Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

“I’ve left everything up to Aunt Seese.”

  “We’re in trouble then.”

  “You guys are so harsh on her,” Natasha put in.

  “We love her,” I said. “She makes us crazy sometimes, but we all love her.”

  Anthony laughed his manliest two-note laugh. “Yeah, sure, but you let her choose the hotel, Dad? Really?”

  “It’s a B and B.”

  “Even worse! It’s gonna be feng shui city, man. Some kind of yurt or igloo or something. Tofu burgers for breakfast. We’re up shit creek.”

  Beneath his not-quite-yet-a-man-but-old-enough-to-curse-in-front-of-his-father façade, Anthony’s sorrow ran like the moles that savaged our garden, night creatures who traveled in deep tunnels, though you might catch a glimpse of them at noon. During the course of his mother’s illness he had never once let anyone see him cry. Two days after she was gone, as I headed up to bed I heard him sobbing in his room. I stood in the hallway with the closed door between us and tried to think of something I might say. Another father, a TV or movie father, would have tapped on the door and gone in and found just the right words, but I was frozen there, a victim of my North Dakota upbringing, maybe. Of old, old rules about men and strength and shame.

  Natasha was a different creature, more open to the world and its pains, a bit less anxious to separate herself from us and make her own way. During Jeannie’s illness she’d spent every minute she could at her mother’s side, had forfeited her next-to-the-last semester of college to be with her, and had, only when Jeannie couldn’t see her, walked the rooms of the house, wet-faced and desolate. I left them alone with their mourning, and they left me alone with mine; that was our unspoken agreement.

  One of the side effects of losing a spouse—at least for me—had been a peculiar inability to perform the most mundane tasks. Making plane and hotel reservations, shopping for food, setting out the trash on time—these duties, which ordinarily I would have completed with a practiced ease, now seemed as daunting as the learning of a Chinese dialect. I let things slide. For the first time in family history, bills were paid late. The dry cleaners had to call three times to remind me to pick up my shirts. My children could be harsh with me about these failings, but I took their casual criticisms like a battered old fighter takes punches. I would stand. I was determined to stand. I was determined to stay sane, and love them, and help them envision a new life after our old one had been ripped to pieces.

  So I had, in fact, allowed my sister Cecelia to make the arrangements and set in place the first few pieces of our elaborate Ringling Family Plan. I should confess at this point that I consider her a peculiar soul. Warmhearted, giving, but offbeat to the point of absolute eccentricity. Before marrying Volya Rinpoche and moving back to the family farm in North Dakota, she’d made a meager living in Paterson, New Jersey, performing past-life regressions, reading palms and Tarot cards, claiming to see the future. I will say no more.

  Since she, her famous husband, and their almost-six-year-old daughter, Shelsa, did not tolerate air travel well, they were taking Amtrak’s Empire Builder from their home in North Dakota, across Montana’s northern tier, across the top of Idaho, and southwest into Seattle. If all went well we were to meet them that evening at a bed-and-breakfast of her choosing, a place called The Inn at Chakra Creek. The inn was owned, in my sister’s words, by “a very nice, very rich man who considers Rinpoche his guru.” This man, whose name was Jarvis Barton-Phillips, was giving us a substantial discount, she said. More than that, as a gesture of his devotion he was donating a “beautiful” pickup truck to the North Dakota retreat center.

  To complicate our travel plans further, Celia suggested that, once we’d gone through the ceremony of distributing Jeannie’s ashes, she, her daughter, their dog, and my two children were going to ride back to Seattle, spend two nights there, then take the train to North Dakota for a week’s vacation on the high plains. Rinpoche and I would drive the beautiful pickup across those nine hundred miles, and join them. This trip, she figured, would be a nice break for her husband, who’d been “working so hard his aura was changing.” And it would be nice for me, too, in her opinion. We were friends, after all, the good monk and I. We’d made one previous road trip together, six months before Shelsa’s birth, and it had gone fairly well. “You and Rinpoche need to spend some quality time again,” Celia told me over the phone as she announced these plans and made her case for them. “He misses you, misses seeing America through your eyes. You might benefit from it, too, Otto.”

