A Single Eye

by Susan Dunlap

  Inside the kitchen, three people were lifting, lugging, shoving, trying not to smack into each other in the tiny space and succeeding none too well. Feeding twenty-six people for two weeks is a big job. At the beginning, with all the raw food assembled, sesshin kitchens tend to look like warehouses. A tall, wispy-thin blond woman was jamming about thirty heads of lettuce into a restaurant-sized refrigerator. A short, serious guy in his late twenties, head shaven, was stashing apples under a table. A girl, a few years younger, honey-haired, plump in a way that looked sweet to probably everyone but her, was carrying cauliflowers to a bin one head at a time. The cartons of cauliflowers stood on the counter and I was surprised no one pointed out the disadvantage of her method. She kept stopping, touching the apple-stasher’s arm, murmuring things I couldn’t hear. He nodded brusquely as if the dictum of silence were already in place.

  I’ve been in my share of sesshin kitchens before sesshins. It’s always as if everyone’s hopes, plus their unnamed fears, have materialized in the lettuce and apples, the lines of milk cartons, the cauliflowers. Workers are scurrying to compress all the perishables into one refrigerator; they’re talking about their inbound flights, bemoaning the loose ends at home, throwing anchors to their normal lives. Paradox reigns: those are the lives they’ve come to sesshin to see through but suddenly are terrified of losing.

  I didn’t know any of these people, and yet I knew these circumstances intimately. The setting, here in the woods, was the last that would have comforted me, but the underpinnings of sesshin were so familiar they gave me a feeling of “home.” I was an old hand at sesshin preparation, and as such I wanted to put an arm around the girl’s shoulder and give her a hug of encouragement. It would be a hard two weeks physically and mentally. We’d all come here to cut loose from our moorings. I watched as she touched the boy’s arm again and he gave another curt nod with his monk-shaven head. There was no way to assure her that she was not the mooring he would be cutting.

  “You here to help?” the tall blond woman called out as she stacked boxes of green-tea bags. At sesshin, it doesn’t matter if you’re a waiter or a CEO, groceries need putting away and toilets need cleaning.

  I glanced at the wheelbarrow and said to the woman, “I just brought up the cacao beans for the roshi. He would like a cup of cocoa. He figured I might get a cup, too.”

  “Take them up to the next door. You’re in the peasant half of the kitchen here; you want the next door, the regal chocolate preparation parlor.” She laughed. “Barry!”

  “Huh?” a man called from the better half of the kitchen. I executed another classy turn and shoved the barrow up five yards and into the next door in time to hear the blond woman call to him, “You’re supposed to give this woman some cocoa.”

  “What, Maureen? Who says so? I don’t have time to be making cocoa now.”

  “Roshi says so.” She winked at me. “The woman hauled your beans up. It’s the least you can do.”

  “I said I don’t have time. The way it’s been raining the last few weeks I’ll be lucky if the road holds out till Thursday and I can get out to . . .” His voice trailed in the fashion of one who’s walled himself in with his own worries and is startled to find someone else’s words actually breaching that wall. He looked from Maureen to me, then his eyes lighted on the barrow as if it was Santa’s sleigh. “My beans are here! My criollos!”

  I couldn’t keep from smiling at the big guy’s kid-like glee. He was in his midforties, and twice my size, with bare muscled arms I would have killed for on those wall-climb gags. His black monk’s robe had sleeves hooked back at the shoulder for work, and those big arms were already hoisting the hundred-and-thirty-pound bag up onto a metal table that looked uncomfortably like one on which I’d once seen an autopsy. His face was round, his head shaved so close I couldn’t have guessed the color of his hair. His eyes I couldn’t make out at all. They were only for the beans. He stood planted like a huge solid Buddha in the center of the altar. And, from what I could tell, that altar was his chocolate kitchen. I breathed in the wonderful aroma of dark winy chocolate.

  “Oh my God, I must’ve died and gone to Hershey.”

  “Hardly,” Barry muttered contemptuously. “I do not create milk chocolate.”

  I, who owed many happy moments to Hershey’s with Almonds, was silenced.

