by Blair Hurley
“Am I early?” said Nicole.
“It’s cool.” Finally, Helen moved from her elaborate slouch. She took Nicole’s coat and pushed out a chair. “We’re just having dinner.” They ate and talked around her about who was sleeping with whom while Nicole sat watching them, cold but sweating, like a sack of moist clay.
When the burritos were gone Helen stood up and went to the windowsill, where a few incense sticks were parked in what looked like a block of cheese. Mold was creeping up one side. “My little shrine,” she said. “My American shrine. Let’s bless the party. Nicole, give us a blessing.”
The other three stared at Nicole humorlessly.
“You guys remember, I told you about Nicole,” said Helen. “She’s the best Zen student in my class. Master’s pet.” She smiled, but there was something mocking and dangerous in her eyes. “Come on, bless us.” She bent her head.
Nicole put her hand on Helen’s head to bless her. “Namu Amida butsu,” she said. “May this party rock.”
The partygoers laughed.
Gradually other younger people began to arrive, dressed in ugly holiday sweaters festooned with knitted menorahs and red-nosed reindeer. The little room was soon packed and smoky, the in-jokes rampant, the relationships unclear. The sugary pop music from Nicole’s childhood was going through an ironic revival and so she knew the blasting songs, but no one danced; it seemed to be there simply to make it hard to hear anyone talking. When someone asked Helen where her Christmas sweater was, Helen went into the back room and emerged in a white sweatshirt with black patches taped on and an inflated latex glove tied to her waist. “I’m a Zen cow,” she announced. “Get it? Mu. Mu.”
That was from the koan, the riddle that is every student’s first foray into the frustrating puzzle of Zen. A monk asks a master if a dog has a Buddha nature and the enigmatic answer is “Mu”— nothing. How many people at the party knew the koan? Was it a private joke for her alone, some coded message? Helen’s eyes searched for Nicole’s over the crowd, latched on, and glimmered.
In a moment of chaotic sound, when the people began to dance, Helen pressed herself to Nicole. “I didn’t think you’d come,” she shouted.
“I was curious.” Curious to see how young college students like Helen lived these days? How they navigated their foreign worlds?
They stared at each other. “He calls you his little theri,” Helen said, still in that shout so close to her ear. “He never calls me that.” It was the Pali word for “nun.”
Then Helen released her and slipped away, between two boys in matching reindeer sweaters, grinding briefly with them as she went. Nicole let the crowd pass her to a corner of the room, clutched her beer, drank it down.
A few swallows later, she reached the deck. It was about fifteen feet off the ground, rickety and swaying. The air was cold and quiet, compared to the roaring music inside. She leaned on the railing, drawing a deep breath.
“You’re his best student,” said Helen behind her. The Boston snow settled fairylike on her hair. “Everyone knows it. Are you training to be a master?”
She could feel the alcohol she’d had narrow her vision, eliminating the periphery, so that she had to swing her head to see things. With an effort she brought Helen into focus. She was angry now, or had been angry for hours, watching Helen dance around her, smiling that predatory smile. “I don’t know,” she said.
Helen slid to the railing beside her and lit a cigarette, cupping her hands around the lighter as though holding something precious.
“Why did you invite me here?”
“I wanted to see if you were a real person.”
I’m real. She wanted to shout it; she wasn’t a figure in a painting or a done-up doll; not a geisha or goddess, either. But she wasn’t sure what she was. She wished she could see herself as Helen saw her: a threat. “Well? Am I?” she demanded.
“He knows everything about you, doesn’t he? He’s got you right where he wants you. You have to be more careful with who you’re fucking. Do you ever think about what you mean to him?”
That was a question with no answer, the riddle she’d been trying to crack for ten years. She knew her Master needed her, the way a teacher with no student is no teacher at all. There were things they shared: intimacies that come from years of sleeping together, accepting each other’s bodies again and again. They were an old married couple, childless perhaps, a fruitless, pointless union, but a union nevertheless. The cement of years sealing the cracks. “You don’t understand,” she said feebly.
