Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  “I’ll try.”

  “Good. Try, only try, and when you try, go outside yourself and meet Jeannie in the place she goes outside herself, understand?”

  “No.”

  “The overlap,” he said, pronouncing the word carefully and correctly, as if he’d practiced it.

  “I don’t know how to go outside myself.”

  “Retreat is for that. Meditate, try, then we talk, and then,” he made a shoveling motion with one hand toward his mouth, “eat and eat.” He made his eyes wide, “TV and TV.” He pantomimed a person sleeping and couldn’t keep from laughing. “Rest and rest.”

  He put both hands on my shoulders, closed his eyes, and began a quiet murmuring/singing chant, something very much like what I’d once seen him do in a bowling alley in Indiana, with a rough character I thought might take a swing at him. It went on for perhaps a minute, then he hugged me again, released me and stood there looking.

  “What?”

  He made a motion like one makes when one puts a phone to one’s ear and talks, then he held out his right hand, palm up. I smiled guiltily, half surprised. Nothing magical here, I told myself. A lucky guess, that’s all. Seese must have told him I’d want to have my phone. I fished around in the bag in a way that kept the Mounds bars from being seen, and handed it over. “If my boss calls,” I said, “tell him I’m fasting and can’t be reached.”

  “Friday,” he said. “Summer. Boss not there, right?”

  The New York publishing world in early August. No one was ever righter.

  My brother-in-law the spiritual master put the phone deep into the folds of his robe, looked at me without smiling, with a tremendous intensity, in something like the way Coach Michalson had looked at us on the gridiron before a particularly hard workout or a game against the notorious Bismarck High Demons, then he gave one short nod and sauntered off in the direction of the house where my sister and I, ordinary Americans in the extreme, had been raised.

  37

  For the first little while it wasn’t so bad. Rinpoche had said nothing about sleeping, so I lay down on the small, fairly comfortable bed and snoozed for an hour and a half. Jeannie appeared in a dream, fleetingly, just a quick snapshot of her face. It had happened a hundred times since her death and always left me feeling as though I were reaching for her, wanting to hear her voice, touch her one more time, but that some invisible limitation had been placed on me. There was always a particular kind of emptiness after those dreams, and I woke to that again and lay looking up at the rafters, blinking the truth away.

  I got up and made an inspection of the kitchen. The small refrigerator held milk and jam and a selection of fresh fruit. Bottled water by the gallon. One stick of butter. I put my candy bars in there because I like them crisp. There was oatmeal and a loaf of Seese’s homemade bread, crackers, herbal teas, peanut butter, canned cashews, one box of Cheerios. Nothing else. The Spartan bathroom. The sort-of closet in which I was to sleep. A chair. A yoga mat. A meditation cushion and an old and somewhat ratty couch. A bookshelf that held, as Rinpoche had promised, exactly four volumes. I made inventory:

  The Inner Life, by Hazrat Inayat Khan, apparently a Sufi mystic and teacher.

  I and Thou, by Martin Buber, a Hebrew scholar, translator, and teacher.

  Intimacy with God, by a Catholic monk named Thomas Keating.

  Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman, radical Protestant.

  Nothing Buddhist. Nothing by Volya Rinpoche. Not one single copy of US, People, Vanity Fair, Sports Illustrated, The New Yorker, or Westchester Magazine.

  I began to retreat in earnest. From everything. From the memories of my late wife, the prospect of an empty house, the idea of Tasha living here instead of going back to school, the worry about her safety, the thought that three days of this lay in front of me, as pleasing to anticipate as oral surgery and the subsequent bill. It made sense, I decided during a patch of interior muttering, to try a little yoga. After my first road trip with Rinpoche, I’d started taking lessons—private lessons; I didn’t want any more group humiliations—and I’d enjoyed it, lost a few pounds, felt stronger, maybe a bit calmer. Once Jeannie fell ill, though, yoga had been one of the things that had gradually gone by the wayside. Lately, I’d been starting up again on my own, half an hour here and there.

