The Philosopher's Apprentice (15 page)

Edwina, to her credit, refused to be daunted by the billowing black thundercloud that hovered perpetually above Londa's head, and in time Londa came to realize that she could have drawn a far worse parent in the great
Geworfenheit
lottery. By Londa's admission their regular Wednesday and Friday luncheons boasted a reasonable facsimile of rapport enhanced by incandescent flashes of candor. Particularly gratifying to Londa was her mother's willingness to give her a plenary sex education. It was one thing merely to read about such bewildering matters as menstrual cramps, yeast infections, the G-spot, birth control pills, STDs, and condoms, quite another to receive such information from a blood relation who by all indices loved you without condition.

Being older, cannier, and better informed than her sisters, Londa did not for a minute imagine she was living a remotely normal existence on Isla de Sangre. Although Edwina had denied Londa the Internet, she did permit her to receive
Up!,
a lurid and almost comically materialistic magazine targeted at female adolescents, every issue of which implicitly informed Londa that the gap between Faustino and the outside world was very large indeed. Above all,
Up!
bespoke a civilization filled to bursting with hip clothing, mesmerizing jewelry, alchemical cosmetics, transformative body-care products, and innocuously transgressive music, and before long Londa had developed a keen interest in the loot that the Western industrialized nation-states and their Asian equivalents were prepared to distribute, for a price, to a demographic apparently willing to remain permanently incurious about the hidden human cost of any particular prize. Every sane young woman wanted her share of the goods, wanted it desperately, and so Londa, always eager to have her mental health corroborated, decided that she must, simply must, become a consumer.

Edwina satisfied her daughter's yearning for conventional treasures in the simplest manner imaginable, by having them delivered to the door. Sweaters, jeans, boots, sneakers, lipstick, fingernail polish, eyeliner, blush, perfume, hair spray, lotions, bracelets, necklaces, and CDs started appearing at Faustino like gifts left by elves in a Hans Christian Andersen story, though the bearer was in fact FedEx. Day and night, the halls of the mansion reverberated with the apocalyptic chords of Shoot the Works, Distressed Leather, Et Tu Brute, and other bands specializing in commodified nihilism. Wherever Londa went, the cloying aroma of her
parfum du jour
trailed behind her, an invisible cloak of fragrance, even as her bracelets clanked and jangled like a night watchman's keys.

In her maternal wisdom, the Übermom understood that without a social context this cavalcade of artifacts would afford Londa only limited amusement. Edwina solved this problem—brilliantly,
I must say—through the clever expedient of turning Faustino into a residential haven for Florida adolescents in need of summer employment. The job seekers arrived variously by catamaran, houseboat, trawler, yacht, and cabin cruiser, and with the exceptions of a female heroin addict from Coral Gables and a wild-eyed Key Largo lad hooked on Grave Robbers II, a stupefyingly violent computer game, Edwina hired them all. There was lanky Julio, who promised Edwina that by summer's end he would single-handedly build a stone wall circumscribing the patio; meticulous Brittany, who contracted with Edwina to reorganize the library; industrious Nick, who undertook to repair the dock on the Bahía de Flores; cheerful Charlotte, who assumed the role of Javier's girl Friday; ethereal Shana, who agreed to cultivate the manor's flower gardens; and a brooding fellow named Armand, who apprenticed himself to Charnock—the Mad Doctor of Blood Island had just returned from Honolulu, skin tanned, misanthropy intact—and in consequence spent his days catching geckos and iguanas for some experiment whose purpose I preferred not to know.

And then there was Gavin Ackerman. There had to be a Gavin Ackerman, the handsome, muscular, nincompoop drummer in Savage Rabbit, a high school garage band that had recently released its fourth home-brew CD,
Spur of the Moment.
Although Edwina had ostensibly engaged Gavin to repair gutters and pick figs, it was obvious that his real function was to develop a requited crush on Londa. From Edwina's viewpoint this was a no-lose situation. If her daughter neglected to fall in love with Gavin, then Edwina would have occasion to praise Londa, extolling her for not allowing mere hunkiness to merit her admiration. Should Gavin greet Londa's apathy with passion, Edwina could then play the teacher, advising her daughter how to let a suitor down gently. In the event that it was Londa who became smitten while Gavin remained unmoved, Edwina would be right there at her daughter's side, recounting the time that she, too, had nearly died of a broken heart. Finally, sce
nario number four: Romeo and Juliet in the Florida Keys—sexually conceived Montague and genetically engineered Capulet, savoring the joys of puppy love and goatish lust. Naturally Edwina would monitor the relationship through every twist and turn, sharing vicariously in Londa's happiness and commiserating with her when September arrived and Gavin had to return to the mainland.

