Philosophy Made Simple (18 page)

Rudy took his oldest daughter out to lunch at the Taj Mahal. While they were waiting for their chicken vindaloo they sat side by side in a booth and looked through the chapter on India in
Weddings of Many Lands.
They wondered what TJ would say about the elephant; they talked about where to put the
mandap
and where to put the sacred fire, about whether the ceremony should be in the house or in the barn or outside in front of the barn; they discussed the original menu with the manager, who recommended a few changes. But they didn’t talk about Meg’s affair, or Helen’s. They’d said all they needed to say.

“You are inviting Norma Jean elephant to this wedding?” the manager asked as they were leaving.

Rudy nodded. “I don’t see why not.”

The manager smiled. “Every elephant, you know,” he said, “is a manifestation of Lord Ganesh, our elephant-headed god, the remover of obstacles. He is always invoked at the beginning of any great undertaking, such as this one. If you invoke Lord Ganesh, everything is sure to be very fine indeed.”

“Sounds like good advice to me,” Rudy said,

“I’m sure you will be very, very happy,” the manager said to Meg.

“No, no,” she said. “Its my sister who’s getting married. She’s in India right now with her fiance.”

“Well then,” he said, “I’m sure your sister will be very, very happy. She is already very lucky to have a good sister like you and a good father to concern themselves with all these matters.”

“I’m sure she will be,” Meg said, “and yes, she is.”

A
fter Meg left, Rudy spent more and more time with Norma Jean. He helped the Russian exercise her every morning. She understood more than forty commands, which the Russian barked out in the old language of the mahouts as they walked around the paddock.
He was teaching them to Rudy, not Norma Jean.

At nine o’clock the Russian would leave Norma Jean out in the paddock so that he could work on bringing his barn by the trailer park up to USDA specifications. She’d take a long drink at the big watering trough by Rudy’s barn and kick up some dirt or play with her soccer ball, which she batted around with her trunk, and her oversized plastic harmonica, which made a sound like a kazoo, before heading out to the acacia trees. Sometimes Rudy went with her, to practice his commands. He could get her to go forward
(agit)
and backward
(peachay),
to the left
(chi)
and to the right
(chai ghoom),
and to raise her trunk
(oopar dhur).
But he couldn’t seem to master the most important command of all: stop, or
dhuth,
which you were supposed to pronounce “dutch,” only without the
ch
sound at the end. Rudy couldn’t quite get it.
On the way back to the barn he’d shout “duth,” “dutch,” “dhuth,” but she’d keep right on going until she reached the watering trough, which Rudy kept full. She’d dip her trunk in, suck up several gallons of water, and blow a fine spray over her back and on her belly and sometimes over Rudy too.

She’d take a little snooze in the afternoon, standing up, and when the Russian came back they’d set out her paints, big cans of tempera paints — children’s finger paints that came from a school-supply wholesaler in Houston. She looked forward to these sessions and would get testy if she had to wait too long. After the painting session, Rudy and the Russian would hose her down and scrub her with two big brushes and then pumice stones, and the Russian would clean her toes.

“Who cleans elephants’ toes out in the jungle?” Rudy asked.

“They clean them themselves with a stick,” the Russian said, “just like they draw pictures.”

They fed her in the morning and again in the evening: a bale of hay, a bale of alfalfa, rolled oats, specially formulated grain that the Russian bought from the zoo in Brownsville, a sack of potatoes, and ten to twenty pounds of fruit. She was very partial to potatoes and oranges. She ate the potatoes whole, but she mashed the oranges with her foot. She consumed a hundred and fifty pounds of fodder every day, half of which she deposited, like steaming loaves of bread, in the front of her stall, where it could easily be mucked out. The Russian shoveled the manure into the back of his truck and sold it to a citrus grower north of town.

Rudy cooked for the Russian and they ate on a card table out in the barn. The Russian had been with his father when his father’d bought Norma Jean at the
hathi
bazaar in Sonepur, and he demonstrated how his father had bargained with the vendor, their hands under a blanket to conceal the negotiations from cu
rious spectators. If the buyer pressed the first two joints of the first finger of the vendors right hand, he said, taking Rudy’s hand and pressing his finger, that would mean he was offering five thousand rupees. If the vendor wasn’t satisfied,
he’d pinch the first joint of the buyer’s next finger to raise the price by five hundred rupees, and so on. After his father’s death, the Russian and Norma Jean had traveled for years with a Russian circus in eastern Europe and then in South America.
He liked to reminisce about her adventures, and Rudy liked to listen to his stories: Norma Jean loose in the streets of Mexico City; Norma Jean swimming all the way across Lake La Barea, near Guadalajara; Norma Jean tapping a keg of beer on the circus train from Chihuahua to Ciudad Obregón. Then, fifteen years ago, the circus went belly-up in Reynosa, just across the river,
and the Russian had simply taken off one night and walked the elephant across the international bridge, passing out
mordidas
to the border guards so they’d look the other way Her Indian name had been Narmada-Jai, but he’d changed it to Norma Jean,
Marilyn Monroe’s real name, because she was so beautiful. He pronounced Marilyn Monroe as one word — Marilynmonroe. What times they’d shared together, good times and bad times, but he was an old man now, he said — he didn’t know exactly how old — and he was worried about what was going to happen to her when he was gone. He offered to sell her to Rudy for five thousand dollars.

