by Blair Hurley
After she hung up, she opened a browser page and searched “Zen Boston.” Maybe she could just join a new Zendo, erase her history with her Master and escape him. She wrote down a list of temples and carried it in her pocket. Now she had a week to try them out: you had to have a new bond before you could tear up an old covenant. Riding the T in the evenings to and from the Shambhala Zen Center, the Society of Compassionate Mind, or the Lotus of Universal Love, she imagined telling her Master she was leaving. I’m going. Good-bye. So long. Sayonara.
And then what would he do? She could creep up to the edge of the moment in her mind, but she couldn’t see beyond it. It would be throwing away the art she’d been crafting for decades.
In Chinatown, there were Ch’an centers on the hot, linty second floors above the groceries. She rode the train there after work and wandered in and out of stores, taking things in. Here the grocery stores had their crates out on the sidewalk, offering thick smells of peanuts, roasted chestnuts, smoked ham hocks. There were plate-sized mushrooms, shaved blocks of coconut, and boxes of tiny fish glinting like dimes. She wanted to dip her hands in them. The prayer session she’d found online was due to begin at six, but still she lingered on the street, fingering the walnuts. She didn’t know a word of Mandarin, which the services here would be conducted in. She could imagine the crush of bodies in the small, hot room, the directions in a language she did not know, the procedures of offering and incense and prostration she had not learned. People would stare. They’d wonder what she was doing there; they’d know she did not belong.
It was snowing, a slushy December mess that seeped up her jeans to the mid-thigh, and instead of going to the Ch’an center, she took cover in a gift shop. The space was tiny and crowded with porcelain, wall-eyed fortune cats that raised their paws in greeting. There were Buddhas too—Buddha postcards, Buddha cookie jars, Buddha Christmas tree ornaments, all shining, obese, laughing. The most common Chinese depictions were these frighteningly fat happiness Buddhas, naked and grinning, lucky when rubbed. They represented wealth and abundance and domestic bliss, but she found them alarming. She was a Catholic girl. Happiness in excess did not feel like religion.
The Tibetan art, too, was strangely frightening. The Buddhas and bodhisattvas in the murals and tapestries were blue and red and orange demons with the heads of bulls or tigers, steaming flame from their nostrils, waving dozens of arms and legs, brandishing necklaces of skulls, human penises erect and enormous. They were supposed to represent the fierce secret energies required for enlightenment. You could meditate and imagine them entering your body, filling you with power. She’d seen them hanging behind the heads of Tibetan lamas, rich and strange and dangerous. But they were too obscene for her.
Always the wood-carved Japanese Buddhas drew her in. They were slender and elongated, their hands carefully posed, the merest Mona Lisa smile curling their sorrowful lips. They seemed to say that suffering was only the beginning of something profound. They had something she didn’t. What was it?
Grace, her mother would say.
The shopkeeper was in a tiny back room watching a K-drama on the security television, but he had spotted her looking at the Buddhas. “Do you like? This one is good for fertility,” he said, displaying the pale female Quan Yin. “This one is for financial success. This one is for happiness in the home. Which one do you like? Which do you want?”
He held out Buddhas in bronze, in pewter, in plastic. When she backed away, he waved prayer cards. Finally she fled the store into the snow, hugging her cold flimsy jacket to her body, her heavy jeans dragging in the gray mush climbing in the streets.
Her Master’s teaching lineage, threaded through with roshis from Japan, was handwritten on a scroll in his meeting room, looking like a pedigree chart for a prize stallion. It was a beautiful branching tree of Japanese characters, tracing all the way back to Bodhidharma, the mysterious monk who brought Buddhism to China. And at the end of this illustrious line, her Master had written his name in a schoolboy’s careful cursive. The scroll was the only decoration in the bare room, besides a jade Buddha seated in the corner.
Her Master had one overlapping tooth that occasionally became visible in the corner of his mouth. It reminded her that he was a man, a man in need of orthodontia, not a spiritual being, and made her think she could leave, easily, that she didn’t need him anymore. Then he would beat the side of a metal urn with a wooden staff—this traditional Japanese drum resounded with a great gong and made her heart beat slower with the thrill of it—and he would say, “When the wind roars, it is the universe that makes it roar. When I beat the drum, it is the universe that resounds! If your voice is loud or soft, it is the voice of the universe. Even silence has a voice!” It was a message for her, she was sure of it. When they were quietly meditating afterward, and his hand was on her shoulder, her body straightened and shivered and resonated with his touch. Then her proud, lonely plans to leave were useless.
The weekend pulled its afternoon silence across the sky. As the sun set on Friday and the house filled with a changed, somber light, she became watchful. There was something suspicious in how she could turn a light on in a room and find it still on an hour later, how the dishes stayed in the sink until she cleaned them, how if she left a book on the floor—just to test—it was still there in the morning. It was like having a stranger staying in the house who would not announce his presence, who was standing behind you every time you turned, who folded the towels and made the bed, burdensome in his sheer unobtrusiveness.
