The Devoted

by Blair Hurley

  At the Dharma Insight Collective, the white-haired woman who’d founded the center gave a rambling speech about her massive dogs, who followed her everywhere, who she was convinced were husbands from her past lives. Now they had both found each other, and they would have to share her in this life. She spoke about lighting our inner candle and shutting off the Internet because it was draining all of our heart energy away. She spoke of the vision quests that everybody used to go on in the sixties, when she was young—people just picking up and going somewhere, anywhere. What had happened to that beautiful life? Above all, she seemed confused by the people around her, by the world she now found herself in. It was not the world she had prepared for.

  She thought, Helen’s costume, the Zen cow, the word she’d said: it was a secret code. A desperate communiqué from behind an enemy line. A message to her younger self: Don’t stay here, get out while you still can. Part of a koan, a riddle to crack.

  When she has been his student for only a year, barely the beginning of what would be her novicehood in Japan, the Master waits for her arrival each week in the back room for their private meeting. She has studied and worked and prayed with an intensity he hasn’t seen since he was a student himself, struggling to keep up in a Japanese monastery hostile to foreigners. The monks there hated him, his encroachment on their ancient and sacred offices. His teachers slapped him, yelled, drenched him with buckets of ice water at four in the morning. This is the hard, rocky path to perfection. He tells her how merciful he is to her, how forgiving. They meditate side by side, and his breath is the metronome setting the rhythm for her to follow. He knows she’s close to her first moment of kensho: a burst of insight, the tiniest glimpse of enlightenment. At first you get it only in a flash: the understanding that the universe is both empty and contingent, a cause and effect and cause. He can tell when he listens to the studied calm of her breathing. The rise and fall of her chest makes the skin on his neck tingle. He has the teacher’s zeal: this visceral vicarious joy in her learning.

  Cause and effect and cause. Like this: her quick intake of breath, the excitement of her insight, gives rise to his hand on her knee. And her startled look gives rise to his lips on her lips. How many innumerable causes have given rise to her earlobes, her neck, her soft breathing presence in his room. He wants to teach her something more. To not touch her would deny her something profound. She’s ready for his instruction.

  THE MASTER

  On New Year’s Eve, she met Sean at an estate sale in a woody suburb.

  It was a cold day for antique hunting. They were the only people in the dark, drafty garage, the sellers huddled at a table in their parkas. Sean moved patiently from one piece to the next, looking for makers’ marks, the sign that someone had been there, had taken pride in their work. There were always cheap knockoffs of Tiffany lamps, somebody’s amateur watercolors. But among the trash there was often treasure, and he had a knack for finding it. At three different estate sales she watched him pull an authentic Steiff bear out of a pile of Beanie Babies, an early Frisbie’s Pies tin from a stack of seventies board games, a chair from the 1700s from a herd of particle-board imitations. He told her he sent the vintage toys and games to his daughter. She loved that stuff.

  All those New England Puritans busily churning out card tables—she had always thought antiques were fussy and drab, but Sean explained how cleverly a join had been hidden or how the grain of wood had been followed in this knotwork, in that table with its straight, clean lines. “Think of how many cheap tables and chairs we go through now,” he said. “And all the while, my grandfather’s desk was in the attic, as good as the day it was made. I pulled it out recently and it’s just beautiful—you can see the work and attention that went into it. You put love into something and it’ll last.”

  They walked in silence alongside the reservoir while she thought about this, gazing at the blue-gray water. It had been lightly touched with snow but was unfrozen, the powdery layers shifting and sliding over each other. She wanted to ask him if what he’d said was always true. Simply because you loved someone or something, was that enough to hold it close, to keep it yours? But it would be cruel to press him: she knew he was missing his daughter. The hurt was still fresh.

  She picked up a few split-open beechnuts, fondling the spiky bell shapes, and then scattered them back to the ground, but Sean scooped them up again. “I’m saving them,” he insisted. “It’s a memory.”

  “That’s what all these antiques are for you, aren’t they? But they’re somebody else’s memories.”

