Philosophy Made Simple (8 page)

Rudy’s new house had been built in the second decade of the century by a New England engineer who’d come to Texas to su-
pervise the installation of the centrifugal pumps in the big pump house in Hidalgo and who’d stayed on to speculate in land and sugarcane. The double-hung sash windows in the living room still had glass panes that the engineer had brought with him from New England, but the original red roof tiles had been replaced with shingles, and Creaky and Maxine had converted a storeroom at the east end of the house into a big kitchen. Creaky’s study, which had also served as his bedroom after the accident,
opened onto the living room. All the doors on the first floor were extra wide to accommodate his wheelchair. The large downstairs bathroom was equipped with a whirlpool tub and an invalids toilet on a pedestal, like a throne.

Rudy propped up
Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring
on the counter next to the refrigerator and contemplated it as he ate a salami sandwich and drank a bottle of beer. What he knew about art he’d learned from Helen, because he’d seen all her slide lectures a dozen times and she’d quizzed him about what he’d seen, just the way she quizzed her students: Egyptian vs. Greek, Medieval vs. Renaissance, Mannerism vs. Baroque,
Neoclassi-cism vs. Romanticism, Realism vs. Impressionism, Cubism vs. Surrealism. But he didn’t always know what he liked.
He’d depended on Helen for cues. She had a way of pointing out things that he hadn’t noticed, like the way the Virgin Mary is holding her thumb in the book she’s reading so she can get right back to it when the angel Gabriel is through telling her she’s pregnant and that God is the father.

And he wondered about
Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring.
Was it an accident? A blot? A Rorschach? Or was it a window on ultimate reality? On the Platonic forms? Probably an accident.
Platonic Reality seemed to be receding into the distance, like a will-o’-the-wisp, no more meaningful, as Aristotle put it,
than singing
la la la.
In any case, there were too many things in this world that required Rudy’s immediate attention.

Rudy concealed his doubts and fears from Medardo, his grove manager, who pulled into the drive in the morning in a sky blue Buick Riviera and parked in front of the garage next to Rudy’s pickup. The trees had been stripped in mid-March, before Rudy’d arrived, and Medardo had dressed the grove with nitrogen fertilizer. The new bud scales had separated and the trees were already starting to bloom. The avocados from the old harvest had belonged to Maxine, but Rudy wanted to go over all the records with Medardo, who also managed the little trailer park by the Russians barn. Medardo was a good-looking man in his fifties whose springy mustache had been carefully trimmed to reveal his upper lip. He wore white linen trousers. Ringlets of curly black hair spilled over the collar of his pale yellow shirt.

Rudy knew from Barney, the real estate agent, that Medardo had been Maxine’s lover for a time, after Creaky’s accident, and had almost married her. In which case Medardo would now be the
patron
and Rudy would be back in Chicago where he belonged. He wanted Medardo to know, however, that he was not a dumb city slicker,
that he’d grown up on a farm and had thirty years’ experience as a commission merchant under his belt, and that he would be keeping a sharp eye on everything — irrigation records, tree maintenance, weeding, fertilizer applications, yields, shipping records, labor costs. And
viernes culturales,
which Maxine had warned him about. “Cultural Fridays.” What the hell were cultural Fridays? Maxine hadn’t been very clear.

Rudy greeted him in Spanish, creating the impression that he spoke that language fluently, when in fact his high-school Span
ish was limited to the indicative mood. They conversed in Spanish nonetheless, and Rudy learned what he wanted to know: that Medardo and a five-man crew had picked close to a million pounds of avocados last season.

He also wanted Medardo to know that he intended to open up a new market in Texas instead of relying so heavily on Becker in Chicago.

“Texas consumes more avocados than any state in the country,” he said, “but if you walk into a supermarket all you find are California avocados.”

Medardo agreed that it didn’t make sense. But what was one to do? He shrugged his shoulders.

They were standing in Creaky’s study, which was empty except for the metal shelves that held Creaky’s grove records. Becker’s produce truck hadn’t arrived yet with Rudy’s furniture.

“Something else that doesn’t make sense,” Rudy said, “are these
viernes culturales?
Cultural Fridays? You bring in guys from Texas A&M to give lectures?”

Medardo put his hand on Rudy’s shoulder and explained. Once a month he took the boys — the pickers — across the border to Reynosa for a night on the town.

“And you expect me to pay for this?” Rudy said.

“You want to keep everybody happy, okay? You know what 1 mean?”

Rudy was determined to be firm with Medardo from the very beginning, to let him know who was boss, but he found it hard to be firm in a language he didn’t know very well, and besides, the man was so handsome, his teeth so white, his smile so unforced,
his animal spirits so contagious, his manner so generous, that Rudy couldn’t bring himself to cancel the cultural Fridays.

“Yeah,” Rudy said, “I know what you mean.”

Getting ready to live is easier than actually living, just as getting ready for a journey is easier than actually going on a journey Rudy was anxious to get on with
Philosophy Made Simple,
but there was a lot to be done first. He replaced the uncomfortable invalids toilet and seated a new one. He installed a shower. He bought a chain saw and, for the woodstove, cut up a couple of dead mesquite trees and a small ironwood tree that almost ruined the chain on his new Stihl saw. He slapped a new coat of calc on the thick adobe walls, and he arranged and rearranged the furniture when it finally arrived. There was no attic, no basement, no closets, but there were cabinets in the old tack room in the barn, where he stored his shotgun and fishing tackle, his Ampex tape recorder, Helens slide projector,
and the footlocker with his dad’s magic stuff. He built bookcases in his study that had closed cabinets on the bottom, where he was going to put Helen’s record collection, and five adjustable shelves on the top. He didn’t have the pattern for Helens Florentine curve, but he didn’t need a pattern; that curve was fixed forever in his imagination. He drew it on a piece of cardboard and cut the top moldings by hand with his Japanese saw. He painted the bookcases forest green.

