And then I met Volya Rinpoche, Celia’s boyfriend at the time, a chunky, sort-of Russian, sort-of Buddhist who looked like he hailed from Tibet or Nepal and who wrote books and ran retreat centers and meditated four hours a day. And he had tipped over the applecart of my self-satisfaction. Decency, goodness, and charity—all fine and well, he seemed to say without actually saying it. Not hurting others—wery good, Otto! But that, for him, was merely a platform. A flat place on the rocky cliffs, high above the sea in Acapulco. You couldn’t stand there all day admiring your tan and quadriceps. You had to dive off into some terrifying interior world of meditation, prayer, and deep awareness. You had to step off that comfortable perch and fly and splash down into the workings of your mind, your “thought patterns” or “thought stream,” as he put it in his books. I fought it, naturally. Of course I fought it. Surrounded as I was by millions of ordinary, uncorrupt peers who went to church or synagogue once a week, or eschewed belief altogether and still lived the upright life, I saw no reason to make that dive. For a long time I had seen no reason to make it.
I turned off the radio and thought about my kids, my wife, the larger questions. It seemed to me that almost all of us took the simple fact of our existence completely for granted—that is, until the expiration date appeared. We grew up, looked around to see how others were dealing with this strange predicament, and made our stand in what were mostly unoriginal ways. Our style of living was a wholesome one—safe, pleasurable, marked by duty and love. But maybe it could also be an anesthetic, and maybe it took a huge jolt of pain in order to reach through that cushion and move us.
Rinpoche stirred and burped. I guided the rumbling pickup through the edge of the busy little town of Wenatchee, where some of the signs were in Spanish and where I saw my first cowboy hat, the West’s signature. There was a huge thin cross on top of one of the hills there—ten stories tall, it must have been. What did it really mean? What did the world’s two billion Christians read into it? What would Jesus have said, really, if he could see the way we spent our time now, the mansions and wars, the Super PACs, hungry kids, and hundred-million-dollar athletes? What would Buddha do about capital punishment? Before meeting Rinpoche I’d gone forty-some years without asking questions like that on anything other than the most superficial level.
Vast sweeps of ochre hillsides now, another planet. Here, too, tongues of green licked along the bases of the brown hills. Rinpoche awoke in time to catch sight of a sign for a golf course. What was the most important difference, he wanted to know, between the miniature version he so enjoyed and golf on the big course?
It’s like the difference between my idea of the spiritual before I met you, I wanted to say, and my idea of it now. One is safe, one a minefield of failure and frustration, with perhaps the potential for a larger joy. But I took refuge in an ordinary explanation instead. More clubs, I told him. Bigger swings. Shoes in two colors and electric carts and cursing.
Not far beyond the golf course we passed another dam—more excitement—and a stretch of striking vistas: great humps of toasted earth everywhere. A vineyard, and then, far below us to the right, the Columbia River cutting its path like a twelve-hundred-mile, blue-gray snake.
As we drove into Quincy we saw windmills on a ridge, a hundred of them or more. There were huge fruit warehouses and, as if for the edification of curious travelers, fields with signs announcing the crops: BEANS. ALFALFA. SPEARMINT. PEPPERMINT. FIELD CORN. WHEAT. I tried to imagine my father and mother putting such things by the side of the roads that bounded their property. They would have thought it absurd, a waste of energy. People, real people, were just supposed to know.
We turned onto Baseline Road, past thirty-foot-high stacks of hay bales covered with plastic tarpaulins, the fields baking under an enormous sky with fluffy clouds on display. Another right, and there it was, a sign for Cave B, my sister’s idea of fine lodging. I girded myself and said a quiet prayer for patience.
11
The prayer, it would turn out, wasn’t needed. You reached the office of the Cave B Inn and Spa via a long entrance road with grapevines growing on either side. At the end of this promenade stood a modern-looking two-story building, all glass and stone and curved roofs. Just beyond it the land descended gradually in a scrub-brush-spotted savannah that stretched a mile or more to the river. On the opposite bank stood an intricate massif of basalt cliffs, miles of them, rising hundreds of feet from the water’s edge. From our vantage point you could see past the tops of these cliffs to an enormous, parched, folded, sage-covered plain that rose and rose, gently, as far as the eye could see. “Looks,” Rinpoche said after a moment of staring, “like my home.”
