Dinner with Buddha (13 page)

The wind was stronger here. When Rinpoche and I stood up out of the car we had to turn our faces away from the flying grit. “Come on in!” Edie shouted. I was trying to place her accent. Central Appalachia, I guessed. The mountains of North Carolina or West Virginia. She led the way up three metal steps, the boys standing to either side like an honor guard, and we stepped into a clean kitchen almost completely filled by a metal table and four mismatched wooden chairs. On the wall above the sink window was a hanging placard:
CHRIST BLESS THIS HOME AND ALL WHO ENTER.
On a small square of counter I saw the pie.

Jesse went down the hall and returned with a folding chair. His mother fussed about in the cabinets and refrigerator and in another minute Rinpoche and I had slices of pie à la mode in front of us. The boys and Edie joined us. They were going after the pie the way they'd gone after the food at TWRITW. Edie ate with a bit more delicacy, looking at us out of the tops of her eyes. The pie was excellent, in fact, and I told her that. Rinpoche made humming noises and smacked his lips, the way he did when he liked the taste of something. “Wery good pie!” he said. “Who make?”

“I did.”

“Wery the best I ever had.”

“You talk funny,” Adam said, and his brother swung an arm into his chest and knocked him right out of his chair and onto the floor.

“Boys!”

Adam stood up, smiling, and slapped his brother on the back of the head and then there was a small pitched battle in the kitchen, how real I couldn't tell. Elbows flying, quick kicks, rabbit punches.

“Boys!”

“It's okay,” I said to her. “Rinpoche here is known to wrestle with my son, who plays football. I'm used to it.”

“Boys, stop!” Edie said, and they separated and tucked in their shirts, taking the occasional slap at each other. “Sit now. We have company.” And, to me. “They're good boys but they can get out of hand.”

“I talk wery funny,” Rinpoche acknowledged agreeably. “I was born in Russia.”

“Russia!” Jesse said. “Say something in Russian!”

“Say, ‘The bad dad's home,' ” his brother said, “Because he is.”

We heard a truck door shut, footsteps on gravel, and then the front door squeaked open again. The man who stepped into the kitchen, just as Rinpoche was saying,
atets dohma,
was as wiry as the rest of his family was plump. Short-cropped blond hair, a face at the sight of which the word
jagged
came to mind—sharp nose, sharp cheekbones, angular mouth. He was dressed from head to toe in a navy-blue work uniform of some sort, smudged here and there with silvery swipes, and he was carrying a six-pack of beer, the cans held together with white plastic rings of the sort that strangle seagulls. At his appearance a charge went through the air. The boys especially seemed to go very still. For just a moment, one couldn't imagine them wrestling. The man looked at me first, then his wife, then Rinpoche. His first words were, “What the fuck?”

Edie seemed completely unafraid of him, a reaction I did not share. “These men helped me change a flat tire or we'd still be at Bog's.”

“You went to Bog's?”

“It's Adam's birthday. I took him to Bog's, yes I did. This here is Otto and this is his brother-in-law Volda.”

I stood and held out my hand. I thought for a moment that Dad would spit.

“Volda's from Russia,” Adam said timidly. It seemed to me he was only trying to get his father to look at him. His father gave my hand a flimsy shake, no eye contact. He was staring at his wife. I had the urge—highly unusual for me, I would even say unique in my experience—to slap him in the face.

After two seconds he shifted his gaze—his eyes seemed weighted—to Rinpoche, who was also standing now, also holding out his hand. Dad wouldn't take it.

“Volda wrestles,” Jesse said. Now he seemed to want not so much attention as to provocation.

“Cage fighter,” his younger brother added.

“Boys, stop it.”

“What are you?” Dad asked.

“Rinpoche.”

“The fuck?”

“A monk,” I said. “A holy man.”

“Get out then,” Dad said. “We don't need no religion bullshit in here.”

“Ethan! If it wasn't for them we'd still be out at Bog's.”

“Get out, queers,” Dad said.

