My sister, who has no sense of irony whatsoever, must have done a bit of research on Leavenworth, Washington. It must have seemed somehow appropriate to her that, given our German ancestry, the first post-ceremony meal I should have with her husband would be in this replica of a Bavarian village. Retired couples and vacationing families strolled past shops selling puzzles and fudge, and milled near motels with names like Der Ritterhof Motor Inn and Bavarian Ritz. In some other mood it might have sickened me. As much pleasure as they offer the traveling masses, I’m not a huge fan of Las Vegas’s fake Venices or the tidy Disney towns of central Florida. I like the real, the tattered, the grit and rust of Manhattan, the docks of Bridgeport, the factories of Fall River, the hot old tobacco towns off I-95 in North Carolina with their brick courthouses and boarded-up furniture mills.
But Leavenworth had a sense of humor about itself, or it least it seemed so to me on that afternoon. I was hungry, besides, and there appeared to be an abundance of eating places. I should elaborate on something I said earlier and admit here again that I have a problem with food. The problem consists a) in my liking it too much, and b) in a certain adventurism nurtured by the white-bread-and-potato cuisine of the Dakota prairie and brought to ripeness by years as an editor of food books, in a part of the world unmatched in the variety of its culinary offerings. I was fussy, I knew that, perhaps even a bit of a snob. But most of us have our fussy spots, our territories of indulgence, don’t we? Coffee, wine, an obsession with watching sports or with travel, cars, or clothing, a passion for hiking, an addiction to sex, work, cocaine, shopping, talking? Aren’t we all creatures of quirk and fetish? To me, eating well had always seemed a benign addiction. I was no glutton. I exercised, tried not to overdo. That summer I’d taken to jogging with Anthony on weekend mornings. But I loved good food, loved a varied diet, and I had the notion, driving past the WILKOMMEN sign, that a tasty bratwurst and a stein of lager would go a good distance toward softening the morning’s rough edges.
Rinpoche seemed not to notice that we’d stepped out of the pickup and into Kaiser Wilhelm II’s back yard. He could be that way. Focused on some other dimension as he so often was, some other precinct of reality, the surfaces of the modern world could be lost on him completely. He had not yet lived long enough in America, or seen enough of our land, to be able to tell, say, that he was driving through a rich neighborhood or a poor one; he had no radar for class, almost none for race or ethnicity. As far as he was concerned, with its dirndl-wearing waitress, German beer flags, and paintings of Rhine castles on the walls, Café Christa, the second-floor restaurant to which I introduced him in Leavenworth, might as well have been a Five Guys Burgers and Fries off any interstate anywhere from Baton Rouge to Berkeley.
The hostess led us to a table. I took my place there, staring out the window at a make-believe maypole and a man on the bandstand playing the accordion and singing Johnny Cash. In my peripheral vision I could see that Rinpoche was noiselessly mouthing a prayer. The waitress approached, a happy creature named Monica with a nice smile, and an outfit of pale blue stringed bodice and flats appropriate to some fantastical Germany of another era. Bratwurst sandwich and a mug of darkish beer for me; salad and water for Rinpoche. She thanked us, gathered the menus, and did not spend one extra second eyeballing my companion’s robe. Maybe she thought he was being forced to dress up for his job, too; maybe there was a Tibetan or Mongolian festival on the next block, near the corner of Parkstrasse and Playgroundstrasse, and he was taking a break for lunch.
“Celia found us a hotel for the night,” I said. “An inn, actually. It’s another couple hours down the road.”
Rinpoche looked at me and nodded. No, that’s not correct: he wasn’t looking at me then; he was looking through me. I was hungry, ready for the soothing ritual of consuming food, replaying the spreading of ashes in my mind’s eye, worrying, already, about the kids, trying to make a little small talk to ease the moment . . . and he was already beyond that, or below it, slicing through the niceties with his gold-flecked eyes. “A little bit maybe,” he said, “Otto’s sister make him angry.”