  It seemed like a good way to fill the time, but just as I was unrolling the yoga mat I decided it would be wise to have the first candy bar, or at least half of it. Possibly I should have waited, but the little voice inside my skull, a most convincing little voice, said: Why not fortify yourself for the ordeal ahead, step off on a good foot, build up the sugar level, lift the mood? I ate one half of the Mounds, then took one more tiny bite and wrapped up the rest and set it back on the shelf in the nearly empty mini-fridge. “I’ve been in hotel rooms with more food than this,” I said aloud. I laughed. I went into the main room, stripped to my underwear, and did twenty minutes of downward-facing dog and upward-facing lazy man. No headstands, no extreme backbends. There was still some kind of a workout involved, a bit of sweat and pumping blood, a wash of yogic exhilaration. But no risks were taken.

  I had a longish shower.

  I stepped out the only exterior door and felt the warmth of the day, took in the sweet smell of cut alfalfa from the leased acreage, heard the sound of a truck passing somewhere in the distance and then the cry of a freight train. Went back inside. Got ready to sit down to meditate, then decided it would be wiser to start, as I sometimes did, with a short reading. I was familiar with Whitman, and decided to save him for later and take a quick look at I and Thou. Somewhere or other I’d heard of the book, or at least heard that phrase “an I-and-Thou relationship.” God knew what it actually meant.

  At home, what I liked to do before meditating was to take one of the books Rinpoche had given me at random, open to a page at random, and read a paragraph or two. I would then set the book aside and “sit,” as he’d taught me. He’d made a point of saying that this premeditation reading was not in order to have something to think about. The point was not to contemplate what one had just read. “Meditation is the opposite of that,” he’d said. The point of the reading was only to place myself in the grasp of a different perspective. When I read the Times or, even more so, the Daily News, I felt the world and all its assumptions surging into me, pure emotion in an IV line. I’d get upset at national politics or feel a wave of compassion for some poor soul who’d been raped, molested, or killed. I’d worry about the war in Syria, the deadlock in Congress, the Iranian nuclear program, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the drug cartels in Mexico, the Midwestern drought, the erosion of democracy in Russia, the U.S. poverty statistics, the stock market, a Yankees slump (not so far this year, thankfully). I’d have a sudden urge to see a play or a new TV show that had gotten a rave review. I’d marvel at some trio of mathematicians who’d spent their careers trying to solve a single problem that no one else on earth could even begin to understand.

  The meditative reading often sent me in another direction, into a different world. Often, the passage I chose had some bearing on a particular difficulty I was having, and that’s close to what happened with I and Thou. I sat on the couch with a pillow behind my back, picked up the paperback copy, opened by chance to page 154, and came upon this: “When a man loves a woman so that her life is present in his own, the You of her eyes allows him to gaze into a ray of the eternal You.”

  I did not understand this, not fully. But it did ring some faint bell, and so I read on for a while, hoping Martin Buber had the answer to a question I couldn’t quite formulate.

  I read two or three pages, skipped ahead, tried another page—dense, complex, obtuse, but ringing that same faint bell in places—then set the book aside and tried to meditate as I’d been taught. I sat in a comfortable position. I folded my hands. Closed my eyes. Drew a long breath, taking on the pain of the world and sending out strength, peace, harmony, love. Again. Again.

  But my mind was a circus on that m
orning. A surge of self-pity, odd bits of memory—Jeannie frowning at me over the tennis net; little flickers of triviality—Frank Denig’s habit of sticking his head around the doorjamb and flashing a thumbs-up for no good reason at all; it was something he’d learned, along with publishing-speak, in a management seminar; there was an itch above my right ankle—was it chiggers? A tick? Did Anthony have everything he needed for football? Wasn’t Jasper due for a shot at the vet’s? Guilt over the candy I’d brought along. It was a lie, really, wasn’t it? A fib. Don’t be so harsh on yourself. I remembered I was meditating and tried to breathe. How was I going to go without dinner? What was the point? Buddha ate everything, didn’t he? I started to think of meals I’d have once I got back to New York. The ricotta pancakes at Comfort Diner. I’d do that first. I owed myself that much. The fine beef kabob at that Afghani place on Ninth Avenue. What was it called? I’d pamper myself. I’d been through a lot. Look what Jeannie went through. If she had meditated, would it have been easier for her? Impossible to believe that. She handled it with great courage. Would I be that brave? Would I have to be one day? I was meditating. Breathe, relax the body. What was Rinpoche pointing me toward? Why did so many people admire him? Would Natasha progress faster than I did? Reach enlightenment? What was that, enlightenment? Was Seese enlightened? If so, what was the point? Breathe. I thought of Rundy preferring a drenching rain to a softheaded New York liberal like me.

