Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  I kicked to the edge of the pool and turned so I could see Rinpoche make his exit. Long before he appeared I could hear him, an echoing “Otto! Oh! Oh!” in the tube, and then the nut-brown bulk of him came into view, face contorted, and there was a giant splash. It took him ten seconds to surface—maybe he was praying under there, giving thanks, adjusting his Speedo, retrieving a diamond ring some unlucky wife had lost. Then the face appeared, radiantly happy. He wiped one hand across his bald skull, fixed his eyes on me and shouted this command: “Again!”

  We made the ride eleven more times and then switched to the slower inner-tube slide and went down twice more. The stair climbing was work, and we were certainly the oldest people in the park at that hour, but I have to admit I loved it. Once the first trip was endured it was all known territory, all thrill, all thoughtless swooping and blue, bleachy splash. By the time we finally called it quits—damp and well chlorinated—I was wondering how much it would cost to build a waterslide on the retreat center property and wishing Natasha and Anthony had been there. To share the fun. To see that their father was not yet an ancient relic.

  All the way back to the room, even as we were putting our bags into the pickup and heading out of the Bighorn lot, Rinpoche kept thanking me for this particular version of American fun. “The best brother-and-law,” he said at one point, and no matter how many times I told him I deserved no credit for the water park, that I’d made the reservations at Bighorn in spite of it, that I wouldn’t even have paid the admission if it hadn’t been for him, he kept telling me how brave I’d been to go first, how he might have gone only on the child’s slide if I hadn’t been there, how he might not have gone down a second time after seeing how fast we went on the first. And so on. He had conquered, in a small way, his supposed fear of “high.” But I suspected then, and I suspect to this day, that it was all a trick. By the second run on the faster slide I realized that the proper technique involved a complete letting go, an abandoning of oneself to the fates, the skill of the waterslide engineers, and the conscientiousness of the county inspectors. A mindless, illogical trust. Was there no spirchal lesson there?

  30

  Billings, it seemed, was not a place you could easily get lost in. And, from our quick visit, not a place you’d want to. Filling the thirsty Uma with gas at a downtown station, I remembered the woman’s comment: “You drive your truck off the road in winter and you’ll be there about five seconds before somebody stops to help.” But the original impression was less than favorable: the Montana Women’s Prison; the Montana Department of Corrections Rehabilitation and Parole Office; a population of street people that ranged from the inebriated Native American of whom we accidentally asked restaurant recommendations to the fifty-year-old bearded drifter sitting on his duffel and bedroll in front of the Conoco station and eyeing a passing preteen girl in a way that would make any father’s fists clench.

  The Crow woman (I asked her as she stepped out of the supermarket, not realizing the state she was in)—stocky, pimpled, drunk or high, wandering from one corner to the next and panhandling very quietly and respectfully—didn’t know any good places to eat. So after the fill-up we followed signs into the historic district—a few blocks of less-than-new buildings—and parked. Two women coming out of McCormick’s Café gave it a rave review, enough of a recommendation as far as I was concerned. Inside, the good monk and I found a tin-ceilinged, brick-walled eatery suffused with natural light and crowded with close-packed tables. McCormick’s had a chalkboard menu with items like Bacon Avocado Hamburger and Mesclun Salad. My kind of place, in other words. Rinpoche enjoyed a smoothie—his latest fascination—and I went for the Portobello Burger, which had a tasty patty of the succulent fungus sitting like a beret on a slightly larger piece of excellent ground beef. No relish, however. There must be something about Montana and relish, some primordial prejudice, some statewide religion that considers it sinful to chop up pickles and mix them with a bit of sugar in vinegar. But let me not complain about McCormick’s Café, because it was a shrine to good food in a city where my New York prejudices had led me to expect no such thing.

