Picking Bones from Ash

by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

  There was a silence, and then my father surprised me. “We could always use extra money, Rumi.” He nodded. “Why don’t you try your hand at finding us some clients?”

  Later that day I found Snowden-roshi flipping through the clothes in my closet. When nothing he saw impressed him, he went out, returning a few hours later with a bag from a small boutique in which was folded a lovely dress made of blue silk, nipped at the waist, and with little cap sleeves.

  “It’s expensive,” I protested to my father.

  “I think you should at least see if it fits.”

  So I changed. When I didn’t come out of the bedroom immediately, my father and Snowden-roshi insisted on coming in to take a look.

  “I knew it!” Snowden-roshi declared.

  “You look lovely, my dear,” my father said. Then he whispered, “The man is loaded. Let him buy it for you if he wants to.”

  We drove to Napa in the late afternoon. The sun kissed the hills, which were covered with a soft down of aging golden grass. In Snowden-roshi’s little black sports car, we crossed the Carneros region, with its neat rows of grapes gently tracing the outline of hills, over to the wide mouth of the Napa Valley stretching open to welcome us to the land of modern-day Dionysians. Here majestic wineries had been crafted out of a romantic architectural imagination—a château, an asymmetrical mix of rectangles, a Spanish villa. We followed a small road into the eastern hills, winding between vineyards marked for Zinfandel and Cabernet, the leaves of the grapevines filtering the light till it took on an emerald hue. We parked beside a stucco building perched on a bluff. Snowden-roshi held my hand to help me cross a cobblestone path, which led through an iron gate to a wide balcony. The valley stretched below us, bordered by low, sleepy hills to the west. Hawks scanned the valley floor for prey. The wind rushed past our ears, as even and soothing as the sound of the ocean.

  This was the Lorenzi Winery, one of the grand originals, started by two Sicilian brothers in the twenties and purchased and renamed in the seventies by Dr. Phillip Lorenzi. His wines had won prizes in Paris and were served in the finest restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

  At Snowden-roshi’s urging, I accepted a glass of wine and soon all my thoughts were tinted with rose. The catering staff whirled through the party on the balcony like finely tuned gears in a machine, bearing hors d’oeuvres on silver trays. I tasted caviar, delicate egg rolls stuffed with morels, and tender shrimp. The guests were all a lot older than I. They were educated and wealthy, judging by their alert eyes and relaxed physiques, the expression of people expecting to get their way in life without too much trouble. My new dress covered me like a talismanic shield, and I felt young and elegant.

  “How nice to meet you,” Dr. Lorenzi said to me. He was wiry and tan, a northern Californian of the golf- and tennis-playing variety, and his wife was equally lean and muscular, with white teeth in a wolfish grin.

  “What a pretty dress. What a pretty girl,” Mrs. Lorenzi purred.

  “She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Snowden-roshi beamed. “The perfect blending of East and West.” There was the flattery again, and I squirmed inside, wondering what I would be expected to provide to continue receiving it.

  Dr. Lorenzi began to drone on and on about how he’d grown wealthy first as a surgeon and then as a Napa Valley vintner, and how, now that he had exhausted the possibilities of accumulating physical possessions, he wished to do something truly great for humanity. He wished to touch the souls of men. He wanted to help spread the teachings of Buddha.

  Snowden-roshi clapped him on the shoulder, and the two men drifted off into business talk.

  “How do you know Snowden-roshi?” Mrs. Lorenzi asked, eyeing me over the edge of her glass goblet as she luxuriated in a gulp of wine.

  “He’s an old friend of my father’s.”

  “Oh. Then you’re not … ?” She wagged her index finger back and forth. Her demeanor changed and she grasped my forearm girlishly, drawing me into a walk that circled the perimeter of the balcony. “No one knows anything about his romantic history. It’s infuriating.”

  “Ah.”

  “There are always these rumors. I mean, you look at him and there’s something a little sad in his eyes, isn’t there? Not surprising given his history, but still.” She stopped moving. We were at the other end of the party, but situated so we had a clear and discreet view of Snowden-roshi and Dr. Lorenzi still deep in conversation. “They say he has a broken heart.”

