Philosophy Made Simple (31 page)

Molly was in the kitchen when Rudy came downstairs in the morning after a short rest. He’d been up most of the night with Norma Jean. She’d told TJ everything, she said. Last night, after everyone had left. She’d “confessed.” She wanted TJ to know who she was.

“Everything?” Rudy asked. “The trips to California? The baseball player? The men at the dance studio?”

“Just about.”

“That probably wasn’t a good idea.”

“Don’t scold me, Papa.”

“How did he take it?”

“I think he’s in shock. He went back to the motel.”

“You were upset,” Rudy said. “Who wouldn’t be?”

She nodded.

“What do you want to happen now?”

“I want to get married.”

“So
you
don’t think it was an evil omen? A
baadha?”

“I don’t know what to think, Papa. You can’t say it was a
good
omen, but the pandit didn’t have to upset everyone like that. It was terrible. He kept talking about the gift of a virgin,
said we were trampling on the ancient ceremonies. What business is it of his whether I’m a virgin or not?”

“That’s true,” Rudy said. “The pandit behaved badly And Father Russell wasn’t much better. The accident upset everyone. What about TJ? What does he think?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because of the
baadha,
or because of what you told him?”

“Either one. It doesn’t matter. I just didn’t want to get married under false pretenses.”

The pandit had announced on Friday night that because of the
baadha,
or evil omen, he was no longer willing to perform the ceremony on Saturday. He had warned Rudy, he said in front of all the guests, against scheduling the wedding on an inauspicious day, but Rudy had refused to listen to him. And now look what had happened. Everyone, including Father Russell, had agreed with the pandit that under the circumstances it would be impossible to proceed, that at best the wedding would have to be postponed.

The Starlight Motel was located on Highway 83—the “longest main street in the USA”—on the dividing line between Mission and McAllen. Rudy, who’d stayed at the Starlight on his first trip to Texas, located TJ’s rental car in front of unit 12 and parked next to it, but he didn’t get out of the cab of the pickup for a few minutes because he didn’t want to confront the possibility that TJ no longer loved his daughter. What could he say to TJ? If he could ask one philosopher to go into the motel room with him, who would it be? Plato? Aristotle? Epicurus? Descartes? Berkeley? Hume? Kant? Schopenhauer? Nietzsche? He ran through the list, but in the end he knew he had to go alone.

He knocked on the door. TJ seemed stunned. His eyes, large and deep brown, were unfocused; his mouth was pursed, thin lips taut. His face showed that he did not understand what had to be done.

“Did I wake you up?” Rudy asked, though he could see that he hadn’t. TJ was in his pajamas, but the TV on the dresser was on.
A notebook was open on a small desk in front of the window. TJ had been writing something. Nervous, Rudy jangled his keys instead of putting them in his pocket.

“Can I do something for you?” TJ asked.

“Yes, you can get dressed and get in the truck. Everyone’s waiting for something to happen.”

TJ stepped back into the semidarkness of the room.

“I think you know how much I love my daughter,” Rudy said, “how very pleased I was when she told me about your engagement,
and how happy I’ve been imagining you as my son-in-law.”

“Mr. Harrington, I think we’ve found ourselves in a very bad situation.”

“1 wanted…I thought we ought to talk about Molly, about this situation.”

“I have just written a letter to her, in fact. Perhaps you would be kind enough to take it to her.” TJ handed him the letter he’d been working on at the little motel desk and sat down on the bed.

“I’d rather not look at it right now,” Rudy said, though he glanced at it and saw the words
important
and
necessary
and
impossible
before putting it back down on the desk. “What I don’t know,” he said, “is how much love you have in your heart for Molly”

“I love her enormously, Mr. Harrington, but I don’t understand how she could…” He waved his hand. “In India…”

“Stop,” Rudy said. “Please don’t say anything else. But let me tell you something.”

“What is it?”

“My daughter is not a
pativrata.
She will not worship you as a god.”

“No, of course not. But she’s, how shall I say—damaged goods.”

Rudy felt light-headed, as if he were going to faint. “My wife was not a
pativrata
either. She fell in love with another man, in Italy This was after we were married, TJ, not before. We had three children.
Molly was seventeen years old, sixteen or seventeen.”

“But how does this apply to me?”

“That’s what I’m trying to understand,” Rudy said. “Parallel universes. Now I want you to tell me something, TJ. What do you think people are doing in your parallel universes? They’re acting out their fantasies, don’t you think? And in this universe people are acting out the fantasies they have in some other universe.”

“Mr. Harrington, the concept of parallel universes is a bit more complicated than that, or maybe less complicated. I never meant to suggest…”

But Rudy interrupted him. “Then let’s just stick to this universe.”

“Mr. Harrington, I don’t want to blame everything on her, but after a certain point it becomes impossible to forgive.”

