Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  Landrea sat with us. On the tray she had a bowl of sliced lemons, sugar, honey, spoons. Rinpoche clung to a stubborn, mysterious silence, the twitch of a grin at the corners of his eyes. He wouldn’t look at me. Landrea slid her hand slowly along the table until it came into contact with her glass. Hers would be a world of spills and falls, unfindable toothbrushes and unkillable flies.

  “How is your trip going so far?” she asked.

  “Fine, it’s going well. We’ve been on the road four days and seen some beautiful sights.”

  A mistake. I studied her face for signs of offense and saw none. She was eighteen or nineteen, I guessed, and though I’d assumed, for some reason, that she was Native American, she didn’t look like one: hair a medium brown, clouded blue eyes. I’d had a good amount of experience dealing with young women her age—Natasha, Natasha’s pals, and a string of summer interns at the office. I knew a bit of their lingo and likes, what they were focused on: friends, dating, fretting a future. Landrea had a completely different way about her, as if she were middle-aged and settled, as if she’d already raised her children, made her mark in a career, lived with a husband for decades, seen the gritty middle of life. I studied her there, across the table, as she sipped from her glass. Was it only the lack of sight? Was that maturity and calm some kind of compensation for all she couldn’t see and do and have?

  “Excuse me,” I said finally, when she went on contentedly sipping and Rinpoche stubbornly ran his gaze over the empty walls and rough-hewn rafters and made kissing noises in the direction of the dog. “I don’t mean to be rude. But we’ve never met, my brother-in-law here says we’re friends, and I feel a little bit awkward just dropping in like this, unannounced.”

  “I was expecting you,” she said.

  I turned to Rinpoche. “Did you call?”

  He pushed out his lips, raised his eyebrows, tilted his head back an inch. Me?

  “Your sister called,” Landrea said at last. “She said you might stop. She said I might be able to help you.”

  Intuition confirmed. “Help me how?”

  “She said you’d lost your wife recently.”

  “I did.”

  Before I could ask Landrea a second time how she might help me, she suggested I tell her about Jeannie. I did that. Talking eased the awkwardness, for one thing, and for another, I didn’t need much prompting to talk about Jeannie in those days. But I was beginning to sense the well-meaning but irritating presence of my sister in that plain room. She’d booked us at the nice B and B, yes; she’d chosen the luxurious Cave B (even though she’d expected us to stay in a yurt). But now she’d arranged for one of her associates to help me with some aura-reading fiddle-faddle, an herbal potion, an incantation for grieving men, and I felt like the blind person on Forty-Fourth Street who simply did not want help. He wanted to be left alone in his blindness, to find his own way, to escape condescension, assistance, pity of all kinds.

  I told Landrea that my late wife had been born in Connecticut to a father who left the family when she was a young girl, and a mother who’d been a world-class tennis player in her youth, then married and had children, got divorced, and pursued, halfheartedly, a career in interior design before giving that up and settling into a routine of verbal abuse and an evening cocktail or four. Jeannie had wanted to get away from that life, so she’d taken the radical step of transferring to the University of North Dakota. We’d met in a Theories of Aesthetics class, senior year. I’d just given up on the idea of becoming an architect; she’d recently abandoned a major in soil chemistry—of all things—and turned to textile design. For a few months we’d hovered at the edges of each other’s circle of acquaintances, and then there had been a February blizzard, a campus-wide snowball fight, men against women. She’d sneaked up behind me and put snow down the collar of my coat; I’d chased her and made a flying tackle and she stood up laughing, dripping white. We’d gone out for hot chocolate at Grand Forks’ one and only all-night diner, had an excellent hour of conversation, a nice good-night kiss. We’d started dating. There was a road trip, ostensibly to see Chicago’s architecture, and we’d stayed in the Knickerbocker Hotel and made love for the first time there.

