I watched the stale old sibling resentment rise behind my thoughts, casting a shadow across their usual crooked run. I breathed. I relaxed my hand on the beer glass. I tried to smile the resentment away, or at least think about smiling it away, but it was no good. For some reason the trials of the past months had bled all the patience out of me, made a mockery of what Celia referred to as my “spiritual training.” It was as if the lessons Rinpoche had taught me, the daily meditation practice, the reading of his own books and those of other masters, his friendly notes and letters, our talks—it had all built up a kind of cushion between me and the world’s hard edges. The little things had stopped bothering me so much. I could get stuck in traffic en route to a Broadway show and not feel my blood pressure rising, not pound the steering wheel and mutter. I was more patient with the kids, at work, enduring a week of the flu or a back spasm on the tennis court. I worried less, laughed more. Jeannie noticed. Everyone noticed. And I gave Rinpoche the credit at every opportunity. Yes, I told one or two close friends, it really worked, this meditation stuff. My mind was more under my control now, but it was a loose, relaxed control, like the forehand of a good tennis player, no tension in it, just the appropriate focus and force.
But then came the routine physical that turned out to be anything but. The tests, the doctors’ somber faces and optimistic projections, the odds and percentages, the medicines, the silent torment of radiation and chemo, the stories we heard in person and read about on-line; then the horrible understanding that we would not be in the fortunate majority, that Jeannie’s situation was different, much worse, and then the unutterable misery of her suffering and of our having to stand by and observe it. Day by day, hour by hour, broken hope after broken hope—a brief remission, word of a miracle drug, the possibility of participating in a trial—it wore away at the cushion until, by the time it all ended, I’d come to inhabit my old petty self again. Jeannie had grown large in her dying, enormous there at the last as if her spirit were swelling out from the ruined sack of bones and flesh, the sunken eyes, thin hair, dry lips. There were patches of anger and despair, but they were fleeting things. Sometimes, sitting beside the bed holding her wrist very lightly or dabbing her lips with a damp washcloth flavored with mint, it seemed to me that my wife had turned into a dark night sky, speckled with stars, cold and marvelous, unreachable, shining down on me but with most of her already in some other world.
“Be large in your mind,” Rinpoche had said to me years ago. It was nothing he’d ever ventured when Jeannie was sick. He meant it for lesser things. Be large in your mind; be big about it.
So I tried then, with my son. “Your aunt’s a nutcase, always has been. But a sweet, loving, kind, generous nutcase who surprises me sometimes in big moments.”
He looked across the table at me, reached for a sip of my beer. He said, “Hard that we’re leaving, too, isn’t it. Me and Tash, I mean.”
“You have your own lives. I want that.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s that ‘yeah?’”
He shrugged. “I just wish you could say it was hard, Dad. It would make me feel better than your wanting us to have our own life and that.”
“The pretend me,” I said. It was something else Rinpoche had pointed out, a tendency to behave according to some abstract should, instead of acknowledging the actual emotion. “It’s been one of the hardest things I’ve ever known. Your mother and I loved having you both at home. We . . . didn’t look forward to your leaving, like some parents do. We were going to enjoy ourselves, sure, but we didn’t look forward. . .”
Anthony turned his eyes out the window. He wanted to see his father’s vulnerability, and he didn’t want to see it. “The whole thing sucks,” he said. “It’s a shit-show.”
“Exactly.”
“Come visit whenever you want, Dad. Come up for the home-game weekend stuff, it’s great.”
“Sure,” I said. “Just what you need. Your dad there with your football buddies, beer in hand, singing the old school songs.”
Natasha rejoined us. The muscles to either side of her mouth were trembling like willow leaves in the wind. Anthony pried at a mussel shell without really trying to open it. His sister spent a few seconds taking in the situation, then said, “Let it out, Dad.”
“I’ve been letting it out. We’ve come to the conclusion that the whole thing sucks. We’ve gotten that far.”
A weak smile. My mother’s mouth and gray-green eyes. “We can feel you’ve been trying to say something ever since we got to JFK. You have that look.”
“What look?”
