Dinner with Buddha (14 page)

Seventeen

With its large-screen television and inoffensive framed prints, its in-room coffee service and envelope for the maid's gratuity, our third-floor room in the chain hotel could have been any room on the outskirts of any city from Kuala Lumpur to Shanghai, could have belonged to any one of a dozen famous chains. But it was perfectly clean and comfortable, with two queen beds, thick walls, and a shower with adequate pressure. I awoke from my deep dream (a dream in which I was completely bald and being awarded a tennis trophy I had not won) refreshed but confused and lay there for a few minutes running the image through my mind once or twice to see if some important message would leap clear of the vague and disconnected somnambulatory feelings. I wondered why it is that dreams so often speak in symbols and signs. Why couldn't there be message boards, text on screens:
YOU ARE AFRAID OF SUCH-AND-SUCH; YOUR FATHER WAS DISAPPOINTED IN YOU; YOU WISH YOU COULD PLAY THE ACCORDION.

My scalp throbbed quietly, but there was no blood on the pillowcase. Just a nick, I was fairly sure. I wondered if the universe was trying to nudge me in the direction of a late-in-life boxing career, and I reminded myself of what I'd learned in the classroom of fatherhood: There is no need to panic at the sight of red liquid; there is so much blood in us from the neck up that even small cuts to the head can bleed out of all proportion to the damage done. It seemed, in retrospect, foolish to have gone to Edie's trailer, but lots of things seem foolish in retrospect. Jeannie would have approved, I was sure. During our years together, she and I had worked hard to stay open to adventure and experience. The last thing we wanted was to become that safe, upper-middle-class couple who arranges every moment of every vacation in advance, who places security so far above everything else on the ladder of life that all the fun is taken out of it, who rushes off to the doctor at every scrape and cough. Yes, there were times, after Jeannie fell ill, when I tortured myself with the idea that we might have done things differently, might have joined the club of those who research every possible cancer-causing agent in every medical study and try desperately to keep every plastic bottle, every spore of mold, and every impure food ingredient out of the home. But even in the depth of my sorrow I knew how impossible that would be. Cancer, that merciless modern plague, waits in certain genes like an assassin in a bedroom closet; there is not one kind of knock that opens the door.

I sat up and saw that Rinpoche had positioned himself, ass on a tower of two pillows, upon his neatly made bed, and was sitting there, cross-legged, facing the curtained windows, still as a stone. For a little while I watched him, wondering what it felt like to be inside his mind. What peaceful gardens did he wander there? What did a world absent of fear, shame, worry, and doubt feel like?

“Good morning, my brother-and-waw!” he said, still without moving, without turning to look at me. “In your sleep you said, ‘Pie!' like you were happy.” He swiveled around to face me.

“What time did you get up?”

“Three!” he said, just like that. Not three, but three!

“And you've been down in the breakfast nook all this time, waiting for them to put out the microwavable cinnamon buns and Styrofoam plates, am I right?”

“Bet your ass, man,” he said.

“There's a pool, want to take a swim before we head out?”

“Sure, man!”

“Did you bring your Speedo?”

“Celia told me to put it.”

Given the inappropriately small size of Rinpoche's Speedo, and the powerful torso and legs it revealed, and given the kind of antics of which my brother-in-law was capable, I said a small prayer of thanks, as we made our way to the elevator, that, this time at least, he'd decided to wear his robe over the bathing suit. With the exception of an extremely fit German- or Dutch-speaking couple in their fifties, we had the outdoor pool area to ourselves. The air was already warm, the morning nearly cloudless. The pool water glistened in the sun, troubled by gentle wavelets, as if the couple had finished their morning laps a few minutes before we arrived.

As I knew he would, the good monk slipped out of his robe and went into his eccentric yoga routine—grunts, loud exhalations, one leg at a time held out in front of him at waist height, head rolled around and around on his linebacker's neck. And then, as I knew he would, he ignored the
NO DIVING
signs and lifted himself into a two-hundred-pound swan dive, arms in the crawl stroke before he hit the water, two lengths of the pool without breathing, and then the wet shimmering face breaking the surface and showing a smile like the sun, aimed in my direction. “Colorado!” he yelled out, as if the word's secondary meaning was “perfect!”

The Germans or Dutch looked up from their
Der Spiegel,
or whatever it was, raising a quartet of blond eyebrows.
Americans, such an indecorous race.

There was nothing scornful about them, it was just that I felt fat and sloppy beside the trim man and grumpy in comparison with Rinpoche, so, after checking to be sure there was no fresh blood in my hair, I jumped in and swam and swam until the run of bad thoughts had been washed away. From that day on, I promised myself, happy dreams of pie aside, I was going back to my no-sugar, no-alcohol diet. My sister and her husband were at peace. My children weren't sick, hungry, or depressed. True, the American political scene was starting to resemble nothing so much as a circus performance in Rome's dying days, and, true, there were families like Edie's scattered all over the landscape, rural and urban, but there wasn't very much I could do about any of that, and no sense drowning myself in my own personal version of
Sturm und Drang.
I climbed out and performed a perfect cannonball into the deep end, far enough from the other guests to keep their glossy pages dry. Rinpoche copied me, making a larger splash, laughing afterward like a kid. The couple sought refuge indoors.

