by David Guy
“Then she got pregnant and wanted to have the child. I hesitated, and she noticed. I wasn’t much of a breadwinner at the time.”
“She had an abortion?”
“She had the child. Just wouldn’t have anything more to do with me. I never saw her again.”
He went through that right before I became his student. I’d had no idea.
Jake wasn’t actively sad, but I’d never seen him so serious. He was making a point of telling me.
“It sounds as if I can’t get involved with anyone,” I said. “Might as well join a monastery.”
“No. But when the person is a student, no matter how much it seems personal, it’s always the dharma. That’s what she’s in love with.”
I’d thought it was Jake all the women loved.
“It’s natural to love the person who shows you that,” he said. “Also natural to love your students. Talk to Socrates about that. But as soon as it gets physical, it becomes the old human mess. Which is wonderful. But bound to be a little disappointing, when she thought you were the Buddha.”
I shook my head.
“Not literally,” he said. “But that’s where the confusion is.”
People did idolize their teachers. I’d seen it a million times.
“So what do you do about all this?” I asked. “Sex. Women.”
“Find somebody who’s not the least bit interested. Thinks meditation is stupid. Remember Ethel?”
Ethel had been a chunky little waitress at the downtown diner near the bike shop. I’d seen her fawn all over Jake, hadn’t thought much of it. She’d died five or six years ago.
“You don’t mean it,” I said.
“She was a Catholic. Thought I was going straight to hell. Maybe that made it exciting.”
“She didn’t want to get married?”
“She’d been married. Besides. Who in their right mind marries a part-time bicycle repairman?”
In the grand Mexican tradition, the one dessert the place had was flan. Jake had some, though I didn’t think it was sweet enough. I drank some coffee. We strolled back out onto Mass. Ave. toward the Y.
“So what happened to Olivia? Do you ever wonder?”
“All the time. Madeleine kept me posted. She kept track of her.”
“She never wanted to see you?”
“Wouldn’t even talk about me, at least to Madeleine. There was some deep problem. I never understood. Maybe that’s why the old monks were celibate. There’s deep wisdom in that.”
Jake didn’t look sad, or upset. He did look tired. It had taken a toll on him, telling me. I wondered why he had picked that moment.
“I’m ready for a nap,” he said.
We went up to the rooms. That hallway was never too bright, with its off-green institutional walls, dull lighting. There was something depressing about it, with the stale smell.
“I’m going to read afterward,” Jake said.
“I’ll take a swim. Come back after that.”
There was something I needed to bring up, wasn’t sure how. I settled on bluntness. “Don’t go wandering off,” I said.
“I’ll have my clothes off,” he said. “I’m not that dotty.”
“You’ll stay in your room.”
“I’m not going to piss in the sink, if that’s what you mean.”
“Just leave your door open.”
It was only for a minute or two.
“I’ll be in here or down at the pool,” I said.
I didn’t take a nap, just lay on my back and pondered things. That wasn’t a bombshell, exactly, but definitely some new information about the man who had been the biggest influence on my life.
In the brief history of American Zen there have been various sex scandals, mostly Japanese teachers coming to this country and fucking their brains out. The situation has been analyzed to death, the comparison with incestuous dysfunctional families definitely covered. People got quite exercised about it.
The truth seemed to be that the priests—they weren’t celibate; Zen priests can marry—were men who fell into a situation where women worshipped them. Not surprisingly, they found that hard to resist. The women who wound up in zendos seemed prone to such situations, also prone to outrage about them. The whole thing was a mess.
All I had was Jake’s side of the story of his relationship with Olivia, but this didn’t sound like that. Jake hadn’t preyed on a weak person. It was a meeting of equals.
The great teachers through history were solitaries. Jesus, the Buddha, almost anyone you wanted to name—Lao-tzu riding off to be a hermit when someone made him write the Tao Te Ching—devoted themselves not to family life but to something else. If you want to know if you’re enlightened, people used to say, ask your wife. These men didn’t have wives.