It may have looked like southernmost Siberia, that enclave of Buddhism in communism’s old frozen heart, but the building where we checked in was thoroughly American and newly made, reminiscent of a ski lodge. Beside the pretty young woman at the desk stood a bowl of cherries. I sampled, she checked her register. They were expecting us, the welcome was warm, all was well . . . until she pronounced this sentence: “We have you booked in two of our yurts for one night, Mr. Ringling.”
I thought she was kidding. Cecelia must have conspired with the young woman in order to play a practical joke on her brother. “Yurts?” I said, playing along.
Smiling all the while, the woman led us across the lodge’s copious main room to a set of high windows that took full advantage of the view. She gestured to her left. And there they were, white and purple round-topped tents baking in the sun. Air-conditioned, I assumed, but still baking in the sun. I did not want to stay in a yurt. I found the word to have an ugly sound, like “blog” or “pus” or “puberty.” I had visions of waking with a sore back after a night of imagining wild horses neighing on the Mongolian steppe. I am not, I wanted to tell her, a yurt-type person. Not many New Yorkers are. My sister is a yurt-type person. No doubt my companion here is yurt-friendly, but my yurtish days are behind me, thank you. Can you recommend a nearby hotel?
But, not wanting to offend, I held my tongue.
“I think you’ll really like them,” she said.
“They look . . . cozy. But I have some spinal issues and—”
Behind us, Rinpoche was eating from the bowl, one cherry after the next, storing the pits in his left cheek, paying no attention. Even the word “yurt” hadn’t roused him.
“Oh, they’re quite luxurious inside, you’ll see.”
“I’m sure they are, but . . . are there other accommodations?”
“The cliff-houses,” she said, smiling.
Those must be the caves, then. And so here was our choice: a Mongolian tent or a cave in the cliffside. Lying in the luxurious yurt fighting off dreams of Genghis Khan, or turning and tossing on bare stone. My sister would consider both options charming, authentic, in keeping with the tough-bodied original inhabitants of this sacred land.
But the clerk was pointing again, and the structures she indicated were not set into the cliff at all but perched on the crest of their land. One of them half faced us. I could see window-walls looking out on the view. I thought I spotted actual furniture inside.
“I think my brother-in-law and I would be more comfortable in the cliffs,” I told her. “He comes, in fact, from a cliff-dwelling people. Are they two-bedrooms or one?”
She returned to the desk to check availability, and I changed the purpose of my prayers. Kind Lord, may I sleep in a cliffhouse tonight.
A moment. A hesitation. The nicely sculpted, uplifted face, the perfect smile that came, perhaps, from three years of orthodontia (I sympathized with her parents): a cliff house was available! And she didn’t think her manager would mind her giving it to us at the same rate as the two yurts.
It didn’t take me long, approximately three seconds, to close the deal. According to the pamphlet she handed us with our keys, Cave B had a spa, a wine-tasting room, and an outdoor swimming pool that looked down on the view. That news, that moment, was the beginning of something lifting up
and away from me. I’m not saying the luxury of the place lessened my sorrow; this was a different weight, the weight of my feelings about my sister. In a nutshell, I had always loved Celia without admiring her worldview. The mocking interior voice I’d cultivated as a teenager had abated over the past few years, but only partly. We were different. We would always be different. Given the opportunity, she would always book me into a yurt, and given the opportunity, I would always upgrade to the luxurious cliff house.
But—and this was a momentous but for us—at that moment I saw that she had started to make a small change in my direction. Yes, she’d booked me into a yurt, but it was a luxurious yurt, and, as foolish as that may sound to someone outside our family, it was to become a landmark for me. There was hope for us to alter our relationship. I would eat her sawdust bread the next time I visited. I would try as hard as I possibly could not to mock her in my mind. I would remember her many kindnesses to my wife and my children. Remember them, really. Keep them always in view.
