Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  Back and forth I swam, thinking of Uncle Gene, thanking him, trying to let go of my concern for my daughter’s future. Wasn’t it true that she was just doing what Jeannie and I had done? Did I really want to burden her with the cargo of parental disappointment we’d had to carry in those early years? Was I really better off, having first traded my dreams of being a radical architect, and later a renowned novelist, for a paycheck every two weeks and the humble satisfactions of editing?

  Yes. No. But around me I could feel—as if they were actual creatures nipping at my skin—the voices of friends, neighbors, and co-workers, the very people we’d told, with so much pride and pleasure, about Natasha’s acceptance to Brown. I imagined their faces and words when I informed them she’d decided to leave school and live on the family farm in North Dakota, cooking, digging in the dirt, watching the snow fall. She was just taking a year off, I’d say. The shock of her mother’s death, and so on. Brown would let her return.

  Brown might very well let her return, but the rest of it would be a lie, and I was trying to swim the lie away as if it were filth on my arms and hands. I swam and swam with my clumsy stroke, kicking, breathing hard, trying to crawl my way back to the walk-up on Ninth Avenue, the arduous thrill of those days, the living in the moment, the sure sense that all would be well.

  When I finally stopped, chest heaving, and stood at the shallow end of the pool, I saw my sister coming through the chain-link gate, holding her reluctant daughter by the hand.

  “Uncle Ott can show you,” she was saying. “Don’t be afraid, honey. Look at Uncle Ott.”

  Shelsa’s pretty face was painted in Cezanne-esque blocks of terror. I swam over to the side nearest them and hoisted myself up onto the edge. “Sit here with me, Shels,” I said.

  She leaned back and shook her head. I patted the concrete. “Sit with your Uncle Ott.”

  The headshaking grew smaller. I patted the concrete another few times. “Come on. I saved you a special place.”

  It took a minute or two, but we convinced her to come and sit beside me. I kicked my feet, making a big splash, and got her to do the same. We were side by side, splashing away, her mother in a lawn chair, watching. “How’s Jasper?” I asked Shelsa, to distract her.

  “He’s a bad boy. He catches birds (boohds was how she said it) in his mouth.”

  “When we get home tonight I’ll punish him.”

  “No, no!”

  I told her I was kidding, and I dropped into the pool in front of her. I stood there for a little while and rubbed her wet feet, tickling, making her laugh. I took handfuls of water and splashed them down over my head, making her laugh again and again. Then I took a very small handful and dropped it on her head, too. She spluttered at first, blinked hard, and then smiled and asked for a repeat. I saw her eyes go to three kids who were horsing around happily in the shallow end. “Want to learn to swim?” I asked.

  She shook her head, no.

  “You sure?”

  No again.

  “Not sure? Want to try?”

  A brave nod.

  We spent the next hour in the pool. Very, very gradually, holding her in my arms most of the time, I got Shelsa accustomed to being in water, then to holding her breath, and then—the hard part—putting her face under the surface. I held her arms and let her kick, nose and mouth in air. Held her midsection and let her swing her arms. It was a younger-child version of the way Uncle Gene had done it for me—step by step, finding the edge of my comfort zone, pushing me past it, taking on the fear in small bites. By checkout time she wasn’t swimming, but I’d gotten her through the baptism, at least. Kicking, breathing out underwater. One good dead man’s float.

  “Was it fun?” her mother asked when we were out and wrapping ourselves in towels.

  “Lot of fun, Mami.”

  Cecelia hugged the girl tight against her and winked at me over her head. “Look what a nice Uncle Ott you have, honey. Look at how brave you are!”

