Dinner with Buddha (27 page)

“And at you,” she said. “You're a boor!”

“Stop making excuses for his inconsiderate behavior.”

“God!”

Rinpoche rapped his knuckles on the table like a judge with a gavel. He was smiling again but it was a rueful smile this time, lined with sadness. “Everybody angry now. Now we sit for the last ten minutes and you go to lunch five minutes late. Sit quiet. We look on the angry in ourselves. We see maybe that it comes part from us and part from the other person. We can say words. We can say, ‘You were late, no good!' Okay. Maybe next day the person on times. But now we look on the part in us that we have control, okay? Ten minutes. Then big lunch!”

The audience sat in something like silence for five or six minutes. There was some coughing and shifting about, and for a little while I was distracted by it. I was thinking that, given another few exchanges, the therapists might have come to blows, the room taking sides on the question of Rinpoche's lack of professionalism. There would be shouted accusations, harsh words, perhaps even fisticuffs. A few of the attendees might get hurt. The
Moab Times-Independent
would run a headline:
CONFERENCE ON SPIRITUALITY ENDS IN HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT. SHRINKS DUKE IT OUT AT RED CLIFFS.

But then I did what Rinpoche had asked me to do. I looked into my part of the anger, not Jeannie's part. She had been late, yes. Inconsiderate, yes again. It had been right for me to speak to her about it, rather than stifling it and cooking in an oily resentment for all of our married life. But had it been right to be
so
angry? Was it to be excused with the classic, “Well, I'm human”? Or “She deserved it”? Or “Maybe next time it will make her think twice about being late”? I looked deeper. I seemed then to be able to set the question in the midst of the quiet room of . . . my
stupa mind
was the way I thought of it. There it sat, the thorny ball of my old anger, still twitching, long after the object of it had left this world. Just looking at it that way made me feel a certain power. I had set aside the question of whether or not it was justified. I was observing it. I was wishing I could have observed it then, in those moments, and felt this power, instead of the semi-frantic powerlessness I'd actually felt. I wondered if it might have made a difference, if Jeannie would somehow have
heard
me when I spoke from that quiet place, instead of in anger. I wondered if it would have upset the kids less. I breathed in and it was clear to me that it was next to impossible to pray while being angry. I breathed out. I felt stronger. I felt an urge to drive through Midtown Manhattan in Friday rush hour and test that new strength and patience. I smiled at that thought, at the image of myself driving Seventh Avenue at five p.m. as a spiritual test, the calm cabbie as bodhisattva, and I heard the great master say, “Eat now, my friends. Sorry to making you late.” And just about half the room erupted in applause.

Thirty-four

After lunch I suggested to my brother-in-law that we drive over to Arches National Park, said to be a place of some of the most stupendous rock formations on the planet. Rinpoche agreed enthusiastically. We packed up bottles of water and small bags of peanuts and dates and set off.

It was thirteen miles from Red Cliffs back into Moab, an extremely serpentine thirteen miles, on Utah Route 128, a heavenly road, certainly one of the great drives one can take in this land of great drives. That road carries you through a million-year-old museum, really, because over millions of years, with enormous patience, the mighty Colorado has cut its snaking path through the sandstone. On turn after turn we were presented with thousand-foot-high, burgundy-colored outcroppings—rounded, massive, proud, so sensuous that you wanted to get out of the car and rub your hands over them. Along that road the river was a hundred to two hundred feet wide, sluicing past dusty, rocky banks, cutting down and down but at the pace of a thousandth of an inch a year. One of these massifs was so huge, so dignified, so impressive, that an odd label for it came into my mind: Headquarters of the Bank of the Underworld.

“Time,” was the only comment Rinpoche made, but it was the perfect comment. This red stillness beneath a bright, still sky was nothing less than a monument to time, its great, mysterious passage. It was a feeling you couldn't get in the East, where the landscape is mostly tree covered, the trees shedding leaves after a six-month lifespan, the trunks standing for fifty or sixty or a hundred years. Yes, the hills were older there—the Appalachians far older than the Rockies, in fact—but you couldn't
feel
the passage of time the way you could feel it on this stretch. You couldn't place your small moment on that giant continuum, or understand yourself to be tiny amid the grandeur.

When 128 met up with 191 the show ended. We cut briefly across a corner of Moab, headed north, and found the entrance to Arches National Park there on the right-hand side. A diorama at the welcome center let us know that the only dangerous species of snake in the park was the miniature faded rattlesnake, and it added the comforting information that “Most visitors who are bitten are trying to catch the snake.” I laughed at that at first—trying to catch a rattlesnake!—then the thought came to me that it was exactly the kind of thing Rinpoche might try. Anthony had told me that when he and Rinp had played golf in Medora, North Dakota, in a river bottom hospitable to rattlers and water moccasins, Rinpoche had gone into the rough after an errant shot and ignored my son's warnings. “Nakes like Rinpoche!” he'd said, or something to that effect. “Nakes love me!”

I made sure to show him the diorama and exact a promise that he wouldn't try any snake catching on this particular hike.

