Breakfast With Buddha (13 page)

Yet something nagged at me, some vague guilt.
Compounding
that, was Rinpoche’s reply. Why
did
a person like me do the right thing and not the wrong thing? Fear of jail, divorce, eternal punishment? A belief in heaven? Just in case there turned out to be an afterlife? And for the people who did more “spiritual work” in their lives, who not only didn’t cheat on their spouse or steal from their company or condemn citizens to torture, but spent hours each week in prayer—for those people were there different, higher, more pleasurable levels of paradise?

I sensed I was missing part of the argument. What about those who didn’t do good, for instance, why was that? And what about the issue of death? What was the point of it? How did one prepare for it? I was worrying these questions like a loose button on a shirt when, at last, Rinpoche and a small bevy of admirers spilled out the door.
There must have been two dozen thank-yous there on the Youngstown sidewalk, at least as many bows. The smiles, the shining faces, the childlike adoration—why was it all so irritating?

Finally, Rinpoche said his last good-byes to the beautiful woman in braids, made his last bow, and we were backing out of the parking space and heading out of town on 422, a road I’d found while stewing in the car. Rinpoche had gone totally quiet. This, in my experience, was unusual for someone who’d just given a talk. Part of my editing duties included chaperoning authors to readings when they were in town, and almost always after the more successful ones had read, or talked, after they had basked in the admiration of a group of people for an hour or two, there was a certain postpresentation ebullience, a high. It took them an hour, or a few hours, or in certain particularly egotistical cases, several days to realize they actually belonged to the level of ordinary existence, despite the fact that people periodically asked for their autograph or requested their opinion on this or that cooking technique.

Perhaps I sound jealous here. I am not. I’ve never really had much urge to write a book, or go on tour, to sign my name on something I’ve written, to have a cooking show on television and be invited to start a restaurant in SoHo. It’s just that, over the years, I’ve noticed the effect an hour or two of public admiration has on a person, and I saw none of that in Rinpoche.

He sat staring out the window at the wreckage, dark now, of the city. In time, we passed some factories—enormous, hulking wrecks where things had once been made, where people had once worked and earned a paycheck and spent that money in Youngstown’s shops and stores. Only one of
these factories had lights on and seemed to be still in use. Soon we were out of Youngstown and riding through a commercial strip where things were still more or less intact.

“Hungry?” I asked my companion.

“Not so much.”

“Even after all that work?”

“Not so much work, talking.”

We went along for a few moments in silence, and I could feel the irrational guilt still clinging to me like a smell. There seemed to be a kind of accusation in the guru’s silence. Possibly I had insulted or embarrassed him. “Listen,” I said, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid I was a bit off-base back there. I came on like an attack dog at the back of the room.”

“Attack dog?”

“You know, my questions were pointed. They were a bit strong. Not appropriate. I should have just kept my mouth shut.”

He was shaking his head in the dark car, looking out at the street and not at me. “No,” he said, sincerely enough. “Your question was the best question, Otto.”

It was the first time I’d heard him use my name, and it sounded odd on his lips. “You’re just saying that to flatter me, to make it so I don’t feel bad.”

“I do not flatter,” he said, in a tone rather more forceful than anything I’d heard him use with me. “Your questions were precisely very good. Your answer to me,” he chuckled and touched my arm lightly, “not so very good.”

“I’ll give it some thought. You said I had until tomorrow.”

“Yes. Tomorrow breakfast.”

“Well, I’m hungry. Do you mind if we stop? We have a ways to go if you’re going to make your lecture in South
Bend tomorrow night. I thought we could have dinner and then drive another hour, so we wouldn’t be in such a rush in the morning.”

“Not to rush,” he said.

“Never?”

“Never rush.”

“Right. How about Italian?”

