“Not usually. No.”
He looked at her as if he’d given the answer and he was waiting for her to comprehend.
“I don’t understand.”
He tried a different angle. “The little girl or the little boy learns words,” he said. “One word, next word. Pretty soon she has ten words, hundred words. She grows up, school, the college maybe. She says, ‘I have enough words now. I don’t know all the words, but I have enough’. Rinpoche says that sometimes, yes?”
“Okay.”
“But spirchal life you don’t say this “enough”. You never say it. Deeper and deeper you go. You say, maybe I know something. Maybe I know many things. I understand. I am wery good! But you don’t say, I stop now. I know God all the way. I know myself all the way. Stopping is from the ego, but God has no ego. God goes and goes, changes, plays, makes new and new, for every second, for all time! You should be like that, satisfied and not satisfied. Love yourself, yes, sure. Yourself is good. I can see in you,” he pointed at her and flashed his smile, “right now, I can see the wery good inside of you. Wery wery good person I see! You should know it. And also know that new is coming for you. Love maybe, a babies, house, work, troubles, getting old or getting sick, death. Every in a little more time, if you try, there will be a new part of God, a new part of the deepness of life for you to see, and if you say always, ‘I know, I know,’ you can’t see it, yes? You can’t learn.”
“Yes, okay, I think so,” she said. Nobody else risked a question for a long time. Unperturbed, Rinpoche finished his tea. He looked at the stones spread around his feet as if wondering how they’d gotten there. When he tilted his head at them in a curious way, I saw the patch of lipstick on his cheek. Other people must have seen it. The silence felt to me as though it were turning a corner from puzzled to annoyed.
At last it was broken by a man who must have been in his mid-seventies, with a floppy cap of feathery white hair and a trimmed white beard to match. “I’ve read all your books, Rinpoche,” he said, “and I have to say I think tonight you didn’t really explain things very well. Excuse me, I say it with all respect. Perhaps it’s just the word ‘God’ that’s throwing me off. I’ve never read that word in your books, or very rarely. I’m here mainly for more peace of mind, not to become a believer, and I think your presentation has really just confused all of us.”
The man had stood to speak. As he took his seat again someone in the middle of the room hissed him. He turned angrily and mouthed, “My opinion!” And the other person hissed something back at him that I couldn’t hear.
We were all waiting for Rinpoche’s response, but seconds passed, a minute passed, two minutes, and eventually it became apparent that he might just continue to stare down into his glass and say nothing. I couldn’t tell if he was offended, angry, cooking up a good response, or what was going on. It was tremendously uncomfortable, not least for the man who’d risked the comment. At last Rinpoche looked up and around the room as if for other, better remarks, and we understood there would be no reply. Silence was the answer. Jesus with the Grand Inquisitor. Not a word. From thirty feet away you could feel the frown on the face of the white-haired man.
Silence and more silence. The shuffling and coughing that never quite breaks a difficult moment. The man who’d introduced Rinpoche was turning red, and I was silently urging him to say a closing word when twenty feet to my right I heard a sound. I turned and saw that the woman from Irv’s had gotten to her feet. Her dress was very short and tight and absolutely scarlet, and it had worked its way high up toward her hips. Her legs were a runner’s legs, the legs of an oarswoman. She stepped away from the chair and I expected her to turn and walk out the door, but instead she went up the aisle outside the rows of chairs, made a ninety-degree left, and walked across in front of the first row. Her heels sounded out an unignorable tat, tat, tat, tat on the hardwood floor, but had she glided along in silence, barefoot, everyone in the room would still have watched. She had the presence of an actor or a dancer, shoulders back, chin up, hips and muscular arms swinging. She made it about halfway from the corner to the central aisle, and then bent down, demurely, knees twisted to the side, and she picked up one of the stones, and said something quietly to the teacher. There might have been a “thank you” at the end of it, I couldn’t quite hear. Then she stood and promenaded back the way she’d come and straight through the door into the night. At last there was the customary closing word from our host: that we should thank Rinpoche for taking time out of his busy schedule to make a stop in Spokane, that the local bookseller had books ready at the table and Rinpoche would be happy to sign them. There was a splash of polite applause. Five or six people approached Rinpoche and asked for his autograph on a book. One young woman simply wanted to touch him. But I sensed that most of the others walked out vaguely disappointed. I counted myself among them. It wasn’t his best talk, I was telling myself. That white-headed guy was at least partly right: Rinpoche never quite closed the circle the way he might have, never quite made his point.
