When the waiter left us, Rinpoche said, “If you want to know why this life is like it is, you should know that it is because of your last life. If you want to know what your future life will be, you should look at the way you are living in this life.”
“So it’s a punishment, then. If you’re straggling down State Street addicted to heroin, and you have AIDS, and you’re poor as dirt and squatting in a doorway scratching lottery tickets you bought with a few dollars someone put in your hat, that means you were a bad person in your last life.”
“Absolutely not,” he said, and for once he was not smiling. “It means you are given that for your practice in this life.”
“Practice for what?”
“For your next life,” he said.
“You’re playing the Zen game with me again. You know I hate it.”
The waiter was back. Since it was my second lunch of the day, I decided to have something light—scallops on a salad, decaf coffee. Rinpoche asked for mint tea.
“They have the smallest banana splits in the world here,” I told him, trying to simultaneously find a conciliatory note and change the subject. But Rinpoche was having none of that.
“My good friend,” he said. “You want A-B-C like the alphabet, and two plus two make four. But you are asking about something so far past ordinary human thinking mind. How can I put together those two things in an answer?”
“I don’t know.”
“I can’t make those things be sense in words, in the logic way of thinking, so I play Zen game. But it is not a game. It is the only way to begin—begin—to understand. I am trying to teach you, but you don’t want to accept the teaching. You are very proud. You have a good life, you have worked hard for that life, you are very intelligent man, and in this society, intelligence like yours gets a good job, a good house, a good life for you and your family.
“There is nothing wrong with that. But you should try now to stop using so much that kind of intelligence, and stop thinking about punishment and sin and good and evil. I am telling you that your kind of intelligence makes you have a good job, but your kind of intelligence does not make you able to answer these questions. For that, you need a different kind of mind. And I am telling you there are people—maybe like that man in the doorway, maybe like that man sweeping the street in the city where your sister lives, or that man sitting outside the gas station the other day, or a woman we will meet soon—who can answer these questions better than you can, though maybe they do not have the fancy words. I am trying to tell you this, but you are proud of your intelligence, and your good job, and you will not let me teach you, so I play games.” He sat back. “Is that answer better to you, my friend?”
The food arrived. For a little while, I buried myself in the pleasure of it, not answering the good Rinpoche. In truth, all during the main course, my mind was running frantically this way and that, trying to find a logical refutation. I finished the salad and ordered one of the World’s Smallest Banana Splits and an extra spoon for Rinpoche, who tried two bites and smiled politely.
“Is that answer more pleaseful to you, my friend?” he asked, when the meal was finished.
“Yes,” I said. “Somewhat more pleaseful, and massively confusing.”
He reached out and touched my forearm in a kind way. Against a background of the rich brown paneling of that room, waiters and waitresses swirled and hurried, balancing trays at their shoulders, leaning in to take orders from elderly matrons whose eyes wandered out the floor-to-ceiling windows and down the length of State Street, where the traffic clogged and loosened like blood in an artery, and the world of business, of endless busyness, hurtled on. That busyness holds such an appeal, their eyes seemed to be saying. Such a strong appeal.
The light of the city of Chicago has a certain quality to it—because of the proximity of the lake, probably—and I was pondering that quality, and pondering the world of busyness, and thinking about my family, and feeling, just below the place where the meal I’d eaten was now at rest in its acidy bath, a kind of tearing open. The feeling reminded me, in a visceral manner beyond thought, of the way I’d felt in the moment I realized Jeannie and I were about to make love for the first time, an event that had occurred only a few miles from where the good Rinpoche and I then sat. In that hotel room there was the sexual excitement, of course (absent now, naturally enough, in the Walnut Room), but there was also something else surrounding it, a kind of terror-ecstasy balance, as if I were stepping off the sill of a tenth-floor window with the smallest of parachutes strapped to my back, a young man making a severe break with the familiar comforts of his past.
Exactly at that moment, as I was lost in that improbable comparison, Rinpoche said, “Ask any question now.”
