by David Guy
He didn’t think the teachers he encountered were wrong. But he’d had a particular experience, couldn’t find anything that seemed similar. He wondered sometimes if something was wrong with him, but had to trust his deep feeling. The last place he tried was in Maine. The end of the line.
When that didn’t work out he went up to Mount Desert and got a job, practiced on his own and taught classes. The nature of the practice is that 80 percent of the people who try it—already a bold group—don’t stick with it. That made for paltry numbers at first. Even when I went, there were just five or six loyalists, Madeleine among them.
“I’m not worried about you,” Jake said. “Whatever happens.”
Wished I could say the same.
“It’s Madeleine I worry about,” he said.
“Madeleine?”
We were obviously talking about different things. I was thinking money.
“If it weren’t for Madeleine, we wouldn’t be sitting here. I’m not at all sure I’d be teaching.”
Almost as soon as Jake and Madeleine met, she let him occupy the garage apartment, rent free. When she left in the winter she made him caretaker, paid him a salary. Eventually she’d bought another house and let him keep the first one and take the income from it in the summer. It was a big break for him, a most generous act.
He seemed genuinely troubled by this subject. He seemed to fade away for a while. I wondered sometimes if certain topics brought his problem on. He had stopped eating—always a bad sign—sat quietly, staring at the table. Then the light came back to his eyes.
“We don’t understand, because sitting was easy for us,” he said.
“Speak for yourself.”
“I don’t mean that stuff at first. Sore back and sore knees.
But I knew when we met that you would stick with this. Your posture was lousy, body all tight. Posture still isn’t great.”
Another reason not to teach. They were adding up.
“You were a troubled human being. I knew there was something here for you.”
He’d known more than I had.
“Madeleine had beautiful posture the first time she sat.” He smiled. “Maybe because she’d done yoga, or been a dancer. It was exquisite.”
I could use her as a model. Listen to me, look at her.
“She just can’t do it. All these years later.”
That was the thing I couldn’t fathom.
“I always had the feeling the basic teaching was true,” Jake said. “Buddha nature, true self. There was a genuine person in there who would just emerge, if you could get past all the crap. That made sense the first time I heard it.”
For me too.
“Madeleine’s afraid of what’s in there. Doesn’t see the true self. What’s standing in the way is so vast, so troubling.”
She had her demons, that was for sure. You just had to go to bed with her—hate to mention it—to see them. Most women lie around forever afterward. She bolted like she was scared to death. Some phony excuse. She’d let you stay but was a terrible sleeper, wandering the house half the night. It was like sleeping alone.
“The funny thing is,” I said, “that her true self is right there. She’s the sweetest person you’ll ever meet.”
“I know. And a model of devotion. She’d give me her last dollar, if it came to that.”
That’d be the day.
“The problem is,” he said, “she’s devoted to me. Has this idea I keep her alive. What if I’m not here?”
She wouldn’t transfer that to me.
“This practice isn’t about sitting,” he said. “It’s about compassion, which can’t be taught. I’ve never helped Madeleine sit. She’s been the biggest puzzle of the past thirty years. But compassion. Where you naturally feel for the person, reach out to help. She teaches that to me.”
11
AT THE GOLDEN D the next morning I had just a muffin, the perfect solution. The coffee was superb, the muffin fresh and delicious, and I wasn’t overwhelmed.
Lily sidled over. “Hank not feeling well. Not eating today.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Jake said.
“I’m fine, really. I like these muffins. Don’t want to distract myself.”
“Maybe have donut today. Very fresh. Still warm.”
“This is all I want.”
She shook her head and walked away. I’d never be the man Jake was.
The omelet man was holding forth. He did seem to be a fine orator, with considerable dignity, though I couldn’t catch the actual words. It was amazing the way people around him sat as if nothing were happening. The scared woman in the overcoat had a glass of water today. She was the one person in the room I might have advised to take up smoking. I really wished she would do something.
At what seemed the ultimate moment in his discourse, the omelet man took a bite of his omelet, stared at it in horror, and tossed it into the wastebasket directly in front of him, on the other side of the counter. Poured his coffee in for good measure.
“Does that woman want some food, Lily?” Jake asked as we left.
“She just want sit. Sit all the time.”
“She wouldn’t eat if I bought it for her?”
“We try. Not want food. Just sit.”
There weren’t too many places that would have let her.
“Chocolate donut good today, Jake.”
Jake beamed. Chocolate was his favorite.
“You take care of Hank. He stop eating too. Pretty soon just like her. Sad face, glass water.”
We stepped out to the avenue. The cold from the night before had lingered, but the day was brilliant and bright, just a few white clouds in the sky. We were wearing our jackets. Autumn was settling in.
“What a donut,” Jake said. “My God.”
It was a chocolate cake donut with chocolate icing.
“You should go back and get one. I’m not kidding.”
“I don’t eat dessert with breakfast.”
“Why not?” He was perfectly serious. “We’re on vacation.”
