Leading the way now, making the left turn, I was almost sure I had the correct road—both Jeannie and I had remembered the name. But it didn’t quite match the picture in my mind. Maybe it was only that the trees had grown taller or the road was better maintained, or that part of the hillside to our right had broken off and tumbled down in a scree of sharp-edged, charcoal-colored boulders. I went along on faith, hoping I had it right. The gravel road turned this way and that, the river, on our left side, moved in and out of view. Another moment of doubt, and then the scene finally fit my memory of it: a slight rise, a turn to the right, a place where two vehicles could pull off and park. The trees were all fir there, sixty, eighty, a hundred feet tall, with rough brown trunks and short, horizontal branches. Sunlight touched the road, but in among the firs where the river ran—Smith Brook was the official name; it would always be a river to me—there was mainly shadow. Someone, some other young couple perhaps, had made a circle of stones there, just as Jeannie and I had done decades before. They’d left a few charred sticks and ashes. Just beyond, through a mossy glade speckled with boulders, the river ran fast and cold in a series of small rapids. I felt the sound of it in my chest.
Jeannie and I had set up the tent in our furious silence, like two workers who despised their job, then we’d gone off in separate directions to gather wood. I’d started a fire, and she’d brought out the small packet of sausages in aluminum foil, two potatoes, a thermos of wine that seemed all wrong now, a celebratory note amid disaster. The bugs assaulted us. We stayed as close to the smoke and as far from each other as we could, and cooked the meat and moved the potatoes around in the coals with sticks. I drank the wine. She abstained. We ate quickly, no eye contact, and while I cleaned up she made three trips to the river for water and doused the fire.
And then there was nothing to do but crawl into the tent, kill the mosquitoes that had followed us, take off some clothes and roll them up under our heads as pillows. There was the sound of the river, and the texture of sleeping bags against our bodies, layers of papery nylon, like a colder skin. In the hour since our arrival the temperature had dropped fifteen degrees.
We hadn’t been in the tent long—Jeannie still and silent, and me worrying she’d fall asleep and we’d wake up to more misery—when another small puff of good wind blew through the dark forest of my mood and I pushed the words out. “I’m sorry. I was a jerk. An ass. Sorry.”
Silence. Count of six or eight or ten, and then she turned toward me and was roughly pushing the material away and holding herself tight against me. “I hate to fight like that. I hate it, Otto. I am a know-it-all, you’re right. And you can be a bastard, too. We’re awful.”
“We’re doing okay,” I said, “given who our parents are.”
One choked syllable of laughter. “We’re too old for that now. We have to carry our own shit now.”
“Heavy load, in my case,” I said.
She laughed and reached down and was yanking at the rest of the clothes I had on, then unzipping the length of the bag and sliding her face down along my belly the way she loved to do. There was something different about the lovemaking that night, though. It was more than the normal release a couple feels after an argument, more than the exhilaration of the great outdoors surrounding us. There was a mysterious new tenderness, and another feeling, too: a sense that we were touching something more than each other there in that cool darkness. I hope I’ve made it clear by this point that I’m not a person who puts much stock in the kookier aspects of life—my sister claimed that territory from our earliest days, and I yielded it to her without hesitation. But until my last breath I will swear that there was something wonderfully eerie about that lovemaking, a vivid sense of a larger world, as if some other spirit were breathing there between us.
Another little while and I was trying to be gentle—I remember that. Her back was on the tent fabric on the hard ground. She was crying out. And we would be linked forever by that hour.
I pulled the pickup a few feet off the road and got out. Jasper jumped down from the high cab and immediately trotted over toward Shelsa for a touch, then went sniffing the air and pissing, as his nature dictated. Shelsa seemed fascinated by the dark rocks on the far side of the road. Her mother followed her there, letting her climb and wander and explore. Anthony was looking off into the middle distance. Natasha was already crying. I felt Rinpoche watching me. There was no avoiding what we’d come there to do, but I felt, suddenly, that I couldn’t do it. There was a finality to it that matched the finality of death so perfectly that I didn’t want to experience it again.