  I didn’t have the strength to resist.

  And that was how, on a hot day in the last week of July, 2012, I came to be driving a Lincoln MKX along I-5 toward the Mukilteo Ferry, a ceramic jar of ashes in my bag, the two remaining loves of my life slumped on leather seats, working their fabulous machines.

  3

  We made the ferry crossing without incident and wound our way along Whidbey Island’s two-lane roads to the town of Coupeville—which my son took great pleasure in mispronouncing as “Coupe de Ville.” There, two blocks from the quaint downtown and not so very far from where my sister promised it would be, stood The Inn at Chakra Creek. It was a purple Victorian, bulging out on three sides with odd-shaped, clapboarded additions—as if the original structure had developed an illness that caused its skin to bubble. Here and there along the gravel walkway stood knee-high stacks of beach stones, arranged, it seemed to me, so that drunken late-night arrivals would be penalized for carelessness, though not too severely.

  “Looks funky,” Anthony said. “What’s with the rocks?”

  “Those are cairns,” Natasha told him in her older-sister voice. “In some Native American cultures they’re considered holy objects of meditation.”

  “They’re rocks,” Anthony almost spit. “Rocks piled up.”

  Thunp, thunp, thunp, went the Lincoln’s doors. We stepped onto the porch as a threesome. Inside, behind a counter, almost at attention, stood a young man of South Asian heritage—Indian or Nepali, perhaps—a shy way of greeting us, and nervous, wavering eyes. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Abbot.”

  “We’re the Ringling party,” I told him. “Otto, Natasha, Anthony. I believe we’ve booked the whole place for one night.”

  “You’re with Volya Rinpoche.”

  “Right. I thought he might be here by now.”

  “We’re waiting for him,” Abbot said. “And for his child, Shelsa.”

  As he pronounced my niece’s name the young man wasn’t exactly breathless, but his tone was close to that of a Manhattan clerk saying “Derek Jeter” moments before the great shortstop checked in. My sister, mostly, and Rinpoche, occasionally, would make some remark about their daughter that went beyond a parent’s ordinary pride. That she’d come to earth to rescue us from a great spiritual danger, or something like that. At moments they suggested I had a support role in her work—Uncle Otto was here to help Shelsa fulfill her destiny—but that’s where I drew the line. My job, as I saw it, was to be a loving uncle, nothing more or less than that.

  “There’s something she’s been sent here to do,” is the way my sister usually put it. “She has a very special purpose.”

  The young man at the desk seemed to have heard the same rumor.

  He showed us upstairs to our three small, perfectly adequate rooms, and then, as he refused the tip I offered, he said, “Jarvis will be here any minute with the truck.”

  “The beautiful pickup.”

  Something skipped across the young man’s handsome face, some shadow, some scampering salamander of trouble. I have, for better or worse, a radar for these things. “Actually,” he added, cocking his head at a rumbling sound—thunder was my first guess, a summer storm moving in—“I think that’s him now.”

  I followed the clerk downstairs and out the front door. There, beside the Lincoln, an ancient pickup truck had been parked. Off-white with a tangerine-colored band around its middle, freckles of rust on the hood and fenders, running lights above the windshield, and a cir
cular dent on the roof over the passenger seat, it could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called beautiful. There was a bicycle thrown carelessly in the bed.

  Walking toward us from the direction of the truck was a tall, thin man with unnaturally broad shoulders, sandy hair that was long in back and thin in front, and an earring in one lobe. “Dude,” he said, apparently to me.

  He gave me one of those handshakes where the thumbs hook each other and the fingers point to the sky, then he banged his thin chest against my shoulder in the style made famous by professional athletes and patted me on the back with his free hand. “Good trip?”

  “Fine,” I said. “Smooth.”

  “This your rental?”

  I said that it was.

  “Cool, man. I have one at my Aspen house. You’ll like it. But hey, I forgot, you’re driving Uma, you and Rinpoche, aren’t you?”

