Philosophy Made Simple (28 page)

In the afternoon, Rudy set up Norma Jean’s paints in the barn. She was anxious to paint and kept shoving Rudy aside with her trunk to get at the brushes, which were laid out in a row on the tray attached to the lower part of the easel. She selected a broad brush with a bent handle that the Russian had made specially for her and set to work. She dipped the brush into a large can of red paint and used her upper trunk muscles to apply bold strokes of color directly to the canvas.

When he heard someone come into the barn he thought it was
Molly, but it was Nandini, bringing him a cup of tea. Norma Jean already had a painting well under way and they both watched her without saying anything.

“Does she ever step back to look at what she’s done?” Nandini finally asked.

“You can see for yourself,” Rudy said.

When she was satisfied with the design, Norma Jean put the broad brush down and selected a smaller brush, which she held with the handle up inside her trunk. She flicked the canvas with light blue paint till it was speckled like a robins egg. Rudy and Nandini stepped back to admire the vibrant surface, like the surface of the big Seurat at the top of the fancy staircase in the Art Institute, Rudy thought, that he and Helen used to admire—
A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.

When she’d finished Rudy attached another canvas to the easel.

“Does she ever make corrections?” Nandini asked.

“She doesn’t need to make corrections,” Rudy said. “She gets it right the first time.”

Using her broad brush, Norma Jean covered the second canvas with warm colors. She struck the canvas; she mashed the brush into the canvas; she swung the brush back and forth, twisting it and turning it, setting it aside whenever she needed the smaller brush—which she manipulated with the wristlike muscles of her lower trunk—for more delicate work.

“Have you read my brothers books?” Nandini asked.

“One of them.
Philosophy Made Simple.
I guess he wrote that when he was a graduate student at Yale. But I haven’t finished it. And I haven’t read
Schopenhauer and the Upanishads.”

“But you know about this shadowy reality he is sometimes talking about. The reality behind reality. Shadows. Dark forms. We can never make them out. What is the name for it?”

“The
Ding an sich.
The thing in itself. The pandit calls it the
Sivaloka.
Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, the Veil of Maya. Its very complicated. For a while I thought I could catch a glimpse of it from time to time. But I could never really focus on it. Just a glimpse, like the glimpse you get of…”—he hesitated—“Marilyn Monroes underpants in
The Seven Year Itch.”
He glanced at her to see if he’d gone too far, said something indelicate, made
brutta figura.
But she smiled.

“Yes,” she said. “I have seen that film in London with my brother many years ago. You get a glimpse of something like that and you never forget it.”

“But it’s very complicated,” Rudy repeated.

Nandini shook her head, as if to deny the complexity. “May I show you something else, Mr. Rudy, that you will never forget?”

“Of course.”

Nandini took Rudy’s hand in hers and placed it on Norma Jeans chest, just in front of her left leg, so that he could feel the beating of her heart. Norma Jean continued to paint.

“This elephant, believe me, Mr. Rudy, know more about this
Ding an sich
than my brother.”

Rudy kept his hand on the elephants heart, feeling the slow beat, like a drumbeat in the distance, across the border, on the other side of the river.

“One time I am camping many years ago with my husband, Ashok,” Nandini went on—this was the first time Rudy’d heard his name—“in the Kaziranga Park. It is raining a little, but everything is very cozy in our small tent. We are cooking rice and chapati on a little propane stove and we are lying next to each other in the dark. When the wind is picking up, a corner of our tent begin to flap, and Ashok is wanting to stake it down. But I tell him, no, let it flap. I like it, you see, that everything is so cozy and neat, but that one part is flapping free.”

She laughed and took his hand, and he thought for a moment that she was going to press it against her own heart.