  Let me be forgiven for those prejudices. I am, as Celia has often pointed out over the years, a man of caustic eye and too-quick judgments. I notice the pimples on the faces of Native American women, the clouds in their eyes, the dearth of food options in a prairie city. I notice the razor wire above a prison entrance, the lust in middle-aged men’s stares. I send the sharp blade of my mind knifing down into the smallest details of other lives. I like to think this comes from an interest in the human condition, a fascination with life, with America, with the infinite possibilities of how we can manage our years. But it also has roots in something less noble, a habit, born in the soil of insecurity no doubt, of seeking out flaws. The only thing I can say in my defense is that I’d become acutely aware of it on that trip, I didn’t like it much, I worried I had passed it on to my kids, and I was trying to change. That kind of effort, Rinpoche had told me many times, was the mundane heart of the spiritual search. Momentous experiences on the meditation cushion were fine and good, but the real work was less glamorous. The real work was the identification of those aspects of yourself that led to what he called “the negative emotions”—anger, envy, bitterness, greed, cynicism, hatred and the like—things that poured hurt into an already overfull world. It was like an infestation of carpenter ants. First you saw them, then you traced them to their nest, and then you set about the hard work of convincing them they were not welcome. According to my wise brother-in-law, doing nothing about your flaws was a kind of spiritual laziness for which one eventually paid a heavy price. The ants were harmless little bugs, it seemed; in time, left alone, they’d eat through the walls of your house.

  On that trip especially, but in my entire life, I’d encountered people who appeared so much more easygoing about these things. It didn’t matter to them what they put into their mouths. Others’ quirks and troubles didn’t quite penetrate their daily run of thoughts. They were kind, forgiving, jovial, mellow, and I had a side that was sharper than that, critical and judgmental. Why? Did it have something to do with education? With editing—which was, after all, a constant struggle to criticize and improve? But Jeannie had been as well educated as I, certainly as sophisticated—to use a word I dislike—and she hadn’t been plagued by this need to observe, compare, and comment. I couldn’t blame my parents, who fought frequently with each other but were live-and-let-live people in the extreme when it came to the rest of humanity. It had something to do with an old defense system, probably: move to Manhattan from Dickinson, ND, and you’re often made to feel like a rube, a hayseed, a hick; you build an armor from whatever metal is available.

  Full in the belly, exhilarated from our aquatic adventure, anxious to see our kin, Rinpoche and I headed east from downtown Billings past a huge refinery and into the Montana wilds. It rained for a moment—the first precipitation since Seattle—darkening the fifty-mile views to north and south, an architecture of emptiness. On the radio the talkers were talking “Natural Rights”: life, liberty, property. The government was their enemy, anger their shield. They were like children who wanted no teachers, no parents. No roads, bridges, post offices, license plates, speed limits, or taxes. They dreamed a fantasy nation of hearty individualists beholden to no one but themselves. And they were, to my mind, a twenty-first-century plague.

  We hadn’t been on the highway thirty minutes, vast stretches of dry, empty prairie to either side, when my phone rang on the seat. I gestured for Rinpoche to answer it, told him how to work the touch screen, watched him slash and poke and then hold it to his ear. “Yes,” he said, as loudly as if he were shouting across all of east Montana. “Yes, yes, wery much!”

  Holding the pickup at sixty on the nearly empty highway, I turned my eyes to him from time to time as this one-sided conversation went on. What if it was somebody calling from the office—Frank Denig, for instance—and Rinpoche was pretending to be me, playing
along, agreeing to an early retirement with no compensation or benefits? And then I heard what sounded like my sister’s voice, and a multitude of more painful options rushed the field of consideration.

  “Sure, sure, wery good,” Rinpoche was saying. I tried to get his attention. I signaled that I wanted to speak to whomever it was. But by the time he looked over at me he’d already hung up.

  “Who was it?”

  “I forget,” he said.

  “Ha, funny. My sister?”

  “Who loves you wery much.”

  “I know that. What’s the plan? I heard you agreeing to all kinds of things. Everybody okay?”

