by Blair Hurley
Sean had not called her back since she’d told him she was a mistake. She wrote letters to him and then crossed them out. Dear Sean. Dear Sean. Dear Sean.
At work downtown, she managed the women’s department’s layout and folded sweaters under brilliant lights. The fashion for retail these days was stunning museum minimalism and brightness; in places like Nordstrom, wrinkles had to disappear in mirrors, diamonds had to sparkle. She sometimes felt like a lab mouse, folding the sweaters under the black globular cameras mounted in every corner. The women in jewelry had their bags weighed before and after their shifts to make sure they weren’t smuggling out gold.
Her coworkers in corporate told her how to dress more New York: crisp blazers and soft, silky blouses. “Everything has to be a mixture of hard and soft,” they explained. If her jewelry was geometric, then her hair had to be teased into soft waves. If she wore boots, she had to wear a dress. Strong eye makeup had to go with girlish pink lipstick.
The next week, Alison and Kathy from the roshi’s class came to her apartment, too. “What are your qualifications?” Kathy asked. She was a psychiatrist; she needed credentials.
“I’ve studied Buddhism for ten years. Buddhism teaches that we’re all in a burning house together. If we can help one another out, then we must,” she said. She was just realizing that she could help.
She told her students about emptiness, samsara, and nirvana. She told them that when Buddhism spoke about life as suffering, the word was a mistranslation, a poor choice in English. It was not that everything was pain; there was so much pleasure and joy to be had, too much. The better translation was “unsatisfactory.” Pleasure makes us hungry for more. We are never sated. We demand more and more. We think we are entitled to pleasure and happiness, when the universe has made no such promises.
“Think about a time in your life when you were happy,” she said. “It’s fleeting, isn’t it? ‘This is happiness,’ and then it’s over.”
Now a few times a week there were women buzzing at her door, filling the hallway with their stories, their anxiety, their laughter. There wasn’t enough room in her studio anymore. Jocelyn connected her with a sculptor wanting to teach ceramics classes, and they arranged to share a studio space in a converted warehouse in Alphabet City. She looked forward to arriving early, laying out the mats and lighting the candles, donning the silk robe that made the ritual feel real. The students seemed to like her, too. After a zazen session, she sometimes took them out into the city, teaching kinhin, walking meditation, which the Master had taught her. They practiced monitoring their breathing, taking slow, graceful steps. They snarled traffic and got honked at; Nicole told them it was a good test of their concentration. When they reached the river, they leaned over the fence and whooped into the wind like children, letting their hair fly. Enjoying the moment. She told her students, You are best at achieving no-mind when you are listening to the body. So run, dance, shout.
“And sex?” asked Alison, a younger painter living in Bushwick.
Nicole hesitated. “Like any other pleasure—it’s over too soon.” The women laughed.
At first, she didn’t charge. But the students had kept leaving checks for her on her kitchen counter in embarrassing, Upper East Side amounts. Finally she left a basket by the door with a note saying, “Suggested donation $30,” and they obeyed. You had to let people pay you or they’d feel guilty, and she needed the money.
And at night she performed her prostrations for her Master, as she had promised on the phone. Ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. Slapping the wooden floor with her open palms. Knees creaking. Submit and submit and submit. She had to be perfect for him, she had to prove she was his best. She told herself she could do this and stay independent as long as her rebellion, her secret teaching, continued. It gave her a strange feeling. Like she had taken a book out of the library and left it on a bus. Like she had left a light on somewhere in the dark house of herself.
Teaching without the permission of your master was a grave sin. The oldest tales warned of a Judas: Devadatta, an ambitious monk who believed he had become greater than the Buddha. He could create illusions that impressed the weak-minded: snakes would fall from the sky and into the laps of astonished princes. He wanted to lead his own order, but the Buddha told him he wasn’t ready. He broke away from the Buddha’s sangha, taking five hundred monks with him, and tried to kill the Buddha by poisoning an elephant to make it go mad. The Buddha quieted the elephant by raising one hand, and Devadatta was condemned to hell.
