A Single Eye

by Susan Dunlap

  “They’re sentimental forks. From drive-throughs all the way to Canada.”

  I picked up a brown number with two surviving tines. “Please! Do you think you’re the first guy who tried to rationalize his clutter? I suppose these six dead tubes of poison oak cream are sentimental, too.”

  He let out a guffaw.

  “A professional’s motto is: The client’s taste is always good. Despite the distressing aesthetics, we can create a very fine display case for these fine forks. We’ll affix it on top of the dashboard so you can enjoy your collection every time you drive. And the best part is if you get hungry on the road—”

  “Yeah, and build me in one of those picnic baskets with plates for eight to go with them.”

  Now I was into my role whole hog. In my mind this ancient cab, this receptacle for the extraneous unpart-withable of Leo’s life, had already become a rolling office, with a bench seat. “We’ll add a little fridge so you can keep your chocolate cold, and a hanging drawer for the rest of the stuff behind the seat—”

  “There’s no chocolate—Oh, the cacao beans. They’re not behind the seat; they’re in the bed. Criollo beans, the finest cacao in the world, I’m told.”

  “Really? Do we get cocoa at night here?”

  “In your dreams, girl. The tenzo—the cook—makes gourmet chocolate for sale. That’s what pays for our gruel.”

  This was not unusual, I knew. Many monasteries, whether Buddhist or Catholic, have to bring in money from guest fees or the sale of some suitable commodity. There’s a Trappist monastery in Kentucky that sells wonderful fruitcake and bourbon chocolate fudge. A moment passed in cocoa dreams, then he reached over and nudged my arm. “Occasionally, occasionally, you might get a cup of cocoa. It’ll be worth the wait.”

  I smiled. This easy bantering was what I liked in a man, no matter his age. The wipers cleared half-inch stripes, leaving most of the windshield an Impressionist haze that veiled the trees. This rain was going to make it a lot easier for me to live here; maybe I would go the entire fortnight without ever having to see a tree clearly. Feeling oddly content in the cluttered cab of the old truck, with the funny old guy driving, I leaned against the seat back and tried to get a handle on him.

  “Are you going to the retreat, too?”

  “I am.”

  “You go a lot?”

  He smiled, as if at some small, private amusement, but then merely nodded.

  “You probably live around here, right? For a while now?”

  Again, he only nodded. I’d always heard that backwoods types are leery of revealing too much about themselves to strangers, but his reticence didn’t seem unfriendly, so I pressed on.

  “A long while,” I heard him murmur.

  “Then you’re just the man I want to talk to—”

  “Lucky for you.” He glanced pointedly around the cab.

  “Right.” I laughed. “So, tell me, what’s the monastery like? And the roshi?”

  Leo’s hands tightened on the steering wheel, his small amused smile faded, and suddenly he seemed to be watching for every rock and dip on the road.

  “The monastery?” he said with sudden formality. “The property is forty acres surrounded by forest. This road loops around the edge. The nine-mile portion; it makes a good transition to the monastery. There should be twenty-six people at sesshin, four residents, and the rest will be people like you who’ve flown in from all over. The schedule is standard for American Soto Zen centers. We start at five A.M., sit forty-minute periods separated by ten minutes walking meditation, three periods before breakfast. That’s breakfast in the zendo—”

  “But no formal dress?”

  He eyed me again. For a moment I thought he was annoyed, or just confused, but then he shifted his glance to my suitcase that did not hold the evening gown, and grinned. “Then there are three more sitting periods, lunch, break, work period, three sitting periods, dinner, break, sit, sit, sit, snooze, if you haven’t been doing that on and off all day. The sesshin director, Rob, has been around for years. There’s no one better. He’s the Buddha of detail, so competent he doubles as jisha.”

  “Jisha? The roshi’s assistant?”

  He nodded, barely skipping a beat. “The cook—even his gruel is great! We grow some of our own vegetables, and there’s the little chocolate business to bring in money. What else? Hmm. You sleep in a cabin or a dorm. Bare bones. Have dokusan—interview—with the roshi—”

  “Garson-roshi. Tell me about him.”

