Breakfast with Buddha
A NOVEL
by
Roland Merullo
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
For
Arlo Kahn
and
For
Michael Miller
Humor is a prelude to faith and
Laughter is the beginning of prayer.
—REINHOLD NIEBUHR
Like the lark that soars in the air, first singing, then
silent, content with the last sweetness that satiates it,
such seemed to me that image, the imprint of the
Eternal Pleasure.
—DANTE, “Paradiso”
Genuine belief seems to have left us.
—WALT WHITMAN, “Democratic Vistas”
I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.
—WALT WHITMAN, “I Hear America Singing”
Contents
Acknowledgments
One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten | Eleven | Twelve | Thirteen | Fourteen | Fifteen | Sixteen | Seventeen | Eighteen | Nineteen | Twenty | Twenty-one | Twenty-two | Twenty-three | Twenty-four | Twenty-five | Twenty-six | Twenty-seven | Twenty-eight | Twenty-nine | Thirty | Thirty-one | Thirty-two | Thirty-three | Thirty-four | Thirty-five | Thirty-six | Thirty-seven | Thirty-eight | Thirty-nine | Forty | Forty-one | Forty-two | Forty-three | Forty-four | Forty-five
Author’s Note
Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Also by Roland Merullo
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my excellent travel companions, Amanda, Alexandra, and Juliana; and everyone at Algonquin for their work on this book, especially Chuck Adams, Ina Stern, Courtney Denney, Brunson Hoole, Janet Patterson, Kelly Clark, Craig Popelars, Michael Taeckens, and Aimee Rodriguez, who all went the extra mile. I am also grateful to several North Dakotans, especially Kay Solberg Link for her hospitality and Gaylon Baker for his wide-ranging knowledge of the state.
ONE
My name is Otto Ringling (no circus jokes, please) and I have a strange story to tell. At first look it may appear to be the story of a road trip I made, at the suggestion of my wonderful wife, from our home in the suburbs of New York City to the territory of my youth—Stark County, North Dakota. In fact, it is the account of an interior voyage, the kind of excursion that’s hard to talk about without sounding foolish or annoyingly serene, or like someone who thinks the Great Spirit has singled him out to be the mouthpiece of ultimate truth. If you knew me you’d know that I am none of the above. I think of myself as Mr. Ordinary—good husband, good father, average looking, average height, middle-of-the-road politics, upper part of the American middle class. Friends think I’m funny, sometimes a little on the wiseass side, a decent, thoughtful, forty-something man who has never been particularly religious in the usual sense of that word. My story here will strike them as out of character, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I promised myself I would just tell the truth about my road trip, and let those who hear the story embrace it or mock it according to their own convictions.
So, in the spirit of full disclosure let me say this: Before the drive to North Dakota, like a lot of people I know, I suffered now and again from a nagging puzzlement about the deeper meaning of things. I functioned well, as the saying goes. My wife and children and I had a comfortable life, really a superbly satisfying life: nice house, two cars, restaurant meals, love, peace, mutual support. And yet, from time to time a gust of uneasiness would blow through the back rooms of my mind, as if a window had been left open there and a storm had come through and my neatly stacked pages of notes on being human had blown off the desk.
By the time I returned to New York, that wind had gone quiet. Outwardly, nothing had changed. I did not start practicing levitation. I did not shave my head and undertake radical dietary adventures. I did not quit my job and move the family to a restored monastery in the Sicilian countryside or leave Jeannie and the kids and shack up with a twenty-two-year-old editorial assistant from the office. Inwardly, however, in those back rooms, in the deeper recesses of thought and mood, something felt entirely different. And so, even though I am a private man, I made the decision—again, at Jeannie’s suggestion—to write down what had happened during my days on the American road. If nothing else, I thought, the story might drop a few laughs into someone’s life, which is not a bad thing these days.
So let me begin here: I am an ordinary, sane, American man. Forty-four years young. Senior editor at a respected Manhattan publishing house—Stanley and Byrnes—that specializes in books on food. I’ve been married to the same woman for almost half my life. We have two teenage children—Natasha is sixteen and a half, Anthony fourteen—an affectionate mixed-breed dog named Jasper, and a house in one of the pricier New York suburbs. Jeannie works, very part-time as a freelance museum photographer and very full-time as an attentive mother. It’s not a perfect life, needless to say. We’ve had our share of worry and disappointment, illness and hurt, and, with two teenagers in the house, we sometimes experience a degree of domestic turbulence that sounds, to my ear, like a boiling teakettle filled with hormones shrieking on a stove. But it is a life Jeannie and I made from scratch, without a lot of money at first, or a lot of help, and we are proud of it, and grateful.
Six months before my trip, a sour new ingredient was dropped into the stew of that good life, into the swirl of dinner parties, arguments over homework, and two-week rentals at the shore in August. My parents, Ronald and Matilda, seventy-two and seventy, were killed in a car crash on a two-lane North Dakota highway called State Route 22. In full possession of their mental faculties, in excellent health, they were familiar voices on the end of the phone line one day and unavailable the next. Gone. Silent. Untouchable. Hardy farm people with forceful and distinct personalities who were turned to ash and memories by a drunk just my age in a careening blue pickup.
