Breakfast With Buddha (8 page)

“You think?”

“He’s hard to get to know. Though Seese seems to have gotten to know him quickly enough. She wants to give him her half of the property. To start an ashram or something. About that, I am not pleased.”

There was an audible sigh on the other end.

“Kids okay?”

“Tasha’s fine. Anthony hurt his elbow at the football try-outs and is up in his room with a bag of ice. Jasper keeps going upstairs to see where you are, then out into the garage, then into the bushes near the stream.”

“Give him some of my old T-shirts to sniff.”

“Can’t. I’m sniffing them.”

“You’re all right?”

“Fine. I’m a little concerned about this idea of Seese’s. That’s a hefty sum to be giving away.”

“I told her the same thing. We’ll see. Maybe something will change. There was a bad accident on the interstate. Two cars and a truck. Someone died, I think. The length of Seese’s farewell hug might have saved my foolish ass.”

“You have a nice ass, actually.”

“We were held up forty minutes. Anyway, I had one of my little fits.”

“In front of the guru?”

“Yeah. He handled it well. He’s been in jail, in Russia.”

“My God, Otto, it sounds like you should be keeping notes.”

“Seese wanted me to show him America. This quadrant of America, at least.”

“The kids miss you already. They’d never say it, but I can tell because they’re not fighting. Want me to call them to the phone?”

“Don’t bother them now. I’ve decided to write them. An actual letter. The old-fashioned way. Prepare them, would you?”

“They’ll be shocked. They won’t know how to open it. They won’t know what it is. They miss you. I miss you.”

“I’ll sneak into bed with you as you dream.”

“I wish.”

We said our good-byes and I hung up and stretched a little more, musing on the notion that I had, by pure chance, found a woman like Jeannie. Or was it chance, after all? Seese had referred to it once as an “arranged marriage” in keeping with her idea that all relationships are part of the general plan, people brought to the same bed by the Supreme Intelligence who runs the universe. Arranged or not, part of the plan or not, after a few years of mutual adjustment
it had worked out remarkably well. Jeannie and I had known nothing of life when we met and starting dating. We had been tremendously different in background, temperament, even hair color. I was a farm kid, she was a Connecticut sophisticate who chose grad school in Dakota to get away from an abusive mother and to pursue a short-lived interest in soil chemistry. Somehow, our physical infatuation and intellectual kinship had evolved into real love, her strengths filling in for my weaknesses, and possibly vice versa. We had our tiffs and bad moments, of course, but I rarely forgot to be grateful for her.

I stretched a bit more—the human vertebral column was not designed for office work, or for hours in the car—then washed up, put on my sport coat, and went downstairs for dinner.

In the 250-year-old dining room I was given a table looking out on a courtyard where a fountain splashed and bubbled and where a ten-foot-tall wooden sculpture stood, looking out of place. General Sutter himself, I imagined. At the check-in desk there had been a brochure giving the general’s story—he had, apparently, “discovered” California, or some such thing—but I have to admit that, with a few exceptions, I am strangely uninterested in American history. All slaughter and deprivation, all courage and will, it left me cold, though I like old houses and places where you can see the mark of the past. I told this to my sister once and she said it was because I’d had no other lifetimes on this continent.

As I was musing on the idea of past lives (I’d heard once, perhaps from her, that reincarnation had been part and parcel of Christian doctrine until the sixth or seventh century
after Christ’s death, at which point some potentate in the Church had decreed it heretical), the waitress set before me a menu I can only describe as astounding. Here we were, deep in the green heart of Pennsylvania, and they were offering elk, buffalo, and seafood coquille. The wine list was just as complete, and after the waitperson (Aliana was her name, studying philosophy and the history of religion at Penn State) had stopped by three times to inquire, I at last settled on fresh Pennsylvania trout, a salad, and half a bottle of Pinot Grigio.

Buffalo on the menu—and we weren’t within a thousand miles of North Dakota.

