Philosophy Made Simple

by Robert Hellenga

  Rudy looked. Dozens of tiny flowers were clustered around a yellow spike. He shook his head. “Amazing. I’ll take these too,” he said.

  She looked at her watch. “Alejandro—the new owner—will be here any minute,” she said. “Want to stay and have lunch with us?”

  “Thanks,” he said, “but I’ve got to be getting home.” Rudy took out his wallet while she wrapped the flowers carefully in newspaper. He had a twenty and two tens and a couple of hundred-peso notes. “On the house,” she said, waving his money away “You can get me something extra special for the wedding.” Rudy thanked her, turning for one last look as he went out the door.

  Late in the afternoon Medardo stopped by with the entire picking crew. They were on their way to Reynosa for a cultural Friday. They’d stopped by as a cortesía to see if Rudy wanted to go along. There were six of them in the car, but there was always room for one more. All six were smoking, and the smoke puffed out the open windows of the Buick Riviera. Through the smoke Rudy could see their eager faces as they leaned forward in the soft leather seats. They were just boys, but they had wives back home in Montemorelos. Rinaldo and Carlos had children. Medardo would give them each a hundred pesos—Rudy’s pesos—which they’d spend at the Lipstick or the Tropicana while Medardo enjoyed himself at Estrella Princesa.

  Rudy shook his head. “Not today,” he said. “I’m going to listen to some music and fix a little supper and take it easy.”

  “Just another day, huh?”

  “I guess so,” Rudy said, but as they drove off he thought: Just another day. For them it’s just another day And for me and for the pandit too, and for Maria. Just another day, and something that had been about to sink in for a long time finally sank. He was overwhelmed. God really is dead. It hadn’t seemed to make that much difference at first, no more difference than the death of a distant, elderly relative. What he hadn’t realized before now was that even the smaller meanings had to go too, like lifeboats that are pulled down into the vortex when the big liner sinks. He hadn’t counted on that, hadn’t thought it through. He no longer cared about the big meanings. Let them go. But to think that there was nothing out there at all. All the holidays that mark the progress of the year, all the rites, rituals, ceremonies designed to ground human experience in some larger reality…smoke and mirrors. Nothing but human creations. Christmas is just another day, a human invention, like Easter, like Thanksgiving, like Ganesh Chaturthi, the birth anniversary of Ganesh, the son of Shiva and Parvathi, like every birthday, every baptism, every commencement, every funeral, every inauguration, every wedding. All that effort to convince ourselves that the desire of two people to fuck is grounded in some larger, ultimate reality, or that a man’s life or a woman’s love really matters in the larger scheme of things, or that endings are really new beginnings. There are no signs, no omens, not even little ones. There’s only what we choose to do. The triptych I saw on Christmas Eve, the vision of the river—even these small signs have to be discounted completely. Nothing out there was calling to me. Nothing. The lightning that struck Norma Jean was a natural electrical discharge, nothing more. In every case we just did what we wanted to do, and then we attributed it to signs and omens and callings. I sold the house in Chicago and came to Texas because that’s what I wanted to do. Nandini went back to Assam because that’s what she wanted to do. It’s as simple as that.

  But it wasn’t as simple as that. It was still Helen’s birthday.

  Rudy sat down in his study and glanced at the copy of Schopenhauer and the Upanishads, which was sitting on top of Philosophy Made Simple. It was an imposing book, almost three inches thick. He hadn’t opened it yet, except to look at the inscription:

  For Rudy,

  “The Idea of the elephant is imperishable.”

  —ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  With warmest wishes,

  Siva Singh

  It was hard to believe there’d be so much to say about Schopenhauer and the Upanishads.

  Rudy put the books aside and took out the file folder containing Helen’s papers. He hadn’t looked at the letter from Bruni in three or four years, and he wanted to see if he could read it, now that he had a pretty good command of Spanish. He could. Not all of it, but most. There wasn’t much to it. Instructions about what to do with a special bottle of vinegar he’d brought back from Modena. A few drops on fresh strawberries, or on a bistecca, or on thin slices of Parmesan cheese.