  “I guess. But when I touch a good piece, and I see all the work that went into it, it’s like I can picture the craftsman working on it, and later the guy sitting at the desk with his bills out, worrying about his kids, and the kid writing there because now his father’s gone. You can see all the lives that have touched this one piece of wood. You’re connected to them all.” He smiled, embarrassed at his own earnestness, but she was humbled and charmed.

  “Let’s eat dinner at my place,” he said. “We’re wicked close, yeah?”

  She laughed. “Yeah. Okay.” It was getting dark.

  She followed him in her car, and saw him turn his head frequently to his rearview mirror, as if afraid she had changed her mind. They cruised along a twisting, narrow road hemmed closely by trees. At one point they crossed a bridge over the marsh and she realized how far out they were, miles away from her home, slipping through the tall yellow cordgrass and the water deepening its blue. Much of Weston was proper forest, and now they were sliding into its darker corners. Sean led her to a tall, narrow house, an old-style up-and-down Victorian with crazy, thick little windows and a widow’s walk. A house like this in Weston would cost a fortune normally, but this one was ramshackle and decaying, too close to the marsh, sure to have water damage.

  “My wife’s and my house,” Sean said as she got out. “She was so eager to get to California that she let me have it. Left me all the furniture, too.” He stopped, jingled his keys in his coat pocket, smiled. “It’s nice to have some company. Better when it’s someone as pretty as you.”

  “I’m glad for the company, too,” she said. She felt a little shiver of exhilaration as she watched him fumble with his keys: this house lost in the marsh, this friendly stranger inviting her in. But he wasn’t a stranger after all, was he? She knew his type so well.

  Sean reached for the light switch. “My wife took a lot of furniture,” he said. “I have her parents’ and my parents’ in the basement, and I keep meaning to bring it up.” The living room was almost bare, equipped only with a college student’s idea of furnishings: fuzzy futon, television, IKEA table in cafeteria white.

  They ate noodles out of bowls on the futon, watching television. There was a Bruins game on and they yelled and cheered at the screen, swearing at the disappointing shots. Nicole could hear her Boston accent rising to match Sean’s. She and Paul had gone to private school and had learned to speak what people called proper English, but at home they sometimes tried it on for fun. It was like having a traditional garment hanging in the closet, a kimono or sari, that you could put on and take off with ease. At midnight they switched the channel and watched the ball drop for the new year. Sean put his arm over her shoulders and she shrugged warmly into his embrace, and they kissed, his lips scratchy and warm. He held her for a long, quiet moment. He was good at tenderness, something she hadn’t experienced in a long time. The newscaster wished for a year more peaceful than the last.

  “I’m glad I’m kissing a Sox fan,” Sean said. And then, the unavoidable: “Guess it’d be a long shot if I asked if you were Catholic.”

  “Long shot in this town?” she joked. Then, with a quick swallow: “Lapsed.”

  “Me too! Got an Irish mother on your back, telling you you’ll go to hell?” he laughed.

  “Something like that,” she said.

  He touched her arm. His relief, filling the room. Times were hard for Catholics, these days. There was much to be ash
amed of. But still, Catholic magic was strong. You could laugh about hell and damnation while still feeling the weight of it on your shoulders. If you grew up believing, the yoke fit for life. Oh, the stern joy of being a Catholic! God knew you, and he was shaking his head over you. “It’s nice to know we have a shared experience,” he said.

  Refrain from lying or deception, she thought. It was one of the five moral precepts of Buddhism, like the Ten Commandments. She could hear her Master’s voice reading them out, and her own quavering voice, vowing to adhere to them.

  She gritted her teeth. “Can I see the furniture?”

  He didn’t want to show her the basement. “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands, so I’ve just been arranging it. It’s a little nuts down there.” But she wheedled a bit, and he relented.

