The Empty Chair (34 page)

I was going to miss her, not just for the surreal opulence of the experience she provided but for her passion and intelligence, and capaciousness of Spirit. She truly was unforgettable.

I had planned to leave the next day, though when morning came, one of the staff delivered a string of characteristically charming, seductive, handwritten notes to my tent. (From the inside, one would never have known it to
be
a tent, such was its luxurious construction and design.) Queenie forbade my departure, insisting she still had vital information to impart. What followed came the next evening over dinner. The detail she subsequently provided—that “single, religious detail” alluded to in the foreword of this book—rocked my world,
as Queenie might have said.

I have never recovered, nor hope I ever will.

I got curious about something. A few months after Kura died, I rang the Paris office to speak to his secretary. I was already in possession of the diaries; we just never had any real reason to talk until now. Justine was hired around the time he returned from Bombay so she'd worked for him about 20 years. I gleaned from his pages that they were devoted to each other. Maybe they used to fuck or maybe she just loved him. If she did, that would have gone unrequited, 'cause I was certain he didn't have any love left to give. Not that kind anyway.

After expressing belated mutual sympathies, I casually asked if the chair had ever found its way back to the village. She was perplexed. “What chair?” she asked. I flashed that Kura may have written down his plan without ever having had time to implement it before he died . . . though if
that
were true, wouldn't Justine have read
about it in the diaries? She had all of the volumes at hand too because I insisted she make copies before sending (I was afraid the originals might be lost in the mail en route. I was always paranoid about that sort of thing). Maybe she wasn't the kind of gal to read her deceased boss's true confessions, but feminine instincts told me otherwise. Another possibility was that she
had
read them but was playing dumb because she thought I'd judge her as a snoop.

So I gave her a leg up by tactfully mentioning the very last page of the journal, in which her employer expressed an urgent desire to have a certain courier return a certain chair to a certain province wherein lay nestled a certain village, and so forth. Her voice quavered; she admitted to being so busy with legalities in the wake of his passing that she hadn't been able to “properly” read the facsimile, at least “not all the way through.” I suppose I'd embarrassed her (not my intent), as there were only two options ultimately to be taken
—
at least
committed
to
—
i.e., to read the damned thing or not. But I'd caught her off-guard and now she risked looking like she didn't really give a shit about his posthumous memoirs. The more I downplayed my question, the more lugubrious she became. It got worse by the moment
—
I could hear her barely suppressed panic at having maybe taken a giant dump on her loved one's final request. Now
I
was committed, and walked her through. “Did there happen to be a wooden chair near Kura's desk when they found him?” Again, she was stymied. (The
when-they-found-him
actually provoked a cough.) I bullet-pointed that he wrote in his diary that a chair had been removed
or at least a chair had been
intended
to be removed
from the office closet, and so on and so forth. After a long pause, Justine said “Ah
,
oui!” a bit too stagily but unmistakably thrilled to be in the affirmative mode. There
was
a chair, she said, a very
odd
little chair . . . Was anything taped to it? No, she said tentatively, “nothing to my
knowledge.
” The footfalls of panic returned. Well, I said, maybe it might be good to have a look? Long pause. She said the closet had been “cleaned out” and I knew she regretted the words as soon as they came from her mouth. One of Kura's pet peeves was giving too much information, a lesson she must have learned well but had forgotten in the heat of the moment.
She said she'd look into it “thoroughly”
as soon as we hung up.

Justine called back three days later, sounding truly distraught. She feared the chair was aboard a ship, on its way to America! She added to my confusion by saying, “It
was
in the closet . . . and that fact alone
should
have made it exempt. It should never have been
touched.
O, it's my fault, Cassiopeia, all my fault!” When I asked what the hell she was talking about, I got pitched into a primer on Kura's recycled goods empire, one of whose entities shipped donated clothes and furniture to needy countries that paid by the pound. (Yawn.) Apparently, back when it was politically unpopular, Kura had a brainstorm that the U.S. would eventually be a bigger importer than exporter. As usual, he was ahead of the curve; by the time his theory bore out he had already laid the groundwork. He'd cultivated high-level relationships in Washington for years, delivering full containers to the States at no cost (to his great tax advantage) . . . which was more than I cared to know. But what could I do? Justine was like the proverbial dog on the pant leg. She ended the conversation by swearing that she
would not rest
until she learned the exact whereabouts of that freakin', fucking chair.

Cut to:
TEN WEEKS LATER.

There she was on the phone again, unbearably chipper, unconscionably French. (It was starting to feel like we'd once had a fling that ended badly.) She began by telling me that she'd at last been able to read the diaries straight through. “There was
so much
about
religion that was hard for a layperson to understand, but it was such a moving experience!
Incroyable.
” Her voice cracked. I'm not sure what it was about her that made me want to shoot myself in the head. “It just brought him right back . . . in such an
amazing
way. Like he was in the very
room 
. . .” She told me the diaries should be published one day, “though of course this cannot happen, for obvious reasons.” Then, almost as an afterthought, Justine said she'd managed to track down the chair. “As it turns out, Cassie, there is an
amazing symmetry
to what happened.” By way of explaining her jubilance, she recapped the last part of the diary—his wish to return the chair to the village school, its destination before being wrested from the boy. While she knew the chair had belonged to Kura's guru, she still couldn't seem to grasp the significance of that final gesture. What she
did
know was that the chair had ended up in a school after all, albeit one in America. Hence, her pleasure that her boss's decree had been fulfilled “in a roundabout way.”

