What was Rudy to do? How was he to understand this inner turmoil? Was he like the old house next door to them in Chicago after the crazy contractor’d gotten through with it? Had too many load-bearing walls been knocked down? Or was the damage only superficial, a necessary prelude to reconstruction? Was Rudy as crazy as the contractor? Or was he an architect with a dream? Should he call in the wrecking crew or the carpenters? He wanted to ask TJ about what exactly Detroit Auntie was arranging for his mother, but he didn’t because he didn’t want to reveal his feelings. But out in the barn, after supper, he opened his heart to Norma Jean, who took his wrist in the tip of her trunk and put his hand in her mouth so that he could massage her tongue.
When Rudy went back up to the house, Molly and TJ were sitting on the veranda. TJ, who’d caught several mice out in the barn, was practicing making them disappear with a vanishing tube from Rudy’s dad’s collection of magic tricks. There was a hinged door in the front of the tube, which resembled the cardboard tube in a roll of toilet paper, only smaller. The back of the tube was attached to an elastic cord that TJ had pinned to the inside of his coat. He’d stuff a mouse into his right hand, which concealed the tube, and then release the tube, which would disappear under the flap of his coat. Rudy understood this part of the trick, but he didn’t understand how TJ got the mice to reappear in his coat pocket or in his sleeve. “Look,” TJ’d say, and Rudy and Molly would look at his outstretched hand, and a mouse would run out of his sleeve, and TJ would catch it and put it back in a cardboard box and repeat the trick, with variations, with another mouse. Molly made him keep the box of mice out on the veranda that night.
Rudy and Molly opened the late responses that had been accumulating and went over the guest list one last time. One of the responses was from Rudy’s cousin, or grandniece, or great-niece—Gary and Vivian’s daughter, Christine. Rudy hadn’t heard from Gary since the letter from Africa that he’d read on the plane, the one suggesting that the Second Coming was at hand. He tried to remember Gary’s dad, his own older brother, Alfred, but he could barely picture his face. What he remembered was that Al’s widow, Francine, had been living with them, and that after Al was killed at Verdun she always insisted on setting an extra place for him at the table. She did that for the three years that she lived with them on the farm, and as far as he knew, she kept on doing it. He couldn’t remember his brother, but he could remember the extra place at the table—the empty chair, the clean plate with the fork on the left and the knife and spoon on the right.
The total came to eighty-seven out-of-town guests, mostly Indian relatives and TJ and Molly’s friends from Ann Arbor.
When he was satisfied with his ability to make the mice disappear and reappear smoothly, TJ set out to solve the geometry problem that Rudy had set him—Rudy’s old favorite: if the bisectors of two angles of a triangle are equal in length, prove the triangle is isosceles. “It’s not so simple,” Rudy said, standing behind TJ and peering over his shoulder. “You can see its true, but you can’t prove it’s true. My math teacher gave this problem to me when I was in seventh grade, and I worked on it for a year because I loved geometry. She couldn’t figure it out either.”
“I’m not a geometer,” TJ said, “but this doesn’t look too difficult. If you’ll give me a few minutes…”
The thing that bothered Rudy about TJ was this: he, Rudy, knew that he could explain everything he knew about avocados to TJ. After a couple of hours, TJ would be able to grasp it all—the physiology of the plant, the different varieties, the growing cycle, the advantages and disadvantages of different grafting methods and different cultivars, grove maintenance, marketing strategies. But TJ might spend weeks or months or even years explaining what he knew about parallel universes to Rudy, and Rudy would never understand it, because to understand parallel universes he’d have to understand abstract mathematics and quantum mechanics, and he couldn’t even prove that if the bisectors of two angles of a triangle are equal in length, the triangle is isosceles.
Rudy tried not to bother TJ, but he couldn’t stop himself from watching his son-in-law-to-be try first this and then that. “You can see it’s true,” Rudy kept saying, “but you can’t prove that it’s true. I’ve never gotten over it. Maybe all the important truths are like that,” he said. TJ just shook his head and drew another triangle.
