Philosophy Made Simple (33 page)

The next morning Nandini spent an hour on the phone talking to the pandit, arranging a puja—some kind of ceremony for Narmada-Jai.
If the puja didn’t work, they were going to call the vet and ask him to put the elephant down, but Nandini was hopeful, more than hopeful. She’d seen miracles, she said. She’d fed the statue of Ganesh in Guwahati a little spoonful of milk. All over India it had happened, she said, and in other countries too. Even in Los Angeles. The statues had drunk milk.

Medardo, who’d dropped by to see what needed to be done, was also optimistic. “Like the Virgin Mary shedding tears,” he said.
“I saw that too in Monterrey, two times.”

So they were in good spirits when Molly came back from McAllen, and no longer spoke in hushed hospital tones. TJ had almost missed his flight, Molly said, smiling. They were still sitting at the breakfast table, their dirty dishes in front of them.
They’d eaten eggs scrambled with the two avocados that had been sitting on the counter, which had finally begun to soften.
Medardo had gone out to sit with Narmada-Jai. Nandini had both elbows on the table and was supporting her chin on her interlocked fingers.

“What are you staring at?” Molly asked.

Everyone laughed. Molly blushed. “We just wanted to see what you looked like married,” Margot said.

“How do I look?”

“Radiant.”

“Are you sure you’re actually married?” Margot asked.

Molly laughed. “There was a certain amount of confusion.”

“That pandit was a piece of work,” Margot said. “You’re lucky he
didn’t
perform the ceremony.”

“The priest wasn’t any better,” Molly said, “but at least the justice of the peace seemed to know what he was doing. And anyway,
don’t you really marry yourselves? Legally, I mean. Even in Christianity I think that you marry yourselves. The church just sort of presides over it. At least that’s what somebody told us when we went for premarital counseling.”

“You
went for premarital counseling?” Meg asked.

“Yes, we went for premarital counseling.”

“Don’t you have the license? That’s what makes it legal—a marriage license from the state of Texas, the thing you got when you went into town with Father Russell?”

Molly put her hand over her mouth. “I don’t remember.”

“Didn’t the JP ask about it? What kind of a JP was he anyway? Do you
have
it, even if it isn’t signed?”

Molly looked around. “He
said
we were married. He pronounced us man and wife.”

“Jesus Christ,” Meg said.

“Well, you didn’t think of it either.”

“I wasn’t the one getting married.”

“I
feel
married.”

“How does it
feel?
”

“Kind of tingly.”

Nandini put her hands over her eyes. Rudy was afraid she was crying, but she was laughing. “You’re married,” he said. “The JP took the certificate into town., to the courthouse.”

“Why didn’t you say so?” Molly asked.

“I wanted to see if you could remember signing it,” Rudy said, looking at the second hand on the old kitchen clock he’d brought from the house in Chicago. The transparent front cover was missing, and part of the white plastic frame at the back had broken off. Helen had taped it together. If it had been in his power he would have stopped time at that moment, would have placed his finger on the clock face to block the second hand. He thought of the old hymn, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” They were together again as a family. Meg and Molly and Margot. And in a parallel universe it might have been, might be, Helen laughing and covering her face with her hands instead of Nandini.

Rudy had read about Zeno’s paradox in
Philosophy Made Simple,
and so he knew that the second hand, which was now at the six, could never reach the twelve, because first it would have to reach the halfway point, the nine, and then, having reached the nine, it would have to reach another halfway point, between the ten and the eleven. And then it would have to reach still another halfway point. No matter how close it got to the twelve,
there would always be another halfway point. But the second hand did not slow down as it approached the twelve. In fact, as it swept past the twelve, through an infinite number of halfway points, it seemed to be accelerating, carrying with it what was left of the morning.

“You ever see Sandro again?” Molly asked.

Margot shook her head. “He’s moved to Rome. But I’m still living in his apartment! It belongs to his wife. She’s cut the phone off, but it’ll be forever before she can get me out of there.”

“Why don’t we have lobster tonight?” Meg said.

“All you can get here,” Rudy said, “are those frozen rock lobster tails.”

“But they’re good,” Molly said. “Have you ever had lobster, Amma?”

Nandini smiled. “Of course, but I’m sure that anything your father prepares will be very fine,” she said, putting on a jacket.
“But what is ‘a piece of work? You are saying that the pandit is ‘a piece of work.’ “ She was in jeans and a sweatshirt. The temperature was still in the low sixties.

“She meant,” Rudy said, and then he paused, not sure how to explain. “She meant that if anyone can work a miracle for Narmada-Jai,
the pandit can.”