We were passing a place with a sign out front,
ALBERINI’S
, and the parking lot was full, always a good omen. We parked, went in, and were seated in a sort of greenhouse facing the street. The hostess who seated us, I noticed, had beautiful breasts. It was hard not to notice because she was wearing a very tight, low-cut top that seemed designed to display them. Such was my state of mind that I found myself wondering if my noticing them, my small spasm of almost reflexive lustful thoughts—that I knew would lead nowhere, and didn’t want to lead anywhere—I wondered if somehow these thoughts would hurt, however slightly, my progress along the spiritual path. If there were such a path. If it led anywhere I wanted to go. Look too long at a hostess’s breasts and you end up in a slightly less wonderful level of heaven than you otherwise would have.

This, I said to myself, is where all the mumbo jumbo leads. You’ll start worrying about every little thing—Is the coffee free trade? The chicken free range? Should you stop looking at attractive women? Recycle the wrapper of your chewing gum? Should you go home, lock yourself in your room, and pray, as the Bible instructs, without ceasing?

From this mental morass, the busboy rescued me with a basket of fresh rolls. The waiter was attentive, the rolls warm, the menu extensive, the breasts world-class. Rinpoche had spring water with lemon. I ordered a salad to start,
then the duck in a port wine sauce over risotto, and a glass of Pinot Noir. I looked once again at the hostess’s chest, in a sort of childhood stubbornness—no one was going to deny me this small, harmless, aesthetic pleasure—then made myself stop. I missed Jeannie.

The salad arrived with a fine, light, somewhat sweet house Italian dressing that went beautifully with the warmed rolls. The Pinot was just tart enough, plummy and rich. The duck was perfectly cooked, if soaked in a somewhat heavy port wine sauce. But the risotto beneath it, touched with amaretto, fit the dish perfectly. It was awkward, eating in front of someone who was not, and I tried, by apologizing again, by offering him a taste of everything, to work my way free of the guilt that clung to me like a rain-soaked shirt on a humid summer afternoon.

“You are a good man,” Rinpoche said, as if we had been talking about that all along.

“Please, stop with the good man remarks. It sounds false to me, to be perfectly honest. It sounds like flattery.”

“Ah,” he said. “You do not believe you are a good man.”

“Of course I do. I don’t hurt people. I’m a good father, I know that. A good husband. A decent citizen. We do our share of charitable work, Jeannie and I. We give generously to various causes.”

“But something,” he said, and he waved both hands around in a way that he had, as if he were playing an imaginary, upside-down keyboard with floating fingers, the notes not quite beside each other, the piano itself not quite level. “Something missing.”

“No, not really. No.”

“Afraid of some things maybe.”

“Not particularly. I don’t like flying, I’ll say that.”

“Of death,” he said. “Of losing everything.”

“I’m not a death worshipper. I don’t think about it. Life is for the living. What comes with death, well, we can’t control that.” He was nodding and smiling in a way that profoundly irritated me. “Let’s leave it,” I said. “Let’s change the subject.” I took another forkful of the risotto, another sip of the wine, and went on the offensive. “You never had any urge to have children?”

“Of course,” he said. “Sad to me I do not have children yet. I love children very much.”

“Why don’t you then? Vow of celibacy?”

“Sellacy?”

“Celibacy. No sex.”

“Sex, sex,” he said, too loudly. There were people at the nearby tables, and they all heard. It seemed we could not eat a meal in a restaurant without attracting stares. “Rinpoches like sex!”

“Really?”

“Of course. Like women very much!”

“But they would cloud the glass, right?”

He laughed at this as if I were making a joke, and tilted his chin up at the ceiling showing the sinews of his thick neck. “No, no. Women could not cloud the glass, Otto! Rinpoches would have a spiritual wife.”

“Spiritual wife? No sex, you mean.”

He laughed again. “A little bit sex. Not too much. Nothing too much for Rinpoches. Food, sex, sleep, business, giving talks, happiness, sadness . . . not too much.”

“But why? Why only a little sex? Why not a lot of sex if there’s nothing wrong with it?”

“You feel inside when you do something right or when you do something wrong, yes?”

“Yes, sure.”

“I feel inside when I have the right balance.”

“And too much sex would throw you off?”

“Too much anything. Too much meditating, too much talk.”

