Dinner with Buddha (29 page)

Thirty-eight

This may sound immodest, but I consider myself a pizza aficionado. As is the case with all my other culinary tastes, I'm not particularly interested in gourmet, just good. I don't care if the maker of the pizza uses artisanal cheese or a whole-grain crust or adds some unexpected topping like butternut squash or andouille sausage; what I care about is that the pizza is made with care and suits my taste. When we used to go to Cape Cod we'd often find these “pseudo pizzas” as I called them—much to the amusement of my children, who ate them with delight and considered me a snob—often made, it seemed, by Greeks (I adore Greek food, and I admire the Greeks' passion for cooking, but I think they should stick to stuffed grape leaves and moussaka and gyro and baklava and leave the pizzas to their fellow Mediterraneans). These pseudo pizzas had thick, doughy crusts and too much cheese. But even the Italians don't always get it right. In Venice on our one visit we found the pizzas to be fairly good but the crust to resemble matzo (again, I love Jewish cuisine, am particularly fond of a good knish, but it wasn't the Italians who fled across the desert and needed unleavened bread). This, in Italy, was a particular disappointment, but it turns out there are, when it comes to food, at least two Italys, and my taste in pizza runs more to the Neapolitan.

The problem with pizza is the problem with driving: Almost anybody can do it, but not so many people can do it well. Lovemaking, the same. Any two people can jump into a bed. Anyone can throw some cheese and tomato sauce on a circular piece of dough and slide it into an oven. But to make the perfect crust (thin, but not too thin, bubbles at the edge, but not too big bubbles), to use real mozzarella so that strings stretch from mouth to table, to get the tomato-to-cheese ratio just right (roughly 3.4 to 2), and most important, to create a pie that is oily without being greasy . . . this is an art form. Whole books have been written on the subject of making the perfect pizza. I know: I edited two of them.

At seven-thirty p.m., after our solitary hour was finished, Rinpoche and I wandered through the main part of the house and out onto the Slot Canyons Inn's back patio, which was pressed up tight against a natural wall of brown stone and covered with a canvas roof held up by poles. There, a young mother named Mandy served us an excellent spinach-artichoke dip accompanied by a just-baked baguette and then a good, perhaps very good but not quite excellent, oven-fired pizza with onions on top. Rinpoche, who had a particular fancy for onions, ate one slice of the pie, and I ate the rest, contemplatively. I badly wanted a beer but I held back, ate slowly, and enjoyed the sight of Roscoe, the inn's Catahoula, who wandered from table to table, begging with great dignity. I slipped him some food, of course. Among my other weaknesses: I am constitutionally incapable of refusing a begging dog.

This particular Catahoula—a breed famous for its ability to hunt wild boar and other mammals and to herd cows—looked like an overgrown beagle, with the same floppy ears and sorrowful eyes. To me, all dogs are irresistible, but Roscoe was particularly so. As soon as we checked in he'd come and sat on the porch outside our door, waiting patiently for a bit of affection. I gave him that, in spades, and gave him bites of the baguette and then a mouthful or two of the pizza.

We also enjoyed a conversation with Mandy. A single mother of two kids, she worked full-time at the electric company and several nights a week at the inn. On that night, her fourteen-year-old son was with her parents, bow-hunting deer and elk. Her six-year-old daughter liked to sleep outdoors under the stars and pestered to be taught to shoot a gun with the same passion that my Natasha had pestered to be taught to drive a car when she was about to turn sixteen. “I love hunting, too,” Mandy told us. “I can't wait to get back out there.”

“This is not New York,” I told Rinpoche when Mandy had left us to our meal. “In New York we tend to look down on people who hunt. It's a savage activity, barbaric . . . and we say this as we're ordering our pasta with venison sausage at some upscale bistro in the West Village.”

He nodded with his mouth full, let out a small grunt.

“We'd no more sleep out under the stars, with all that darkness and all those snakes, than we'd root for a Boston sports team, and yet we think nothing of crossing a Manhattan street while the
DO NOT WALK
sign is on, or going up to the eightieth floor of a building in a metal box.”

More nodding, a swallow, a sip of water.

“Until recently I would have said that the great thing about America, the great and unique thing, is that we're really a dozen countries all sewn together by a fluke of history, and yet we seem to get along well and feel a certain sense of patriotic unity. Lately, though, I'm not so sure. Somehow this awful political divide has formed, a Grand Canyon separating the two Americas. We used to be able to talk across that divide. Then for a while we used to be able to shout across it. Now we're so far apart we just stand on one bank or the other and yell insults up into the air. It worries me, I have to say.”

More nodding. Rinpoche said, “I like wery much what you tell me these things about America, my friend. I like to understand this country.”

“I love the place,” I said. “But I have to say lately I wonder if we might be just another of history's great empires on the downward slope.”

“I don't understand this.”

“All the great empires in history—the Incas, the Aztecs, Persia, Greece, Rome, Portugal, Spain, Britain, the Soviet Union—had their moment in history where they were powerful and thriving, and then something happened and they went into a slide and either were conquered and overrun or just slowly lost their zip, their edge. Slowly declined and ended up either out of business altogether or as just another country.”

“All comes from the mind,” Rinpoche said.

“I suppose.”

“There is the individual karma and the, how you say, collection?”

“Collective.”

“Collective karma. Sometimes, in the collective karma, the thinking makes a change. Seems wery small. Just thoughts in a mind. Just things people say. But with a millions of people this makes in the history a big change.”

“And what can you do about it? I'm not going to run for the senate, not going to start a talk-radio show. If I write a book—which I've been thinking about doing lately, for some reason—it's not going to be a book that changes the collective karma.”

“Everybody has a thing they supposed to do in this life.”

