Jake Fades

by David Guy

  She laughed.

  If she’d kissed me right then I didn’t know what might happen. We were as close as two human beings get.

  “This is a kiss, then.” She bowed.

  I bowed back.

  “It was better that we didn’t do it. You were right.”

  We did do it, was the truth of the matter, just then, in that room. We’d been as intimate as if we had. We were lovers.

  The practice was to be that way with the whole world.

  16

  THE FIRST THING I NOTICED the next day was that Jess was there at six. She stood out because her place was down the middle, with the room dividers, and she was the only one. Attendance fell after the weekend, though some people came before and after work. That morning she was the only one.

  Maybe Sunday was her day off; she had gotten to bed early and gotten enough sleep. She seemed to sit well.

  The next thing I noticed was that she wasn’t there when the talk began.

  I was looking for her. She was my touchstone, I had realized the day before, the person I taught to. You teach to everyone, but she had caught me short that first day, asking me to start at the beginning. That was important. You couldn’t assume anything.

  I also felt close to her emotionally, Kevin as well. He would serve as a substitute.

  I couldn’t help wondering where she was.

  The other thing that threw me that morning was that Jake had me do the bows. We’d gone to the dokusan room, where we picked up the incense, and he said, “I’ve got it,” in the most casual way. It wasn’t until he had the lighted incense and was walking out that I realized what was happening. He was making me the speaker.

  The day before I had thought he should. Today I wasn’t so sure.

  Then I wasn’t sure what happened when the talk began. We sat in our places in the front, but if I was the officiating priest I should be starting, though I had no idea what to talk about. I was waiting for him.

  For a long time he said nothing. The day before, I thought he’d shown no signs of his problem—though I didn’t know what happened when he wasn’t talking, which was most of the time. But now he seemed to be having a spell, wore an absolutely absent gaze. I looked for Madeleine, but she was looking down, avoiding my eyes.

  “Jake?” I said.

  “I had something and lost it,” he said. “Give me a minute.”

  “I can go ahead.” Though I didn’t know with what.

  “No. Wait a minute.”

  We sat for what must have been three or four minutes. People had assumed their best posture. If we’d sat the whole time in silence it would have been good enough for me.

  Finally Jake said, “The Buddha held up a flower and Mahakashyapa smiled.” He turned to me.

  As he said those words I realized what the moment in the dokusan room had been. It was what the whole retreat had been, the whole week. My whole life with him for that matter. I was to talk about transmission.

  It’s one of the most famous stories in Zen, supposedly the founding story, though it may be apocryphal and created by someone to make a point. A huge group of monks were sitting in front of the Buddha, waiting for him to deliver a lecture. For a long time he didn’t say anything, then he held up a flower. One monk, Mahakashyapa, smiled. One out of twelve hundred got the point.

  The whole of the Buddha’s message could be reduced to that: do you appreciate this flower? Do you see that it contains the whole universe? One monk did, and he became the model for Zen transmission, which is outside the scriptures, just one mind connecting to another, beyond words.

  If you want to study the ineffable, it’s right in front of you. A leaf on a tree is ineffable. If you want to know the creator, look around, he’s everywhere. If you want to know eternity, this is it. This moment is as eternal as they come. The answer is not in a book. It’s not in a talk. It’s right there in front of you. Look.

  The problem with this subject—which by its whole nature is somewhat opposed to talking—is that it was full of emotion for me. Jake had just done with a simple physical gesture what he was asking me to talk about, did it in a way that spoke volumes. Then he seemed to have forgotten the whole point—which tore me up in another way—and come back just enough to say one thing. The Buddha held up a flower and Mahakashyapa smiled.

  What I wanted to talk about was the millions of ways Jake had embodied that for me, from the first day I met him and he stood there smiling while Josh pitched an adolescent fit until that simple gesture of stepping in front of me and taking the incense, with everything in between: taking us to a pizza parlor after Josh’s fit so we could have a little food and calm down; listening to me with a modest smile as if he hadn’t done anything while I tried to express my gratitude; taking me as a student as if there were nothing more normal than a half-assed high school history teacher moving to Bar Harbor for eight weeks to study Zen; showing me how to sit and sitting with me patiently through days and nights that turned into years.

  Riding with him on the Mount Desert bike paths through months of summers; watching him take a whole bike apart and put it back together as if he were doing nothing, as if there were no time involved at all, when he knew the owner would come steaming in at five demanding it back; watching him eat pancakes at the diner, lobster rolls from a roadside stand, some goofball donut from a Chinese donut shop as if it were the finest French pastry in the world.

  The man was there. In everything he did, he was right there. Even when he sat waiting for his mind to return, which he knew it might never do, he was there. It was so true that I could take it for granted. I did. I ignored a teaching that was right in front of me.

  I totally screwed up the talk. In thinking about this man who was constantly present, but whom I couldn’t talk about because he literally was present, I was entirely un-present, patching together a talk by remembering things I’d read. I told stories from the Zen tradition, some of which everyone had heard multiple times, but they were all dead because I couldn’t talk about the thing that was alive for me in the moment. I was sweating bullets as I spoke, pausing for long stretches of time, starting one story and abandoning it for another, getting two stories confused, forgetting the names of characters.

