He watched me. There was the tiniest smile at the corners of his mouth. “Why angry?” he asked.
“Why? Because my sister is forever trying to convince me to do this or that—meditate, stop eating meat, start washing my hands with organic soap, and so on. It annoys me, frankly. I have a very nice life, thank you, and a faith of my own.”
“Why angry?” he repeated.
“Because you frustrate me, you people. The evangelical so-called Christians telling everyone else how to live, when they can’t even stay away from prostitutes. The New Agers telling everyone else what to do and not do when they can barely manage their own mortgage payment. What right have you to tell me about my important step, my dreams? You hardly know me.”
But he was smiling at me as if he did know me. The smile was an odd combination of innocent goodwill and sureness, as if he were at once happy to see me standing up for myself, but also laughing at me, kindly, the way a father laughs at his two-year-old when she mispronounces a word. No, that’s not right; that implies a condescension that wasn’t there. It was more like a seasoned affection. Strong, even, yellowish teeth, lips stretched wide, longshoreman’s face still and solid—the Rinpoche was looking at me as if he knew me through and through and liked me in spite of it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m blaming you for things other people do. I’ll buy you dinner to make up for it. It’s just a sore subject with me, that’s all. A sore subject with a long history. Family stuff.”
“Okay,” he said, and the smile broadened. He reached across and poked me in the arm, hard, with one thick finger, and chuckled. “Okay. Sorry, too.”
I started the car and continued down 501. At just this point—this is the absolute truth—we passed a stone church in front of which stood a small sign carrying this message: IT’S NOT ABOUT RELIGION. IT’S ABOUT RELATIONSHIP.
“Sorry again,” I said.
He said, “Open American conversation.” And I felt a twist of something—anger, shame—in my guts. Or a combination of the two. Or maybe just hunger.
Another sign by the side of the road: GO IN PEACE. SERVE THE LORD.
Then a diner called Kumm Esse, and a sign there saying, TRY OUR STRAWBERRY PIE. I very nearly pulled in.
And just beyond Kumm Esse, another church, with another message, DISCOVER YOUR PURPOSE. SUNDAY 10:15.
It was the message center for the proselytizers of the world, all of them confident in their knowing, eager to make others like them, sure of what would spread happiness. I decided I’d go home and make a sign for my front yard that said LEAVE THE REST OF US ALONE, DAMN IT! but then, beneath all this, something was nagging at me. Why so angry?
Soon we drove up a gentle slope and into the village of Lititz. We found the inn just where the fellow with the cane had said it would be, right on 501. All I could think about then was the consolation of food. A good dinner, the best dinner Lititz could offer. Glass of wine, cut of meat, vegetables. Slice of strawberry pie, if strawberry pie happened to be the specialty hereabouts. That would calm me down. Two more days with Rinpoche and I’d be done. We’d leave early in the morning to make up for our little detour. We’d play music on the CD player, listen to the hot winds from the right and left, Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow, a sports show, Dr. Joyce Brothers, Joyce Meyers, the Reverend Armando Fillipo Buck. We’d get through this and go back to our normal lives. I felt suddenly strong and sure of myself . . . and ready to eat.
Except that, as I found a parking spot on the street near the inn, and did a neat parallel parking job, I happened to remember—in the way you remember such things—a flash of recurring dream I’d been having over the past few months. Half a dozen times. Always there was some flood coming, or some animal, or, once, a churning yellow bulldozer. And always yours truly was sprinting for his life.
Escape.
TEN
The General Sutter Inn, located in the quaint village of Lititz, Pennsylvania, turned out to be the absolutely perfect antidote to a long day on the road. From his carpetbag, Rinpoche pulled a wad of bills, and he asked for the least expensive room, which turned out to be sixty-two dollars plus tax. He counted out the money slowly and carefully and smiled at the young woman behind the desk. I handed over a credit card, asked for something larger, and was given a key to a hundred-dollar room, also on the second floor, 212 in fact, my office area code. “What about dinner?” I asked Rinpoche. “My treat. I promised. Make up for any bad moments on the drive.”