  Together we watched Snowden-roshi, a man in his theater, speaking earnestly with Dr. Lorenzi while the sun caught his robes and his hands. All around, women and men admired him, just as we were doing. It occurred to me that perhaps he had brought me here because he had wanted me to see him this way.

  Mrs. Lorenzi clasped my hand with the self-assurance of one who is accustomed to drawing strangers into her confidence within moments of meeting. She nodded at Snowden-roshi. “You’ll tell me, though, if you hear anything.”

  “Yes. Of course,” I lied.

  The sun slipped down behind the western mountains, and the valley began to grow cold. The euphoria from the wine and the amber evening light faded, leaving me with a heavy nostalgia. I wanted another glass of wine to try to recapture my earlier mood, but Snowden-roshi took my hands and steered me inside a hall with rust-colored Mexican tiles and stucco walls. He seated me toward the front, where a small stage had been erected. “You aren’t used to drinking,” he cautioned. “You must learn to hydrate,” and he handed me a glass of water. Then he left me to sit alone. I drank slowly, taking in the enormous canvases covering the walls. They depicted scenes from the history of California—Native Americans in Yosemite, the valley in 1890 devoid of grapes, and pioneers engaging in a picnic by the sea. The isolation I had often felt at parties crept over me.

  Now the partygoers threaded into the remaining seats behind me, and Snowden-roshi took the stage. He thanked the guests and his hosts. He wanted to talk about the ancient Greeks, from whom we had inherited much of our political and cultural system. These wise men had understood that a man’s life was filled with two things—mythos and logos. “Mythos,” Snowden-roshi declared, “is all that is sacred. It is the intuitive, spiritual side of life and can only be expressed and experienced through ritual, meditation, and art. Mythos anchored ancient people. It gave them a way to express joy, sadness, and pain. But it did not try to explain the world literally, only how we were meant to perceive it.”

  Causal, rational explanation was the realm of logos. Snowden-roshi believed that the ancient civilizations had been wise in keeping mythos and logos separate. Terrible things happened, he declared, if people sought practical solutions in mythos or tried to find emotional shelter in logos. Our own world was fractured because we had an imbalance between the two.

  The air pulsed as the pupils of his eyes contracted and expanded, like little whirlpools. A blue vein pressed out against his forehead. Behind me, the audience seemed to breathe as one.

  “We can see this now,” Snowden-roshi continued, “with science trying to explain away the mysteries of the soul, and religion trying to explain all the origins of the universe.” Those of us who were Elect—those of us in this room—had a duty to take our fractured selves and heal. This was the beauty of Buddhism, he continued. It didn’t judge. It didn’t frighten people into pretending to be pious. It merely asked that all humans engage in knowing themselves, and in practicing compassion and kindness.

  The Indians had supported their temples through self-sufficiency. The Chinese had begged. The Japanese had performed social services. The American Buddhist temple would need to find a new way, one that mixed a free-market system with compassion. Snowden-roshi was certain that the donors there that evening would give generously. And then he announced the evening’s highlight, a performance troupe from San Francisco, here to put on a classical Nō play. This was the kind of thing the aristocrats of medieval Japan had enjoyed.

  The lights dimmed, and a group of
musicians dressed in blue happi coats and pantaloons silently took the stage. They began to play. It was an eerie sound, just this side of music, a shade away from reeds rustling in the wind or shrill birds exclaiming in midflight. A man climbed the stairs leading to the stage and introduced himself both as the narrator of the story and as a character in the play, a Buddhist priest. He recalled a beautiful woman he had once met while crossing a river in the Japanese Alps. As he reminisced, a new character crept out of his memory and onto the stage. I felt my face grow both hot and cold.

  She was wearing a Nō mask of the archetype of a beautiful woman. The mask was white, the lips scarlet and slightly parted, and the nose sloped elegantly between her high cheekbones. She waved the sleeves of her heavy orange-and-gold robes and swept the golden fan in her right hand through the air. Again and again she lifted her white feet and stomped to articulate a note, and the room spun with her dizzying, hypnotic dance.

