Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

“You sound so sure.”

  He laughed and reached out and cupped the back of my head in his spread fingers. “Rest this busy head,” he said. “Let Rinpoche drive. You sit here, look, sleep, do the phone, rest the questions.”

  “You couldn’t drive this. It’s a stick shift. Four speed. Clutch. It would take you quite a while and quite a bit of practice to learn.”

  He laughed again and worked his right hand and left foot as if shifting. “You, too,” he said, fluttering the fingers of his other hand near his temple. “Quite a while, man!”

  Livingston, Montana

  28

  It’s always a risk, arranging your lodging via the Internet. You can’t trust the reviews—good or bad. You can’t really be sure about the photos. You have little sense of the firmness of the mattress or the quality of the breakfast food. But we’d been lucky on that trip, able to avoid chain hotels entirely. From the Cave B to Kalispell, from the Davenport to the Inn at Chakra Creek, from Celia’s selections to my own, there had been no disasters, no creaky beds or cranky clerks, nothing to complain about. Our plans weren’t fixed in stone, but I figured we had only one more night on the road together and so Billings would make sense as a stopping place. Using my magical phone I found us a hotel called The Bighorn Resort, a short distance outside town and just off the interstate.

  What worried me about the Bighorn was that, according to the website, it was attached to some kind of water park with slides and chutes and pools. I love swimming outdoors, a fact to which the various adventures here may testify, but indoor pools and water parks have always seemed to me nothing more than breeding grounds for the more onerous of the earth’s bacteria, tepid fake ponds suitable mostly for four-year-olds to pee in and arthritic old men to soak their bones. We arrived in Billings so late, however, that I needn’t have worried. The water park was long closed for the day. Even Rinpoche, who seemed in possession of an unlimited store of energy, looked tired around the eyes and told me we should sleep in the next morning, meet for breakfast at eight thirty instead of our customary seven fifteen.

  This was fine with me. But what often happens when I’ve made a long drive into the later hours is that my body cranks itself up to stay awake, and then needs some cranking-down time. There was a bar at the Bighorn, a modest little place with sports on the raised TV and a small selection of local beers. I decided I’d have one solitary Moose Drool, watch fifteen minutes of the Olympics, and head upstairs to the room.

  The bar was packed, the tables filled with what appeared to be members of a traveling theater company. Prone to wild gesticulation and loud laughter, the actors enlivened the place at least, though they left only a seat or two at the corner of the bar. I sipped my Moose Drool and watched Olympic table tennis, a game that resembles matches in the Ringling family basement about as closely as heart surgery resembles the eating of baby back ribs. I can honestly say I didn’t notice the woman who sat down a stool away, on the other side of the corner, until I heard her ask, “You part of this weird crowd?” and realized she was speaking to me.

  I turned to look at her. Somewhere close to forty, I guessed, with reddish brown hair hanging long and straight on both sides of her face, and eyes touched with a watery sadness. In front of her she held what looked to be a margarita, partly consumed. Her posture had a combative aspect to it, as if she expected me to take a swing at her and was more than ready to hit back.

  “No,” I said, “just down for a beer before bed.”

  “Loud, aren’t they?”

  I said that they were.

  “Traveling with your family?”

  “Brother-in-law. We’re driving from Seattle to North Dakota. Every five or six years we take a road trip together. Family tradition.”

  “Never heard of that,” she said. It occurred to me, from the way she reached for her glass, that she might have more than the one drink in her. “Your wife’s brother?”

  “Sister’s husband. I lost my wife in January.”

  “Sorry.”

  It was a sincere “Sorry,” and one spoken in the minor key of my own pain. So many things had been said to me, to us, since Jeannie died, some of them kind and others clumsy. At the service in Bronxville, for example, one of Natasha’s former high school pals had come up to her and said, “I remember the time we were in the basement making a lot of noise and your mom came down and screamed at us.”