Jake considered any trip a vacation. Actually, his whole life was a vacation.
I put an arm around him and gave him a squeeze. The man was irrepressible.
We headed toward Hampshire. He had apparently slept better, wasn’t dragging like the day before.
“You can come in,” Jake said as we got near Madeleine’s. “She’d like to see you.”
“We’ve been over that,” I said. Madeleine was the soul of politeness, but always was disappointed if she wasn’t alone with Jake. The time they had alone was different, and helped her somehow. She guarded it jealously.
“We’ve got to talk logistics about the center,” Jake said. “Sometime.”
“There’s plenty of time for that.”
“I’m not going to be the one to pick out office furniture,” he said. “I can tell you that.”
There was something I never thought I’d be doing.
Madeleine waited for us at the front door. “I do think we should talk soon,” she said when she heard I was leaving. “How about tomorrow morning? I can talk to Darcy about the food.” Madeleine had volunteered her cook to handle the retreat.
“Tomorrow it is,” Jake said. “She can make some more of those cookies.”
Darcy was a big Irish woman, threw food at you whenever she got a chance.
I had time for a walk before I met Jess. I headed toward Harvard, figured I’d circle around and come back. I loved that kind of crisp fall morning. Autumn was my favorite season in New England.
I was like Jake, hadn’t realized things were so far along in Madeleine’s plans. I knew we were finally, after all these years, coming to do a retreat in Cambridge, as she’d always wanted. I also knew that Madeleine wanted to lure Jake down there for good, have a place for him to teach full time. I was vaguely aware she’d had her house in mind for that purpose. But I thought she’d have done something much more makeshift at that point, move furniture
out of one room temporarily. I’d never thought she was fully engaged in transforming the place, had already—as Jake mentioned the day before—put down a deposit on a condo for herself. It was as if she were trying to steamroll things through: if she got the place ready, he had to come. She was a shrewd person and a good business-woman. If she was behind it, it would be first rate.
I wasn’t afraid, as Jake seemed to be, of the administrative side. I wasn’t even worried about living in the building where the center was. Jake and I were both part hermits. The setup at Mount Desert was just about right for us. But we’d adjust.
The thing that scared the bejesus out of me was the whole thing of being a teacher.
He’d given me everything he had. We’d gone over the classic texts of Soto Zen. He’d put me through lay ordination, then a small priest ordination a few years before. But I’d done all that in the context of being his sidekick. I hadn’t seen it another way.
The true thing that a teacher passes on, the truest thing, Jake had given me just by my being around him, the love and compassion that permeated his person. He was not a perfect human being. You couldn’t live with someone for years and not see his imperfections. In that way Madeleine was lucky he hadn’t fallen for her, and Jake was right to avoid it (I was utterly convinced that anyone who got into bed with her became that person she had to flee. He would have lost his whole aura in the space of a few minutes).
The thing I’m talking about he had the first day I met him, when he watched Josh pitch a fit as if he were singing an aria. That was the day that made me want to study with him, even before I knew what he taught; I wanted to discover wisdom that manifested as compassion. There was no splitting them apart. They were one thing.
I still thought after all those years, even after being exasperated at him on numerous occasions, that he was the sanest, sweetest person I’d ever met, made others saner and sweeter by being around them.
A person would have to be blind not to see he was getting older, or that something was happening to what the world would call his mind. “Firewood becomes ash,” Dogen Zenji said, “and it does not become firewood again.” But the profound presence that made Jake different from most people was there just as much after his episodes began as it was there before. I believed it would be there if he were totally blotto. And inasmuch as I’d thought about the future, all I’d really decided was to stay with him until the end. Past that I hadn’t figured.
Jess, when I met her that morning, had yet another look, a short blue skirt and purple pullover sweater. She did still have the nose ring and several dozen earrings, but wasn’t as garish with the makeup, didn’t look like a budding vampire. She was sitting at a booth and rose to kiss my cheek when I arrived. It was as if she’d gone to charm school.
She didn’t even offer to blow me for a hundred bucks.
“No booze today,” she said. “I’m a changed woman.”
Our little waitress—we had her again—smiled broadly.
“Yesterday morning was a dream,” Jess said. “The afternoon a nightmare.”
“And I’m eating today,” I said. “I took it easy with Jake.” I wanted an egg that didn’t taste like day-old grease.
After we ordered, Jess said, “This thing about art school. Taking a class. It’s gotten out of hand.”
“I thought you looked a little shocked.”
“I was just talking. To say something.”
“It came from somewhere.”
“It’s one of those things girls say when they’re sitting around. I ought to go to art school and start a line of jewelry. Lose thirty pounds and become a model. Take up the bass and start a rock band. It’s not like you’re going to do it.”
“What did you study before, when you were in school?”
“Nothing. That was the problem.”
“What were you supposed to study?”
“I don’t know. Liberal farts. What everybody does. What’s the point?”
