by David Guy
Little? She was bigger than I was.
“It’s not how it looks,” Jess said. “We’re just buddies.”
“Yeah. You watch out for them buddies, young lady.”
I gave her a 30 percent tip. She put up with a lot.
We walked down Prospect to Jess’s house and she let us in, stepped into the living room. It wasn’t spotless, but had undergone a transformation. All the magazines had been picked up, the CDs. The beer cans were gone, ashtrays empty.
“This place isn’t always a pigsty,” she said.
“I’m impressed.” The posters were still on the wall, of course.
“I figured we’d do it out here, since you’re scared of the bedroom. Wait a minute.” She walked to the bedroom and came out, blushing. “I bought one of these.”
It was a meditation cushion. She’d have been less embarrassed with her roommate’s vibrator.
“I’m not saying I’m going to use it. But at least I’ve got it. One more blip on the credit card.”
I didn’t want to know her credit card debt.
We sat in the living room for instruction. I’ve done it literally dozens of times, taking care of the new students up in Maine, could have done it in my sleep. I try to tailor it to the particular person.
The thing about Zen is that it’s simple exactly where you expect it to be complicated. The Japanese are obsessed with physical posture, put more emphasis on that than any other tradition. But when you’ve finally got the posture figured out, there’s nothing more. Some people teach following the breathing, and we give that to beginners. Might even let them count their breaths. But all that finally falls away and you’re just sitting.
Think not thinking, Dogen said. How do you think not thinking? Beyond thinking. Figure that out.
“That’s it?” Jess asked.
“The point is to do nothing,” I said.
“You think this is what my mother did?”
“There are other ways to begin. But for most traditions, this is what it comes down to.”
“Seems easy.”
“Right. Nothing to it.”
The instructions were simplicity itself, but what happened afterward could get complicated. The human mind is intricate.
“It doesn’t quite, exactly, feel right,” Jess said.
“You’re leaning forward a little.”
“I feel like I’m straight.”
“You’re pretty good. But you want to throw your shoulders back a little, puff out your stomach. I’ll show you.”
I moved behind Jess to adjust her posture, slid my hand up her spine, gently pulled her shoulders back, then reached around and touched her breasts.
“Oh Christ,” I said.
It had been a problem, just a slight problem, that her skirt was so short, her legs white and bare. She wore that same light scent as the day before, and her hair smelled marvelous. Her shoulders were soft, and my hands seemed to move on their own. “I’m sorry, Jess. Jesus Christ. I didn’t mean to do that.”
She’d reddened, also smiled. “Maybe you did.”
“No. It just happened.”
“Maybe your hands know what you really want.”
Maybe they did. That was why I didn’t normally adjust women’s posture during instruction.
“Why don’t we see if they want to again?” she said.
I had moved in front of her, and she took my hands, put them on her breasts. I took them away.
“You want to fuck me,” she said. “I know you do.”
“I do.”
“And I want you to. Really.”
“I can’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
“There’s nothing wrong. But this is something else. I’m your teacher.”
“So what? I fucked one of my teachers in high school.”
Good grief. “He shouldn’t have done that.”
“He just should have done it better. Listen, Hank. Forget about it. You didn’t show me anything.”
“What?”
“I could have figured this much on my own. Sit there with my legs crossed.”
“I suppose.”
“So you’re not my teacher. We really didn’t do anything. You can fuck me.”
I had moved away, but not too far. I didn’t want her to take my hands again. She was smiling, flushed with passion.
“You don’t understand,” I said.
“Explain it to me.”
I stood up, stepped over to a bean bag chair and sat. It would have helped if there had been some real furniture in the place.
“You’re coming to the retreat on Friday,” I said.
“Saturday. I’ve told you a million times. I can’t come at night.”
“Okay, Saturday.”
“And I’m only going to stay a few hours. Can’t stay long. I can’t get up too early.”
“Just be there at ten thirty. That’s when Jake gives a talk. So you’re becoming Jake’s student. Even if it’s only for a while. But that’s the way everybody starts.”
“All right.”
“When you’re Jake’s student you’re mine. I’m an extension of him.” That was a stretch, but it seemed truer than it had a few days before. “And it’s not appropriate to have sex with students. It’s a violation.”
“All right. I get it. So how do you get your rocks off?”
I shrugged. “Not everybody’s a student.”
“A lot of them must be. The women you meet. You’re not tempted?”
“I’m tempted right now. Why do you think I’m sitting over here?”
She started up from her cushion.
“Sit down, Jess.”
She sat back down, blushing. “This is still vaguely insulting.”
“It’s not meant that way. I’m telling you I want to. I’m just not going to.”
“How about if I don’t go to the retreat? Drop the whole thing?”
I shook my head. “You asked about it, Jess. You expressed a wish. You’re Jake’s student for life.”
It was a strange thing to say, and Jess wrinkled her brow, but I honestly halfway believed it. There was a karmic tie.
