Rudy realized that this was not just a casual proposal but a special invitation that probably wouldn’t be offered a third time, and he couldn’t say that it didn’t appeal to him. Beautiful young women, trained by Estrella herself. But he couldn’t imagine his way couldn’t imagine himself walking into Estrella Princesa, talking politics, trying to explain American foreign policy to somebody’s uncle with a little amiguita at his side. What was Medardo thinking of? It was out of the question. But how to decline? How to explain to Medardo that the senses are the cave?
“Think about it, señor. Consider. Your books … Plato, Aristotle. They cannot explain everything. You have to live.”
Rudy wondered about Medardo’s affair with Maxine Wilson. He couldn’t imagine asking in English, but he felt free to ask in Spanish.
Medardo put his hand over his heart. “A man has one great love in his life, and she was mine. I confess this to you, and to you alone,” he said. “She was a remarkable woman, a beautiful woman, and after Creaky’s accident… It was a terrible thing, to be paralyzed like that. He could move only one arm, you know, just enough to use his special phone and manipulate the control of his electric wheelchair, and to smoke. He smoked all day. He had a clothespin that hooked onto the sleeve of his shirt, and Maxine’d light a cigarette for him and put it in the clothespin. She hated cigarettes and tried to get him to quit, but it was the only pleasure he had left.” Medardo paused to light a cigarette. “Love is a strange thing, Rudy,” he said. “It was not a matter of choice. You norteamericanos think that love is the source of security and peace and happiness, but in reality it is a source of suffering and anxiety. I was completely vulnerable. I even quit smoking for a while myself. It was a torture.”
Rudy pictured the middle-aged, graying woman who’d shown him Creaky’s files the first time he’d come to Texas, and who’d sat across from him in the lawyer’s office at the closing, signing the papers with a ballpoint pen. “I’m sorry,” he said.
“Your philosophers, Rudy,” Medardo said, “what do they know about love and suffering?”
“Well,” Rudy said, “I don’t know about love, but Socrates was executed; and Aristotle had to leave Athens or he would have been executed too.”
“Really? Executed? Philosophers? Why would they execute philosophers?”
“I guess they asked too many questions.”
“Ah, Rudy,” he said, dropping his cigarette and stamping it out in the sandy soil, “maybe you’d better be careful, no?”
“I don’t think I’ll be executed,” Rudy said. “Not for a while, anyway.”
Medardo stepped forward and gave Rudy a proper Mexican abrazo. It took a bit of doing to get the abrazo right — like learning to use his Japanese saw, or getting the curves just right for Helen’s bookcases — but in the end Rudy’s right arm went over Medardo’s left, his left under Medardo’s right, and they tilted their heads to the left and administered a series of palmadas, little pats on the back, as if they were burping babies, an ancient and powerful means of expressing kinship and love, joy and comfort.
What sorts of things did Medardo get up to at Estrella Princesa? Rudy had a vision of himself as Aristotle, bare-assed with some bare-assed whore riding on his back, while Medardo, like Alexander, watched from behind a bush. No, thank you. But he remained a little uneasy, nonetheless, about Medardo’s invitation, which he had neither accepted nor declined. He felt that Medardo had been a little disappointed in him, and so he was trying to work out an explanation, trying to articulate the things he should have said on Wednesday night when they were irrigating. But what should he have said?
Rudy noodled his explanation all day Thursday and all day Friday, but when Medardo stopped by he had trouble putting his thoughts into words. “Querido Medardo,” he said. “Forgive me, but my love for my wife was quite a different thing from what you propose. The pleasure you enjoy at Estrella Princesa is only a rough sketch of true pleasure, like my drawing of Plato’s cave. It is mixed with pain. Only when your soul follows wisdom do you find true pleasure. Most men live like brute animals. They look down and stoop over the ground; they poke their noses under the table; they kick and butt each other with their horns and hooves because they want these animal pleasures. True happiness is only when the soul acts in harmony with virtue.”