Justine declared that she would never have learned of the chair's Stateside migration without the “creative investigations” of “a very interesting man called Quasimodo.” (It was as though she'd forgotten I'd accompanied Kura to Delhi and most likely would have been privy to the name.) She wound up flying him to California, where he reported that the item was indeed part of a shipment of five containers to arrive at the Port of Oakland. Four left the harbor on trains, but the fifth—the only one that held furniture—languished outside a warehouse for six weeks before its contents were trucked to a sorting facility. Records indicated the items remained there another month and were then dispersed to needy schools in the Bay Area. The resourceful
Monsieur Q
had diligently visited every institution on the list, to no avail. He'd even come armed with a Polaroid—Justine found the Land Camera mugshot tucked in the pages of
The Book of Satsang
—but never had the opportunity to compare and contrast. In the end, there wasn't any real proof the chair had been adopted by any school at all, but it was close enough to ease Justine's guilt. For that, I was genuinely glad. Sometime later I received an envelope with a final, eerie souvenir. Justine had thoughtfully framed Kura's photo of the chair, believing it would make a nice memento.

I'd only seen it from a relative distance, swaddled in the darkness of Dashir Cave, but in Paris, Kura had taken a picture under harsh fluorescent lights. Now that I had a closer look, I was surprised by what I saw. Justine was right, it
was
an odd little chair. Its shabby state couldn't hide its provenance—turn-of-the-century Edwardian. (I happen to know a bit about these things.) The armrests were high; they call them elbow chairs. I used to see them on weekend treks with the love that
I
lost. (She adored antiquing.) I wondered how a chair like that would have found its way to the foothills of the Himalayas, though I'm sure they're not uncommon in India . . . probably belonged to some Brit, a bureaucrat who sold it or gave it away, then wound up at a flea market or something—oh look, I'm already coming up with a backstory! Still, it's likely that the explanation was pretty prosaic. But isn't it always—don't you find, Bruce, that just when you think it's simple, the truth reveals itself to be so
crazy-complicated?
Somewhat
of a riddle, I suppose . . . though not exactly Hemingway's snow leopard, is it? I'll bet
somebody
has that story. Good luck finding him.

There are mysteries upon mysteries, no?

I never asked if I could examine any of her artifacts, including Kura's diaries, but for some reason I
did
inquire about the “mugshot” of the chair. She excitedly summoned a helper to fetch a 19th-century Japanese puzzle box made of exotic wood. She moved a series of slats until the top slid open. There were papers inside; underneath them, a photo framed in mother-of-pearl. Actually, three photos:
a large “portrait” of the chair, flanked on both sides by smaller, detailed images. The first was that of its cabriole-style leg, ending in a finely ornamented foot; the second, of an engraved copper identifier affixed to the undercarriage.

The letters were well-worn but you could just make them out
—
the name of a shop, with a phone number:
“Ballendine's Second Penny.” With a shock that hasn't diminished an iota to this day, I came to realize the American guru's chair was the very same that Ryder used to hang himself.

In 2010, Charley gave me the account of his son's death. I heard Queenie's story five years earlier, and had been haunted by it ever since; my mind had ready access to its many details. So the moment Charley mentioned the name of his wife's parents' shop
—
Ballendine's Second Penny—everything started to click. We can presume that the cheap-looking, provisional dog tag featuring the merchant's name fell off somewhere between Paris and Berkeley; after all, it was fastened to the cane, most of which had already disappeared by the time Kelly came across it. (God knows how it held on during its life in India.) Otherwise, I would most assuredly have heard about it from Charley.
It would have been a very big deal
indeed
that an item from the “Second Penny” would have reappeared in such a way
—
like the proverbial dog traveling thousands of miles to come home . . . and an even bigger deal that Ryder would have jumped from it.
15

As earlier explained, the chronology of narratives was reversed for dramatic considerations; in a sense, Queenie's story was
the “second guru” in that (for me) it truly did make sense of the first, in ways both figurative and literal. And I suppose I naturally resisted the linear approach, not only because it goes against my grain but because some key plot points
—
the dog tag; the chair winding up in Berkeley
—
might have interfered with the reader's absorption in Charley's moving chronicle, even telegraphing what was to come. The last thing I wanted was to rob anyone of a hoped-for frisson.

I often find myself musing along the same lines as Queenie. We know how the chair journeyed from India to Berkeley yet the story behind its voyage to Dashir Cave from a defunct antiques shop in Syracuse that occasionally bore a “Gone Fishin'” sign will never be known.

But as the lady said, there are mysteries upon mysteries.