  Finally, I gave up. Opened my eyes, stretched, stood, decided once and for all that the retreat idea had been a mistake. But it wouldn’t look good, especially in front of Tasha, to walk out now, go back to the house, and tell them it wasn’t for me. Even if it meant sleeping and reading away the three days, I’d stick it out.

  I stepped outside and watched the clouds for a while, then went through the kitchen cabinets again, wondering if I’d missed something—some fresh-baked croissants, eggs, bacon, real maple syrup and whole-grain pancake mix, a slice of peach cobbler that the previous retreatant had accidentally left behind. No. Nothing had been missed. I walked around the cabin ten times to get a little exercise. Came back inside, picked up I and Thou, set it down again.

  I lay on the bed with my hands behind my neck and thought about work, about Gilligan Neufaren and his happy way. Maybe he’d been sent into my life just now in order to show me another route to salvation, something that suited me better than Rinpoche’s maddening riddles, periods of fasting, and faith in meditation as the healer of all things. Maybe the Neufaren way was the better route for me now—a healthy, well-off, single man in his earliest fifties. There were still so many pleasures to take hold of, so much life to live, so many meals, books, trips, fine conversations, all of it lying there before me.

  After an hour or more of this I heard the door crack open and a tentative voice say, “Uncle Ott?”

  I hustled out of bed and tried to look as though I’d been doing something other than what I had been doing. Too late. My niece was in the main room, staring at me, carrying an old-fashioned picnic basket and ready to report on her lazy, duplicitous uncle.

  “Shels, give me a big hug.”

  She set down the basket and came over and jumped into my arms. I twirled her around once and set her on the couch. She looked up at me with the intense, serious, curious, older-than-her-years gaze for which she was already famous in our family. She seemed, for just a moment, to shimmer.

  “What?” I said.

  “Yunch!” She jumped to her feet.

  “Already? The time’s gone by so fast. Your mom and dad sent you with food for Uncle Ott?”

  For an instant she seemed to see right through me, the way her father so often did. I half expected her to say, “Yes, Uncle Ott. A little yunch to go with your Mounds bar.”

  But of course she didn’t.

  We sat together at the table and she insisted on showing me, one item at a time, what was in the basket. I was hungry, but not ravenous. I was able to hope that some of the food, at least, would not be green, that my sister had sent the girl here with two portions, not one, or that Shelsa had already eaten.

  With great attentiveness she lifted away the two hinged wooden covers. Beneath them, someone—Celia, probably—had set a folded, blue-checked cloth. Shelsa lifted this off and put it aside like some kind of surgeon preparing for incision. She took out a single Bartlett pear, said, “Pear,” showed it to me, and waited for a reaction.

  “Uncle Ott loves pears,” I said.

  She reached in and took out a square plastic container, two inches high, and said, “Um-us.”

  “Hummus. Good. My favorite.”

  “Cwakers.”

  “Perfect.”

  “Sell ree.”

  “Crunchy.”

  Each time she reached in I tried to get a sense of how far down she was digging, how many more layers there might be. This was, after all, my nourishment for the next eighteen hours.

  She took the checkered cloth and put it back into the basket.

  “That’s it?”

  She nodded somberly.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Wery.”

  “Well, let’s eat, then.”

