by Susan Dunlap
“When I came back . . . Maureen . . . was walking . . . away with the shovel.”
It wasn’t till after Barry arrived and found something to tie Gabe’s hands behind him that my skin went clammy, my stomach churned, and I disgraced myself.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
The moment Gabe had feared all these years came while we were all in the zendo. The sheriff dug up the red maple, exhumed Aeneas’s body, and found the plastic-wrapped manila envelope with the signed admission statement from the curator in San Francisco, the paper that could have made Gabe’s career but ended up drawing him back here year after fearful year until it testified to his guilt.
After that, sesshin took on a surreal quality. The sheriff questioned everyone individually in a macabre simulacrum of dokusan interviews. Then people were free to leave, but only a few did. Most of the students had barely been aware of the events, much less endangered. I thought Amber would be the first out, but she stayed. I guess she, like Maureen before her, really came for reasons other than what she had assumed.
On Sunday, we had the long-overdue memorial service for Aeneas. We walked slowly in a circle in the zendo, chanting the Heart Sutra, and offering incense. Amber could have spoken about her brother, but she didn’t. It was Rob’s words that I remember. He quoted the second poem from the tale of the Sixth Patriarch.
The body is not a bodhi tree
There is no clear mirror anywhere
Fundamentally nothing exists
Nothing for dust to cling to.
“Did Aeneas understand there had never been a mirror? I don’t know. But he was a mirror for me, and I have more dust clinging than I let myself realize.” Rob’s wide shoulders slumped, the light of his startlingly blue eyes dulled. He stumbled and caught himself on Maureen’s outstretched hand. I had never respected him more.
Roshi, seated on his zafu, his robes tucked neatly under his knees, said what he had in his opening talk three days ago. “Things change.” He looked slowly around the room, meeting each person’s eyes, then repeated, “Things change.”
We all waited for him to go on, but he said no more. Indignation rattled me; I almost cried out, Is that all, Roshi? A man died here. One of your students killed him. You did nothing for years! Can’t you at least give us some closure? But in the end I decided Roshi was right in giving no final words that would have framed Aeneas’s death and Gabe’s murdering, would have made it suitable for display, discussion, finished, and done. One of the familiar symbols of Zen is the circle. The circle is never complete; there’s always an opening through which life flows.
In the remaining days, we returned to the rule of total silence, and moved in that state of closeness and separation it provided. I thought of the irony of my life, that I had been so focused on being accepted by the big kids I had never let on how scared I’d been and so I spent my life being scared. But even now, I knew I would keep the events of the family hike in Tilden Park to myself. They were still John’s to keep or tell.
But as the days passed and I wore out those considerations, I found myself just sitting on my zafu in the zendo. The weather cleared and I felt the sun on my shoulders; it worsened and I listened to the rain battering the windows; I heard the leaves rustle, the oil lamp sputter, Marcus’s breathing to my right, the occasional odd glucking noise from Amber, and my own sudden laugh—aloud, there in the zendo.
Fundamentally nothing exists
I had misplaced the emphasis as: fundamentally nothing exists. Now I heard it as: fundamentally nothing exists. And I sat enjoying those sounds and feelings I had always considered nothing but filler between my thoughts. Momentarily a veil lifted.
After that I spent my breaks learning to walk in the woods, feeling the pounding of my heart as thumps of flesh, catching thoughts of danger that no longer existed, seeing trees as plants. Until Amber popped out from behind a redwood and just about panicked me into the stream.
Barry was different, too, and Maureen. Barry just cooked. Only twice in the remaining days did I see him look longingly toward his big silver winnower or the great orange conche. One day in the second week, when we all came back to the zendo, cold and tired from work period, the servers offered each of us tea and a small block of wonderfully rich chocolate, with a hint of wine, a soupcon of gardenia. I nibbled slowly, savoring each morsel, and shot a glance at Barry in time to see him smile.
Maureen, on the other hand, was more distracted than ever. Had it not been for the silence I would have asked her where she’d be going when Leo left.
Roshi saw each one of us in a dokusan interview. When my turn came, there was too much to say, and no way to focus it and what tumbled out of my mouth was, “I feel so bad for everyone. But you know who I keep thinking about? Gabe. I had liked Gabe.”
“We all liked Gabe,” Roshi said as if discussing someone who was still here. “We do the best we can, even though sometimes it doesn’t seem anywhere near good.”
We all do the best we can. He had said that to me on the drive in, as he laughed about my suitcase filled with tubes of shark cartilage ointment for everyone’s knee pain rather than the wool pants and socks to make my own mornings here bearable.
“Leo—Roshi,” I said slowly, knowing I was on the edge of speaking out of turn—again—“if you had known the killer was Gabe, instead of thinking it was Maureen, would you still have set up this sesshin for him?”
I thought he would ponder that, or tell me Of course or Hardly. But in an instant he leaned forward and snapped his finger against the back of my hand. He meant that what exists is the present, not speculation about what might have been in the past. He didn’t have to say that we had all benefited from this sesshin.