  34

  My parents had owned two thousand acres of prime Stark County farmland—sloping, windswept fields where they grew durum wheat and soybeans mostly, and a smaller amount of corn, barley, canola and sunflowers, depending on the market. They cultivated a kitchen garden, too, fifty square feet of seed and sweat, that helped feed us for much of the year. When they were killed by a drunk driver on a nearby highway, the house, barns, and land came down to Celia and me, and after some difficult discussions between the two of us, we agreed that we’d continue to lease eighteen hundred acres and use the rest as a retreat center for Rinpoche. This meant paying for the main barn to be converted into a dormitory-like setup with small rooms on the second floor and a large, open meditation space on the first. Rinpoche, Cecelia, and Shelsa—just born then—settled into the white clapboard farmhouse, and after a couple of years they had a local carpenter build three cabins in one corner of their acreage. These were for solitary retreats, and each one of them had a woodstove, electric hotplate and small refrigerator, a shower and toilet, a bedroom and a small open room used for “sitting,” yoga, and reading.

  There was a fair amount of expense involved in all this—especially getting water to the cabins and figuring out what to do with the waste—but the land was valuable, and the lease payments covered some of it. Rinpoche earned a surprisingly good sum from his talks and books. And a few of the retreatants, like Jarvis, were wealthy, and paid handsome “tributes” for the privilege of living alone for a week under Rinpoche’s tutelage or sleeping in the dormitory and meditating six times a day with him and their fellow seekers. Jeannie and I had decided not to take any of the proceeds from the lease and not to make use of the mineral rights. Perhaps in compensation for the years of barbs and ridicule, her mother had left her a healthy inheritance; I was a senior editor with twenty-plus years of service at a profitable publishing house, and I made more than enough to support us; she’d worked, too, once the kids were in high school, taking photos for the local art museum and socking the money away. Twice a year we’d fly to Fargo on a family pilgrimage; and twice a year Seese, Shelsa, and Rinpoche would drive or take the train east and return the favor. These visits were a joy, not a chore. There was plenty of room in both houses, plenty of food and laughter. We always took them into Manhattan in cold weather, out to the Cape in warm. They worked hard to find things for us to do in North Dakota—tenpin bowling at the local lanes, drives along the Missouri River or to a reservation festival, snow forts and snowball fights and sledding.

  And then Jeannie was diagnosed and went into her long, slow, brutal decline, and all that ended.

  I was thinking of her, of course, as we drove east from Medora on that day, turned off the highway and onto a gravel road, and pulled up the long drive toward the house where I’d been raised. I saw Jasper Jr. come out across the porch, black tail wagging. The sight of him made me think of our Jasper, curled up at Jeannie’s feet in her last weeks, and it raised another small tide of sorrow in my throat. Something like eighty-five per cent of women with Jeannie’s diagnosis survived the disease. I’d wondered, a million times, why she couldn’t have been in that group.

  We settled in. Though the day was fine and warm, I could feel an old claustrophobia pressing against me, the same sense of airlessness that had chased me east in the first place. I surfed the Internet for a while, read the campaign coverage, answered e-mails, but I could hear the armies of boredom marching toward the house the way they’d marched thirty-five years earlier. I wondered how Tasha would defend herself against them.

  Rinpoche suggested a two-hour welcome-home meditation, but I pled tiredness and lay in the same upstairs bed I’d lain in as a boy and took a nap. The others went off on a walk to inspect the newest cabin or to look for birds—Shelsa’s passion, apparently. There would be pheasant, partridge, ruffed grouse, a dozen smaller songbirds.

  That afternoon, after a nice lunch that consisted mainly of grilled vegetables that had been grown a hundred feet from where we sat, Anthony made his go
od-byes and carried his knapsack and computer bag to the pickup. He and I set off for the airport in Fargo. The landscape changed as we drove eastward, from the dry prairies of midstate to the flat fertile fields of the Red River Valley. It’s a different North Dakota there, touched less by the Wild West than the Midwest, closer to Minnesota than Montana—geographically, politically, and culturally. My son had his BlackBerry against one raised knee and was reading and typing and letting out the occasional laugh. Between us hung some kind of curtain, I could feel it. Love, of course, certainly. But a thick fabric of years and difference, too.

