Philosophy Made Simple (22 page)

His parents had been asleep and he’d taken the keys from the hook in the kitchen and after he’d started the car, which his dad had left out by the packing shed, he’d waited five minutes, ten minutes, to make sure they hadn’t woken up, and then he’d driven to Silver Beach, the amusement park on US 12, his hands trembling on the wheel, afraid to go more than fifty miles an hour. At first. And then goosing it up to sixty, seventy, eighty, so that the car left the pavement and soared into the air when he went over the viaduct north of Stevensville. His dad was waiting
for him in the kitchen when he got back. He thought he was in for a whipping, but his dad poured them both a little tot of whiskey, in jelly glasses, and asked him not to take the car again without asking. It was Rudy’s first taste of whiskey. “Your mother doesn’t need to know about this,” his dad said, and Rudy didn’t know if he meant the car or the whiskey.

Rudy took Norma Jean past the sugar hackberries by the house, past the septic tank, past the garden, and around the garage before heading back, past Siva’s Mercedes and Father Russell’s Pontiac. Someone had turned on the light in the barn, and he could see the priest and the philosopher standing in the big doorway. He couldn’t get Norma Jean to stop, but he maneuvered her into the barn—tugging at her loose skin with the ankus, the way the Russian did—and eased her into her stall, like a pilot bringing a big liner into port. He took a deep breath and opened up a bale of alfalfa for her and emptied a sack of potatoes onto the floor in front of her.

Uncle Siva, who had an early-morning flight, was anxious to leave. Father Russell stayed behind to have a nightcap and to chat while Rudy washed up the dishes.

“You still think he’s dangerous?” Rudy asked, handing Father Russell a dish towel.

Father Russell laughed. “Now why in the world,” he asked, putting down the plate he’d just dried and shaking his head back and forth, “would an Übermensch care one way or another about whether or not it’s okay to put Parmesan cheese on a plate of spaghetti? Why, you’re more of an Übermensch than that phony.”

Rudy slept in the barn that night, as he always did when the Russian went to visit his sister. It was hot, but he covered himself
with a flannel sheet. He was too excited to sleep, too aware of his own strength. How Helen would have enjoyed this evening.
Now there was an Übermensch, or an Überwoman. Helen. How her face had glowed when she told him she wouldn’t come back to Chicago with him. It was a beautiful apartment, in the center of Florence, but there was a nightclub on the first floor and the music started up as they were talking, the noise echoing in the air shaft and filling the courtyard. Margot was already asleep.
They were talking in the kitchen. Helen was standing in front of the stairs that led up to a rooftop terrazzo. She’d charted her course, and it was only because of the cancer that she’d altered it later on. But she had chosen her own way then too.
She’d come home with Margot in June and taught for another three years. When she became too sick to teach any longer, she’d organized her
self
around something other than splenic irradiation and courses of busulfan and radioactive phosphorus—around old photographs and old memories, around her art books and the cartoons in
The New Yorker,
and around her record collection, mostly operas, and the slides that she’d used in her art history classes. Rudy moved the record player upstairs so she could listen to music, and he bought a new screen and set up the projector in the bedroom so that they could look at the slides together in the evening. So much beauty, it was overwhelming: Italian operas; Greek temples and sculptures; medieval cathedrals and manuscripts; Renaissance paintings; the Impressionists; the Modernists. She never complained. She was cheerful if not happy. She was in a lot of pain, but not in too much pain to smile at the
New Yorker
cartoons that Rudy held up for her to see, not even at the end, when he had to describe them for her and read the captions.

Helen would have put Parmesan cheese on the spaghetti. She
put Parmesan cheese on everything and didn’t worry about making
brutta figura.

How funny Uncle Siva had looked, like the donkey who can’t decide between two equidistant bales of hay Rudy would find no help in that quarter. But he didn’t think he’d need it. He thought maybe the priest was right. He had a bit of Übermensch in him.

T
he thing Rudy enjoyed most about walking Norma Jean, which he did every chance he got—and the Russian, far from objecting,
actually encouraged him—was the sense of power. He couldn’t get enough of it. He’d read about the life force and the will to power in the chapters on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and he thought this was what he was tapping into, though what he experienced with Norma Jean was not blind and impersonal, but gentle. A soft command, a touch of the ankus, and the elephant would turn to the right or to the left, guided by his own will.

It didn’t occur to him to ride her—the Russian never rode her, never talked about riding her—till Molly arrived on Saturday,
a week before the wedding. Siva had come back from Oaxaca the night before and had eaten supper out in the barn with Rudy and the Russian, who was leaving again in the morning to pay another visit to his sister. Rudy thought Siva might hold the elephant walk against him, but the philosopher was in good spirits. They drank some Pölstar vodka, which the Russian bought by the
case in Reynosa, and told stories. The Russian told Norma Jean stories that Rudy’d heard before but never tired of hearing.
Siva told Oaxaca stories: he’d climbed the pyramid at Mont Alban, and he’d met a woman in a little
posada
in a canyon right on the beach at Puerto Angel who was going to join him in Paris at the end of September. Rudy told about seeing the river for the first time and about mistaking the mysterious lights on the river for the
Ding an sich,
but he kept his own counsel about the life force and the will to power.

The Russian left about ten o’clock in the morning. He took his time, fussing over Norma Jean, kissing the bridge of her trunk and her big elephant cheeks while Rudy stomped around, impatient for him to be off. Molly had called from the airport; she was going to drop TJ and Nandini off at the motel and come right over. Rudy was making a cup of Constant Comment tea when he heard her car in the drive.