  Maybe, he thought, he’d look up Bruni when he went to visit Margot in April, challenge the man to a duel, like one of the characters in Il saraceno. Or maybe buy him a drink. He laughed. What he remembered most about his trip to Italy, back in March 1953, when Helen was having the affair, was that they’d gone to Venice and Bruni was supposed to be going along, but of course he hadn’t gone, and in Venice…Helen had everything pretty well organized, and when they got on the water bus in Venice she gave each student a map with all the information about where to get off and the hotel where they were staying and how to get there, and the telephone number. Everybody had this information except Margot, who was fifteen and who wasn’t supposed to go off on her own anyway, but when they came to the first stop, just as they were pulling away from the dock, one of the students said to Rudy, “Isn’t that your daughter getting off the boat?” and Rudy looked up and there she was, going up the ramp from the dock up to the street, looking straight ahead, carried along by the crowd. Rudy shouted at her, but she couldn’t hear him, and by the time he found Helen, who was up in the front of the boat talking to a group of students, they were already pulling over to the next stop, so he could either chew Helen out or he could get off the boat and go back to find Margot, which is what he did, except that on the way back they met the next boat coming from the station, and there was Margot on it, leaning over the railing, but she couldn’t hear Rudy yelling, so he got off the boat again and start running to San Zaccaria, which he could see on the map, figuring he could get there before the boat did, because the boat had to make a big loop. But two boats stopped and he didn’t see her, so he got on the next boat and just kept looking at every stop, but he still didn’t see her and pretty soon they were heading out to open sea, right off the edge of the map. But when they finally got to the end of the line, the Lido, there she was, sitting on a bench, like a regular park bench, waiting for him.

  On the way back to San Zaccaria, she told him all about her school. It had been hard at first. Her teachers had known she was coming, she said, but they hadn’t known she didn’t speak Italian, so they made her read out loud on the first day. She just said the words the way you’d say them in English, and everybody laughed. The math was harder than it was at home, and she had to read Homer and Dante, and her teachers interrogated her in front of the class, just like the other students. She cried herself to sleep every night. It was a real horror story. But when Rudy asked her if she wanted to come home with him, she said no.

  The hotel wasn’t marked very well on Rudy’s map and they had to ask directions. They walked up to a policeman, and Rudy said something in English and showed him the map, but the policeman couldn’t understand what Rudy wanted, so Margot had to do the talking. They chatted away for a while and Rudy couldn’t understand a word, and then she took his hand and said, “It’s okay, Papa, I know the way,” and Rudy was thinking: She’s reading books I’ll never read, talking a language I’ll never understand. She’s being carried away from me, just like she was on the water bus, only to a place where I’ll never be able to go.

  And he’d felt the same way about Helen. She was being carried away from him to a place where he could never go. He knew he couldn’t follow her.

  That night the three of them ate in a nice restaurant down by the big lagoon. There were waiters in white coats all over the place, and the food was good, not cheap, but Helen had an expense account—the program paid for everything. There was a big family at a table not too far from theirs, and Helen kept saying that a couple of the women were giving her dirty look
s, but whenever Rudy looked over, they were just laughing and having a good time. “Helen,” he said, “why on earth would they be giving you dirty looks? That’s crazy. Look, they’re just having a good time.” But in a few minutes she’d start again. He couldn’t talk her out of it, and then he figured her conscience must be bothering her, so he left it at that.

  And then, at the end of May, she called to say that she had cancer and was coming home.

  He looked through Helen’s record albums for Ilsaraceno. He didn’t really care much for opera, but this was Helen’s favorite and they’d listened to it together several times when she was sick. In the last act, the Count and II saraceno encounter each other outside Isabellas window and, as they’re waiting, each one for the other to leave, they sing a duet: “O happy men, if love, which rules the stars, rule your hearts.” Of course they sing it in Italian, but Helen had translated it for him. Isabella appears and the two men kill each other, and then Isabella, after singing her lungs out, kills herself too. It’s very sad.