  Once I started I couldn’t stop. Landrea seemed interested; Rinpoche watched the walls. Graduation, graduate school for me in Chicago, then the move to New York City—a place where both of us felt immediately at home. The Chelsea walk-up, the menial jobs, a wedding so informal it embarrassed her mother in front of her country club friends and at the same time forced my parents to go out and buy fancy clothes and stay in a Big City hotel. The job at Stanley and Byrnes, Jeannie’s museum work, our decision to buy the house in Bronxville which we couldn’t really afford but which “spoke to us,” as Jeannie’s sister put it. The birth of our children, the challenges and joys of parenthood, the death of her mother and my parents. I went on and on, came to the onset of her illness and suddenly stopped.

  Landrea waited to be sure I’d finished, then said, “But what was she like?” and I felt again, strangely, that I was speaking with someone my own age.

  “Like? She was kind, capable, giving, athletic. She hated for the house to be messy. If she had a drink at a party she’d always find a man to speak with, to fall into some deep conversation with, not exactly flirting, but it made me angry, at the beginning especially. She loved her friends, loved her flower garden, went to church only for weddings and the big holidays but professed a belief in God. She’d drive the kids all over creation and then sometimes be short with them if they skipped a chore or a homework assignment. She was physically affectionate. She would not eat scallions or lima beans or bluefish or anything malted. Every Thursday night we’d sit out on the patio in warm weather, or inside in cold, and have a glass of white wine and talk. I could go on and on. I’m sorry. I’ve already gone on and on. Forgive me, but how old are you, anyway?”

  “Twenty.”

  “And you live here alone?”

  “My boyfriend visits.”

  “And you know my sister how? From what?”

  “Your sister lived for a short time with my uncle.”

  She lived for a short time with a lot of people, I barely kept myself from saying.

  “His name was Leo. She might have mentioned him to you.”

  “He was killed by a delivery truck. Portland. In front of her eyes.”

  “Yes. I was very close with him. Celia and I were both devastated, though in different ways. I was five. We’ve stayed in touch since then. She’s done a lot of work, as I’m sure you know, with people on the other side. My uncle started her on that path and has stayed in contact with her, and she’s helped a lot of people, me included, and taught me many things. We have a deep connection, your sister and I.”

  There it was then. The other side. I was suddenly ready to leave. I shot Rinpoche an angry look. One of the things I’d always liked about him was that I never felt he was working very hard to convert me to any system of belief. He had a system, sure—something “not-really-Buddhist,” as he called it—but it always seemed to me he felt so confident in it that it didn’t matter very much what other people believed. It was the same with his talks. He didn’t advertise, didn’t self-promote, didn’t keep a list of e-mail addresses. If someone asked him to, he’d agree to give a talk—sometimes for money, sometimes not—and if people showed up, that was fine, and if they didn’t, also fine, and if they stomped out angrily after it was finished, or lost faith in him, all fine, too. I trusted him to be that way. It was, really, the main reason why I had let him bring me anywhere close to the world of meditation and such things in the first place.

  But I didn’t trust my sister in the same way, and now my lack of trust had been validated. Rather than approach me in a direct manner after Jeannie’s death—she knew I’d have no tolerance for talk of contacting people on the other side—she’d sneakily arranged for Rinpoche to do it through this pleasant young woman. Maybe the whole idea for this trip had been a smoke screen, a r
use, a sly way of bringing me together with a twenty-year-old blind palm-reader who was going to “help” me. Sending us to Cave B, telling Rinpoche to be enthusiastic about dams, planting the Kalispell idea in his robe. I sensed a vast, far-out conspiracy. It made me furious.

  “I feel,” Landrea said, “that something has upset you.”

  For a five-count I tried to hold it in. For that short stretch I told myself I’d be kind and polite to this woman, who had such a difficult life. I made myself take a breath. Somehow, that one deliberate breath reminded me of a certain sense I had in meditation. There was no magic in this, I hasten to say. I didn’t receive messages from the beyond: Otto, this is the Lord speaking. Thou shalt be kind! I simply touched an interior part of myself that was one degree wiser than I used to be. Not even wiser; wiser isn’t even the word. More patient. I took one breath and realized I could be angry a bit later if I wanted to be angry. There would always be time for that. There was no rush. I could resist the reflex.