The crowd dispersed. Rinpoche and I walked back together along the sidewalk, the night a few degrees cooler now, the traffic thin. A sort of halo of doubt hung over me, resurrection of an older demon, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. My brother-in-law went along contentedly enough, at peace with the silence. In the glorious Davenport lobby I asked if I could buy him something to drink—there was a coffee bar there off to one side. “More tea? An Italian soda?”
He shook his head and looked at me, expecting something, it seemed. Praise, understanding, a question. “What did that woman say to you?” I asked him. “At the end?”
He looked at me and grinned. “Tell you other time, man,” he said, then he patted me on the shoulder and went off to his nightly prayer.
I bought a cup of tea and sat at one of the tables, running my eyes across the gold-leaf trim beneath the ceiling, the heavy chandeliers, the purposely twisted poles atop which small square lamps sat, the marble floor tiles. I liked my lessons neat. I was a fan of the clear yes or no from the depths of my logical mind. And, until half an hour earlier, I had been a fan of Volya Rinpoche. I wanted him to succeed. I wanted him to live up to the reputation he had among my sister and some hundreds of thousands of others around the world. I was, as the saying goes, invested in the idea that he knew something essential I didn’t know and would be able to teach me. After all these years, all these wessons, all the hours I’d spent in reading and meditation, if he turned out to be a kindly fraud, I think I would have taken to drink, or signed up for a lifetime of therapy, or never again in my life ventured off the safely beaten path.
Into the room came a couple in their thirties, the man about five feet six, the woman much taller. They were obviously in love, on a honeymoon perhaps. I noticed that she was wearing heels—a nice touch, I thought, as if she were saying Yes, I’m tall, isn’t that fine! I liked the way he looked at her. It made me miss my wife. Jeannie had accepted my new interest in meditation and the interior life with a bemused but nevertheless respectful good humor, with her typical open-mindedness. Not for her, she said, just as beef tongue at the diner was not for her, though she was happy enough to watch me enjoy it. She had, she said, her own path, Christian in essence but not aligned with any particular group; a belief in God, in goodness, in some possibility of an afterlife. “I prefer to just deal with the moment,” she told me once, but mostly we didn’t speak about it. I wondered if she’d only been indulging me, the way I had, for so long, indulged my sister. I looked back and tried to see if Rinpoche’s lessons, if meditation, might really have made no lasting change in my life. Maybe it was just the years of living that had changed me. Maybe I hadn’t changed as much as I thought.
Again and again in his books, and in those he’d recommended, I read that it was important not to confuse the message with the messenger. Even the greatest spiritual teachers were human. If you searched for flaws, you’d find them, but outer perfection wasn’t the point.
&
nbsp; I’d never really liked that idea. I wanted, I suppose, some sort of proof, some secret way of thrusting myself up beyond the inertia and travails of this life, some kind of guarantee that the effort was worth it. I wanted to see the rules of reality stretched. I wanted love to persist and death to be a temporary inconvenience and some great secret to be hiding in the back room of the meditative life. But in the Davenport lobby on that dark night of my soul, I suspected that those rules were as unyielding as gravity, and that Jeannie, my solace, was gone from me forever.