“TheI’m-about-to-make-a-fatherly-pronouncementlook,” Tasha said.
“All right,” I said, but it took me a few seconds. “All I wanted to say was: We have to do this. Mom asked us to do it.”
Nothing. They were suddenly focused on their food. Natasha pulled her chin down almost to her chest.
“Guys.”
They looked reluctantly up.
“We’re not going to make a big fuss. If you want to say something, that will be fine; if not, also fine. Rinpoche might say something. Aunt Seese probably will.”
“It’s a weird thing to do,” Anthony said. “It’s . . . Mom’s not in that little jar you carried. That’s not her.”
“I know that. But she asked. Maybe she just wanted us to have a trip together before you both go back to school. A memory, that’s all. She asked me to do it, and I promised her I would. Maybe something will come of this that we can’t yet see. A last gift from her or something.”
“Now you’re sounding like Aunt Seese,” Anthony said.
Natasha said nothing.
We ate the rest of the meal in a discontented silence. A TV on the wall was showing wildfires in New Mexico and advertisements for the upcoming London Olympics. For once, nothing on the dessert menu held much appeal for us. I paid, left my usual oversized tip, went out and stood on the sidewalk in the cool, salty air while my children each used the bathroom, Natasha’s second time. The bad silence clung to our clothing and hair as we walked back toward the inn. I made a point, as I had done all their lives, of touching them—not for long, nothing to make them uncomfortable, just a physical signal, a token, the quick squeeze of arm or shoulder. “The medicine of touch,” Jeannie had called it.
And then, from fifty yards away, we could see Rinpoche in his robe, standing in front of the purple house, a spiritual advance man. He heard our footsteps and turned. He made a study of Anthony, then Natasha, then me, and there was so much care in his face that I was cast back to the hours he’d spent at Jeannie’s bedside. Between the day of her diagnosis and the moment of her death, three years, all told, they’d made probably a dozen trips east, he and my sister and their child, driven the whole way and stayed for a week each time. Prayers, baths, late-night doses of medicine, walks with the kids and Jasper into town for the distraction of a Haagen-Dazs milkshake. Just Rinpoche’s presence in the house had seemed to lift a cold iron weight from my children’s shoulders. I hoped he could manage that again.
Embraces all around.
“How are you?” I asked him after he’d released me from his World Wrestling Federation headlock.
Rinpoche seemed surprised at the question, as if he was always perfectly fine, and any asking about it was unnecessary. The shaved head, the gold-trimmed maroon robe that he wore in all weather, skin the color of coffee with a spoonful of cream in it and the longshoreman’s face that looked carved from a stone cliff, the big smile, the ridiculously uninhibited laugh—he was a sort-of-Buddhist monk from the Russia/China border, a place called Skovorodino in the Ortyk region of South Siberia. And he was, if you believed what my sister and many thousands of others believed, an enlightened spiritual teacher from a long line of holy men.
He was, to me, mainly a brother-in-law, a friend. Kooky, maddening at times, infallibly kind, at moments direct to the point of bluntness, in possession of secret abilities—I loved him, I suppose, and trusted him at least
enough to have taken meditation lessons from him over the past six years, to have read or at least perused most of the books he sent, to have allowed him and my sister to lease out most of our late parents’ North Dakota farm and turn the rest of it into a “retreat center,” a place of cabins and meditation rooms, wholesome cooking done by self-serious New Age types in sandals and loose clothing. I loved him, I trusted him that much, I had come to feel, after a period of doubt, that he was a good husband for my sister and an excellent father to our niece. And at the same time an ocean stood between us, a body of water too large to bridge. I was a New Yorker now, had been for the past twenty-eight years. Sophisticated, perhaps spoiled, a tad cynical, fond of strong coffee and the Times, witty in a big-city way, afraid of pain and death, open to the idea of a calmer mind but not yet quite to the associated antics that accompanied a serious spiritual practice. I thought of myself as a flawed, ordinary man—in my own way I tried to be good—but despite the meditation and the exotic reading, it was still an all-American way. I was, for better and worse, still me. Nothing, not even the trauma of Jeannie’s passing, had changed that.