Helen shook her head. “I know how to handle him, okay? He talks a lot, but I don’t believe everything I hear. Maybe you should just get out of this. Before you get hurt.” She was drunk, making her bid for ownership. Leave him to me, she was saying. Leaning heavily on the wooden railing, letting her chin fall to her chest.
Coldly, desperately, Nicole asked, “Why can’t you leave us alone?”
Helen muttered something. It sounded like “Mu.” Or maybe it was a curse. She lurched forward; Nicole shrank back. Then Helen was hanging over the railing, vomiting over it. Nicole grabbed her by the waist, trying to hold her steady so she wouldn’t fall. Just walk away, some part of her said. Let this foolish girl go, this child who thinks she understands.
Shouts and laughter broke their silence; someone was calling Helen’s name. She straightened, wiping her mouth, and stepped back inside. No one noticed when Nicole collected her coat and left.
It was well past eleven and the train was near its last run when she got on. She took the train toward the river, moving west to the outlying neighborhoods. For a while the engine cut out and they glided over the black Charles in silence, the carnival lights of the skyline retreating, the other skyline swallowing her up.
The sudden blast of heat made sweat run warmly down her arms. She could smell the sourness of her own body now, the accumulation of other smells, female fluids, shrill waxes, the bite of bile under a veneer of perfume. She was eighteen again and crammed in a car with two boys, one her friend, the other her boyfriend, and they were running away. It was inevitable, really, this stone that had been set rolling so long ago; with her good Catholic family, with her Master, she was always looking over her shoulder, figuring out how to escape.
It was all there, the sweet rot of herself.
“Mom wants you closer to me,” her brother, Paul, had told her on the phone that week. He was six years older than her and had always been protective. “If you were in New York, I could keep an eye on you, and Mom wouldn’t have to worry.” From her beach community of the single, the elderly, and the insufferable in North Carolina, their mother directed family affairs.
“I told you to stop looking for apartments for me,” she said. “I’m fine here. I’m okay.”
“Don’t you want to see your wonderful brother more?”
“My wonderful brother can visit anytime he likes. Bring the kids. Bring Marion. We’ll video-chat with Mom and make it a party.”
He called every week, full of breezy anecdotes about life and the kids (June’s learning “Eight Days a Week” on the piano; Charlie’s still into dinosaurs). They’d fallen off from their long phone calls when he was in college and she was still at home, when she’d complain about their parents and he’d listen, he’d always listen, the phone warming in her hand over time as though the heat of his sympathy could reach her. This time he sounded impatient. “Nic, there’s a studio opening up near us in Murray Hill. It’s small, but you don’t need much, I know. The light is good. I could help you out with the deposit.”
She started to explain that she was a New Englander, that she never did well when she left. She was best among all the people bundled in their coats half the year, minding their own business. But her old explanations had grown tired.
Maybe he’d gotten nervous at her thirty-second birthday, when she’d brought no friends to the family dinner; maybe she’d said too quickly that no, she had no romances on the horizon, when he’d asked. Maybe the c
hange happened when he’d last visited and found her up at dawn, meditating silently on the patio of her apartment in her pajamas. To outsiders it looked severe, monastic. He’d seen the lone carton of milk in her fridge, the one plate in the drying rack. He was doing reconnaissance, she knew, for their mother. She’d caught him flipping through her address book. What did he think about the total absence of names except for his? She would never be free of his worry.
“What’s keeping you there?” he demanded.
Once, when her Master had rolled off her and was retying his sash, she said, “That was good.” He looked at her. Then she felt bad because they normally never said anything to acknowledge that they were fucking instead of sharing the sort of intimate spiritual space a master and student were supposed to share. She went home kicking herself and saying, “That was good! That was good!” and then hating herself more because she was a Zen student and lesson number one was not to anxiously inhabit the past.