18
I’d like to confess here to having a map fetish, a cartographic obsession. I like the odd names (Othello, Washington, for one good example), and often build a whole imaginary world around unknown roads, cities, and towns—a great bistro, cool swimming hole, welcoming locals. On my office wall was a detailed map of North Dakota, gift from my colleagues to mark my twentieth year at Stanley and Byrnes. I spent a few minutes every day looking at it, remembering the places I’d been and wondering about those I hadn’t. At home we’d always had both a world map and a map of the United States on the wall of our finished basement, and countless times Jeannie and I had sent Anthony or Natasha down there with a geography question. We’d be talking about the elections in Russia and the kids would ask where it was, and we’d take them to the map and show them the route of the Trans-Siberian, or where some of the work camps had been, in Norilsk and Sakhalin, or the farthest east the German army had pushed before being stopped at what was then called Stalingrad. When the kids were in grammar school and junior high and we’d be out for a burger and milk shake someplace, waiting for our food to arrive, I’d sometimes quiz them. “Natasha Ringling,” I’d say in a stentorian voice, “for one hundred points, please tell me the names of the states that border Utah.” “Anthony Ringling, can you name four countries in South America?” They loved it. It passed the time. Jeannie and I had never wanted them to be like the many Americans unable to find Arkansas or Nevada on a map of their own country. Nor were we priming our kids for the SATs in third grade. We dropped bits of learning into the mix, we argued, traveled, cleaned the house, had some fun. An ordinary, decent family, in other words. I missed those days. I wanted them back. But where on the map do you go in order to ask for that?
When I awoke that morning (still on East Coast time, I’d become, in Washington state, an early riser) I sat at the table with my Rand McNally and plotted the rest of our trip. Interstate 90 runs in a wavy line from Spokane through the thin part of Idaho and across half of Montana and then I-94 angles off into North Dakota and within three miles of what had once been my parents’ farm. That would have been the logical route for Rinpoche and me to take. But I still had almost two weeks of vacation left, and I’ve always believed that seeing America only from the interstate is like Skyping with your marital partner (something Jeannie and I had never tried). It’s a substitute for real travel, for burying yourself in the sights, smells, and stoplight traffic, the Main Streets and boondocks of an actual nation.
Besides, I’d made arrangements for a couple of stops of my own, and those were away from the interstate. One of our most successful authors, Gilligan Neufaren (one does not make up a name like that), was on a fly-fishing vacation near Ennis, and we’d talked about getting together at a restaurant he liked. And then there was Yellowstone. If part of my job was to show the country to Rinpoche, how could I pass within a hundred miles of the greatest national park and not take him there for a visit?
Studying the map closely, going from the Montana page to the Wyoming page and back again three times, I saw that it would be perfectly feasible to leave I-90 east of Butte, dip down on Route 287 through Ennis, swing east and south through Yellowstone, and then zip back up Route 89 to the interstate at Livingston. Simple.
But, as Jeannie pointed out more than once, not only do I almost always picture a place on the map as more interesting than it actually turns out to be, I almost always assume it will take less time to get there than it actually does. In this case, to further complicate matters, I failed to recognize something she no doubt would have pointed out to me: Montana is so big that the folks at Rand McNally use a different scale for displaying it. What looks like an easy two-hour ride in Massachusetts turns out to be almost twice that in the compressed version of the map’s Montana.
By the time I set the Rand McNally aside, showered, and packed up, it was still only a little after seven o’clock. Rinpoche and I had talked about getting an early start, so I went and tapped on his door. No answer. He was meditating, I assumed, or out for a sunrise constitutional. I went downstairs to the lobby and had a cup of excellent green tea and honey from the café there (which also served Red Bull at three dollars an infusion), read about the troubles in Syria , scanned an editorial calling on the Republican presidential candidate to release his tax records, admired the chandeliers, ogled a pair of attractive women rolling their luggage across the tile, checked my watch, and felt a little tap of doubt at my temples, residue of the previous night’s crisis of faith.
At five to eight I climbed back upstairs and knocked more loudly on my brother-in-law’s door. Nothing. I put an ear to the wood; no mooing sounds. I returned to my room and used the telephone there and by then the doubts were fully awake again, circling and buzzing like mosquitoes on an August night. Sensing that I’d finally seen through his act, the famous Volya Rinpoche had packed his things and absconded. Maybe he’d borrowed a sum of money from my sister on some pretense and had crossed the border into Canada already and was looking to find another gullible palm reader to pretend to fall in love with, a woman who’d inherited a large amount of acreage, perfect for a “retreat center,” where he could hide out for another six or seven years.