  It was an exaggeration, of course, if not an outright lie—Jeannie didn’t scream, at kids or anyone else, ever—but the comment hurt Natasha all the same. It was offered, as I tried to explain to her, from a place of terrible discomfort. Even adults had a tough time consoling the bereaved. They said too much, or inadvertently smiled while saying it, or let slip a completely inappropriate remark—all from nervousness and, probably, a gut aversion to the hard fact of death. With our sparkling shopping malls and endlessly entertaining telephones, we pushed death into a corner and looked away for fifty or sixty or eighty-five years. It waited there patiently, though, patiently, patiently, then jumped out at us right in the middle of a table tennis game, a winter morning, a night of drugged sleep. Who could find a good thing to say about that?

  “You sound like you’ve had a similar pain. Did you lose your husband?”

  She took a drink and nodded, swallowed. “Yup,” she said.

  “What caused it?”

  “Him being an asshole.”

  “Oh.”

  “My theory,” she went on, “is that exactly ninety-two percent of men are assholes.”

  I worried, for a moment, that she’d be like Giorgio the B and B owner, stringing one sentence, one story, one abrasive opinion seamlessly into the next. I’d be stuck sitting there till closing time, an ear.

  “They won’t do a dish or change a diaper if their freakin’ life depends on it, and then you see them with their buddies, fixing a water pump or a tractor axle, and they’re happy as little boys. Minus the bedroom out of the equation and they’d be gone in a second.” She twisted her mouth in a way that made me think she was going to spit.

  “Is that what happened? He left?”

  She shook her head. The flesh on either side of her mouth swung very slightly, the pendulum of age. “I booted the bastard. Four years now, and know what? Not for one second do I look back and think maybe I made a mistake.”

  “Kids?”

  “Two girls, mostly grown. Yourself?”

  “Girl and a boy, mostly grown, too. Both in college.”

  She made a “hmph” sound and took another drink. I had her figured for a tough divorcée living alone on a ranch outside Billings, cursing, castrating hogs. But she said, “I’m a nurse, you know. I see the worst part of life every day—sick kids, people dying, in pain, stupid people who bring all kinds of bad shit on themself with meth or booze or that. I say to my girls, Listen, you have as good a time as you can for as long as you can, and if you do decide to get married, you make damn sure you find a guy who wants more than just what’s between your legs and who gives more than just what’s between his.”

  “Good advice,” I said. “I’ll tell Natasha.”

  “Nice name. Yeah, they’re not gonna end up like old mom.”

  “Mom’s not that old,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She twirled her drink, looked absently at the TV screen for a minute.

  “A fair number of my friends wash dishes and change diapers, you know. I did.”

  “Yeah? Where the hell might these friends of yours be?”

  “New York, mostly.”

  “Hah. There you go. Send one of them out west.”

  “Billings a nice town?”

  “Nice? The people are nice, sure, the normal ones. You drive your truck off the road in winter and you’ll be there about five seconds before somebody stops to help. But look at the freakin’ place. You been here long?”

  “Just arrived.”

  “We got the women’s prison. We got the halfway house where every freakin’ sex offender in Montana has
to come before they let him out for good. Probation offices. We got the Crow Reservation down the road and those poor bastards drink and wander around. Fifty, sixty percent unemployment down there. I wouldn’t call it nice. I’d call it harsh. But I tell ya, I get off work at eleven o’clock and I walk home in the decent weather and not once, not once in freakin twenty years, has anybody given me a hard time.”

  “You look like you can take care of yourself,” I said, which probably wasn’t exactly the right thing to say.

  She shot me a sideways look. “I can, mister. But I don’t think that’s it. Good people here, excepting my stupid husband and his pals. The whoring bastard.”

  “Cheated on you?”

  “Hah. Freakin’ rooster. Anything with panties on, he’d follow it down the block like a dog after bacon. You cheat on your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Married how long, if you don’t mind me asking.”

  “Twenty-four years.”

  “And she goes and dies on ya. My husband’s healthy as a horse still, even now, the stupid prick. You think the good Lord would give him the syph or something.”

  “You’d think so.”

  “Should I have another drink?” she asked.

  “I’d be happy to buy you one. I’m headed out, though. We drove something like four hundred miles today.”

  “That’s a trip to the grocery store in Montana. You going to sleep?”

  “Hope so.”

  “Want to swing by my house on the way to bed? It’s three blocks.”