Maybe that’s why we think they were enlightened.
I had long since stopped thinking Jake was perfect. It was because he was so human that I admired him: he had taken the raw materials of humanity and made something wonderful, with no tool other than sitting and watching it all, learning to accept.
After about an hour I took a swim. I hadn’t heard any stirring next door at all. There were four of us in the pool, but I had my own lane. That goofy pool was starting to grow on me.
Often, swimming brings up something altogether new. It’s a kind of Zen activity. Strange to say, but it hasn’t been my experience that thoughts reside in the brain. They permeate the body, as does the mind (which is different from the brain). “Everything is mind” is the famous Zen saying, but that doesn’t mean, as people think, that everything is all in your head. It means your mind is your body. It’s also the grass, the trees, the birds singing outside.
Anyway, that act of swimming changed my mind. By the time I finished, I thought the real issue was Jess. In the grand scheme of things she was like Madeleine more than like Olivia, a confused, needy person looking for help. It was only the sheerest accident that we walked into the bar and she heard about the retreat, but everything was like that: I happened into a bike shop twenty years before and saw a flyer about Zen classes. I hadn’t been looking.
I met Jake and knew he had something I wanted. She seemed to do the same. A dozen barflies heard we were having that retreat, and they didn’t express interest. Jess didn’t really care about art school, didn’t want to go to that class in the fall, but she did want to meditate. Scared shitless, but she wanted to learn.
She also wanted to fuck me. And that would ruin everything.
It wasn’t really me. She’d just happened to meet a couple of older guys who weren’t treating her as a slutty bar girl. She wanted to know them, tried to do so in the usual way. Which turned her right back into a slutty bar girl. She tried to get away from that and walked right into it.
I—when I was being truthful—would have loved to do what she wanted. There was nothing I’d have liked more than to go back to that bedroom. That was what I’d face for the rest of my life if I did this. One woman after another like Jess.
I took a shower and went upstairs, hesitated a moment, knocked on Jake’s door. He was sitting in bed reading, his little reading spectacles down on his nose.
“I went out and wandered aimlessly for a while, like a lunatic,” he said. “Now I’m back.”
He was reading the Shobogenzo, the great lifetime work of our Zen lineage’s founding teacher, from the thirteenth century.
“How’s the book?” I said.
“As you lose your mind, it almost makes sense.”
We got together again when we headed for the bar. The sun was setting red over the buildings. Traffic had slowed. I could almost imagine living in that city.
I asked Jake the one question that really bothered me, about that man who seemed to notice every detail.
“How’d you let her get pregnant?” I asked.
“You still carrying her around?” he asked.
“I am. And she’s heavy, being pregnant and all.”
“Of all the phrases in t
he history of romance, the least romantic is, ‘Is your diaphragm in?’ Night after night that phrase spoils things a little. Night after night, because you’ve just gotten together, the answer is yes. There’s one night you don’t ask. That’s the night you should have.”
The Green Street Grill for some reason was a total madhouse that evening, whether we were arriving late or what. The regulars were there somewhere, a few turned and bowed, but were buried in a crowd three and four deep at the bar, waiting for the restaurant. This was what I’d heard the place was like. We must have come on off nights.
We didn’t get our central seats at the bar, didn’t get any. We were lucky to get to the bar, which took five minutes and a major effort. Jess had a couple of women helping her. As soon as she saw us, she poured our beer and came over. We stood at the far side, where the crowd had finally thinned out. She leaned over and took Jake’s face in her hands, kissed his cheek.
“Hi, Padre,” she said. “This place is a zoo.”
“You said it.”
“Everybody wants a drink now. Two drinks, in case they can’t get me later. If they don’t get a drink they’ll slit their throats.”
People got frantic when their alcohol was threatened.
“Anyway,” she said. “Fuck’em. How are you?”