Every time she spoke to her Master on the phone, she considered her betrayal. But now she had already poisoned the elephant. Word was spreading, one student telling a friend, and then that person telling another, and strangers were showing up at her studio space, bowing low, asking, Please, help.
Family dinner night: at her brother’s door, June and Charlie pulled her in by both arms. They wanted her to pick a name for the new pet turtle scrabbling grumpily at the glass walls of its tank. It had to be something Buddhist, June insisted. Nicole chose Hotei, for the Laughing Buddha: god of contentment and protector of children.
Downstairs, the door slammed. “Halloo,” said Paul, in the funny voice their father had always used when coming home from work.
“We’ve named our turtle, Dad,” June yelled.
“Don’t yell between rooms,” Paul yelled back. He appeared in the doorway, his coat over his arm. “Hi, Nic. Hi, scoundrels.”
“His name is Hotei,” said June, staring wide-eyed at her dad. “The Laughing Buddha.”
Paul looked slightly pained. “Why not something a little more—I don’t know, petlike? Fido or Sparky or something?”
“No. I want Hotei. He’s Hotei,” June insisted. And then, trying on a much older girl’s voice: “Jesus, what’s your problem?”
“Language,” said Paul. “Everyone wash up for dinner.”
Under Nicole’s parents’ heavy brass chandelier, Paul circled the table, filling wine glasses. “This bottle’s from Mom’s stock. She wants you to call, by the way. She’s so glad you moved here.”
“She can call me, if she’s so eager.”
“We both know she doesn’t make a lot of overtures.” Paul sat down, overfilled his own glass. “Anyway. You remember your friend Eddie? He’s living in New York now. We crossed paths a while back—his company managed some investments of ours.”
Nicole’s mouthful of food became cold mush. “Eddie?”
“I thought you could reconnect with him. Who knows, maybe talk to him about getting a better job.”
“Oh.” Nicole put her fork down, careful not to drip on the white tablecloth, her mother’s tablecloth with the fragile Irish lace. “Did you.”
Eddie, the third member of her runaway party; the car had been his. Eddie, whom she hadn’t seen since that final night. She wondered what he looked like now.
She knew he had returned to his family; she had hoped never to see him again. If she saw Eddie’s face, she wasn’t sure what she would do. It would make everything too real.
“I’ve decided I’m never getting married,” June announced.
Paul and Marion smiled indulgently. “What makes you say that?” Paul asked.
“I’m going to be alone, like Aunt Nic.” She delivered this small, sad pronouncement, her thin little girl’s voice loud in the room.
Nicole began to offer some benign advice. But Marion didn’t wait. “I’m sure Aunt Nic wouldn’t want to be considered a role model,” she said.
A silence settled on the table. Nicole felt a curious relief. Now it had been laid bare, Marion’s feelings about her. According to Marion, she was not just a lovable screwup. Her story, her whole life, was dangerous.
“Aunt Nic will find somebody,” Paul said, forcing a smile. “And you will too, when you’re older.”
“No! I’ll never!” June fled the table. After a nod from Marion, Charlie left as well. The three adults fiddled with their napkins in the quiet. Somewhere outside, a dog bar
ked; on this side street, they could almost be in the suburbs again, the remains of their dinner congealing on their plates.
“It’s a difficult age,” said Marion.
Paul put down his fork. “Do we have to speak about our children in platitudes?”
Nicole stared at her lap. She had never seen Paul and Marion fight, but it was remarkable how similar they sounded to her own parents, right down to the shame she felt at witnessing it. Marion’s eyes narrowed; Paul hunched his shoulders and turned to Nicole. “Want to help me take out the trash?”
They hauled a few bags to the dumpster shared by the neighboring apartments. The night air was heavy with rain; no stars could be seen in the clouds. “Why Hotei?” Paul asked suddenly.
Nicole laughed. “Because she knew you wouldn’t like it. She wants to piss you off.”