“Hey,” I said. “We helped out your wife. She invited us back for a slice of pie. How about showing just the smallest bit of respect.”

“How about this,” Dad said, swinging the six-pack in a wild haymaker. It was my very good luck that the weight of the beer made it happen in semi–slow motion. I managed to duck enough so that only the bottom of the cans caught the top of my head, but then, before either the Bad Dad or I could do anything else, the boys were on him, several hundred pounds of boys, and Dad was on his back on the floor, and they were punching, and he was swinging his arms, and Edie, who'd stood up by this point and was in the center of my view, had streams of tears going down her cheeks. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” she kept saying. “He's been drinking, I'm so sorry, mister!”

I was down on one knee and I could already feel the blood trickling through my hair. I watched the scene a few feet in front of me as if it were a film playing on the television and I'd slept on the couch after a night of drinking and had just awakened. Arms and legs, shirts running up the boys' backs, showing their pale white skin. From what I could tell, Dad was taking somewhat of a beating, though they made a point, it seemed, of not hitting him in the face. There was a great deal of cursing, an abundance of cursing, most of it from Dad's mouth. Edie had started weeping in a pitiful way. Rinpoche had begun chanting—a prayer for peace it must have been. I'd seen it work in the past, one time, diffusing a situation that could have turned violent. But this time it didn't work, at all. The punches ceased, but there was still a violent struggle going on. I could see that Dad had Adam by his right ear, and Adam was elbowing that arm fiercely, trying to get free. He started crying now, too, and that seemed to be too much for his older brother, who punched his father in the groin. Once, hard. Dad spat out a furious four-letter howl and let go of the ear.

“I'm ashamed, ashamed!” Edie was wailing. She'd wet a washcloth in the sink and now she pressed it against my head. “Jesus, forgive him. I'm sorry!”

The main problem, at that point, was logistical: The tangle of bodies, still writhing, though Dad had almost given up, stood between me and the door. Rinpoche had stopped chanting. I got to my feet. Edie, on tiptoes now, was trying to keep the washcloth against my scalp but it slipped out of her hand and down against my ear and neck, where I caught it. I looked at Rinpoche. “Wery bad,” he mouthed in my direction.

“I think,” I said to Edie, in a shaky voice, “that we're going to head out now, if you don't mind. Are you safe?”

“Safe, sure,” she said bitterly. “Safe as can be.”

I handed her the bloody washcloth and she said, “Thank you.”

By this point the boys had their father flat on his back, arms pinned to his sides. He'd stopped struggling but was grunting and gasping for breath. His eyes shifted hard and settled on me with such a fierce hatred it made me shake. Rinpoche stepped over them first but instead of heading right out the door he knelt down and put his mouth close to Dad's ear. I couldn't hear what he said. I was still a bit dazed and, at that point, just wanting to get away from there before anything worse happened, before Edie came out of the bedroom with a gun, or the boys started to pull out their father's teeth with pliers, or a vicious Rhodesian Ridgeback materialized and took a chunk out of my inner thigh. My head hurt, but the blood was no longer dripping down across my cheek. The world was not a steady place.

“Get out while you can!” Adam yelled, but the yell, the warning, sounded half-serious. His ear was bleeding. He put a hand up to it and when he saw the blood on his fingers he smiled. It was all some kind of stage play acted out in a sociopathic community theater. They must have been getting ready to audition for a new reality show. Edie plopped down in a chair and covered her face in her hands and, with that as our final image, out we went into the gritty wind. At that point a dog did materialize, but it was a scruffy black mutt, cat-sized, trotting over from the next yard and yapping at us as if we were aliens just landed.

Then the aliens were in the car, backing it into a three-point turn, throwing up a cloud of dust that drifted back in the direction of the trailer. I asked Rinpoche if he was all right.

“Wery good, man,” he said, somewhat wearily.

“There's another little piece of America for you.”

“Your head has the blood on.”

I reached up and touched it. Tender as could be but already scabbing over. “Stitches will not be required,” I said, but I was a bit woozy, the pulse still pounding, the scene replaying itself over and over in my inner eye. “There's an American expression I've never liked,” I said. “No good deed goes unpunished.”