Carried along on this new vow, I drove the pickup the few hundred yards downhill, parked near Cliffhouse #11, and unlocked the door. Miraculous. Two big bedrooms separated by a living room with leather couch and stone fireplace, TV, gorgeous old desk. One bath with Italian tile and glass shower. Floor-to-ceiling windows facing out on a small patio and the world-class vista. It was a place where I could happily have served a life sentence.
Rinpoche, of course, did not appear to notice, or to care. Comfort seemed not to matter to him. A bed, a bathroom, a little something to eat—that was all he asked for. The size of the bed, the firmness of the mattress and pillows, thread count, color, tile or linoleum, strong shower or weak, a bowl of cherries or a five-course gourmet dinner—it was literally all the same to him, and for me it was the difference between deep relaxation and the nagging little voice of . . . dissatisfaction. I was spoiled, to use a word I dislike. I admit that. Standing at the window, smiling, soaking up the view, I wondered how that had happened. Gradually at first, and then suddenly, as Hemingway had written about a character’s bankruptcy. Perhaps it had something to do with age. In our twenties, Jeannie and I had been perfectly happy to camp, perfectly satisfied with our third-floor Chelsea walkup, where the mattress sagged, the shower on full blast could barely put out a candle, and our idea of a fancy night out was dinner at the four-dollar Indian buffet on Ninth Avenue. Those years had been a kind of Garden of Eden for us. And then came the better jobs, the promotions, the house in Bronxville where our neighbors all had granite countertops and gave dinner parties with good wine. The thirties, the forties, the hard work of child rearing; our bodies changing beneath us like disloyal friends—an ache, a strain, minor surgery, expensive and unavoidable dental work, trouble digesting certain foods. It began to seem to us—to me, at least—that we were owed a comfortable life. After all, everyone in our circle of friends stayed in four-or five-star hotels when traveling and drove cars that were new or almost new. Having less than that was somehow wrong, the sign of a loser, someone disliked by God . . . even as we were acutely aware of the poverty and suffering that lay twenty minutes south of us on the train. How had that happened?
Rinpoche set his oversized cloth handbag on his bed. I suggested a swim. He enthusiastically agreed. We changed in our separate spaces and when he reappeared I saw that he had not yet been advised to upgrade from his too-small Speedo. Perhaps my sister never saw him in it; he saved it for road trips with Otto. Maybe she saw him in it and liked it. For my part, I hoped he’d cover up with the customary maroon robe, but the Cave B seemed to have brought out the wild man in him. There were pink flip-flops, a new wardrobe addition; the robe stayed in his room. We closed the heavy wooden door and set off along the path.
Side by side we went, brushed by grape leaves and greeted along the way by a couple with wet hair. The water, they said, was “properly refreshing.” Aha! We went through the gate, Rinpoche and I, and staked out two of the metal chaises. The pool was nowhere over my head, lined with stone, inviting; our gaze was drawn down the dry slope to the river, and then out to the massifs beyond. Two young couples, one white, one black, each with a single son, lounged in the shaded area, all eyes on the wide fellow in the tiny suit and pink flip-flops. I saw glossy magazines, gold jewelry, what appeared to be a champagne bottle upside-down in an ice bucket. I splashed in and swam a lap, looked up. There was my friend doing his Skovorodian yoga, a sequence of bizarre postures—one leg and then the other held straight out in front of him for the count of thirty, both arms wrapped around his head as if he were twisting it off, a deep squat, a leap and grunt, a tiptoe stance with fists in armpits. I’d seen it before, exactly once, on a sandy beach in northern Minnesota, but it was an unforgettable display, equal parts stunning flexibility, surprising strength, and clownish theater. I swam another lap and tried to pretend he was traveling alone. It didn’t work. We’d been seen together. Another lap, the children laughing now and being shushed, the men turning away, the women enchanted. At last it was over. Rinpoche made a whoop and, ignoring the NO DIVING notices, catapulted himself headfirst into the water, legs splayed, arms working in air before the splash, then swam the length of the pool and back again without taking a breath. I could do nothing but watch. When he surfaced, chest heaving, shaved head glistening in the sun, he stood triumphantly at one end of the pool, taking in the children’s faces as though they’d been encouraging him the whole time, then searching out mine. “Fun, Otto, is swimming!” he yelled, rather loudly. “Fun!”
