Breakfast With Buddha (17 page)

We were passing through Monroeville at that moment, a tiny little burb. In a parking lot to our left there was a police car with blue lights blinking and a policeman standing on the tar, and, opposite him, there was a large man with reddish hair and sideburns and a goofy, drunken smile on his face, as if what awaited him was not handcuffs, the local hoosegow, and a DUI conviction, but an invitation to the officer’s home for dinner with the wife and kids.

“They think the country’s gone to hell,” I said. “They think America isn’t living right. They think God is going to punish us if we don’t straighten out, and that, until God himself arrives on the scene, they are the ones who can do the straightening.”

“Ah.”

TWENTY-TWO

We pulled into
South Bend, Indiana, in early evening and not far from the highway came upon our lodging for that night, a place called the Inn at Saint Mary’s. If nothing else, my chauffering of the Rinpoche was giving me a look at places I otherwise would have whizzed right past. Plus it was saving me a bit of cash here and there: the people who’d invited him to talk at Notre Dame had set us both up at the Inn at St. Mary’s with very nice suites, all paid for, thank you. Accustomed as I had become to the high-finance accounting that goes with suburban life—the bills, the donations, the taxes, the cash outlays for ballet dresses, football cleats, and granite countertops—I found myself wondering how Rinpoche, as we say in the book business, worked his numbers. I knew from Cecelia’s letter that he had not been paid for the Youngstown talk, but would be paid handsomely for this one. Did he demand cold, hard cash for the dispensing of his wisdom? Or did he get paid by check and just walk into a bank and say, “Hi, I’m the famous Volya Rinpoche, would you mind cashing this for me even though
I don’t have an account here?” and then fold the
dinero
into the sleeve of his robe and produce it whenever he wanted to chip in for gas (which he did, against my objections) or buy a postcard (over which he would lean, and with great concentration inscribe a message to my sister)? Did he have a nonprofit foundation? Patrons? An inheritance stashed away in a bank in Ulan Bator, from which he periodically ordered drafts? I wondered what percentage of my interior life was spent thinking about money and what Rinpoche would have to say on the subject, but I did not ask.

By this time he and I had developed a traveling regimen. When we stopped for the day, if we were both having dinner, we’d first go to our separate rooms and give each other an hour of alone time, one of us meditating, the other flipping through TV channels, taking a shower, or lying on the bed and going through a long-ago-memorized routine of stretches designed to ease an aching back. My suite in South Bend was on the first floor, two large rooms, two televisions, a couch, desk, and king-sized bed, very clean, fairly quiet, with a strong shower and tan striped wallpaper marred only by not very original drawings of Notre Dame dormitories and classroom buildings. Probably they got a lot of ND alums at the inn, down from Michigan or over from North Carolina for the big football weekend, and the drawings of Father Mahoney hall, or whatever, summoned memories of the good old years. It occurred to me in one of my many fruitless musings that if the term
religion
were defined more broadly—and I believed it should be—then the real religion of Notre Dame would be not Catholicism but football. After all, did they get a hundred thousand screaming fans for Mass on a Sacred Sabbath morn? Did the parishioners come early for the service and set up barbecues
in the rectory parking lot? Return year after year to relive memories of a favorite sermon? Buy pennants, sweatshirts, and bumper stickers with the name of their church emblazoned on them?

And then, in the midst of this somewhat irreverent reverie, I wondered what my own religion might be. If I defined it that way, that broadly, as the primary focus of my thoughts and passions, what would it be? Family life, perhaps. Our sacred rituals would include eating meals together, going to Anthony’s piano recitals and Natasha’s soccer games, walking Jasper by Sprain Brook, the annual trips to the Green Mountains in winter and Cape Cod in summer; like the so-called Christians on the radio shows, we were engaged in a continual debate about rules and transgression.

Or maybe I belonged to the First Church of Good Eating. Or work. Or sex. Or money. What occupied the very center of the stream of thoughts that ran through my gray matter night and day? What was the deepest pool in which the largest fish cruised and fed? Or should I use the Hindu model, with dozens of gods and goddesses—Jeannie, Natasha, Anthony, my parents, my boss, my tennis partners and friends, my sister, sex, food, swimming, work, bank balance, reading—each presiding over their precinct in the Greater Realm?