From the narrow storage area behind the seat of the pickup I lifted the ceramic jar I’d carried across the country. Crazed, pearly white in color, with a copper handle in the center of a circular lid, it was a beautiful piece of handiwork, a gift to Jeannie from me on the occasion of Natasha’s birth. Near the very end, when we’d stopped being able to pretend there was still hope, she’d asked to be cremated—we’d had exactly one conversation about it—and asked that her ashes be spread in this place. Beyond that, she hadn’t specified. No particular time, no particular form to the service. I assumed, of course, that she’d want the kids to be there, but she hadn’t ever said as much. Some people we knew designed an entire memorial ceremony before they passed on: musical selections, favorite readings, hand-picked speakers. But Jeannie wasn’t like that. A woman of little fuss, the last thing she would have wanted was to have a big fuss made over the spreading of her ashes. We’d had a modest service in Bronxville—friends reading and remembering, a reception to follow, all of us numb. This was more personal. Our grief had thawed and matured and we were alone with it now—no kind neighbors, cousins, or ministers. No anesthesia at all.
I removed the tape from the porcelain jar and went over and stood on the spot where we’d once set up our tent. There were two dried gardenias sitting on top of the ashes—my wife had a great passion for her flower garden. Natasha immediately came and stood next to me, hooking her arm inside mine, shaking. Anthony went and sat on a boulder by the river. From the first, as I said, he’d been against having any kind of ceremony, and had fought with me about it several times. It was Cecelia who’d convinced him. In private. Dad not in the room. Here came Aunt Seese now, smiling her peaceful smile, holding her jewel of a daughter by the fingers of one hand. Rinpoche went over and said a word to Anthony, then joined us. When I started to call to my son, Rinpoche very subtly shook his head, and I stopped and let Anthony be.
“This is what Jeannie asked me—” I managed to squeeze up past the muscles of my throat. “Anybody who wants to can . . . speak. This is what she asked—”
We were standing in a ragged circle. A few bugs pestered us. A few thin rays of sunlight angled down through the boughs of the trees. We could hear the river and smell its load of freshened air. My sister said, “We love you, Jeannie. We miss you. We know you’re in a better world and that we’ll join you there and that you’re watching over us. We love you.”
“Love you,” Shelsa echoed.
We all looked at Natasha. Tears pouring down both sides of her face now, eyelids flickering, lips trembling. “Mom,” she said. “Mom. Good-bye. Love you.” She squeezed my arm hard and completely broke down, weeping in a way that frightened her cousin, and pushing her face against the sleeve of my shirt just as she’d done in childhood. Rinpoche began to hum, and then the humming transformed itself into a quiet chant in a voice an octave lower than his normal speaking voice, two octaves lower than the sound he made when he laughed. It was in his native language, I assumed. Ortyk. A bubbling tongue from the steppes of southern Siberia, as mellifluous as it was impenetrable, water running across rounded stones. It went on and on, a minute, two minutes. Shelsa moved over next to him and without missing a beat he lifted her into his arms and kept on with it, eyes closed now, head swinging slightly left to right, all traces of the caffeine rush and morning hilarity gone. At last, he held one long final note and was finished. There
was a pause. And just as I was about to speak he yelled out, “Jeannie!” very loudly, pronouncing it Jannie, as he’d always done. The name echoed and rebounded against the hillsides, and I glanced over at Anthony. He looked up, then down again, scratching a stick in the dirt between his splayed legs, miserable.
I lifted the flower petals out of the jar, squeezed them tight in my hand and tossed them into the air. I hadn’t prepared any words but what came to me was this: “My gift. My precious gift. I give you back.” And then I felt foolish and self-conscious. It didn’t help that when I went to throw the ashes into the air the breeze sent some of them back against our clothes. Tasha sobbed and sobbed. Celia had a smile frozen on her face and tears running into it. Rinpoche was bouncing his daughter in his arms, whispering something in her ear. There were ashes still in the jar. I dug my fingers in and tossed them up as best I could, and held the jar out to my daughter, who wouldn’t touch them.
And then, mercifully, it was over. There was nothing left to do. Rinpoche put Shelsa up on his shoulders, one leg to either side of his neck. Tasha mumbled something angrily about her brother and let Celia wrap an arm around her. I closed the jar and walked over to where my son sat and I put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Let’s go. It’s okay . . .”