And there was a rock-bottom notion in Zen that once you started on the path, you never got off. You could neglect it all you wanted, quit altogether. You were still there.
“You just beat off, don’t you?” she said.
I shrugged. “A lot of the time.”
“Me too,” she said.
“Your roommate too.”
She laughed.
“I kind of get it,” she said. “I really do. But for me, I meet a nice guy. I mean, I was just trying to get the rent money. But then this guy takes me to breakfast. He takes me again. He talks to me about things that matter. He’s not all over me. Doesn’t go on and on about himself. He’s old enough to be my grandfather, but what the hell. I’m not used to it. It’s nice. So I want to fuck him. I don’t see what’s wrong.”
That speech was the most persuasive thing she’d done. Even more than putting my hands on her breasts.
“There’s nothing wrong,” I said.
“And you’re not going to do it,” she said.
“Right.”
“I don’t see how you do this. I don’t see why you do it. Taking me out. Being so nice.”
“I once knew this guy who was a vegetarian,” I said. “I’m not and neither is Jake, though a lot of Buddhists are. We were walking by this barbecue place, ribs and chicken, and the smell was overwhelming. Probably half their customers came in because of the smell. They must have wafted it out or something. I said to the guy, ‘Don’t you like that smell?’
“He said, ‘Yes, it’s great.’
“‘Don’t you want to go in?’ I asked.
“He said, ‘No. I’ve decided not to go in and I don’t go in. I like the smell, but I don’t go in. They’re two different things.’”
“All right,” she said. “At least you like my smell.”
And a hell of a lot more t
han that.
“What do you do now?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Probably take a swim at the Y. Jake’s off with his sponsor.”
“You think he fucks her?”
“Please, Jess. Enough.”
“I bet she wants him to. I’m going to ask, when she sends me to art school.”
She stood up, smoothed down her skirt.
“I’ll walk you down,” she said. “It’s my day to go early and set up.”
“You’re going like that?”
“I’ll come back and change. We’ve got to be black and tight at work. Short skirts and lots of cleavage. Get all the barflies hot and thirsty.”
I figured it was a policy.
We walked out and headed down Prospect.
“So what are my chances of getting together with your little boy?” she asked. “If I can’t have his daddy.”
“I don’t know, Jess. I’m seeing him tomorrow. I’ll tell him where you work. Say his name came up and you like his column. He’ll like that.”
“Me and about a million other girls with big soft tits, I’m sure.”
Jess did have a way of putting things.
“He doesn’t come to meditation?” she asked.
“He likes Jake, but never wanted to meditate. Thinks I’m a little nuts.”
“You are a little nuts. But you’re okay.”
We had crossed Mass. Ave., were standing on the corner.
“Tonight,” I said, “when we come to the bar, tell me what hours you’re coming to the retreat. Tell me like we haven’t talked about it before. Jake doesn’t know we’re meeting.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know. I just haven’t told him.”
I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I felt guilty, not absolutely sure I could hold out. Maybe I figured he’d think the whole thing unwise.
“It’s because he’ll think you’re banging me,” she said.
“No.”
“He knows what a horny bastard you are.” She wore a big smile. She really was a lovely woman without all the make-up, and the metal.
“Want to have breakfast tomorrow?” I asked.
“You like to torture yourself,” she said.
“I just like having breakfast.”
“All right, Hank. We’ll do it.” She took me by the shoulders and kissed me hard on the mouth. “Have a good swim. I hope the water’s cold.”
I hoped so too.
I turned toward the Y and saw Jake, about a block down. It was so unexpected, so much as if Jess had conjured him with words, so much the one person I didn’t want to see, that for a moment I thought it was an apparition, my guilty conscience projecting him. What was worse was that he looked stricken, as if he’d just seen the worst thing he could possibly imagine. Rarely had I seen his face so abashed. He was walking straight at me, slowly. I waited for him to say something. Then I realized he was going to walk right past.
“Jake,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“What?”
“What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“Just down here.”
He nodded in the direction he was walking, his voice weak and distant.
“Don’t you want to go this way?” I turned him around.
He didn’t say anything.
“Why don’t we go back to the Y? Maybe take a nap. Have you had lunch? I thought you were having lunch with Madeleine.”
“Madeleine?”
“I thought you two were having lunch at one of those fancy restaurants.”
We walked to the Y. There were four or five guys on the steps, hanging around the way they did, and they said, “Hey, Jake. How’s it going, brother.” One of them banged fists with him, like a basketball player. We went up to his room and got him to bed—that tape with his name was still on the door, but I wasn’t sure he even remembered it—lying face up. His face had calmed, didn’t look so bewildered anymore, but he still didn’t seem quite with me, stared up at the ceiling.
I sat beside him, on the floor, took his cushion and sat zazen. I don’t know how he used that thing. It had no oomph at all.
I don’t know how long I sat. It didn’t seem terribly long, though it seemed a long time for him to be out that way.