Joke about it, fine,
a little voice in me chirped.
But try answering the question, Otto. What is the main current in the river? If you had your own talk show—God save America from that—what would you rant about? What do you care about most?

Lying on the bed in the nice suite, with the hot Indiana day easing into evening beyond the curtained windows, I
gave the matter some serious thought. And what I came up with, to my own surprise, was love. It was the only answer that held up. Love—of Jeannie and the kids, of Jasper, our wonderful mutt, of work, of eating. There was my next career. I would be the national radio voice of the Love Party, somewhere left of the Democrats and right of the Republicans, far out in space.

I’d be the Rush Limbaugh of Love, the Jesse Jackson of Love, the Michael Savage, the Jerry Brown. Callers would dial the 800 number and tell me how much they appreciated the show, how I was the only voice in the country talking any sense, how those awful, no-love types had ruined the America we adored, and how it was our duty to take it back from them. Twenty minutes out of every hour there would be commercials for medications, for investments, for enlistment in the Peace Corps. We are the few, the proud, the volunteers in Zimbabwe.

But can’t you,
the voice chirped,
answer the question in a serious way? Isn’t mockery the province of the insecure? Isn’t that what you do with Rinpoche and Cecelia, in your heart of hearts, make fun of them because something in their way of thinking threatens you, or at least challenges your assumptions?

Instead of dealing with that question, I started thinking about food. I took a shower, wondering the whole time what we might find for dinner there in the flat cornfields north of Indianapolis.

Rinpoche’s talk wasn’t scheduled until nine p.m., which I thought was an odd hour. The other strange thing was that he’d agreed to go out to dinner with me. I’d expected him to skip dinner entirely and leave me to venture out into the culinary wilderness on my own. But on the drive in
from Ohio he’d said he wanted to find a restaurant and have the evening meal with me before his talk. It was the latest in a series of curveballs.

“Do you really eat meat?” I had asked him.

“A little meat, not too much.”

“Do you mind spices?”

“Spices very good. In Skovorodino we never had spices. When I went to India I discover my tongue.”

I laughed and thought:
What is called for here is Thai. Not too much meat, spicy as you want it. Probably some more-or-less Buddhist statuettes on the walls.
So, at check-in, I’d inquired about the possibility of finding a Thai restaurant in the vicinity, and the young fellow at the desk (who looked as though he appreciated a good feed as much as I did) told us, with a big, proud smile, that there was a place called Siam, right here in downtown South Bend.

“You can’t miss it, really,” he said.

“No, trust me. I can.”

He laughed, and for the first time I really digested the fact that I was back in the Midwest. Not so many good eating choices, maybe (I hoped that had changed), but there was a kind of ease and unself-consciousness between people that seemed to grow like corn in this soil. “Take a right out of the driveway. Follow that road. No turns. You’ll come into downtown and it will be there on your right.”

When I thanked him, he said, “You bet.”

So I was thinking about that as I showered and dressed and ran from the questions of the chirping internal voice. And then I went to knock on Rinpoche’s door. Green curry, I was thinking. Thai iced coffee. Basil fried rice. Pad Thai. Tom yum soup.

Running. Running.

Rinpoche and I went down the first-floor corridor side by side, and through the large, sunlit, sofa-and-chair-filled lobby, where we attracted some not entirely friendly gazes from the dads of freshmen football recruits, in town to watch the August double-sessions.

When we were settled again in the car, stopped at a light on the way to Siam, I said, without planning to: “I bought one of your books in Oberlin when you were talking with the woman in the coffee shop. I didn’t want to tell you. I hid it in the trunk so I could read it when you weren’t watching. I’m a bit ashamed of that.”

Rinpoche liked to ride with his oversized cloth purse between his ankles (I sometimes wondered if it was filled with cash), even though I’d suggested several times that he keep it in the trunk or back seat. It was resting there now. He reached down and unclasped it, fished one hand in, and brought out a paperback copy of
Mending Your Life with Food,
by Jersey L. Rickard Jr., a book I’d edited. It had been released two summers earlier, sold 88,000 copies in hardcover, and earned the author close to a quarter of a million dollars in foreign rights sales alone. I looked over and saw him holding up the book—one of my biggest successes—so I could see it. There was an enormous sly smile on his face. My astonishment must have shown because, when the light turned green and we started forward, Rinpoche began to laugh and did not stop laughing until we found a parking space on Jefferson Street, two blocks from Siam.