At the end of his third week in Texas, Rudy got Medardo, who’d stopped by on his way to Reynosa for a cultural Friday, to help him carry Helens big post-office desk into the study and place it against the west wall so that he could look out the window at the upper grove and the rows of sabal palms that lined the drive.

They rolled out a threadbare Oriental rug that Helen had bought at an auction, and Rudy cracked open a couple bottles of
Pearl. Then he and Medardo unpacked the books and shelved them at random; Rudy didn’t care. He could sort them out later.
Right now he wanted to see what the room would look like full of books. It looked beautiful. The finishing touch was
Golden Flower and Jade Tree,
another Norma Jean, which Rudy hung between the two deep-set windows on the north wall. It was a beautiful room, a serious room where serious thinking could be done.

If Rudy and Medardo had been speaking English they would soon have exhausted their supply of conversation, but in Spanish things took time, and the beer and the fatigue made Rudy less self-conscious. In Spanish he was a different person — more relaxed, less impatient. Time slowed down in Spanish. A simple story about something that had happened on the market, which would take two minutes to tell in English, would take him fifteen minutes in Spanish. And there were topics he and Medardo would probably have avoided in English: Rudy’s philosophical project or quest, for example. Rudy couldn’t imagine giving an account of it in English, but in Spanish it seemed easy to explain to Medardo what he was trying to accomplish, as if he were spending Monopoly money instead of real money: to get some answers to the big questions, to settle on a rule of life. He drew a sketch of Plato’s cave and showed it to Medardo, and he explained how he’d thought he’d caught glimpses of the realm outside the cave — on Christmas Eve and then again when he first glimpsed the Rio Grande.

Medardo examined the sketch of the cave. “These people in the cave,” he said. “It’s like they’re sitting in a movie theater,
right, or in front of the television set?”

Rudy nodded. “Something like that, but they’re tied to their chairs, so they can’t get up and look out the window.”

“And you feel you were looking out the window? On Christmas Eve? And when you saw the river the first time?”

“That’s what it felt like,” Rudy said, “but Aristotle — Plato’s star pupil — Aristotle made fun of Plato’s ideal forms and said they were no more meaningful than singing
la la la.”
He laughed. “
La la la.
That’s very funny”

Medardo laughed too. “Señor ‘arrington,” he said, “Señor Aristotle was right about these glimpses of higher reality. You have to be careful. My cousin in Matamoros had a vision of the Virgin Mary, naked, and the bishop and a whole carload of priests came all the way from the cathedral in Monterrey. The church always investigates these things, you know, visions, miracles,
things like that. They asked him all kinds of questions, and then they told him not to talk about it anymore.”

Rudy opened two more beers. He could never be sure, in Spanish, when Medardo was pulling his leg.

“Do you think it was a vision?”

“I think he got his hands on a copy of
Playboy
magazine and it unsettled his brain.”

“How about you, Medardo? Have you ever caught a glimpse of anything?”

Medardo leaned forward and put his hand on Rudy’s arm. “Sometimes, señor, in the act of love …” He poured some beer in his glass and watched the foam rise and spill over the edge and run down the side. He wiped the side of the glass with a large white handkerchief. “Sometimes in the act of love 1 seem to
see
something, but then afterward, I think …” Medardo paused to light a cigarette. “Afterward I think I was only singing
la la la.”

Rudy found one of Helen’s ashtrays in the desk and placed it on the arm of Medardo’s chair. “My wife used to tell a story about Aristotle that you’d appreciate,” he said. “When Aristotle was an old man he got a job as the tutor of Alexander the Great. He’s giving young Alexander a hard time about his girlfriend, so Alexander gets his girlfriend, whose name is Phyllis,
to dance naked
right in front of Aristotle’s window, where he’s writing his book about ethics. Pretty soon Aristotle has such an
erection
he can’t take it anymore and goes out and propositions Phyllis. Phyllis says sure, but she wants Aristotle to do her a little favor; she wants to play horsey —
jugar a caballo”

Medardo laughed. “What you want to say, Rudy, is
montar al caballito”

“Montar al caballito,”
Rudy repeated. “In one of her lectures,” he went on, “my wife used to show a slide of a medieval tapestry with a picture of Aristotle and Phyllis. Aristotle’s wearing a bridle, and Phyllis is riding on his back, using a whip on the old man’s bare rear end. Alexander’s watching from behind a bush. You’d think Aristotle would be stuck. Here he is, caught with his pants down. But he was a smart old guy: ‘If love can do this to an old man like me, a philosopher,’ he says to Alexander, just think how dangerous it is for a young fellow like you.’“

The dean at Edgar Lee Masters had asked Helen not to show this particular slide, but Helen had ignored his request on the grounds that the slide was an integral part of her lecture on the iconography of education.
Iconography
was one of Helen’s favorite words.

Medardo laughed. “It would make a wonderful
comedia,
don’t you think? I’ll play Alexander and you can play Aristotle, and we’ll get one of the girls at Estrella Princesa to play Phyllis and ride on your back. What do you say? Ah, Rudy,” he went on, without giving Rudy a chance to respond, “I hope your wife had many more stories like this one, but now I must be on my way.” He smiled, revealing his large white teeth, and put his hand on Rudy’s shoulder. “No, no, don’t get up. I’ll let myself out.” He stood in the doorway for a moment. “Maybe you’d like to join me one of these days. When you get settled. For a
viernes cultural.”