“Can’t,” she said.
“Why not?”
“Rinpoche doesn’t fly. He says it’s unnatural. A stress on the spirit.”
“How did he get here from Europe, then?”
“Boat.”
“Fine. I’ll pay his train fare.”
“He’d get lost, Otto. The way I did. He doesn’t know America at all. You have to take him, show him the ropes.”
“I don’t have to anything,” I said, and when she smiled somewhat sadly I realized she’d spoken the same words only a few minutes earlier.
“Otto, my dear brother, please! I know you don’t believe in what I do, but everything in your aura says you could be liberated in this life. Do you realize what a blessing that is? I had a dream about you with Rinpoche, just two nights ago. That’s why I arranged it this way.”
“Arranged, nothing, Seese. You tricked me. The word is tricked, not arranged. The correct term is died, not moved on. I can tolerate a lot of things but I really won’t sit by and let the language be corrupted. I—”
“Otto, please. I’ve never asked you one favor in our whole adult lives, and now I’m asking. Once. Just please take Rinpoche out there with you and show him America, get him used to America. The country needs help, spiritual help.”
“You’ve got that part right.”
“And Rinpoche has been chosen to provide it. That’s all I can tell you right now. He’ll change your life, too, if you just let him.”
“Why would I want to change my life, Seese? Think about it?”
“Your interior life. Your soul’s arc through the various—”
I held up a hand, traffic cop on the spiritual highway. “I am a Christian, Cecelia. Not a particularly good one, not a particularly avid practitioner, but a Christian all the same. Good, sensible, Protestant stock, same as you. We don’t shave our heads and walk around in bathrobes, and we don’t seek spiritual counsel from those who do.”
She tucked her hair behind one ear; it immediately fell back down. She said, “He’s not into converting people. He doesn’t label, don’t you see? Ask him what religion he is and he’ll say he doesn’t care. But he has peace of mind, Otto, a deep, deep peace that nothing can shake. Can you say the same thing? Since Mom and Pop died, especially, can you? You said yourself it will only be a few days. And he has his own money and is very easy to be with. So could you do this for me? Just this one small thing? Please?”
WHICH IS BASICALLY the story of how, after another half hour of pleading, on my sister’s part, and attempting to resist, on mine, I ended up agreeing to drive Volvo Rinpoche from NJ to ND. When we went outside to give him the news, the Rinpoche seemed interested, mildly curious, amused, but not in any discernable way grateful. His luggage consisted of one cloth bag that looked like an oversized, well-worn pocketbook with leather handles. He accepted a minute-long embrace from my sister, bowed to her in a tender way, and settled himself in the front seat as calmly as if he’d been making the insurance payments for the past six months. My sister hugged me double-long, a double-long spinal massage included.
I was behind the wheel, seatbelt on, without knowing quite how it had happened. I lowered the window. “You said you had a dream about Rinpoche and me,” I said to Cecelia. “What were we doing?”
A gorgeous smile lit my sister’s face. She leaned toward me, happy as a child, and said, “Bowling!”
SEVEN
Between Cecelia’s house and the interstate on-ramp, somewhere among the tattered wood-frame triple-deckers and boarded-up topless joints (Doctor’s Cave Lounge, Go Go Girls!) of Paterson’s vibrant downtown, Rinpoche and I got lost. Probably I should take sole credit and say “I got lost,” but it is true that the presence of a Rinpoche there in the car’s front seat acted as a significant distraction. Or, as Anthony used to say when he was in grade school, “a major annoyment.” Getting lost did nothing to brighten my mood, which had been somewhat sour to begin with, and which turned bitter around the edges when I realized, driving away from my sister’s house, that she had manipulated me expertly.
I knew it was only a matter of a few minutes until we found the road we were looking for, but it was an annoyment all the same. I thought I’d been retracing my steps from the interstate to Seese’s house: We went past the same park I had seen on the way in—metal wastebaskets chained to the benches; we looped around behind a familiar line of rehabilitated factory buildings. As I knew we would from memories of other visits, we soon saw the sign for Interstate 80 East, but, for some reason, there was no corresponding sign for Interstate 80 West, and all this, on top of the fact that I always felt a twinge of guilt there, seeing people living in such a rough, poor, dangerous, noisy place, while my family and I lived in safe comfort, had me banging the bottom of my fist against the steering wheel.
