A Single Eye

by Susan Dunlap

  “What are you doing in here?”

  “Looking for a place to sleep.”

  “In the woodshed? Please! Why don’t you sleep in your dorm like everyone else?”

  “Because it’s almost work period, and His Assholeness said since I showed up late I was the one who could help him with something or other, I don’t know what. I wasn’t listening by then because I was so ticked. And besides, I knew I wasn’t going to be doing it, so why listen to the details, right?”

  That was three steps below an excuse; it couldn’t be anything but the truth. I had sat through those beginning periods of zazen in sesshins and snapped from dream to waking to dream and back so often in one forty-minute period it was like turning pages. I had ended those periods with the odd disoriented feeling that neither state was real.

  I don’t know if it was my memory or Gabe’s conspiratorial shrug or Rob’s infuriating demands that made me do what I did about this special work project for Gabe.

  I said, “We’re adults. We don’t do punishments here. That’s stupid. Go to bed. Sleep through afternoon zazen. Set your alarm so you’re up in time for dinner and do the evening sittings. There’s no sense in your being dead on the cushion for days.”

  “Shall I tell that to Rob?”

  “Tell him the roshi’s assistant told you it was okay.”

  He gave my shoulder a little punch, and I only flinched a smidge.

  “I owe you, Assistant.”

  Then he winked! Or it looked like a wink in the half-dark. I was so furious with myself I said, “Well, Gabe, you can pay up—”

  “Yeah, I should’ve paid up by bringing you your letter here instead of leaving it on your bed.”

  “Letter?”

  We didn’t get mail here. The mail carrier didn’t trot nine miles into the woods to drop in our box.

  “I picked the mail up on my way from town. Figured it might soften the blow from being late. Now, maybe if I’d had a nice package for Rob—”

  “You didn’t happen to notice the return address on my letter, did you?”

  Who could be writing me here? No one knew I was here, no one but my family and Yamana-roshi. Yamana couldn’t have gotten a letter here unless he overnighted it, unless it was vital. About Leo? Or Aeneas? Leo and Aeneas? How bad would it have to be to overnight a letter?

  He hesitated. “I glanced, but I was in a rush. Jog my memory.”

  “New York?”

  He seemed to be pulling the tail of the memory out of his head.

  “Omigod, San Francisco?” Mom? Something happened to Duffy?

  “What’s in San Francisco?”

  “My family.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked down. “No. It wasn’t from San Francisco.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Gabe’s hand was on the door. But now he turned back to assess me.

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  I hesitated and in that moment I saw his expression shift from the upward furrowing of strategizing to the downwardly scrunched brow of one drawing back with regret. I wondered what was behind that, but I was so relieved there was no letter telling me Duffy had run into the street or choked on an anchovy—his favorite—I couldn’t do anything but sigh in gratitude. It was only when Gabe shifted to leave that I grabbed the chance he offered here.

  “Tell me about Aeneas’s disappearance. What happened that day?”

  His whole face relaxed, and he gave a conspiratorial nod and leaned back against the shelf behind him.

  “Got you already, has it? Did you read up on it in blog archives before you came? Or did you hear word of mouth?”

  He wasn’t even embarrassed. He assumed I was on the make, like him!

  “Word of mouth,” I said, choosing the safer lie. “But my facts are sketchy. I mean, I have no time line.”

  “Oh, well, that’s easy,” he said, glancing around for a ledge on which to rest his arm. The musty shed didn’t offer a mantel-like support, and he ended up resting his left arm, somewhat gingerly, on the shelf above the cyanide. Rain rapped louder on the roof and the reminder that we were protected from the wet gave the small damp space a cozier feel than it deserved. “All I can tell you about is the day of the opening, the day Aeneas disappeared. I only got here that morning, so I’m not reliable on anything before. By the time I got here the Japanese roshis had been here overnight. They were old, frail guys. Used to being cared for in their own temples, used to sleeping in beautiful rooms, with walls and floors.”

  “Not tents, you mean?” Work period was going to start any minute. I didn’t have all day.