  “Standard American chocolate!” he huffed, as he poured the beans out onto the table. “These are criollos, the most prized cacao beans in the world. What I create will be seventy-two percent cacao.”

  Sounded good to me. Any percent chocolate was more percent than the usual sesshin fare. Surely he wouldn’t be shipping off for sale all of that fine chocolate. Surely there would be the occasional short-weighted bar, the tainted truffle. While he made the roshi’s cocoa, I leaned back against a counter and took in this decidedly unusual kitchen, really two kitchens in one. Not exactly before-and-after. More like for-richer-for-poorer. Here in the richer half the windows were high up and even with white walls there was something dark and cozy about this room with the giant man and his hulking, old-fashioned machines. I could just imagine hauling them out here nine miles on the rutted road from the highway!

  And when I took a sip of the half-cup he offered me, I just sighed. It was like Irish coffee but a million times better—thick, dark, with a touch of sweetness, a bit of liquor flavor.

  “Oh, I really have gone to heaven. Barry, can I just stay in here for the whole sesshin? I’ll cart you up and down the hill.”

  He turned to me and smiled as if I’d cooed over his first-born. “I make it special for Roshi. And that cocoa is from the old powder, only half Criollo beans. But this new batch—”

  “By which, he means, don’t figure you’re going to get another cup,” Maureen commented from her end of the kitchen. “The rest of us get cocoa very occasionally, as a great treat, but not the roshi’s special cocoa. So enjoy.”

  Zen teaches us to be in the moment and a moment of the Roshi’s Special Reserve cocoa was just the one to be with. I stepped outside and sat on a bench between the kitchen doors and looked over my steaming cup at the people strolling across the knoll and at the great trees beyond. It says something about the illusory nature of fear that the forest didn’t seem so bad now that I had a cup of cocoa in hand. But sitting here wasn’t walking into the woods. I had arranged my life so that the possibility didn’t arise.

  I sipped slowly, trying to focus entirely on the taste. But the woods teased and jeered. I’d survived the ride in the open bed of the pickup; maybe this was the time I’d get over my childish fear. Slowly I raised my eyes and stared at the line of trees at the far side of the quad a quarter mile away. No reaction! I took a long relieved swallow, finished the cup, and with bravado turned to the trees just beyond the kitchen. My stomach lurched, my gaze went blurry. The cocoa cup jolted and I had to grab to keep from dropping it.

  “. . . way to the cabins?”

  I breathed in thickly, slowly, so the movement took all my attention.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, in a voice that couldn’t have sounded as constricted to her as it did to me. “Maureen?”

  The blond woman from the kitchen nodded. “I wanted to make sure you knew the way to the cabins.”

  “I was just . . . Thanks, yes, it’d be great if you pointed me there. Let me take my cup into the kitchen,” I said, grabbing for time to pull myself together.

  When I came back outside, with the roshi’s thermos in hand, Maureen was shifting her wraith-like body from one long thin leg to the other. She was as dissimilar to bear-like Barry as two people could be. Like a young gazelle’s, her feet seemed to hit the ground solely so she could spring off. As soon as we were clear of the building, the wind smacked our faces. It was one of those damp winds that chill you so slowly you don’t realize it till you’re iced to the bone and you feel like you’ll never be warm again. The down jacket that had been a burden as I pushed the wheelbarrow was now bare
ly adequate, but she, in tan drawstring pants and a black short-sleeved T-shirt, seemed oblivious. Goose bumps bloomed on her arm but they might as well have been body paint for all the attention she paid. She turned toward me and the fading light showed spidery lines around her eyes and mouth, sun scratches. She wasn’t as young a gazelle as I had assumed. A bit older than I. Forty probably. And yet, as she bounced from foot to foot, she seemed years younger, lithe, free.

  “Tell me how things work here.”

  We headed across the knoll. “Parking lot, where you arrived, is down there to the right. Meditation hall—zendo—is that round dome up to the left. Whole place is like a baseball diamond, only much bigger. Cabins are first base, zendo’s second, kitchen’s third. The office is home, and the parking lot, well, imagine the shortstop between third and home. When we built the zendo having it at the top of the quad, near the top of such a steep hill, seemed wonderful. But I’ll tell you, uh—”

  “Darcy.”