  I thought: My sister invited a friend named Uma to go with us. Uma will squeeze in between Rinpoche and me, peasant skirt hiked up between her knees, one leg to either side of the stick shift. She’ll tune the radio to a station that plays the mating sounds of whales. She’ll cringe and offer a blessing every time a moth smashes against the windshield. She’ll want to give me healing massages. I said: “Who’s Uma?”

  “Dude,” Jarvis said, with a condescending snort, “Uma’s the truck. I named her after Uma Thurman, the most beautiful woman in the universe. Her dad’s a Buddhist, too.”

  “I get it.”

  Jarvis reached out a lanky arm and patted me on the shoulder so I wouldn’t feel bad. “She’s a classic, you know. Certified antique. Worth a small fortune these days, but it’s my honor to donate her to my guru.” He paused for a moment and took a breath. “My teacher.”

  “What year is she?” I asked, because nothing else came to mind.

  “Eighty-three. And listen, in case I don’t see him, tell Rinpoche I don’t mind one bit if he wants to sell her and use the money for whatever purpose he envisions. I won’t be offended in the least, okay? Good karma, right?”

  “I’ll pass that on. Is there . . . should we be aware of any mechanical issues? It’s a long drive. Mountains and so on. I’d hate to get stranded in the wilds of Montana.”

  “Uma’s all set. Tank’s full. Fresh oil. Papers in the glove box, all signed. Muffler’s got a little pinhole, and you might just keep an eye on the temp gauge from time to time and if you see it moving into the red just turn the heat on. Otherwise, you’ll be a magnet for the babes in this thing, man.” He dangled a key ring in front of me—two keys and a silvery crescent moon. “Gotta zoom. Business calls. Right livelihood, agreed?”

  “Absolutely.”

  He lifted the bicycle out of the truck bed, hopped on, and pedaled away happily down the road. I remembered my sister saying that Jarvis had made a fortune in Silicon Valley, and that, in addition to this B and B, he owned a string of boutique hotels in Oregon and Northern California, homes in Aspen and Kaua’i. Several times a year he traveled to North Dakota to see Rinpoche and have himself a three-day retreat. And in what was, apparently, a common practice among spiritual devotees, he was making a donation of something close to his heart, simultaneously earning a tax deduction and accumulating good karma. I walked over to the truck and made an inspection. Old and battered though it was, it did have classic lines, I had to admit. In the glove box a large white envelope held a registration and an official-looking document, signing ownership of the truck over to Volya Rinpoche, “His Holiness.” Everything was in order, except for two things: His Holiness, to my knowledge, could not drive. And, beneath the envelope, there was a small plastic bag of what appeared to be marijuana.

  4

  The plan had been for Cecelia (I call her Celia, or Seese), Rinpoche, and Shelsa to meet us at the Chakra Creek in time for all of us to go out to dinner. The whole clan would spend the night, and then we’d head up to the Cascades the next morning in a two-vehicle caravan. But the dinner hour came and went, and we still had no word from them. I pictured them somewhere in an Amtrak outback, stalled on the tracks in northern Idaho, not a timepiece or a mobile phone among them, nothing to eat but the tofu and pumpkin-seed-bread sandwiches Seese had brought along, or day-old microwaved croissants with cheese—the dining car specialty. I was hungry. We were all hungry. It was nearly eleven o’clock New York time.

  We decided to leave a note at the desk and walk into town, hoping they’d arrive soon and join us. Coupe de Ville turned out to be a wonderful little village, a single commercial street set close against the Strait of Juan de Fuca, shops on both sides, all of it picture-postcard quaint. The bookstore, the ice cream parlor, a place that sold gifts, furniture, and antiques; a shop where you could buy artisanal bread and local jellies. All of it was closed at that hour, but we found one restaurant still open, and went in. We were led past a sign—a joke, probably—that read NO FIREARMS BEYOND THIS POINT and were seated at a window table with a spectacular view of the harbor and one snow-topped mountain in the distance.