He lifted his eyebrows and flexed his cheeks—his face had an amazing elasticity, as if he’d spent years in a specialized gym developing the muscles over his cheekbones—and shook his head, no. “Just sitting now. Just sleep,” he said. “Tomorrow we eat, Rinpoche and you.”
“Fine. Good night then.”
“Good night, you-are-a-good-man.”
Rinpoche and I took the carpeted stairs together, then went along separate hallways without another word.
The inn was 250 years old, and seemed it. In the best sense. Creaking wooden floors, wainscoting, lace curtains, sitting rooms with three armchairs and a shelf of books. Room 212 faced onto the street that intersected with 501, and it was a little noisy but otherwise perfectly fine: a king-sized bed, an old-fashioned tiled bath, heavy mahogany dresser and desk in the style of the pieces I was driving all the way to North Dakota to fetch. A television the size of two half-gallons of ice cream stacked one on top of the other. There were exposed pipes, and the ceiling had suffered from a leak at some point, but I liked all that, liked it a thousand times more than the sanitized chain hotels with three hundred rooms, the kind of place I was used to from my business travel. I liked having an actual key instead of a plastic card, liked the old porcelain handles on the shower, liked the fact that you could actually open the windows, liked the absence of disinfectant smell, generic wall prints, an “entertainment center,” and the “bar” with its four-dollar bottles of spring water and nine-dollar bags of nuts.
I stretched, sat on the bed, took off my shoes and socks, and called home.
“Is this the Prince of the Road?” Jeannie asked when she answered.
“It is. The prince is tired. He misses his wife. He is traveling with a man who wears a gold-trimmed red robe.”
There was a rather long pause. And then, “Otto? Really?”
“The Prince of the Road never lies.”
“Is it some kind of midlife trouble, honey? Is there something I should know?”
A two-second delay and then I lay sideways across the bed and burst out laughing. The laugh was like something from my childhood, and it seemed to wring the whole day’s weariness out of me. When it died, it died slowly, in a fading out of smaller riffs. “Nothing except the fact that my wonderful sister tricked me into taking her spiritual master instead of her. I am traveling with the guru Volya Rinpoche, newly arrived in these United States by way of Siberia.”
“You’re making some kind of a joke.”
“Dead serious.”
“Seese didn’t come? After all that?”
“Seese is back in Paterson regressing a good friend.”
“And who is with you, really?”
“Volvo Rinpoche or Volya Rinpoche, something like that. Shaved head, nice smile, slight trouble with English, and mysterious as the day is long. I like him, I think.”
“You think?”
“He’s hard to get to know. Though Seese seems to have gotten to know him quickly enough. She wants to give him her half of the property. To start an ashram or something. About that, I am not pleased.”
There was an audible sigh on the other end.
“Kids okay?”
“Tasha’s fine. Anthony hurt his elbow at the football try-outs and is up in his room with a bag of ice. Jasper keeps going upstairs to see where you are, then out into the garage, then into the bushes near the stream.”
“Give him some of my old T-shirts to sniff.”
“Can’t. I’m sniffing them.”
“Yo
u’re all right?”
“Fine. I’m a little concerned about this idea of Seese’s. That’s a hefty sum to be giving away.”
“I told her the same thing. We’ll see. Maybe something will change. There was a bad accident on the interstate. Two cars and a truck. Someone died, I think. The length of Seese’s farewell hug might have saved my foolish ass.”
“You have a nice ass, actually.”
“We were held up forty minutes. Anyway, I had one of my little fits.”
“In front of the guru?”
“Yeah. He handled it well. He’s been in jail, in Russia.”
“My God, Otto, it sounds like you should be keeping notes.”
“Seese wanted me to show him America. This quadrant of America, at least.”
“The kids miss you already. They’d never say it, but I can tell because they’re not fighting. Want me to call them to the phone?”