  The catch in my voice surprised me. It jolted me back to the reason I had come to this sesshin, to study with this teacher. He is like you. Keeps hidden from himself. He will see what you do not want him to see. It is a great chance for you. If Garson-roshi was going to see into me, I damned well needed a heads-up on who he was. As for the guy who disappeared, I knew better than to ask directly. Students are protective of their teachers. Leo wouldn’t tell a woman he’d met half an hour ago about what could well be his teacher’s lowest moment. More likely, he’d clam up altogether.

  I hedged, “Garson was here in the beginning, right?”

  The steering wheel was big and thick. Leo tapped his fingers slowly, as if taking careful aim with his nails. Even amidst the clatter of the truck and its contents, the sharp clicks were unnerving. He let his gaze rest on me a shade too long. “We don’t have much time to talk. I want to hear about you, Darcy.”

  The truck jolted again and forced his gaze to the road. I clutched my pack in front of me, only partially to keep it from bouncing. Did he know about me, my work or my dumb fear? How could he? I hadn’t mentioned either on the application. To everyone here I was tree-neutral Darcy Lott, self-employed.

  So, then was he just avoiding my question? Or did this sweet old guy have more on his mind? There’s an intimacy about any sesshin; romances bloom, die, and can be long buried before the end. You think when you come to sesshin it’ll all be spiritual, but twenty-six people in the woods for two weeks are still twenty-six people in the woods. I eyed him anew over my pack. Nothing about him offered an answer; he was just a funny, cute old guy in a knit cap trying to shepherd an old truck along the road. A guy, but maybe not so old as I’d assumed. I’d been judging him by Manhattan standards. Life out here was hard on skin, and sitting zazen could be murder on knees. He was probably no more than ten years older than I and there was definitely something intriguing about him. But that didn’t matter, because the last thing I needed in my two weeks here was getting involved with a man, “cute and intriguing” notwithstanding.

  “You okay, Darcy?” Leo’s hand was on my shoulder.

  I jumped. “Yeah. The truck bouncing around; it scared me. We don’t drive dirt roads in Manhattan.”

  “We’re almost halfway there. Around the bend there’s a path to the monastery, about a mile long. You could walk. But the road’s not that bad, right?”

  He smiled. I could tell he knew I was avoiding and covering, and something about the way he let his hand linger made me uneasy about leaving him with questions to gnaw on. I had to give him something.

  “Okay, here’s the thumbnail. I am the youngest of seven children. My oldest sister, Katy, works for a news organization now, Janice was known as ‘the nice one’ growing up, the youngest, Grace, a doctor. My oldest brother, John, is a police lieutenant, the next one’s a lawyer—he’s Gary—and Mike, the youngest, the one closest to me in age, is gone. I was always the little kid puffing out my chest and scrambling to keep up. By the time I was in ninth grade, even Mike was in college. Grace was in medical school. The others were married, buying homes, having children, succeeding in their lives. It was like everything had been done, you know? Like books read and shut. I wanted to rebel, but Mike had done that one. I wanted to live somewhere exotic but Gary had spent two years in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and written us so often we knew the townspeople by name. I wanted . . . In the end, I realized that, rather than knowing where I fit into the picture, I just wanted to know who I was. And
then I just wanted to know for myself without some authority giving me its truth.”

  “You didn’t tell them that, did you?”

  I shook my head, “Oh, yeah. I bored them all to death, even dragged one sister into the zendo for the longest forty minutes of her life. It says a lot about what a gracious, decent person she is that she didn’t stalk out.” Suddenly I laughed. “It also says her legs went numb.”

  “Arrogance,” he said, seemingly as much to himself as to me, “the Zen disease. It shows how ignorant we are.”

  “About life?’

  “That, too. I meant, about Zen.”

  “But, I have to say for my family, strange as they think ‘Darcy’s Zen thing’ is, they don’t bug me about it. My brother met my plane, and Mom is keeping my dog for two weeks so I can come here.”