“Why?” Paul asked again. Under the dim light from the streetlamp, his face looked young and innocent. “I don’t get it. She used to be happy. She used to love me.”
“She still does!” Nicole reached for her brother’s shoulder. He was so good, so clearly good. Kind and loving, constant, stable. “You know, I still loved all of you, even when I left? I never stopped.”
Paul shrugged her hand away. “She’s not you, Nicole. She’s not going to do what you did.”
“I know.” Nicole stepped away, sensing that Paul’s mood had changed. “You’ve just done something to piss her off, that’s all. Perfect Paul, own up. Admit what you did.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He hoisted a bag into the dumpster. “I wish I smoked. It’s nice out here. Quiet.”
She considered that Paul might have his own share of loneliness, the kind you could get even in a crowded room. “Mom would kill you,” she said.
“We don’t have to do what Mom wants.”
“You always do what she wants. You’re the one who makes her happy.”
Paul’s gaze had a veteran emptiness. “It’s because I lie so as not to offend her delicate sensibilities.”
“You do?”
“I did what she wanted when it mattered. I told her I went to church, and I told her Marion and I hadn’t slept together before we got married. Yeah, she asked. I take care of her the way she wants. I call every few days, do what needs doing.”
“Why don’t you stop, then?”
“Because she’s my mother and I’m part of a family, and that means doing things you don’t like. That’s what people do,” he said, enunciating the words as though she were a child. “They lie. But you knew that already, didn’t you?” He hurled the last bag into the recycling bin. “Come back in for dessert,” he said, and went inside.
She lingered for a moment, watching him through the windows of the warmly lit house. He and Marion floated from kitchen to dining room, putting things away. Then Marion moved toward Paul and held him by the shoulders. They spoke, but Nicole could not make out the words. It seemed right to her, that she couldn’t know what was said. Someone else’s marriage was like a house. You could only watch from the windows.
She turned and looked at the apartment building behind Paul’s townhouse; it was an old brick tenement with fire escapes zigzagging across its surface. In the checkerboard of light and dark windows she could see other silhouettes moving—husbands, wives, cats on sills. One caught her eye: a woman moving in a kitchen, swaying to music while she stood at the sink. In the other room, a light on, but no one there. “That’s me,” Nicole whispered.
We are all in the great god Indra’s magnificent net, her Master tells her, seven years into her training. You move and I feel it. You grow, you change, and you tug on the strings of the net. Try to tear free, and you snarl things even tighter. The people all around you are affected.
She nods; she can understand that. But the confines of the net are becoming more constraining every day. She meditates with her Master’s shadow stretching over her shoulders and imagines herself growing, her neck straining, her limbs restless, struggling to open, to move. Tell me the answer to the koan, he says. Show me your original face, before your parents were born.
She says, I have always had this face. A true master never asks to see something that isn’t already there.
But even when she gives the right answer, her Master seems angry. Being self-satisfied with your own progress, he says, leaning over her, is a barrier to enlightenment.
But I’m not, she says. Satisfied is not what she is.
I know. I know. His hands cup her shoulders, slide downward, claim each part of her piece by piece. In truth, she loves the way he touches her into being, as though each piece of her body, her life, has no meaning until he has gotten his hands on it, shaped it a little. He is going to make her excellent. And there is so much work to do.
You are on a journey to discover the origins of joy, anger, sorrow, and pleasure, her Master tells her. Let’s figure these out one at a time. Go to the source, as they say. Let’s start with pleasure. Let’s see how it begins.
“So go on,” Jocelyn said on the phone when Nicole got home from Paul and Marion’s that night. “Tell me about when you ran. What made you leave? Where did you go?”
THE GONE YEAR
My mother wasn’t doing well, and she decided she should take a vacation to visit her cousins in North Carolina, Nicole began. There was a beach house there that the family often shared in the summer. It would be a little rest cure. This was right after St. Augustine closed.
“Take care of your father while I’m gone,” she told Nicole, packing her suitcase. “It’ll just be the two of you.” She sighed. “You’ll have to break in the new church for me. They won’t have as nice a benediction. I thought you and Paul would want to be married in the old one.” Her mother knelt suddenly on the carpet in her stockings, clasping her hands on the bed like a child. “Nic, say a Hail Mary with me. It’s good luck. Before a journey.”
Nicole froze. “Do we have to?”
Her mother looked at her. “What’s gotten into you?” Then her eyes roved over her daughter’s face. “Have you cut your hair?”
She had cut a few ragged inches around her face with kitchen shears. It was part of her new allegiance to Buddhism: monks and nuns shaved their heads or sliced off a topknot as a symbolic cutting of ties with their families. But that wasn’t all that her mother was noticing. It’s me. I’m different.
“Come on now, for me.” Her mother’s eyes were closed in prayer. Nicole knelt next to her.
Hail Mary, full of grace. Our Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus, her mother said in her fragile voice.
Once her mother was away, she read stacks of introductory books on Buddhism. The library’s copies had long lists of red and blue checkout stamps, going back to the sixties; the more advanced the book she took out (Esoteric Buddhism or Special Topics in Japanese Zen Sects), the fewer the stamps, as though she were winnowing the list of Buddhists in Boston down to a committed few. She read the lancets and koans of Dogen, the hysterical prayers of Nichiren, the metaphysical wanderings of Ch’ang-sha. Ch’ang-sha wrote, “The entire universe is your eye; the entire universe is your complete body; the entire universe is your own luminance. The entire universe is within your own luminance. In the entire universe there is no one who is not your own self.”
In her morning meditations beside her bed, she began to see that every move she made threatened the world around her. Karma, the law of cause and effect, meant that every action had its reverberation out in the world. The universe, her books told her, was not a stony firmament, a Catholic certainty, but a fragile web. She was ready and willing to believe it.
Jules called her a few days after the party. He’d gotten her number from a school directory. “Do you want to hang out or what?”
He parked down the street, as she’d asked, and then she walked out to meet him and they drove to a park with a few jogging trails. It was misty out and they could just see a big old house up on the hill, se
a-gray. “You know, I have a girlfriend,” he said, walking ahead of her quickly.
She thought he had broken up with the theater girl, but she didn’t say it. She ducked her head and murmured, “I know,” wanting to seem serious and respectful. She wondered if this was why they were at this park instead of the movies or the mall, hidden from public view.
In his tight jeans his legs were slightly bowed, and it gave his walk a little hitch, a jaunty swing. It was the way a cowboy would walk, a boy acting like a cowboy. “Then why did you take me here?” she said.
He laughed. “Man, we can go back if you want.”
“I’d just like to know what I am to you.” It was a desperate ploy, this frankness, but she was pretty sure the only attraction she had for him was her directness. If he was looking for the usual things a girl could offer, he already had plenty. She knew those Boston girls from the big-lawned suburbs, the girls who went to her school, who clattered into ice cream shops in their field hockey cleats, with their dark blond hair and their freckled rosy-glowing skin, smelling of baby powder and body glitter—those demure entitled girls stalking down Newbury Street in packs, those brisk beaming ponytailed girls, too busy, too accomplished even to be mean, assembling their résumés for the Ivy League schools where they would meet drunk blond boys, those girls, who were trained to attack on the soccer field, on the debate teams and model U.N.’s of the world but were still called “sweet”—those girls, diligently turning the keys of their palate expanders—those Boston prep school girls.
Jules shrugged, a thin-lipped smile on his face. “You’re like all the other good girls, looking for somebody who’ll give you flowers.”
“No, I’m not.” Hadn’t screwing in the muddy backyard of a friend’s house during a party been bad enough for him? “What’ll it take to prove I’m not?”
Jules dug into his pocket, came up with an orange prescription bottle. “From my dad’s knee surgery. They’re sick.” He palmed two pills, swallowed, and offered the bottle.