Glass Grapes (15 page)

Whatever faith exists it will not be altered by human affairs. Those who believe deeply in the Buddha consider it possible that when he arrives the wind and waves will be calmed.

—Inscription in Cave 323, Tang dynasty

Their conversations were always so soft they didn't get anywhere, but then neither did either get really upset or disoriented as happens sometimes when there is direct disagreement or tension between the two parties who are trying to agree about what to do about a specific problem, a hard one, or what should they do in general, even harder. It was as if they had entered into a room lined with soft materials and moved about effortlessly and easily, bumping into one another softly.

The shape of their conversations goes something like:
what do you think,
and
yes I agree with you,
and
I'd be happy to try if you'd like to,
and
you certainly are right.
The entire conversation has a sort of ritualized shape
to it, organized around repeated phrases, and a rather respectful even reverential manner. If anyone thinks this is an exaggeration, just try eavesdropping once in a while. It is rather as if what one hears, rather than the individual voices, is a sort of echoing drone, a circling around a central tone of accord.

What is being set in motion by their engaged endeavor at agreement is not however only agreement but rather the process of perpetual becoming, each of them dedicated to the idea, although neither has a need to speak of it, of never reaching a conclusion and thereby slowing time to the eternal present by means of never arriving but always rearranging the terms of the agreement. If one comes into conflict, on the other hand, as they both recognize, one of the parties will win and one will lose and time will be reinstated. It will be 3
A.M.
and one of them will exult,
I win.

But if they keep on having the same or nearly the same conversation about, as it happens this time, a trip they might take in the future, they will possess that trip endlessly since they will never arrive at the moment of decision, will never buy the tickets, will never experience liftoff or jet lag and will never regret that the trip has come to an end.

Thus far they have successfully prolonged time through Thailand, Japan, and China, all places they thought they had wanted to visit and certainly they had read the guidebooks about, wanting especially to encounter what they believed would be a different sense
of time, a sense of time slowed and prolonged towards which they aspired. They would, they thought, be encouraged to recognize the transitoriness of all human endeavor and the need to avoid attachments to the paltry things of this world.

She had been especially drawn to the Chinese caves at Dunhuang since time there was layered over itself again and again, walls originally painted in the
4
^TH
century, then repainted in the
6
^TH
and afterwards partially destroyed and repainted until the encrusted present was an emblem of multiple times overlapped into the present moment that they would see once they got there. It was the color she especially wanted, the hallucinated and druggy turquoise of the ceilings and, she thought, it must have helped those long-ago believers touch the eternity they chanted about while circling round and round the center pole. The Buddhist angels floated up there, holding bowls of timelessness in their outstretched hands. This was the trip they had most agreed upon; it seemed to them at the exact moment during which they were discussing it to be the most perfect trip in the world. Their voices grew soft and quiet as they came into perfect accord. The moment seemed to extend. The room fairly hummed with unity and pleasure. It will be perfect, they said.

But of course once they had agreed on the perfection of this specific plan and walked in circles about the living room, saying
yes it seems exactly right,
and
I agree about the length of the stay,
and
what a good idea you've
proposed,
they were unable to move out of the perfection they already had in hand. It seemed a travesty to disrupt it. They could see the whole so completely that the thought of leaving this perfection for the imperfection of dusty travel stopped them dead in their tracks. And so they gathered themselves into the agreed-upon rituals of chanted accord. They pulled the caves of their own making in close and agreed that it would be best,
yes,
she echoed, for the time being, not to rush into anything, but to go over the same ground again and again, trying to get a sense of having already been where they had thought to go so that they could finally agree on how much they had thoroughly enjoyed the moment of standing still in the middle of Magao Cave 323 where they could almost hear the distant chanting of believers.

She listened to him talking quietly on the phone, although she knew it was something she wasn't supposed to do. She knew that in his former life others had pulled at him and asked him what he was doing, whom he was talking to, when he was leaving, and when he was coming back. Now the unspoken rule between them in this new life they had set up was to walk into the other room and not to.