In answer to my question, Rinpoche sent me a long, piercing look and shrugged. We started down the gravel path, cairns to either side. “Train ride wery long,” he said, swallowing the “v”—a new affectation—and putting a hand against his lower back as if it hurt, which I was quite sure it did not. The man was built like a sumo wrestler and was as limber as a yogi. He liked to pretend to be as weak and frail as everyone else, but he wasn’t. I’d never known him to suffer from so much as a head cold, to seem tired or out of sorts, to take any medicine or vitamins at all.
“You could have been here in two hours on a plane.”
He nodded, acknowledging the point. “This time, train,” he said. “More safe. Shelsa saw some of the West America.”
From behind, Anthony reached out and gave Rinpoche an affectionate rub of the muscles to either side of his neck. “Good to see you, Unc,” he said. “Where’s the rest of the gang?”
Rinpoche looped one arm around his neck and pulled him close. “Good of seeing you, too,” he said.
“Where’s your posse?”
“Shelsa sleeping. Wery tired. Her mother go there with her to the bed. I am waiting outside to see my two most beautiful people.” He had one arm around each of their necks now and he leaned first to one side, then the other, and planted a loud kiss on their heads. I watched from a few feet behind.
“And what about my dad?” Tasha asked. “Isn’t he one of the most beautiful people?”
Rinpoche turned around and looked at me, and there was something new in his face, some sorrow there that I’d never seen, a slight change, my sister would have said, in his aura. “Most best uncle and brother-and-law!” he said, much too loudly. “Shelsa cries, not seeing you so long. Tomorrow in the morning, I told her. Tomorrow you have breakfast with Uncle Ott!”
5
The Inn at Chakra Creek eschewed the decadent luxury of television, but the mattresses were firm, there was a small heated swimming pool that Rinpoche and my children splashed in happily until late, and, according to a pamphlet on the night table, ICC offered a breakfast in which nearly everything on the menu had been grown within twenty-five miles. Local eggs. Bacon, ham, and sausage from hogs raised just down the road. Biscuits from Washington State wheat, jam from an orchard in Everett. And so on. Only the coffee—and perhaps the sugar in the jam—hailed from far-off lands, and it was fair-trade coffee, the author of the pamphlet noted, “rich as molasses and with a major kick.”
I clicked off the lamp and lay there in darkness, tempted to join them for a swim but too weary. The way the mind worked, Rinpoche had told me, was that it returned to inspect its bruises again and again and again. Childhood humiliation or abuse, physical trauma, argument, bereavement, loss—if you paid attention you’d notice that, when the pain was fresh, the mind would go back there every few seconds, as if checking it to make sure it was still alive. In time, the trouble burrowed deeper into the stony soil of the thoughts, but anything could awaken it and pull it back to the surface. The trick, he’d counseled me, was neither to encourage the hard memories nor push them away with too much force. The trick was to bring yourself back to the present, the air in which old hurt couldn’t breathe. “Stay there with what you hear,” he said, “what you see. What your hands against something feel. And if the bad thing come, just let him come, Otto. Let him run and run and bark like a dog in a big big field, until he gets tired and lays down there and goes to sleep. Okay?”
Here was the present, then: the sound of my son’s happy shout and one loud splash. The smell of sea air drifting in through the open window. The feel of the cool breeze across my shoulders and cheeks, and the sheets and blanket on my legs. I let an image of my wife—she was, for some reason, standing at the stove and turning her head over one shoulder to look at me—come wandering into the field. I let it circle and trot there. More than anything on earth I wanted to hear her speak again, just once, tell me she was still intact in some other dimension, safe there, at peace. I tried not to cling too desperately to the image, and not to push it away, and in a little while the noise from the swimming pool subsided, and the pain of her absence died down, and I was able to fall asleep.
