Dinner with Buddha (2 page)

Two

While this joyous reunion was taking place, my twenty-three-year-old daughter, Natasha, was out running errands in Dickinson. It had been four months since I'd seen her, and though we spoke on the phone two or three times a week and passed e-mails and other digital burps back and forth through the ether on a daily basis, I missed her terribly. My son, Anthony, was in college on the East Coast—there already for preseason football—and during the school year I made a point of driving up to Maine to see him every third weekend or so. I'd take him and a friend out to dinner. We might attend a track meet or baseball game. We'd joke and catch up, talk sports and classes, and I'd give him a firm handshake and a hug, slip a twenty into his hand, and get in my car and head back to my empty life in Bronxville.

But things were different with Tasha; they had always been different. We'd always had a particularly close relationship, and from the time she was about four, I'd felt, strangely enough, that she'd arrived in my life to teach me things that no one else could teach me. Jeannie, her mother, felt the same way, and we'd had many conversations about that. I am not a humble man, but I am humble enough to recognize, in my twice-tattooed and occasionally moody eldest child, a strength and wisdom I do not possess. Two years ago, when her mother—and my beloved wife—passed away, Natasha had dealt with that blow not by overeating and watching too much TV, not by losing faith in the possibility of some Divine Explanation, but in just the opposite fashion: She left school before the start of her junior year at Brown and moved out here, to the retreat center run by Rinpoche and Celia, and devoted herself to the spiritual search. She told me she wanted to understand what had happened with her mother—why such things happened—before settling into a more traditional life—career, marriage, children. In short, while her father was floating away from the big questions, clinging to his meditation lifesaver, she was swimming a hard crawl stroke right into them.

A quarter hour after the hugfest, Natasha arrived in the retreat center's antique pickup, nicknamed Uma, raising a plume of dust behind her as she came. There were more warm embraces. A few minutes of packing away groceries and making small talk, and then, while Shelsa fed the dog, and while Seese prepared some kind of tofu burgers with miso mustard on top and made a salad composed of leaves and stems no one in my circle of friends had ever heard of, never mind eaten, Tash and I went out for a stroll. We did this by instinct, without having planned it, and without discussing it. There were no meditation retreats in the month of August, no earnest strangers wandering the grounds where Seese and I had played and done chores as children and where our parents had worked and sweated, no sound of the meditation bell or Rinpoche's basso chants echoing across the wheat fields. A beautiful silence had settled over our land, a curtain of quiet broken only by the crunch of our footsteps on the gravel road and the occasional happy burst of song from a meadowlark. For a little while then it was the North Dakota of my imagination.

“Things good, Dad?” my daughter asked, in her cheerful, hopeful way. She had my mother's northern European aspect—the wide-set pale eyes, the pale freckled skin—and her own mother's mouth, a heartbreaking mouth that stretched effortlessly into the saddest of all smiles and flexed into frown when she was troubled. She was tall, slim, athletic, beautiful to my eye, capable of great things, and I worried almost constantly that she'd wither away here in this dusty outback, remain single and unhappy, sprinting down a dead-end road into middle age.

“Good,” I fibbed. “Fine. And with you?”

“Nice. I have what you'd probably call ‘a love interest.' ”

“Wonderful! Good guy?”

“Older,” she said. “Kind. Really into meditation.”

What leapt to my lips was:
How much older?
But I'd learned long ago to tread lightly when it came to Natasha's love interests. I was happy she'd found someone, but she had, in this arena, a genetic similarity to her Aunt Cecelia: Both of them had loved their way through a string of unusual boyfriends—the wild, the nerdy, the addicted and arrested, handsome and not so handsome, tall, thin, stocky, short, brilliant and rather slow; men, young and not so young, who inhabited the fringes of the masculine netherworld. I'd learned to accept it and hoped now only for one outcome: that my daughter's romantic explorations would end up where my sister's had, with a good man who treated her well.

So instead of probing I said, “And how's that going? The meditation, I mean.”

“Rinpoche's guiding me. He says I'm making progress but it doesn't feel like progress. It just feels like a gradual, I don't know, a gradual becoming more myself. I'm not afraid of the things I used to be afraid of.”

“Such as?”

“Such as Bakken creeps coming on to me in the market. Such as going out for long walks on the farm roads at night. Such as being out on my bike in a thunderstorm.”

Keep going, I thought. Soon it will be not afraid of getting into cars with strangers, not afraid of jumping out of airplanes, not afraid of working as a guard in the state prison, not afraid of. . . . I said, “As a fearful man, I have to say I'm jealous.”

“Little things, Dad, but it's nice. And it's because of the meditation. Are you keeping up with your practice?”

“Sure,” I said. “It's the last bastion of discipline for me. I sometimes think that, without it, I'd drown in a sea of wine and television.”

“You've gotten fat.”

“Thanks.”

“Are you still working out?”

“Not as much.”

“Are you depressed, Dad?”

“Not so much.”

“What do you do all day?”

“Oh, you know. I meditate for twenty minutes or half an hour, morning and night. In the middle of the day I keep busy. A little tennis. Reading. TV. Seeing friends.”

“You're depressed.”

“Right.”

“You should come out here and live with us. Rinpoche's an expert on depression.”

“And never experienced it a day in his life, I bet.”

“No, but still.”

“It's good to be here, hon. Nice to see you in the flesh, to see Rinpoche and Aunt Seese and Shelsa. But after all these years of city life, being here is like downshifting from fourth to second. It's very pleasant, refreshing. But it's not the life for me, Tash. I left this life a long time ago. I can't go back.”