  It was a disaster. By the time it was over Madeleine was staring at the floor in embarrassment, Kevin had had his eyes completely shut—sleeping?—for a good fifteen minutes, and everyone else was shifting in their places. For the second straight day, a record, no one had questions. They all just wished I would shut the fuck up.

  So much for this particular act of transmission.

  When we walked up the stairs during the after-lunch break, Jake stepped into my room. The kindest thing he could have done was take out a gun and blow my brains out.

  “What happened to Jessica?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. She was here early, then left.”

  “How’s she been in dokusan?”

  “Her usual self. All over the place. She got into mourning for her mother, who died a few months ago. Did a lot of crying yesterday.”

  Jake reddened, frowned.

  “Maybe she was crying too much,” I said, “and she was afraid she’d disturb people. She worried about that yesterday.”

  “There are ways to deal with that.”

  “I know.”

  “She could sit in a separate room. One of us could sit with her.”

  “I told her everything was fine yesterday. I honestly hadn’t noticed the crying. I didn’t see her go out this morning. She just suddenly wasn’t there.”

  Jake nodded, headed out the door.

  “I’m sorry about that talk, Jake.”

  “Why?”

  “I screwed up. All over the place.”

  “I’ve heard worse. The point isn’t a polished performance.”

  That was a good thing.

  “You talk from your gut. Sometimes it’s twisted up.” For sure. “You give people what you’ve got.”

  I skipped work perio
d that day—usually I took one of the jobs—and took a long walk around the neighborhood, trying to get rid of that feeling. It wasn’t happening. My longing for some real exercise, a swim, was almost palpable. Finally I saw I just had to sit with it. I’d been telling people that for three days.

  Madeleine came to dokusan late that afternoon.

  “I really think I’d like to see Jake,” she said. “I’ve waited long enough.”

  “He doesn’t want to see anyone,” I said.

  I had no idea why I said that. It just sounded right.

  “Don’t you think he’d see me?”

  “I’m sure he would. But he doesn’t want to see anyone.”

  “Couldn’t you ask him?”

  “I could. I’m just trying to decide on the right thing to do.” For her, I meant. She thought I meant for him.

  “We can think about that together,” I said.

  She sat there staring at me. Tears came to her eyes.

  “It’s as if he’s not here,” she said. “It’s as if he’s dead.”

  “He’s here. He’s just not talking.”

  “What good is he to me if he’s not talking?”

  I didn’t say anything for a moment. “I think it’s some good,” I said.

  “I’ve never sat so long in my life. If this were Maine, I would long since have gone on a business trip.”

  I didn’t see the point. Couldn’t she leave for a business trip from here?

  “I’ll get him if you want me to,” I said.

  “Didn’t I say I wanted you to?”

  “If you want me to now.”

  The tears ran down her face. She really needed to bawl. She wouldn’t do it in front of me.

  “All right then.” She looked as if she’d like to smack me. “Don’t get him. What am I supposed to do?”

  I thought the answer to that was obvious. Go sit on your cushion.

  “I’ll be any help I can, Madeleine,” I said.

  She skipped the bow, stood up and walked out.

  Then she came back, stood at the door, and bowed. I bowed back.

  She would happily have killed me. But she would have bowed first.

  At the end of the evening, we do one final service with no bells whatsoever. The lights are dim, and we do three floor bows, then chant the Refuges. It always seems a perfect end to the day. I walk to my room ready for sleep.

  That evening, when we got to the top of the stairs, Jake said, “I want to check on Jessica.”

  “You want to call?”

  “I want to go down there. I want to see her.”

  If his spells could have given him a crazy idea, I would have thought this was one. I almost held my hand to his forehead.

  “You want to walk?”

  “There’s a cab stand a block away.”

  “Shouldn’t we change?”

  “I’d rather not take the time.”

  He was heading for the Green Street Grill in his robes? He’d cause a sensation.

  “You don’t need to come if you don’t want,” he said. “I just want to talk to her.”

  “I’m coming.”

  I sure as hell wasn’t going to let him go out there alone.

  Jake was right; there was a cab stand a block away. I’d never noticed. The cabbie didn’t seem surprised at a couple of Zen priests in robes—this was Cambridge, after all—but did raise an eyebrow when we said where we were going.

  When we arrived, Jake told him we’d be coming back—“You just having a quick one?” the cabbie asked—but that he didn’t know how long we’d be. The cabbie said he’d be at the Mass. Ave. cab stand. We gave him a nice tip since it had been a short trip.

  The bar—I shouldn’t have been surprised—was dead at that point on a Monday. I was glad our crowd of barflies didn’t stay there for five or six hours every evening. Jess was cleaning up, washing glasses, when we came in.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Padre. You guys are checking up.”

  “Just wondering how you are,” Jake said. “We were worried.”

  “Jake always likes a beer or two in the middle of a retreat,” I said.

  “You can’t blame him,” Jess said. “The usual?”

  “I’m going to pass,” Jake said. “You go ahead,” he said to me. “I’d like some tonic water,” I said. “Hold the gin.”