6
It turned out that Cecelia had decided to bring along their new dog, Jasper Jr. named by Shelsa after our elderly mutt, Jasper Sr., a half-Doberman, half-Lab mix who was being minded by a kind neighbor at home. Their Jasper was a few inches shorter and a few pounds lighter but looked eerily like ours: short black coat with touches of bronze on the muzzle and breast. That same proud dignity. Karmic twins, as Cecelia put it. Jasper Jr., she told me, had been allowed onto the train only after a prolonged discussion between Rinpoche and the stationmaster. He’d make the trip up into the mountains with us, then ride back with them on Amtrak (dogs not usually allowed, but she had a letter of permission in her purse). Another Ringling Family Plan.
As the only guests that morning, we sat at two pushed-together tables in the breakfast nook, all six of us. Jasper was happily sniffing around outside. My sister’s husband sat directly opposite me. He had his daughter on his knee and was feeding her sips of coffee on an empty stomach.
“You’re gonna juice her all up, Uncle,” Anthony said.
Rinpoche laughed his mucousy laugh and reached out and squeezed Anthony’s bicep. “Strong!” he said. “After, you and me, we wessel.”
“Rinpoche, I don’t think that’s wise,” my sister cautioned. She did that sometimes, addressed her beloved by his title. ‘Volya’ just didn’t fit him as well, for any of us, and ‘Rinpoche’ actually meant ‘precious one’, so it made sense, I suppose, between wife and husband.
“And it’s ‘wrestle’ anyway, not ‘wessle’ Tasha said.
Rinpoche appeared unoffended. In all the time I’d known him, almost six years of living with my voluble sister and hosting American retreatants at the North Dakota farm, he’d made next to no progress in the language. Lately, in fact, he seemed to have lost grammatical ground. His mispronunciations were inconsistent and legendary. Sometimes he got it right, sometimes not. Wessle. Brother-in-waw. Brother-and-law. Wery. Very. He’d developed a penchant for convoluted phraseology like “Jeannie now is wery sick, couldn’t she?” I’d learned, on our visits to Dakota and in New York, to let it go. But Tasha often felt obliged to correct him, and he always thanked her and tried the proper pronunciation or appropriate grammar once, then forgot it instantly. He spoke, he claimed, eleven languages, four of them fluently—his native Ortyk, Russian, Italian, and English—so this trouble with pronunciation always seemed strange to me, an act, a game. Perhaps—who could ever know with Rinpoche—he was making some statement about the mutability of language itself, the way it can stand between raw reality and the mind. A tree, after all, was not a tree; that was merely its assigned label, in one of earth’s hundreds of languages. Death was not death; it was a mystery, a passage
, ineffable.
Thinking this, I realized I was angry at him on that morning, and for no good reason, no good reason at all. He’d been exceedingly kind to Jeannie and me during her illness. He’d visited, soothed her in ways I couldn’t seem to, spoken privately with the kids in their worst hours. Since our previous road trip he’d taken me on as a private meditation student, a poor but fairly dutiful one, and sprayed nothing but patience and good humor in my direction . . . and that morning I was angry with him and trying to understand why. Maybe I’d expected the meditation lessons to take all the pain out of my life. Maybe I held that against him.
“Wessel,” he said, looking at my daughter with his eyebrows raised, his stevedore’s face, a face that never seemed to age, crinkled up in a pantomime of confusion.
“Wrestle. RRRRR. Are.”
“Waaah,” he said.
“Say ‘Rinpoche,’ Anthony suggested.
“Win—poach—hay.”
“Now you’re pulling my dick.”
“What this dick?” Rinpoche asked. He looked quizzically at my sister. “Dick, dick. What this is?” He’d been ignoring me the whole morning. One hug at the top of the stairs, and then what almost felt like the cold shoulder. As if he knew in advance that I’d be angry. Or as if he were disappointed in me, thought I should be more spiritually mature by now, should have learned the advanced dance steps of the soul. I should have been able to deal with death the way he seemed to deal with it, not ignoring it, not making light, but somehow, at the same time, the farthest thing from devastated. Hadn’t he been instructing me all these years—books, letters, meditation pointers, detachment, equanimity? What was my problem?
“‘Dick’ is a very rude word for a man’s penis,” my sister explained patiently, as if there were other very rude words for a woman’s penis. “Your nephew is being uncouth and saying things he shouldn’t say in front of his young cousin.”
Lunch with Buddha Page 3