Rudy laughed. “I can remember when her picture was on all the magazine covers at the same time. Marilyn Monroe’s picture.
That was the summer Helen went to Italy for the first time and I started doing all the cooking.”

The Russian poured a small glass of vodka for each of them and they drank.

“I can remember the day she
died
too,” Rudy said. “August fifth, nineteen sixty-two. My youngest daughter had just gotten
a job as a book conservator at the Newberry Library, and Molly — the one who’s getting married — was getting ready to take off for Ann Arbor to study modern dance.”

“You can’t understand it without vodka,” the Russian said, pouring two more glasses.

“I guess that’s true of a lot of things,” Rudy said.

That night, as he was drifting off to sleep, Rudy could hear Norma Jean, through his bedroom window, stirring in her stall,
making her presence felt — an occasional trumpet blast followed by a full-throated roar.

Sometimes after lunch, while Norma Jean was snoozing, Rudy’d read
Philosophy Made Simple
out in the barn. He read and reread the chapters on Berkeley and Hume, underlining key passages with Helens fountain pen till there were no more passages left to underline, but he couldn’t find the flaws in the arguments that led, step by step,
to the following conclusions: that the external world has no palpable existence apart from our perceptions; that the self itself is nothing but a bundle of these perceptions; that causality is psychological, rather than physical — a habit of mind based on the laws of association and constant conjunction.

And yet these arguments changed nothing. When he looked out his kitchen window in the morning, the sugar hackberries and the barn were still stubbornly there, and so were the sabal palms along the drive; when he looked inside himself he could still catch a glimpse of the boy who’d eaten the entire peach crop with his dad, three years in a row, back in the twenties;
and when he turned his key in the ignition of the pickup, electric current flowed from the battery through the coil to the distributor and from the distributor to the spark plugs, and the engine started.

He found Kant’s blend of rationalism and empiricism much more to his liking than Berkeley’s idealism and Hume’s skepticism,
though the chapter on Kant was very difficult.
There’s something “out there” after all,
he thought,
beyond the realm of phenomena, beyond the world of appearances.
He was back where he’d started, in Plato’s cave, trying to make sense of the shadows.

But what was out there, in this realm beyond the cave, which Kant called the noumenon? The
Ding an sich,
that’s what was out there. The “thing in itself.” That’s what Rudy wanted. Not the appearance of the thing, not the representation of the thing in his mind, but the thing in itself, reality.

But the problem was, you could never get at this reality, this
Ding an sich.
It’s like a camera, Siva Singh explained. How do you know that the pictures you take are going to be black-and-white? Kant’s answer is simple: because you have black-and-white film in the camera. It doesn’t matter how you set the f-stop or adjust the shutter speed. It doesn’t matter where you stand or how you hold your camera or how you shade the camera lens. You’re going to get black-and-white photos. It’s the same with people. How do you know that the next thing you see is going to exist in space and time? Answer: because you’ve got space-and-time film in your camera. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re never going to get a picture of the
Ding an sich.

Rudy could see the sense in this, but it bothered him anyway. He couldn’t stop himself from taking mental pictures, turning his imaginary camera every which way, trying different light settings and shutter speeds, hoping to capture on film a glimpse of the
Ding an sich,
like the glimpse you get of Marilyn Monroe’s underpants in
The Seven Year Itch.
He and Helen had seen
The Seven Year Itch
when it first came out in 1955, at the Biograph Theater up on North Lincoln, and the image was still as clear as a bell —
the bil
lowing skirt, Marilyns laughter as she tries to hold it down, and then the little glimpse of white panty, like a star glimpsed through a gap in scudding clouds. There had to be
some
way to get color pictures. Why not just load color film in your camera?

And then one night, about eleven o’clock, he was taken by surprise. He was standing at the edge of the grove. It was dark under the avocado trees; the moon was hidden by clouds. He could see, in the beam of his flashlight, the narrow, silvery mesquite leaves on the trees on the far side of the slope, and he could feel the pods on the path under his feet. He was halfway down the slope when he saw a mysterious light coming around the bend in the river, heard mysterious music, music and soft laughter that rippled through the dark: the
Ding an sich.
He fumbled with the switch of his flashlight. He wanted to see what it looked like. “
Hola!”
he shouted, aiming the beam of the flashlight at the light on the river, the source of music and laughter.

The light went out, the music stopped, the laughter ceased. The flashlight sent a feeble beam into the darkness. He could see faces, wide-eyed, and a girl’s bare breasts. It was his neighbors son, floating down the river in his new pontoon boat,
with his girlfriend.

“So,” Maria said, when Rudy told her about it on his next cultural Friday. “You thought for a minute you got a glimpse of this
Ding an sich? La cosa en si misma?
Like a vision of the Virgin Mary?”

“Something like that.” Rudy laughed. “Just for a minute. What do you think?”

“Maybe,” she said, laughing. “Probably as close as you’re going to get.”