We drove a ways up into the dry hills, the road turning and climbing, surreal felt-hat-gray formations appearing now and again to either side. There were arches, yes, and odd rock towers, too. But the landscape was dotted with every imaginable stony shape. We decided to stop and hike through a section called Garden of Eden, which was the home of a dozen crooked pillars. These were citizens of some other world, standing there unsmiling, chins raised, proud as the proudest chieftains. Glorious. Beyond them stretched long views under a heavy sky, the landscape pocked with other proud stone creatures standing singly and in groups. Rinpoche and I hiked for half an hour along dry paths and ended up eventually at a particularly striking sandstone arch that offered a view back toward Moab. There, a group of people, an extended family it seemed, was having a conversation in another language. Rinpoche greeted them in that tongue—Italian, it would turn out to be—and you could read the surprise on their faces. Here they were, six thousand miles from home, in a section of the United States not exactly known for diversity, and who should walk up and greet them in their own language but a bald-headed
signore
in a maroon robe!

I wandered around on my own, marveling at the sights, drinking them in like a thirsty man. “There is nothing like this anywhere else on earth,” I said aloud to myself at one point. “I wish you could see this,” I said to Jeannie. “I wish we'd taken the kids here and seen this together.”

When I returned to the big arch, Rinpoche appeared to be holding court. The Italian family—a woman about my own age, three thirtyish couples, two small kids—had gathered around him, engaged in a lively back-and-forth. Rinpoche introduced me, and the talk turned to English. Some of them were more proficient than others, but they were all so pleased to be in conversation with us, so warm, so enthusiastic, so remarkably open and friendly.
Are all Italians like this?
I found myself wondering, and I cast my mind back to the one trip Jeannie and I had taken there, to Venice on our twentieth anniversary. My parents had come east to mind the kids—who were near the end of high school by then and needed almost no minding—and Jeannie and I had set off on the one vacation we'd ever taken without them. Venice was, well, Venice. I remembered the food, the feeling of being alone with her after all those years of crowded family life, the feeling of missing our children, our regret at not bringing them, our joy in each other. The churches—in one of which Jeannie sat for a long time in prayer—the canals, the elegant old apartment houses, the food, the food, the food, the prices! Our interactions with the Italians had been limited to brief exchanges in the hotel and in restaurants. We hadn't really gotten a feel for the country and its people, nothing like what I sensed in that circle of happy souls with the shadows lengthening around us and the arches and pillars offering themselves for our entertainment.

Rinpoche was telling them about his meditation center there. Near Torino, he said, one of four he supervised on three continents. “You should come there to see me, to meditate,” he said. They smiled, indulging him. I couldn't imagine them sitting still and quiet.

“What do you think of American food?” I asked, because, though I'd been to Italy only on that brief visit, I'd edited half a dozen books on the cuisine, often finding myself drooling over the galley pages.

There was a diplomatic pause. “Meat, meat, meat,” the woman said, at last.

“Yes, especially in this part of the country.”

“But the meat is
buonissimo,
” one of the younger men added diplomatically. “Perfect meat you have. Perfect.”

“Thank you.”

“We have an inn near Bologna,” they said, “not so far away. You and your brother-in-law should come there. You have children?”

I held up two fingers.

“A wife?”

“She died two years ago.”

There was a general expression of sympathy. Even the boy and girl, who were all of five and seven, made sad faces.

“Come with the children then. Your brother-in-law speaks the perfect Italian. Come see us! We'll make good care with you, you'll see!”

It was impossible not to be infected by their warmth, by the sense that I'd known them for decades.

“I think maybe we come,” Rinpoche said. “I have the feeling we are coming.”

A storm was brewing in the valley. One of the children let out an exclamation and pointed and we all turned to see flashes of lightning there among eggplant-purple clouds, folded and roiling and sliding east. The older woman dug a business card out of her purse, scrawled a telephone number on it, and handed it to Rinpoche, insisting, so sincerely, that he call and come visit, that he bring his brother-in-law and nephews and nieces and wife and little girl. He had to come see them. He must!

“Nice, nice people,” Rinpoche said, as we made the walk back to the SUV. “Lot of people there like that. Friends, you make, wery quick there. Wery good friends.”

“Why haven't you gone back all these years?”

“Too much the flying.”

“You can take a boat. That's how you came, isn't it? Before you met Seese?”

“Boat, yes,” he said, wrapping an arm around my shoulders and holding me that way as we walked. “We going, I think, Otto. Soon. I have the feeling we are going.”

“Count me in.”

“What means?”

“Count me in? It means, ‘include me.' Yes, I'll go. With bells on.”

“What means with these bells?”

“That I'd be happy to go.”

“You have to,” he said. “No choice about.”

A small remark, but it was spoken in a particularly strange tone, not light, not mildly encouraging, but as if I actually, in fact, and very definitely had no choice in the matter.

We headed down past the entrance and off into the wilds of Utah.

Thirty-five

As we drove north on Utah 191 and then turned onto I-70 West, all color leached out of the land, leaving only a palette of dry grays, a stony scene that went on for miles and miles. It was a moonscape, lifeless and somehow unkind, and the unkindness was matched by a radio program on which the host ranted coldheartedly about Muslims and lazy illegals. They seemed, in his mind, conjoined.