  Sean led the way down a narrow staircase. The two of them stumbled through the dark until he found a light bulb on a chain. They were in one of those vast subterranean rooms, as large as the house, and it was crammed with old furniture. There were sofas, tables, grandfather clocks, armoires, easy chairs, even glass-paneled cabinets containing little porcelain ladies and bulldogs, miniature crystal vases and lamps shaped like bouquets of flowers. There were vases filled with roses and lilies made from tissue paper, and bowls of granite peaches, and Siamese-cat bookends and silver tea sets and souvenir spoons. It was all in the same style as the things Nicole’s parents had owned: the sofas tightly stuffed, shiny, with clawed dark feet, the side tables with fleur-de-lis handles. Even the turquoise of the fabric was that particular shade of blue that seemed to exist only in the homes of the elderly. The knickknacks (brass mallards, china sailors in pea coats, little Christmas-village cottages) were the same sorts of objects quietly waiting in the old family home in Waban for Nicole, now that her mother had moved to North Carolina. Sean had two of everything, and he had arranged all of it in little sitting room configurations, as if the basement were a display room. There was a dining area there, another one in the corner, and two dens, one on either side of the stairs. Nicole sat down on one sofa, feeling strangely shy. It was just like the couch she had spent much of her adolescence on, reading on her back and leaving pistachio shells between the cushions. Back then she’d been starting to shed her Catholicism. She remembered her childhood friend Kumiko, with her family shrine, and all those books she’d read: Siddhartha and The Dharma Bums. She’d spent a lot of time imagining the Buddha as a handsome prince, a well-brought-up young man who saw sickness, age, and death and demanded an answer for it. She used to picture him in his fasting period, skin and bone, his face grave and beautiful in its deprivation. In her mind he still looked like Jules, the only boy she had loved.

  Sean sat down beside her. He started to kiss her, slowly, clumsily. She ran her hands up and down his legs, feeling a quick need overtaking her, flushing her face, her neck, her elbows. Sean was moving urgently now, too. He bunched up her skirt and slipped his hand under it. He would let her lead, she realized. It had been so long since sex had meant taking another body for hers, handling it, exploring as she liked. She unzipped his jeans, letting him work them down over his ass, and reached into his boxers. He was still soft, not an eighteen-year-old who would be automatically astounded by her breasts or hips. Neither of them had the desperation of adolescents, but she wanted it badly, that lovely frenzy of feeling. She let him touch her until he was hard and panting; then she pushed his hand away. She scrabbled on the sofa to get on top of him, almost slipping, then worked him hard, enjoying the silky firmness of his skin, the tinny blast of beer fumes as he gasped, the sweet forbidden feel of the satin couch. Once he came she let him reciprocate, only because he insisted. She lay back on the sofa, letting her eyes roam over the cluttered antique showroom, while he labored honestly at his job. Even as her feelings began to swell and flood, she knew that no harm would come to her. He couldn’t really touch her. She didn’t know where she was, but it wasn’t here. Her Master’s hand was on her shoulder in his little private room as he read the precepts. Refrain from sexual misconduct. Refrain from intoxicants. Refrain from lying. Beside her, Sean dozing off, falling sweetly, swiftly asleep. Poor blind man, her Master would say. He thinks he has you. Come, little theri. All he had to do was call. In her mind she jumped up at his word and flitted away. She could no more refuse than she could flow backward through time, become another self, another life. She lay in the dark in Sean’s unknowing arms, too frightened to close her eyes. Better to be under her Master’s spell than to be flooded with guilt, with worry, with grief for what she had done.

  Tuesday.

  The streets in central Waltham were crowded with corner convenience stores, cheap Indian restaurants, and psychic palm-reading boutiques. It was a long walk from Nicole’s apartment, but she enjoyed the focused solitude of it, the gentle huff up and down the hills, the long wooded tracts and backyards piled with children’s toys, the high, sagging fences. There was the occasional place where her path crossed the train line and she could look down a long secret channel through the trees. Somewhere down that road, her childhood home on its hill, the curtains drawn. At some point she stepped out of the woods and back into town, and she could prepare herself for the week’s sermon.