At that moment, a new life began for Rudy, at least in his imagination. He knew now that she knew that, though nothing had been settled, there was something to
be
settled, something that would be settled before she left. The opportunity would not simply slip past them. Conscious decisions would be made. Nothing would be left to chance. To speak of it at this point would be almost indecent. This was
Mollys
wedding, after all, Molly and TJ’s. Let the young people enjoy, let them celebrate. There would be time afterward for the grown-ups to arrange things, to negotiate.

Norma Jean finished her fifth painting of the day Rudy removed the canvas from the easel and began to put her paints away while Nandini led her back to her stall.

T
hey’d gone out to the barn—Rudy, Uncle Siva, Nandini, Maria, and the art dealer from San Antonio—to look at the wall of Norma Jeans. It was hot already and they were drinking iced tea. The dealer, a man Rudy’s age, had loosened his tie. Norma Jean was eating her favorite meal of smashed oranges mixed with alfalfa. It was three days before the wedding. Rudy had just told the story of the two kids in the pontoon boat, how it had made him think of the Ding
an sich.

“Sangam,”
Uncle Siva said, putting his hand on Rudy’s shoulder, “the auspicious confluence of two mighty rivers.”
Sangam.
It was the same word the pandit had used to describe the coming together of two families. “Two great philosophical traditions come together in the work of Schopenhauer,” Siva said. “Plato and Kant flowing from the west, the Upanishads flowing from the east. Schopenhauer used to read the Upanishads every night before going to bed, in a Latin translation of a Persian translation.
It was called the
Oupnek’hat,
and he regarded it as the consolation of his life. He seized on the idea of maya, do you see,
illusion. The phenomenal realm is the realm of maya, which conceals reality from us like a veil.”

“So, there
is
a way to lift this veil?”

“Yes and no,” Siva said. “You see, this is where Schopenhauer differs from Kant. The noumenal and the phenomenal are not really two separate realms but two different manifestations of a single, undivided reality To lift the veil is to become aware of this undivided reality in a different way Let me put it as simply as possible. When we look inside ourselves—and this is more or less what Kant neglected to do—what do we find? We find the
will,
which is an unfortunate term. It’s unfortunate in German too:
der Wille.
The Hindu word
iccha
would be more precise, but it’s not likely to gain currency.”

“The
will,”
Rudy said.

“Always striving, always demanding, always craving, wanting wanting wanting. It’s only in moments of better consciousness,
moments in which we circumvent ordinary empirical consciousness and cease to will, that we lose the sense of ourselves as separate individuals and can participate in the timeless vision apprehended by saints and artists.”

Rudy knew a little bit about the “will,” but he was stunned. This was what he’d been looking for all along: “The timeless vision apprehended by saints and artists,’ “ he said. “That’s it exactly.”

“Or Marilyn Monroes
chaddi,”
Nandini added, smiling.

“Underpants,” Siva translated.

Yes,
Rudy thought,
the glimpse of Marilyn Monroe’s underpants.
He could still see it in his mind’s eye, and that was it exactly too. “Well,” he said, turning to Maria’s art dealer, “what do you think?”

“The timeless vision apprehended by saints and artists?” The dealer laughed. “I like it. I can see it; I can see what you mean. To tell you the truth, I’ve been looking for something like this.” He
waved his arm at the wall of paintings. “Maybe we’re onto the next big thing. Norma Jean may be the new Miró or Kandinsky or Arshile Gorky. What do you think? And if worse comes to worst I could always sell this stuff to hotels. They’ve got all those walls. They’ve got to put
something
on them. It might as well be elephant art. And she can turn them out in a hurry. No problem there! What’d you say? Five or six a day? People are tired of sunsets on the desert and moonlight on the river and lonely old cacti.
I’m
tired of sunsets on the desert myself. Let ‘em look at
Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring
or
Strong Nuclear Force
or
Ants Climbing a Tree.
Where do you get these titles anyway?”

“You want to have a show then?” Rudy asked, without explaining about the titles.

“Absolutely. Maybe get Norma Jean up to San Antonio for the opening. She could stay overnight at the zoo, have a sleepover with some of the old jungle crowd.”