“I feel like I've done it. My thing was to raise good children and I've done that. Since they've gone out of the house I feel empty. Without purpose.”

“Maybe some new purpose coming.”

“Maybe.”

“What book you wanna write?”

“I don't know. About food, probably. That's my area of expertise, more or less. The problem is, after all these years of editing food books I'd have trouble coming up with a new idea. So many areas have been so thoroughly covered. Any suggestions?”

“Write the book about America!”

“Big subject.”

“Sure. But maybe the book to change the American karma. More focus on the world inside.”

“The thought stream.”

“Sure.”

“All books do that, to some degree, don't you think? Maybe that's the whole purpose of the book, moving a tiny rivulet of the communal thought stream a little this way or that way. Every movie. Every song. Every radio and TV show. Maybe every word and every action of every citizen moves it a little this way or that.”

“Big responsibility, being a person.”

“Can make you nuts if you think about it.”

“Sure. Just do the laughing meditation little bit every day.”

We fell silent for a bit, Rinpoche sitting with his arms crossed over his big chest, and yours truly churning through the last two slices of pizza. Just to the left of my left foot Roscoe assumed a new pose—balancing on his spine, belly up, forepaws bent at the wrist, head turned slightly toward me, and eyes wide and pleading. It seemed to me a version of the laughing meditation. “You,” I told him, “have a great future in film.”

“I miss my dog,” I said to Rinpoche. “There's no love like the love a dog gives you.”

“You give food, you touch, you make him not too cold and not too hot and everything okay.”

“And here we are, the master species, wanting ninety-seven million different things to be just a certain way. More oil on the pizza, a green car instead of a black one, a new face, another trip, a granite countertop. Always more money, no matter how much we have.”

Rinpoche flexed his lips but made no other sign.

The words “more money” caused me to think of gambling and to recall, with some pain, the recent e-mail exchange with my sister. The memory of it was something like a bureau-sized alien spacecraft coming in for a landing just on the far side of Roscoe's belly. It sat there, looking completely out of place on the inn's peaceful patio, in the windless desert night, amid talk of deer hunting, communal karma, and the Great American Book. It was impossible to ignore. I hoped Rinpoche would say something to move the conversation in a new direction, away from the alien craft, but he was silent. I fussed with the last crumbs of pizza crust, asked Mandy for a water refill, sneaked glances at a young couple having what appeared to be a contentious discussion on the other side of the patio. At last, I cleared my throat and said, “Um,” and then, two seconds later, “I just had an e-mail exchange with your wonderful wife.”

“Wery wonderful,” he said. “You and me, wonderful wifes we got.”

“You miss her.”

“Big,” he said, spreading his arms wide as if he needed, at that moment, some body-to-body affection. He reached down for Roscoe and lifted the Catahoula onto his lap. Roscoe didn't resist.

“Yes, very good woman . . . except that she wants me to take you to Las Vegas.”

“What is this, Lost Wegas?”

“Las Vegas. It's a city. In Nevada. Maybe, I don't know, five or six hours' drive from here. The problem is, if I had to pick one American city that seems unspiritual, Las Vegas would be at the top of the list. Nothing else even close. Lot of prostitution, drugs, gambling.”

“The machines?”

“It's pretty much where the gambling machines were invented. There are machines in the gas stations, in the convenience stores, in the airport. There are dozens of hotels with casinos in them, huge casinos.”

“I think,” he said carefully, thoughtfully, stroking Roscoe's head, “that Lost Wegas is important for me to know about America.”

“There's no place like it, really.”

“Tomorrow we go then.”

“Okay. Fine. Seese will be happy.”

“The machines,” he said, with a particular glint in his eye. “The other ones, too, we can try. Cards. Like that.”

“Cards, dice, sports betting, whatever you want. I'm not going to worry about it anymore. But, if you lose too much money, please just stop, okay?”

“I win,” he said.

“Yes, so far. But that doesn't always last.”

Rinpoche nodded without much conviction. I was tired of fighting and tried to tell myself that, unless he had massive sums in the bank, or a huge limit on his credit cards, there was only so much money Rinpoche could lose in a day or two.

Still, when we paid and thanked Mandy and complimented the two young men working the pizza ovens and went back to our suite, I sat outside on the deck for a while and looked at the stars and pondered. It seemed to me that I'd become rather passive since Jeannie died. Seese wanted me to go into the mountains with her husband, so I went. She wanted me to go to Las Vegas, so I went. What would be next? Skydiving? Moving to Thailand? Opening a frozen yogurt shop in Dickinson? At that point—it must have been the Froyo idea—the power went out and the inn's lights died. Through the open window I could hear Rinpoche snoring lightly in his sleep and I looked up into the sky and saw more stars than I saw in a year in Bronxville. A nice new peacefulness settled over me. In the midst of that peace I understood that I was a drifting man. It wasn't so unpleasant to drift. I had enough money; I'd never want for food. Yes, I was lonely, but Jeannie had told me she wanted me to date other women after she was gone, and though I'd resisted the idea for two years now, it was starting to seem like something I might try. I wouldn't tell Natasha and Anthony at first, wouldn't get involved in anything too serious. But I'd have some company at least. I could take in a show, a symphony, go out to dinner again without feeling like the Solitary Man every moment of my life. Sex didn't matter as much to me as it once had. And probably it wouldn't be a sexual relationship in any case, not for a while. What I wanted was the company of a woman.

But how else to fill the time? Dating was all well and good, but one didn't date from breakfast until bedtime. Where was my purpose in life now? What was I supposed to do, beyond the meditation practice and keeping the house more or less in order? I'd mentioned the idea of writing a book but, really, that was pure fantasy. There were plenty of books in the world already—food books and otherwise. And probably I didn't have the self-discipline. And, even if I did, it was such solitary work, exactly what I didn't need.