“What means?”

“It means you do good things for people and all you get in return is shit.”

“Ah.”

“I tell you that is the very last tire I ever change for anybody in my life.”

I found the interstate west and took the entrance ramp, trying as hard as I could not to turn my eyes toward the Desolation Café. I was in a strange place then. There is a way in which, as realistically as it is portrayed in films and on TV, violence has a very different flavor in real life. It wasn't as if we'd been involved in a shooting or a war, but the events at Edie's were so far outside the boundaries of what I'd lived with for the past half century that my mind seemed unable to make sense of it. I was driving along I-80 like an automaton, on cruise control, steering, checking the mirrors. But three-quarters of me was running the scenes over and over again in my mind as if the cells there were trying to settle themselves back into the orbits they'd been shaken out of. I wasn't trembling, but I was unsettled at some deep level.

I could only imagine what it must be like for the man or woman who comes home from war, having seen true violence, again and again, and then tries to re-enter the ordinary world of eating in a café or mailing something at the post office. I could only imagine. I could only imagine what would become of Jesse and Adam when they grew older and left the nest, and what would become of their mother, then, living with her gentlemanly Ethan.

Rinpoche, of course, was as calm as ever. During the whole weird two-minute scenario, at least as I reconstructed it in my mind's eye, he'd been still, watching, alert, unruffled. “You've seen things like that before?” I asked him. Just then the highway split and I nearly missed the turn toward Denver onto I-76.

“Sometimes,” he said.

“In Russia?”

A nod. Casual. Unconcerned. No volatile memories playing there. “They beat us sometimes. Me and my father.”

“Not good.”

“No.”

“I thought I saw something in the eyes of those boys when we were changing the tire.”

“Those boys see it many times,” he said. “Worse maybe.”

“Nice way to grow up.”

He made a small grunt.

Reconstructing the scene yet again I remembered the last thing Rinpoche had done before we hurried out the door. “What did you say to old Dad back there? I saw you whispering in his ear. Were you suggesting some chess moves for the after-supper game? Reciting the U.S. presidents in reverse alphabetical order?”

Rinpoche either didn't hear the question and my goofiness or pretended not to hear it. It seemed to me that, in another moment, he was going to go into one of his nap-meditations, a kind of highway hypnosis with mantra.

“You told him something.”

The good monk turned his head to me, then forward again. “Told him there was money under the dish. With the pie.”

“Huh?”

“I put. I said, ‘Look under the dish, man.' ”

“You put money there? When?”

“When he say ‘fuck' the first time.”

“How much?”

A shrug. “Pretty much what I had.”

“Everything you had? That giant bankroll?”

He scratched a thumbnail over a small ice cream stain on his robe. He said, “Looked like they could need it.”

Sixteen

On the night of what I will always think of as Our Famous Visit to Edie's, I wanted predictability. So, at a rest area off I-76 I used my phone and found us a room in a chain hotel on the outskirts of Denver. En route, we shared a pizza and played some pocket billiards at a place called Cable's Pub and Grill in Fort Morgan, where the Yankees were on the big-screen TV and the waitress located a tube of antibiotic ointment in the kitchen and let me dab some on my head.

We found the hotel without any trouble, checked in without incident, took showers, turned off the lights, and lay there in our separate beds with only a little highway noise and a bit of light filtering in between the curtains, and a hardly noticeable throbbing on my scalp.

“You asleep?” I said across the room.

“Soon.”

“Before you sign off can I ask you something?”

“Always, my friend.”

“Do you think it really helps at all to give people like that money? I mean, setting that one family aside, you know there's a national debate going on these days about welfare and programs for poor kids and so on. One side feels compassion for them and wants the government to help. The other side says giving them money isn't compassionate at all, only keeps them poor, takes away the incentive to find work, and it isn't fair to people who don't get anything free.”

“Man was working, I think, Otto.”

“Right,
he
was. I'm speaking more generally. I gave a little money to the people on the reservation, but did that really help them?”