  The snow had melted, but the sidewalks were still gritty with tossed sand. At the doorway of the Peaceful Healing Zen Center she dropped her sneakers, rotted with winter salt, at the end of a line of flats and loafers. It was nothing more than a glass storefront, wedged in between a hardware store and a Mexican restaurant. The restaurant was called Iguana Cantina; a giant animatronic iguana waggled its head over the door.

  She hovered in the doorway of the meditation room: the holiday party guests were all there. She fell into a half-lotus at the back of the room and kept her gaze focused downward, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes, until the Master swept in. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and his face glowed with a restless vitality. As he passed through the aisle of seated practitioners, his hand went down, touching the shoulders of some and not others. Each touched person sat a little straighter.

  The Master pressed his long-fingered hands together. “We think there is a permanent essence to us, a soul that continues from moment to moment and that survives when we die,” he said. “But nothing, not even the self, has a permanent essence. What we think of as the self is merely a series of conditions—thoughts, feelings, actions—that have originated from the moment before. Our lives are a long row of dominoes falling. What do we call this phenomenon?”

  Nicole could feel a deep vibration in her feet, a boozy flush that shot upward through her body. “Dependent origination,” she breathed, and several others whispered it, too: “Dependent origination.”

  The Master nodded. He pulled a book of matches out of a long sleeve and lit a candle waiting at the front of the room. “Rebirth is the passing of a flame from one candle to the next. We are being reborn every moment of our lives.” He demonstrated, lighting a second candle with the first. “What has been passed on?”

  The room was tense and silent, pregnant with the answer.

  “Nothing! Nothing but the energy of the moment before.” The Master licked his thumb and extinguished the candles. “Let us consider the relevant sermon, the Fire Sermon.” He opened his book. Nicole studied the Master in his navy robe with its patterned obi, cornflower blue. The broad masculine outline and rugged jaw: a cowboy priest. She imagined the shape of him underneath the heavy cloth, his genitals deep within another underrobe and then another, safe and pendulous.

  The Master read, “‘The Blessed One addressed the priests:—All things, O priests, are on fire. And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire? The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent, originates in dependence on impressions, that also is on fire. And with what are these on fire? With the fire of passion, say I, with the fire of hatred, with the fire of infatuat
ion; with birth, old age, death, sorrow, lamentation, misery, grief, and despair are they on fire.’”

  Why had he chosen to read the Fire Sermon today? she wondered. It was as if he knew she had transgressed.

  “Imagine being on fire,” said the Master. “Fire is an energetic force, but it also destroys, it consumes. Imagine your life burning up before you, your body crumbling to ash. Our desire, our attachment, is destroying us. It is eating us from the inside out.”

  He closed the book and gazed at all of them. “You must free yourself from desperate, clinging love. Or you’ll burn up.”

  In the silent meditation that followed, Nicole settled on the Zen koan Helen had referenced, calming her breathing, relaxing her spine.

  Monk: Does a dog have Buddha nature?

  Joshu: Mu.

  She half-closed her eyes. What does mu mean?

  Sometimes meditation was like following a bouncing ball down a flight of stairs. It had its own thrilling momentum. It floated her down levels of thought, leading her toward something silent and immovable at the core of her, the space where time unclocked itself and she became a singular being. On good days her meditation was like flying through her own mind, her inner self a map of neural nodes. There was a place she could reach where she felt a great growing warmth for Paul, her mother. A place where she forgave her father for dying. And another one, farther down, where her own past released its hold on her. Where she could be seventeen again and could think about her father, or about Jules, without the crazy blindsiding of grief and regret.

  Meditation was not passive, as many people thought. It was like feeling your way down a flight of stairs in the dark, your every nerve awake and listening. If you felt your way through one room and another, you might find a well whose water never stirred. You might feel the damp inside of a cave. You might be able to speak to people who were gone and ask them questions. But she could not find these things without her Master’s hand on her shoulder, his voice inside: You have found what is vast and empty, the unborn.