  The truth—it’s hard to explain, as difficult as retreat can be—is that the last thing you want is alcohol. You don’t want what clarity you have even slightly fogged over. On a normal day, I find a beer relaxing. On retreat it would be intrusive. I have no taste for it.

  The tonic water didn’t take a minute. Jess knew her way around.

  “So we were worried,” Jake said. “Neither of us saw you go.”

  “You thought I’d crapped out.”

  “It happens,” Jake said. “I once took a hike in the middle of sesshin.”

  “Hank told me,” Jess said.

  That was during one of our morning talks, which Jake didn’t know about. He didn’t seem to notice.

  “I wasn’t taking a walk,” Jess said. “And I wasn’t crapping out. Maybe Hank told you, I had a rough first day.”

  “It goes without saying,” Jake said.

  “The second wasn’t a cakewalk either. Even this morning, I was still sore. Kind of tired. Still couldn’t follow a breath if you’d held a gun to my head.”

  Jake laughed.

  “But something yesterday made me see what this is all about,” she said. “Just the tiniest glimpse, though I still have no idea what I’m doing. Not one clue how to meditate.”

  “No one knows that,” Jake said.

  “I’m still at the point where I think I’ll figure it out.”

  Jess was deeper than she looked.

  “Anyway,” she said. “I decided yesterday I want to do this. I want to learn what it is, however long it takes. I want Hank to be my teacher.”

  I actually blushed. I thought she preferred Jake. It was just as well she hadn’t heard the talk that day.

  “He’s taken a lot of shit from me,” she said. “But he’s hung in there. I left today because I had to cry. I’d been holding back, but this morning I knew I had to cut loose. So after breakfast I came back and sat in my apartment. I have a cushion there, Padre. I bought one.”

  “Great.”

  “I sat on that thing and bawled my eyes out. Sobbing and moaning. Pretty soon I was lying on the floor, rolling around. I had to do it. I knew I did. Get it all out.”

  It probably wasn’t all out. It took time.

  “Did I do the right thing?” Jess asked.

  “We could have found you a place in the house,” Jake said. “But you have good instincts.”

  Jess beamed. She loved being praised by this man.

  He turned to me. “I’d like to talk to Jess alone for a while.”

  That surprised me. Jake spent plenty of time talking to students alone, in dokusan and elsewhere; I was in no way privy to everything that went on. But Jess wasn’t his student. She had just said she wanted to work with me. And he’d never talked to her privately. I couldn’t imagine what he wanted to say.

  I nodded, smiled, took my tonic water and walked to a table away from the bar.

  They talked for half an hour. I had to admit to a slight feeling of paranoia, wondering if Jake was asking about our meetings (“He was really good, Padre. He only grabbed my tits once”), but it didn’t seem like that kind of conversation. Not that I was looking or anything. But I couldn’t help seeing out of the corner of my eye, and Jess got more and more involved, radiant in the way only Jake could make her feel. He did most of the talking.

  Finally, when they were finished, he called me over.

  “I think we should have a drink,” Jess said. “On the house.” She looked back toward the kitchen. “Not that the house is going to know.”

  I looked at Jake. I’d follow his lead.

  “Maybe just a swallow for us,” Jake said. “It really doesn�
�t go with sitting.” He turned to me. “Can you take a swallow?”

  “Just one.”

  Jess got out three shot glasses and took a bottle from behind the bar. “Jose Cuervo tequila,” she said. “My favorite.”

  She gave us both a small swallow in the bottom of the glass, herself a full shot.

  “To clear minds,” she said. “Even when they’re fuzzy.” This woman knew more than I thought. “And to the truth, which will set us free.”

  “May all beings be free,” Jake said.

  We clinked glasses, and I drank my swallow of tequila, which I was not used to. Even that little bit burned. Jess knocked her whole shot back.

  I had no idea what this was all about.

  “Good night, Padre,” she said. She leaned over the bar and kissed him on the mouth. “See you in the morning.”

  “We won’t check on you again,” Jake said.

  “I also get to kiss my teacher,” Jess said. “Since we’re not in that little room.”

  She kissed me on the mouth too.

  “Expect me bright and early, boys,” she said. “I’m rarin’ to go.”

  “It’s important to get rest,” I said.

  “I can’t sleep anyway,” she said.

  “Maybe tonight you will,” I said. It was the stuff about her mother that woke her up.

  “After that shot, I’d be asleep in ten minutes,” Jake said.

  “I’m used to it, Padre.”

  “Don’t get too used to it.”

  She blew us a kiss as we stepped out the door.

  Our cabbie was still at the stand. He was the only one. He must have wondered where we’d been.

  “After that first one,” he said, “the second goes down mighty smooth.”

  “You said it,” Jake said.

  We rode in silence for a minute or two. Jake was gazing out the window, his face reflected in the streetlights.

  Finally he said, “You’d have told me if something happened.”

  “What did she say?” I asked.

  “Nothing. That isn’t what we talked about.”

  I was glad to hear it. I pondered his question.

  “It’s a moot point,” I said. “Nothing was going to happen.”

  “I guess that’s right,” he said. “It is a moot point.”

  We rode on a while longer.