We all went out to North Dakota for the memorial service. (My sister, Cecelia, who lives in New Jersey, took the train; she inherited my mother’s fear of air travel.) Tears were shed. There was talk of the old times, good and not so good. There was anger at the man—soon to be imprisoned—who had killed them. I expected all that. What I did not expect was the enormous feeling of emptiness that surrounded me in the weeks following my parents’ burial.
It was more than bereavement. It was a kind of sawing dissatisfaction that cut back and forth against the fibers of who I believed myself to be. Sometimes even in the sunniest moods I’d be aware of it. Turn your eyes away from the good life for just a second and there it was: not depression as much as an ugly little doubt about everything you had ever done; not confusion, exactly, but a kind of lingering question.
What’s the point of all this? would be putting the question too crudely, but it was something along those lines. All this striving and aggravation, all these joys and miseries, all this busyness, all this stuff—a thousand headlines, a hundred thousand conversations, e-mails, meetings, tax returns, warranties, bills, privacy notices, ads for Viagra, calls for donations, election cycles, war in the news every day, trips to the dump with empty wine bottles, fillings and physicals, braces and recitals, Jeannie’s moods, my moods, the kids’ moods, soccer tournaments, plumbers’ bills, sitcom characters, oil changes, wakes, weddings, watering the flowerbeds—all of this, I started to ask myself, leads exactly where? To a smashed-up Buick on a country highway? And then what? Paradise?
All right, I’m a fan of the old idea that if you live a decent life you rise up to heaven afterward. I’m not opposed. But sometimes, riding the commuter train home past the tenements of Harlem, or calling Natasha and Anthony away from their IMing long en
ough for the frenzied modern ritual of a family meal, or just standing around at a friend’s fiftieth birthday party with a glass of Pinot Noir in one hand, I’d feel this sudden ache cutting along my skin, as if I were suffering from a kind of existential flu. Just a moment, just a flash, but it would pierce the shiny shell of my life like a sword through a seam of armor.
I’d had similar moments even before my parents’ deaths. But after that day—February 7, a frigid North Dakota Tuesday—it was as if a curtain had been lifted and the ordinary chores and pleasures of life were now set against a backdrop of wondering. The purpose, the plan, the deeper meaning—who could I trust to tell me? A therapist? The local minister? A tennis partner who’d lived ten years longer and seen more of the world? I found myself thinking about it at night before I went to sleep, and while standing on the train platform on my way to work, or watching TV, or talking with my kids, and even, sometimes, just after Jeannie and I had finished making love.
And so, I suppose, such a state of mind left me perfectly primed for my extraordinary adventure. If I can risk a sweeping observation, it seems to me that life often works that way: You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears. But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to its own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you’re not prepared for, or don’t want, or can’t, at first, accept.
TWO
When they retired from farming, my parents remained in the house where my sister and I had been raised, and they leased the two thousand fertile acres surrounding it, land that was planted in sunflowers, soybeans, and durum wheat. After their deaths, the duty of selling off the old farmstead fell upon my shoulders, as I am the older and—I have to say this—only responsible child. It was not a job I wanted, God knows. There was more than enough on my plate without that helping of high-plains beef. But there are duties you don’t turn your back on: your child is hungry, you make dinner; your spouse is ill, you take care of her; your parents die, you settle the estate.
Two things made this duty more complicated than it might otherwise have been. The first was my younger sister, Cecelia, a nice enough woman who is as flaky as a good spanakopita crust, and who, as I mentioned, does not tolerate air travel well. And the second was the fact that, though I had zero interest in keeping the house and land, I did, for sentimental reasons, want to salvage a few pieces of my parents’ sturdy antique furniture. So, how best to sell the house and move the furniture—given my sister’s unpredictability and the long distances involved—became, in my mind, the North Dakota Question.
Over the course of our marriage, Jeannie and I have developed a nice ritual. On Thursday evenings, no matter what else is going on, we sit together for an hour over a glass of wine and we talk. These conversations range from Natasha’s taste in boyfriends (outrageous hairstyles, enormous vocabularies) to the excesses of the president of Belarus. We laugh, we tease, we debate, and we sip good wine—out on our fieldstone patio in warm weather, and at the kitchen table in cold.
One of these conversations—it was April, the maple trees were in bud, we sat indoors—was devoted to the North Dakota Question.
“You’re procrastinating on this,” Jeannie said, in her typically straightforward fashion.
“Thanks.”
“You’ve always had North Dakota issues. You’ve always avoided them.”
“It’s not issues. It’s a house. Land. It’s five or six old oak tables and chairs and so on. . . . Issues. You sound like my sister.”
“Which is another issue.”
“Your siblings are more or less normal—you can’t relate. You grew up in central Connecticut. No one has issues about central Connecticut.”