I looked up and for an instant the image of him seemed to flicker. For a second or two he seemed about to morph into someone or something else. Just nervousness, I decided, just a twitch in the optical nerve. Too many hours on the road. I looked at him more closely and he stabilized, if that is the word, and I hesitated for a moment and then hesitated some more and then said, “All right, my question is this: Assuming I wanted to find out about the greatest pleasure, as you call it . . . assuming I was open to that . . . what would the next step be?”
A smile the size of Lake Michigan. The no-longer-wavering Rinpoche saying, “How many days do we have now, you and me together driving?”
I pictured the route I’d planned out for him, north and then west so we could see the lakes in Wisconsin and Minnesota rather than the dry, flat, featureless grazing land of eastern South Dakota. “Maybe three days more.”
“Not enough,” he said.
“Maybe four, then, at the very most. I promised Jeannie and the kids I’d be back in time to—”
“Four days,” he said.
“All right.”
“Is it possible to show me to understand America in four days, Otto?”
I laughed and shook my head. “Fifty years, maybe.”
“Fifty years to teach you, also.”
“But you keep saying how advanced I am, what a good soul.”
“I am advanced, too.” He slapped himself in the center of his chest. “Rinpoche is not stupid,” he added, and let out such an uproarious laugh that people at tables on all sides of us interrupted their meals to stare. “Rinpoche can understand America in four days.”
“Not stupid at all,” I agreed, quietly. “All right. I’ll try to show you America in four days. You try to show me enlightenment.”
“Maybe a little enlightenment. Maybe one piece.”
“A fair exchange. One piece of enlightenment for one piece of the American experience.”
“My good friend,” he said, and I could see that I had made him happy, and it was not an unpleasant feeling, though the twisting in my intestines, the pinching at the bottom of my lungs, the sense that I was somehow going back on an old, old promise I had made to myself many years before—all of that abated only slightly.
TWENTY-NINE
At the Marshall Field’s information desk I made an inquiry about baseball tickets and Chicago’s other options for American fun. We retrieved the car and made the stop-and-go drive up North Michigan Avenue to a side street, where I pulled the car down and around the corner and back up in front of the Knickerbocker Hotel. I handed the keys over to an eager and clean-shaven young valet, and then, inside the lobby, was hit with such a wave of nostalgia that I stumbled and bumbled through the check-in like a college senior on his first overnight trip with his first serious love. After agreeing on a schedule for the rest of the day, we went to our separate rooms, the Rinpoche and I, and even then, when I was lying on the bed in the stately old room I’d requested, with the quiet hum and whistle of the city pressing through the window glass, and the soft pillow beneath my head, even then memories knocked and glided through the blood in my brain.
I dialed the number of my wife’s cell phone. It was the middle of the afternoon, too early for my customary call, a
nd when she heard my voice she said, “What’s wrong, Otto?” with a small note of panic.
“Absolutely nothing. Guess where I am?”
“Bismarck. You drove all night. You’re frustrated, you can’t take it anymore and drove all night without sleeping, risking your life, because—”
“Chicago,” I said. “Knickerbocker Hotel. Room 721.”
She paused a beat. “You’re joking.”
“Not at all. I’m lying on the bed farthest from the window.”
“You’re really there? Since when did you become such a romantic?”
“Next anniversary we’re coming here.”
“I’m not opposed. Only not by bus this time. And with more than eighteen dollars in our pockets when we leave. That was such an extravagance.”
“They’ve redone the wallpaper and the curtains, and the TV is different.”
“They had no right to make changes to that room without consulting us. We should file suit.”
“Do you remember that day?”
“Minute by minute. I could recite our conversations verbatim. I remember what we did. I remember what you were wearing—those awful double-knit maroon pants your mother had given you. I remember reaching down to undo the clasp and my hands were shaking so hard I thought you’d laugh at me.”
“Grandmother. It was my grandmother who gave them to me.”