Medardo smiled. “So,” he said, “you don’t want to go?”
Rudy shook his head.
“The trees look good,” Medardo said. “Did you notice how the leaves are opening up? They were starting to curl before we irrigated. Just a little. You have to know what to look for. Now they’re fine.” He waved from the window of his Buick Riviera as he drove off. In the late-afternoon sun his car looked black rather than sky blue.
A week later Rudy had a heart attack. If Norma Jean hadn’t picked him up and laid him in the back of his truck, and if the Russian hadn’t driven him to the hospital in McAllen, the date on his tombstone would have read May 3, 1967. And he wouldn’t have cared.
He’d eaten a fiery chicken vindaloo at an Indian restaurant in McAllen, the Taj Mahal, and had spoken to the manager about catering Mollys wedding. He’d been prompted by a call from Molly, who’d found a hotel in Detroit that offered an assortment of Indian wedding packages.
Rudy was annoyed. “Are you trying to punish me?”
“Punish you? Papa, we just thought it would be easier for everyone. TJ’s relatives live in Detroit. Our friends are in Ann Arbor. It just makes sense. All you’d have to do is show up. With your checkbook. The hotel will need a deposit fairly soon.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Rudy said, “and I’m the one with the checkbook.”
“Just think about it, that’s all.”
“I’ve already thought about it,” he said.
“Well then,” she said, “suit yourself.”
The manager of the Taj Mahal had been very accommodating, and had given him the business card of a pandit, a Hindu priest, who ran a small ashram near Bentsen State Park. Rudy studied the card:
Pandit Sathyasiva Bhagvanulu
WEDDINGS, FUNERALS, HOROSCOPES, PUJAS
“Is this the guy who’s getting rid of the crows?” Rudy asked.
“Yes, he is a very remarkable man.”
“I read about him in the Monitor” Rudy said.
“Precisely. I have a copy of the article in my office if you’d like to see it again.”
Thousands of crows had been gathering in the downtown area, nesting in the trees, fouling the sidewalks and the car lots along Highway 83. The city had tried everything, including bringing in a falconer, but nothing had worked. The crows had mobbed the falcons, which had then refused to fly. Now the city had employed the pandit. The pandit refused to explain how he proposed to get rid of the crows — except to say that he wouldn’t kill them; and he wouldn’t allow anyone to observe him. This secrecy prompted people to watch for him, and various sightings were reported — in a car lot on Highway 83, on the municipal golf course, walking along the Mission Main Canal just north of the second lifting station — as if he were a rare bird, and in his bright robe, according to the article in the Monitor, he did look rather like a flamingo. There was a photo of him in the paper looking up at a dozen or so crows perched on telephone wires. The crows dispersed during the day to forage but gathered in the city in the evening, darkening the skies.
The manager also produced a scrapbook with photos of a number of Indian weddings he’d catered, one of which included, in addition to the photographs of the different dishes, several photos of an elephant that was all dolled up with costume jewelry and velvet trappings. In the background was a citrus grove.
“This is Norma Jean, right?” Rudy asked.
“Precisely.” The manager shook his head up and down vigorously “She is a very fine animal, very fine, very beautifully shaped, very well behaved. She did not cause one bit of concern. There were two hundred guests at this particular wedding, and we took care of everything. You won’t nee
d to be concerned at all.”
Rudy spent most of the afternoon with the manager, drinking sweet tea and planning a menu that included tangy lentil soups, spicy vegetable curries, baked spiced fish, cucumbers in yogurt, hot bitter mango and sour lime chutneys, and platters of aromatic rice tinged with saffron. And the chicken vindaloo that Rudy had eaten for lunch.