Jeannie laughed. She has beautiful chestnut hair, just touched with a streak of gray now, and she has so far resisted the temptation to cut it short. We were in the kitchen and were drinking, I remember, a cold, fruity Vernaccia; I reached across and refilled her glass. Above our heads, something that might have been called music thumped in Anthony’s room. I glanced at my wife and saw that, around the edges of the North Dakota Question, a familiar kind of empathy and understanding floated. Aged love, time-tested, what could beat that?
Jeannie twirled her glass. My parents’ marriage had been solid but tumultuous, their relationship composed of weeks of tender mercies and a stoic, high-plains peace, interrupted by volcanic arguments over something as simple as the way my father put his toothbrush in the holder, or how Mom cooked the oatmeal. I wondered if they’d been having one of these famous fights when the front bumper of the pickup smashed through Pop’s door at seventy miles an hour.
“You’re going to have to drive out, you know that,” Jeannie said at last. “Cecelia has to be there and she’ll never fly. And you’ll need to rent a trailer to cart the stuff back.”
“Movers could do it.”
“Movers can’t sell the house.”
“Real estate agents can.”
“You should go and make your peace with the place. You know you should, Otto. And you need some time away from us and away from work. It’s been years since you’ve had a real break.”
“I could fly and meet her there.”
A frown. Then a shriek and door-slamming somewhere above us. We waited a few beats to see if it was anything serious. No.
“And leave Cecelia to drive there and back?” Jeannie said. “Alone? In her fourteen-year-old Chevrolet, with her twenty-year-old maps? She’d end up in Honduras.”
“She could intuit her way. Consult the spirit guides.”
The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.
“She made it out for the service okay,” I said.
“Okay? Getting off the train in Fargo instead of Minot and having to hire a car and driver with her last hundred dollars? You and I at the Amtrak station watching passengers get off, the train pull away, no Aunt Seese? That’s your idea of okay?”
“Reasonably okay,” I said. And then, “What about this? What about we make a family trip out of it? Two weeks in August. Just the four of us in the minivan. Aunt Seese takes the train.”
It was one of those offerings you know are dust before the last syllables are out. At work, on a fairly regular basis, I was on the receiving end of similarly frail proposals. The author of a book that sold three hundred copies saying she had an idea for a new project, an exhaustive treatment of the Bulgarian sour pickle. She could make it work, she knew she could.
Jeannie set down her glass and began to count on her fingers: “One, we trade Cape Cod for greater Bismarck, which means sea breezes and seventies for tornado warnings and ninety-six in the shade. Two, our dog and our two beautiful offspring sit in the back of the same car for three thousand miles, round-trip. Three—”
I held up my hand. “You had me at two. Look, let me at least run it by the kids. I have the vacation time. I could take three weeks instead of two, one on the Cape, the rest for the Ringlings on the Road. We could visit some chefs I know, historical sites, have some first-class meals, make an adventure out of it.”
Jeannie looked at me for a three-count, a touch of amusement at the corners of her mouth. She said, “I have two words for you, my love.”
“And which two might they be?”
“Not . . . likely.”
And on that note our sixty minutes of alone time ended.
THREE
During dinner I decided not to go anywhere near the North Dakota Question. Jeannie cooks, the kids set and clear the table and sweep the floor, I like to wash the dishes. Though we are fairly relaxed in our parenting style, we have two rules: show basic respect for the others at the table; and no books, magazines, schoolwork, or electronic devices while food is being consumed. Natasha and Anthony had apparently been arguing about something upstairs, and they passed the meal buried in slightly different versions of adolescent sulking, Nata
sha picking at her food, Anthony wolfing it. During cleanup they muttered and snarled, then pounded off to their separate door-slammings and various algebras.
When the sink was clean, dishes stacked, I made my way up the stairs carrying my hopelessly optimistic family vacation plan in both hands like a pot of dying geraniums to a sick aunt.
I knocked on Natasha’s door and found our scholarly daughter at her computer, headphones on, the walls around her papered with soccer players from the U.S. women’s team and posters of teen boy rock stars with flat stomachs and pouty lips. Still sour-faced from the argument with her brother, she took off the headphones and, somewhat reluctantly, turned to me. I pulled up a chair. I noticed for the thousandth time how much she resembles my mother through the eyes. A high-plains, gray-green, pioneer directness, as if, beneath the freckles and long lashes, lay windswept stone. At moments, I worried that, like my mother, she would make a steady, dependable, but not particularly warm wife. Then again, I’d come home two hours early one afternoon that winter and discovered her and her genius boyfriend, Jared, making out on the living room couch, and there had been plenty of warmth there. An abundance of warmth.
I said, “Tasha, you know I have to go to North Dakota to settle Gram and Gramps’s property.”
“I know, Dad.” A glance at the computer screen. Maybe Stacey was writing to say that Neal’s new hairstyle wasn’t as cute as his old one, or that Ilene’s choice in skirts that day had been off the wall. It was important to answer such things without delay.
“Well, I thought it might be fun if we made a road trip out of it. The four of us. Jasper, too. We could try camping, or stay in nice hotels, or a combination. Swim, eat, see the big sights. A family adventure. What do you think?”
She looked at me for what seemed the span of her childhood, then said: “Camping, Dad? With, like, my brother the disgusting beast?”
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