TWENTY-THREE

My experience of
Thai restaurants, from Miami Beach to Massachusetts, is that the food served in them is of a universally high quality and that the interiors tend toward the Nouveau Plastique. There are exceptions, of course. But Siam was not one of them. A storefront on a crowded stretch of business block, in the flat, staid, if—in a midwestern way—somewhat alluring downtown South Bend, Siam was filled with evening light from tall sidewalk windows and presided over by a crew of waiters and waitresses who seemed to believe that if the water in a customer’s drinking glass fell below the three-quarters-full mark then King Padinpathanrananan himself would appear magically in the doorway and give them a bad time.

They were a friendly, gentle sort, the women black-haired, slim as saplings, and beautiful, and the food they served Rinpoche and me had a healthfulness and tang to it that made
me
realize I had a tongue. What a wonderful cuisine it is! Rinpoche was partial to white rice and ordered a half-portion of vegetarian Pad Thai to accompany it. After
the spring rolls and a full portion of chicken satay, and after flirting for a few minutes with the idea of a green curry, I at last settled on a main dish that included tender pieces of chicken, carrots, cabbage, green peppers, and onions in a gingery sauce.

At the table closest to ours sat a man with one of those ear buds, and he was talking, apparently, to his young daughter, going on and on with her, obviously very much smitten with fatherhood. “Sure, sweetheart. And I’ll be home day after tomorrow. I miss you more than anything. Here’s a kiss for my little pumpkin.” And so on. It reminded me exactly of my younger self, precell days, standing at a payphone outside a conference in Dallas, with booksellers from all over the Southwest waiting their turn, and Natasha on the other end of the line, asking how many days till I came home, how many hours, how many minutes was that, Daddy? And me thinking nothing else mattered, not sales, not marketing, not publicity, not anything at all but keeping this innocent happiness in her voice for as long as we possibly could.

The interesting part was that Rinpoche could not see the ear bud, and so, from his angle, the happy and well-dressed father appeared to be talking to himself, or to his Shrimp Pwangathang, saying, “Yes, sweetheart, I love you, Daddy loves you,” in a low voice. I could see that Rinpoche was watching, and I knew him well enough by then to understand that he was struggling between his ordinary urge to laugh at everything and some sense he was beginning to have about Americans, that there were places and times where laughter might be deemed childish, even offensive. The muscles of his face were working as if his skin covered a colony of ants under siege. “My little pickpocket,” the
man beside him went on, stirring sticky rice with the tines of his fork. “Daddy’s going to come tuck you in tomorrow night.”

Rinpoche could barely contain himself. His lips were twitching. There were tears forming at the corners of his eyes. At last, he could no longer stand it. A one-syllable laugh escaped him. The man looked over, the ear bud peeking out, but it was too late. Without excusing himself, Rinpoche got up and left the table, made straight for the entrance, and I saw him there on the sidewalk beyond the glass, doubled over, his wide maroon ass pointing back at me and the happy dad. Laughing and laughing, hands on his knees, folds of the robe shaking, passersby stopping to see if he needed assistance. . . . He really was not quite normal.

By the time the entire Siam experience was finished, it was twenty-five past eight, and I thought it made sense for us to get over to the lecture hall so Rinpoche could see if he liked the setup. Out on the sidewalk, I took Cecelia’s letter from my pocket and checked the name of the hall and the time. The event was being sponsored by an organization called Catholics for Interfaith Dialogue, which sounded promising, though I wondered, as we drove to the sprawling green Notre Dame campus, what kind of organization would have their feature lectures at nine o’clock at night.

We drove down a long driveway onto the campus, parked, and asked the first person we saw how to get to O’Malley Auditorium. It turned out to be a five-minute walk from the neat, bland, pale-brick building in front of which we stood. When we arrived, the door of the auditorium was locked and there were no lights on inside. The entrance was rather
grand—three glass doors, carved stone archways, trimmed shrubs to either side of the cement walk.