“Sorry.”
The inn’s daytime clerk—a dreadlocked, elaborately tattooed twenty-year-old who, after asking Rinpoche to sign the guest register that morning, had sliced the page out of his book with a Swiss Army knife and taped it to the wall beside the reception desk—interrupted this conversation with refills of the miraculous coffee. He had Bob Marley’s hair and Justin Bieber’s face, and a way of speaking that matched Cecelia’s like a sibling. “Going up to the Cascades today?” he inquired, in a singsong, optimistic rhythm.
I nodded, attempted a smile. He filled my cup with a reverent gesture: the liquid was melted gold, a precious thing, as fine as the pamphlet promised. “Little vacation from the hectic other side?”
“Family trip,” I said.
When he stood there, wanting more, Natasha filled in the blanks. “We’re going out today to spread my mother’s ashes.”
“Cool. Your mom must have been a great lady.”
Tears sprang into Natasha’s eyes as if a switch had been thrown behind the gray-green circles. I ground my teeth hard enough to make free-trade porcelain. Bob Bieber didn’t seem to notice. “Your dog’s cool, too, dude.” He seemed to be speaking to me. I was “dude” here to everyone, the mellow surfer-dad up from La Jolla for the coffee and cold waves. “He’s like, what? Lab or something?”
“Half Doberman.” Be careful, I was tempted to say, or he’ll bite your dick off.
“Dasper,” Shelsa said.
“Cool name.”
Leave us, leave us, leave us! I thought. But the gregarious fellow didn’t move. Shelsa had taken to fingering her scrambled eggs and Rinpoche was holding her, watching, smiling. His style of childrearing seemed to belong to the school of affectionate lassitude. He spoke to her as if she were his equal, a fellow traveler, a full soul, and held her, tickled her, and made her laugh as if there were nothing more precious to him on this earth. What would you do, I found myself wondering, if you had to watch her die? What would happen to all the spiritual talk then, the detachment, the inner peace?
It was a terrible thought, shameful and petty, a kidney stone of distilled bitterness. Me at my worst. It pains me to confess it, but pain or no, I am going to be honest here; I promised myself that. I’m going to show myself with all my warts and sins, though I confess to a tremendous desire to tell this story with gold dust on all of it, to be the man Rinpoche kept assuring me I was, a helper to Shelsa in her important work, a seeker on the verge of a great spiritual awakening, a Bronxville saint.
The young waiter didn’t appear to understand that he should leave now, that we were a family in mourning, that his presence among us was as welcome as a fluorescent bulb at 4:00 a.m. It seemed to me that he was ogling Natasha—whose nicely proportioned breasts, gift from her late mother’s DNA, were pressing out against a cashmere sweater, color of sapphire. What else, what deadly poison, had been passed down in that gene pool? “We’re, like, honored to have you here,” the young man said, as if speaking to them.
Shelsa patted the last yellow bubbles of egg, small living ducklings, then looked up at the waiter and said “Dick” very clearly, and a great burst of laughter went up around him and he stood there, smiling, shaggy, confused, forgiven.
Freed from him at last, finished with the sumptuous, all-local repast, we gathered our things and assembled on the lawn of the Inn at Chakra Creek. This was the day I’d been dreading. The saying of grace at table, the speeches at a colleague’s retirement party—any and all kinds of ritual or formality threw me back hard against the side of the North Dakota barn where my parents had stored hay and machinery. Their way of life was as orderly as the furrowed soybean fields, a formal, strict, Lutheran life ruled by ancient ritual that had ceased to have any meaning for me by the time the first hair sprouted above my upper lip. The inside of my father’s Buick—and it was somehow his car and not my mother’s—was immaculate. We sat in the same pew every week at St. John’s, dressed in carefully ironed clothing. We gave thanks before meals. Cecelia and I rose at five every summer day of our young lives and went through our assigned chores with the regularity of robots. For a long stretch of years, these rites had managed to keep chaos at bay, to render the weeks predictable with their pressed Sunday trousers and polished kitchen floor. And then, one cold morning—BAM!—a drunk driver plowed into the Buick on a country road, and none of that mattered anymore.