She had no answer that her brother would understand.
On Christmas Eve, Boston was bright and black at once, the trees strung carelessly with lights, snow still pristine as fairy dust in the white uncharted paths of the Public Garden and the Common, in dark alleys and unlit secret passageways. Nicole was not yet home from Helen’s, she might miss the last train, but she stepped off at Park Street, the Common beside her. At first she was alone, watching the puff of her breath seed the chill air; the last of the skaters on Frog Pond were gone now, no one spilling loud and drunk out of bars, no hockey fans yelling at each other in the crosswalks, no janitors and maids waiting at bus stops for the beginning of the night shift. Tomorrow, the city and its neighborhoods would be quiet. All of Boston, Christian and otherwise, hunkering down for the holiday. But gradually she found herself part of a line of laughing people, families in their nice long coats, girls slipping on the ice in their glossy Mary Janes. Their company seemed so cheerful, their direction so singular, that Nicole moved with them, following but not trailing behind, part of the crowds in their earmuffs and their Sunday best. Nicole was almost inside St. Paul’s before she realized where she was: they were going to church, for the Midnight Mass.
She tried to step out of the current, but the crowd was jamming through the narrow doorway and she was blocking everyone. She went on instead to the little red velvet entry room, struggling past the cheerful removal of coats and counting of children’s heads. She let the crowd carry her on into the church, and automatically crossed herself as she slid into a back pew. A boy in a white surplice handed her a candle with a white circle of cardboard to trap the dripping wax. She clutched it helplessly, looking for a way out, a door not blocked by the faithful.
The service began, with the crinkle and wheeze of an organ: children in white, gathered by the altar, caroling in sweet, high tones. For a moment, she let herself relax; “Silent Night” always had a hold on her, that call for stillness. Around her, churchgoers were passing a flame down their line of candles, tipping one to the next. Was it apostasy just to listen? The music filled the crowded space, soft and heavy, more lullaby than hymn. She closed her eyes. She was very tired.
When the song ended, a priest in white with a deep green stole shuffled up to the lectern. She wanted to slip away, but now she was not alone in her pew: a man was bent in what looked like earnest prayer, hands clasped to his forehead, head lowered. The Our Father began. This was no place for her, not now. She touched his shoulder.
He looked up quickly. He was square all around: square-jawed, square-shouldered, his chest broad, his legs wide and sturdy. His skin was gray and pebbled like a New England beach. “Excuse me,” she whispered. He gazed at her, uncomprehending.
Then his eyes traveled downward, seemed to understand. Carefully, he tipped his candle to hers. Now both were lit, and he smiled, and she did too, not sure why this small gesture filled her with such unexpected happiness.
When everyone began filing up to the altar for Communion, she slipped away. But in the all-night ice cream parlor next door, where she was at the counter devouring a cone, he found her.
He waved through the window, and she waved back without recognizing him; then he came in and sat at the counter with her, and from the side she remembered his old-fashioned, triangular sideburns. She liked his sheepish smile.
His name was Sean. “I’m getting too old for Midnight Mass.”
She laughed, roughly. “I don’t normally—I was actually—”
“Me neither. But once in a while—you know. You get pulled back in.” He nodded at her ice cream cone. “What did you get?”
“Moose Tracks.” A decadent favorite, with swirls of fudge and peanut butter cups.
“Sounds good.” He got up, asked for a sample, and came back with a tiny spoon, pulling it slowly from his mouth. She felt obscurely pleased. “What do you do?” she asked.
“Oh, I’m a buyer. I buy lawn equipment for a wholesale home improvement chain. And I buy antiques, kind of on the side, and sell them. As a hobby.” She ate her ice cream quietly, a rare ease settling on her shoulders.
“Are you married?” she asked.
“Divorced. A year ago,” he said, and put down the spoon, smacking his lips. “You?”