  I found two mismatched glasses and filled them with cold water. Shelsa was busy arranging the food, spacing everything evenly, keeping the hummus and crackers exactly halfway between us. I was very glad for the company. She stopped me as I was about to eat. “Pray first, Uncle.”

  We bowed our heads and were silent for a moment. I was thinking about dinner. We began to eat.

  “Has Jasper Junior been bad today?”

  She shook her head.

  “What are Mom and Dad doing?”

  “Mami’s cooking. Papi’s doing a walk.”

  “Where?”

  She made a big circle with one hand. “Around the fawm.”

  “Are they worried about Uncle Ott?”

  She shook her head. “Mami says you’re having a big weewization. Are you?”

  “Not yet. Soon, though. Anytime now.”

  I sliced the pear in half and cut out the pit, and we shared the juicy flesh for dessert. I like to have something sweet at the end of a meal, and the pear flesh was not quite the ticket. I was an inch away from saying, “Hey, I have a candy bar in the fridge. Don’t tell anybody, okay. We’ll share it.” But some interior Congress voted that notion down.

  She helped me tidy up, and when that small task was finished I didn’t want her to leave. “Do you do this for all the other people who come to stay? Is this your job?”

  “Only Uncle Ott,” she said, and then she leaned against the side of my leg and hugged, and said, “Going now,” and closed the door quietly behind her as though someone were sleeping. I went over and opened it and watched her go along the road until it dipped and turned behind a patch of fescue and she was no longer visible.

  38

  As the afternoon wore on, as the first real hunger appeared and began to gnaw away at my entrails like some small animal determined to grow big, I decided the books had been put there not to be skimmed, but to be read in their entirety. Maybe Martin Buber had something to say about hunger, I thought. Maybe there would be a sentence claiming it was perfectly fine to eat on solitary retreats. As much as one wanted. Anytime. I began I and Thou at the introduction and went forward. “Buber taught me,” the writer of the preface said on page 23, “that mysticism need not lead outside the world. Or if mysticism does, by definition, so much the worse for it.”

  Good. I agreed. Walter Kaufmann was his name. I fully agreed.

  Though the actual text proved to be slow going, every once in a while there would be a sentence or a passage that stopped me. That familiar bell rang. I felt that some marvelous new emerald of wisdom might be lying ahead, there on the next page, that I might, as Rinpoche suggested, be ready for a realization, a big step, that everything would then be solved. I would laugh and joke my way through the last thirty years of my life and pass on quietly into a new dimension. See my wife. Guide our kids f
rom above. Eat whatever I wanted without gaining weight.

  I stopped and did a short meditation. I managed another ten minutes of yoga. I read on.

  There were many difficult passages in I and Thou, actual sentences like this one, commas correctly included, on p. 102: “That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me.”

  Who, I thought, would make any money from publishing this? What kind of mind went this deep? How far could a guy like me follow?

  The afternoon light faded, and, setting the book aside, I was for once not sorry to see the day go. I brewed myself a cup of tea and I have to say I took more time doing this, paid more attention, carried the cup out the door with a considerably greater gratitude than I used to carry a bottle of fifty-dollar Santa Margherita onto the patio at home. I stood sipping, studying the western sky. The hunger gnawed away. I missed my wife and tried to make sense of the last bit of instruction Rinpoche had given me. Overlap yourself with herself. Go outside yourself, Otto. What did that mean? Buber’s “two basic words” were I and Thou, or I and You. He seemed to be saying that everything in life is a relationship between one person and another, or one person and a tree, a cloud, a rushing river, a bug, a snake, a cup of tea. Maybe somewhere deep in the heart of that I-Thou connection lay what Rinpoche would call the God-spirit. The Divine Intelligence. Is that where a good wife went when she died? To the mysterious center of God’s mind? To the hyphen in the I-Thou? If so, how did a living husband follow?

  39

  That night, freed from the exertion of digestion, I slept the sleep of the ancient Egyptians in their tombs. I woke up wondering if I should get out of bed and make breakfast or simply devour the pillow, blanket, and mattress and then eat the metal frame.