“Not at all.”
Another nod, two skeptical downward beats. Smile muscles flexing around the eyes, nothing more. “Little bit, maybe,” he said.
“Anger’s not the right word.”
“Piss-ed,” he said, trying out his slang.
“Not exactly, no. She pushes my buttons, that’s all. Always has. The food rules—everything organic or local or good for you. The idea that everything, every decision, down to what kind of toilet paper to put in the bathroom, everything has to answer to some god of environmental guilt. The idea that we can’t make the smallest mark on the earth or it will be ruined forever. The belief that one should always be happy, smiling, upbeat, unruffled. The belief in angels and helping spirits, voices from the beyond. Hard for me, that’s all. I’m a practical guy, ordinary. I take what the world gives.”
Rinpoche said, “Ah,” and smiled.
“All right,” I admitted under his steady gaze. “A little bit pissed. Now especially. It’s a hard day for me, for us. A hard time. But I love her, you know that.”
Monica brought the water and salad and beer and Rinpoche thanked her. He had the habit—open to misinterpretation in these parts—of making physical contact with the serving people. Man, woman, old, young, attractive or not, Dunkin’ Donuts, Ruth’s Chris Steak House, it didn’t matter. He thanked them, he touched a hand or shoulder, held on to a finger and squeezed. Some of them liked it and some of them did not. Monica melted, smiled, walked away.
“What is this ‘buttons’?” he asked.
“It’s an American expression. If you have, well, a doorbell, for example, you push the button and you get an immediate response. An elevator. A light switch. The expression refers to things people do that get a response from you, almost always a negative response. A child refuses to go to bed, for example, and he pushes your buttons. You get frustrated, upset. You might raise your voice.”
“Piss-ed you on, yes?”
“Off. Pisses you off. Yes. Or just irritates or annoys.”
“What does the buttons come from?”
“What do you mean?”
“Where is it, this buttons?”
“It’s a reflex. Certain things irritate certain people, that’s all. Everyone—“Everyone has them, I’d started to say. But in Rinpoche’s case I wasn’t so sure. More than six years I’d known him, and if there were buttons, I’d never seen them pushed. Nothing about my sister seemed to particularly irritate him. It was irritating.
“What from?” he persisted.
As I was pondering this question the bratwurst sandwich arrived, accompanied by a scoop of dryish potato salad and a very nice pickle. I had a bite before answering, a swig of beer. “Who knows? From childhood, maybe. Some people like beer and some like wine, and some people don’t like either. Certain kinds of behavior irritate certain people, that’s all.”
He nodded and crunched lettuce, absorbing this lesson in the ways of the non-monkish world. “Buttons wery important, these buttons,” he said after a minute.
“Not really. One learns to live with things. A burp of disagreement now and then, that’s all. A passing annoyance.”
“’Life is unsatisfaction’, Buddha said.”
“I thought he said, ‘Life is suffering’.”
“No, no. That is a bad translation. In Ortyk it is zhesta fallu nas. ‘Nas’, it means ‘unsatisfaction,’ not ‘suffering.’”
“Dis-satisfaction, we say.”
“Same thing. Always in life it is. You have a dissatisfaction with your sister. You want that she should be not how she is. Should be like you want her to be.”
“Not so much that, but—”
“You want life to be that way, how you want it. Small and big things. You want that Jeannie shouldn’t die.”
“Of course I want that she shouldn’t die! Wouldn’t you want that for someone you love? The mother
of your kids? Your friend, your partner? What, I’m supposed to not want that?”
“Of course,” he said. “Me and you, same thing.”
Monica swung by with a worried look on her face. “Everything okay?”
“Perfect,” I said. And then, when she was gone, to Rinpoche with a bit of an edge in my voice, “You don’t have buttons?”
“Million buttons,” he said.
“Then how come I’ve never seen them? Seese doesn’t irritate you in the least. Shelsa yells and fusses, you laugh. We get caught in traffic, you breathe. You’re buttonless. Perpetually satisfied.”