She looked different, I can’t say how. She was back in uniform, had the short tight skirt that looked as if her ass were about to burst through like a blooming flower, the tight top showing major cleavage. She had the earrings, the nose ring. I could have sworn the hair streaks were heading in the blond direction, but maybe it was just the light.
But she still had something of the girlish quality from that morning. It was as if she were dressed up in a costume.
“I’m fine,” Jake said. “A few senior moments today.” Major understatement. “But feeling good.”
“You look adorable.”
Jake actually blushed.
“Do I have to stand on my head to get a drink around here?” a guy down the bar said.
“You might try it,” Jess said. “Why don’t you do that? You’ve had three that I know of.”
“I don’t ask you to count my drinks. Just bring them.”
“I’m talking to my priest, cocksucker. Learn some manners.”
Jake took a slug of his beer.
“I’m sorry, Padre,” Jess said. “Where were we?”
“Telling him he’s adorable,” I said.
“I talked to my friend again,” Jake said. “She’ll see you at the retreat. Looking into art class options.”
“Honestly, Padre. It was a girlish whim.”
“She’s just a helpful person. Have you figured out when you’re coming?”
“I’m thinking around ten. Stay until four.”
“Nine fifty would be better,” I said. “We start a sitting then.”
“You get there when you can,” Jake said. “We’ll fit you in.”
“I can make nine fifty,” she said. “You don’t want to miss Hank’s talk,” Jake said.
Christ. He had eliminated himself altogether.
He handed her a slip of paper with the address.
“I’ll be there with bells on,” she said. “But I’ve got to go. The drunkards of the world await.” She leaned over and kissed him again, pinched his cheek.
“You’re so cute,” she said.
Jake downed the rest of his Guinness in one gulp. A little tough to pace myself with that.
“This place is obnoxious tonight,” he said. “Let’s go.”
I had to put my beer down the same way. About five minutes later it hit me like a hammer.
Further down Mass. Ave. than we usually went, halfway to Harvard Square, was a little place that made Italian sandwiches. They baked the thin crusty loaves of bread on the premises, filled them with prosciutto, mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, basil. The place was packed at lunch, not bad in the evening. After Green Street we needed some quiet.
“She’s going to come not knowing how to meditate,” Jake said. “You’ll give her instruction.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
That was the time, if there ever was one, to tell Jake about already giving her instruction, seeing her for breakfast the last two days, but I couldn’t get past the fact that I’d grabbed her boobs. I felt guilty.
“She may have trouble,” he said. “Seems a little squirmy.”
“It’ll work out.”
You never knew how sesshin would be for somebody new, even somebody old. It was a total crapshoot.
We ate for a while. There was nothing like that fresh-baked bread.
“This Olivia,” I said. “Was she the love of your life?’
He shrugged, gazed down at his plate.
“I assume not Ethel,” I said.
I couldn’t say how many times that woman had brought me a plate of pancakes as I sat right beside Jake, never suspecting. That was as much a bombshell as the other news.
“Ethel came closer, if I’m being honest. Didn’t ask a lot of life or of me. Never even cared if I spent the night, since I got up so early. I haven’t met many like her.”
I haven’t met any. She was the last person I’d have put Jake with.
“Olivia was different.” He put down his sandwich, took a drink of his beer. He was having two that night. “For one thing, I knew her such a short time. Five months. Then not to know her at all, even to see her, for twenty-some years.”
In a way, Jake said, he hadn’t known much about her. She showed up in his class at the beginning of the summer. She was a little on the countercultural side, wore peasant blouses and blue jeans, maybe a T-shirt when it was really hot. She was a major athlete and outdoorswoman, rode a bike all over the island, went canoeing and waterskiing, jogged. She’d done modern dance when she was younger, was very physical.
“I think that’s why she got into it so quickly,” he said. “Sometimes when you’ve practiced a discipline like dance it comes naturally. Sitting is physical.”
