Fraud (6 page)

“Well, I’m black and gay, and I’m proud of it,” says Seagal. The straight, white audience laughs appreciatively and applauds. Racism eradicated, we move on. I find her at dinner that night and tell her how much I admired her question. She thanks me and tells me that she has switched seminars and gone over to the “Freeing the Fire Within” retreat.

Questions of compassion are now left up to the likes of the woman who says, “We had some lamas visiting down in Charleston, and they led us in a meditation where we took on all the pain in the universe. And I had to stop, because there’s so much pain in the universe.” To look at her, she seems no worse for wear for shouldering all the suffering of the cosmos. I forget to thank her. Later she will ask, “If we are all one and God is in us, does that mean we are God?” She poses it quizzically, as if she had a question about schedule B on her taxes.

But her questions speak to a larger truth about the Omega crowd. There is great concern for the universe here, with the skein of fate and predestination that enmeshes everything, and this concern affects even the most quotidian decisions and incidents: Meg bought a Lumina because “the Spirit told me to. And also the name. Lumina? Luminous?” (“Wait a sec! Lumina
does
sound just like Luminous! My God, do the executives at Chevy know about this?”) Behind me in the lunch line, a young woman tells her friends, “So I started to think, Am I gonna hear another song about angels tonight? And I turned on the radio and that song ‘On the Wings of Love’ came on. And you know the first verse is all about an angel, and I was like, I definitely did not plan this. This is so random. And
then
I thought, Maybe it’s not so random.”

Another time, a statuesque Susannah York type, a participant in the “Healing the Light Body” shamanic workshop, rolls her eyes back into her head rapturously during our morning meal. “You know, yesterday I
prayed
for organic yogurt, and here it is. It’s a manifestation!” she says, her voice breathy and awestruck at the mysterious ways of the Breakfast Deity.

But if things are habitually attributed to higher causes, I am hard-pressed to see them redound to higher purposes. I hear a lot of talk about the good karma accrued by being good to oneself, but actual hands-on altruism gets almost no play the entire weekend. When I wonder aloud how, at a weekend devoted to the notion of
bodhicitta
(awakened compassion), it seems curious that there is no newspaper for us to monitor the suffering of the world at large, Meg tells me, “It’s karma.” Meaning, I suppose, that those pesky ethnic Albanians—who that very weekend were being slaughtered—were getting what they deserved. “Besides,” she continues, “you should take a break from all that.” I counter that the casualties of the globe’s misfortunes, the purported objects of our compassion, like the Kosovars, don’t have the luxury of taking a break. Meg immediately holds up her hands in a frightened Stop gesture. “I was told I just gotta say things, so I’ll say that this gives me agita? When things get heavy, I can’t eat? Can we talk about something else?”

Meg’s reaction turns out not to be all that aberrant. The word I most overhear, flying from mouths like spittle, is “intense.” But it usually seems to apply to a massage or a movement class. When I do chance to overhear of a true test of faith and character, one person telling another, “My father died last Christmas and it was fairly intense, so I went to a bereavement workshop, which helped a lot,” the response she gets is, “Yeah, when everyone in the room is facing the same direction and the energy is aligned, it can be a very powerful force.”

The subject of Tibet itself, origin of the weekend’s teachings, is dispensed with in three minutes. A man stands up at the mike and mentions that he heard that the “purpose” of the oppression by the Chinese is so that attention would be paid to Tibetan Buddhism by the world at large. A kind of genocidal PR campaign, ordained by karma: Hitler wore khakis. He relays this information as though he were passing on a handy stain-removal tip.

Even the political T-shirt, that ubiquitous (non-dairy) manifestation of principle, is completely absent, unless a teal garment with the words “Susan B. Anthony” scripted in glitter puff-paint counts. And it’s certainly not because of any text-free clothing policy at Omega. I see endorsements for blue-green algae (“food of champions”), Kiss My Face lotion, several polar bears, and an embarrassment of angels (how random, then again . . . maybe not). The only shirt concerned with others is focused on a demographic so remote as to be politically negligible: “U.F.O.ria.”