The Veil of Maya
Meg had just argued her first case before the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals and had won. She walked up and down the veranda replaying some of her arguments, as if she were addressing a black-robed judge, but Rudy—the judge—wasn’t listening to her words. He was listening to the sound of her voice, and he knew that her aventura was over and that she hadn’t told Dan, who’d taken the boys to the grocery store. Well, he thought, the story wont he over till he finds out, and then we’ll see.
And Margot. Margot had been arrested at the airport in Rome for trying to take an antiquity out of the country, an Etruscan statue that she’d bought in London. She’d had all the necessary papers, but she was detained anyway and had to take a later flight.
“Italy’s been good for you,” Rudy told her on the way home from the airport. “Maybe I should send your sisters!”
She laughed. “Maybe you should come yourself, Papa.”
“I’ve got an avocado harvest to deal with,” he said.
“After the harvest,” she said., so he knew she wasn’t planning to come home soon.
“Maybe I’ll do that,” he said. “Maybe in April?”
Rudy slowed down as they drove by Medardo’s trailer park so that Margot could admire the yard ornaments. “So,” he said, “you’re not mad anymore? About the house?”
She looked at him and smiled. “Florence is beautiful in April,” she said. “A little crowded, but that’s okay. And no, I’m not mad. But you have to admit it was a bit of a shock.”
“And the man you fell in love with?”
“Back to his wife. In Rome.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “You seemed so happy…”
“I was happy,” she said, “and I’m happy now,” but she told him the story of how they’d fallen in love. It was a long story, and she told it they way she used to tell him about a movie she’d seen, taking almost as long to relate the plot as it would take to see the film, because she didn’t want to leave anything out.
She hadn’t finished by the time they got back to the grove, so Rudy kept on driving down the farm-to-market road till he came to the mission chapel, La Lomita. He parked the car in the parking lot while she finished her story.
It was a sad story, but it was a. wonderful story too. He thought he was a lucky man to hear such a story from his youngest daughter.
The Russian had left almost eight hundred of Norma Jean’s paintings behind, two hundred already framed. On Monday morning, Rudy and his three daughters and two sons-in-law turned the barn into a museum while the boys climbed on the walls of Norma Jean’s stall. Dan had his hands full trying to keep them from falling in. Rudy gave them each bananas and carrots to feed her, and promised them that they could sleep out in the barn with him one night.
TJ got up on a ladder to pound in the nails and Rudy and Dan and the girls labeled the framed paintings and handed them up to him. The girls used the names of recipes from the Chinese cookbook that Rudy found in the Russians barn, and when they ran out of recipes they got more names from TJ, starting with the four fundamental constants that hold the universe together: Strong Nuclear Force, Weak Nuclear Force, Electromagnetic Force, Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation.
It took them three hours to hang a hundred and fifty paintings. When they were done everyone except Rudy went up to the house to fix sandwiches for lunch. Rudy stayed behind to admire their work. The wall of paintings was so beautiful, even in the dim light of the barn, that he put aside his hope of ecstasy and his fear of loneliness, his anxiety about keeping Norma Jean, his worries about the wedding, put aside everything he knew about the certainty of death a
nd the untrustworthiness of the senses, put aside his failure to validate his earlier visions, and let the bright colors wash over him, let himself be ravished by the bright beauty.
In the afternoon, Rudy set up Norma Jean’s paints in the barn. She was anxious to paint and kept shoving Rudy aside with her trunk to get at the brushes, which were laid out in a row on the tray attached to the lower part of the easel. She selected a broad brush with a bent handle that the Russian had made specially for her and set to work. She dipped the brush into a large can of red paint and used her upper trunk muscles to apply bold strokes of color directly to the canvas.
When he heard someone come into the barn he thought it was Molly, but it was Nandini, bringing him a cup of tea. Norma Jean already had a painting well under way and they both watched her without saying anything.
“Does she ever step back to look at what she’s done?” Nandini finally asked.
“You can see for yourself,” Rudy said.
When she was satisfied with the design, Norma Jean put the broad brush down and selected a smaller brush, which she held with the handle up inside her trunk. She flicked the canvas with light blue paint till it was speckled like a robins egg. Rudy and Nandini stepped back to admire the vibrant surface, like the surface of the big Seurat at the top of the fancy staircase in the Art Institute, Rudy thought, that he and Helen used to admire—A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.