Rudy started to say that Molly was truly sorry and that it was never impossible to forgive; but he knew that Molly was not sorry, and that Helen had not been sorry either, and instead he said, “TJ, there’s nothing to forgive. Do you see what I mean?”
He sat down beside TJ on the bed. “You said ‘damaged goods’ a little while ago. That was the expression you used. Do you know that that’s what your uncle said about your mother? Your mother, TJ. ‘Damaged goods.’ But I think your uncle was mistaken,
and I think you are mistaken too. I think what you meant to say was ‘warm and open-hearted and generous.’ I think you meant to say ‘loving and kind and giving.’ Because those are Molly’s fundamental constants, TJ. Those are what you get when you lift the Veil of Molly and look beyond the world of appearances.” Rudy
shook his head. “At Christmas, do you think I didn’t hear you two? The pans were rattling in the kitchen. And I was sad because I missed my wife, but I was happy for you too. I was more than happy—I was full of joy.’’

TJ said nothing and the moment stretched out into a long silence. Rudy studied the faded flowers in the wallpaper, irises,
like the ones Maria had brought on the night Uncle Siva arrived. The chatter on the TV was interrupted by the loud bray of a commercial. TJ let out a sharp, high-pitched laugh. He got up and turned off the TV and went into the bathroom. Rudy could hear him blowing his nose. When he came out he had a wad of toilet paper in his hand. “Nothing seems interesting or important,”
he said, sitting back down on the bed next to Rudy.

“Everything depends on metaphor, you know,” Rudy said. “That’s what Aristotle says. The greatest thing is to be a master of metaphor. Damaged goods? That’s the wrong metaphor.”

“But what is the right metaphor?”

They sat there like a couple of philosophers looking into the heart of the mystery, as if they were looking for pictures to form in the flames of a fire or from the stains on a garden wall.

“I have the
mangalashtak,”
Rudy said finally, “that I picked for the wedding. The pandit thought I should compose one myself, but I didn’t think I’d do a very good job. This is a poem that my wife sent to me before we got married.” He took out his billfold to show TJ Helen’s letter but at first he couldn’t find it and he started to panic, the way he always did when he lost things. He remembered folding the letter and putting it in his billfold. He took everything out of his billfold and spread it out on the desk, shoving TJ’s papers aside. Several crumpled bills. Scraps of paper with addresses and notes and phone numbers. An old shopping list.
A bit of dental floss wrapped in a piece of pink paper, for emergencies. Credit cards, driver’s license, social security card,
a deposit
slip from the bank, receipts. He closed his eyes for a moment. “I wish my wife was here. She could recite it for you. She’d know it by heart.”

“It is not necessary. Maybe you could just tell me the idea.”

“It’s not so simple,” Rudy said. “You need the words.” Finally he found it in one of those slots behind the hinges of the billfold, along with his emergency hundred-dollar bill.

He unfolded the poem, the
mangalashtak,
and handed it to TJ, who read it silently.

“I didn’t really understand it either,” Rudy said, “till Helen explained it to me. These first four lines are called a quatrain.
See how it rhymes:
blue
and
you, pearls
and
girls.
The speakers a young woman. She’s telling her lover that she’s not going to love him like other girls, she’s not going to lock up her love up in a secret compartment—that’s the silver casket. She’s not going to attach all kinds of conditions to her love. She’s not going to give him all the traditional love gadgets listed in the second four lines: the lovers’ knot is a kind of ring with two pieces of metal that fit together with a secret spring for a perfume compartment. I think that kind of ring was originally used for poison.

“Then there’s a change, you see. It’s called a
volta.
That means ‘a turn.’ Now she tells him what she’s going to give him:
love in the open hand, cowslips in a hat, apples in her skirt.
Everything’s natural, you see what I mean? And then the ending is a couplet:
calling out as children do: ‘Look what I have!
—
And these are all for you.’

“Molly’s not a child, TJ. Love in the open hand is what she’ll bring you, apples in her skirt. That’s the metaphor you want.”

Rudy got up and went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his face. TJ’s leather dopp kit was next to the sink, zipped shut. There was nothing out on the counter. No shaving lotion, no razor, no deodorant. The towels, hanging neatly on a rack over the toilet, had not been used. Rudy took one down and dried his face.

“How’s Norma Jean?” TJ asked.

Rudy looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. “Still out cold,” he called, putting the towel down and then picking it up again. “I don’t think there’s much of a chance. The vet from the Brownsville Zoo’s coming this morning.” Rudy stayed in the bathroom, but they began to talk about the elephant, and the remarkable paintings she’d done, and the sweetness of her disposition,
and how she’d set aside the little pile of grain for the mice, and how tragic her death would be.

“But who would marry us now?” TJ asked. “The pandit and the priest both said—”

“Don’t worry about those old goats,” Rudy interrupted, coming out of the bathroom, holding the towel against his face so TJ couldn’t see his expression. “You give Molly a call. I’ll round up a justice of the peace and meet you back at the house.”

“By the way, Rudy,” TJ said, “I have your proof.” He shuffled through the papers on the desk. “Here it is. In ΔABC, let ∠ABC
= 2α, and ∠ACB = 2ß. Okay? And let BE and CF be the internal bisectors of the angles ABC and ACB respectively Now, suppose…”

Rudy listened to TJ’s solution to the two-bisectors problem. TJ had not proved that it was true, but he’d proved that everything else is false, a proof he called reductio ad absurdum. The proof required only a few simple steps, and Rudy was able to follow it without difficulty. The only problem, TJ said, was that some mathematicians didn’t accept reductio ad absurdum as a valid principle. But Rudy accepted it, so it didn’t matter.