Physically, Omega resembles nothing so much as a kibbutz. Intensely green and lovely, its architecture utilitarian and simple, serving everyone. And if relentless navel gazing and self-obsession, practiced simultaneously by very large groups of people, somehow equaled communalism, then it
would
be a kibbutz. Aside from a rather involved busing procedure in the dining hall of having to separate our dishes, cutlery, and compostable and noncompostable trash, the heavy lifting is left up to the young, pierced, dewy, and eminently fuckable staff.

Reading further in my welcome booklet, I see that the Omega Garden is “[b]ased on the raised-bed French intensive method of gardening [and] is the source of many of the vegetables we serve in the Cafe.” This is probably true; it may be a “source,” but it’s doubtful that it’s the bulk, given the garden’s jewel-box size and its hypercosmetic rows of nascent lettuces. It’s like being told that Marie Antoinette’s milkmaid routine kept Versailles in cheese.

A week prior to my arrival at Omega, I was in Disney World with my friend Sarah, where the people on staff are referred to as “cast members”; where we walked from an animatronic display of this nation’s presidents to a simulacrum of Tom Sawyer’s island in under one minute; where, in the middle of lunching on our “Patriot Platter” in the Liberty Tree Tavern, we were visited at table by Goofy, Minnie Mouse, Chip,
and
Dale. Yet it all felt less ersatz than the faux Arcadianism of Omega. There is nothing wrong, I keep trying to tell myself, with people finding relaxation any way they want. Perhaps there is even something to admire in seeking higher truths in one’s spare time. I certainly manage, over the course of the retreat, to have many interesting conversations about Buddhism with many delightful people. Why, then, as I sit in an Adirondack chair under the spreading boughs of a majestic pine tree, a bed of orange poppies beside me, a brook babbling not ten feet away, do I feel as though I am trapped in hell? Funnily enough, Seagal had described hell as being when “you’re put in a place where everyone has the same delusion.”

The collective delusion here is overwhelming narcissism posing as altruism. I have ended up for the weekend at a spa that refuses to call itself a spa; an “institute” with a terror of the world so crippling as to have no newspapers. No surprise, really, had I but taken the time, prior to my arrival, to seriously parse the terms “self-help” and “retreat.” The former unabashedly egocentric, the latter alluding to defeated flight.

The evening’s concerts are held in the Lake Theater, a barnlike structure with a small stage. The overhead light is grimy and yellow and flickering as moths and June bugs ping against the bulbs like rice at a wedding. A young folksinger on guitar and piano is accompanied by her ponytailed husband on bass. The audience is sparse, mostly women, alone and in pairs, the demographic hinted at on the first day. They sit with the studied serenity, the composed posture, that broadcasts for all the world to see “I go to things all the time alone. I don’t mind.”

In Edith Wharton’s
House of Mirth,
the heroine Lily Bart—no longer as young as she once was, the financial promises made to her failing to pan out, her prospects at marriage dwindling daily, has a friend named Gerty Farish. Gerty is also unmarried. Gerty has no annuity. Gerty takes her meals in public dining rooms with other single women. And she does so good-naturedly. Every time Lily sees Gerty, she experiences an interval of panic. Wharton writes: “. . . the restrictions of Gerty’s life, which had once had the charm of contrast, now reminded [Lily] too painfully of the limits to which her own existence was shrinking.”

After a day of angry, dismissive contempt, the blood beats behind my eyes with identification. I am uncoupled by this unexpected Gerty Farish moment in this crowd of women trying to make sense of a world that has ruled them out of hand for the cardinal sin of having dared to remain single past the age of thirty-five. I have sat alone in theaters, restaurants, parks, my back straight, a book, perhaps. I am acquainted with this good posture.

At one point the singer looks over at her husband and they give each other a smile of such amiable companionship, a look of such pleased and secure partnership, that it reaches all of us with the cold immediacy of a slap in the face. It turns out to be true: when everyone in the room is facing the same direction and the energy is aligned, it can be a very powerful force.

By Sunday morning the hall is decidedly sparser—easily one-half of the people are gone or have decided to opt out of poor Larry Reynosa’s relentlessly frequent stretching exercise. There is a picked-over feeling in the room. A buffet down to its garnishes on a soiled tablecloth. “Something very exciting better happen today,” says the couple beside me.