“And Aunt Seese drives you nuts, right?”

“I love Aunt Seese. I admire her. I'm happy to see her so happy.”

“But . . .”

“But she can drive me crazy, still, yes.”

“Have you ever really looked into that, Dad?”

“As a matter of fact, I have. Many times.”

“And?”

“I think it's because she refuses to see the world as it actually is. She believes that if she eats carefully and prays a lot and is devoted to Rinpoche and Shelsa—all good things, by the way—then she'll escape pain and death, she'll somehow come to inhabit another earth where people don't cheat and murder. We were just talking about it, as a matter of fact. She dreams of a different world, which is all fine and good, except that, as far as any rational person knows, that world doesn't exist. She's been that way since she was a girl. She hasn't changed.”

“She thinks,” my daughter said, in a measured, thoughtful tone that was new to her, “that if she clears her mind down to the deepest level then three things will happen: she'll never be afraid; it will be easier to love people; and it will be easier to die.”

This, coming from a girl who'd recently watched her own mother die, stopped me in my tracks. Not literally—we kept walking; we were going past the solitary retreat cabins now, tidy and small, with unpainted wood siding and metal roofs. In my better days—only a few years earlier—I'd made a three-day retreat in one of them. I marked that as the end of my optimism, the high point of my spiritual attainment. Since then I'd been gliding down, slowly, almost without noticing. Down and down. My dog had died. I'd grown a belly. Even with the meditation practice, on certain days, in certain difficult hours, my mind was a circus of despair.

“You say that,” I told Natasha, then I paused, “you say that in a way that's different from Aunt Seese. She sounds like she hopes it's true, you sound like you know it's true. Is that just what Rinpoche tells you, or—”

“Rinpoche is enlightened, you know that, Dad, right?”

“I believe I do, yes. I'm not sure what it means, but I believe it.”

“It means that he doesn't identify with his body and his personality, his
I.
His mind has exploded out into something much bigger. In Christian terms it's like Jesus saying, ‘Not I, but the Father who lives in me.' ”

“I can feel something like that from him. I've always felt it. I just don't see it happening to me. Your aunt calls me his ‘disciple.' I think that's absurd. I'm his brother-in-law, his friend, his admirer. Period.”

“Enlightenment happens in stages, Dad. You have your ups and downs and then, if you keep trying, it comes over you when you least expect it.”

“Even if you don't pursue what you call ‘the spiritual life'?”

“Eventually. Sure. Just living makes it happen. The act of being alive is, in and of itself, spiritual evolution, unless a person purposely resists it. All the pain and pleasure, it's all a lesson. But a spiritual practice is like . . .” she twisted her lips to one side the way I'd seen her do five thousand times. “It's like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions. Like what you and Mom did for us.”

I couldn't speak.

“It's the difference between somebody who wants to be a good tennis player and goes out and plays once a week and somebody else who wants to be a good tennis player and takes lessons, practices, reads up on the sport, plays a lot.”

“Maybe I'm too lazy for that, hon.”

“I don't want you to be.”

“Why?”

“Why didn't you want me to hang out with Judy Millen when we were little?”

“Because her parents were racist homophobes who believed God loved them and hated your mother and me because we didn't go to church on Sunday and sometimes voted for women.”

“Why didn't you want me to binge drink in college and sleep with just anybody?”

“For obvious reasons, and I don't see the link between binge drinking and the spiritual life.”

“If you love somebody you want what's good for them, that's the link. I don't want to see my father fat and depressed—sorry, Dad—and giving up on life. Mom wouldn't want her death to do that to you. I don't want you to grow old and die that way. I want you to really understand what a great person you are, which is something you've resisted all your life. I think there's some weird, I-can't-possibly-be-special, North Dakota fake humility there. Have you ever looked at that?”

I didn't answer. We walked along. On the heels of her loving assault I tried to think of something funny to say, some wise remark, some deflection. Natasha had always been able to pierce that artfully constructed armor of mine, an armor that worked so well with my New York friends. At the office, at parties, meeting a neighbor at a café in town or on the front lawn during leaf-raking season, we had a repartee, my acquaintances and I, a hail-fellow-well-met bravado, in some cases a pattern of minor-league jousting. Harmless, to be sure, but an armor all the same. Here, in a few sentences, she'd pierced it again. I felt raw, unguarded, shaken up, afraid of something I couldn't name. We went along for another while and then—again, without talking about it—turned around and headed back. Only a weak yellowish light remained in the western sky, the last promise of day. Finally, when we were again within sight of the farmhouse, I said, “So tell me about this new boyfriend. Name. Age. Characteristics.”

I could feel her smiling next to me. I remembered what it felt like to smile at the mention of a lover. I remembered, so well, saying the word “Jeannie” to my friends and the warm feeling it raised in me. I remembered it as if it were yesterday.

“His name is Warren,” Natasha said. “And he's got some of that same North Dakota neohumility I was just talking about.”

“It has a good side.”

“Sure it does. I love you, I love him. It's just that sometimes I can clearly see those self-imposed limits and it makes me nuts. He's thirty-eight but he looks much younger. He's six-seven, 240 pounds. He played tight end at UND until he got hurt. He's a woodworker, a great one. He has a little furniture shop in Bismarck. He used to have a drug problem, long ago, after the injury, and he went to jail for a few months—just the county jail, just for shoplifting. But he's way, way past that now. He comes here on retreats three or four times a year and is a huge, huge fan of Rinpoche. He's going to be staying here to help us out while you and Rinpoche are traveling.”