by Blair Hurley
In her private meeting with her Master afterward, she said, “I can reach deep levels. You know I can. But I can only do it when you guide me, when you walk me through my own mind. Without that, I stay right on the surface. I wait for something to happen, but nothing does.”
Her Master’s large, sunburned face was relaxed and grave, his watery gray eyes settled on something over her shoulder. He would not reward her with his gaze until she had done well. They were seated on tatami mats in his second room, cross-legged, Nicole trying to exude serenity in the posture of her spine and hands. Over time, sitting cross-legged always pressed on her bad ankle, but the Master looked as reliable as stone. “When you’re monitoring your thoughts, what returns again and again?” he asked.
“Well—” Her eyes moved to the ceiling, then back to the broad exposed V of her Master’s chest. She remembered him telling her of his wandering and searching, the questing that had ended in Zen. You’re like me, he’d said. It’s taken you a long time to find your way. But now you’ve found me. She’d begun to cry, out of relief.
“It’s you,” she said. “It’s Paul. I keep thinking about people I love, and I think, How can I let go of them? Love is a good thing. Being bound to other people, because they love you”—she choked—“is a good thing.”
“Don’t try to cut ties with a knife,” he said. “Don’t shove things and people away from you. Remember instead that your attachment is real, while the apparent permanence of these feelings and people is not.”
“The Buddha says to make all desires cease.”
“You don’t begin by denying it. You begin by saying, ‘Yes, I have this desire.’” He reached out and rested his hand on her knee.
Nicole held still. She was always surprised when they reached this moment in their meetings. They were teacher and student, very old, accustomed friends; each time he let his hand travel up her skirt, the shock was fresh. It was only then that she noticed the dry, furry smell of his robe, the warmth of the straw mat on her knees, the strange vegetal whiffs of his green tea breath. He draped himself on top of her, yanking his robes aside. She followed the sound of her breath up and down her rib cage. I am awake. Sometimes it was more like a dream, like the arrival of the white bear in her favorite fairy tale, “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.” An enchanted prince in disguise, visiting her in her sleep. She let him place her limbs where he wanted them, let his hand clasp the back of her neck and pull her close. She let him drive into her furiously, the sensation bright and hot and clear like an injection of burning liquid amber. “Oh,” she said finally, once. The grinning jade Buddha watched them from the corner.
Then he eased off her and they began straightening themselves. There was no higher authority to be worried about, no law or punishment from tribunal, cleric, or priest, but Nicole felt tense after each encounter, no matter how eagerly she leaned into his grasp. She did not know if it was a sinful thing, something to be ashamed of, or if it was holy and right.
Afterward they lay back together and he read her poetry from the sutras. He read the parts about the beautiful daughters of the god Mara, sent to seduce the Buddha on his journey toward enlightenment. He described their long, flowing hair and the many jewels that adorned their virginal bodies. His fingers traced her navel in trailing circles.
“My brother wants me to move to New York,” she said. “Maybe I should. Sometimes I think I’m stalled here.” The words sounded potent and frightening as she spoke them.
“And throw away all the progress we’ve made?” he said. “Why?”
“What am I to you?” she asked. “Am I just a nun?” She thought of Helen’s warning: You need to know what you mean to him.
He didn’t answer her directly. He read from the sutras instead, quoting Mara the deceiver:
You are bound by every shackle
Whether human or divine;
The bonds that tie you down are strong
And you shall not escape me.
“You are my student, little theri,” he said. “It’s wonderful to be a student in Zen. It’s the best thing there is. There is nothing more you need.”
Yesterday, she’d been with Sean. It had been awkward and fumbling, but they’d laughed and she’d felt some semblance of normalcy.
Then her Master stroked her hair, and made the promises that lovers make: that he would always be there, that she would never be without him. Wasn’t that enough?
At home, she shed her clothes laboriously, exhausted as she always was after the session. Kukai slunk between her legs and then retreated from her outreached hand. After a minute in a scalding shower, up to her ankles in soapy water, she turned off the faucet and squatted on the shower floor to unclog the drain.
There was a wet mass of something in there. It was her own hair. She drew it out slowly, a great red-brown ball of it.
She reached in deeper and pulled out a fat twisted rope, which connected to another glob of hair, glistening, clotted with soap scum. She thought she might gag but kept pulling slowly so as not to break the chain of it, loosening cluster after cluster, watching it adhere sluggishly to the tile. It seemed like it was all here, handfuls, ten years’ worth. And if she kept pulling, it would get lighter and redder, back to the strawberry down, the color of her hair when she was twenty-two and said, I want to learn from you and I will be your student, I will be yours for this life and all the next lives and that was all she wanted.
Here was the sick thing worming through her, the gummy plaque of her own desperation. This was the thing that made her watch Helen with the greedy territorial gaze of an old alley cat. He is mine, he chose me, he has no more willing pupil. Here was ten years’ worth of oleaginous submission.
Naked, wet, she picked up the cordless and dialed Paul’s number one-handed, dripping on the kitchen floor. When she’d managed to burn every bridge, there was still Paul. She listened to the lonely digital ring, her only connection these days to a world outside her Master’s damp cave.