Rinpoche certainly tries. We are told he will lead a special fire ritual that morning in honor of the auspicious full moon. But he is late. As we congregate on the lawn in the hot sun, our numbers dwindle yet further. The ceremony, when he finally begins it, is impressive. A smoldering brazier of pine branches and burning pieces of red and yellow cloth sends a plume of thick white smoke up into the summer sky. Seagal chants the Tibetan verses, which he reads from texts bound up in a beautiful silk and lacquer reticule. The English translation is poetry of exquisite intricacy and refraction, speaking of unknowable worlds of bliss and terror—“The five realms of existence, including one called Hell”—unchartable beauties, nuances beyond our conscious comprehension. We are chastened into silent thought.

Arriving at the dining hall that night, we are informed that there will be an unprecedented evening session. I tell Meg that it smacks vaguely of eleventh-hour bang for the buck. Seagal is trying to make up for his “punctuality issues.” I say this lightly. Meg, whom at this point I would almost sooner saw my tongue off with a plastic knife than have another one-on-one conversation with, says, “Maybe it’s
our
issue. I view this time as a bubble. Maybe we should go with the flow like we’re in a monastery.” Unable to bear it any longer, I say, my voice far sharper than I intended: “Even in a Buddhist monastery—where I’ve been”—a bald-faced lie—“they show up at the time they say they will. I don’t think it’s invalid, having told two hundred people he’d be here at a certain time, for him to show up then.”

I frankly don’t care whether Rinpoche shows up at all. I am at this point thinking only about the next day, when I can take a cab to the Amtrak station and return to that nest of perversion and unenlightenment known as New York City, where the practice (and criminal nonpractice) of empathy and compassion has all the immediacy, importance, and conflicting allegiances of war.

Meg and I are so clearly sick of each other that her attempt at jocularity merely highlights, rather than defuses, her anger at me. “Wait, let me back up,” she says, leaning over toward me with strained Lotus Eater levity, assuming my position in my chair. “Let me learn nonresistance and try to align myself with you.” The corners of her eyes are shining, as sharp and gleaming as rat teeth. It’s moot, as it turns out, because by the time supper is over we are told that the evening session is canceled.

Disencumbered and disenfranchised, our evening suddenly stretching before us, we start to gather aimlessly in front of the Omega café. Larry Reynosa, who has so far addressed us in traditional Japanese martial arts garb, is there in street drag. A few of the seminarians are asking him questions about his life with Rinpoche. The crowd begins to grow, and a de facto evening session led (not surprisingly) by Reynosa begins to organically take shape in the gathering dusk.

On the periphery of the circle, I begin to speak with an older man whom I noticed earlier. “I’m here ’cause my son did a good job on my taxes and I thought I’d treat him to a weekend.” He is dressed in head-to-toe Early Bird Special: athletic shoes with white tennis socks, shorts, Izod shirt snowed with dandruff, and nylon jacket. He has always been a bit of a seeker, he’s studying Cabala in Philadelphia. I ask him what he thinks of this weekend.

“It’s okay.” He shrugs resignedly. “But I didn’t really sign on to spend twenty-five hours a day with him,” he says, indicating Reynosa.

He is a CPA who refuses to use a calculator. He is delighted when I tell him I’m a writer. “Oh, that must be the most wonderful thing in the whole world! That guy, what’s his name . . . James Michener wrote that book
The Drifters,
and I read it at age forty and I freaked out. I’m sixty-six now and I thought, If they can do it, why can’t I? And I disappeared for a few years.”

“Where did you go?” I ask.

“Aw, I dunno.” He sighs, suddenly tired at what a long, strange trip it’s been.

The son is as painfully thin as his father, but weak chinned. At least the latter, despite the alpine levels of dandruff and wickedly long eyebrows, still maintains a Martin Landau handsomeness. We decide to head over together to the evening’s concert. Tonight it’s a woman advertised on the flyers pinned up here and there as having “a voice like dark chocolate.” Her tones are not uncocoalike. She sings a lot of noodly Thelonious Monk numbers to which she wrote her own lyrics. In one couplet she innovatively rhymes “just gotta let loose” with “rhythm’ll make your body loose.” Most noteworthy is her earnest, unsmiling quality; even when she smiles she looks serious: Doris Day at Bennington.

Walking back together from the Lake Theater, we run into a friend of his, also an older Tennis Jew: silver hair, gold chain, athletic wear, tan.