  “They don’t go camping in Japan. In Japan they don’t have dirt.”

  In spite of everything, I laughed. Poor old guys.

  “So everyone’s rushing around trying to make them comfortable, and there’s no way they’re going to be comfortable. Plus they don’t speak English, so no one knows what they’re not comfortable about. Are they thirsty? Do they want food? The chairs are too tall, and too wobbly. If they had been comfortable they sure wouldn’t have been after a couple hours of that.”

  “But—?”

  Gabe nodded approvingly.

  “But one of them went into the zendo to check on something and discovered the Buddha missing.” “And—”

  Gabe was enjoying this, making me ask.

  “All hell broke loose. In an understated Zen kind of way. I mean your first thought at a Zen monastery opening is not that someone’s going to pocket the Buddha. I think Leo just assumed the cleaning crew had moved it. Barry was elbow deep in food for the reception after the ceremony, so he wouldn’t have noticed unless the Buddha was in the stew. It was Rob—well, you could guess that, right?—who went ballistic searching tents, just about turning out suitcases.”

  He leaned toward me, a hunger in his eyes. I couldn’t figure whether that hunger was for an audience for his opinions, or a source of something he’d missed.

  Outside something cracked. The clappers. The first call for work meeting. I made a ‘come’ motion with my fingers.

  “Okay, okay. Here’s what happened. They didn’t find the Buddha. They had to do the whole ceremony without it.”

  “Surely they had another Buddha, or something they’d have had on the altar before. A Zen center running low on Buddhas is like the Forty-niners running out of footballs.”

  “Whatever. But Roshi didn’t replace it. The empty space loomed over the ceremony. People could barely watch the priests. Honest to God, it was the weirdest Zen ceremony I’ve ever seen.”

  And it must have been one of the most embarrassing, for Leo. Poor Leo. Why had he let himself be so humiliated in front of the foreign dignitaries?

  “But, Gabe, the Buddha’s on the altar now.”

  He shrugged. “My information is that it turned up later. How much later or why I don’t know.”

  Squinting in the dim light, he peered around until his gaze landed on a suede gardening glove. He snatched it up and began pulling at one finger, as if milking off his nervous energy. I was betting Gabe Luzotta was never still. He probably even tossed and jabbered in his sleep. But this time he wasn’t just futzing for futzing’s sake; he was avoiding me.

  “You do know, Gabe.”

  “Not hardly. If I—”

  “You know, and you’ll tell me. You’re looking at this as a potential story, right? Old scandal in Zen monastery lingers for half a dozen years. It has the makings of a New Yorker piece, particularly if Aeneas is dead. You think he’s dead, right?”

  He pulled the gardening glove taut.

  “I’m going to lay things out, Gabe. I’m not a writer. I don’t care about the story. It’s all yours. But I need to know what happened and what is happening at this sesshin. You will tell me.”

  “Or?”

  “Or I’ll have a word with Rob and he’ll have you out at the coast road by sunset, no matter what it takes. You know he’d love to have reason to be rid of y
ou.”

  On movie sets, I’d faced down professional tough guys. Some blustered, some caved, some saved face, but some swallowed hard and considered the long run. I couldn’t swear to it, but I think Gabe swallowed before he let out a huge laugh. Then he punched my shoulder.

  “Assistant, I knew I liked you. I just didn’t know how much. Okay, you’re on, but it’s not going to be as free as you think.”

  I waited.

  “You gotta share. Whatever you find is mine, right?”

  “I don’t—”

  “This is a deal breaker. I’m not shitting you. I need documentation. Unimpeachable documentation. You gotta share what you find.”

  The clappers clacked right outside the door. We both jumped. The timekeeper must have heard him laughing. I just hoped the guy hadn’t heard anything else. I picked up the bucket of kindling.

  “Bring those logs to Leo’s porch.”

  “Hey, I want a handshake, Assistant.”

  “I’ll be straight with you.”

  He blocked the door. “That’s not the same thing.”