  The priest, too, was entranced by the young woman’s dancing, but slowly grew alarmed. As she danced, the woman wailed that she had once loved a man, but he had betrayed her and now she was doomed to roam the earth as a ghost. Then the beautiful woman turned around slowly, so we could see only her back, and put a white sheet over her head. When she removed the sheet, her glossy locks had been replaced with matted, coarse hair. A minute later she turned around to face us and the mask of the beautiful woman was gone, and in its place was the face of a demon.

  Shrill, eerie notes accumulated like falling water and pooled together into a thick and frightening atmosphere. The demon bit her sleeves and lurched to a stop in front of me. I peered up into her face, all bulging eyes, protruding teeth, and skin as scarlet as an angry red wound. She rattled her fan inches from my nose and put her hands on her hips and rocked backward, shaking her head in a way that mocked me. She staggered from foot to foot, then pointed the fan at my face. She ran to another corner of the stage, only to return to me again and again, as though I were to blame for her condition. I rose out of my seat, but Snowden-roshi put a hand on my shoulder and forced me to sit.

  The priest cried out to Buddha and waved his rosary with ecstatic energy. Finally the music lulled like an ebbing tide, and the invisible strings tying the audience to the drama relaxed. The demon began to retreat. In the end we were left with nothing but the priest standing at the edge of the stage.

  It was dark when we left. The valley was cold and I shivered until the heat came on in the car. I was feeling pensive and wanted to be left alone with my thoughts, but Snowden-roshi was in the mood to talk.

  “Did you enjoy that?” He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. “I thought you might like to see how some of those antiques you deal with are actually used. The masks, for instance.”

  “It was impressive,” I said quietly.

  “You were very charming with people tonight,” he continued lightly. “I was proud of you. Some of these guests will visit the shop just to see you. If I’m there, I’ll help with the sales. If not, you’ll have to manage.”

  “Why are you here? I mean, really?”

  He feigned surprise. “Haven’t we had a nice time together?”

  “You want something.”

  He studied me, almost with an expression of amusement. “You’re not what you seem, are you? You can be surprisingly direct for someone under her father’s thumb the way you are.”

  “People often confuse shyness with weakness.”

  He nodded and seemed to be thinking. “It’s just karma. I hope to help you here and there. Your mother would have liked that. She wouldn’t have wanted you to grow up never leaving François’ house.”

  I smiled. “I’m spoiled.”

  “You I have no problem with. Your father, on the other hand …”

  “He loves me.”

  “He’s overprotective. No one else will tell you, so I will.” He relaxed. “What’s he trying to protect you from, I wonder?”

  We fell silent. The conversation had not gone in the direction I’d anticipated, so I changed the subject. “What was she like?”

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Inspiring because she was beautiful. She hated to be bad at anything that she did.” He paused. “I was in love with her, you know. We all were.”

  “We?”

  “Small band of expats. It was the seventies.”

  “Am I like her?”

  “I don’t know yet,” he said honestly. We were quiet for a moment, and then he asked, “Do you happen to know exactly where she is buried?”

  “No.”

  “I wouldn’t mind knowing,” he said, “if you find out. We could offer some prayers for her. I’d like to take her some flowers, but François says her grave is in Japan.”

  This was news to me. “It is?”

  Snowden-roshi continued. “Do you know what the Japanese believe about the dead? They say that you must pour water over their tombstones so their souls don’t stay thirsty. Isn’t that lovely? And there are all these complex things you have to do. Special sutras you have to read every so often to keep their souls chugging along toward rebirth. Oh well.” He shrugged. “I imagine someone is praying for her somewhere in Japan.”

  Back in my room, I hung up the dress to let it air. I opened the window, and the cool evening breeze slid beside me, bringing in the scent of the ocean. From the dress I could smell something else, a faint reminder of dust and wine and incense.

  All at once, I studied the dress again. I realized that it hid all my flaws—my small chest and long waist. I thought about all the times I had passed Snowden-roshi in the hallway, or sat across from him at dinner. He already knew exactly what my arms and legs and breasts were like, and he had considered all these things before choosing an outfit for me.