But I wasn’t quite ready to give up on the question of Gabe. “It just shouldn’t have had to end like this. I mean, someone else was lazy with their research, and he ended up losing his big chance to get his piece in the New Yorker. He managed to get an interview with a woman at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, an interview that would have clinched his documentation. Then Aeneas snatched the admission she signed, and left Gabe without ‘the thing someone didn’t want to give to begin with.’ Gabe’s real good at poking till he gets an answer. I can imagine him getting that curator to say more than she intended, particularly when she had time to think about it afterwards. All for a magazine expose that wasn’t going to do her any good. But once Gabe lost the verification, he was cooked. No wonder he was frantic. And now he’ll be going to prison and his life is over.”
Roshi picked up his cocoa, poured a bit on the floor. Then he looked at me and added, “Or not.”
I smiled. Then I bowed and reached for the rag. Or not.
I started to leave.
“Darcy, your fear of the woods, you do know it was—”
“A great gift?” I said sarcastically.
He grinned. “A great gift. If you’d never had this fear that so embarrassed you, that you had to keep working to overcome or at least hide, would you ever have been in shape or brave enough to be a stuntwoman?”
“Well, no.”
“Or tough enough to sit facing the wall day after day, not knowing what would cross your mind the next moment, if you’d see something you didn’t want to know, or if you’d suddenly forget all that and just be.”
I nodded. “I guess it was a gift.”
At that cliché he grinned and gave me the half-wink I had hoped would pass between us when things got too-too in the zendo, when he was still the funny guy in the old truck, before I had any idea he was the teacher.
“Thanks for sharing.”
I bowed and walked out. He was laughing.
It wasn’t till I was in the van, looking out the window at Leo standing at the end of the path that led back to the bathhouse, with Maureen and Rob, that I felt the full thrust of missing him.
About halfway along the road, the lawyer from Vermont pulled out an envelope he’d found on his bed. My letter. It was, indeed, from Mom. She had mailed
it the day I got my acceptance to sesshin and called to give her the address, in case of emergency.
Darce,
Surprise! The day your Zen sit ends, we’ll all be waiting at the coast road to take you to a huge, carnivorous dinner. In a place that allows dogs. (If Duffy’s not in China.)
Love ya,
Mom
When the dirt road ended, there they were: Mom, John, Gary, Janice, and Duffy, who forgot all his fine training and generations of dour Scottyness and leapt into my lap.
By the time I got home to New York the story of the murder was still ricocheting off its own angles in the New York papers and magazines. Gabe had no remorse about Aeneas, but he came to see plenty about the descriptions of himself: pedestrian wordsmith, shoddy investigator, toothless muckraker, and the most stinging: perennial schlimazel.
Thanksgiving was over and white winter lights sparkled on the street trees as I turned from Sixth Avenue onto Ninth Street. Cabs raced westward, adding their lights to the rush hour array. I walked slowly through the after-workers heading past me to Balducci’s for gourmet takeout. I thought of sesshin gruel and how glad I was not to be eating it now. I had expected to find only relief on returning here, but things change. I would have given anything to have avoided going to California and to Leo, but now that I was back here, I thought of him every time I lifted a cup, opened a letter, sat cross-legged alone in my apartment. His words were tattooed beneath my skin, but they weren’t enough. I missed his teaching; I missed him.
And yet, when I walked into the Ninth Street zendo, gratitude filled me like the incense suffusing the air. The jisha bowed and pointed to Yamana-roshi’s dokusan room. I knocked once; he rang his bell and I entered.
Yamana-roshi sat cross-legged on his brown mat. On the altar beside him the candlewick was long and the flame burned high. I bowed to the Buddha and to Yamana-roshi and sat on my cushion. I had already told him about Aeneas’s death and Gabe’s guilt. Now, here in the dokusan room, the issue was my own practice.
“Be alert!” he said. “Were you alert?”
“I kept an eye open.”
He smiled at that Americanism he so liked. “Just one?”
“Just sometimes.”
“Hmm. Are you out of the woods?”
“Yes and no. I can walk in them, but I’m not out. I wasn’t there long enough to not escape.”
He nodded slowly. “Nothing has changed, Darcy. You are still you. I am still me. I cannot help you.”
My stomach lurched. I could feel the panic rising up my body. “But”—
He raised his palm. “Garson-roshi called me. He is leaving the monastery. One of his senior students is taking charge. A man”—a smile flickered on Yamana-roshi-s face—“who makes very good chocolate.’”
Tense as I was, I smiled. It was the right choice. Of all of us, Barry was the one who had faced his fantasies and walked on.
“What about Le—Garson-roshi?”
“He said to me, ‘I am not a desirable commodity just now.’ His words. True. But he is a deep teacher, deeper than before. He has agreed to go to a Zen center which needs a teacher. A center in a very sticky situation.”
Yamana looked away for an instant, and I suspected the move was to cover his reaction to the picture of a situation covered in honey.
“Very odd, too good to be true. He needs a jisha he can trust.”
I put my hands together, bowed, and said, “Yes.”
It occurred to me on the way out that I should have asked where that Zen center was.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Scharffen Berger Chocolate Maker for its very fine factory tour, which I took twice. (Life is hard.)
And to my friend Dolly Gattozzi for her wise and gracious suggestions and her knowledge of Zen Buddhism.
A special thanks to my superb agent, Dominick Abel.