This particular ceremony, the idea of finding something to say to mark the spreading of Jeannie’s ashes, struck me as an impossible challenge. If you couldn’t capture “table” with a word, how were you supposed to say what she had meant to us? No, it would be at once too final and not final enough; it would hurt too much to speak.
Even just standing there trying to decide seating arrangements in the vehicles—even that put me on edge.
And, of course, Rinpoche chose that moment to challenge my muscular son to a wessling match. You bizarre man, I thought.
But Anthony loved it. A delighted smile lit his face. He stripped off his jersey and tossed it aside in a single motion. He faced his maroon-robed opponent in a crouch. Rinpoche was laughing, circling his hands like some kind of orchestra conductor gone mad. There seemed to be no tension in his body. He was a rubber man, on the medium-short side, chunky, thick-limbed, but pliable as the stem of a dandelion. Cecelia picked up her daughter and frowned. Natasha had her hips cocked, head tilted sideways, ready for disdain, laughter, or approval, whatever seemed the appropriate posture for viewing the spectacle of feather-fluffing masculine absurdity. The dreadlocked waiter had come to the doorway and was holding my sister’s forgotten sweater in his hand, watching the great spiritual master—his idol—whirl hands and laugh like a lunatic.
The combatants were standing on a patch of perfect lawn, one of them straight out of a prep school wrestling team, the other straight out of some Siberian Camp Sumo. The cairns stood at a safe distance. Rinpoche waved his hands and laughed but made no move forward, and I thought for a moment it had all been meant as a joke. But then Anthony made a charge, low, like a bull or a linebacker, muscles rippling, and somehow, in a tenth of a second, Rinpoche had him on his back on the ground and was leaning across him with all his weight, laughing and chuckling. It was Cassius Clay’s phantom punch in Lewiston; no one had seen it. Sonny Liston on his back on the canvas. No one, least of all Anthony, understood what had happened. The only sign of exertion on the winner’s side was that the maroon robe had ridden up the back of Rinpoche’s legs. We could see his wide ass. He was wearing what were known as commando underpants, a brief-boxer hybrid I’d never cottoned to. Red in color. The muscles of his legs were like iron.
I worried Anthony would be shamed, but he was laughing, too. “All right, okay. Get off. Man, you’re fat! No fair, you’re a different weight class.”
Rinpoche rolled back and forth across him, torso to torso, as if my son were some kind of foam cylinder in the gym. The otherwise mellow Jasper Jr. (Celia said she sometimes sang him to sleep) stood by and barked without enthusiasm, playing a role. Men wrestled. Women watched. Dogs barked. Shelsa climbed down out of her mother’s arms and ran over and jumped onto her dad’s backside. Anthony let out an “Oof!” and hugged her and laughed with his arms wrapped around Rinpoche, and I saw Tasha sidle over to the dreadlocked boy and accept her aunt’s sweater and thank him warmly.
“Your husband’s a nut,” I said to Celia, trying to sail with the prevailing winds. My own words sounded sour and small in my ear.
“It’s just his way of cheering them up,” she said, but she was looking at the entangled bodies, not me, when she said it. She reached her hand sideways and took hold of mine, then looked. “Don’t,” she said, “be fooled.”
“Fooled how?”
She squinted. The narrowed eyes seemed to say: why are you pretending, Otto? She started to say something else, then stopped, and went to fetch her daughter.
7
It was difficult to make the segue from that scene to the mood I thought
I was supposed to be in as we headed north and east. As we left Whidbey Island—by way of Oak Harbor, route 20, then I-5 again—the road was thick with logging trucks and Winnebagos, and I was glad to see that my sister had ceded the driving responsibilities. I didn’t trust Cecelia behind the wheel, either as navigator or driver. She did not like written directions. She did not know GPS from UPS. She appeared to assume that the correct route would be made known to her via some sort of celestial Morse code at the appropriate moment, and she seemed to believe that driving faster than speed-limit-minus-ten was an idea for reckless fools.