With snow heavy in the air, she sat on the deck in her parka, meditating. She sat so still that chipmunks and squirrels sometimes came to her knee. The cat, Kukai, sat nearby, drawn to her quietness, and sometimes jumped into her lap and sniffed up at her face to see if she was still alive.
Kukai was named after a Japanese monk who wandered the country with his followers, handing out slips of wood with prayers on them. He was a scruffy tabby, a stray who’d appeared wet and thin on the hood of her car, balled up and bleeding from dog bites. Like other stray animals she and Paul had sometimes brought home when they were kids, he had strange habits. He stored food in hiding places, so that her feet crunched on kibble when she tried on her winter boots on the first day of the season. He yowled at birds and scratched and picked at himself until great patches of fur fell out. In the night she’d sometimes wake up, heart pounding, and find him staring at her, eyes shining in the dark. She thought he must have some trauma in his past and he was still sizing her up, trying to determine if she would betray him. She pulled him close and pressed her face into his fur, and he let her. Beneath the fur, his skin was rough and scabby, a network of scars. She thought, Somebody kicked you. Something bit you. You limped your way to my car. She thought, We can be strays together.
Now she sat on the porch with him and stared at the moon, waiting for the moment of transformation. Soon, soon, it would happen. You couldn’t wait for it forever.
“Aren’t you lonely, little theri?” her Master had asked her a week ago.
“No,” she’d said.
“You were built for loneliness, weren’t you. Some people are. Were you always this way?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you are lonelier than you let on. Lonelier than you think.” Her Master stroked her hair.
She thought, I have you. I have the stillness of afternoon light on snow. I have a cave in myself that I’ve carved out over many years. It’s dark and close, with just enough room for me. Whenever I want, I just climb inside.
Loneliness had its routines. There was the part when you talked to the cat, bright and falsetto. Then there was the part when you talked to yourself, not liking it much but feeling the words arising anyway, the urge to speak like the need to pee. Then there was the part, worse, when you fell stonily into silence. Then words would not come, were gone, words were nowhere, until Sean’s call roused them thickly from the mud.
“How about that rain check?” he asked.
She remembered a muddy spring when she was young, pressing into an angry crowd on the Common. Catholics rallying to a cause. Sean pointed out the Chapel of the Holy Spirit on Park Street, an old brick building, unassuming and square. “That’s where I had my first Communion, would you believe it,” he said. He rubbed his nose, shoved his hands in his pockets. She knew he was waiting for her to volunteer her story. “Where was yours?” he asked, when she did not.
“St. Augustine,” she said. “It’s one of the ones that closed.”
“That’s a shame. You could go to mine, if you like. It’s a nice sermon.”
She turned away, letting people slip by her on the narrow, snow-drifted sidewalk. She knew what he thought: he’d seen her in the Midnight Mass. And would it be that awful a lie? She smiled vaguely, and managed to trip into the gutter so he had to catch her, and she spoke brightly about an antique table she had seen at a garage sale (he loved antiques, his eyes glowed whenever he spoke of them), and they moved on.
She knew she couldn’t tell him anything resembling the truth. No one would understand all of it, its scope and depth. Even Paul knew almost nothing. He asked her, sometimes, what she did all day, what the services were like in a Buddhist temple. Do you pray, he asked. Or do you make offerings to the god of Whatever?
The truth was, she had been under her Master’s tutelage for nearly ten years. He had instructed her in the ways of a Zen student. He showed her how to clean the floors of the Zendo by pushing a wet rag while running, bent double; how to eat rice from a bowl, then drink tea from the bowl, then use a last splash of that tea to clean the bowl, each motion thoughtful, efficient, not a drop wasted; he showed her how to bow before a fellow student, before a respected teacher, how to prostrate oneself before a master.
First you press your hands together, then touch them to your heart, to your forehead, sites of compassion, of wisdom; then bend, press your palms to the ground, slide them until you are facedown, stretched flat, nose kissing the floorboards. Then get up and do it again. A pose of complete and perfect humility. Some monks in Nepal and Tibet considered this the holiest form of practice and went on thousand-mile pilgrimages through the foothills of the Himalayas, prostrating every step, until they had crossed into India and reached the Buddha’s site of enlightenment. Every year, some died on these journeys. The ones who survived grew bone spurs on their wrists and wore the skin off their knees and hands. In serious Tibetan sects, you could not be considered a fully ordained monk until you had completed one hundred thousand prostrations. Her Master was merciful, though: only fifty prostrations a meeting, leaping up and down, sweating and straining and kissing the floor.
“See what a gentle Master I am?” he said, with a small, crooked smile.
Halfway through her prostrations, her brain entered some kind of shock, when the walls of the room faded, and around her was a brilliant white. She was frightened by this vertiginous blindness, but always her Master’s voice, soothing and dark and warm, brought her home again.