For better or worse, the two youngsters and their hormones performed as anticipated, and it soon became impossible to run into Londa without simultaneously encountering Gavin, and to glimpse either adolescent alone would be as momentous as seeing a sea serpent poke its snout above the Bahía de Flores. They held hands constantly, necked conspicuously, and bragged about each other to anyone who would listen. The figs that Gavin had been engaged to pick stayed on their trees, though I came to suspect that as the torrid Florida days rolled by and the sultry tropical nights elapsed, swain and maid were reaping their own succulent harvest.

So complete was Londa's infatuation that at least once per tutorial the topic would shift from the conundrum of justice—we were devoting the summer to my chapter on John Rawls—to the protocols of desire. Londa wanted to know exactly what went on in men's minds, and whether their seeming enslavement to their penises made them despise women without knowing it. I addressed her confusion as best I could, explicating various theories that indeed posited an unconscious male animus toward the female, though at some point in each disquisition I insisted that we return to Professor Rawls and his ingenious idea that a truly just society would be founded behind a “veil of ignorance,” each architect totally unaware of where in the socioeconomic hierarchy he might end up. The fact was, however, that I found these digressions therapeutic. By tuning in to Londa's romantic life, listening patiently as she waxed rhapsodic over Gavin's scorched-earth politics and off-the-shelf alienation, I managed to convince myself that she was really just another bubbleheaded
Up!
subscriber, and this assessment, inaccurate
though it was, proved crucial to my conclusion that, on the whole, all things considered, certain indications to the contrary, I was not madly in love with her.

Thanks to the benign hedonism of Faustino's youthful work corps, the estate soon came to resemble an American-International beach party movie from the mid-1960s. On the dunes of Isla de Sangre, our imported teenagers staged barbecues, dance marathons, sand-castle competitions, and volleyball tournaments. It occurred to me that, like the vast majority of Western adolescents, they believed themselves immortal—mumquats would have been a superfluous addition to their diets—though I myself had no difficulty picturing their various appointments in Samarra. Occasionally, prompted by self-pity combined with too much beer, I would wander down to the bay and superimpose my depression on their rites, beholding limber zombies tossing horseshoes, agile corpses riding surfboards, and frisky cadavers burying each other in the sand.
Beach Blanket Geworfenheit.

While Londa was the putative hostess of these celebrations, Edwina did most of the planning and supervising, and during the festivities themselves my student and her boyfriend stayed noticeably aloof. As “Medusa's Mirror” or “Redneck Serenade” or some similarly dance-friendly Distressed Leather hit poured from the boom box, and the teens shook, rattled, and rolled accordingly, Londa and Gavin would linger in the shadows, sparking everyone's resentment through this seeming assertion of a superior sensibility.

A curious situation. Now that Londa finally had a social life, she apparently didn't want it—unless, of course, the vacuous Gavin satisfied her need for companionship, which I doubted profoundly. When I apprised my fellow teachers of this paradox, Jordan revealed that every time she proposed to ferry her prepubescent stepsister from Tampa to Torre de la Carne, Yolly replied that she wouldn't have any idea how to entertain such a visitor, nor did she want to learn. Henry told a similar story about Donya. On numerous
occasions he'd announced that he would happily fly to Houston, collect both his nieces, and bring them back to Casa de los Huesos. Invariably Donya had responded that she wanted as her playmates only Edwina, Henry, Brock, her dog, and “that man called Mason who talks so funny.”

“The loneliness of a vatling must be dreadful,” Brock said.

“They aren't just stuck on an island—they're marooned in their skulls,” Jordan said.

“And so they pass their days in solitude,” Henry said, “waiting for each other.”

