American Appetites (20 page)

But there was Leo Reinhart, who had divorced his wife long ago and showed no interest in remarrying: handsome puckish Leo with his Italian-made clothes that fitted him tightly, but not too tightly. And there was Vincent Hawley. And Vaughn Cassity. And, not least, Amos Kuhn.
A prominent man, a much talked-of man. I gave him up for you
.

In its snug grave the coffin was slightly tilted; one of the attendants deftly straightened it; the ceremony seemed to have ended. Was anything next? What was next? They were to be spared the literal burial, the dumping of earth upon the gleaming artifact, for which thank God; such a sight might do permanent damage to already strained nerves. Now that Ebenbach had relinquished his mild authority over the assemblage, things were coming loose, as if unglued; the day was revealed as an ordinary day, just as a holiday, awaited eagerly by children and extended beyond its significance, is only an ordinary day after all; though fraught with danger. Ian tasted panic: what was there to say, where was there to go, what was there to do?—he looked around for Glynnis and could not find her.

On their return to the graveled drive where their cars were parked, strung out, numerous and seemingly festive, as at a party, Ian realized what it was he wanted to tell their friends. It was a clear, simple thought, so simple it might be overlooked. He raised his voice to speak; he said, “Wait: do you know what this is?” They were walking in a loose informal group, speaking as if conversationally of the morning's weather, and of Hazelton Memorial Cemetery, which was such an attractive place, and of the brunch planned at the Cassitys'—a variation of a funeral breakfast to which in a weak moment Ian seemed to have agreed, though now he doubted he could force himself to attend—and, since Reverend Ebenbach was not in their group and could not reasonably be expected to overhear, they spoke approvingly of him, and of the Unitarian service, which had been so tasteful and so moving—exactly what Glynnis would have wanted. “Wait: do you know what this is?” Ian interrupted. “Do you know what this is?” When he had their attention, and the attention of several others close by, he said excitedly, “This is our first death.”

SO IT WOULD
be repeated afterward, the words radiating outward in rough concentric circles from their core. Ian McCullough, the husband of, the one involved in, yes but what was it, what exactly was it, a woman walking through a plate-glass window blind drunk, or falling through a plate-glass window blind drunk, or had she been pushed, had they been fighting and had she been pushed, or had he killed her outright? . . . Yes but you must expect them to lie.

He foresaw that even a posthumous being would not be possible.

2.

There began now an interlude of clockless days: soft time, Ian McCullough thought it. Time spilling beyond its natural boundaries of day, night . . . daylight, dark . . . wakefulness and the stupor of sleep.

They had not taken him into custody at the cemetery: nor were they waiting for him back at the house, when he and his daughter returned.

He thought, They respect death.

He thought, They are waiting for me to go to them.

He thought, Of course, my own death would be easier.

“
DO YOU KNOW
what the Bardo state is?” Bianca asked. “The forty-nine days following death?”

Drifting restlessly about the house as if, without the weight and stolidity of her mother's presence, it was a house new to her, and dangerous with secrets, Bianca had discovered an aged paperback copy of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
in a remote bookcase. The book, which had belonged to Glynnis in the 1960s, was faithfully annotated through two thirds of its length; then untouched, as if unread. The section called “Bardo of
Karmic
Illusions” was most meticulously marked.

“The Bardo state,” Bianca read aloud, “is forty-nine days following death, during which time the soul is trapped in a dream-state, suffering from
karmic
illusions and nightmares. These images distract the soul from the purity of consciousness that means liberation from the cycle of birth and death so it's necessary for the holy book of the
Bardo Thodol
to be recited by a
lama
in the presence of the corpse. . . .” She looked up from the book and stared into a corner of the room. Her voice had been halting, uncertain; though she'd meant simply to share this arcane knowledge with Ian (the bright curious daughter, the scholarly father), she seemed to have become rather intimidated by it.

She wondered why the soul could not make its own way after death, why it required a guide. Why reincarnation—returning to the phenomenal world, getting born again, and again—must always be hell. “That isn't a very encouraging vision of life, is it,” she said.