The wine arrived with a basket of warm rolls and what appeared to be about a pint of butter. I sipped, watched the water splash in the fountain. I thought about Natasha and Anthony and it was as if I could feel them in my chest, each of them there, all their past and all their future, right there.

In the midst of this affectionate musing the salad was served. As I started in on it, I was visited again by a wave of loneliness, and by the feeling that had been bothering me over the past few months. Not loss, not mourning, just a sort of quiet knocking at the door of my contentment. I ate and drank and pondered it. With the children, with me—was something missing? Were Jeannie and I simply looking around us and judging things against the standards of our neighbors, and the kids’ schoolmates, and letting ourselves be satisfied with that? Friends of ours had taken their children and gone to live in India for a school year and had come back convinced that they had too much of everything, that America was largely lacking in any real spiritual dimension. But wasn’t that merely a kind of guilt talking?
Would their having less make for the poor Calcuttans having more? And weren’t there different styles of spiritual living, each suited to its own cultural particularities?

Aliana brought the trout, and as she set it before me, I asked about her studies and her plans, just the usual small talk that middle-aged people make with young adults. She turned a frank gaze on me and said, “I saw how my parents lived, you know, just getting money, spending money, worrying all the time. I wanted to figure things out a little before I started in on that kind of a life. I wanted, you know, to get the big picture in focus. My grandfather retired after thirty-five years of investment banking, left my grandmother, and sailed around the world for two years, trying to pick up younger women. It was kind of sad, you know? I didn’t want to follow somebody else’s idea of success and end up that way.”

“And the course work is doing that for you? I mean, giving you the perspective you want?”

She shook her head and smiled ruefully. “My boyfriend is doing that for me. He’s a yoga teacher. The course work is just, you know, blah blah.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember it from my own blah blah days. Sometimes there’s something useful in there, though.”

“Not yet.”

She went to check on her other tables, leaving me with my uneasiness and the plates of food. It was a nice meal—trout dusted with almonds, mashed potatoes with some skin left on (the way I liked them), grilled asparagus—sufficient even for a picky New York food person, and, in almost every corner of the globe, luxurious. I sent a quiet thank you toward the plump fellow at the gas station, and pulled out his coupon, which proved to be past its date.

I decided not to have dessert, left Aliana a fifteen-dollar tip on a fifty-dollar meal—because I liked her, was rooting for her, and because I have more money than I really need and remember what it felt like to have less—and went out and walked in the balmy air, up and down the commercial street in front of the hotel. Another Amish carriage clopped by with two beautiful children staring out the back window.

And then, back up in room 212, I flicked through fifty channels looking for I didn’t know what. It was the usual messy stew: news, drama, stupidity, sports. I kept flipping. At home I would have been on the computer, or talking with Jeannie or the kids, or replacing a lightbulb, or lying on the sofa scratching Jasper’s belly and watching the Yankees. But the Yankees weren’t on, and I had decided not to bring my computer (Jeannie’s idea, actually—
Get all the way away from work,
she’d said), so there was a small emptiness where those things would have been. And television was designed with just such an emptiness in mind. I flipped and flipped for almost half an hour without settling on anything, then drank half a glass of water, went to the desk, and wrote my elder child this letter—which she has saved—on General Sutter’s stationery:

Dear Tash,

How are you? This is your old dad writing. I’m thinking of you and Anthony and missing you. If you two are on speaking terms, tell him I’ll write to him tomorrow.

Being away from the family has given me time to think. I’ve been thinking about how, sometimes, because we all see each other every day, there is a tendency to take each other for granted, to get caught up
in all the routine details of clothes, food, money, rules. You’re at an age now when you are forming what will be your own future life, and your mother and I know that, and we only want that life to be the best that it can be. If sometimes it seems like we put you in a cage and move the bars in closer every day, well, we don’t mean to—we mean to move them closer every
other
day!