 

WHILE EDWINA HAD DONE A REASONABLE JOB
of scripting her eldest daughter's adolescence, she'd evidently failed to anticipate the most obvious crisis of all. At some point in the courtship, the boy was certain to ask Londa about her past—and what was she supposed to do then? Hem and haw? Change the subject? Perhaps Edwina actually imagined Londa telling Gavin she was an amnesiac, in which case someone would have to inform Lady Daedalus that the average teenage girl would rather spend eighteen hours a day manicuring a golf course with nail scissors than risk being thought a clueless, vapid, brain-damaged dork.

It happened that Londa herself had not only foreseen this problem, she'd attempted a solution. Upon realizing that her every waking thought invariably circled back to Gavin, she went rooting through her mother's desk, found a blank leather-bound journal, and spent the next six hours inventing a life for herself. She titled her project
The Book of Londa,
and upon its completion she talked me into taking the thing home for the weekend.

The Book of Londa
told of a seven-year-old girl, born and raised in Boston, whose mother, the stellar molecular geneticist Edwina Sabacthani, had one day vanished without a trace. The father of this hypothetical Londa—the equally hypothetical David Sabacthani, a writer of bestselling murder mysteries—soon decided that his be
loved Edwina was gone for good. He arranged for his wife to be declared legally dead, then married his most ardent fan, a disturbed dental hygienist named Gretchen Coldwell.

The fictionalized Londa's fortunes now went from bad to worse. Two days after her eighth birthday, her father died in a sailing accident off Cape Cod. When Gretchen Sabacthani née Coldwell undertook to raise Londa single-handedly, the woman's latent depravity emerged from the swamp that was her soul. With a nod to the sadistic parents who figured in Largesse, her Utilitarian board game, Londa imagined Gretchen feeding her stepdaughter on worms and dirt, beating her with a bicycle chain, and locking her in the basement for weeks at a time.

This monstrous state of affairs persisted for five years, and then one glorious day Edwina escaped from her abductors, an anarchist cabal that had been forcing her to design biological weapons in the Canary Islands. Arriving home, Edwina lost no time deposing her dead husband's wife, rebonding with Londa, and assisting the CIA in tracking down the anarchists, after which mother and daughter fled to Isla de Sangre to start a new life together.

The Book of Londa
did not end there. Years later, Gretchen was kidnapped by a mysterious woman called the Crimson Kantian—a swashbuckling vigilante, masked and cloaked like Zorro—then taken to a secret grotto on the southern shore of Isla de Sangre. After threatening Gretchen with a thumbscrew and menacing her with a torture rack, the Crimson Kantian abruptly switched strategies and introduced her prisoner not only to the categorical imperative but also to Stoic self-denial, Epicurean self-restraint, and Rawlsian fairness. These mandatory tutorials took hold, and Gretchen eventually became a model citizen who dedicated her remaining years to organizing food banks and running soup kitchens.

“So what do you think of my life?” Londa asked shortly after the start of Monday's lesson. I had just given her the fundamental Rawlsian thought problem: specify the limits—both to wealth and
to privation—that you would impose on an embryonic human community, knowing that you yourself could be cast into any of the circumstances you allow, from the lowest to the highest.

“You want my honest reaction?” I replied.

“Uh-huh.”

“Gavin won't buy any of it.”

“The ending
is
rather fanciful,” she said in an abashed tone.

“I won't mince words, Londa. The ending is ridiculous.”

“Perhaps the Crimson Kantian shouldn't wear a mask. That's a bit much, huh?”

“I meant
psychologically
ridiculous. This Gretchen character wouldn't mend her ways just from hearing about Stoicism or Epicureanism.”

“But isn't that what happened to
me
?”

I exhaled wearily and returned the journal. “I don't know
what
happened to you, Londa.” Our gazes met. Her mismatched green eyes had never looked lovelier. “I wish I did, but I don't.”

We proceeded to give her a more credible childhood, one spent largely on Isla de Sangre under her widowed mother's tender care, with occasional trips to the mainland. From
The Book of Londa
we took only the idea of a father who'd died while sailing. For the balance of her manufactured memories, we cracked the spine of my own life and riffled through its bland but plausible anecdotes. Romping with a German shepherd named Kip, collecting postcards from around the world, falling under the spell of
The Little Prince,
staging amateur fireworks displays for my cousins on the Fourth of July, improvising a stink bomb using the antique but functional Gilbert chemistry set I'd acquired at a flea market—it all entered Londa's trove of nonexistent recollections.