“What are you thinking?” Rudy asked.

“What am I thinking? I just told you what I’m thinking.”

“I mean about price.”

“Yeah. Well, I was thinking five hundred, but you don’t want to go too low. Maybe start at a thousand, fifteen hundred. Maybe get a tie-in with the save-the-elephants crowd. Give a percentage, one percent, two percent. People like that. Of course,
you gotta get them out of those cheap frames first.”

Rudy thought the dealer was crazy, but he liked him anyway and invited him to the wedding.

During the three days that remained, there was a great deal of coming and going, as there always is before a wedding. This had been the case at Meg’s wedding, and it had been the case at
Rudy’s own wedding, though Helen and Rudy had had a reception in the church basement, with cake and punch and little silver trays of mints and chocolates, not a dinner with poppadoms and samosas and curries and spicy grilled fish and cucumbers in yogurt.

Norma Jeans pleasant disposition and satisfying barrel shape acted like a magnet, drawing everyone toward the barn, which reminded Rudy of the big museum in Florence, not the most famous one, but the one across the river that had three or four rows of paintings on each wall. And Maria had brought dried wildflowers. Bouquets of shooting stars, tansy, yarrow, sage,
and Indian paintbrush hung from the rafters and over the windows. The girls had moved the card table holding Mollys jigsaw puzzle—with a picture of the Kalighat, the most important temple in Calcutta, which Molly had visited with TJ—to the barn,
where, in the afternoons after Norma Jeans bath, they listened to the radio and drank tea as they worked on it while Norma Jean poked around in her stall, making a little pile of grain for the mice, until it was time to paint.

Meg and Margot were going to wear identical simple long dresses for the wedding ceremony, but Molly was going to wear a red sari trimmed with gold. The grooms party—TJ and Uncle Siva and a friend of TJ’s from the University of Michigan—would gather in front of the barn, where the guests would be greeted by Norma Jean. Once the guests were assembled, TJ and the groom’s party would fetch Molly from the house, and Nandini would lead Norma Jean to the
mandap,
where she would lend an auspicious presence.

Fortunately no one had an idee fixe about exactly how things ought to be and must be and therefore had to be. Even the pandit,
Sathyasiva Bhagvanulu, and the priest, Father Russell, who—by taking care of the marriage license and by putting the
seminary at the disposal of the wedding guests—had earned the right to act as an unofficial consultant, were flexible and didn’t insist that every detail had to be precisely this way or that. So during the remaining days, Molly was content to leave the details up to Nandini, and Rudy was content to cook for everyone and to do as he was told. The result of all this activity was a sense of well-being, like the pleasant hum of a beehive, rather than anxiety.

On Tuesday morning, Siva and TJ drove over to Pharr to look for the cotton plantation where William Burroughs had lived in the forties. Rudy went into town to buy red and purple sheets to drape over Norma Jean, and then he made a second trip for a spool of a certain kind of thread; and then he made a third trip for turmeric to smear on the bride and groom just before the ceremony When he returned, Father Russell’s battered old Pontiac with white sidewall tires was parked in front of the barn next to the pandits forest green Cadillac Seville. In the barn, Meg and Margot were working on the jigsaw puzzle while the priest and the pandit conferred with Nandini and Molly about the final details. A friendly rivalry had developed between the two priests. Father Russell had brought a big sack of sweet corn from his garden at the seminary and the pandit had brought a clay idol of Lord Ganesh.

Uncle Siva and TJ had returned from Pharr without having located the plantation. “The locals don’t want to talk about Burroughs,”
Siva said. “Or Kerouac. Kerouac describes the house in
On the Road,
you know.”

“I don’t know about that,” Rudy said, “but there are pictures of those two guys at Joe’s Place in Reynosa. One of Burroughs’s friends was killed by a lion at Joe’s, but there aren’t any lions there now.”