He stood up and looked at me, half furious that I’d forced this on him, that I’d tried to break apart the smooth manly exterior he’d built up through years of football and wrestling camaraderie, the steady girlfriends, the broken this and bruised that, the triumphant survival of high school and his first college year. He was glaring into my eyes, a cargo of tears there, willed not to fall.
“One thing,” I said, though I hadn’t planned on saying it. “One thing you should know.”
“What?”
“This place. That spot where we were standing. That was the place we made Natasha, your mom and I.”
It was another in a series of things I shouldn’t have said to him, one more in a string of awkward moments. For some reason, with his departure for college the year before, with the trauma in our home since then, I’d lost the ability to speak to my son. It was nothing like the arguments we’d had in his one bad teenage year, more subtle than that, cause for great distance. I would almost have preferred the old fights.
The look he gave me then, blank but fringed with anger, seemed to say, “What am I supposed to do with that, Dad?” But instead of speaking he leaned in and gave me a hug that could snap your spine, and held on that way, neck to neck, for ten seconds, and then turned and walked fast toward the car. Grown up.
9
I think, in some way, our own grief embarrassed us. For months we’d dammed up the feelings, trying to get through the days, trying to pretend away the enormous absence in the house. And then, on that little patch of moist, buggy land, we’d been naked again, flooded with feelings, and it was almost too much. We said our good-byes quickly. There was a short discussion about Jasper: I thought it might be easier on him to travel the road with Rinpoche and me rather than go back to Seattle and—if the Amtrak authorities consented—get packed up again for the train ride east. But Natasha, speaking on her cousin’s behalf, wouldn’t hear of it. “No way, Dad. Just no way,” she said, and none of us wanted a battle then.
So she and Anthony and Celia and Shelsa headed down the road, throwing up a cloud of dust in front of Rinpoche and me. They took a right turn onto the highway. Anthony tooted twice and accelerated, and I watched him go all the way up the long hill and over the top, watched until they were out of sight. Rinpoche and I went straight across the two climbing lanes into a sort of island cutout, turned left, and began the long descent of the Cascades’ eastern slope in the company of a collection of cyclists who’d been driven to the ski area at the top of the pass and were joyfully gliding down.
At first, besides the cyclists and trees, there wasn’t much of interest along the sides of this road. We were riding with the triangular windows open and the main ones partly lowered; the temperature seemed to be climbing a degree a minute, and I kept one eye on the gauge, expecting the worst. A broad, slow-moving river appeared to our right, spotted with islands of deadfall, oblong and irregular, that resembled poorly constructed beaver dams. Another mile, and the water went crashing over a long rapids and then spilled across the top of a concrete dam.
“What is?” my companion asked, pointing. I could feel a sadness radiating from him, and I wondered if leaving his daughter and wife to make a five-or-six-day trip with his bereaved brother-in-law was something he’d been coerced into doing. I hadn’t been crazy about the idea myself, but at least I stood to learn something from him. What could he get from me? More weight and worry? Bits of info on the American scene? I told myself I’d at least try to be a decent friend.
I explained the way dams worked, and he seemed suddenly fascinated, as if he’d never before encountered the concept. This was the Rinpoche I knew, a man of quick enthusiasms where they were least expected. On our previous road trip, six days from New Jersey to North Dakota, he had formed a fascination with tenpin bowling, miniature golf, casino gambling and Hershey’s Kisses. What would it be this time? Dams? Corn dogs? Rodeos?
“I like this idea wery much,” he said, when I’d finished my explanation. “All the water blocked up and then from it we get the power.”