There was no disputing it.
Cave B Inn and Winery
Quincy, Washington
12
After our swim, Rinpoche retired for meditation and I enjoyed a half hour of wine tasting and a stroll along the grounds. Staked into the dry soil here and there were small signs warning of snakes, but I saw nothing more dangerous than a startled ring-necked killdeer protecting her nest. A perusal of the dining situation and the inn’s Panorama Restaurant turned up news of a five-course prix fixe dinner for $69, more if you chose the matched wines. The view, the cliffhouse, the exercise, my new good feelings about Cecelia, the promise of a fine meal, a text from Natasha saying they were safely back in Seattle and about to take Shelsa downstairs for the Maxwell’s superb pizza—it felt only proper to give thanks, so I returned to #11, sat with a pillow behind my back on the leather couch, and tried to calm my mind in the manner the good monk had shown me.
Jeannie’s death—so painful and premature—had sent her spirit spinning into some other dimension of the universe, and had broken open a dam in what Rinpoche called the “thought-stream” of my mind. Six years of fairly regular practice, and I’d been able, not to stop that stream—that wasn’t the point—but to slow it down, to modulate it. Exactly, it occurred to me then, the way an actual dam modulated a river. When I needed to think quickly and in complex fashion, I could. But when I needed a bit of rest, on a long flight or a sleepless hour, say, I could step into a quiet interior room for a stretch of time and find peace.
That peaceful room had been flooded now. Thoughts, all kinds of thoughts, tumbled and rushed in a tumultuous interior whitewater, and I wondered if even a spiritual master of a brother-in-law would ever be able to build another dam among the ruins.
Still, I sat there and tried. There was the usual run of thoughts—the kids, the upcoming meal, the water in my left ear, the ceremony at Smith Brook, Jeannie, Cecelia, Jeannie, the scene at the pool, Jeannie, Anthony, Natasha, work. Jeannie. Once she’d really started to suffer I seemed to lose completely the ability to put a space between those thoughts, to sink down into the edge of the world Rinpoche always inhabited. I’d been doing so well for a while. I’d even gotten to the point where meditation was invigorating, a respite from the run of mental frenzy (no wonder Rinpoche had so much energy). Now it was as if sadness and worry were the default setting. Sadness, worry, a drop of bitterness, a constant run of words and images. My friends hadn’t lost their wives. Their children hadn’t lost
their mothers. And what to do about the huge empty house? And how would the kids make out at school with no mother to speak to? And Jeannie’s face at the end. And her last word. And would there ever be lovemaking again in my life. And the guilt about even thinking that. And Jeannie again, working in her flower garden when she was well. And then, at last, one tiny stretch of quiet, the smallest glint of peace and mindfulness, a settling, a stillness. Enough.
Time to eat.
Rinpoche had told me he wouldn’t be having dinner that night—a fairly common occurrence—so I made a reservation for one and changed into long pants and a dress shirt, and strolled past the grapevines and toward my evening meal. The dining room occupied half the main building and offered the same otherworldly views out over the Columbia River Gorge. It was strange: before Jeannie left this world I’d been perfectly happy to eat alone in a restaurant. When I traveled to a book show, when she and the kids were away and I went out for dinner in Bronxville, when—a rainy day tradition—I stopped at the Comfort Diner on East Forty-Fifth for their ricotta pancakes and real maple syrup before going on to the office, I was perfectly satisfied to have only a plate of food for company, and never felt awkward about holding up one finger when the hostess asked how many in the party.
Now all that had changed. Now, sitting alone in a restaurant felt like a mark of failure, a reminder of my widowerhood, a shameful act. I sensed that there were eyes on me, wondering what was the problem. Was he impossible to live with? Had he abandoned wife and family for a younger woman and been jilted and thrown out and was left now to lick his wounds and eat alone? Was he a gay man without a partner?
In any case, the anticipation of a solitary feast wasn’t the pure joy it had once been. I gave the hostess—Latina, young, pleasant—my name and watched her face for signs of pity. She led me across the room. Just as we reached my chair a couple at the adjacent table looked up and smiled and the man said, “Alone? Why don’t you join us?”
Lunch with Buddha Page 8