  “Okay, sure. She make one nights a reservation in Medora.”

  “Medora?”

  “Near home.”

  “I know where Medora is, but why aren’t we just going straight to Dickinson?”

  “Last part of little wacation,” he said. “A barbecue. Do you eat meat?”

  “You know I eat meat.”

  “The steak?”

  “Of course.”

  “Fun,” she says. “And some big news, too.”

  “There we go. I had a feeling it was something like that. The big news is the part that worries me. The rest of it is a setup, trust me. A little steak barbecue to soften up old Uncle Ott.”

  “News is good, she say.”

  And I said, “Good is relative,” and drove on.

  East of Forsyth in the great state of Montana one is hard-pressed to find dotted lines running next to the roads on Rand McNally, let me put it that way. We could have angled northwest to Sumatra (someone with a sense of humor named these places), but I could feel in my belly the desire to see my children. The dark stubble on Anthony’s cheeks, the way Natasha had of walking—as if she were about to break into a run at any moment. I missed them.

  The landscape there, on the road to Miles City, was dry as sawdust and about the same color. We passed mile upon mile of rangeland, unimaginably large swaths of uninhabited territory enlivened only by sagebrush and dry streambeds, one line of fencing along the highway, the occasional creek marked by a stripe of greenery, the occasional billboard showing an infant and a slogan like, “Take My Hand, not My Life.” Here and there a few dozen head of cattle gathered close together in the heat, with a million acres of open land around them. What, I wondered, were they afraid of? What did they know of their future?

  Now the radio offered sentimental Christian songs like “You Deliver Me” and “When I Feel Like I Can’t Go On.” Rinpoche bobbed his head to the music.

  We went along for only an hour or so, then took the exit for Miles City, where the side of a barn was painted with the image of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco and the words DON’T LET METH BE YOUR LAST RIDE. An iced coffee there, a short stroll to stretch our legs. There was a fantastic western-wear shop, two floors of eight-hundred-dollar felt hats and gorgeous stitched boots, and we loaded up on gifts: pearl-button shirts, belts and belt buckles, a carved horse for Shelsa from her uncle, a nice scarf for Cecelia. I realized I’d never sent the postcards I’d bought in Baring, so I scribbled a greeting and sent off one each to Jeannie’s sister, our dog-sitting neighbor, and a friend at work.

  Somewhere on the road between there and Glendive, a distance of seventy-five miles, I found myself yet again replaying the conversation with the woman in the bar at Bighorn. Strangely enough, the emptiness of the land around us made me wish I’d taken her up on her offer, walked the three blocks by her side, fallen into bed with her and tried to make the encounter into something more than mutual masturbation. It wouldn’t have been easy, manufacturing an intimacy there in a bungalow on Billings’ hard edges. She was pretty, though, worn and pretty and lonely, and not so drunk that she’d have invited just anyone back to her house for sex. At least that’s what I wanted to believe. I wasn’t superstitious enough to think Jeannie would have cared. I wouldn’t have told Natasha and Anthony, any more than I’d expect them, now, to tell me. How long was I obliged to wait—a year? five years? forever?—before sleeping with another woman would no longer tarnish memories of my wife?

  I didn’t know. It had just felt wrong. Or perhaps I’d merely been afraid.

  “What about sex?” I said aloud, without planning to. I turned off the Christian music station.

  “Sex, sex, sex,” Rinpoche said. “Funny word. In Ortyk we say lahkusha.”

  “That has a better sound to it. In English all the sex words are ugly: ‘intercourse’, ‘pubic’, ‘fellatio’, ‘cunnilingus’, ‘orgasm.’ No poetry anywhere.”

  Rinpoche grunted. He’d been fingering his loop of brown beads, but now he let his hands rest. “It makes life,” he said.

  “That and so much more. I can’t think of any aspect of living that’s more full of joy and trouble. You were celibate for a time, weren’t you?”