  “Maureen,” she said, apparently not registering the number of times I’d heard it. “There are plenty of mornings when I’m headed up there in the dark and rain at quarter to five, that I wish we’d had the humility to put it in the middle.”

  “So you live here all the time?” Don’t they ever let you off the Styx, Charon?

  “The whole six years, since the beginning. I was here the first summer, before the Japanese roshis came for the official opening.”

  Dusk was edging toward night and a heavy mist was beginning to gust. I pulled my down jacket tighter around me, glanced over at Maureen shifting foot to foot, blond hair tossing, the wind flapping her T-shirt over her pert nipples. Clearly she had plenty still to do before sesshin started and no time to chat.

  “You’ve been here since the beginning,” I said. “You must have known everyone then, Rob, Leo, and, well, Aeneas—”

  She jerked back, looked down at her T-shirt, yanked at the hem. “And Barry, too. You’re wondering about Barry’s kitchen, right? How come the rest of the place looks like a scout camp and Barry’s chocolate kitchen could be in the Saint Francis Hotel?”

  Aeneas was sure a sore spot. She hadn’t seemed jumpy until I mentioned his name. I was dying to ask what she thought his disappearance meant. But she wasn’t likely to tell me any more than Leo had. So I made do with seeing where she’d go with her detour about the kitchens.

  “Yeah, how come the differences?”

  “Because Barry’s gourmet chocolates sell for a bundle and he gives the money, at least most of it, to the monastery. At that level of ‘gourmet,’ his old world machinery makes a big difference. Rob paid for those machines, plus the generator in the kitchen and the running water in the bathhouse, which was probably way more important to him.” She laughed awkwardly, and I silently added: Tight ass that he is.

  My silence seemed to unnerve her even more and she said quickly, “That’s okay. Rob can laugh about it now, when he has to. Early on, one of the students went into town and made six copies of his picture, framed them in those cheap paper frames and hung them in the place of honor over each toilet. We all bowed to him before and after.”

  One of the students? Aeneas? Or herself? I didn’t ask what privileges Rob got in return for his money, but there was just enough of an edge to her voice to make me sure there were some. Life in a monastery is like a family and “Mom loves you best” isn’t just for kids. Now the regal bully who yanked me out of the truck so he could wag his finger at the roshi made sense. If he owned half the place, no wonder he was so put out when Leo fired him as jisha. That had to be what caused that brouhaha in the truck. There was one question I wanted to ask about this Rob, but I couldn’t bear to. Instead I asked, “Where’d a resident get the money for exotic chocolate machines and good plumbing?”

  “Resident? Oh, Rob wasn’t a resident. Back then he was still a partner in a San Francisco law firm. It was before he even moved to town up here. He’s only been full time here for a year or so. This’ll only be his second winter.”

  Only his second winter! Did the imperious Rob have a clue that he was lower tier?

  Maureen shot a glance over her shoulder, as if sighting last-minute tasks. “I have to get—”

  “But why?”

  She turned back to me, her shoulders suddenly hunched against the cold she hadn’t noticed before my question.

  “Why would Rob spend all that money on a place he didn’t even live at for years?”

  “For the good of the monastery.”

  “Generous,” I said in a tone that conveyed how little that word fit the man who had dragged me from the truck.

  “Because he knew he would come to live here . . . eventually.”

  Now things fell into place, into appalling place. “Because,” I said, “he’s the one slated to succeed Leo when Leo leaves. After this last sesshin.”

  Maureen crumbled forward. Her eyes went opaque, as if my words had knocked out the light behind them. She was shaking now, perhaps from the cold. She turned and strode away, not like a gazelle at all.

  A great ball of loneliness filled Maureen Heaney’s chest. It choked out her breath. The last sesshin! Why? Was Roshi leaving here? Was he closing down the monastery? What was he doing? A small cry erupted from her; she stopped, startled. Why wouldn’t he tell her what he was up to? He had always confided in her. It had been she he’d eyed when he made a joke, she who’d brought him juice on mornings after, she who’d celebrated with him when he’d got sober. She who protected him. And now . . . nothing.