She spent the first year of her studenthood in a dizzy excitement nearly all the time, full to bursting with a convert’s zeal. There was so much to learn, and her Master guided her along gradually, reading her haiku while she sat with her eyes closed. Now the swinging bridge / is quieted with creepers / Like our tendriled life. She sat, absorbing the sound of the words, letting them sink line by beautiful line into her body. He taught her koans, beginning with the first and most fundamental, when a student asks a master if a dog has a Buddha nature and the enigmatic answer is only “Mu.” Mu in Japanese means “no” or even more than no; it was a total negation, closer to “nothing.” It didn’t make sense, because the doctrine said that all sentient beings, from humans to oysters, had a Buddha nature. He told her to sit with the answer in her mind, ponder its refusal. He said, The koan teaches us about what religion can and can’t give. We come humbly to the Buddha, bowing and scraping, begging for enlightenment. We ask, and the answer is no. We ask and we ask, and still the answer is no. We plead for just a little awareness, just a little peace. But there is still something not right in us, and we are not asking the question correctly. And until it is right, the answer will always be no.
He told her to sit with the answer until it drove her insane. And just when she couldn’t think about it anymore, on the other side of the wall of reason there would be a new awareness that enlightenment was within her own power, not the unanswered demand she had always put on one god or another.
She had not felt this way since she was nine years old and wanted to be a nun, felt meaning shining out of every windowpane or stranger’s face, thought the world was a book written in a language you only had to learn to know its mysteries. The private room she visited each week came to be something more. It was a small, dark envelope of frozen time. A place where forgiveness, both by her and of her, was possible. All week she anticipated the return to it, the way an anxious lover awaits a letter in the mail. She realized now, that was it: she was in love.
And then what? When he first touched her knee, when he leaned close, when she felt his breath on her neck, when his hand traveled higher, when he asked so politely, wasn’t this the intimate spiritual space they shared, hadn’t she wanted this, the fruition of their bond?
And he showed her how to wrap her legs around his body and press him harder into her, a move that hadn’t occurred to her with her teenage boyfriend Jules, and that made her groan with pleasure, and thank him for the privilege.
Once in a while they lay still on the straw mat afterward and breathed, and did not get up right away and adjust their clothes, and it felt good to be there, and she felt a little clearer, as though some cloudy toxin in the water of her brain had been filtered out. Her Master sometimes held on to her then, in a full-body embrace, accepting all of her, and told her he would be a home for her when she had no home. Then she knew she wouldn’t be able to abandon him or the training, at least not yet. The years had slipped by her in this way, as she built toward her one hundred thousand prostrations, her calves growing whiplike, her hands shiny.
If she did her fifty prostrations every week, she calculated once, it would take her more than thirty-eight years to reach her goal.
When she wasn’t practicing, she was in the back room of the shoe warehouse, digging for sizes. She floundered among fallen heaps of boxes, her hands closing on the bones of loose and scattered shoes. There was an element of the absurd in it, and the other saleswomen felt it, too. Instead of sorting and organizing, they just stood by, smoked an illegal cigarette or swiped long-fingered through their phones.
In the back room they joked about the customers, making up stories. That woman, insisting her feet hadn’t grown two sizes since her third child. The man buying penny loafers to impress his future father-in-law: he was going to propose to his girlfriend. But you could just tell, from the sweaty-palmed way he gripped the shoes, that he’d be turned down.
In the back room, the saleswomen rubbed each other’s aching feet. “You deserve a break, girl,” they said, laughing. Outside the boss was waiting, the customers were tapping their bare feet, saying, “Where is that salesgirl?” But someone was always waiting for them. Their husbands, or kids, or boyfriends. Where’s dinner, where’s my catche
r’s mitt, where’s size 10 of this sandal? They ran up to their lives saying, Sorry I’m late.
On their breaks, the saleswomen stood around in the parking lot and talked about their husbands and boyfriends and lovers. There was always something going wrong, something disappointing. Missed anniversaries or absent support payments. But while they had spent years at the store, the same way Nicole had, they had something to show for it: children and husbands and nest eggs. She sent out résumés for office jobs sometimes, but when an interview came through, she backed away, afraid the commitment would interfere with her training.
What did she have to show after ten years? A spine as straight as a flagpole. An ability to sit still. A GED and a bachelor’s and a mental library of Zen poetry, so many verses of cherry blossoms and falling leaves. How could that be all, how could that be enough?
Today Nicole hovered on the outside of their circle and the women pulled her in. Hands were on her shoulders, warm, with their beautiful manicures. She hid her own bitten-off fingernails in her palms.
“You’re always so quiet,” said Jolene. “Tell us your story.”
“Yeah, come on, tell us,” the others chimed in.
She knew that in this circle of women, her story was who she was dating, the man she was screwing or wishing she were screwing or formerly screwed. She began, obediently, the way all the other stories began: “Well, there’s this guy—”
“Does he love you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you love him?”
“I don’t know.”
The women murmured sympathetically. “We know what you mean. Exactly.”
Paul was waiting for her decision; there were only a few days left. In the Prana Power Yoga Cooperative of Boston, she stretched in ways her body hadn’t moved in years, her joints becoming musical in their unfamiliar activity. She couldn’t do goddess stance or downward-facing dog right. Her stomach muscles screamed in boat pose. The women around her, in their matching Lycra, looked like the eerily serene members of a cult.