  I felt a pang of loneliness thinking of Duffy, who had been ecstatic to be in Mom’s backyard, which would soon be little more than a hole with just his black rope of tail showing above grass line. I was sorry there’d been no time to see Mom. I wished I could tell Leo about them all and the baseless fear that had brought me here. It had been a silly childhood fear, probably born of nothing more than a family day in Muir Woods, each of the older kids assuming the other was watching the little one, all of them forgetting me for an hour or so. If I hadn’t screamed “till her face matched her hair,” the incident wouldn’t have become family legend and the cause of death of a succession of Christmas and birthday bonsais. I wished I could laugh with Leo about whichever well-meaning sister came up with the bonsai idea, not to bring a touch of life to my apartment but because she figured that my seeing the little tree die would show me I was in control. But I couldn’t tell him, anymore than I could chance letting a hint about my fear out to anyone. I drew back into the corner of the cab.

  The truck flopped into holes and rattled its way out. I shifted my luggage and braced my knees against the outer pocket that held sweaters. A soft low sound came from Leo’s side of the cab, like he was starting to hum. It was a moment before I realized he was gearing up to ask the question.

  “So you’re an organizer?” he said. “A professional organizer? That’s what you do for a living? You have your own business?”

  I stiffened. But I hadn’t told him about my fear. So, then there was no need to hide my job. In a burst of relief, I said, “I’m not really a professional organizer, organizing is just a small part of my work. I’ve got the world’s best job: I’m a stunt double, in movies. I love it. I’ve loved it since I was a kid climbing out my window. I was nine when I figured out how to get to the tree and down. When my brother John spotted me, he cut off the limb by my window. I was so mad . . .”

  Leo was grinning.

  “But here’s the thing”—my words tumbled out powered by the joy of talking gags and of not having to watch what I said—“I started out intent on escaping, but soon it was the escape itself that was the kick. Figuring out how to do it, and then doing it. There were times I got out and walked back in the front door just so John would make it harder for me. John’s a big-time control guy, so making it hard was what he liked to do. When I was older I’d sneak out, across the roof—”

  “John couldn’t cut the roof off, huh?”

  “Just what I told him!” I caught Leo’s eye and we laughed. “Then I’d go to the movies, not for the show but to watch the stunts. For me, second unit directors were like football stars were for Dad and my brothers. And when we got a VCR with slo-mo I was in heaven. I was also a huge bore in family gatherings. Well, you can probably imagine by now.”

  Leo was still smiling.

  I sat, enjoying our easy connection. I busied myself looking at him, at the dashboard, at my luggage, as if we were floating along in the Bay rather than driving between gigantic trees.

  After a bit, I said, “You were going to tell me about Garson-roshi.”

  “First tell me about your teacher in New York.”

  My family, my job, and now my teacher: Leo was stalling. I didn’t want to think what that meant. And it was hard to pass up the chance to coo about Yamana-roshi.

  “Yamana-roshi came to New York because his American students insisted they could never keep up their Zen practice at home without him. That was thirty years ago. Yamana-roshi was forty-five years old. He spoke about six words of English. His students hadn’t given a thought to how to support him. He lived in a tiny studio that doubled as the zendo, got mugged four times in his first two months, survived on rice for years. After morning zazen, when his students went to work, he was alone till evening zazen, day after day. In Japan he had a temple in his ancestral village. Its picture is on his wall. Once, he had a chance to go back there—five or six years ago—that was before I knew him—but something happened to keep him here. Now he’s too old to travel.”

  Yamana-roshi! I squeezed my eyes shut against the flood of longing. I felt as if I had walked into exile just like he had. I had to swallow before I could speak again, and then the words came more slowly. “He’s still in the zendo every morning, still gives each of us dokusan every week, and even though he has never mastered how to hail a cab, he can see into our hearts.”

  Leo’s face stiffened. I couldn’t read his expression enough to figure if he was annoyed, or something else.

