Jake Fades

by David Guy

It was true. That was what the whole thing was about. The whole trip was an excuse to spend time at the Green Street Grill.

  While Madeleine had been talking, actually for the past fifteen minutes or so, I had been aware that someone was standing outside the door. I thought it must be Darcy, worried about breakfast, and couldn’t understand why she didn’t just come in. She wasn’t shy. But the conversation seemed to have stopped, so I stepped away, and went to the door.

  It was Lily from the Golden Donut, holding two shopping bags.

  “Hank,” she said. “I bring donuts.”

  “You brought donuts?”

  “Jake say bring donuts fourth day. Time his students need treat. Get over hump. I walk here from Central Square, find ambulance, take Jake away. They tell me Jake die last night. I no believe.”

  “He did, Lily. He died in his sleep.”

  I put my arms around her. Tears were pouring down her cheeks.

  The Jake Knew He Was Going to Die meter jumped up another notch. This was looking weird. On the other hand, I couldn’t believe he’d want donuts served after he was gone. He would have wanted to be there.

  I stepped back into the room and spoke.

  “I think we should have breakfast now. We’ll have a regular oryoki breakfast. But before we do, Jake had arranged a treat for us. I’d like the servers to stay for it.”

  Everyone took their places around the room, facing the center, and Lily, tears still streaming down her face, went around serving donuts from two boxes. We put them on the napkins we had left over from tea. After Lily made the rounds, I had her sit beside me, and take one for herself. We bowed, and began to eat.

  “This was Jake’s favorite treat at Lily’s diner,” I said.

  It was the chocolate cake donuts with chocolate icing. They were amazing, though rather rich.

  He had definitely planned to be there.

  Afterward—though we hardly needed it—we ate our oatmeal in the big bowl and stewed fruit in the small one. We were full at the end of that breakfast, full the way Jake liked to be. I don’t know how we’d have done meditating on it.

  People had learned a lot about their teacher that morning, much that they hadn’t known. I wasn’t sure how they were doing. But the last gift the teacher gives, and it is the hardest for some to accept, is to let us know he is human. The last gift he gives—it’s a precious one—is to die.

  When the Buddha was dying, and Ananda and the others had to face that, that was the final teaching, the thing he had insisted on all his life. All conditioned things are impermanent, and your teacher, like you, is an impermanent being. You have the same capacity to free yourself he did. Be a lamp unto yourselves.

  At the end of the meal, I said, “Helen’s right about sesshin. There’s too much to process, too much to absorb.” Especially now. “People need to talk. Though sitting is the best way to absorb all this. I’ll talk it over with Madeleine, but I think we should prepare a service for Friday, right here. It was going to be the last day of sesshin. It gives us a chance to gather our thoughts, and prepare to say good-bye.”

  I bowed to the group. They bowed to me, began filing out.

  As I would discover three days later, the group absorbed the new information well. They knew Jake was human; it was what they most loved about him, that he was so obviously human yet also full of compassion and wisdom. A huge crowd showed up for the service, all kinds of people from Mount Desert. It was a solemn and raucous affair, a Buddhist funeral that I conducted—my first ever—followed by stories about Jake, laughing and crying. It lasted three hours.

  I didn’t know that on the Tuesday Jake died. I wasn’t sure how they’d react. When the group filed out of the room, they immediately moved to the hallway, and outside on the sidewalk, to talk. Only Jess and I were left.

  It wasn’t that she was being shunned. People wanted to know her, to hear about Jake and her mother, but they also didn’t want to overwhelm her. She was still slightly isolated.

  She walked up and we hugged for a long time.

  “I’m really going to need you now,” she said. “I feel cut loose.”

  “I’m here.”

  “I really want to do this. In a way my mother never did. She didn’t have a group.”

  “Right.”

  “I talked to Jake last night about how my mother was. How I always wanted to be like her, so disciplined, so devoted, kind of like a nun, with her music.