  Now the glamour of the evening didn’t feel so pleasurable. I felt vulnerable. The old uneasiness I’d felt about Snowden-roshi since he’d returned to us reasserted itself in my gut. He wanted something from me. I, raised to always know the answer to a challenge, felt uneasily at sea.

  That night I could hear Snowden-roshi in the guest bedroom, the springs of the old mattress complaining against his weight, and when I thought of him by himself, whirling in the sheets, I, too, squirmed inside my bed. Further down the hall, my father tossed in his sleep. The entire house seemed to complain. First one beam groaned, and then another and another, like the bones of a spine passing along stress. The creaking followed me into sleep, where I dreamed that I was a passenger on an old wooden boat.

  Then, as dreams do, this scene delivered me to a new one, and I dreamed I was sleeping in a Japanese-style room.

  The fibers of the lime-colored tatami floor undulated, reflecting the moonlight as it quivered through an open window. An actor stepped into view, wearing the Nō mask of a woman. She was dressed in a brilliant red-and-silver kimono. As the woman turned her back to me, her thick black hair suddenly grew coarse and matted and I became frightened in anticipation of seeing her face again.

  I saw her nose first, sharp and curved like a meat hook. Her chin pointed down at the ground in a V, and her cheekbones drew up high against her ears. Vermilion eyes flashed. She put a hand through the window and motioned to me to come closer. The floor in the room tilted, and I was sliding down toward the window.

  A voice called my name. “Rumi,” it said softly. A woman’s voice, just roused from sleeping. The mask fell. Through the open hole where her face had been, I saw a backdrop of whirling cherry petals carried by the wind. The hair and the kimono collapsed to the ground, mere actor’s props without a body.

  When I woke up, I was shivering. The curtains over the open bedroom window heaved.

  I closed the window and looked around my room. Gray moonlight hung over the furniture in my bedroom, a blanket of ash from an adolescent Pompeii. I flicked on the lamp on my nightstand and the ash dissolved. Objects echoed with longing and romance. On one corner of the wall, François had hung my report cards, a wedge-shaped army of A’s marching along like stocky serge
ants.

  I heard a sound, as light as a kernel of rice falling from a table onto a tile floor. The air grew cooler. Scratching traveled the length of the wall. Tiny fingers picked at the paint, looking for a point of entry through the wood. Then the sound faded, leaving me alone.

  I felt a little the way you do on the first full day of autumn, when the air has permanently shifted from sultry to cool and the atmosphere has grown so tense the leaves on deciduous trees all fall in fear. Something, I knew, had come for me.

  CHAPTER 8

  The Ghost

  Now the objects clamored for my attention. When François handed me a new Ch’ing dynasty vase or a Japanese suzuribako lacquer writing box, I didn’t need to wait for them to speak. They called to me the moment they were unwrapped: gilded voices, cool sopranos, rasping coughs. My environment was a cacophony of dynasties, textures, and sounds.

  My father began to notice that something was amiss. He brought home a damaged screen of waterfowl and willow trees that he had found at a garage sale in the Oakland Hills, convinced that it was from the Muromachi period. But I knew it was a much later copy, perhaps even as late as 1900.

  “No, Rumi.” He smiled at me, tolerantly. “See the way the water splashes against this rock? The lines are elastic.”

  “The forger was talented.”

  “Forger? You’ve become so suspicious lately. It’s affecting your judgment.”

  I made him take the back of the screen apart. Even when he found that the original painting was backed with newspaper dated 1897, he still could not believe that the screen hadn’t been completed three hundred years before. “But it looks … right.”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  He shot me an accusatory glance, as though I had magically transformed the screen from the undervalued one he had purchased to the relatively common piece lying here now.

  The following evening, Snowden-roshi, exhausted from another interview in which he had expounded on the superiority of Buddhism, came for dinner with a group of friends. This had become something of a habit since the party in Napa Valley. He liked to come to the shop at the end of the day with some of his followers who were looking for small Buddhas and mandalas. After they made a purchase, we would invite them for dinner, and François and I would scurry to expand our dinners to accommodate the guests.