  He put on the record and arranged Marias flowers in a vase while he listened to the overture and to Isabellas first aria, but the music wasn’t what he wanted. What he wanted was to listen to Helen’s tapes, which were on the shelf over his desk. He knew they were blank, but somehow he thought that he might hear something if he played them one more time. He turned off the record player and put the record back in its sleeve. His old Am-pex 960, top -of-the-line in its day, expensive, one of the very first two-track recorders on the market, was in one of the storage cabinets in the tack room. He had no idea what was available now. The little cassette players, which were everywhere, were so much more convenient. He lugged the heavy tape recorder in from the barn, cleaned the tape heads with a Q-tip dipped in alcohol, and put on one of his old tapes as a test. For several years, when the girls were young, he’d made a tape every Christmas: talking, telling stories, playing his guitar, singing—blues and hymns. He advanced the tape for a minute or so, to make sure the fast-forward was working properly, and then stopped it and pressed the play button. He heard himself, his best song:

  …murder in the first degree,

  The judges wife cried out, You got to let that man go free,

  ‘Cause he’s a jelly roll baker, bake the best jelly roll in town,

  Why he’s the only man around, bake good jelly roll with his damper down.

  He moved the recorder to the coffee table in front of the living room sofa, rewound the tape, put another stick of ironwood in the stove and closed the top vents partway.

  He threaded the first of Helens tapes and hit the play button. He’d recorded Helen on both channels at slow speed, 3.25 feet per second. One hour per tape. He could remember arranging the two mikes over the bed. And he remembered hooking up the defective punch-in/out switch, which he’d bought at a place on Wabash, not far from the dance place where Molly was giving lessons. He never bothered to take it back.

  She’d made the tapes right after she came home from the hospital the last time. She wanted to die at home. The girls were all living at home, so they could help take care of their mother. Meg had her law degree from Northwestern. She didn’t have a job yet, but she’d already met Dan, and she was taking the Howard Street El up to Evanston two or three times a week. Molly had dropped out of Edgar Lee Masters and was giving dancing lessons down in the South Loop. Margot had apprenticed herself to a bookbinder in Hyde Park. She took the El downtown every morning and then the Jeffrey Express to the South Side.

  When he leaned back, the couch creaked. He put his knees up and covered himself with a light quilt. He tried not to move around a lot. He tried to open himself to the silence, but it was hard to stay focused. He remembered embracing Maria on the couch one night when she’d come to see about the flowers for the wedding, her head propped up on the arm where his head was propped up now. Afterward she’d asked him about his childhood, and he’d told her, and she’d told him about her childhood in Matamoros. He remembered the sound of Nandini’s sari sliding to the floor on the day alter Narmada-Jai went for her last swim. He remembered the first time he’d lifted Helen’s skirts, on their wedding night, in the Drake Hotel in Chicago, standing behind her as they looked out at the lights at the end of the breakwater. He was twenty-three years old, she was twenty-four, and Schopenhauer’s life force was flowing through them. And the last time too—in the hospital bed in their bedroom, right after she’d finished making her tapes—as if something inside her had refused to grow old, had refused to become ill. Had this been the life force too? Afterward she broke down and cried for the first and only time during her illness, and there was nothing Rudy could do except hold her in his arms.

  He tried to bring his mind back to the silence. “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream,” Helen used to say, “her mind moves upon silence.” From one of her favorite poems. Keats? Yeats? Rudy couldn’t remember, but he could almost hear her voice:

  She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,

  That nobody looks; her feet

  Practise a tinker shuffle

  Picked up on a street.

  Like a long-legged fly upon the stream

  Her mind moves upon silence.

  He didn’t rewind the tape, because he didn’t think he’d ever listen to it again. He just put it back in its box.