  And so I did. I took another breath. I looked into the face of the young woman opposite me, age of my daughter, attitude of my sister, asking about my wife, and I said, “With all due respect, Landrea, I’m not really a fan of the other side. I believe in the possibility of an existence after this one. In my best moments I believe in it, I hope for it. I would very much like to think I will see my wife again in some form. But the idea of contacting her across the barrier of death—that’s what you meant by ‘help,’ wasn’t it?—that’s not workable for me. Not acceptable. I don’t buy it. I’m sorry.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Why am I sorry, or why don’t I buy it?”

  “Why don’t you buy it?”

  “Because it’s too easy, that’s why. It denies the very real pain of losing someone you love. It’s wishful thinking.”

  “To me it’s very real.”

  “I’m sure it is. I don’t mean to offend you in any way.”

  “I’m not offended. You couldn’t offend me. I just feel, now that you’ve gone to all the trouble of visiting me here, you should at least let me try to make contact with Jeannie. If afterward you think it’s all false, that’s fine. But sit here for another little while and let me try.”

  “I don’t know that I could bear it,” I said.

  She laughed. I was offended. She said, “Look what you’ve borne in the past few years.”

  “I’ve reached my limit,” I said.

  “I know a little bit about that. I can feel in myself what you’ve been feeling. Your sorrow has reawakened my own sorrow about my uncle, who was like a father to me. Even though all these years have passed, I can remember the pain of it. When he died, within one hour of the time he passed on, I lost my sight.”

  Ridiculous, I thought. I said, “But how could that be? What explanation did the doctors give you?”

  “There are plenty of occurrences that defy what we think of as the unchangeable physical laws. Read Einstein. He saw it. Some people mocked him, but now he’s considered a genius. I have Salish friends here and they have a very different way of looking at life, a different belief system, a different relationship to the land, different assumptions, if you will.”

  “But you’re not Salish yourself?”

  “One-sixteenth,” she said. “But I’m not here because of that. This isn’t the kind of thing a Salish person would do, it’s not part of their spiritual tradition. It’s just me, who I am. I’m here because I like the feeling of the land. It suits me. Helping people this way suits me, too. This skill that I have is just like any other skill, like being a carpenter or a cook or a ship’s captain.”

  “I respect that,” I said. “And I’ll be happy to pay you. I’m awash in money now. Jeanie’s insurance—”

  She laughed and shook her head.

  “Or not, whatever you’d like. But you have to realize how alien all this is to a person like me. I’m from a German American Midwestern farming family. There are no more practical, level-headed, unimaginative people on the face of the earth.”

  She touched her glass as if to be sure it was still there, but she didn’t drink. “You have, with Rinpoche, the opportunity to avail yourself of another tradition of wisdom, very different from the typical American or European way. I understand you’ve already done that to some degree. Why would you stop there? Why pick up one stone and not the other twenty-three? Why read half the book?”

  It took me a moment to get the twenty-four-stone reference. I was already into my next sentence when it registered. “Because this particular book—” I’d said, and then I remembered the little table in Spokane and the neat row of rocks, and I turned to Rinpoche and saw that the giant smile had bloomed there again. A smile the size of Siberia. Pleased as punch, as my mother used to say. He was nodding again, the whole upper part of his body moving. See, Otto?

  “You are right on the edge of a momentous change,” Landrea went on. She’d tilted her head sideways and upward, as if there were a bird in the rafters and she was listening to its song with her better ear. “Externally. But internally, also.” A second’s pause, not enough time for me to resist, and then: “I can sense Jeannie now.”

  And I was trapped. Caught. No walking out.

  “She says she loves you very much. She sends greetings to Rinpoche. She says . . . “ Landrea tilted her head another few degrees and moved her hand from the iced tea glass so that it was flat on the tabletop, fingers spread. “She says not to worry about Natasha. That something will happen with Natasha and you will be tempted to worry but that it will be fine. She’s fine, she says. No pain where she is. No pain and a different kind of creativity, which she enjoys. She says—I don’t understand this, but she says Jasper is not who he seems to be. She says . . . swimming, something about swimming? Did you swim with her?”