“Don’t bother them now. I’ve decided to write them. An actual letter. The old-fashioned way. Prepare them, would you?”
“They’ll be shocked. They won’t know how to open it. They won’t know what it is. They miss you. I miss you.”
“I’ll sneak into bed with you as you dream.”
“I wish.”
We said our good-byes and I hung up and stretched a little more, musing on the notion that I had, by pure chance, found a woman like Jeannie. Or was it chance, after all? Seese had referred to it once as an “arranged marriage” in keeping with her idea that all relationships are part of the general plan, people brought to the same bed by the Supreme Intelligence who runs the universe. Arranged or not, part of the plan or not, after a few years of mutual adjustment it had worked out remarkably well. Jeannie and I had known nothing of life when we met and starting dating. We had been tremendously different in background, temperament, even hair color. I was a farm kid, she was a Connecticut sophisticate who chose grad school in Dakota to get away from an abusive mother and to pursue a short-lived interest in soil chemistry. Somehow, our physical infatuation and intellectual kinship had evolved into real love, her strengths filling in for my weaknesses, and possibly vice versa. We had our tiffs and bad moments, of course, but I rarely forgot to be grateful for her.
I stretched a bit more—the human vertebral column was not designed for office work, or for hours in the car—then washed up, put on my sport coat, and went downstairs for dinner.
In the 250-year-old dining room I was given a table looking out on a courtyard where a fountain splashed and bubbled and where a ten-foot-tall wooden sculpture stood, looking out of place. General Sutter himself, I imagined. At the check-in desk there had been a brochure giving the general’s story—he had, apparently, “discovered” California, or some such thing—but I have to admit that, with a few exceptions, I am strangely uninterested in American history. All slaughter and deprivation, all courage and will, it left me cold, though I like old houses and places where you can see the mark of the past. I told this to my sister once and she said it was because I’d had no other lifetimes on this continent.
As I was musing on the idea of past lives (I’d heard once, perhaps from her, that reincarnation had been part and parcel of Christian doctrine until the sixth or seventh century after Christ’s death, at which point some potentate in the Church had decreed it heretical), the waitress set before me a menu I can only describe as astounding. Here we were, deep in the green heart of Pennsylvania, and they were offering elk, buffalo, and seafood coquille. The wine list was just as complete, and after the waitperson (Aliana was her name, studying philosophy and the history of religion at Penn State) had stopped by three times to inquire, I at last settled on fresh Pennsylvania trout, a salad, and half a bottle of Pinot Grigio.
Buffalo on the menu—and we weren’t within a thousand miles of North Dakota.
The wine arrived with a basket of warm rolls and what appeared to be about a pint of butter. I sipped, watched the water splash in the fountain. I thought about Natasha and Anthony and it was as if I could feel them in my chest, each of them there, all their past and all their future, right there.
In the midst of this affectionate musing the salad was served. As I started in on it, I was visited again by a wave of loneliness, and by the feeling that had been bothering me over the past few months. Not loss, not mourning, just a sort of quiet knocking at the door of my contentment. I ate and drank and pondered it. With the children, with me—was something missing? Were Jeannie and I simply looking around us and judging things against the standards of our neighbors, and the kids’ schoolmates, and letting ourselves be satisfied with that? Friends of ours had taken their children and gone to live in India for a school year and had come back convinced that they had too much of everything, that America was largely lacking in any real spiritual dimension. But wasn’t that merely a kind of guilt talking? Would their having less make for the poor Calcuttans having more? And weren’t there different styles of spiritual living, each suited to its own cultural particularities?
Aliana brought the trout, and as she set it before me, I asked about her studies and her plans, just the usual small talk that middle-aged people make with young adults. She turned a frank gaze on me and said, “I saw how my parents lived, you know, just getting money, spending money, worrying all the time. I wanted to figure things out a little before I started in on that kind of a life. I wanted, you know, to get the big picture in focus. My grandfather retired after thirty-five years of investment banking, left my grandmother, and sailed around the world for two years, trying to pick up younger women. It was kind of sad, you know? I didn’t want to follow somebody else’s idea of success and end up that way.”