  I was tired then, and so long removed from the world of unexpected sexual encounters that I just sat there staring at her for a few seconds.

  “You look like somebody just asked you to wipe their ass.”

  “Out of practice,” I said. “Just . . . I don’t know.”

  “I’d get you back in practice,” she said, and I could see then that she was quite drunk. The tough exterior had been hiding something tender as a fingertip, and now, with one sentence, it had all been put on display. It was as though she’d lifted a sheet off a glass case with sadness relics in it. “We’re talking an hour of fun. Who gets hurt?”

  “No one,” I said. “I’d like to. Very much. It’s just, I think it’s just too soon for me.”

  She raised and lowered her eyebrows and flexed her lips. She took a twenty- dollar bill out of her pocket and set the edge of it under her empty glass. “Well,” she said, “it’s not like I ask every day.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “I won’t take it personal.”

  “You shouldn’t. Not at all. Really.”

  She set a hand on the top of my leg and slid off the stool and I watched her walk toward the door, steadily enough, shoulders slightly hunched as if there were a big sack of troubles there and it grew especially heavy at that hour of the day.

  In bed, in the few minutes before the gloved hand of sleep took hold of me, I found myself remembering lovemaking with my wife. The hunger and heat of the early years, then the familiar patterns in our Bronxville bed, a comfortable dance of give and take. In biblical parlance, when you made love with a woman you “knew” her. That seemed exactly right.

  29

  Next morning the monk from Skovorodino came to breakfast in his bathing suit and pink flip flops. Nothing else. I walked into the breakfast nook—a crowded place of Styrofoam and plastic knives, biscuits, waffle machines, and husky, sugar-starved Montanans—and saw him there at a corner table, bare-chested, peeling an orange and sipping tea. The looks being sent in his direction were the farthest thing from friendly, but no one seemed to have the courage to tell him to put on a shirt. I poured myself a coffee and carried it and a box of cereal over to him. “Rinpoche, most people don’t wear only bathing suits to breakfast,” I was about to say when I noticed a pair of teenage girls come in with their mother, the younger females in bikinis and sandals. I remembered the water park. I decided the No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service idea wasn’t an important enough aspect of Americana to pass on to my friend. On the one hand I was sure he wouldn’t be wandering around Dickinson, North Dakota, in a Speedo, and on the other I’d long ago resigned myself to his eccentricities: the watery high-pitched laugh that mutated into fits of giggling, the boyish enthusiasms, the wrestling matches on a B and B lawn, the running around in a crowd of teenagers anxious to get sprayed with heated sulfur water from the earth’s core. They hurt no one, these spurts of bizarre behavior. My brother-in-law hurt no one, ever, was never mean or petty, rarely judgmental or selfish or curt. He simply did not care what others thought of him, and in that way, I suppose, he was the perfect match for my sister. They left the embarrassment to people like me, mainstream sorts, members of the herd, conventional to a fault.

  “You miss Shelsa?” I asked him.

  “Wery much.”

  “We’re only about three hundred miles from the farm. We’ll get there tonight, no problem.”

  “Good, good,” he said, peeling away.

  “Are you worried about her? I mean, what you told me earlier—people wanting to hurt her, the dreams, and so on?”

  “Worried, worried, sure, yes.”

  “I think she’ll be fine.”

  He nodded, refused to look up for a moment, and then met my eyes. “Maybe her father shouldn’t be having the wacation now, though.”

  “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you sound even a little bit guilty.”

  “Maybe. Little bit.”

  “She’s fine with Seese and the kids. They’re way out in the middle of our North Dakota nowhere. Not many bad people there.”

  “Maybe, sure,” he said, as if he wanted to talk about something else.

  “It’s funny, I didn’t think of you as being on vacation. I don’t think of what you do as work, I guess, which is pretty foolish. You write, you teach, you give talks.”

  “Talks finished,” he said.

  “Because of Shelsa?”

  “Now she will give talks.”

  “A little young yet, isn’t she?”

  “Little bit.”

  “I’ve never seen you this way. What’s wrong? It’s something else.”