At this, I fell quiet. I considered the idea of ordering another glass of wine, wanted to—I had no balance problem there—but, thinking of the drive ahead, I refrained. I did savor a piece of tiramisu and a decaffeinated coffee. And then one of the waitstaff was kind enough to suggest a town where we might stop, an hour or so up the road, and a nice inn he thought would be suitable for us. I asked him to pass on my compliments to the chef, on the meal I’d just eaten, mentioned that I edited food books, and the waiter told this to the chef and owner, a man named Richard Alberini. Richard came out for a brief chat, shaking Rinpoche’s hand exactly as if he fit the profile of the typical Tuesday-night customer.

Youngstown, Alberini said, had not so long ago been a thriving place with a strong middle class and a wonderful cultural life. And then the jobs had been shipped elsewhere and the city had begun a long slide from which it still had not recovered. Business in his place had declined, he said, but they still drew customers from all over that part of Ohio. I wondered, talking to him, if the people who had moved the jobs, whoever those people had actually been, ever came back to the city now, even just to drive through. And I wondered, when they did, what kind of feelings they might have, how they would explain the situation to themselves in a way that left them feeling like good people. Profit fed the life we lived, I knew that, and saw the necessity of it. But those people had made a god of profit, it seemed to me,
and according to the rules of their religion, if it was profitable to close the factory and ship the jobs overseas, then it was morally right. In order to keep from feeling guilty, they had, I supposed, devised all sorts of ways of thinking about what they did and didn’t do, all sorts of clever rationalizations. It occurred to me that, in a different arena, I might be in the habit of doing the same thing.

SIXTEEN

The place where
we ended up staying on that warm night—the Inn of Chagrin Falls in Chagrin Falls, Ohio—was a few miles off Route 422, down a dark road, tucked behind a town we caught only a glimpse of as we drove in.

The young woman at the reception desk was perfectly welcoming, though Rinpoche flinched when he heard the price of our rooms. I resolved to find a way to take the financial burden of my luxurious tastes off his shoulders. He lingered in the first-floor library, perusing the shelves of books there. We said good night, exchanged bows; I went off to my well-heeled solitude.

Whereas, at the General Sutter Inn, which had zero pretensions and simply was what it was, the creaky floors, patched ceilings, and undersized TV didn’t matter to me in the slightest, the small imperfections at Chagrin Falls nagged like an aching tooth. Unfair, of course, because it really was a very comfortable place, the room cozy and cool, the pillows abundant. But chief among the small imperfections was some kind of air conditioner or air filter
machine located outside my window. It hummed loudly until midnight. I was sitting at the glass-topped desk trying to compose a letter to my son, and then, a while later, lying in bed trying to make sense of the day, wondering about internal balance and sex and food, and all the while this loud hum cut into my thoughts like a talkative neighbor on a long flight.

Just a sour mood, probably. I wrote to Anthony and tried to keep my irritation out of the letter.

Dear Anthony,

How goes it? How is practice going?

I thought that, while I am on the road, I’d take the chance to write real letters to Natasha and to you, something I don’t think I’ve ever done in my life. I know you don’t want me gushing about things like this, certainly not in person, but I just want to tell you that you and your sister mean everything to me, to your mother and to me. In these years, when the two of you are really growing into your own lives, there are going to be some tensions between you, and between you and your parents. This can be hard, but it is natural. During these moments I just want you to remember that I love you and your sister more than anything on earth, that Mom and I are proud of you both, and that you’ve made us happy from the moment you were born.

Aunt Seese sort of tricked me into making the drive with her spiritual teacher, I guess you could call him. Decent guy, a little weird, quiet most of the time. I find myself resistant to the type of things Aunt Seese is into, as you probably know. They are not bad things,
they are just not for me. (I’d like to hear your thoughts on this when I get home.) So her friend—he’s called Rinpoche, which is a term of respect, as I understand it,
RIN-po-shay
—and I have had a few moments of our own, if you know what I mean. Maybe you’ll meet him someday.

Anyway, I hope school and football are going well, and I look forward to seeing you again and telling you about the trip in a couple more weeks and hearing about what’s been going on with you.