She could, however, hear him say something in the even way he did no matter what and agitation kicked in. It seemed a reaction one might have to poison oak, although that couldn't be right since this was a non-irritant that made her irritable. How could quietude in a quiet room set her off?

Trying not to respond to someone who most especially wants you not to respond was hard. It seemed a
kind of setup if you were the sort of person, surprisingly, she found, she was. It was difficult not to say,
who was that dear.
It was difficult to try not to have a reaction when you were having a reaction and she found that trying not to try was worse.

She found herself lurking in ways she had never lurked before. She hadn't thought of herself as someone who would lurk in the hall, just so she could listen in. She found her own body dragging slowly through the hall and found it hard to recognize herself, she who always had taken her days as they came. She wondered who that person was she had become, the one who listened in.

She had read about men who had secret lives and she was sure he was not one of them. But it was hard to tell despite his obvious integrity. Then too, you could never tell, and she was the one at home alone all day while he went off to teach his classes and although he said they were perfectly matched, it was true she didn't understand the books he wrote. Somehow, despite the lectures she gave herself about it, these phone conversations made her feel left out and, although she had never used the word
alienated
before, it was what she felt.

His conversations were lengthy, quiet, serious. They took place during or after dinner while she was clearing up. She thought she could hear certain repeated
words and she tried to piece them together as if she were knitting together an ancient manuscript. There were words she recognized like
emptiness
or
dependent
and there were words that came in a sort of tonal slur so that she couldn't quite get hold. After holding back for sometime she'd sometimes allow herself to ask, in a voice a bit too bright, who had called, but he would smile and say
no one
or
it's nothing important,
not meaning, she thought, in any way to dismiss her question which however he didn't answer as he moved out of the room into his study.

Over a period of time she collected the overheard words in a list and when she typed them into Google she got back any number of sites she thought might be useful in sorting out what was going on in the back of his mind. Pages printed out in front of her and she underlined the important ones in yellow marker:

#1 Ultimate truth ‘cannot be spoken'
(pu k' e shuo ag)
.

Taking up the idea of the unspoken, she tried to pare down what she said and more often than that to smile blankly during all conversations. It seemed a gesture that was as close to the truth as she could get, especially since her own smile was a bit crooked, one side of a lip sidling up farther than the other. She tried not to push as she had occasionally done previously, but to let things go their own way into silence.

At first she found this unpleasant, like watching a string of words freeze in the air. He continued to make the phone calls as he had always done, although he noticed that their interactions had shifted somewhat. Nevertheless, he had his work to do and he continued to move ahead, phoning, e-mailing, writing, and working. She wasn't sure where this would get them, but she'd see.

She read:
The Bodhisattva's mode of being is described in terms of ‘no grasping,' ‘no attachment.'
She was unsure what to do since she'd always liked holding onto him, not in public, of course—she hated couples who grabbed each other in public—but in the kitchen on the way through the house, she liked the sense of being attached to him, settled into his skin and clothes, washing them, folding them, a bit of cloth passing under her hands. She decided to leave the laundry until next week.

#2 Conventional truth is
samsara
in that it alienates one from the source and truth of all existence.

The word she grasped most clearly and the one that seemed most useful was
conventional.
She knew, of course, that he was the intellectual and she the conventional one. But before she hadn't minded and he seemed to appreciate her willingness to keep life going for them both. She'd do the shopping and he'd go to work. She'd buy the groceries and cook; he'd read academic magazines before dinner and retreat to his study afterwards while she took up her colored pencils to draw.

She'd put on her favorite movie and then arrange the pencils in rows and draw precisely accurate pictures of everything in the house as Julie Andrews sang. She had already done the furniture, the items in the refrigerator, the contents of her purse, even the money, the coins and bills, the ticket stubs and credit cards. At first the pictures were not so small, but they began to get so much smaller that she could fit hundreds on a single sheet. As she fitted them one after another in rows across the blank paper, it seemed to make them all equal somehow, as if the large and the small could all be colored red.