  “The high,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “In the place,” he waved one arm behind him, toward the building that held the water park, “the woman say there’s a slide. You have to go, she say. Wery high, wery fast, and then—pssh—in the water.”

  “Have to go is just an expression. She didn’t mean it literally.”

  “Fun, she said.”

  “I’m sure. But it’s mostly for kids. I’ve never been on a waterslide in my life, for instance. The water’s—”

  “Rinpoche doesn’t like any high,” he said. “Airplanes, slides. Wery to me scary, Otto.”

  “Then let’s just skip it and head out. We’ll get to Dickinson that much earlier.”

  He was shaking his head with a stubbornness I’d seen many times. Leaving without a waterpark adventure was simply not going to be an option.

  “You’re determined to face your fears,” I said. “You’re giving me some kind of lesson.”

  More head shaking. He put a section of orange into his mouth, chewed, swallowed, and made his eyes wide like a terrified man. An act, all of it. He should have been on stage. He should have traveled with the troupe of arm-wavers and loud-laughers who occupied the tables on the far side of the grazing ranchers. I wondered if even the fear for Shelsa’s safety—something he’d mentioned exactly once—was a device, a ruse, a lever to move me where I needed to be moved. Maybe Rinpoche was light-years beyond physical fear. Maybe Shelsa was, too. “All this is for my benefit, isn’t it? A metaphor.”

  “Me and you,” he said, swooping one hand down through the air. “We go high now. Wery fast she say.”

  I gave up. I surrendered. Another week and I’d be back in the empty house in Bronxville, dressing in a sport jacket and neat khakis every morning, driving to the train station, buying the Times, riding into the c
ity and taking the elevator to my eleventh-floor office with the map of North Dakota on the wall, photos of Jeannie and the kids on a side table, and stacks of manuscripts and contracts and meeting memos on my desk. It occurred to me that maybe I should have taken the woman up on her offer of the night before and had an hour of fun. Whom would it have hurt, indeed? And what would it matter if I splashed around in chlorine for half an hour with the brother-in-law I probably wouldn’t see again until Thanksgiving? Maybe there was a lesson there because, in truth—could Rinpoche have known this?—I was subtly intimidated by the waterslide idea. I’ve gone on a roller coaster exactly once in my life—that was sufficient. I played a little football in high school, JV hockey for two years in college. I’ve flown a hundred times or more, in big planes and small; I’ve gone into the surf off Cape Cod on days when wiser men stayed onshore, and I’ve ventured, on my volunteer tutoring duties, into New York neighborhoods that posed some risk. But I’m not the most physically courageous person on the planet, not a daredevil, not especially afraid of heights but not a fan of amusement rides in which one gives up control over one’s well-being in exchange for a few minutes of thrill.

  But there I was, walking the halls of the Bighorn Resort with a few bran flakes and one cup of mediocre coffee in my belly and a bathing suit on, escorted by a brown-skinned monk with mysterious motivations and a fear, so he said, of heights.

  That fear was soon tested. We paid, walked in, and found ourselves in a cement-floored wonderland of screaming kids and bored young lifeguards with flat stomachs. There was a wading pool, a hot tub, a smaller slide for the little ones, a hinged bucket that poured a hundred gallons of water down on your head from a height of forty feet . . . and two waterslides. Rinpoche and I did not speak. Moving slowly, like condemned men, we set our towels down and climbed three flights of stairs. Two ominous tubular openings greeted us there. A laconic young man said one was designed to be used with inner tubes, and one was not. The inner tubes were down below, so our only choice for that first trip was the other slide, said to be “a little faster.” Rinpoche and I looked at each other. “All right. I’ll go first,” I said. He nodded, offered what looked to be a genuinely nervous smile. I sat on the wet plastic, leaned back, pushed off, and I was suddenly being shot through a winding cylinder, gathering speed, riding up on the turns like a man on a luge, and going almost as fast. When you were halfway down, the diabolical invention began making quick turns left and right so you were swung hard side to side, dropping, dropping, a sheet of water beneath you, your stomach left somewhere above, and then a sudden dark straightaway and you were thrown into air and a hard splashdown. Underwater. Finished. Free.