“I remember taking a shower with you, hours after that, and feeling like a wild girl, and thinking what a nice muscular body you had, and feeling so self-conscious and so excited, like a whole new world had opened up. I remember the hockey-stick scar on your neck.”
“You’ll scandalize the children.”
“They’re out. I remember everything.”
“You’re the romantic,” I said.
“What possessed you?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted. . . . You should have come with me on this trip. You should meet this Rinpoche guy, he’s not what I expected.”
“Has he converted you?”
“Not exactly.”
“Not exactly?”
“I did go into a barber shop in the Loop and have them shave off all my hair. I wear a robe now, I’ve sworn an oath to remain celibate, and I—”
“You’re scaring me.”
“I think there’s something to what he says,” I told her then, in a different tone, and she noticed it, naturally—we’ve been married long enough for her to detect that small change in my voice—and there was a silence. “It’s not bad,” I added, foolishly.
“Tell me what’s happening.”
“What’s happening is that he’s worn down my cynicism a little.”
“What cynicism? You’re the farthest thing from a cynic: you’re a romantic.”
“He’s made me think about things from a different angle, that’s all. Life and death, you know.”
“What does he have you doing?”
“Nothing. We just talk. I’m trying to give him a sense of America, and he’s promised to try and give me a sense of . . . I don’t know what to call it . . . another dimension of the interior life, I guess it would be.”
“It doesn’t sound like you.”
“I know it.”
“Dimension of the interior life . . . it doesn’t sound like something you’d say at all.”
“I know. I just have a feeling there’s something I’m not paying attention to, and I’m willing to spend a couple of days exploring it.”
“Should I put a FOR SALE sign on the house?”
“Just FOR RENT,” I said, and she laughed, and I knew there was no problem between us, and wouldn’t be, that the cord of our affection for each other was strong enough to allow me to venture out of the safe territory of our ordinary patterns without either of us pushing a panic button. I can’t overstate what a feeling of freedom and love I had then, how calm that made me, how suddenly the whirring in my belly ceased to worry me.
Jeannie and I talked for another few minutes without discussing Rinpoche and his ideas. She had always been slightly more open to such things than her husband, and I knew we’d both hang up and think about what had been said and have a longer conversation about it at some point, but I did not want to go there yet. We talked about the children—the strongest fibers in the cord that linked us—and then simple things, domestic things: repairs to the front gutters, her plans for the rest of the day. When I hung up I lay back on the bed more contentedly even than I had twenty-four years earlier, my first real love there against me, skin to skin, and the future opening out in front of us, a vast prairie of possibility.
THIRTY
Both of Chicago’s baseball teams were at home, as it turned out, so that night I took Rinpoche to see the Cubs at Wrigley Field. We rode the subway out there, rumbling and roaring beneath the city in an eclectic crowd of fans, troubled urban souls, and late commuters. It is such a great thrill to step out of the train and see the banks of lights above the walls of an old ballfield, to smell the popcorn and beer, to cross paths with scalpers offering tickets, and dads with their excited children. If you are late, as we were, it is at once exciting and frustrating to listen to the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd swelling and ebbing just on the other side of the wall and to want so badly to be among that crowd. There is no feeling like walking through the old cement bowels of a place like Wrigley or Fenway or the House That Ruth Built, then emerging into the artificial light, seeing the flat, perfect emerald city of the playing field, the players themselves like gods in their white uniforms and fluid movements, the alert ushers, the families in rows, making the long climb up gum-stained concrete steps, sidling into seats, watching the way darkness falls gradually beyond the banks of lights as if the world there is a separate, sadder thing, and you have temporarily loosened its hold on you. The Cubs were playing the Phillies that night, and our seats were behind home plate but far up under the overhanging upper deck, almost in the last row.