  “Take it or leave it.” I stuck out my hand and we shook. But to me it meant only what I’d said, and to him it meant nothing at all.

  I waited a minute after he left, considering two things. The first was what I now remembered about Gabe. His name had sounded familiar because he had a low-level fall-guy notoriety in New York. He was like the running back who fumbled on the goal line in the playoff game twenty years ago. His name wouldn’t ring bells unless the topic was hanging onto the ball. In Gabe’s case the topic was unimpeachable documentation. Gabe Luzotta’s misfortune had happened five or six years ago, well before I’d moved to New York, and by the time I heard the story some details had gone missing. Gabe was not the writer of the fraudulent story that spawned the major scandal; he was the poor guy who had submitted a piece on kickbacks that snagged the spectacular Chinese Temple Diamonds Exhibit for San Francisco instead of New York. The piece, a natural for the New Yorker, had been documented well enough to squeak by a month earlier, but was poison in the wake of the scandal. The New Yorker had nixed it, and then no one else dared touch it. “Paste Diamond Gabe” he’d been called. Paste Diamond Gabe been cited in definitions of schlimazel more than once, though I’d heard the depiction wasn’t quite accurate. Poor guy. I’d felt sorry for him when I heard the story and a lot sorrier now that I knew him.

  Could Gabe have been at the opening to do a story on it? Not likely; even with Leo’s history, it hardly made a magazine piece. An odd coincidence? Whichever, it wasn’t anything I could settle now.

  The second, and more pressing thing, was seeing the group at that opening. The ceremony was planned as a big event. There would have been a group picture taken. I just hoped no one had destroyed it. Group pictures, I’ve noticed, illuminate the group more than the individuals. It was a long shot but what I was desperate to see was some clue about Aeneas. Why had the star student suddenly lost it that day of the opening and raced through the grounds waving a gin bottle? Was he acting out some obscure koan in which he insulted every teacher there, the elderly eminent Japanese, and his own teacher? Or had he been a diversion while the Buddha was being snatched?

  I was, I realized, asking a lot for a group photo.

  The clappers resounded in the distance. I had just time to build Leo’s fire and slip into the work meeting on time. That would have been the wise move. Instead I slipped out, along the path to the adjoining office, and went inside.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The clappers sounded again—three clacks—as I stepped out of the shed, ran under the overhang and into the office. Six or seven minutes to find a photo from the opening ceremony, make some sense of it, and get to work meeting before Rob started wondering about me. After that, there’d be Roshi’s fire to conquer. All before I could grab a minute to slip into my cabin for my letter.

  The office was the size of the two-car garage I had slept above at a friend’s house. Two Japanese screens—black on white with one red accent each—divided the area into a large and small room. The larger part was a surprisingly appealing space crowded with two soft and shabby leather chairs, sagging damask couch, and a heavy round oak coffee table strewn with magazines like Wind Bell, Turning Wheel and Tricycle, Zen magazines, but magazines, nevertheless. A huge stone hearth took up the entire end wall. It was a raised hearth, with a granite ledge in front where the cold, wet, tired, lonely, or frustrated Zen student could sit, hug knees to chest, and let his back get dry and warm to roasting. When the chill was gone, he could reach over to a little cabinet beside the hearth, grab one of the four mugs and pour himself a cup of tea from a pot heating on a hook over the fire.

  Four mugs. Leo, Maureen, Barry, and, more lately, Rob. So they were the only residents. But who were these people? I tried to squeeze a sense of them from the room.

  It was such a bare bones place, and yet the only spot of comfort in the whole monastery complex. Everything here must have taken on overwhelming importance. The arrival of each chair and rug must have been cause for celebration, with Barry, Maureen, and Rob running excitedly to the parking lot as Leo pulled up with the green leather recliner in the back of the pickup. Maureen would be the one to climb right up, plop in it, and give the thumbs up. Barry would give a great sigh of appreciation that would shake his bear-like body, and Rob—

  No wait, I had the picture wrong. It would be Rob driving the truck, because it would be Rob’s money from selling his law practice in San Francisco or from ongoing, much smaller legal fees up here that would have made possible the purchase of even a used recliner. And Maureen might still clamber up and plop into it, but she wouldn’t be like a kid getting a gift beyond her imagining. She’d be the kid allowed to ride her cousin’s new dirt bike, play with her friend’s beautiful doll, sit in the chair given by the friend who would disdain her pleasure in it. Every time she or Barry sunk down, it would be an indictment of their unseemly attachment to comfort. Rob’s austere patronage would forever hang over it.