And then, in front of another red brick factory building, I came upon a thirty- or thirty-five-year-old man with very black skin, white sneakers, and a neat pair of blue jeans. He was sweeping the sidewalk with an attentiveness and care that caught my eye as we passed. I must have caught his eye as well, because he looked up and smiled, as if I were a regular traveler on that route, a cousin or neighbor or friend. I made a U-turn in a bank parking lot, pulled up alongside him, and asked directions, talking to him across the front of Rinpoche’s berobed body.
“You were goin’ the wrong way, man!” the fellow said, and he was so sunny, so unabashedly helpful, and so precise with the directions, that my mood sank a little further. This happens to me on occasion in the presence of especially friendly and well-meaning souls. I do not know why. I am a friendly and well-meaning soul myself, optimistic, engaging, affable, and less cynical, by a factor of three, than most of my Manhattan colleagues. But Cecelia’s syrupy condescension, and Rinpoche’s lippy grin, and this good man with the broom and dustpan sweeping grit from the front of an old textile mill as though he were dusting a sacred icon—the combination made me feel like a curmudgeon.
In any case, thanks to the joyful sweeper, we found the entrance to 80 West without any further trouble and were soon humming along the interstate with the bridges and bricks of greater New York already giving way to the greenery of western New Jersey. My plan was simple: maximize time on the fast highways, maximize hours behind the wheel, get to North Dakota in three days or less, drop off the Volvo Rinpoche, do my business, and then enjoy a leisurely ride home, complete with fine meals and maybe a modest adventure that I could take back as material for office conversations. People would ask about my time away, my big trip. I wouldn’t have to mention the guru, could talk about wading in the upper reaches of the Delaware, or a phenomenal little trattoria I’d stumbled upon in the wilds of western Indiana.
At the same time, though, I was determined to be civil and decent to my traveling companion. Here is a lesson I learned long ago, and which my kids remind me of whenever I need reminding: When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable. So I would be decent, I’d be perfectly polite. I’d give Mr. Rinpoche a taste of solid old midwestern American hail-fellow-well-met.
“So,” I said, with the car already on cruise control and sailing past lumbering eighteen-wheelers, “tell me something about what it’s like to be a Rinpoche. Am I pronouncing it right?”
He swiveled his shaved head so that the muscles of his longshoreman’s neck flexed, and he fixed me with a gaze that might have come from Natasha surveying the clumsy eyebrow piercing of a new sophomore girl. As if to make up for the look, he smiled. Then he turned his eyes forward out the windshield and chuckled, and it was a low, mucusy, raspy chuckle, which floated across the seat and went on for longer than would have been polite in most circles. In fact, it went on to the point where I started to believe that he was laughing at me. Just at that moment he stopped, sighed somewhat sadly, and said, “Boring life,” though it sounded almost like wife in his pronunciation. “Most very boring, boring life.” And then he chuckled for another few seconds.
I was undecided at that point as to whether I liked or disliked the man. But I pressed on in a friendly tone: “Oh, come on. Seese says you’re a big shot. You have centers all over the world. That doesn’t sound boring to me.”
“Boring, boring,” he repeated, and coughed up some phlegm.
“No, really. Tell me what you do. I want to know.”
“Want to know? Really?”
“Absolutely.”
Again the swiveled head, the look, a last gurgle or two of the mucusy chuckle. “I sit,” he said, and he lifted his coarse hands helplessly off his thighs and let them fall back again, two little slaps.
“Not good for the shape,” I said. “You know, you sit all day you can get . . . wide. At our age, especially. My age, anyway.”
Rinpoche seemed to hear none of this ridiculous patter. The hills to either side of the road were growing steeper now as we moved closer to the Pennsylvania border. He seemed taken with them. Wherever it was that he came from, they didn’t have hills like this, apparently.
“How old are you, anyway?”
He shrugged.
“No, come on. If we’re going to spend a few days together on the road we ought to be able to talk about such things.”