  “Ten year,” he said. “In our tradition, ten year, then you can do.”

  “Must have been fun, that first time.”

  “Always fun,” he said.

  “We have a bit of a Puritan tradition still alive in this country. Between that, some of our Catholic friends and the so-called Christian conservatives there’s a lot of guilt and bad feeling around the edges of the subject, seems to me. On the one hand, the TV, the Internet, the magazines—we’re absolutely bombarded with sex images. On the other, there’s this background refrain of guilt.”

  “Easy answer,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Always with love.”

  “Always? Never just for release? For pure pleasure? For what the French call divertissement? Diversion, entertainment, fun?”

  “Sure,” he said. “But love is the main thing. If you have love in you when you do sex, maybe no trouble comes.”

  I thought of my children, just entering that landscape, so much delight and treachery there, as though you were traipsing barefoot across a luscious field of high grass, the day was hot but breezy . . . and there were poisonous snakes slithering near your ankles. Jeannie and I had always spoken openly to our kids on the subject, the basic facts (“We know already, Dad!”), bits of advice or caution here and there. Mainly they navigated it on their own, the way most of us do.

  “For some people,” Rinpoche went on, “the lahkusha can be a teaching.”

  “Everything can be a teaching in your tradition, it seems to me. Sex, sports, illness, death, birth, waterslides, prison, family life, nature. What isn’t a spiritual lesson, I’d like to know.”

  “Nothing isn’t, for me,” he said. “For you, too, now, I think. For Otto now, everything shows the path.”

  “The path to what, Rinpoche?”

  He sent a look of the most profound pity across Uma’s front seat. He said, “Otto, my friend,” in such a tender way that, wounded old sentimental fool that I was in those weeks, I felt a quick rush of water in my eyes. Two blinks took care of it; I hoped he hadn’t seen. “My good friend,” he repeated, “do you think, really, that all this complicated machine,” he squeezed my upper arm as if by “machine” he meant my body, “and all this big,” he gestured toward the windshield, beyond which the earth spread out in all directions like the Russian steppe, “is here just for the nothing?”

  “No. But my question is: what’s the something?”

  “The something is inside,” he said, tapping the top of my skull lightly with his left palm. “If you try, you can make in here a weh-ree quiet place. Wery quiet. And then, in that quiet place comes a new feeling.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  At that moment a man about my own age went past us on a motorcycle, plowing along in the fast lane. He had very long hair, all gray, and the wind blew it out behind him in a rippling celebration. I felt the smallest touch of envy.

  When Rinpoche didn’t answer immediately I glanced across the seat and saw that he’d closed his eyes, as if he were studying his own enlightenment, searching for words to make it clear.

  “It feels,” he said, then he opened his e
yes and looked at me, “what I told you before—that you know you should die one day. You really know, you feel it. And same time you feel: this is okay.”

  I watched the motorcyclist growing smaller in the distance. “So then the whole point and purpose of being alive is to not be afraid of death? That’s it?”

  He pushed out his lips and made a small shake of his head, disappointed, it seemed, in his pupil. He tried again. “My father was the great teacher, yes? When he was dying, around him the people wery sad. ‘Don’t go! Don’t go, Master!’ everyone cry. Me, too. ‘Don’t go, Papa,’ I say. ‘Don’t go now!’ Know what he answer?”

  “Tell me.”

  “He answer: Stupid people! Where do you think I could go?”

  You could go to a place where nobody could see you or speak to you or touch you, I thought. But I didn’t say it. The shivers were on me again, a follicle gymnastics.

  “When he tell me that,” Rinpoche went on, “all in a sudden, I see.”

  “You were enlightened.”

  “I see,” he corrected. “I understand one thing, but this is the most important one. I understand in the most real way that this body doesn’t belong for me.”

  “To me.”

  “Yes. I borrow it for a little some time, this body, just to hold my spirit. Then, little some more time, I give back.”