I’m goofy, all right, sorry. It’s been a long day. I’ll tell you about it when I get home, but I’m riding to North Dakota with some kind of spiritual master your aunt hooked me up with. Nice enough guy.

I just wanted to write to say that I love you, that you and your brother mean everything to me and Mom, that your happiness means everything to us. When I get home, I’ll take you out to breakfast at Mitch’s if you can spare the time. Saturday. Any time you want to wake up. Breakfast at Mitch’s at one p.m. if you want. A date. Jared will be sick with jealousy.

All my love,

Dad           

I read the note over twice, folded it into an envelope, sealed it. I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face then took off my clothes and got into the bed. It felt huge, as hotel beds always feel without Jeannie in them. I lay awake for awhile, hearing another horse-drawn carriage go by beneath the windows and thinking about how impossible it was to convey to your children the depth of your love. My own parents, it seemed to me, had just abandoned any idea of doing that. Or maybe their parents had never given them a decent example of how to even try. Or maybe they just assumed their love was so obvious it didn’t need to be
talked about. Or maybe the hard grind of farming life had knocked all the energy out of them. I remembered, once, on one of the rare times that we were out together as a family having a meal, seeing another family of four in the booth across the way. The kids were about the same age as Seese and I, which must have been preteen somewhere. But the mother and father were always touching them: arm around the shoulder, hand on the wrist. I remember that it made me sad, and that the sadness seemed unmanly somehow, and so I never mentioned it to anyone. It was part and parcel of the prairie life to keep your hurts well covered. I went to sleep thinking about that.

ELEVEN

Breakfast at the
General Sutter Inn is served in a street-side café that sits just off the main lobby. The morning meal is free for guests, if they choose from a limited menu; or they also have the option to order from the more extensive regular menu and take a five-dollar credit.

I sat at a table looking out on the street. Still partially full from the night before, I eschewed the cornmeal pancakes and crab and shrimp quiche and asked for something simple: coffee, apple juice, and oatmeal with honey. Rinpoche was nowhere to be seen and I realized we hadn’t set a time for breakfast. The food arrived quickly. I picked up my copy of
USA Today
and was reading about Israel’s bombing of Lebanon’s infrastructure and speculation about Cuba after Fidel and the big heat wave we were driving through. I looked up from this mix of news, glanced through the window, and caught sight of my traveling companion. He was out on the sidewalk, bending down, collecting something, putting stones or plants into a pocket buried in his robe.

After a few minutes of this, the good Rinpoche came in and sat down opposite me. A wide grin animated his rugged face, as if, given a chance to select from the entire population of North America, he would make me the breakfast companion first on his list. It was a nice feeling.

“How did you pass the night, sir?” I asked him.

He put his hands together at the side of his cheek and tilted his head onto them, eyes closed, tiny smile playing.

“That good, eh?”

The waitress swung by our table. Rinpoche ordered tea with one poached egg on wheat toast and she took his order while making a deliberate but only half-successful effort not to let her eyes wander across his outfit. It was not, apparently, the season for maroon in central Pennsylvania.

“Glad to see that you eat,” I said, when she’d left us.

“You,” he pointed to me, “you ate last night. Big!” He spread his hands out from his sides as if encompassing a three-foot-wide beach ball of a belly.

I was, in fact, suffering just a bit from a case of morning regret, and going very slow on the oatmeal. “How did you know that?”

He laughed as if I had made a joke. “Your face shows.”

“My aura?”

“Yes, yes. Anyone could see.” He pondered a moment, turned serious. “You can ask me now, any question. I will give you a wesson.”

Just as he was saying this, the waitress brought his tea, and now, on her second visit, she could not at all keep herself from giving him, and then me, the famous once-over. I imagined her providing a detailed report to the cook and busboy.
Two true weirdoes out there this morning, Eddie. You have to take a look.

“A lesson?” I said, when we were alone.