  “Many times.”

  “That’s all, then. She’s fine, that’s all. Sends love. Bye.”

  Until the last second, the very last word, I was having none of it. There were no chills running up my arms, no sense whatsoever that Landrea was actually in any kind of contact with my wife. She was a fraud, a sitcom psychic in an exotic setting. It was a waste of time and emotional energy. Most of what Landrea had said was information I’d just given her—the name of our daughter. The fact that Jeannie loved me. Even the bits about Jasper and swimming—things I hadn’t mentioned—could have been something Cecelia told her in one of their conversations.

  But then she said “Bye,” softly, and my fortress of down-to-earth sensibility cracked. There were chills in abundance then. There was the feeling of the sensible me losing its battle, an interior unraveling. I was, for a just moment, physically afraid.

  Late on Jeannie’s last night on earth I’d awakened from sleep with the sense that something was wrong. We’d made a bedroom for her downstairs in what had been her study. It was more convenient that way; the hospice aide could rest on the couch. Some of her medications were refrigerated, and the kitchen was close by. There were no stairs to climb or descend. The kids could have their peace above, and I could get a good sleep. That night I woke up suddenly and listened, and then I sat up and went down the stairs—the nurse was dozing—and tiptoed into Jeannie’s room, and saw her there on the bed, weak, frail, eyelids flickering, the bottles and tubes, the photos—me, Anthony, Natasha, a beautiful beach scene from a vacation in Aruba—set up where she could look at them. The second I entered the room I could hear her labored breathing, and I was just at the point of calling the hospice nurse when Jeannie turned her head an inch in my direction and fluttered the fingers of her left hand. I went and sat by the bed, took her hand as gently as if it were a paper sculpture one of the kids had brought home from second grade. “Hon?” I managed to say. “Thirsty?” The tiniest shake of the head, the smallest, smallest squeeze of the fingers with the very last ounce of her strength, the eyes held half open as if by a great exertion. I wanted to say I loved her, but I couldn’t manage to get the word up out of my throat. She almost smiled
. She took a breath. She said “Bye,” very softly, exactly the way Landrea had said it. And she was gone.

  Mission Mountain Wilderness

  Near Ronan, Montana

  Sign in Salish Language

  Montana

  22

  Between Arlee and Ennis, a distance of close to two hundred miles, Rinpoche and I barely spoke. There was a quick stop for what turned out to be the best iced coffee on earth, at a place called Bernice’s Bakery, in Missoula. There was the vast Montana landscape sliding past—mountain ranges lifting out of the horizon then sinking away, long stretches of bare brown hillside, clusters of homes and buildings that marked the occasional mining town. I didn’t like to be late, for anything, especially for a meal, and I was worried about being late for my dinner with Gilligan Neufaren, but it was the hour with Landrea that held the lid of silence down over us. Although my fortress of stubbornness had cracked, it hadn’t exactly crumbled. In spite of it all, in spite of the “Bye” and the chills and the reference to the twenty-four stones, I was still torn between one Otto Ringling and another. You don’t cancel out fifty years of logic and assumption with a word. Even the preface of six years of meditation won’t let you do that. It didn’t let me do it, in any case.

  But to be absolutely honest, I suspected then that Landrea had touched if not another world, then at least another dimension of this one. The laws that had always made sense of the predicament in which I found myself—standing in a breathing body on a spinning sphere of stone—those laws had been amended, expanded, played with. Half of me, maybe a little more than half, believed that. The remaining 46 percent did not. Swooping down out of the northeastern Montana mountains, the big highway tilted and turned, its seventy-five-mile-an-hour speed limit too much for an old girl like Uma. We went along at sixty, eschewing conversation at first, Rinpoche fingering his beads and yours truly torn neatly in half between the reality of CNN and the Daily News, and that of a blind, twenty-year-old, one-sixteenth Salish woman in a cabin in the woods.