  “Jake told me I wasn’t supposed to be like her, I was supposed to be like me. Zazen would make me more like me. God knows what that is. I’m going to drink and fuck more?”

  I shrugged. “Who knows?”

  “Anyway, he said you could help me, in a way he never could. A father couldn’t help his daughter. Another teacher could.”

  “You teach yourself. A teacher helps you.”

  “You’ve got to keep me on the straight and narrow. Keep me at it.”

  That sounded like a hell of a task.

  “Stay in touch, anyway. You’ve got to be with me.”

  “I will. And you’ve got to promise to stay out of my pants. I can’t do that alone.”

  “Really? You seem like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

  “I’m a pebble in a stream. We’ve got to agree on that.”

  “It’s a deal.” She shook my hand. “Right now I feel like a walk. Want to come?”

  “I better do some things here. I’ll come to the bar tonight. We’ll make plans.”

  “Sounds good.”

  We hugged, walked into the hall.

  People were packing up sleeping bags, getting things together.

  I walked upstairs looking for Madeleine. She was in Jake’s room, putting away his belongings, crying.

  “It still smells like him,” she said. “The room smells like him, and his robes.”

  It was true. There was always a scent of incense around Jake, because he lit it every time he sat, even at home. You could smell it in the room.

  I helped her get the things together. His suitcase was virtually packed. He’d been living out of it, quite neatly.

  “Did that sound all right for the memorial service?” I asked. “I didn’t mean to speak up without asking.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I didn’t want to leave things open-ended.”

  “Everything you did this morning seemed right. But I think we need to talk about”—she waved her hand—“all this.” She gestured to the room, meant the whole building.

  “Is this the time?”

  “It might not be. But if I wait, it’s going to be harder.”

  “All right.”

  She sat in a chair in the corner, I on the edge of the bed.

  “I don’t think you should go through with it,” she said. “I don’t think you should run the center.”

  I had a terrific sinking sensation when she said that, as if I would fall if I weren’t already sitting. It was almost as much of a shock as finding Jake dead. In a way it was related. Everything was disappearing. The world turned upside down.

  “Really?” I said.

  Funny that I would have gotten so attached to something I hadn’t even thought about a week before.

  “I’ve been thinking since I realized Jake’s plan. That he had no intention of taking the center. He wanted it for you.”

  “Yes.”

  “I respect that wish. I feel bad about going against something he clearly wanted. But my idea was to have a place for him. A place where he could teach, meet students on a regular basis. A repository for his teaching. I wasn’t interested in starting a center.”

  I nodded.

  “You don’t have the following he had. How could you? You haven’t taught much. I don’t know that all his students will want to be with you. In a way, you’ll be starting from scratch. I don’t know that you could support a center.”

  “Jake thought I could.”

  “Jake loved you. He was trying to take care of you.”

  That did it. I
put my head down and started bawling.

  Madeleine reached across and took my hand. She came and sat on the side of the bed, held me while I cried.

  As difficult as it was for me to hear her words, there was truth to them. I hadn’t taught much, hadn’t given many talks. I hadn’t often led services, though I would be leading a terribly important one in a couple of days. Jake had started to realize all that in the past week. He’d regretted not bringing me along sooner.

  I didn’t know that his students would study with me. They hardly knew me. Madeleine for one wouldn’t be my student. It was hard to take a teacher seriously when you’d been to bed with him, even twenty years before.

  The only student I had for sure was Jess. And she’d been practicing for less than a week.

  “I’m not crying because of what you said,” I managed to say after a while. “I just miss Jake. I realize how much I miss him.”

  “I know.”

  I had liked the idea of having a center. It would give me security, make Josh feel better about my situation. But there was a reason Jake had avoided it for so long, finally escaped it with his death. There was something fundamentally false in that security.

  Madeleine had made the right decision. I wasn’t ready.

  “Have you seen Jake’s will?” she asked.

  “I haven’t.”

  “He left you the house on Mount Desert. He told me last week.”