For dinner, Rinpoche had popcorn and bottled water; I went with a hot dog and a beer and convinced him to try a few bites of cotton candy. He seemed to enjoy the cotton candy and the stadium atmosphere, but the game itself perplexed him. I tried to explain the immeasurably complicated pageantry of strikes and balls, umpires hooking their hands and making their war cries, the illogical shape of the field, the bases, the white-clothed young supermen spaced out on the greensward. Impossible. Try explaining, for one small example, the infield fly rule to someone who has not grown up with it. After a while I gave up and just submerged myself in the ocean of noise around us, standing and cheering when the home team scored, sitting in a muttering angst when the visitors’ third baseman smacked a home run. In the bottom of the fifth I turned to Rinpoche, intending to explain the meaning of a double play, and I saw that he had fallen asleep there with the bag of popcorn clutched tightly in his hands, his big square head tilted slightly to the left. On his face was an expression of the most profound peace, cousin to the peace you see in the Buddha’s smile. Even the next inning’s home-run roar didn’t wake him. From time to time I would take my eyes away from the elegant existential distraction that is baseball and look at the expression on Rinpoche’s face, and I’d imagine myself pointing to it and saying to Jeannie, “See that. That’s what I was trying to explain on the phone. That is what I want.”
THIRTY-ONE
The next day, because I wanted to show Rinpoche a bit more of the city before we moved on, I signed us up for an architectural cruise on the Chicago River. I suppose I felt the need to add some cultural or intellectual component to his American tour. We could have gone to a museum, but it was a glorious midwestern summer day, not too hot or humid, the sky blue and endless. Plus, as much as I enjoy paintings and sculpture, I like buildings more. For a time, in college, I even thought of majoring in engineering, with a minor in design, imagined myself going on to architecture school and then transforming the nonexistent skyline of Grand Forks, Fargo, or Bismarck with a series of startling glass-walled masterpiece
s that people would be marveling at hundreds of years after Otto Anthony Ringling was gone from this earth.
But all that had been decades earlier. By the time Rinpoche and I walked down to the Chicago River on that perfect summer morning, my desires had been pruned, my architectural ambitions narrowed to this: I just wanted to soak up a little more of the big city. There would be nothing like it for the rest of our trip, I knew that. What awaited Rinpoche now, at least along the route I’d planned, was the pleasant, corn-fed humility of Madison and then the green-and-brown expanse of nature for eight hundred more miles.
So for an hour Rinpoche and I sat on the hard bench seats of a diesel-powered boat and listened to a fellow with a microphone talk about the great fire, and the deep-set pilings of this or that ninety-story building, and the million-dollar condominiums with river views. We looked out and up at the intricate cornices and massive steel walls, and down at the eddies of plastic cups, twigs, twisted tooth-white prophylactics, and the rest of the river filth. “At one time,” our guide said, “the river flowed west to east, emptying into the lake. But people took their drinking water from the lake then, as they do now, and every year so many people fell ill and died from waterborne diseases that the city actually reversed the flow of the river so that it now empties in the other direction.”
At last we disembarked, grabbed a quick Chinese appetizer at Jia’s on Sterling Street, then retrieved the car again and made our way north on Highway 12, out of the city, out past the airport with its chain-link fences and cargo warehouses, out through the sedate suburb of Des Plaines, and then into the countryside and across the Wisconsin line.
I noticed, of course, that since our conversation in Marshall Field’s, Rinpoche had not brought up the subject of my spiritual re-education. I was at peace with that. Somehow, overnight, the flame of my curiosity had dimmed. Looking around at the thousands of faces in Wrigley Field, I’d had the thought that they were, most of them, good solid midwesterners, good fathers, mothers, and friends. How many of them meditated? Went to church, temple, or mosque every day? How many of them worried excessively about what might happen to them at the end of their lives? If all these thousands of good people weren’t troubled by such things on an hour-to-hour basis, then why should I trouble myself? The thought had some power, and it carried me through that night and half the following day on a happy, easygoing mood that wasn’t conducive to deep questioning.
Breakfast With Buddha Page 17