“You should get off the fast road,” he said.
“What? What fast road?” I thought he was making a comment about my hectic but satisfying career. I heard this remark as a preliminary foray into the terrain of spiritual advice, and I was having none of it. I’d made up my mind about that. I’d be his chauffeur. To please my sister, as a favor to a stranger. But the second he started trying to convert me, to advise me, to bring my aura into focus or lift me up into a higher chakra—I’d shut that channel down.
“This road,” he said. “You should get off it now.”
It was my turn to chuckle, but I was leaning toward dislike. We were on what was called the Christopher Columbus Highway, as if there might be something out where we were going that had not yet been discovered, or had been discovered only by people who didn’t count. As if, when the road was named, all the population of New Jersey had insisted that the state was actually flat, and if you went too far you’d fall off, and Rinpoche and I were courageous enough to disagree and risk our lives, heading off into the uncharted seas west of Paterson. The scenery here, while nice enough, wasn’t anything to get excited about—woods to either side, a few steep inclines, the occasional sorrowful driver slumped guiltily behind the wheel in the breakdown lane, with a circus of red and blue lights on the roof of the car behind him and the straight-spined trooper standing at his door in a pose of little sympathy. “This is the best road to where we’re going,” I said, with just the smallest edge. “If you have to go to the bathroom or something, there’s probably going to be a rest area up ahead pretty soon.”
Again, he did not seem to hear. Or, more likely, he heard and was ignoring me. Which was not something I appreciated. Just then we came across a sign saying there was a scenic overlook a mile ahead. He could relieve himself in the trees there if he really needed to.
For the next minute or so Rinpoche did not speak. I pulled into the scenic area, which was just a parking lot on a hillside with a few men loitering near their cars, trying to make a kind of eye contact that was at the same time shy and aggressive. The expression on their faces reminded me of the look on the face of a former colleague of mine, whom I’ll call Fred, a man I’d twice bumped into at lunchtime as he was coming out of a GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! club on Eighth Avenue, when we’d had our offices on Seventh. I suppose lust, whatever form it takes, has its own peculiar shadow. Its own aura.
We got out, me in my slacks and jersey and Rinpoche in his billowing maroon robe, and discovered that the trees in the valley in front of us had grown to a height where they obscured whatever view had once been so appealing. Apparently, this information had yet to reach the particular state bureaucracy in charge of roadside rest areas. So we just stood there side by side and looked out at the tops of trees. There seemed to be nothing to say. I thought of suggesting he go pee in the woods, then decided against it. Not the place to be seen walking down a trail into the shrubbery with a dress on.
We stood there staring dumbly out at the scene, and then, when a sprinkling of raindrops washed over us, we got back in the car and pulled onto the road. Seventy-two miles per hour seemed a safe speed—fast enough to get us where we were going in good time, slow enough to keep from attracting the attention of the troopers’ radar. As we approached an exit, Rinpoche coughed in a meaningful way; I ignored him, tried to forget about his fast-road remark. Seventy-two miles per hour. Say, seven or eight or nine good hours per day. We’d be in Dakota by the weekend.
Those were my calculations as we crested a hill and saw two long lines of unmoving cars just a little ways in front of us. I uttered a mild epithet—nothing that wasn’t heard a hundred times a day in the finest public high schools in the land—and bounced my fist once against the steering wheel. Rinpoche did not speak.
EIGHT
The vehicles in front of us were stopped dead. A hundred yards from where we took our place in line, I saw someone get out of his car and walk along the median until he reached the top of the next rise. The man stood on the hill there like a scout, for a long few minutes, and then, shaking his head, walked slowly back. He stopped to lean in near the driver’s-side window of one of his stalled neighbors and give the bad news. Around me, people were turning off their engines. We could hear urgent sirens, then see an ambulance, two ambulances, a police car, and then a tow truck going past in the breakdown lane.
“Fast road not so fast here,” the wise Rinpoche observed.
I uttered the epithet again. Rinpoche glanced over, and I thought, for a moment, that he was going to ask the definition of the word I’d used, twice now.