  “Was I telling you more than you wanted to know? I guess I went on a bit long. It’s just that I, well, I have such respect for Yamana-roshi. And, well, love. But I’m sure you feel the same about your roshi here.”

  He didn’t respond at all, just kept staring ahead with the same glazed expression. I thought he muttered six years ago to himself but I couldn’t be sure.

  Then he said, “The roshi here . . . Okay, I’ll tell you about him, but it won’t be the same kind of story, not by a long shot. You may be sorry you came.”

  My stomach clutched.

  “The general take, early on, was that the roshi had ‘a lot of promise.’ He was one of those rare Westerners who could sit in full lotus easily. Never moved. He gave off the air of seriousness. He had a good memory. He could quote obscure Buddhist scriptures. Promise. Lots of promise. So they sent him to Japan to study. More promise. A certain type of personality does well in Japan. In the monastery there, sitting in full lotus for long periods won him a certain acceptance. He learned to be contained. And he learned to drink. Alcoholism wasn’t uncommon among Japanese masters. In their controlled environment, on the monastery grounds, it was quite manageable. Just a different type of consciousness. But it didn’t translate well to this country.”

  Leo hesitated, tapping his teeth softly, as if weighing whether to give me the full explanation. He inhaled shallowly, and before he spoke, I knew I’d be getting no more.

  “So when this piece of land was given for a monastery, and when people realized how far out into nowhere it was, they were only too glad to exile the roshi here. Other than burning down the forest there wasn’t much damage he could do.”

  Zen in American isn’t organized like the major Christian sects; no one could force him to go anywhere. But I could imagine the abbots of his lineage making an argument he couldn’t sensibly refuse.

  “And that all happened before the student disappeared, right?”

  He slowed the truck and turned toward me, his shaggy eyebrows scrunched in surprise, or maybe distress.

  “Darcy, I don’t . . .”

  I felt terrible. This sweet man! But I had to know. I looked pointedly at Leo and waited.

  “Okay. Thumbnail. The student, Aeneas, was here almost from the beginning. He was meticulous in his work; he was a mimic with perfect pitch, memorized all the chants in Japanese, and could sit zazen without moving for longer than I have seen anyone sit. Abbots and teachers from Japan came for the opening ceremonies. When they left Aeneas was gone. We assumed he went with them. Recently we learned he didn’t. No one has heard from him.”

  “What do you think happened? Is he dead?”

  Leo looked straight ahead, but he wasn’t
concentrating on the road. “What I know is there’s been no word from him since the opening.”

  “So he could still be here. His body, I mean, if—”

  He clutched my shoulder again. “Darcy, this is wild country. A man could stumble into a ravine and never be found. He could get a ride to the coast road and hitch to Canada. He could get in a fight with a friend and be dead.”

  I gasped.

  “I’m not saying that to shock you, or because I know the answer. The last time I saw Aeneas was the day of the opening and as far as I know no one has heard from him since.”

  The admission had deflated him. I wanted to reach over and touch his arm to comfort him. “It must have made being out here the next years all the harder.”

  He nodded.

  I took a breath and asked the question I needed answered, the one Yamana must already have asked. “And Garson-roshi, what did he do?”

  His smile faded, replaced by a tight mouth and sharply drawn cheeks. I had the feeling I had posed the kind of question a nice man couldn’t answer honestly. He seemed to be considering each word.

  “The roshi did nothing. The roshi was too involved in his own regimen of Samurai sitting—zazen hour after hour, day after day, in a desperate attempt to deal with his personal disgrace and disappointment. He was under the illusion he was really practicing, aiming for a concentration that blocked out everything, when what he was really doing was isolating himself and shirking his responsibilities.” Leo started, as if he heard the disgust in his voice and was shocked by it, or more likely by the fact of having revealed so much to a newcomer. “So, to answer your question, Darcy, he chose to ignore any questions about the Japanese abbots taking Aeneas with them. But this was his monastery; he should never have put himself in a position where he could be uninvolved.”