“I don't know,” Rinpoche said across the dark space between us. “I don't have the big idea. In the minute when I think it's good, I give. When I think it isn't good, I don't give.”

“That's not very helpful to the national conversation.”

“Big question is how much you need for yourself.”

“Right, I know. Maybe you judge me, us, for the big house we have, for the nice cars Jeannie and I drove, for the vacations we took with our kids, the clothes we bought them, the gadgets, the meals out. No question we didn't need all that.”

He was silent. I worried he'd fallen asleep . . . or was judging me.

“You're supposed to say, ‘No, I don't judge you for that, Otto. You're a good man. You worked hard. You gave a lot to charity. You were only doing what any father would do—taking care of his kids.' ”

More silence. Then, “Some teachers say the best place to go on the spiritual life is from the middle. Too much money, maybe, you don't want to think about dying, about after dying. Not enough money, all you think about is money, where I'm going to get it, how can I eat, how can my children eat. In the middle, you have enough and you can have time not to worry, to look for something else than money.”

I said, “But a lot of times the way it works is you never really rest in that middle. You have a nice car, you want a nicer one. You have money, you all of a sudden need to have a boat, a summer house, a ski house. You used to like going out for a hamburger and a milk shake, but now you can have oysters and lobster and steak and fine wine. Your tastes change. You get caught up. Your friends are going on cruises down the Rhine River, you don't want to go to Cape Cod for a week anymore, and you have the cash for more exotic things, so why not?”

Nothing. I heard a child complaining to his mother in the hallway. At that hour.

“There is a story,” Rinpoche said finally, “about one monk, wery famous. This monk he has a simple house, wery small, and a small garden on the land near the house where he grow his food. He have many, how you say, student.”

“Disciples.”

“Sure. One day he go away on a trip someplace, maybe to see another monk that is the friend. He stays three weeks maybe. When he comes back, the disciples they have maked him a new room on his house so he is more comfortable, has the space, see? What does the monk do? He gets wery, wery angry on them and breaks down the new room all apart so he just has the house the way he used to have it.”

Now it was my turn to be silent. I was translating the story into modern American. I was away for three weeks. Anthony and some college friends came to Bronxville and built a beautiful one-room addition onto the back of our garage, a second-floor room, maybe, with a dormer. Pale hardwood floors, an antique desk, excellent lighting, a view out over the neighborhood. A place for Dad to write that book he'd always been meaning to write. What does Dad do? He comes home from the trip, gets out his chainsaw and sledgehammer, and cuts and smashes the new addition to splinters while his son and friends watch.

It didn't work for me.

“As lessons go,” I said, “that isn't your best one.”

“It's a wesson to say, ‘Enough for me now. I'm okay.' ”

“How do you really help, is my question? Give up a cruise and send the money to Pine Ridge?”

“Maybe. Maybe one time you take the cruise and one time no cruise.”

“Hard to find the line.”

“Don't worry so much, Otto. Don't think so much about. You fixed the tire for that woman, yes? You don't have to be every second fixing the tires. You make your mind calm, calm, and then you see the minute when you can do and the time when you don't.”

“Got it, thanks. I just wish the world was as simple for me as it seems to be for you.”

“Because everything that happens, you think on it. You judge, judge, worry, worry, the tea cup going up and down and over and there. Now, right now, what is it to do? Sleep. Tomorrow maybe in one minute you can feel to do something else, not make the cruise maybe, not eat, give maybe. Maybe one day I see you selling your house and living in a small place like the monk. Doesn't matter so much. If you are worried all times about going a little bit wrong, then always you are thinking about you, you, you. That way you don't see clear, okay? Too much
you
in the picture.”

“Okay, thanks. Good sleep.”

He grunted his good-night. But it wouldn't have been Rinpoche if he didn't add this last line, just to jostle me. “I like wery much that pie with the cherries,” he said, sounding perfectly sincere. “I think about it now. I remember the taste. Tomorrow we get another piece more of it someplace, okay?”