The wedding presents were piled up in the living room—on the leather couch, on the two Windsor chairs, on the coffee table.
Molly opened them one by one: toasters, blenders, knives, a copper pot from American friends; saris, jewelry, an Indian cookbook,
another raffia elephant sewing basket. And even a tiny illustrated copy of the Kama Sutra from one of TJ’s cousins! There was a present for Rudy too. Margot had bought it for Molly, but she gave it to Rudy instead. It was an Etruscan statue. A young girl, naked, left leg stretched out in front of her, right leg curled underneath her, the way Margot used to sit—all the girls, actually. She held a bird in one hand, a sparrow or a meadow-lark. She was about nine inches high and was the most beautiful thing Rudy’d ever seen. When he looked at her he was stunned. He looked away and then back. He looked away again,
and then back.

“Is this the antiquity you bought at Sotheby’s?”

Margot nodded. “It was very exciting.”

“How much?”

She shook her head. “You know better than to ask, Papa.”

He handed it to Nandirn.

“Maximum beauty,” she said. “Absolute maximum.”

“I want
you
to have it,” he said, looking around him to see what he’d done, and for a moment, time—silent, invisible, odorless, tasteless,
untouchable, neither river nor harvester but a thing in itself—stood still, stopped as surely as the second hand on the kitchen clock would have stopped if he’d blocked it with his finger.

But time was invented to keep everything from happening all at once. You can’t get on without it. Rudy was the only one who noticed a slight tremor, no more than a dogs tail brushing against his leg. The others kept right on talking and admiring the statue, and then the girls went upstairs to bed, and Rudy and Nandini went out to relieve Medardo, so he could go home to get some sleep. Narmada-jai was still unconscious, but her sides rose and fell. Rudy put his hand under her leg till he could feel the beating of her great heart, which continued to measure out the seconds and the minutes and the hours.

T
he weather was cool and cloudy after the storm. Nandini, who’d spent most of the night out with Narmada-Jai, was now asleep upstairs. Meg and Molly had gone outside to stay with the elephant. Rudy started to empty the dishwasher, but the dishes made too much clatter and he decided to wait. He boiled water for tea. When Nandini came down, half an hour later, she was holding the Etruscan statue.

“Maximum beauty,” Rudy said.

“Absolute maximum.”

They sat at the kitchen table drinking Assam tea with milk and sugar and chatting about this and that, like two young lovers too shy to say what’s in their hearts, till Medardo came to spell the girls at around seven o’clock. There were clothes to be washed and dried, suitcases to be packed and repacked, blouses to be ironed, reservations to be confirmed. Rudy boiled a dozen eggs, and he and Nandini drank more tea. When the eggs had cooled they took two of them out to Medardo.

Rudy thought they should call the vet, even though the pandit was due later in the day When an elephants been down two or three days, the vet had said on Saturday, it can’t get up again, but Rudy couldn’t bring himself to say this to Nandini, at least not in words. He put his arm around her, however—the first time he’d touched her, except to shake her hand, or to sit next to her in the car—and he thought she knew what he was thinking, because she leaned her head against his chest and let him hold her in his arms.

Rudy took Margot to the airport in McAllen. She said she was happy for him, but without explaining what she meant. He remembered how frightened she’d been when he’d put her on the plane at O’Hare, when she’d left for Italy on her own, last November, spending her own money because he hadn’t wanted her to go and wouldn’t pay for her ticket. She’d been twenty-nine years old. Now she was thirty ‘‘Italy’s been good for you,” he said, for the fourth or fifth time.

At the gate he asked her again: “How much did you say you spent for that little Etruscan girl?”

She shook her head and laughed.

“So Nandini better keep it in a safe place?”

She laughed again. “I think it will be safe with her.”

When he got back to the house, Meg and Molly were preparing to leave for Houston. Meg would fly to Milwaukee, Molly to New York, and from New York to Calcutta. From Calcutta she’d go by train to Guwahati, where someone from the tea garden would meet her. Rudy and Nandini, who was staying for the puja,
watched them pack the car. Nandini had some last-minute advice for Molly.

“When you get to the end of the driveway,” Rudy said to Molly as she closed the trunk of the car, “the wedding will be over.
That will be it.”

“Don’t, Papa,” she said, and he knew he could still make her cry.

They drove off, and Rudy waved and kept on waving, remembering his own parents, long dead, standing on the porch of the small farmhouse outside St. Joe, waving to him and Helen and the girls as they pulled out of the driveway Now he understood how they’d felt. He didn’t think of them very often now. They had faded away in his memory, like travelers disappearing into a dark wood, or ships disappearing over the horizon.