She’d run away from home when she was seventeen with her boyfriend, Jules, and another friend, just driven out of her suburb one night and not returned for the better part of a year. Her mother and Paul had then fallen into a long habit of worry that never left. Not until now did she wonder what her family had thought during that time: She was in trouble. She was the culmination of a series of bad parenting choices. She was a mistake. She was dead. Month after month that your child is gone, you cannot picture where she is or if she needs you. Then, as now, she’d come close to the brink before she’d admit she needed help, needed to flee from the mess she’d made, needed someone’s arms to run into.
When Paul picked up, she asked, “Are you still there?” as though it hadn’t been days at all.
“Always,” he said. It was sweet, really. She had to remember that he was sweet.
“All right,” she said. “Sign the lease.”
JOCELYN
Paul had come to Boston at January’s end, and for one weekend they packed like college students on the last day of the term: savagely, stuffing things in garbage bags. She threw out more than she kept, feeling a rare glee as she tossed chipped mugs, shrunken T-shirts, blackened pots. Shedding material possessions was a question not of letting go but of waging a ceaseless and vigilant war; you had to fight not to accumulate. There was scarcely an armful of clothes to begin with: long skirts with flower prints, peasant blouses, whatever reminded her that she was a wanderer-outcast at heart. But in her bare closet there was always that navy dress hanging at the back, the good shoes, the pantyhose rolled in a ball, things you needed from time to time.
She picked up a strand of tattered Tibetan prayer flags that had been strung on her window for she didn’t know how long. No: she did. These were the same flags she’d had with her when she ran away, for that long gone year. Her bare feet were up on the dash and the flags streamed out the window behind them, a thread of blue and gold. She looked at Paul and stuffed the flags in her pocket, a magic act in reverse. Disap
pearing the memory.
The Buddha told his monks they might have two robes, a water filter, and a begging bowl. At the end, staring at the full garbage bags, Nicole had moved one chosen at random from the pack pile to the trash pile.
The ringing woke her.
“Is this Nicole!” a fuzzy female voice shouted down her ear. She was in the new apartment in Curry Hill, still amid a riot of unopened bags, her mattress on the floor beside its new plastic-wrapped frame. Out her window she could see a Middle Eastern bookstore with Arabic script, and a young man with his feet up on the counter, reading a book. Photo spreads on a travel agency’s glass storefront advertised packages for the hajj. In a slanting rain she gazed at sandy minarets, green flags, and white-robed pilgrims moving like sea foam to the oil-black Kaaba. It was beautiful, the way all religions she didn’t know looked beautiful.
“Yes? Who’s this?”
“Jocelyn. I’m Buffy’s friend.”
“Buffy?” It was too early in the morning. Buffy from the Zendo, of the Christmas party.
“You know, from your meditation class? Buffy said you’d know—”
“Oh yes, of course. I know who she is. But how—”
“I guess she found out that you had moved? Anyway, I live in Brooklyn. She was just wondering if you might like to meet. It’s always nice to meet new people in a new city.”
Of course, Buffy would be the one to make inquiries after Nicole missed a session. She was stable and reliable; she was a married Back Bay woman who kept track of where to send Christmas cards. “I thought you might want to meet somebody here,” Jocelyn said. “New York can be a lonely place.”
New York might be difficult; but in Boston it was nearly impossible to make new friends, with every face hidden behind a baseball cap or a coat collar. They were all so buttoned up, so tribal, and Nicole was too, wary of change or too much kindness. She made a private promise to herself: Meet people. Make friends. They chose a time for coffee in a bookstore in Union Square.
She packed onto a 4 train among twenty-somethings with matching earbuds. When a man with a cane got on and began a loud, determined monologue, she listened, then dropped a quarter in his Red Sox cap as he swayed by. “God bless you, young lady,” he said, and she bowed, half-expecting the pressure of a priest’s hand on her head as after Communion, the brief push and clasp of her skull.
She watched chess games in Union Square under umbrellas and the evening rush at Whole Foods, the streetlights in rain and newsagents in their flimsy stands, enthroned behind Aztec temples of gum. Paul was away at another conference; except for her new employers, she hadn’t spoken to anyone in days. In a week’s time she’d applied for and gotten a job in management at Nordstrom Rack, overseeing women’s wear. Paul had helped with this too, having heard something about an opening from a friend in textiles; she was keeping track of all the ways he was greasing the wheels for her, helping her to slide into her new life. Maybe the job would lead to something higher up, a desk job with corporate, trips to China to buy silk. She occasionally imagined that for herself.
She’d been fingerprinted by the borough of Manhattan as part of her new-employee background check. She’d wanted to turn to the unsmiling woman rolling her thumb on an inkpad and tell her she was on the run, an escapee. (Was that what she was?) She’d seen her first crazy ranting person on the subway, her first handful of Hasidim unsmilingly handing out flyers on Talmudic law, her first cop toting an AK-47. The people of New York did not have time for her and her stories.
In the bookstore she followed the signs to the Religion/Spirituality section, on the third floor. There was a pleasing library hush up here, among the unpopular shelves. She traced a line of the books on Buddhism and her finger stopped on a translation of the Therigatha. It was a very old part of the original canon, a collection of poetry by Buddhist nuns. She opened it to a random page and read:
I gave up my house
and set out into homelessness.