He laughed again. “The buttons show you the line where you stop,” he said.
“I was talking about you.”
“Us. Buttons show us, Otto. Patient, patient, good, good, calm, calm, and then,” he chopped his hand down on the table like a karate teacher. The silverware jumped. “Button! Not what we want to be. Hah!”
“Very funny.”
He shook his head. “Sometimes wery sad. But important. It’s the place to work for you, for me. You feel the buttons and you work there.”
“How?”
“First, you only look. You see. You see wery deep into the buttons and you maybe change a little. Cecelia has a friend who is, how you say, doesn’t see?”
“Blind.”
“Who is blind. Maybe you’ll meet her soon. What happens to her, even the blind, she always says ‘yes.’”
“I don’t want to always say yes. To Jeannie’s death, for one huge example. Who would want to say yes to that? Who would want to be blind?”
“Nobody,” he said, as if agreeing with me. “I don’t want. You don’t. Nobody.”
“Exactly my point.”
“Me, too, the same,” he said.
I had a long drink of the beer. He was pushing my buttons, the good monk. Pushing them to the point where I had stopped really hearing what he was trying to say. Chewing bratwurst with a vengeance, sipping beer like it was a cure-all, I had a few moments of wishing I’d spent two days in Seattle—at the art deco Maxwell Hotel, for example, a favorite spot I’d recommended to Seese and the kids. Touring the islands perhaps, wading in the sea, then flying back to the comfort of my house. The sanity of the crossword puzzle, the company of my old dog.
“Beer good?” he asked.
“Not bad. Want a sip?”
He surprised me by taking the glass into one thick hand and raising it to his lips. I’d never known him to drink, or, before this trip, to use caffeine. He and Cecelia were the purest of souls in that way. He took a small taste and made a face as if he’d sampled month-old rainwater from a puddle on the porch. “Ooh.”
“On the bitter side. I like it that way.”
“Bubbles from metal,” he said.
“You’re dissatisfied. You wish it tasted differently.”
He laughed approvingly and pointed at me. “Good. Otto, my friend, my brother-and-law, is working in the buttons place now.”
“Thank you for the lesson.”
“You’re welcome. What is this music in the window?”
“Country. The late, great Johnny Cash. A famous singer. He went to prison, also, like you.”
“Now died?”
“Yes, a few years ago. This is his music.”
“Little bit sad,” Rinpoche said.
“Yes.”
“But it makes you feel happy.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
He turned down the corners of his lips and nodded in time to the beat, as if Johnny Cash, too, had left his music as confirmation of some profound spiritual lesson. Yes, there was sadness—prison, death, heartbreak, addiction. Yes, of course. Let me make of it good music.
My brother-in-law took a piece of the rye bread and wiped the salad bowl with it, picking up the oil and vinegar and two small strips of onion and lettuce there, wasting absolutely nothing. “I think,” he said, “in my next book I’ll write about this buttons place. What you do there. How you work.”
“You’ll sell millions.”
“I need a good editor now,” he said, looking up at me with his head still tilted down. “Want a job?”
“I already have a job, but thanks.”
“Maybe, sure,” he said, without much conviction. He’d suggested, more than once, that I was in the wrong profession. Karmically out of place in this world.
“I’ll help you out with it if you want, though.”
“Thank you, my friend,” he said, and we ordered herbal tea and coffee and sat there for a while—getting used to each other again, it seemed to me. Four or five or six days we were going to spend on the road together; there was no fixed plan. It might seem a strange way to use one’s vacation time—a road trip with an eccentric monk—but I was already fingering my hidden parcel of hope then. I had long ago gingerly taken hold of the idea that my brother-in-law knew something I didn’t know, about the living of life, and about dying. It was an intangible something, of course. Unlike, say, the ability to play the piano or hammer a nail, his particular skill was invisible, vaporous, the kind of thing that made itself known only subtly, periodically, in certain kinds of moments. Those moments had included, for me, his presence at my dying wife’s bedside. There was something magnificent in his way of being with her, an unruffled straightforwardness combined with the deepest compassion, a facing of the situation head-on, without pity or discomfort or the smallest false note. He’d run a center for the dying somewhere in Italy. He knew life at a level I did not; I’d admitted that long ago. I wanted him to teach me.