  Not lost on me was the fact that my own father—whom Anthony adored—had taken me on a similar drive the day I left home for New York. I’d like to say it made for a sweet symmetry, but the memory wasn’t particularly sweet. If there was a curtain of generational difference between Anthony and me, the space between my father and me sported a wire-topped Berlin wall. He and my mother had wanted me to go to college, pushed me to go, in fact. And the study of architecture made some sense to them. What didn’t make sense was the abandonment of that career path and the decision to leave the heartland and live in Manhattan. New York, to them, represented everything that was repugnant about the non-Dakota world. Crime, people who didn’t speak English, exotic food that would poison your digestion, heinous traffic, dirty streets, a life of money and rush that made eye contact and slow conversation obsolete. The murder rate in New York City—just that statistic alone—was confirmation that they lived a good life, they’d made the right choices, they’d never leave.

  What had they expected? That I’d settle on the farm with them, marry Cindy Meerschum from third grade and ease Pop’s load by driving the tractor in planting season?

  Something like that. Their imaginations stretched only a short distance beyond the boundaries of their own lives. Even this drive had been a risk for my dad; in Fargo and on the surrounding roads, anything might happen. He’d changed out of his overalls for the occasion and was wearing a dress shirt and chinos—church clothes. He gripped the wheel with his two powerful hands, watched the road, worked his crooked teeth against the inside of his cheek. I looked at the passing farms and thought about making love with Jeannie.

  Somewhere near Valley City he said, without turning his head, “You ain’t comin’ back, then.”

  I said no, Pop, probably not, but assured him I’d get home to visit whenever I could.

  He pondered that for a dozen miles, the tires of the pickup whirring. If someone had asked me, “Does your father love you?” I would have answered, “Yes, of course,” reflexively, but I would not have been able to go down into that love and speak its essence. Neither could he or my mother. We were a practical, capable, decent people, but emotionally illiterate; not one of us was schooled in the calculus of affection. It was my wife who would teach me that.

  “Well,” my dad said, as we drew into the outskirts of Fargo and turned north on I-29, “take good care of yourself back there, won’t you?”

  I said that I would. Another few minutes and we pulled up in front of the terminal building. He coughed, lowered his window, and spat. He seemed old to me then, grizzled, going gray, forty-eight years on the earth. I saw him swallow. I had an urge to say or do something, but I had no model for that. Our best moments had consisted of standing next to each other at the end of an exhausting day of baling hay, the sweet smell of it in the air, sweat drying on our shirts, the sun sinking low, my mother ringing the porch bell that meant supper was almost ready. Fine moments, really, a manly, high-plains code of mutual affection and respect, but empty of word or touch. In front of the terminal then, all I knew how to do was reach over and shake his hand and look into his eyes. I thanked him for the ride, promised to write, and then I was out of the truck and moving toward my freedom. I remember that he waited there, watching, until I’d gone through the glass doors. And I remember that I didn’t turn around.

  When Anthony looked up from his phone for a moment I asked about his courses. He was not much like his sister, a happier child, strong, confident, immune to doubt. Sophomore year, and he already had his future drawn up: business school, then working his way up to Director or Chief Fundraiser of a medical charity. He wanted to have a hand in curing cancer, he said. “Payback, Dad, big-time.” Eventually, he wanted to settle someplace with Lizzie—who was a junior and pre-med—and start his own consulting firm for charitable fundraising, have a house and family, maybe a country club or beach club membership so the kids could swim on hot summer days and he and Lizzie could play golf or tennis on the weekends. He’d taken the money his mother had left him and with two other well-off Bowdoin friends, had made a down payment on a duplex in Brunswick, which they rented out. At his age I’d been drinking beer and trying marijuana and faking my way through trigonometry. He knew a bit about the tax code, investments, long-term strategies.

  Over those last twenty miles I struggled to find something to say to him. We have a new line of books coming out on organic produce. Rinpoche says I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. Your sister is a lot like her aunt. I hope you’ll bring Lizzie home for a visit once in a while; I like her. But all those things were too safe and predictable, modern-day versions of “Take good care of yourself back there, won’t you?” Still paying bills with paper checks and struggling to understand my new phone, I must have seemed to him like a troglodyte, a relic, a sexless old father who needed to get his stuff together and move on.