It was some kind of spiritual metaphor for him, I supposed, but I didn’t want to go there just then. We talked for a while about windmills and solar panels, and then about the recent oil boom that had changed the North Dakotan landscape. Most of the action was to the north and west of where I’d grown up, and where Rinpoche and Cecelia now ran their retreat center. The world there had changed: jobs, oil rigs, bigger trucks; in Williston not enough housing for the newly arrived workers, traffic jams, an atmosphere of roughness in the bars and stores. The retreat center—my brother-in-law oversaw four more of them in Europe, but he’d delegated most of that work now—was as untouched by the energy boom as it was by everything else that went on in the ordinary world. Celia and Rinpoche inhabited a kind of sacred vacuum, almost entirely insulated from the life around them (though Celia said her husband had made friends with the local farmers and was learning about the growing of durum wheat and soybeans). It wasn’t that he showed no interest in ordinary life; it was more that the ratio was flipped. I was immersed in commuter train schedules and peevish authors, car insurance bills (with two young drivers!) and tuition payments, the mechanic, the landscaper, the presidential race . . . and I made a little time each day for meditation and spiritual reading. Rinpoche meditated at least four hours every day, and spent time teaching, giving talks, writing books on the interior life, and rereading the sacred volumes left by other teachers in his lineage. And he made a little time each day for life’s regular old activities: chatting with the farmer who leased our acreage, digging in the garden, watching two minutes of the news, taking walks with his wife. Over the years of our acquaintance I had come to see that their understanding of “real” was fundamentally different from mine and Jeannie’s. It was more than a matter of emphasis. A kind of continental divide separated us: their thoughts started out close to mine—we loved our children, cared for our homes and bodies—then ran down different slopes, to other seas. Their definition of reality—of what could happen, and what could not—was, in places, as different from ours as a chocolate chip from a caper.
As I think I mentioned, because one of the effects of bereavement is a certain inability to perform mundane tasks with any efficiency, I’d allowed my sister to make the arrangements for the first two days of our trip. It was, as Anthony noted, a risk. Before leaving home I’d worried that Cecelia would put us up in a youth hostel in West Seattle someplace, that Anthony and Natasha and I would end up sleeping in bunks, making our own breakfast from a plastic bag of old granola and a carton of soy milk. But my sister, it turned out, knew me well, and she was nothing if not kind, and so she’d set us up in Jarvis’s B and B, a place of cairns, good coffee, and a he
ated pool. A compromise, in other words. She’d even found lodging for Rinpoche and me for this, our second night. It went by the strange name Cave B Inn, just outside the central Washington town of Quincy. The “inn” part of this appealed to me, I have to say. Appealed to me as much as the “cave” part did not. I pictured myself, tired from the emotional strain and long drive and from having been bounced around in the old pickup, pulling up to the entrance of a funky motel with stone walls and no windows. It wouldn’t even be Cave A, where the better-heeled adventurers slept. It was Cave B. Hard class. Steerage. You rode an old coal car down into darkness; you went to sleep wrapped in a musty blanket.
I decided not to think about it.
Strangely enough, as we went down and down into the heat and the approaches to the town of Leavenworth, Washington, I discovered that the ceremony had skimmed a layer of sadness from my thoughts. It wasn’t like I’d left Jeannie behind there on Smith Brook Road. There would be no leaving her behind. There would be no “closure”—a word I’d come to despise—no sudden relief from the awfulness of watching her die, not for me. At the same time, though, if I am to be completely honest, I have to say that the ceremony lifted part of the weight off my chest, ushered me into a new stage. It may have been the spreading of her ashes, or it may have been the presence of the man beside me, known around the world as a spiritual master but known to me as the guy who’d been nuts enough to marry my sister. Rinpoche went through his days surrounded by an eerie peacefulness, a cocoon of calm. I sometimes wondered if anything could hurt or worry him.
Leavenworth—it was Celia who suggested we stop there for lunch—turned out to be a place of amiable oddness. I began to suspect as much as we entered the town, driving past a large sign with WILKOMMEN written on it. German, as far as I knew, had not suddenly been voted the native tongue of central Washington State. Soon we pulled into the commercial district—temperature into the nineties at this point—and were surrounded by buildings in the Black Forest Chalet style, with the cutout porch railings, the colorful facades, the scores of hanging plants. Taking an open curbside spot, I noticed that the street signs said things like Park Strasse and Alpensee Strasse. I heard music from a bandstand and half expected to see Bavarians in lederhosen marching down the middle of the avenue blowing mountain flutes and singing “Edelweiss.”
Lunch with Buddha Page 6