“And the course work is doing that for you? I mean, giving you the perspective you want?”
She shook her head and smiled ruefully. “My boyfriend is doing that for me. He’s a yoga teacher. The course work is just, you know, blah blah.”
“I know,” I said. “I remember it from my own blah blah days. Sometimes there’s something useful in there, though.”
“Not yet.”
She went to check on her other tables, leaving me with my uneasiness and the plates of food. It was a nice meal—trout dusted with almonds, mashed potatoes with some skin left on (the way I liked them), grilled asparagus—sufficient even for a picky New York food person, and, in almost every corner of the globe, luxurious. I sent a quiet thank you toward the plump fellow at the gas station, and pulled out his coupon, which proved to be past its date.
I decided not to have dessert, left Aliana a fifteen-dollar tip on a fifty-dollar meal—because I liked her, was rooting for her, and because I have more money than I really need and remember what it felt like to have less—and went out and walked in the balmy air, up and down the commercial street in front of the hotel. Another Amish carriage clopped by with two beautiful children staring out the back window.
And then, back up in room 212, I flicked through fifty channels looking for I didn’t know what. It was the usual messy stew: news, drama, stupidity, sports. I kept flipping. At home I would have been on the computer, or talking with Jeannie or the kids, or replacing a lightbulb, or lying on the sofa scratching Jasper’s belly and watching the Yankees. But the Yankees weren’t on, and I had decided not to bring my computer (Jeannie’s idea, actually—Get all the way away from work, she’d said), so there was a small emptiness where those things would have been. And television was designed with just such an emptiness in mind. I flipped and flipped for almost half an hour without settling on anything, then drank half a glass of water, went to the desk, and wrote my elder child this letter—which she has saved—on General Sutter’s stationery:
Dear Tash,
How are you? This is your old dad writing. I’m thinking of you and Anthony and missing you. If you two are on speaking terms, tell him I’ll write to him tomorrow.
Being away from the family has given me time to think. I’ve been thinking about how, sometimes, because we all see each other every day, t
here is a tendency to take each other for granted, to get caught up in all the routine details of clothes, food, money, rules. You’re at an age now when you are forming what will be your own future life, and your mother and I know that, and we only want that life to be the best that it can be. If sometimes it seems like we put you in a cage and move the bars in closer every day, well, we don’t mean to—we mean to move them closer every other day!
I’m goofy, all right, sorry. It’s been a long day. I’ll tell you about it when I get home, but I’m riding to North Dakota with some kind of spiritual master your aunt hooked me up with. Nice enough guy.
I just wanted to write to say that I love you, that you and your brother mean everything to me and Mom, that your happiness means everything to us. When I get home, I’ll take you out to breakfast at Mitch’s if you can spare the time. Saturday. Any time you want to wake up. Breakfast at Mitch’s at one p.m. if you want. A date. Jared will be sick with jealousy.
All my love,
Dad
I read the note over twice, folded it into an envelope, sealed it. I brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face then took off my clothes and got into the bed. It felt huge, as hotel beds always feel without Jeannie in them. I lay awake for awhile, hearing another horse-drawn carriage go by beneath the windows and thinking about how impossible it was to convey to your children the depth of your love. My own parents, it seemed to me, had just abandoned any idea of doing that. Or maybe their parents had never given them a decent example of how to even try. Or maybe they just assumed their love was so obvious it didn’t need to be talked about. Or maybe the hard grind of farming life had knocked all the energy out of them. I remembered, once, on one of the rare times that we were out together as a family having a meal, seeing another family of four in the booth across the way. The kids were about the same age as Seese and I, which must have been preteen somewhere. But the mother and father were always touching them: arm around the shoulder, hand on the wrist. I remember that it made me sad, and that the sadness seemed unmanly somehow, and so I never mentioned it to anyone. It was part and parcel of the prairie life to keep your hurts well covered. I went to sleep thinking about that.
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