  In all that had been happening, I’d forgotten about it.

  “He thought you should sell it,” she said. “Or give it back to me. Assuming you’d be down here. But I think you should start all over. Start the way Jake did.”

  Put out flyers in the bike shop. Maybe I could even learn to work on bikes.

  Forget it. Even Jake couldn’t teach me that.

  Maybe I could learn to flip pancakes.

  “The place needs some work,” she said.

  “It does.”

  “And you’ve got to pay taxes. You’ve got to make enough to pay property tax every year.”

  Maybe I’d have to dust off the old teacher’s certificate.

  That wouldn’t be bad. I’d have the summers free.

  “I hope you understand,” she said.

  “I do.”

  She was Jake’s student, Jake’s benefactor. She wasn’t mine.

  “I want you to stay until the memorial service, of course,” she said. “As long after that as you need.”

  “They still have my room at the Y.”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  We finished getting Jake’s things together, and I went next door and changed out of my robes, walked downstairs. The crowd seemed to have cleared out, all the sleeping bags gone. I figured I’d take a walk, maybe drop in at the bookstore and let Morrie know. Jake had had lots of friends in Cambridge.

  Kevin was sitting on the front stoop, staring at the traffic. He only wore a light shirt, held his arms folded around himself, shivering. He needed a sweater.

  “Hello, Hank,” he said.

  “Bad day.” “Bad day,” I said. The teaching was that every day was a good day, but it was hard to see that now. I pulled him up from where he was sitting, gave him a hug.

  He was the one person all day who hadn’t been crying. He still had those sad eyes, looked terribly discouraged, but couldn’t bring himself to cry. It was as if he always expected some disaster, this event confirmed his general view of things.

  “I don’t know what to do with myself,” he said. “I’ve got these days off from work.”

  “I know.”

  “Is it okay to sit some more? Will they let me sit in there?”

  “It’s always fine to sit. I’m sure they will.”

  I wasn’t sure who this “they” was.

  Kevin was the one person I might have urged to do less sitting.

  “I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said. “I was going to do dokusan today.”

  “I was just going to walk for a while. You want to walk?”

  “Sure.”

  “You need a sweater? Get a sweater.”

  Somebody had to act like his mother.

  When he came back out we walked down Hampshire, taking our time.

  “That talk you gave yesterday,” he said. “Knowing your teacher through his body. Learning by just being around him. I didn’t really understand.”

  “That talk was kind of a mess,” I said.

  The thought occurred to me that, if that talk had been better, Madeleine might have let me take over the center.

  “It stuck with me, though,” he said. “I can’t seem to get it out of my mind.”

  He didn’t seem to have heard me.

  “It’s as if I got it in some deep place,” he said. “I got it in my body, but don’t have it in my head yet.”

  It must have been a deep place, for him to get that talk.

  “Anyway,” he said. “I liked Jake. He was a great guy. And of course I’m sad he’s dead. But he never really spoke to me. Maybe he was too old. Or I’m immature. But that talk of yours really got me, like no talk ever has. It made me want to do this. Really practice Zen.”

  “That’s great,” I said. It was a miracle.

  “And I never thought I’d say this to anybody. It sounds cheesy or something. I hope it’s okay. But I want you to be my teacher.”

  We stopped, turned to face each other. He was blushing, looking down.

  “That probably sounds stupid,” he said.

  “It’s not stupid. I’m honored.”

  “I’m not sure what it means.”

  “It is rather mysterious.”

  “I don’t know how we start.”

  “I think we already started.”

  “Yeah. I guess that’s right.” He shrugged.

  “I don’t suppose you know how to repair bikes,” I said.

  “No. What? You got a bike down?”

  “It was just an idea.”

  “I’m a total klutz around tools. A hopeless case.”

  “Me too. How about flipping pancakes?”

  “Pancakes? Jesus. I never did it.”

  “We’ll figure something out. Let’s keep walking.”

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