“What do you know about Islam?” I asked my companion.

“I like wery much that they say the prayer five times a day.”

“Yes.”

“Keeps you not to forget. And I like wery much the Sufi. This is a part of Islam, mystical part. I like them
wery
much!”

“I remember you had a Sufi book in the retreat cabin.”

“What I like, Otto, is these Sufi people they think you should be human. The full human. Not interested in special things, in big gods coming down, in special meditations, like that. They want that if you married, you are the good husband or the wife. If you work, you do the work the right way, not the wrong way. If you sick, you say, ‘I am sick. This is part of my job now.' ”

“They're into the nitty-gritty,” I said.

“What means?”

“The everyday. The ordinary.”

“Yes! Just do the best nitty-gritty and you okay, man!”

“But they're mystics. By definition, mystics are at least partly into another realm, another world. It comes from
mystery.
We have an image of mystics as being off in a cloud someplace.”

“Is bad, this image. They maybe in the meditation have special feelings, sure, wery special. But what is the point in it?”

“Of it.”

“The point in it, in the special meditations, is then when you come back to be the husband you wash the dishes maybe, you make your wife feel good in herself, you be kind. You love. This is the point. My father used to tell me that he walked around giving. Every time. He give to my mother, to me, to his friends, to his, how you say—”

“Disciples, maybe.”

“Maybe, yes. The young people who come to hear him and learn. Give, give. But not with the big show, Otto. Just like the well. The well gives you water and gives and gives, but no show about, you see?”

“I do.”

“The earth gives.”

“Some places more than others.”

“Sure. But you have the breath now. You have the muscles to move this car, you have the brain to think, you have all the food. Something gives that to you, all the time. You want to try to be like that something.”

“
God
some people call that.”

“Call what you want to call. Something gave you. You give back.”

“And sitting around the house in Bronxville watching the Yanks and drinking Pinot Noir with my gourmet popcorn is not exactly a posture of giving, am I right?”

“You were resting,” he said.

“I was?”

An emphatic nod. “God, maybe, doesn't need to rest, but the Sufi say be human, not God. Human sometimes needs a break, man. After hard work, after raising up the kids, after heavy things happening on you. Little break you took. Now you go back to work.”

“Editing, you mean?”

His laugh was almost scornful, a first in my experience of Rinpoche. He said, after a moment, “Sometime, you know, I think sometime maybe you try to say wrong things on purpose.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Pull over now, on the side.”

“Kind of a bad spot. This is an interstate.”

“Pull now. One minute.”

I pulled over to the far edge of the paved shoulder. Tractor trailers roared past, too close for comfort.

“Stand out with me.”

We got out and walked around to the safer side of the vehicle. The sun was hot without being merciless; the air stirred for three seconds and went still. The ground beneath our feet was gray sand, dust, useless. Rinpoche bent down and lifted up two cupped handfuls of it. “See,” he said, a bit more gently now, but still with a hint of impatience in his voice. “Million years ago maybe this dirt was good to grow the food. Maybe plants here, and the big animals ate from the plants. It made use.”

“It was useful.”

“Million years maybe. Twenty million. Hundred million. Then, finish. Now what you grow in this?”

“Nothing.”

“Good. You had the big house, yes, the good wife. In that house, with that wife, you grow the beautiful children, yes?”

“Exceptionally beautiful.”

“Good. Wery good. Put your hands out like me.”

I held out my hands, together, palms up. “Listen me now, my good friend.” He poured the stone dust into my palms. “Maybe make you sad, but listen. The big house now like this. The editing job, like this dirt, see? Nothing grows for you there. Finish, that life. Now you rested, now you give a different way, understand?”

I nodded, but without a great deal of enthusiasm. This wasn't the model, this constant giving into one's sunlit years. The model was to raise your children, to drive them everywhere they needed to be driven, to counsel them, support them financially, to see to their teeth and health, to speak with their teachers, to clothe them, comfort them, advise them, attend their dance recitals and athletic contests, rush them to the emergency room when necessary, make them costumes for Halloween, shower them with gifts at Christmas or Hanukkah, accept the warm fire of their love, see them off on their own adult adventures and then . . . spend the winter months in Florida or Aruba, take a train through Europe with your wife. Read the
Times
and have dinner with friends; drive up to see the kids, the grandkids, and stay at a nice bed and breakfast so as not to inconvenience them; gather the whole clan on the Cape for someone's birthday. The idea was to relax, to rest, to do a bit of volunteer work, maybe, but basically to suck at the pleasure faucet for your last ten or twenty decent years and then to pass on as peacefully as modern medicine would allow. It was supposed to be like that, I wanted to tell him, because the idea of it being like that had been engraved into the stone at the base of my thought stream. I'd seen dozens of older friends do it. Even my parents and Jeannie's mom had enjoyed their own versions of a stretch of years like that. It was the natural pattern . . . at least for the educated American upper middle. Before I could explain all this to Rinpoche, however, before I could make my small protest, he said, “The editing now, the house,” and pulled my hands apart so that the pile of stony powder fell onto the toes of my running shoes. He looked hard into my eyes and said, “Finish.”