It was almost five o’clock when Rudy left the restaurant. He drove straight to the Russians to have a shot of vodka and chew the fat, and to buy three more paintings, one for each of the girls, and to see if Norma Jean would like to be in another wedding. The Russian was giving Norma Jean a bath outside her little barn when Rudy pulled into the drive. A portable radio was blasting the Beatles’ new album, Sgt. Pepper, and Norma Jean was dipping her trunk into a big horse trough, sucking up water and then spraying herself so thoroughly that sheets of water covered her shoulders and flowed down her sides and onto the Russian, who was on his knees, scrubbing her stomach with a large brush. She had her eyes closed, and the Russian was doubled up underneath her, so they didn’t see Rudy. Norma Jean struck Rudy as a being from the beginning of time, or maybe outside of time, like a Platonic idea, but at the same time he had the impression that he had intruded upon an especially intimate scene, as if he had intruded on a husband and wife in the privacy of their own bathroom. This is happiness, he thought as he watched the Russian scrub the big brush back and forth on Norma Jean’s stomach.
He was about to clear his throat to announce his presence when a sharp pain in his chest took his breath away, as if he’d taken a bullet, or as if Norma Jean had sat on him. He opened the door and staggered out of the truck. He tried to hold himself up by putting his right arm through the open window, but he fell, belching loudly as he hit the ground. And then he was trying to tell the Russian, who was kneeling over him, that he just needed to lie still for a while, right there on the ground. He got his breath back for a minute; the clenched fist opened up. That’s when he realized something else: that he didn’t mind dying, didn’t care, didn’t give a hoot, as his dad used to say. He’d been a little frightened at first, but once the pain let up he didn’t care one way or the other. He wondered if that was how Creaky’d felt. Or Helen. He just didn’t want to die in Texas, that was all. He just wanted to go home.
He passed out again, and when he woke up in the Rio Grande Regional Hospital in McAllen, what he thought he remembered was the Russian lifting up his shoulders so that Norma Jean could slip her trunk underneath him and pick him up and lay him down gently in the bed of the pickup.
He tried to explain to the doctor the next morning: about trying to swim against the current in the Rio Grande, about straining to turn the valve that opened clockwise instead of counterclockwise, about the chicken vindaloo he’d eaten for lunch at the Taj Mahal, about the sensation of being shot in the chest, about the importance of the wedding … But the doctor wasn’t listening. “You’re lucky to be alive,” he said. “You’re lucky we’ve got one of the first CCUs in Texas.”
“What’s a CCU?”
“Coronary care unit.”
“What’s the diagnosis?” Rudy asked.
“Myocardial infarction.”
“Why can’t you just say ‘heart attack?”
“Because your heart didn’t ‘attack’ you,” the doctor said. “I’m going to give you a prescription for an oral arrhythmic and nitroglycerin tablets.”
“What’s ‘infarction’?”
“It’s a blockage. Your hearts not getting enough blood. If you exert yourself too much, or get too worked up, especially after a heavy meal, then boom, you’ll find yourself lying on the ground again. Your blood pressure will shoot way, way up and you’ll develop diastolic hypertension.”
“Avocados are supposed to reduce the risk of heart attacks,” Rudy said. “Cancer too, and diabetes.”
The doctor looked at him over the top of his glasses. “You need to watch your diet,” he said. “No smoking. No alcohol. No rich foods — and that includes avocados. You don’t want to clog up those arteries: no bacon, no sausage, no eggs, no butter, no cream, no driving for at least a month. The main thing is to keep calm. No emotional excitement. No conjugal relations.”
“No conjugal relations?” Rudy said. “I’m not married.”
“You’re wearing a ring.”
“I was married.”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
“What about the nitrogen fertilizer?” Rudy asked. “Could that have something to do with it? We got a couple of sacks of nitrogen fertilizer in the barn left over from last winter.”
The doctor shook his head while he wrote something on his clipboard. “You’re barking up the wrong tree,” he said.
