Philosophy Made Simple (38 page)

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 slowing 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.”

It’s Helen’s voice all right, and now she’s mad. They’re in the kitchen. They’ve made love and Rudy’s sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee, looking through the Sunday
Trib.
The girls have been rampaging through the house. Now they’re at the toaster for the fourth or fifth time. Every time, the same drama plays itself out: three girls fighting over two pieces of toast. Meg holds one slice high over her head. Margot and Molly pull at her arms and simultaneously struggle with each other over the second slice. Helen is on the phone, talking to someone in Italian. Finally she loses patience, clamps her hand over the mouthpiece: “No more toast for the rest of the day,” she shouts.

Rudy puts the paper down and looks up. The girls are momentarily stunned. Their mouths open wide. There’s a moment of silence.
Helen starts to laugh. Meg puts her fists on her skinny hips: “Mother,” she says, “you’re a woman of empty threats.”

Now Helen is laughing and trying to explain to the person on the other end of the phone what has just happened, and why its so funny, but she can’t remember the word for toast in Italian. “What’s the word for toast in Italian?” she asks. “I can’t remember.” But nobody knows.

And now the girls have gathered around her as she holds her adopted chicken in her arms. He hears her cluck and chortle to the chicken, hears the chicken cluck and chortle back, and then she’s turning to him, in a room on the eighth floor of the Drake Hotel. Helen turning to him. “I’ve never done this before,” she says. “You’ll have to show me the way.” And now they’ve undressed each other and she says, “How like you this? And this?” And she takes his erection in her hand and says: “O Rudy,
this is going to be such a great adventure. Not just
this”
—squeezing him—“but
this.”
She lets go and holds out her arms. “
This life, this everything.”

The noise of the crowd is deafening. He’s shooting two free throws with twenty seconds left on the clock, the last game of the season. The game will decide the league championship. Not the NBA, of course—only the old Midwest Industrial League. There’s a center jump after every basket; all the players shoot two-handed set shots because the jump shot hasn’t been invented yet;
and at 6’ 2” Rudy is the tallest man on his team, the South Water Bluestreaks, which is down by one point—38-39. He shoots his two free throws underhanded, lifts the ball up toward the basket like a shaman releasing a bird into the air. He sinks both shots, and after the game, savoring the moment of victory, wanting it to last forever, he walks across the crowded floor of the gymnasium to speak to one of the refs, who’s talking
to a beautiful girl in a chartreuse dress. “Rudy,” the ref says, “let me introduce you to my niece, Helen.” And Rudy says,
“How do you do?” and holds out his hand. Helen shakes her long red hair and takes his hand in hers and smiles. Her voice is rich and deep. “Pleased to meet you,” she says. “You must be very happy.” The tape has come to an end long ago, the light has faded, the silence has thickened. If he doesn’t do something now, the silence will carry him down, just as the river carried Norma Jean down, down past Pepe’s, down past the international bridge at Hidalgo, on past Brownsville and out into the Gulf.
But the phone rings. For a minute he thinks it might be Helen, calling to say she’s coming home, but then he clears his head.
He loses count of the rings. The phone rings and rings, but he doesn’t answer it. Just as a passenger in an airplane that follows a certain parabolic arc will experience a brief period of weightlessness at the pinnacle of the arc, so at the pinnacle of his own parabolic arc Rudy experiences the cessation of willing, and for a brief moment he sees things as they really are.

For their hard work and good advice: my agent, Henry Dunow, and my editor, Pat Strachan.

For his hospitality in Mission, Texas and for sharing his knowledge of the region: Noe Torres.

For sharing his knowledge of Texas avocados and the Texas avocado industry: Medardo Riojas.

For their help with Hindu customs and words: Shalini Lulla, Shalini Krishan, Nandini Singh, Rachana Umashankar.

For their help with Spanish: Tim Foster, Jorge Prats, Robin Regan, Xavier Romano.

For his help with parallel universes: Chuck Schulz.

For his advice on Rudy’s heart condition: Dr. Robert Currie.

For his advice on flowers: David Graflund.

For their fund of general knowledge: Bill and Syd Brady.

For reading an early version of
Philosophy Made Simple:
Monica Berlin.

For proofreading the manuscript: Terry Jackson.

The
Philosophy Made Simple
that Rudy studies was written by TJ’s uncle Siva and bears little resemblance to the
Philosophy Made Simple
written by Richard H. Popkin and Avrum Stroll.

Robert Hellenga received his BA from the University of Michigan and studied at Queen’s University in Belfast and at the University of North Carolina before completing a PhD in English Literature at Princeton University. He teaches at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, and is the author of three previous novels,
The Sixteen Pleasures, The Fall of a Sparrow,
and
Blues Lessons.

Philosophy Made Simple

A NOVEL

Robert Hellenga

A conversation with Robert Hellenga

Philosophy Made Simple
marks the return of the Harrington family, whom readers first encountered in your novel
The Sixteen Pleasures.
Why did you decide to bring back these characters?

In the original version of
The Sixteen Pleasures,
Margot’s father, Rudy, had his own chapters. These were ultimately deleted, because the editor and I agreed that they impeded the forward movement of the novel. I published these three chapters separately, as short stories, but I never got over the feeling that I still had some unfinished business with Rudy. So I just took up his story where I’d left off—on an avocado grove in Texas.