She wondered aloud, “Why forty-nine days? Why not fifty, or forty-eight?”

She sniggered, drawing the edge of her hand roughly beneath her nose. “Imagine sitting there and reciting to a corpse! All those days!”

Ian said, “No. I can't imagine.”

She put away the book and talked of other things; bicycled to the cemetery, though she and Ian had been there only that afternoon; planned to go out with her friends; but returned early, at dusk, and sought out Ian in his study, where, with little success, he was making an attempt to work. (Though he would not be attending the Frankfurt conference and had no need to do so, he was revising his paper: “perfecting” it, as he liked to think.)
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
again in hand, Bianca insisted upon reading to him passages on the Chikhai Bardo, “the primary clear light seen at the moment of death”; and the Chonyid Bardo, “when the
karmic
apparitions appear”; and the Dharma-Kaya, “the state of perfect enlightenment.”

She leaned in Ian's doorway, her pale skin glowing with a fervor he could not interpret. “This is how it begins, this is what the lama recites to the dying person at the very moment of death,” she said. “
O nobly born: listen. Now thou art experiencing the Radiance of the Clear Light of Pure Reality. Recognize it, O nobly born, thy present intellect, in real nature void, not formed into anything as regards characteristics or color, naturally void, is the very Reality, the All-Good. . . .
” She read as if the words gave her difficulty, as if she were translating them as she went along. “What is hardest for me to understand, unless I don't understand it right, is that the Buddhists believe that our moment of greatest lucidity is at death . . . at the very instant of death. And afterward, as the days pass, we sink back into illusion again, these
karmic
remnants, and things gradually degenerate, get crazier and crazier, as we approach physical rebirth.” She regarded Ian with her rather flat gray eyes, contemplatively yet urgently, as if this were a snarl of a problem which, together, they might unravel. “Of course you have to believe in reincarnation to believe in any of it, don't you,” she said. “That's a stumbling block to people like us.”

Ian said, “Unless you read it as metaphor.”

“Metaphor for what?” Bianca said suspiciously. Then: “I don't want
met
aphor, I want the real thing.”

Ian laughed and said, “Well.”

Bianca stared at him and did not reply. She was leaning in the doorway, her forehead puckered; Ian saw, with a father's attentive eye—or was it, Glynnis being gone, a mother's attentive eye?—that she would soon wear out her face, her very youth, with such severe frowning. “Did Mother take this stuff seriously?” she asked.

Ian considered the question. Glynnis had gone through phases of belief and commitment and skepticism, as they all had, though perhaps with more passion than most, in those terrible years of war abroad and assassinations at home; he could recall her immersion of some months in Buddhism, both Mahayana and Zen; her
zazen
meditation, in the company of other devotees, in the University of Michigan arboretum; her conversation, her reading, her . . . passion. “We tended to believe things while we were caught up in them,” he said. He paused, hoping Bianca would not misunderstand. “Then, afterward, we forgot.”

“You moved on.”

“We moved on.”

YET BIANCA COULD
not, it seemed, let the matter rest; began to frighten herself, and Ian, by wondering if Glynnis were truly dead.

After all, you know. What if?

Those ancient beliefs, those strange religions “people like us” dismiss as superstition: What if?

One evening Bianca embarrassed Ian, not to say Roberta and Denis Grinnell, who had dropped by the house for a drink, by deflecting their questions (about her first year at Wesleyan, the friends she'd made, the final exams that still lay before her) and talking instead of
The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and Mahayana Buddhism; how little people know of such things in the West; how little they want to know.

“It forces you to think, doesn't it,” Bianca said passionately. “I mean, it scares you half to death, the possibility that these beliefs might be right, and ours wrong. Reincarnation, for instance . . . being trapped in what they call the cycle of
karmic
illusion . . . being born again, and again, and again . . . and no escape.”

Though Bianca seemed to be making an effort to speak in the usual measured cadences of Hazelton-on-Hudson, like any bright young person hoping to impress her elders even as she learns from them, or, indeed, challenges them, they could see a thin film of moisture on her upper lip, and they could hear her breath. She panted as if she had run to them with urgent and incomprehensible news, to seek them out where they sat, drinks in hand, on the flagstone terrace overlooking the lawn.