  And Rob? No, that she couldn’t think about at all.

  She kept moving, overrunning the grounds, as if distance could lessen the pain. The chill air slapped her face, her bare arms, T-shirt–clad chest. How had she ever survived this isolated life? Ask her seven years ago if she’d like to live in the woods with three strange men and she would have laughed. She wasn’t a nun, she’d had lovers and planned to have lovers, but in other ways she lived closer to the life of the convent than any other. The garden here, it was all hers. When she’d planted the lovely red Japanese maple, no one questioned the location, and no one offered to help. She liked that. And the feel of muscles on her back, her butt, her thighs and arms from that work. You’d never find it in a Zen book, she thought, but years of hard work and practicing being aware had made her sex life a whole lot better . . . when she had any sex life.

  Now she couldn’t imagine leaving here. She loved setting off through the woods at sunrise, walking long and without plan, till she collapsed. She was strong, a runner, a dancer still in every stride, and it was always close to noon before that moment of welcome exhaustion came. She napped, then ate, and she set about finding her way back to the monastery. In her early years here she had gotten lost and the thrill of fear was part of the experience.

  Now, after six years, there was little to surprise her. But for the first time in years she felt fear again. This time it wasn’t a game; there was no thrill, only dread, confusion, things swirling out of control.

  Six years ago she’d made a choice. Maybe if she had done the right thing then . . .

  CHAPTER SIX

  I liked Leo; I liked him a lot. I really hoped that this last sesshin of his would be everything he wished for. As his jisha, I wanted to give his students the best access to him, to shield him from all distractions; I wanted him to be able to see into his students, to make their last sesshin with him here important. Keep an eye open, Yamana-roshi had said. Be aware! I’d do my best. And if the kind of problems Yamana-roshi foresaw arose, I would spot them.

  It was already twenty to seven. I was cutting this close. Thermos of cocoa in hand, I took a deep breath and knocked on Leo’s cabin door.

  It swung open.

  For a moment I thought I’d got the wrong place. The cabin looked empty, really empty except for an oil lamp, a narrow two-drawer dresser and a futon. The whole room—bare wood walls, no plaster—was the size of a one-car garage. The lamp sent dim waves of light over the bare floor a
nd bare walls. Oil lamps cut the dark enough so you don’t stumble over a book, but only a fool would try to read that book. It was a moment before I noticed the brown-robed figure beside the futon.

  “Leo! I hardly recognized you!”

  “Sensei,” he corrected.

  I must have flushed neon red. “Or Roshi?”

  He grinned and held out his hands for the cocoa, like a kid.

  “This should be the worst mistake you make! I just don’t want you to get into bad habits already. People aren’t sure what to call the teacher. A lot of students don’t even know what roshi means.”

  Sensei means teacher. But roshi is more. People assume it’s an administrative title, like abbot, or a rank, like lieutenant colonel. But roshi is a title of respect given by a teacher’s students. It signifies a teacher who has experienced enlightenment and also one they trust can teach them.

  I nodded, still not quite recovered from my gaffe. It was cold in the cabin. Roshi poured from thermos to cup and held the cup between his hands, warming his fingers while savoring the aroma. The oil lamp sent deep shadows over his face, making his eyebrows bushier, the points of his high cheekbones sharper, and his mouth wider. Exaggerating his already exaggerated features gave him an aura of almost mystical authority.

  He motioned me to the cushion across from him. I plunked my jacket on a hook, gave my head a shake—a mistake that sent the cold condensed mist down my hair onto my shoulders and back—and sat. I stared at the hem of his okesa, the sari-like rectangle of brown silk hand-sewn together from many smaller rectangles, all cut from the same original cloth. The okesa would have been stitched by his students, silently repeating a mantra with each stitch, squinting to make sure the stitch matched every other stitch in height and spacing. The sewing of a teacher’s okesa was a coming together of the community, a visible sign of support, indeed, of love, from the students. It was too dark in here to spot a frayed hem or block of stitches come loose, to guess how tattered his support had become.