Cleansed and chlorinated, baptized into my new and healthier life, I eschewed the sugary, white-flour offerings of the free breakfast and jogged up three flights of stairs. I packed up my rolling suitcase, Rinpoche his worn leather satchel, and soon we were on the road again, a mile above sea level, two souls in motion. We could see the Rockies now, jagged and majestic on the western horizon, with bands of purplish clouds streaming close above their snow-dappled peaks, and then, below, a cluster of yellow-brick buildings I knew to be Boulder. Before Rinpoche told me his “speaking” was in “Lead Willage,” Colorado, I assumed Boulder would be the site of it. Boulder; Sedona; Taos; Madison; Missoula; Austin; Cambridge; Berkeley, California; and Burlington, Vermont—these are the nation's meditative outposts, capitals of the alternative universe. Sensitive, somewhat hairy, riding in sandals and jeans on the tip of the country's left wing, its citizens were either a lazy, lunatic fringe or Aquarian ambassadors pointing the rest of us toward a kinder set of laws about the way life was supposed to be lived. Boulder would be the sensible place for a speaking engagement. I pictured a café with twenty-eight kinds of coffee drinks, an audience of the young and young at heart, listening with great reverence and then going home to a dose of marijuana or Vitaminwater before bed.

But of course I was wrong. By then I should have known my companion better than that, should long ago have shed my judgments and oversimplifications. The speaking, it turned out, would be in Leadville, twice as high and half as alternative; in Boulder he just wanted to say hi to a friend.

I wanted to eat. We found a place to park on Pearl Street and then, at my urging, secured a table just as a restaurant called L'Atelier was opening its doors for lunch. Boulder seemed cleaner than I'd imagined, glistening glass and stone Buddhas in its windows, a store called Bliss, perfect pavement, healthy-looking college kids with backpacks and phones. And L'Atelier fit in well. There were spotless cloth napkins twirled into swans in wine glasses. There was a collection of ceramic statuettes. There was a waiter who delighted in telling us about the many ways in which the food on the luncheon menu was grown or raised, the way the ingredients were combined. It was a culinary-school mini-seminar and by the time he finished I was impressed . . . but ravenous.

Bouillabaisse for me, vegetarian ravioli for the monk. While we waited for the wild-caught halibut to be set into the cream from grass-fed cows alongside organic onions with free-trade spices, I devoured a basket of baguette slices smeared with cold butter. Rinpoche sat opposite in the booth, watching.

“When the actual meal comes I'll eat more meditatively,” I said.

He shrugged, didn't seem to care.

“What are you going to speak about tonight?”

Another shrug. “Don't know yet.”

“You don't prepare? Nothing written down? No pages of one of your books marked with Post-it notes?”

“When I sit up there I take a little tea, breathe a breath, two breath, look at the peoples there, then I know.”

“I would have thought you'd be speaking here, in Boulder. I think the people here would be open to what you have to say.”

“Already lot of teachers here,” he said.

“And you seem to appeal to a different crowd . . . at least in the other events I've seen.”

“Every kinds of crowd.”

“Why is that? I mean, black and white and Asian and American Indian and Hispanic, old and young, alternative, as Tash would call them, and absolute middle of the road, rich and poor and middle-class, women and men and those who inhabit the territory in between. It's a little unusual, in my very limited experience of spiritual teachers, to attract such mixed audiences. Please explain, sir.”

He smiled at the tone of the question, broke off a corner of baguette heel, and nibbled at it. For a moment I thought he wouldn't answer.

The bouillabaisse and ravioli were served. I went to work immediately but Rinpoche had found one of those single-serving jars of jam in the folds of his robe—God knew what else he carried around in its pockets—and was holding it now between thumb and forefinger. “I took this from a hotel one time in another speaking. They give it free.”

“They do that at some of the finer establishments. You'll notice this morning that the only thing free in the hotel was a packet of instant coffee.”

He ignored me, twirled the thimble of a bottle in his fingers, then held it up between us. “This paper on, what do you call it?”

“Label. Says it's raspberry and so on, what the ingredients are, the company that makes it.”

“Ah. Wery nice label, yes?”

“Well made. Tasteful.”

A nod, a few seconds of label gazing. “But what you eat is the inside.”

“Exactly. And, as a matter of fact, if you don't mind, a little raspberry jam would go well on a buttered baguette with my fish stew. There's a little sugar in it but it's fruit sugar and fruit sugar doesn't count on my diet. May I?”

He handed me the bottle. It opened with a satisfying
pop
and I had slathered jam on my baguette and was lifting it to my lips by the time I realized he was smiling at me.

“What?”

“A wesson,” he said.

“The jam?”

“You're not eating the label.”

“Of course I'm not eating the label.” He watched me, waited. I hurried back across the conversation.

“Black, white, American Indian, woman, man—some people think like that, like the label. Maybe Rinpoche thinks, a little more, the jam is important part. So that's maybe why different labels come to the speaking.”

“Lesson has registered,” I said, after a moment.

“Good. Eat.”

I ate. But instead of contemplating where the fish came from, the cream, the onions, the spices, and instead of really experiencing the full taste of it on my tongue as Rinpoche had recommended, I found myself wrapped in a swirl of thoughts about what my Bronxville friends would say about this wesson. It would seem simplistic to them. Don't look at people by their category—gender, race, social standing, age—but relate to them inside-to-inside, soul-to-soul, from and to that place where we're so much more alike than different. A notion like that would be fodder for mockery. My friends and I—most Americans—lived in a stew of propaganda that insisted on the categorization of humanity. We were gay or straight, we were male or female or part of each, we were conservative or liberal, black or white or red or yellow or brown or mixed or Italian or Irish or Nigerian American. We wore Brooks Brothers or Izod or Polo or Levi's, we opened our mouth and said one word about abortion or taxes or God or radical Islam or military service or Bush or Obama or Fox or NPR or we said we were from Mississippi or North Dakota or the West Village or Boulder and within the time it took to say “box” we were in one. We'd somehow gotten to be straight white males or gay African American females first, and human beings second, and if you claimed the eschewment of label you'd be mocked, dismissed, labeled as a naive rube from beyond the Adirondacks.