  We turned onto I-29. Anthony put his phone in his pocket and looked out at the landscape as if he might miss it. He said, “Rinpoche’s a nightmare on the golf course.”

  “I bet.”

  “He had a wicked case of the shanks. He kept going into the deep grass near the river to look for his ball. I kept telling him there were snakes in there, bad snakes, maybe. He called them ‘nakes’. He kept saying, ‘Nakes never bite Rinpoche. Bad luck for them. Bad karma.’”

  “Sounds like him. And I bet he’d never get bitten, either.”

  “Yeah.” Anthony was silent for a while. “He made four holes-in-one in a row in mini-golf, though, did I tell you that?”

  “No. You played late.”

  “Yeah, he convinced the woman to keep it open, don’t ask me how. Slipped her twenty bucks or something, maybe. Four holes-in-one in a row, Dad! You know how hard it is to do that? And then he missed the next two by about an inch. And then he seemed to kind of stop caring and just fooled around.”

  “Maybe he has a practice area in the barn someplace,” I said.

  Anthony looked over at me and smiled. He had his mother’s mouth. My eyes. “He says he wants to come east and see a game. I said I’d take you and him to a party afterward. ‘I’ll give you the whole experience, Rinp,’ I said. ‘You can flirt with some girls, have a few brews, help us clean up the puke the next morning.’”

  “Sounds like fun. Count me in. He’s a good uncle, isn’t he.”

  Anthony nodded, waited, said, “And you’re a good dad.”

  Another quick wash in the eyes. I took a breath and let a few automatic responses pass across my brain without finding the route to my mouth, and then, as we turned into the airport, the fog cleared for a moment, blessedly, and I said, “And as a son, you’ve been a major pain in the ass.”

  The right note for once. Anthony laughed uproariously, unaffectedly, the way he might laugh with a friend.

  Not long after I dropped him off (a hug and a handshake both) I did something I almost never do, and something, probably, that I shouldn’t have done: I picked up a hitchhiker. A thin-built, slightly hunched man with a red-brown beard and a knapsack, he looked like a lonely soul, not particularly threatening. The sky above him did look threatening, however. There was a bubbling purple cloudbank creeping in, and he was standing a bit furtively at the bottom of the ramp, no shelter anywhere within hundreds of yards. I had second thoughts almost as soon as I’d put on the brakes, but he was already hurrying toward Uma’s right rear fender by then, looking vulner
able, grateful, the last thing from trouble.

  There was a whiff of whiskey and smoke when he sat in the cab. He thanked me immediately, one eye on the sky. I asked him to put on his seatbelt and he said, “Oh, sure, no problem,” in an obliging way.

  Once we were on the highway I asked him where he was headed.

  “Williston,” he said. “Workin’ an oil job. But if you can git me as far as Bismarck, that’d work. Friends there.”

  “I’m going to Dickinson.”

  “Bismarck’s fine, then. I’m grateful.”

  We went along without speaking for a little while, moving toward the clouds as they moved toward us. “Sky showing evil,” my mother would have said, but it was no surprise in that part of the world in summer: without any mountains to slow it down for five hundred miles to the west of us, evil weather had a way of hatching without warning from what seemed the most benign of afternoons.

  “Mind if I smoke?” my passenger asked. “Rundy, by the way.” He held a calloused hand across the shift.

  “Otto. I’d rather you didn’t.”

  “No problem. You a Dickinson guy?”

  “Used to be. I was born and raised there. New York now.”

  “Never been.”

  I could feel him appraising me across the seat, not in an unpleasant way, really, just in the way of a person trying to figure you out, size you up, understand who he was riding with. I had friends at home who confessed to being ill at ease in the company of working folk, touched by a sliver of shame when they walked past the carpentry crew in their suit and tie. But I’d worked hard as a kid, and even now never suffered from that particular form of discomfort. The best idea, it seemed to me, was just to be yourself and let people—richer or poorer, less or better educated—think what they wanted.