I’ve sworn myself to full honesty here, so while I feel bound to admit all this, I do so with a measure of shame. My musings made little sense in any case. What was Rinpoche going to do, leave his wife and daughter, run away with one piece of luggage and a nice smile, and hope to make a new life in another country? True, that’s what he seemed to have done in coming to America—appear out of nowhere, carrying almost nothing, find his way to a kindly, generous woman . . . and so on. But even in the depths of my loneliness and misery there in Spokane, part of me understood that I was indulging my meanest, most cynical side. He was a good man. Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people counted on him for spiritual guidance. His books sold well all over the world; his monthly meditation retreats were booked half a year in advance. One mediocre talk shouldn’t be enough to break the bridge of my faith in half, should it?
The thing to do, I decided, was check out of the hotel, load my meager luggage into the pickup, find myself an excellent breakfast spot, and trust that my traveling companion would make his presence known to me before too much more time passed. I left ten dollars for the cleaning woman and checked out of the room. Loaded up the truck, then set out on foot. The Spokane morning was warm and dry. Sprague Street, littered and locked up, made me think of the Sunday morning hangovers of my college years. Harmless now, touched with regret, the sidewalks smelling of stale beer, it was a place of exhausted urges and listless commerce, one convenience store advertising lottery tickets and espresso, one city bus trundling along with its handful of sleepy passengers.
I went from Sprague to Post, wandered around a bit, and was walking past a sad collection of drunks and street people in front of the Greyhound station when a flash of maroon caught my eye. Sitting on a concrete planter beside a man in greasy pants and whiskey-rouged skin was my sister’s husband. The morning sun shone from his shaved head. On the sidewalk between his feet sat his battered cloth bag, a sort of oversized purse, the only piece of luggage I’d ever known him to have. Until he caught my eye, checked his left wrist as if there were a timepiece there, and wagged a scolding finger at me in a joking way, I thought my ugly suspicions had been correct: Rinpoche was leaving for Canada on the eight-thirty Greyhound, skipping out, running. I saw him pat the sagging man on the
shoulder, offer a word of what sounded like encouragement, then lift his bag and come toward me.
“Hi,” he said happily. “I am waiting one hour for my friend, Otto, to go.”
“Funny place to wait. How’d you know I’d be walking by?”
The happy laugh, the big shoulders lifted and dropped in a helpless shrug. “I’m buying you now the breakfast you like,” he said. “Close by is the place.”
One block, a left turn, and Madeline’s French Bakery showed itself to us like a vision of paradise. It had not quite yet opened for the day. Rinpoche and I stood at the door and waited. “You are sad last night,” he said. “I could see. So I thought: What can take away the sadness from my good friend, my brother-and-law? Food can take it. This morning I asked downstairs: where is the best breakfast we can find? And the people say here.”
“Is it in the top twenty French bakeries in America?”
He squinted at me. Behind him I heard the door lock snap open. My stomach made one slow somersault.
Inside, after a careful inspection of the pastry choices, Rinpoche instructed me to secure a table and wait. He was buying and he would be bringing the food. I should wait, relax, say a small prayer if I wanted to, text Natasha and Anthony.
I did all of the above. Another few minutes and he came striding over with a tray in his hands and the lighthouse beacon of a smile on his features. Caffe latte, large. Cinnamon roll the size of two clenched fists. Bowl of fresh fruit and the customary green tea for him. He set these items on the table with great care, gently, attentively, as if he were setting a newborn down in its crib, then he put the tray back and joined me.
“I wasn’t sad last night,” I said, “I was doubting you. I didn’t like the talk you gave. I didn’t think it worked. I worried you were a fake, that you’d tricked my sister and all those people into believing you had something to teach them, and that you’d tricked me, too. When I saw you at the bus station just now, with your bag all packed, I thought you were running away to Canada.”
Lunch with Buddha Page 14