Before we left Cafe Christa, Monica told us that Leavenworth had been a thriving town a hundred years earlier, but when the rail depot moved to Wenatchee and things changed in the lumber industry the town had fallen into the dark hole that’s the resting place of so many other American communities. The world of commerce evolves so quickly, and with such little regard for the human beings involved, that whole cities—take Detroit, take Gary, take the old mill towns of New England—go into a decline from which it seems they’ll never be rescued. It was like that with Leavenworth, she said, until some enterprising genius came up with the idea of making it into a replica of a Bavarian village. I could imagine the scene. People, he must have argued, would always look for a fun place to go on vacation. They wanted exotic without having to fly ten hours. So what about, say, authentic German sights, sounds, and tastes without having to board an airplane and learn the future tense of “to be blond”? I could picture the discussion around some wooden conference table in the early sixties, the mockery and disbelief, the genius’s persistence, one or two men with money eventually being swayed. The genius had been right—Leavenworth not only came back to life, it blossomed and bore fruit. He’d pushed them out of their zone of assumption.
I paid for lunch, thanking the kindly Monica twice. We stopped for a moment in a small bookstore near where we’d left the pickup, then headed out, past the willows in the park and the fellow playing Johnny Cash and Die Musik Box Store. Across the Wenatchee River we went, and back into the American Northwest.
Lunch at Café Christa
Leavenworth, Washington
10
There, beyond the dry backside of the Cascades, the landscape underwent a sudden change. In place of fir-coated slopes, we were now driving our grumbling old Uma past dry hills the color of a peanut shell, with well-irrigated apple and pear orchards carpeting the valleys. There was a sign for a winery, a few poor homes and poorer-looking trailers, an advertisement for roller derby. Rinpoche lolled his head to one side and dozed, and I turned on the radio, quietly, and found a sermon in progress. Listening to such shows was another odd hobby of mine. I indulged on long drives, mostly, and only for brief stretches, but I heard some disturbing and unforgettable things.
“God,” this speaker was announcing to the prairies of eastern Washington, “has no intention of spending eternity with a loser.” I pondered this during a commercial break. I remembered reading in parts of t
he Bible of my youth that God rewarded the righteous with herds of oxen and barns full of grain, with multitudes of children and servants and all good things. We were coming back to that, it seemed to me, at least in some circles. Wealth had become, again, a sign of being favored by the Lord. And it didn’t seem to matter one iota how the wealth had been gained. No matter if the mansions I saw now atop the dry hills just east of Monitor belonged to people who worked someone else to the bone for minimum wage or less. They were prosperous. Non-losers. Smiled upon by the Great Winner above. It was akin to the malevolent creed that equated illness with moral decay, that blamed the sick.
But the rest of the sermon was about character and doing good deeds, and it made some sense to me. “A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit,” the voice on the radio intoned. Okay. But very, very few of the people I knew warranted the label “corrupt.” There were no thieves that we knew of among our circle of friends, relatives and co-workers, no rapists, murderers, or big-time cheats. Surely Jeannie and I and Natasha and Anthony had lived our lives according to the ancient Judeo-Christian idea of treating others the way we ourselves wished to be treated. For most of my life I’d taken a kind of refuge in that, neither a loser nor a grievous sinner. I’d been content with decency, with thoughtful parenthood and volunteering, with writing checks to charities and commiserating with disconsolate friends. I was a believer, but not a churchgoer. An upstanding, upper-middle-class man who tutored poor African-American kids once a week and went to his daughter’s soccer matches and his son’s football games, who didn’t cheat on his wife or his taxes and put in an honest day’s work.
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