As he’d spent the last twenty years telling me.
“How old was she?” I asked.
“Your age. Madeleine’s. I can’t believe you don’t remember.”
I didn’t think I’d ever seen her.
She was something of a mysterious person, he said, a private person. There were aspects of her life—her parents and family—she didn’t talk about at all. He didn’t know how she was able to be up there all summer, so casually move up for the fall. She said she was in transition, used that expression a lot, but didn’t say why. She didn’t like him asking.
“I had the idea something had happened,” he said. “Some major life change. But she never said a word.”
Most people would have told their meditation teacher, to say nothing of their boyfriend.
“But I never in my life saw someone get into meditation so fast. We had three all-days that summer and they weren’t a problem. At the beginning of the fall we did a five-day and she breezed through that. It was as if she already knew what the whole thing was about. If there was ever an argument for past lives, it was someone like her. Who seemed to know practice when she got here.”
I had an uncle who believed in reincarnation when he saw Art Tatum play the piano. “No way he could have learned that in one lifetime,” he said. “Impossible.”
“And I want to tell you, Hank. Which is why I mentioned it. Having sex with that woman was the most natural thing in the world. Our minds had been in the same place, as if we were the same person. Sex didn’t seem to make it different. She moved in soon after. I thought we’d teach together someday. It made sense to have a woman assistant, with so many women students.”
By that time we had finished our dinners and the place had cleared out. They stayed open until nine.
“She got pregnant and it changed everything. She’d have the baby and find a way to raise it. I agreed that was the thing to do. I just couldn’t see how. Came to a block in the road and hesitated. A classic Zen moment,
in a way. Suddenly she was the teacher and I the struggling student.”
He shook his head.
“She blew through the roadblock and took off. I’d flunked the koan.”
I needed to meet this woman. I wasn’t sure I’d like her, but I’d like to meet her.
“I don’t get the bitterness,” I said.
“What?”
“Never seeing you again. Not letting you see the child. That should ease up after a while.”
I wasn’t best friends with my ex-wife, but we got along.
“I wrote her letters through the years, sent them through Madeleine. Never heard a word. It’s one thing to get a hostile reception. Gives you something to work with. But nothing.” He shook his head.
There was something weird about that, verging on pathological. She might have impressed Jake in some ways, but she had something to learn about compassion. It would have helped the child to know his father. Especially a father as loving as Jake.
This was one of those unenlightened restaurants—as far as Jake was concerned—that didn’t see dessert as the crowning moment of the meal. There wasn’t a whole lot to be had at that hour out on Mass. Ave., lots of bars but not an abundance of coffee houses. We finally found one up across from the Y, a funky place that seemed eclectic, aging hippies reading discarded newspapers but also kids tapping away at their laptops, text messaging on their cell phones, checking their pagers, whatever they do. It’s all beyond me.
We managed to hook Jake up with a big crumbly chocolate cookie, a small cup of coffee, got him into bed not too long after that, curled up with his Buddhist sutras. One more night at the Y and we moved to our new digs.
13
THE GOLDEN D that last morning had a muffin I’d never run into before, blueberry corn. “Only on Friday,” Lily said. “One day we serve this muffin.”
“Why is that?”
“People come for fish cakes and beans Friday. This muffin give them special treat.”
I gazed at Jake. “Catholics have been eating meat on Friday for years,” I said.
“These old Cambridge neighborhoods are hardcore. Haven’t given up.”
Haul out the tuna noodle casserole.
Parts of Cambridge—a mile in either direction from Central Square—were on the cutting edge of the twenty-first century, but Cambridgeport seemed a throwback. Matrons in house-dresses out sweeping the sidewalks, broad-faced Irishmen off to work in the morning with lunch buckets, neighborhood characters still walking the streets talking to themselves. Other cultures had spiced the place up—a Jamaican market, Indian grocery—but the originals were still there.