Finally he said, “All right, I remember.”
“What?”
“I spent the morning with Madeleine. We were going to have lunch. Then something came up and she had to meet somebody. She brought me back and dropped me off, and I stood with those guys on the steps talking.”
I suppose he would have come back to himself sooner or later. I wondered where he might have wound up.
“So you haven’t had lunch,” I said.
“I haven’t.”
“Are you hungry?”
“Always.” He sat up on the side of the bed, the old smile on his face. “What are you in the mood for?”
12
THE THING I LIKE about the Mexican place near Central Square is that it’s not like the American idea of Mexican. Blazing hot salsas and gobs of cheese on everything, Corona beer with a lime on the top. It just had fresh ingredients and the best limeade I’ve ever tasted. People from all over the square come there.
Jake and I got one of the booths, so we could take our time.
It was only the purest accident that I’d shown up at Mass. Ave. when I had. Jake would have come to himself sooner or later, but who knows where he would have been, how many streets he would have crossed? I couldn’t let him off by himself at all. If I wasn’t with him, Madeleine had to be.
“That was bad, Jake,” I said, early in the lunch.
“I really lost it.” He was wearing that little smile.
“I haven’t seen you like that.”
“You just haven’t noticed. Around the shop.”
I didn’t know how far gone he was sometimes.
“Maybe we can put a little collar on me,” he said. “Like a dog.”
He didn’t see how serious this was.
“I’d have figured it out sooner or later,” he said. “People would help me.”
He was digging into his lunch, quesadillas with chicken and guacamole, corn chips on the side. It was a tad sloppy, squirting all over the place, but he sopped up the guacamole with his tortillas, went back for more limeade. There was nothing wrong with his appetite.
“Before I go completely gaga,” he said after a while, “there’s something I want to tell you.”
“You’re not going gaga,” I said. “You just had a bad episode.”
“Partly because I want to tell somebody. Partly because you need to hear it, if you’re going to teach.”
“I’ve been thinking about that. Don’t know that I’m ready.”
“You’re never ready. You just do it, when the time comes.”
I knew he was right. I couldn’t picture it.
“Do you remember Olivia?” he asked.
Olivia. I drew a complete blank.
“She was with the group when you started. Years ago.”
The group had been tiny. I thought I remembered everyone.
“That first summer, when you came just a time or two.”
Jake couldn’t remember who or where he was half the time, but was sure of something that happened twenty years before.
“Dark woman. Olive complexion. Big breasts.”
Sounded like someone I would have noticed.
“You wouldn’t have called her beautiful. Maybe not even pretty. But there was something about her. The one student I ever had who took to practice naturally. It isn’t natural in a way. Goes against the habits of a lifetime. But if I ever had a student who dove right into it, it was her.”
There was something different about the way Jake spoke to me now. He’d finished eating, we both had, but it was as if everything had stopped. There was a major pause in the middle of the room. He wasn’t solemn, but didn’t wear that little smile. He was just talking.
“If I’d had to pick a
dharma heir, not that I was thinking of that then, it would have been her.”
An odd thing to say to the person you’d just named your dharma heir two days before.
“She didn’t feel like an equal. More like a superior. Naturally calm and still.”
He seemed to gaze back on that time, looking down at his hands, one lying on top of the other on the table.
“Calm and still aren’t everything, of course. But they’re impressive.”
He looked up and his gaze was entirely blank. It happened that quickly, like losing your place in a book, but more than that, as if the book disappeared. You didn’t remember what reading was.
I waited a while, then put a hand on top of his. “Olivia,” I said. “Twenty years ago. Your dharma heir.”
He frowned. “That would have been a mistake.” He contradicted himself from just seconds before. “It’s better to have someone who struggled, who understands student struggles. It’s better to have you.”
It was good I was so screwed up.
“What happened to her?” I asked.
She had gone on to some other teacher? Contracted some terrible disease? Died?
“We became lovers. That’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you.”
For the first moment since it had happened, I wondered if he’d seen me with Jess that morning. I wondered if that was the incident that set him off, if it worked that way. I almost asked.
“I’ve been wanting to tell you for years,” he said.
“Why didn’t you?”
“The time wasn’t right. You had that whole thing about sex. I didn’t want to lecture.”
“It isn’t lecturing.”
“Maybe I didn’t want you to know. Who knows?”
“Christ, Jake. One woman. Compared to things I did.”
I was lucky to keep it to one a day sometimes.
“I understood about not taking advantage of Madeleine. Who seemed to need me, really wanted me. Olivia didn’t need me at all. Didn’t have that yearning. She was my star.”
I’d never heard him talk about anyone that way.
“That was what made her attractive,” he said.
“So what happened?”
“At first it was amazing. The kind of connection you never have. She moved up in the off season and stayed for a while. We had a life together. A life of practice.”
He heaved a big sigh, stared down at his hands.