  He threaded the second tape and waited for it to start. But of course there was nothing to wait for, no sound, not even tape hiss. Just the slight rustle of the reels, turning. Chakras. Wheels. The wheel of karma. Had Helen escaped, gotten off the wheel? And if she had escaped, where had she escaped to? Nirvana? Moksha? He wanted to walk around, wanted to pee. But he held it in till the tape came to an end. His body wanted a beer but settled for a small glass of water.

  His body was fighting hard now. Twitching. Straining. Telling him to turn this way and then that, the way it sometimes did when he couldn’t get to sleep at night. And his imagination was acting up, filling the room with fantasies about lives he might have lived. But these fantasies were crowded out by memories of this life, the one he was living now, in this universe—snapshots of his life’s journey. Am I at the beginning of this chapter? Near the middle? Approaching the end?

  Time slowed down. It was agonizingly slow. He looked at his watch. 7:48. He listened to the silence. He waited. He looked again: still 7:48.

  He leaned back into the silence, tried to shut down his imagination. And just when he was about to give up, he succeeded for a few minutes, and there was nothing at all. This encouraged him to go on. He wasn’t changing position so often. He hardly noticed when the tape came to an end. Just a slight change in the quality of the silence. He stretched his legs. He was getting hungry, but he was anxious to get back into the silence.

  His own breathing filled the room. Everything had become brownish gray, metallic, the color of the magnetic tape, the color of Narmada-Jai. How desperate he’d been when he played those tapes the first time. Desperate to hear Helen’s voice. Now she’d been dead seven years, almost eight, but it seemed to him like seven weeks, seven days, seven minutes. Her death was still as fresh as a tomato from the garden.

  Now he was getting discouraged. His body was fighting him again. Hunger too. Imagination and fantasy were his enemies. Even reason was his enemy, telling him it was silly to go on. Stupid. Irrational.

  He was thinking about supper now. The littleneck clams called to him from the refrigerator. The unopened package of fresh spaghetti from the Lebanese place in McAllen sat impatient on the kitchen table, next to the bouquet of Marías flowers. The fillet, wrapped in butchers paper, hid in the back of the refrigerator, behind the bottle of pinot grigio, which reclined on its side. The Nero Wolfe novel—his safety net, someone in charge who would unravel everything in the end—bided its time on Helens desk in the study.

  The house was getting chilly, but he didn’t want to put any more wood in the stove, didn’t want to disturb the silence, which was reaching a critical mass. He could feel his heart s
lowing down, his breathing too. The sun set. And then he could do it. It was as easy as shipping your paddle in a canoe and letting the current carry you downstream. He didn’t have to do anything more. The light was gone, out there. He could feel the sound of the river, like the thrum of the elephant’s song.

  The tape ended. His hunger was gone. He couldn’t feel the cold.

  He put the tape back in its box and threaded a new one. It was the next-to-last tape. Now he was floating downstream again—encountering a few small rapids at first, the canoe turning this way and then that, and then it was perfectly calm. The silence encompassed everything, spreading out, like the river spilling out of the floodway, covering everything in the valley, the delta, everything but his little hill, his lomita.

  Time sped up. The new tape seemed to be over as soon as it began. And when it ended, time slowed down again, and he was overcome with sadness and loss, and then a sense of joy when he remembered that there was still one more tape.

  There’s something different about the silence now, this silence. This silence is charged, like the air before a storm. Rudy pictures Narmada-Jai plunging into the river. The image fades and he’s back in the canoe, lying back, not thinking. And then he hears it, perfectly clear: Helen’s laughter. He hears her laughter everywhere, sees her craning her neck to look for him as she and Margot come down the gangway of the SS Rotterdam and then disappear into the crowd and then reappear in the customs house. He’s come out to New York to meet them. They’ll spend the night at the Waldorf-Astoria and take the: Twilight Limited back to Chicago. Rudy arranges with a porter to have their luggage sent directly to the hotel. The customs officer looks them over and chalks their suitcases without opening them. Helen’s sick now, and they probably don’t know the worst yet, but it doesn’t matter. She’s coming toward him, suitcase in her hand, and she’s calling to him, “Rudy, old pal, I’m home.”