I gave up desire and hate.
My ignorance was thrown out.
I pulled out craving
along with its root.
Now I am quenched and still.
She closed the book and pressed her forehead to its spine, suddenly overcome. Her heart beating wispily, her breath too short.
In her very last Tuesday session, Helen had been absent. In the private meeting that followed, she bowed formally before her Master, pressing her forehead to the mat. One more prostration. Then one more, to hide the trembling. Twenty-six thousand and one.
Her Master was speaking of the importance of achieving no-mind, an advanced concept they’d been working on. It was not the same thing as not thinking; it was returning to a time before conscious, verbal thought. She kept nodding, but he could tell there was something changed in the air between them.
“You’re not listening to me,” he said sharply.
She bowed again, to hide her face. “Master—what if I were needed in New York?”
Above her head, his voice seemed to come from every corner of the room. “It’s important for you to stay close to me. You’re at a delicate stage in your advancement. One wrong move”—he put his hand on her thigh, closed his fingers tight—“and you could slide back into a deluded state. When we near insight, we become afraid of the truths we might learn.”
In the dense silence of the room, she waited.
After a long time, he said, “And I would miss you.”
Something was tickling under her tongue, some new anger was there to make her speak. She looked up, said, “You have plenty of other students to keep you busy. Helen, she’s bright. When she comes back—you could keep working on her.”
“You know you are my best,” he said simply.
“Are you sure you don’t tell all your students that?”
He laughed, a sudden bark. She could surprise him; she had that talent. But he quickly grew stern again. “You’ve become impudent. I ought to whip you with the keisaku until you see sense.” He was referring to the flat wooden stick used during meditation sessions. If a monk slouched or fell asleep, or showed any lapse in concentration, the keisaku, the teaching stick, would be cracked across his shoulders. In Japan, it was serious business. It could raise welts.
Nicole took a deep breath. Monks were supposed to welcome the beating as needed assistance, to bow and thank their masters for this gift of instruction. “I’m sorry, Master. I accept my punishment.” She bowed low, closed her eyes.
The keisaku leaned against the far wall. She heard her Master get up and pad by her in his socks. He stroked her shoulder with it, he moved it up and down her back. Gently across her body, caressing her.
She was shaking as she walked away from the Zen center that day. The street was quiet, the storefronts going dark, the animatronic lizard gazing at her with its unlit eyes. He did not know this was the last time.
The Buddha said that when a man has a poisoned arrow in his chest, you don’t stop to wonder who fired it, or what kind of wood it was made of, or what bird supplied the feathers. You don’t argue about what poison is on the tip.
You yank it out.
“Are you Nicole?” A woman was standing sway-hipped in the aisle. She looked to be in her late thirties, slim and dressed in draped vintage clothing—a frilly dress with an old housewife print under a Castro jacket, strands of her long blond hair tangled in a few necklaces. Whenever Nicole saw footage of hippies like her on television, she felt both longing and embarrassment.
She shelved the book of poetry and grabbed at a biography of the Dalai Lama instead. “You must be Jocelyn. How do you know Buffy again?”
“We worked together, oh, years ago, when I lived in Boston.” Jocelyn touched the spine of the Dalai Lama book. “Do you think he’s happy?”
“The Dalai Lama? Oh—probably. He’s always smiling.”
“He always looks sad behind his smile. Like he’s got the weight of the world on his shoulders.”
“He’s not Jesus,” said
Nicole. It came out sharper than she’d intended. But this woman sounded like the sort she was always being confused with: women who read Buddhist sutras and horoscopes with equal credulity, women who liked their spirituality lite. She put down the Dalai Lama book and stepped away.
Jocelyn laughed. “True, true.” They were quiet. “Damn. So you’re a Buddhist? Like, a real one? I meditate a little, but Vipassana-style—I think that’s what Hindus do.”
They sat down at the café in the store and drank shots of matcha green tea. Jocelyn wanted to know if Nicole had grown up in Boston and what that was like. Nicole answered warily. There was a certain sleepy amiability to Jocelyn’s questions that kept Nicole talking, telling her about the move, her brother, even a quick acknowledgment—something she rarely elaborated on—that she had converted to Buddhism when she was seventeen.
Jocelyn nodded, eyes wide, swallowing the room, the walls of books, Nicole. “So how did it feel?”
No one had asked her that before. “It felt like—like saying goodbye to someone you love.”
“Oh wow, that’s really sad,” Jocelyn said. Then she smiled again and pressed her hands together, in greeting or prayer. “Come out with me tonight. I’m having some drinks with friends. If you’re new in town, you need to meet some people.”
“Thanks, but—”
“But what? Come on.” She grabbed Nicole’s arm and shook it playfully.
The party started around sunset in a bar in the Village, a dark little polished-wood pub with loud music and baskets of steaming sweet potato fries. Jocelyn waved around the group: “This is Nicole the Buddhist. That’s Simon the painter, Jenny does videography, and Harold has this performance art thing going on right now in the Village—you should check it out . . .”