“Oh, Papa,” she called to him when he stepped out onto the veranda, “this isn’t so bad. I thought…But where’s the river? Where’s the elephant?”

“The river’s over there,” he said, pointing at the upper grove. “You can’t see it from here, and the elephant’s in the barn.”

He was tempted to scold her when she told him she was going back to India after the wedding to shoot the big dance scene at the neighboring tea garden, but then he was always tempted to scold her. Meg, who needed prodding, brought out the reckless devil in him, but Molly, who needed restraint, brought out his more cautious, play-it-safe self.
Don’t go back to India, for Christ’s sake,
he wanted to say
Go back to Ann Arbor with your husband. Forget about the movie. This is your honeymoon.
He’d felt an upsurge of joy when he first saw her, but now he was annoyed, and he was
angry with himself for being annoyed. It was a kind of jealousy or resentment, actually. Of the way she lived for the moment,
her motives and desires transparent. There was no more guile in her than in Norma Jean. But his negative feelings—the impulse to scold her—soon vanished. The morning air was fresh and not so humid. A breeze was blowing in from the river, though he knew it wouldn’t last. He had her all to himself, for a few minutes anyway. He put his arms around her.

“So,” he said, holding her out at arm’s length to have a good look. “As beautiful as ever, even after traveling for almost thirty hours. I was getting a little worried.”

“You know me.”

He thought he did, but he wasn’t sure what she meant. He knew that the impulse to scold would come back again—
How could you just stay in India like that and not come back to plan your own wedding?
—but he wasn’t going to let it interfere with his present happiness.

“The elephants out in the barn?”

“Just hold on,” he said.

She said she was sorry about coming back so late, but he could see that she wasn’t sorry at all. She was pleased with herself.
Rudy was pleased with himself too. He showed her the freezer, which was packed with frozen
Saint-Cyrs
in different-sized plastic containers.

They walked out to the barn, holding mugs of hot, milky tea, which Molly said was the way they drink tea in India.

“So,” Rudy said, “you’re going back to India?”

“Yup.”

“And how do TJ and his mother feel about that?”

“Well, TJ’s not too thrilled, but Nandini is more progressive in her way. One of the few female mahouts in Assam. Well, she’s not a mahout really, but she knows how to handle an elephant better
than the mahouts. And she’s one of the only female elephant owners. The mahouts say that elephants don’t want to be ridden by women, because women menstruate, but they must have made an exception for Nandini. The elephants, not the mahouts. And for me too. I’ve been riding almost every day. She’s taught me a lot about elephants.”

“That’s what her brother said. What about your real estate license? I thought you already had a desk lined up in a good office?”

“Selling real estate? I don’t know, Papa. It’s not much better than selling insurance. All these horrible people, worried about their middle-class lives. Comfort, security…”

“That’s what I worry about,” Rudy said. “Money. Security. Mortgage payments. Putting down roots in a new place, creating a home.”

“I know, Papa. A house is the biggest investment most people will ever make in their lives, but…I’ve tried a lot of things,
Papa, but you always encouraged us to try new things. And Mama too. It’s not me—selling real estate.”

“You sold
our
house.”

“That was the hardest thing I ever did, Papa. It was terrible. It was a huge mistake. I cried all the time.”

“You encouraged me to move, remember? This old place is too big for you, blah blah blah.’ “

“But we didn’t know you’d move so far away.”

“Here’s what I’ve figured out,” he said. “That old house—our house—held so many memories…It would have been too easy to sink down into them, like sinking down into that old sofa we had up in the attic. That’s what I was doing. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was starting to hear a door close now and then, or someone taking a shower, and I’d wait for one of you girls to
come downstairs. I needed to break away from that old life. I needed a life with a future, a last fling.”

“Quite a fling,” she said, laughing and looking around her. “I guess I wouldn’t have had an elephant in my wedding if you’d stayed in Chicago.”

Rudy put his arms around her again. “Don’t go back to India,” he said. He couldn’t help himself. He thought he was a bit of an Übermensch. After all, he’d taken his fate into his own hands when he decided to buy the grove. He hadn’t just drifted downstream with the current, he’d shaped his life according to his own hearts desire. But then his older, more cautious self kicked in: “Go back to Ann Arbor with your husband. It’s your honeymoon.”

“We’re taking our honeymoon in January,” she said. “TJ’s giving a paper in London. Besides, we’ve been living together for six months. It’s not like it’s the first time for us.”

“This is your shot at a normal life,” he said. “You’ve made it this far; you’re almost an adult; don’t go backward now. What if this trip is a deal breaker?”

“You mean, don’t upset the apple cart, don’t rock the boat?”

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

“Papa, you worry too much. TJ knows how important this is to me. How many chances will I get to be in a movie? I’ll get a credit. We’ve talked it through. I’ll be gone only a week, two at the most.”

He was thinking, not for the first time, that he was glad she was marrying TJ, who seemed sensible, smart—maybe even brilliant—and stable. And he was thinking about her string of disastrous boyfriends: high school dropouts with tattoos, cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves of their T-shirts; a disc jockey who was ten years older than she; the guy she wanted to go to California with on a motorcycle. That was in 1954, right after
she graduated from high school. And later she did go to California with a guy, a different guy, on a motorcycle. There was a baseball player too. Married. He gave her free tickets to all the Cubs home games and introduced her to all the players:
Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo. She could have gone to Italy with Helen and Margot, but she hadn’t wanted to. And then there were the men she met when she was teaching at the dance studio on Jackson and Wabash, after she dropped out of Edgar Lee Masters. If he closed his eyes he could still see the hand-lettered sign, up in the second-story window: