Jake Fades

by David Guy

  “How are you both?” she said. “Staying at that awful Y. I don’t see why you don’t stay here.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Jake said. “Hank likes to swim.”

  True enough. I hadn’t been swimming yet, of course. Hadn’t actually considered it.

  “I could find Hank a place to swim,” she said. “For heaven’s sake.”

  She could build me a pool if she wanted.

  “Can’t you help me with this, Henry?” she said. Only she, in all the world, still called me that. She took Jake’s arm. “He never lets me take care of him.”

  Jake was smiling, and they made a cute couple—though she was an inch taller, a quarter-century younger—but I could see, right at that moment, that Jake lost it. There was a certain who is this woman and why is she holding onto me? look to him. It wasn’t fear, just bewilderment. He had that way of noticing, calming, then waiting, waiting.

  “The man never wants much luxury,” I said. “You should see where we ate breakfast.”

  “Not that Chinese donut house. Can you see me in there?”

  Actually, Madeleine, no.

  “I made the dreadful error of ordering sausage. My tummy’s never been the same.”

  Jake was still in lala land. I wasn’t worried. He was in the hands of the person who loved him most in the world. But my heart ached.

  “Let me show you both what I’ve done to the place. Hank won’t have much point of reference. We’re about halfway to where we should be.”

  Madeleine, just a few years younger than I—in her early fifties—was still stunning. She was petite, though slightly taller than our little friar—with silvery hair that was right on the edge of blond, still bright and beautiful. She had kept her figure—no children, despite all the husbands—and had the high cheekbones, little bud of a mouth, that I associate with movie stars from the thirties. A single mole on the right cheek. She had the warmth and grace of a true aristocrat. Whatever her personal problems, she was brilliant with people.

  “I bought this house with husband number two,” she said. “Number two describes him rather well, I’m afraid. He was before your time, Henry, I believe.”

  “So was number three.”

  “Oh dear, really? The years do fly by, don’t they?”

  So do the husbands.

  She had opened the door to one side of the hall and let us in.

  “This used to be the living room. I picture it as the zendo.”

  It had been entirely cleared out. The hardwood floors were newly refinished, bright and beautiful, lined with rows of zabutons—mats for meditation—and zafus, the round cushions. At the front of the room was an altar with a large Buddha, candles on either side of it, containers for holding incense. A far more elaborate setup than we had in Maine.

  “My God,” I said. “This is beautiful.”

  “What do you think, sweetheart?”

  “Very nice.” Jake nodded.

  Madeleine finally noticed. She wasn’t oblivious, just addressing her remarks to me, leading Jake by the arm. Now she heard that vague empty answer, turned to him, and looked.

  “Are you all right, darling?” she said.

  “Fine,” he said, just barely there.

  Madeleine could handle any social situation, but not any emotional one. Her face, which had worn a radiant smile, went to pieces.

  “You are?” she said.

  “This used to be the living room,” I said. I took Jake’s other arm. “Madeleine’s house. Your favorite student.”

  “Hardly that,” Madeleine said. “The one who’s been with you the longest,” I said. “The one who’s most loyal.”

  Suddenly, saying that, I knew it was true. It didn’t matter how much she could or couldn’t sit, had or hadn’t done it. No one was more devoted to Jake. No one loved him more.

  “This was the living room,” I said. “What was it like?”

  “Well.” Madeleine’s voice was halting. “There was a sofa right here.” She pointed in front of us. “Another one there.” She gestured to the end of the room, toward the street. “Lamps on either side. Sheer draperies coming down alongside the windows. Various chairs around. A piano in the corner.”

  “I remember,” Jake said.

  It wasn’t what he said, but the way he said it. His voice didn’t have that lost quality. He was back.

  “This is amazing,” he said. “I can’t believe what you’ve done.”

  “I told you I was going to.”

  “I know. But actually seeing it.”

  Madeleine had regained her composure. She wasn’t quite back to Jacqueline Kennedy Shows You the White House. But she was okay.

  “The classroom is downstairs,” she said. “That’s the room that needed the most work. I had to put in the flooring, repaint the walls. It’s a large room, a little dark, maybe a little cool.”

  “Perfect for sitting,” I said.

  “I’ve imagined an office upstairs. Bedrooms for the two of you. There’s a guest room as well. There could be another resident. And over time, if all this grows, there’s a third floor as well. That could be a lecture hall, an alternate sitting room.”

  We were standing in a small triangle at that point, she talking about her dream, which was way beyond anything I’d heard, Jake completely back with us, listening and beaming. She started to cry.

  She wasn’t sobbing. She didn’t break down. But tears just flowed from her eyes, ran down her cheeks.

  “I’ve dreamed of this for so long,” she said.

  “It isn’t that,” Jake said. “It’s that you hadn’t seen this before. Me.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I’ve described it to her,” he said to me. “But she hasn’t seen it. She didn’t believe it.”

  “I believed it.”

  “You hadn’t seen it.”

  She had taken out a handkerchief, was wiping her eyes.

  “Why don’t you give us a minute, Hank?” Jake said. “You could take a look at the classroom.”

  “I’m all right, really,” Madeleine said.

  “I could sit,” I said. “It never hurts.”

  “Do that,” Jake said. “I’ll come and get you.”

  The classroom was beautiful, cushions set out in rows. I sat for quite some time.

  4

  “SO WE’VE GOT TO FACE THIS NOW,” Jake said. “We’re all agreed?”

  He, the focus of the situation, was the calmest person in the room. Madeleine, pouring tea—we sat at a table in the kitchen—avoided our eyes. She still seemed upset.

  “It’s a fact of nature,” Jake said. “When you die, you give up everything you are. Your name, identity, your precious ideas. You’re not a teacher anymore. Not a Buddhist. Not anything.”

  “Do we want some cookies with our tea?” Madeleine still hadn’t raised her eyes.

  “Why not?” Jake said.

  Do you have to give up cookies when you die? That would be upsetting.

  Madeleine got a tin of cookies from the counter, opened and put them in front of us, still not looking up. Her eyes were sad, her face somber.

  “If you get old,” Jake said, “if you’re lucky enough to do that, you feel things going in your body, disappearing never to return. You’ve probably felt that. Both of you.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Sometimes it’s the mind. The whole thing’s unpredictable. It’s all one process.”

  “Why are we talking about dying?” Madeleine said.

  “It’s all about dying,” Jake said. “This whole practice. Letting go of all we are. What a relief.”

  One thing the man wasn’t letting go of was that cookie. Nor was he so involved in what he said that he didn’t appreciate it. He took a second bite. “Delicious.”

  “Darcy makes them,” Madeleine said. “I agree.”

  She pushed the tin in my direction.

  “I’m going to die,” he said. “Probably soon.”

  The last lesson your teacher giv
es you is his death. The most valuable one.

  “Please, darling.” Madeleine’s mouth trembled. “Don’t say that.” She covered his hand with hers.

  “My heart’s been a ticking time bomb for years,” he said.

  “And will be for years to come,” I said.

  “That’s where you’re not being realistic.”

  Especially if he kept slamming those cookies. He had taken another.

  “If you create this center,” he said, “it’s going to be Hank who runs it.”

  She looked further down. She hadn’t so much as sipped her tea.

  And I hadn’t considered running a center. I didn’t know if I wanted to.

  “I want that,” Jake said. “That would be a good thing.”

  Madeleine looked up now. Her face had settled, eyes calmed.

  “Nothing against Henry, of course,” she said. “I’m sure he would run a wonderful center. But it’s been my dream for years that you would come down here and teach. Make yourself more accessible. Be closer to me. That was selfish, of course. I wasn’t thinking of it as simply starting a center.”

  “Nor was I,” I said. “I must say.”

  “I’ve never actually heard Henry teach,” she said.

  There was a reason for that. I’d never taught.

  “I’m sure he’s a very good teacher,” she said.

  Only one doubter was left in the room. The man himself.

  “Hank is my teaching,” Jake said. “He embodies it.”

  “Jake,” I said, “That’s ridiculous.”

  “He’s lived with me over twenty years. Heard every lecture I’ve given in that time.”

  “Hearing isn’t living it.” I looked straight at Madeleine. “I don’t embody anything.”

  “If anyone in this world can carry on what I’ve done, it’s him.”

  I didn’t know what had come over him. If there was any real indication of senility, this was it. He had always emphasized that practice was the important thing, not his teaching, not anyone’s. The dharma isn’t rocket science. Most people got the gist after a while. The point isn’t to know it. It’s to live it.

  “That’s a ringing endorsement,” Madeleine said. “It does make me feel better.”

  Unfortunately, it was based on nothing I’d ever done.

  “The problem is that I knew Henry back when,” Madeleine said. “That’s not his fault. It’s hard for me to make the transition.”

  “Hank’s practiced for twenty-two years,” Jake said.

  To what effect? I sometimes wondered.

  “It’s hard to believe it’s been that long,” Madeleine said.

  I wondered how she meant that.

  The real problem was that she and I had some history together.

  Back when I first met Jake, it had taken me a while to decide about practice. He had shown me about sitting, taught me some of the basics. For a year I tried by myself, sitting on my own, calling on the phone from time to time. But I’ve never been one for phone conversation, and there’s something about the physical presence of the teacher. Teaching gets passed through the air. You’ve got to bang heads a little.

  The main thing was that my life wasn’t working out. I needed a drastic change, and I decided to go study with him.

  I hadn’t thought I’d stay. I figured one year of intense practice would give me a firm foundation. I could move to a new place, get a new job, make a new start.

  Here I was twenty-some years later, still running a cash register.

  In those days, most of Jake’s teaching was in the summer. Some students stayed for considerable periods, Madeleine all summer. A class met twice a week, a sitting group every morning. I found a place to live and threw myself into it completely.

  I suppose Madeleine was on the rebound from number three at that point. Maybe they were still married. Wouldn’t have bothered me. She was beautiful, sophisticated, and rich, though I didn’t know the extent of the money. She was vulnerable about relationships, quite vulnerable as a human being, though I didn’t know how far that went. She worshipped Jake’s teaching, clinging to it like a raft. It gave us something to talk about.

  All that didn’t matter, in a way. She could have been fat, ugly, poor, never heard a word about Jake: we still would have found each other. The Woman Who Can’t Hold Onto a Man always finds The Man Who Adores Women, All Women. They fall into their dance effortlessly, as if they’ve done it dozens of times (in our case, we had). The only surprising thing was that we didn’t get married.

  I suppose what saved us was the tourist season; it played out quickly, like a shipboard romance. Maybe meditation had something to do with that. We had hardly gotten to know each other before we realized we’d known each other all our lives. Not you again! It was so brief that there weren’t a lot of hard feelings. Just the humiliation of doing it again.

  I could understand how Madeleine had trouble seeing me as a teacher. She was quite gracious under the circumstances.

  “What we plan to do,” Jake said, sipping—perhaps slurping (there was a little of the cab driver still in him)—his tea, “is co-teach this retreat.” He glanced at the cookie tin.

  “All right.”

  “We’ll sit up front together, and I’ll start. Won’t make a big deal out of the fact that Hank’s there. But if I start to falter, or completely lose it, he’ll take over.”

  “That sounds difficult.” Madeleine glanced at me.

  You said it, sister.

  “It’s the only way I can do it,” Jake said.

  “I just hope you won’t be defeatist,” she said. “There’s no reason to assume something will go wrong.”

  “It’s true,” I said. “You’re coherent around me for hours at a time.”

  “I’m faking some of that. I have lots of little lapses.”

  “You can talk through those,” Madeleine said.

  I was with her. I’d be happy to sit there and look pretty. Enigmatic. Whatever.

  “We’ll see,” Jake said. “God willing, I’ll continue.”

  I hoped he wouldn’t reference God in a Buddhist talk.

  “And I hope you won’t give up on running the center,” Madeleine said. “That’s still my deepest dream. That your spirit will inform it.”

  “It will,” he said. “One way or another.”

  Who knows what he meant by that? Maybe this was one of those lapses.

  You couldn’t tell the lapses from the wisdom.

  He still eyed the cookie tin. If he resists this temptation, I thought, if he can have the willpower to slow down a little, everything’s going to be fine. He’ll give the talks. I’ll sit there, just like the old days. I made a little bet with myself.

  “We’ve got to get going,” Jake said. “Hank’s got a luncheon date.” He reached into the tin and took two cookies.

  Christ.

  He seemed to reconsider for a moment, then took a third.

  “Luncheon date,” Madeleine said. “Cherchez la femme.”

  They never forget, do they?

  “It’s my son,” I said. “He works up here.”

  “That’s right.”

  “He’s quite the young man,” Jake said.

  Not so young, actually.

  “I wish I’d known this,” Madeleine said, taking Jake’s arm on our way out. “I would have cancelled my appointment.”

  “I’ll come tomorrow. I’m headed for that goofball bookstore.”

  “You’ll be all right, by yourself?”

  “I can go stark raving mad in there and they’ll never notice.”

  “That’s enough talk about going crazy,” Madeleine said. “And about dying. You don’t have to teach all the time.”

  That was Jake’s flaw, if he had one. He couldn’t turn it off.

  “We want you with us forever,” she said.

  “I will be,” he said. “You can count on it.”

  Now what was he talking about?

  5

  THE GOOFBALL SPIRITUAL
BOOKSTORE in question used to be at Harvard Square but was now on Mass. Ave. near Central. Jake loved the place. Apparently no one had told the owner there was such a thing as returns, so he had a huge back stock on Buddhism and Zen. He also had major sections on Edgar Cayce, Madame Blavatsky, UFOs, astrology. Boldly displayed at the front for years was a Benjamin Franklin compilation entitled Fart Proudly. He gave as much space to total quacks as to renowned teachers.

  “That’s as it should be,” Jake said. “How do we know who’s right?”

  Jake combed the Buddhist section but ranged far and wide, might spend long afternoons leafing through some obscure Indian sage. He also loved talking to the guy who ran the place, a Carlos Castaneda freak who loved to bullshit.

  We took our time walking down. I wasn’t meeting Josh until one.

  “Why did you say that stuff?” I asked. “That I’m your dharma heir.”

  “I don’t know who is, if not you. Do I have one?”

  The old man was trudging along, taking in the morning air, beaming in the sun, munching his cookies.

  “I came to you all screwed up,” I said. “Stayed because I needed time. More than other people.”

  “Everybody starts because they’re screwed up. That’s why the Buddha started. Dogen was a homeless orphan.”

  So was Kodo Sawaki, the man who taught Jake’s teacher.

  “I stayed because I couldn’t leave,” I said.

  “Maybe the first year or two. After that you wanted to go deeper. The old life wouldn’t satisfy you.”

  The old life looked pallid beside what I did with Jake, much as I liked some of it.

  “I wouldn’t have let you just hang on,” he said.

  In the Buddha’s day, too, many people decided to stay. They preferred the new life they’d found, difficult as it was.

  “I talked to Madeleine the way I had to, so she’d understand. It’s not the way I usually put things. But it’s not a lie.”

  If he meant all that, it was humbling. It was scary.

  “I screwed this up, bringing you along as a teacher,” he said. “I didn’t have a model. I’ve waited too long.”

  “I thought your Japanese teacher was your model.”

  “Those guys were so eccentric, for the twentieth century. And Buddhism was ancient in that culture. It’s not the same here.”