Rudy didn’t say anything. He didn’t like hospitals — who does? — but he’d never really minded them. He’d had his tonsils out, and he’d been hospitalized once for pneumonia. He’d never particularly minded the dentist either. You went with your mother; you looked at a magazine. And whatever was wrong was taken care of. He hadn’t even minded the shots, not the way his daughters had. In his arm or in his butt, it didn’t matter. The doctor’s office in St. Joe had been right in the doctors house, and on their way home Rudy and his mother would stop at the drugstore in Stevensville to pick up a prescription and Rudy would order a cherry phosphate. His mother would have something too. It was hard to remember. He did remember spinning round on a stool. But then when Helen got sick … it was different. In and out of the Passavant Pavilion at Northwestern Memorial Hospital on Huron Street, right on the Gold Coast. Dr. Arnold in his office saying there was nothing more they could do. Helen had smoked for years, but it wasn’t lung cancer that killed her. It was leukemia — attacking her lymph nodes, liver, spleen. She took a kind of perverse pleasure in that. At least they — Rudy and the girls — couldn’t say “we told you so.”
“And if I don’t?” Rudy asked the doctor — back in Texas now. What did he care? He hadn’t had a cigarette in ten years; he drank a glass of wine or two with dinner, it’s true, but whom was he going to have conjugal relations with — he hadn’t been with a woman since Helen died — unless he went with Medardo to Reynosa? Actually, he’d started to consider it. Rudy and Medardo: a couple of cockhounds, a couple of whoremasters. Better to die across the border in a whorehouse than in Texas.
“Don’t what?” the doctor asked.
“Don’t follow your advice.”
“Your next one will be a lot worse,” the doctor said.
“I’ll think about it.”
“You have to realize, Mr. Harrington, that dying is not like going to sleep. Very few people die with dignity Five percent at most. For most people it’s a painful struggle.”
Rudy’s father had died of a heart attack at the Benton Harbor market, keeled over while he was bidding on a load of strawberries, but his mother had died at home. There’d been a lot of coming and going, a lot of eating and drinking, even a bottle of whiskey, though his mother had been a member of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. But it was Helen he was thinking about now, how her body had shut down so that she no longer needed the morphine, how her breathing had slowed, how her lower jaw had jutted forward, how she’d slept with her eyes open because there wasn’t enough strength in her muscles to hold her eyelids shut. There hadn’t been much left of her at the end, and what was left had turned white. She’d lost her hair and looked like a marble statue or pillar in a museum. Rudy remembered the phone next to the bed ringing and ringing, though it was the middle of the night, and Margot coming into the room. She was working for a bookbinder in Hyde Park, on the South Side, just before she got a job at the Newberry Library A boatload of black-market avocados — enough avocados to supply the entire Midwest — had left the Cayman Islands without the bill of lading, something that didn’t seem important at the time, though it caused him a lot of grief when it docked in Hammond, Indiana, and he was almost arrested.
Rudy was inclined to argue with the doctor, calling him D
oc: “A heart attack, Doc. A massive coronary. Bingo. That’s it. Lights out. Doesn’t sound too bad to me.”
“If the lights don’t go all the way out,” the doctor said, “then you may run into some problems.”
“What’s the worst that could happen?” Rudy asked.
“The worst? You could wind up on a respirator, or paralyzed.”
“I’d rather be dead.”
“Suit yourself,” the doctor said.
“That’s what I used to say to my daughters,” Rudy said.
Rudy didn’t mind dying; he just didn’t want to die all alone. In Texas. He wanted to die in Chicago, in his own bed, with the dogs snoozing on the floor and the sound of his daughters moving around downstairs, or climbing the stairs to bring him a cup of tea or bouillon. The certainty that he’d made a mistake returned, washing over him, like a big wave, suffocating him. He didn’t see how he could go on. The prospect of arranging an Indian wedding … The thing was impossible. All the talk of curries and chutneys and the elephant had been an illusion, a harmless fantasy. Better to let Molly arrange things with the hotel in Detroit. He lay back in the hospital bed and recited a litany of all the ancestors and relatives whose names he could remember and of the names of all the men he’d known on the market, and he tried to remember the street addresses and phone numbers of all the places he’d ever lived and of all the places his children had ever lived and of all the places he and Helen had made love.
Last Will & Testament
Philosophy Made Simple Page 8