She noticed that the unconventional women in the neighborhood tended to go to classes, gardening classes or yoga classes or mommy and me classes. You could recognize them by their footwear. Since she had no children and no garden, this left the yoga class, and so she enrolled in the local Y. Her favorite pose was the corpse pose at the end, but the rest was fine as well and she kept it up. One morning when he had needed to let her know he would be late returning from work, he phoned, but she didn't answer. When he asked her where she had been, she said
nowhere dear.
She thought it would be best if she sprung all her unconventionality on him at once, perhaps for their anniversary coming up soon. She thought that might be the right time.

She hadn't been sure she'd like the classes, they seemed so peculiar and the words so foreign, but she
did. It seemed like loading the dishwasher. You had to be adept, you had to be precise, you had to pay attention to each plate and slot. She slotted herself into the sideways facing warrior pose between two panes of glass. She floated in the space like an insect on a flower and, although she'd never felt so alone before, she also felt fine.

One day when her husband couldn't reach her, he came home for lunch and slipped on the wet path up to the front door and twisted his ankle, not too badly, but it did hurt and he had to wear a soft cast. He found himself reaching out for solace in ways he hadn't before.

When the phone rang after dinner, she answered it and then held it at arm's length and waited for him to make his way with his one crutch over to the small space off the kitchen. She found that his sprain made him talk louder into the mouthpiece so that it was easier to listen for the special words, but she had to do the dishes quickly in order to get to the meditation class recommended by her yoga instructor, so she forgot to listen.
Goodbye dear,
she called and left as he was finishing up the conversation on the phone.

#3 Destruction, cessation, non-existence, elimination, exhaustion—all give negative description to the experience of ultimate truth.

The center of truth seemed the most perplexing and painful of all. Moreover and in truth, she and her husband
had become completely out of touch and exhausted. He spent all his time writing his book and she spent all her time working on her new spiritual life and when she wasn't working on her spiritual life and taking up new forms, Ashtanga and Flow, she was drawing members of her yoga class. She had given up attention to the things at home—they seemed somehow ghostly, illusory, from some period in her life she couldn't remember—and she became fixated on making a poster of very small figures in all the poses she had been learning.

She wasn't at all sure how to get the feet right, and besides they were so often in places no one's feet were meant to be, and though she hated to admit it, she began to long for Julie Andrews on the hillside. She crumpled paper after paper. She was tired. Late at night they passed on the way to the bedroom, completely devoted to the experiences they were having, but worn and somewhat lonely.

#4 The most important implication of dependent origination, therefore, is that no entity exists independent of other entities.

One morning as she was working with her pencils during yoga class, she realized that she didn't recognize anyone. Her neighbors whom she had known slightly before beginning the class and whom by now she knew far better, seemed like strangers to her. Perhaps, she thought, it was that they assumed such twisted postures,
were upside down and backwards, turned into dogs, trees, camels, and ploughs. When she got home, she showered, hoping to wash away the queasy feeling of dislocation, and dried her hair before the mirror, but she found she too had taken on a look she couldn't quite recognize, a look not animal or vegetable, but partial.

When her husband returned late that night, his limp still keeping him to a bit of a slow pace and the use of a cane, she looked at him hard. He too looked partial, partly she supposed because she hadn't seen much of him of late or hadn't looked at him carefully for some time, but partly because he looked smudged as if she had run her thumb across one of the lines of her drawings.

For the first time in months she decided to run a few sentences by him to see how it would go.
How are you,
she asked,
how's your work going, what would you like for dinner tomorrow, did you notice the moon on the way home, what do you think we should do for our anniversary, does your foot hurt much, would you mind fixing the screen door, how's Stan?
Since it had been a while, she simply spun out an entire list, thinking to catch up as it were. He looked startled, but replied,
fine, ok, spinach, yes, go to a movie, yes, I'm afraid so, I'll get to it tomorrow, and not bad, I think.

It reminded her of the church services of her youth—call and response. When they finally got over
the odd shape of this exchange, they both felt better and settled in their skin. It seemed they'd gotten somewhere both familiar and different. That night they hooked into one another in the bed as they hadn't done for weeks and slept better than they had for days. For their anniversary, they went to a movie and out to dinner at a nice local restaurant and had the usual.