Anthony was at the wheel of the SUV. His sister, a better driver but one who didn’t enjoy it as much, watched over him carefully from the passenger seat. Celia sat in back with Shelsa. I’d decided it would be best to let them lead the way, not because I worried how Anthony would handle the big machine with the jet-fighter dashboard display—he was a decent driver and I was sure his sister wouldn’t be stingy with advice—but because I wanted them to set the pace, and Celia to decide when she needed to stop and let Shelsa run around or use the facilities.
And I think, too, that I wanted to be able to see my kids. It sounds strange, perhaps: I saw them every day at home, and all I could see of them in this case was indistinct shapes through the Lincoln’s rear window. But I had an urge to keep them in view. Every day that summer I’d had a clearer and clearer understanding that they’d soon be leaving the house, in two months, a month, now a few weeks. That morning, when the first daylight shone through the inn curtains, I’d awakened to an acute sense of emptiness in the room, an echoing hollowness, as if my heart were beating in the massive blackness between Saturn and Jupiter. I could already feel the empty house I was going back to. I could picture myself taking the commuter train from Manhattan to the Bronxville station after a day at the office, fishing the car keys out of my pocket, making the six-minute drive home, opening the door, walking into the kitchen. Jasper would be there, at least, standing up on his creaky old legs and hobbling over to greet me. But then would come the solitary hour at the stove and table, the solitary perusal of a submitted manuscript (I still couldn’t bring myself to do that work on an electronic tablet, as my colleagues did; around the office I’d gotten a reputation as a Luddite), the solitary viewing of an hour of late-night TV. The empty bed.
People said I’d eventually become accustomed to it. In my dentist’s waiting room I’d read an article on grieving, and the clear message was this: time heals. People remade their lives, found a new companion, a new hobby, picked themselves up and cleaned themselves off and went on. I believed all that. But I believed it the way you believe in, say, an afterlife: hopefully, dutifully, but also haunted by the nagging possibility that it might not be so. And even if it were so, even if in a year or two years or five years the pain of Jeannie’s absence would abate, that did nothing to soften the feelings of the moment, or the fact that the children, our children, would be leaving the house in a little over four weeks and I was obliged to be happy for them.
So I wanted the Lincoln in front of me, where I could see it. Rinpoche and I followed along in the certified-antique pickup, which I’d already come to love. The smooth, scalloped wheel, hard as a seashell; the torn and scratched-up leather seat; the simple speedometer display, the comforting clutch work and sound of changing gears, even the mumbling muffler—all of it brought me back to an earlier day, an earlier me bouncing along in similar vehicles on Dickinson’s dusty gravel roads, splashing through new snow, revving the engine in front of a friend’s trailer. It spoke to the simpler America that was either a fact or a fantasy, I was never sure. I liked it anyway. I counted on the idea of it being there, something solid beneath the modern rush and the rough tides of adulthood.
Rinpoche seemed to like his new vehicle, too. From the minute he’d set eyes on the orange-and-cream fenders, the big smile had broken open across his face. “This is what the trucks looked like when I was a young man,” I told him, and he went over and slapped the rust-speckled hood with real affection. It was a gesture right out of the high plains, as American as barbecue; he was learning quickly. Inside, he ran his hands over the dashboard and seats. He worked the chrome door handle, flipped the sunshade up and down. “Pickup,” he said, beaming at me. In his mouth the word sounded like “Pee-gahp,” but it carried the same odd pride I felt in driving it.
With the stick in the middle, it was a bit awkward for Jasper Jr.—who wanted, that morning, to demonstrate his feelings for me. I nudged him gently away. He gave me a perplexed look, so I fondled his ears for a moment, then nudged him again. Rinpoche lifted him onto his be-robed lap, and Jasper wiggled his ass, pawed at the maroon fabric and eventually found a position that felt both comfortable and dignified, his head against Rinpoche’s jaw. I saw the good monk take a sniff of one floppy ear.
The road east—we took Exit 194, Snohomish, Wenatchee, and it led us onto Route 2—was flat at first and four lanes, with marsh and grassland to either side. Soon enough it narrowed, and though it didn’t rise much, you could sense it lifting its eyes to the high peaks ahead. I could, at least. I could sense it because I knew this road, remembered it the way you remember certain pieces of a long-past family vacation, an overseas trip from years before, a walk you took once, in childhood. It had etched itself into the part of my mind that seemed to keep the memories right there where you could blow one breath into them and make them stand up and walk. There were high-tension wires and hay bales, the meandering Skykomish River, and these tendrils of feeling from different days.