When she’d finished Rudy attached another canvas to the easel.
“Does she ever make corrections?” Nandini asked.
“She doesn’t need to make corrections,” Rudy said. “She gets it right the first time.”
Using her broad brush, Norma Jean covered the second canvas with warm colors. She struck the canvas; she mashed the brush into the canvas; she swung the brush back and forth, twisting it and turning it, setting it aside whenever she needed the smaller brush—which she manipulated with the wristlike muscles of her lower trunk—for more delicate work.
“Have you read my brothers books?” Nandini asked.
“One of them. Philosophy Made Simple. I guess he wrote that when he was a graduate student at Yale. But I haven’t finished it. And I haven’t read Schopenhauer and the Upanishads.”
“But you know about this shadowy reality he is sometimes talking about. The reality behind reality. Shadows. Dark forms. We can never make them out. What is the name for it?”
“The Ding an sich. The thing in itself. The pandit calls it the Sivaloka. Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, the Veil of Maya. Its very complicated. For a while I thought I could catch a glimpse of it from time to time. But I could never really focus on it. Just a glimpse, like the glimpse you get of…”—he hesitated—“Marilyn Monroes underpants in The Seven Year Itch.” He glanced at her to see if he’d gone too far, said something indelicate, made brutta figura. But she smiled.
“Yes,” she said. “I have seen that film in London with my brother many years ago. You get a glimpse of something like that and you never forget it.”
“But it’s very complicated,” Rudy repeated.
Nandini shook her head, as if to deny the complexity. “May I show you something else, Mr. Rudy, that you will never forget?”
“Of course.”
Nandini took Rudy’s hand in hers and placed it on Norma Jeans chest, just in front of her left leg, so that he could feel the beating of her heart. Norma Jean continued to paint.
“This elephant, believe me, Mr. Rudy, know more about this Ding an sich than my brother.”
Rudy kept his hand on the elephants heart, feeling the slow beat, like a drumbeat in the distance, across the border, on the other side of the river.
“One time I am camping many years ago with my husband, Ashok,” Nandini went on—this was the first time Rudy’d heard his name—“in the Kaziranga Park. It is raining a little, but everything is very cozy in our small tent. We are cooking rice and chapati on a little propane stove and we are lying next to each other in the dark. When the wind is picking up, a corner of our tent begin to flap, and Ashok is wanting to stake it down. But I tell him, no, let it flap. I like it, you see, that everything is so cozy and neat, but that one part is flapping free.”
She laughed and took his hand, and he thought for a moment that she was going to press it against her own heart.
At that moment, a new life began for Rudy, at least in his imagination. He knew now that she knew that, though nothing had been settled, there was something to be settled, something that would be settled before she left. The opportunity would not simply slip past them. Conscious decisions would be made. Nothing would be left to chance. To speak of it at this point would be almost indecent. This was Mollys wedding, after all, Molly and TJ’s. Let the young people enjoy, let them celebrate. There would be time afterward for the grown-ups to arrange things, to negotiate.
Norma Jean finished her fifth painting of the day Rudy removed the canvas from the easel and began to put her paints away while Nandini led her back to her stall.
Nirvana
They’d gone out to the barn—Rudy, Uncle Siva, Nandini, Maria, and the art dealer from San Antonio—to look at the wall of Norma Jeans. It was hot already and they were drinking iced tea. The dealer, a man Rudy’s age, had loosened his tie. Norma Jean was eating her favorite meal of smashed oranges mixed with alfalfa. It was three days before the wedding. Rudy had just told the story of the two kids in the pontoon boat, how it had made him think of the Ding an sich.
“Sangam,” Uncle Siva said, putting his hand on Rudy’s shoulder, “the auspicious confluence of two mighty rivers.” Sangam. It was the same word the pandit had used to describe the coming together of two families. “Two great philosophical traditions come together in the work of Schopenhauer,” Siva said. “Plato and Kant flowing from the west, the Upanishads flowing from the east. Schopenhauer used to read the Upanishads every night before going to bed, in a Latin translation of a Persian translation. It was called the Oupnek’hat, and he regarded it as the consolation of his life. He seized on the idea of maya, do you see, illusion. The phenomenal realm is the realm of maya, which conceals reality from us like a veil.”