“They believe that the soul is still in the body after death. Forty-nine days after death. My God! Think of it!” She shook her head forcibly, as if to clear it. Her eyes were wide, staring, protuberant. “I know it's impossible, but I keep thinking . . . what if she woke up somehow? Mother, I mean. Mommy. In that coffin. In that
box?
That we let them put her in? I know it's crazy and of course it could never be but—well, what if it
is
true?”

The adults stirred in discomfort. Ian made a faint sound as of pain. After a moment Denis said, “I don't see any reason for you to torture yourself like that, Bianca,” in a father's reproving tone, and Roberta said softly, “After all, dear—it
is
impossible.”

“Yes,” Bianca said coldly. “I know.”

Roberta went on to say—for Roberta Grinnell, Glynnis's friend of fifteen years, her closest and dearest woman friend, may have felt something of Glynnis's authority, here, at this moment, giving counsel to Glynnis's daughter, and in any case she was a former psychiatric social worker—“The Oriental religions, Buddhism, Hinduism, aren't they fundamentally life-negating? not life-affirming? Don't they take the position that life is suffering, and that—”

Bianca said sharply, and with surprising dignity, “That's the usual bullshit, reducing systems of complex psychological and epistemological thought to some damn old jargon term. Life-affirming, life-negating. I mean, my God.”

“
Bianca
,” Ian said, wincing.

“I mean, it's just so much more
complex
than that.”

“But hardly a reason to be rude.”

“I didn't mean to be rude,” Bianca said, with a perfunctory glance toward Roberta. “I'm sorry if it came out that way.” She said again, as if someone had challenged her, “It's all so much more
complex
than that, that's all I meant.”

So they talked at length, but disjointedly, Bianca's attention focused exclusively on the men, as if poor Roberta did not exist or were invisible. Oriental religion and Western religion: “organized systems of belief,” “sociopolitical-economic transpositions of interior ‘mystical' states” (to use Denis's clinical terminology), the immortality of the soul, and of course “reincarnation”—whatever the word meant.

Denis thought the concept sheerly nonsense, since it was contrary to all scientific evidence; Ian thought it might be interpreted in two ways—as literal or as metaphorical. (“Not metaphorical! Not again!” Bianca said, laughing. “It's reality we want, Daddy.”) “If literal,” he said, “it
is
illogical and should be rejected out of hand; if metaphorical, and what is meant is genetic inheritance, with all that that signifies of the will's curtailed freedom, then it makes a kind of sense. A kind of tragic sense.” He heard, and loathed, his own voice. Who was he, to speak such words, to make such judgments, and in so pontifical and melancholy a tone, as if knowledge heavily weighed upon his shoulders? . . . Seeing his daughter's disbelieving look he said, “It's a legitimate way of talking about something so mysterious we can't in fact talk about it. Something so terrible we can't in fact . . .” And his voice trailed off, weak, faltering, for he seemed not to know what he meant to say (Ian had of late fallen into his old habit of failing to complete sentences, a mannerism of speech from which Glynnis had presumably weaned him, an infuriating habit, he knew, for it left his listeners waiting expectantly, never quite certain if he meant to continue or if, in fact, he had stopped) “. . . can't in fact comprehend it. Except as metaphor.”

Bianca said sharply, “Look, Daddy: ‘reincarnation' is really beside the point and you know it. What I'm trying to talk about, and what you won't let me talk about, is the living soul in the dead body in the coffin in the ground.” Her eyes were red-rimmed and quick-darting, her mouth damp; she sat on the edge of one of the heavy wrought-iron chairs Ian had painted white the previous summer, leaning far forward, hands squeezed between her bare knees, bare shoulders hunched. Ian saw belatedly that she was wearing a batik wraparound skirt that had once belonged to Glynnis: orange, green, yellow, brightly tropical in its colors. Her sandaled feet, long, narrow, bare, white, were set flat upon the flagstones with a look of enormous tension.