Josh had hung around artsy types without career ambition. It was fine if their parents were around, or they had a dependable boyfriend, a little money in the bank. What was scary—if it was true—was the thought of her scraping by for the rent every month. Even though—as that fat guy on the barstool suggested—she apparently had a viable skill that was much in demand.
“My mother was never like that,” Jess said. “Not for one minute of her life, I’m convinced. Things might not have worked out the way she wanted. But she always wanted to do music, from the time she was little. Practiced the same way, hours every day. She didn’t push me into music, which was good. But she wanted me to find something like that. That kind of passion.”
“It’s intimidating.”
“You said it. Not just the passion, the intensity, day after day. I was proud of her. But I didn’t have that. I didn’t see how anybody could. How could you be that way?”
It was more or less the way Jake was about all of life.
Our food arrived, another omelet for Jess, eggs over easy for me, potatoes that seemed just to have been cooked rather than sitting around on a grill drying out, fresh fruit, a warm bagel and cream cheese. The orange juice was fresh squeezed.
I wondered if I could drag Jake up here.
We ate for a while, enjoying the food.
“My mother used to play things for me when I was a little girl,” Jess said. “Sometimes her own, sometimes other people’s. I didn’t know the difference, though I used to play a game, trying to guess what was hers. It was like playing, two kids playing. The music just rolled off the piano. Those were some of the sweetest moments of my life.”
“Did she play for her partner?”
“Didn’t have a partner then. It was just the two of us.”
I didn’t want to say much, it all sounded so delicate.
“The funny thing was, after Mother got sick, all her anxiety about performing went away. She gave a concert before she died, big crowd at the Unitarian church, played only her own compositions. It was fantastic, she didn’t seem nervous at all. Pumped up and radiant, but not nervous. I never heard anything like it, even when I was a girl. It was like seeing the person she could have been.”
She put her head down and cried. She didn’t sob, but tears streamed from her eyes, her chest heaving. “Fuck,” she said.
We were sitting in a booth in the far corner. Jess had her back to the place, and hardly anyone was there. Our little waitress had been barreling in our direction with a coffeepot, but I waved her off. I reached over and took Jess’s hand.
“It’s all right, Jess. There’s nobody here.”
“I know. It’s just too . . . I haven’t talked about this.”
“It’s good to talk.”
“I know, but Christ. Bawling into my eggs at a restaurant.”
“You’re not the first, I’m sure.” The place catered to neurotic intellectuals. People probably cried there all the time.
She took out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes, blew her nose. She blew again.
“Feels good, actually.” She laughed.
“I wish I’d known your mother,” I said.
“She didn’t know a lot of guys. Didn’t know a lot of people period. Her thing was women. Didn’t hang out with men. She knew what you’re after, with those fat dicks of yours.”
We both laughed. The crying seemed to be over.
I nodded at the waitress, who’d been hovering with the coffeepot. She came and poured.
“You all right, honey?” she asked. “Maybe you should of had one of them drinks.”
“I’m fine,” Jess said. “We’re fine.”
She sipped her coffee.
“I’m convinced the whole thing, everything she did, came out of that stuff in the morning. Yoga and meditation. She had a special room for that, this small bright room in one corner of the house, where she did those things. The one came out of the other.”
That was true and it wasn’t. Meditating was no guarantee you’d produce anything. It
didn’t make you an artist. It was its own thing.
At the same time, Jess was right. The art did come out of the meditating.
“So I want to do it,” she said. “But I’m also scared.”
“Everybody’s scared,” I said.
She gave a huge shudder, shook all over.
“Why are you scared?” I asked.
“Because it means I’m serious,” she said.
“Really?”
“About life.” She shook her head. “You know what I mean? I’m going to buckle down and do it. Really live my life. Quit farting around.”
“Yes.”
“Mother was so serious. She was fun too. But she had this serious side. She was just going to do it. That’s why it wasn’t so sad when she died. I knew she had lived her life.”
“That’s wonderful.”
“But what if, like, Lauren, my roommate, my best friend, comes home and finds me meditating?”
“What if she does?”
“It’s like I was praying, or something. Beating off.”
“Women call it beating off?”
“This woman does.”
You learn something new every day.
“It’s so private,” she said. “So embarrassing.”
“So do it in your room. Do it when she’s not there. You can tell her you do it, right?”
“I don’t know, Hank.”
“Tell her you’re taking a class. You have a teacher.”
“Even so.”
“She knows you beat off, right?”
“Not like she does. You ought to see her vibrator. It’s got to be eight inches long.”
Not the best example on my part, perhaps.
“Anyway,” she said. “Would you show me? I’ve never done it.”
“Jake gives instruction the first night.”
“I can’t be there at night. I told you guys. I want you to come to the house and show me. I don’t want to be embarrassed.”
“All right. I’ll be happy to. But what if Lauren comes in?”
“She won’t. She’s at work. But if she does, I’ll tell her we’re there to fuck.”
Wouldn’t want to tell her something embarrassing.
The waitress came with the check. She looked at me pointedly as she tore it off. “You take care of this little girl.”