Jeannie and I had met in North Dakota, first made love in the Knickerbocker Hotel in Chicago, and spent most of our honeymoon in a brightly tiled casa de huespedes four blocks from the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City. Like a lot of optimistic young couples, we’d found a cheap walk-up in New York City—Twenty-ninth and Eighth, in Chelsea—and set about trying to make careers in the arts. She was waiting tables and spent her free hours taking photographs. Having abandoned the idea of a life in architecture, I made some money correcting standardized tests for a company with offices in Queens, and labored away on what I hoped would be the Great American Novel.
The novel went nowhere, but I did eventually land a job at a small publishing house closer to home. Mindless work, for the most part: mailing galleys, making calls to printers and designers, running errands. One of Jeannie’s regular customers at the restaurant worked for a museum in Soho, and he helped her find part-time photo work there. A happy year went by. Two happy years. And then, by the purest of coincidences, I heard about an editorial position—a real editorial position—at Stanley and Byrnes, a house that specialized in food books. I applied, managed to do well in the interview, and was told, after a week of tense expectation, that they’d take me on—as long as I was willing to wait the two months until one of their senior editors retired and those beneath him moved up a rung.
A wiser couple would have spent those two months saving up, looking far into the future toward a suburban home and a family. But we lacked that particular kind of wisdom, Jeannie and I, and made up for it with a sense of adventure. We knew we wanted kids, we’d had that discussion, but, product of sensible people that we were, sensible and stultified, we knew we wanted a little room to ramble first. For a while we thought about going to Europe, but Jeannie had always wanted to see the Pacific Northwest, so instead of crossing the pond we booked a flight to Seattle, rented the cheapest vehicle available, and set out, with backpacks and a small tent, for a two-week escapade.
Things went badly from the start. The day before we left I’d caught some kind of minor-league flu, and I was feverish, cranky, and sleep-deprived. The flight was rough, the hotel filled with a menagerie of loud misfits. We had an argument there—I don’t remember what about—and then, as we headed north from Seattle there was another fight, worse this time, atypically bad for us. That one I remember. We were both well-educated young people, proud of our brains, probably especially proud because we’d come from re
latively provincial folk—smart, clever, capable, well off in her case, but parents who didn’t know the difference between Franco and Frankfurt, between summertime and a sommelier. Mix in a measure of twenty-something hubris and we had, in those years, I’m slightly ashamed to admit, made gods of our own mental capabilities. In this there was a measure of competitiveness, too: we not only wanted to be smart, we wanted to be smarter. On that day the competitiveness pushed its snout between us, snarling and snapping. I was at the wheel, still a bit under the weather; Jeannie had the map open across the tops of her legs, and announced that she’d found a shortcut.
“One of your famous shortcuts,” I said.
She pressed her lips together, breathed through her nose, said she was trying to save us time and gas money and I should stop being so sarcastic. “It doesn’t become you.”
She never used that phrase. I wondered if she’d met someone at the museum, someone sophisticated and older, a savant who’d seen the great sights of Europe and who used phrases like “doesn’t become you.” I worried she was already dissatisfied with me and having an affair. Heading north on the bland interstate, I had a whole ridiculous fantasy going about the deterioration of our marriage. She was ashamed to tell people her husband was a North Dakota rube. There would be parties at the museum, cool Manhattan artists’ parties, and she wouldn’t invite me, or she’d invite me and leave me standing in a corner, Coke in hand, while she talked Eisenstein and Cartier-Bresson with older men in wrinkled linen sport coats and I looked down at the cowshit on my cheap shoes. Ridiculous, in retrospect. But this wasn’t retrospect. This was the angst and trauma of untested love, as real as the pleasure we gave each other in bed, as real as the cockroaches scuttling through the kitchen drawers, and the night sirens and morning junkies on Twenty-ninth Street.
Lunch with Buddha Page 4