“Oh, I’m single. You know, unattached.” She gave a short laugh. “Attachment” was one of those fraught words in Buddhism, like “pride” in Catholicism; it was something you were supposed to be fighting all the time. She was good at that. There was only the problem of her Master.
They kept talking until the roads outside were empty. Sean lived in Weston, a wooded neighborhood hugging Boston’s outer rim. He talked about his ex-wife, married now, and his daughter. He showed her a picture: she was a high school kid, tall and blocky like her father, with the sure limbs of a rugby player. Sean told her about his wife’s new husband, who was “some California guy,” tan and wearing Ray-Bans and surfing at five every morning. “I can tell you’re a born-and-bred New Englander,” Sean said. “So you know what I’m talking about. I mean, who is this guy?”
She, too, had known immediately upon seeing him what kind of accent he would have, with its broad deep o’s (“Noath Shoa”) and nasal a’s. It was something about the unhealthy pallor and roughness of his skin, the baseball cap exposing the red tips of his ears, the deeply scuffed parka that was stained with seasons of salt; she knew.
She smiled. “Yeah, it’s another world.” To New Englanders, there was always something disquieting about the West Coast. How did they get so tan? How much of all that blond hair was real? Did they really go around in bathing suits all the time? Bostonians were suspicious and prickly. Everything west of Worcester was Out There, irrelevant, and West Coast people were embarrassing, emotional, and false. No, you needed seasons to build character. Of course, Boston had its own problems. She had discovered only recently that the local term for chocolate sprinkles (“jimmies”) stemmed from a racial slur for black people. Townies threw rocks at the integrated buses, got drunk at Sox games, changed lanes without signaling. Still, a dyed-in-the-wool Bostonian had no business leaving. You were Boston for life.
Sean reached under his cap to scratch his head. “You gotta go where you gotta go.” It was the voice of her mailman, the guy who cashed checks for her at the bank, the cop who pulled alongside when she was sobbing in her parked car once and said, You got somewhere to go, hon? You’re an Irishwoman, aren’t ya?
Suddenly he was dear to her, in that way she sometimes felt bursts of love for Boston, for the sweet grubbiness of its people, for her own frumpy belonging, for the way even now the kids behind the counter were badmouthing the chain ice cream store next door. She felt a lump rising in her throat. He was looking at her intently. He knew her, too. He knew her story, or the parts that mattered. He brushed her hand with his own. “Listen—you got anybody to spend Christmas with? You want to grab a little dinner tomorrow?”
“Oh, I—” She wanted to. But she had to get home; she had to prepare herself for next Tuesday, and the next,
and the next. “I don’t know if I can tomorrow—”
Sean’s face fell, just a little; he mastered the look well. “Sure, yeah.”
“Rain check?” she said, apologetic.
“Yeah. Yeah, definitely.”
He was getting up to go; he was taking the hint. But it took a long time to get suited up for winter, didn’t it. He stood there, winding his scarf very slowly. She felt something like desperation. Don’t go yet, she wanted to say. Don’t you see, I didn’t want to say no. You must see that. I can tell by the look of you that I’d want to feel your arms around me. It would feel like cuddling in an old armchair. Nubby and warm.
“I’ll just go to the bathroom.” He shifted off to the back of the store. He’d left his gloves on the counter. She grabbed her receipt and wrote. Dear Sean, Please call me. She left her number and stuffed the scrap into his glove. Then she was running out of the store before he could come back, running like a fool, her damp hair loose and freezing in the winter air, her coat flapping open.
On Christmas Day, her brother called. She listened to the happy crackle of wrapping paper in the background, tasteful choral songs trilling. Her niece, June, co-opted the phone, boisterous: “Why aren’t you here, Aunt Nic?”
She explained that she hadn’t been able to get off work. The day after Christmas was crazy for returns. “We’re just stepping out to church,” Paul said. “But that apartment, Nic. I’ve got to sign by New Year’s, and you could be in it by February.”