  The waitress bounced over and announced the specials, but we were in the mood for simpler fare that night. Anthony had the local mussels, Natasha—flirting with vegetarianism—ordered a warm spinach salad, and yours truly went the healthy route for once: pasta primavera. The simple act of looking at a menu, ordering food, sitting there in anticipation of its arrival—these things were almost a religious rite for a person like me, an opiate. I’m an editor of culinary books, picky about what I eat, in a non-snobby way, but my fascination with food is so much more than professional. I enjoy it the way other people build a pleasure palace around ballet or the NHL or the ups and downs of a presidential campaign, the way Jeannie enjoyed her flower garden. She loved the colors and textures, the miracle of bloom and the feel of dirt between her fingers. I’m fascinated by the limitless variety of ingredients, the skill of an accomplished chef or capable short-order cook, the smells, sights and tastes of the great American cornucopia.

  The waitress brought warm dinner rolls and a microbrew beer and I ate and sipped and gave silent thanks—something Rinpoche always encouraged me to do. We made conversation for a while, admired the view, held to our rule of no cell phones at the table, and were more than ready to eat by the time the waitress reappeared.

  “How do you rate it, Dad?” Anthony inquired after I’d taken two bites of the primavera. Asking my opinion about a restaurant meal had become a family joke, one of many. I always played along. On that night, though, I felt we were teetering on a tightrope. I’d felt that way for months. We wanted to laugh and tease, the way we’d always done as a foursome. It had been one of the qualities—along with patience and an abundance of physical affection—that had made our family life a kind of fruit tree we could nourish ourselves from, year round. At the same time, joking in those months had come to feel wrong, improper, vaguely disloyal. I tried anyway.

  “It would be fine,” I said, “if the pasta hadn’t been cooked to the point where it could be used as paste in a kindergarten class.”

  Anthony laughed, Natasha smiled.

  “That good, huh?”

  “The vegetables are nice and fresh, but my God, what is it with pasta? How hard is it to take it out of the pot before it turns into wet cardboard? It should have some body. It should be a worthwhile vehicle for the sauce, or, in this case, a sturdy companion to the vegetables. You should have to have a decent set of back teeth in order to eat it.”

  Perhaps hearing my tone of voice, the waitress swung by and asked if everything was all right. I said that it was, smiled at her, inquired as to the name of the mountain we were looking at.

  “That’s Mount Baker,” she said proudly.

  “Spectacular.”

  “You’re kind, at least,” Tasha said when we were alone again. “Kind, if picky.”

  Their meals were perfectly fine. Everything was more or less all right to that point. We were running with the routine, balancing on the tightrope. We’d make it to the other side, no problem. W
e’d get through tomorrow’s ceremony, separate for a while, have a quiet week together at the farm. But then Tasha slipped, the way one of us was almost always slipping. Some image of Jeannie, a breeze of memory, would blow across the conversation and suddenly we’d all be falling, arms thrashing air, faces contorted. “One of my earliest memories,” she said, stirring the salad absently with her fork, “is you blowing up at Mom for cooking the pasta too long one night at supper.”

  “Blowing up is too strong.”

  “Getting mad.”

  “I apologized within sixty seconds. I’m sorry that’s one of your early memories. I’m sorry I’m so picky.”

  “It’s just one of your little quirks, Dad,” she said.

  “Still.”

  “You and Mom didn’t fight much,” Anthony said in my defense, “compared to some of my friends’ parents.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You seemed happy.”

  “We were,” I said, a bit too stiffly. I was trying desperately to unfreeze, to hold us up in the air above the canyon bottom. Natasha’s lower lip had started to tremble. She left us—to wash her hands, she said.

  “All ready for school?” I asked my son, as a way of chasing the dead air.

  “Shipped the trunk. Suitcases packed. Room assignment all set.”

  “I’ll drive you up if you want.”

  “Thanks, Dad, but Emory’s taking me . . . . And you’re driving back to the farm with the Rinp anyway, and hanging out for a week, so the timing wouldn’t work.”

  “Right. I forgot, I guess.”

  “You’re pissed off.”

  “Not really.”

  “Sure you are. She pushes your buttons, Aunt Seese. Anybody can see that. You wanted a hotel, she got a B and B. You were on time, she’s late, same as always.”

  “And Tash doesn’t push yours?”

  “Yeah, I guess. She means well, though, Aunt Seese. She just thought you wouldn’t want to go straight back to the, you know, the empty house and everything.”