  I had never done without, but as the youngest I had worn clothes that had been through three sisters, and not recently. “This is a perfectly good sweater,” Mom had said as she held out a woolly item out of style longer than I’d been alive. Cold or dowdy had been my choice, and I’d been cold a lot. I’d envied my only-child friends. And I’d resented each of my sisters individually as the damp wind chilled an arm for Katy, the other arm for Janice, and my whole back for Grace. There’d been days I sat shivering, ignoring the teacher in every class till lunch period, as I wholeheartedly resented. So I could imagine what Barry and Maureen felt.

  I had wanted to come to sesshin, but by the time it was over I’d be dying to go home. The idea of living here permanently was ghastly. And living here, alone, with three other people not of my choosing—It made me want New York so much my lungs hurt. And it made me think of those four in a different light. The commitment they’d made so they could practice Zen awed me. Even Rob. Because of them, the rest of us could drop in for sesshins like this. What could it be like day after day, year after year out here? Had two of them had passionate encounters on that sagging damask couch? Screaming fights over the magazine-strewn table? Whatever, the strength of their commitment to this monastery amazed me.

  The clappers sounded again. No time for speculating. I made a beeline back into the office section and tried the central desk drawer. It slid right open, revealing nothing but pencils, pen, paperclips, letterhead, and an array of rubber bands that made me sure no incoming band had ever been discarded.

  The clappers hit, softer in the distance. The timekeeper was already moving toward the meeting site.

  The left-hand drawers held old schedules, lecture notes, and pages of notes I couldn’t decipher. But there, under those sheets, enlarged but not framed, were photos labeled “Opening.” Three of them, eight by tens. I pulled them out and glanced hurriedly at each. They looked to be of the same subjects, taken in succession the way you do j
ust to make sure you get one shot in which no one moved. I chose the one on top, the one someone eyed last. Aeneas would be in this picture, as would the person who killed him.

  The picture showed about twenty people pressing in together in three rows in front of what looked like a huge half ball that had to be the unfinished zendo. The porch hadn’t been built yet and the crawl space under the zendo was visible. Sun shone bright, glistening off the shaved heads of the two elderly, tiny Japanese dignitaries in the front, a younger, larger one in the middle row, and off the long blond hair of the woman beside him. A breeze had lifted her fine hair and held it out like a bridal veil. There was a fragile, delicate, almost translucent quality to her skin and her unexpectedly bared forehead. Her dark, wide-set eyes and too-wide mouth looked tentative. I couldn’t stop staring at her. Maureen. She could have been the daughter of her present self. The difference wasn’t one of wrinkles or sun damage, but something hard to tether to words. When she ran across the quad yesterday her connection to the earth had appeared tenuous. A mere six years earlier she had looked as if floating on a wind current was her natural state and rarely would her feet graze the soil.

  As I scanned the other figures in the photo, I realized the reason I was drawn to Maureen was that everybody in the photo had been drawn to her. Barry, at the end of a row, was eyeing her quizzically. Rob—it took me a moment to place Rob because in the photo he looked like a mix between present-day Rob and Justin—was smiling at the camera but his shoulders were turned toward her as if to allow him to shift his gaze the instant the camera shutter closed. Leo stood in front of her and was leaning toward her. And the Japanese teacher next to her stared outright, smiling like a possessive child.

  The Maureen in the photo was the just-born gazelle, struggling to stand on quivering legs. All around her were hands eager to be extended, to draw her up, draw her in, to keep her in their corral. I wondered if she had been aware of the affect she’d had with that seductive combination of ephemeral beauty and need.