“So, there is a way to lift this veil?”
“Yes and no,” Siva said. “You see, this is where Schopenhauer differs from Kant. The noumenal and the phenomenal are not really two separate realms but two different manifestations of a single, undivided reality To lift the veil is to become aware of this undivided reality in a different way Let me put it as simply as possible. When we look inside ourselves—and this is more or less what Kant neglected to do—what do we find? We find the will, which is an unfortunate term. It’s unfortunate in German too: der Wille. The Hindu word iccha would be more precise, but it’s not likely to gain currency.”
“The will,” Rudy said.
“Always striving, always demanding, always craving, wanting wanting wanting. It’s only in moments of better consciousness, moments in which we circumvent ordinary empirical consciousness and cease to will, that we lose the sense of ourselves as separate individuals and can participate in the timeless vision apprehended by saints and artists.”
Rudy knew a little bit about the “will,” but he was stunned. This was what he’d been looking for all along: “The timeless vision apprehended by saints and artists,’ “ he said. “That’s it exactly.”
“Or Marilyn Monroes chaddi,” Nandini added, smiling.
“Underpants,” Siva translated.
Yes, Rudy thought, the glimpse of Marilyn Monroe’s underpants. He could still see it in his mind’s eye, and that was it exactly too. “Well,” he said, turning to Maria’s art dealer, “what do you think?”
“The timeless vision apprehended by saints and artists?” The dealer laughed. “I like it. I can see it; I can see what you mean. To tell you the truth, I’ve been looking for something like this.” He waved his arm at the wall of paintings. “Maybe we’re onto the next big thing. Norma Jean may be the new Miró or Kandinsky or Arshile Gorky. What do you t
hink? And if worse comes to worst I could always sell this stuff to hotels. They’ve got all those walls. They’ve got to put something on them. It might as well be elephant art. And she can turn them out in a hurry. No problem there! What’d you say? Five or six a day? People are tired of sunsets on the desert and moonlight on the river and lonely old cacti. I’m tired of sunsets on the desert myself. Let ‘em look at Plum Blossom and Snow Competing for Spring or Strong Nuclear Force or Ants Climbing a Tree. Where do you get these titles anyway?”
“You want to have a show then?” Rudy asked, without explaining about the titles.
“Absolutely. Maybe get Norma Jean up to San Antonio for the opening. She could stay overnight at the zoo, have a sleepover with some of the old jungle crowd.”
“What are you thinking?” Rudy asked.
“What am I thinking? I just told you what I’m thinking.”
“I mean about price.”
“Yeah. Well, I was thinking five hundred, but you don’t want to go too low. Maybe start at a thousand, fifteen hundred. Maybe get a tie-in with the save-the-elephants crowd. Give a percentage, one percent, two percent. People like that. Of course, you gotta get them out of those cheap frames first.”
Rudy thought the dealer was crazy, but he liked him anyway and invited him to the wedding.
During the three days that remained, there was a great deal of coming and going, as there always is before a wedding. This had been the case at Meg’s wedding, and it had been the case at Rudy’s own wedding, though Helen and Rudy had had a reception in the church basement, with cake and punch and little silver trays of mints and chocolates, not a dinner with poppadoms and samosas and curries and spicy grilled fish and cucumbers in yogurt.
Norma Jeans pleasant disposition and satisfying barrel shape acted like a magnet, drawing everyone toward the barn, which reminded Rudy of the big museum in Florence, not the most famous one, but the one across the river that had three or four rows of paintings on each wall. And Maria had brought dried wildflowers. Bouquets of shooting stars, tansy, yarrow, sage, and Indian paintbrush hung from the rafters and over the windows. The girls had moved the card table holding Mollys jigsaw puzzle—with a picture of the Kalighat, the most important temple in Calcutta, which Molly had visited with TJ—to the barn, where, in the afternoons after Norma Jeans bath, they listened to the radio and drank tea as they worked on it while Norma Jean poked around in her stall, making a little pile of grain for the mice, until it was time to paint.
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