But no, he sat there quietly, doing what Rinpoches do, and I could feel, in my depths, the stirring of a part of me that I try to hide from the world. I should confess at this point that I am prone to small fits of anger. Not anger at other people; I don’t usually blow up at my assistant at work, at Jeannie, or the kids. But if I’m in the wrong mood and something frustrating comes into my life—a new computer on which I can’t figure out how to arrange my e-mails; a screen door with directions written badly in six languages (put screw “A” insite hole “B” after titening bolt “a” with wrench “g” but before placing latch “E” on insite of the door handel), with a missing screw besides; a serious printer’s error on a book already late; a knotted shoelace on a young child, out in the rain in front of the church where his cousin is about to be baptized; a lawn mower that stalls and won’t start again, with the lawn half-cut—something as petty as that, if I’m in the wrong mood, will set me off on five or ten minutes of muttering, slamming cupboard doors, or stomping around our small yard kicking tufts of dirt, and so on. It is a pitiful display. I’m embarrassed about it, ashamed. Jeannie and the kids have seen enough of it so it no longer intimidates or even annoys them. “Dad is steaming off,” Natasha will say, and they’ll let me open and close the new medicine cabinet door twenty times, saying, “See! Look how cheaply this is made! Why is everything made so cheap now, even expensive goddamned medicine cabinets? Look at this, look at this Cheap Piece of Garbage! Would somebody look at this!”
Nobody looks at it. The kids smirk. Jeannie washes a dish. If it happens at work, my assistant, Salahnda, takes a coffee break. Ten minutes and it’s over, and I’m left chastened and humbled. But for those ten minutes, I am as ugly as a parent yelling at his child in the park.
It’s interesting to me how these things get passed on, how the sins of the father, or the mother, survive through the years and seep down into the lives of their children and grandchildren. I am occasionally haunted by this, in regards to my own children, haunted by a worry that I might, without knowing it, be passing something on to them, some unattractive tendency, quirk, or failing. Sometimes, after one of my small tantrums, I revive memories of my own dad, an
otherwise steady Germanic soul, gone spitting and red-faced over a transmission on a tractor or some such thing. I’d get off the bus and walk up the long driveway, schoolbag banging shoulder blades, and there he’d be in the door of the bigger barn, wrench in his powerful hands, the belly of the tractor opened as if in an operating theater, the dark grease, the gears, the covering piece lying neatly on its back with the bolts held in it for safekeeping. Meticulous, he was. Exceptionally good with his hands, even by the standards of a Dakota farmer. Taciturn most of the time, but not unkind. And then there would be these little tantrums where he’d stomp and bellow and then mutter, again and again, the terribly sacrilegious phrase, “Jameson Crow! Jameson durn Crow!” and whack at the dirt with his wrench or his boot heel, his face the color of a McIntosh apple.
It wasn’t a question of fearing him, exactly. He never took out his frustrations on me or Cecelia or Mom. But it was as if you were accustomed to coming home to gently rolling prairie—which I was, in fact—and then on this day you came home and from beneath the prairie soil there came a spouting gusher of fury and frustration, a dark brew. Ten minutes the gusher would go, half an hour at most. My mother, who had a radar for these moods, would bring him out a cup of tea and a hard German biscuit and at first he would ignore her, ignore the tray, and continue with his Jameson Crowing. Eventually he’d soften enough to go over and take a sip of the tea, a nibble from the biscuit, and that would signal the beginning of the end of it. He’d be on the road to recovery, the family would let out a collective held breath, and for a week or a few weeks or sometimes as long as a couple of months we would not see that side of him again.
So this trait had been passed down to me. That’s the way it works, isn’t it? Part of the ugliness in you is purely your own. But a portion of it is learned, or inherited. And, strangely enough, it seems immune to the scrutiny of your own conscience. Somehow, it’s all right—your tantrums or whatever else it might be: shortness with the children, meanness to a spouse, eating too much, cheating a little bit at work or on the tennis court, watching pornographic videos when the family is in bed or stealing away during every other lunch hour for a drink at GIRLS! GIRLS! GIRLS! It’s all right. We find excuses for our small and not-so-small addictions and transgressions. We rationalize. They are part and parcel of the judging mind, and so the judging mind excuses them.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 4