Breakfast With Buddha (3 page)

“You know what you need?” Jeannie asked, after a while.

“What? To drive my loony sister to North Dakota and back?”

“Yes, but before that. You need to retire early and go upstairs with your extremely affectionate wife.”

FOUR

Sometimes, after making
love with Jeannie, I’d lie there beside her and feel as though the multifarious complexities that surrounded our life had been whisked away like particles of fog on a warm wind. Mind would be clear, body at peace. A fresh optimism would bloom along the windowsills of the bedroom, laying its frail, scented wreath across the sheets and pillows, and I would be clear-minded and capable, and what had to be done would be obvious, and my ability to do it beyond doubt.

That, or something like it, is what happened on the night I’ve been describing here. Before the lovemaking there was the sour taste of obligation postponed, there were the stunted conversations with the kids, two of the three people I love most on this earth, and there was the patio sadness yawning off toward a meaningless eternity.

After the lovemaking there was the calm understanding that the trip to North Dakota would be only ten days, two weeks at most, that my odd sister was a good-hearted soul. Jeannie and the children would survive perfectly well without
me. Little chance I’d enjoy the trip—even postcoital calm doesn’t turn a tree root into a truffle—but it seemed at least possible that, by getting so far away from the ordinary routine, I might gain a new perspective on things.

It was a wonderful feeling, really, that sleepy, sure state. I think sometimes that our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest.

I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port? But those strategies—injecting heroin, say, or spending eighty hours a week at the office—work for a time and then stop working. Eventually the bill comes due. It occurred to me, as I faded toward sleep, that, while I wasn’t addicted to anything (well, good food, perhaps), I had devised a strategy of my own, a weaving together of favorite pleasures—food, family time, sex, work I enjoyed, tennis, vacations, TV, reading. They made a harmless enough tapestry, a pretty landscape of pleasure speckled with moments of selflessness, annoyance, worry, fear. But it was a strategy all the same, and it had started to wear thin, and then my parents’ dying had punched a hole in the worn section. That night, I had the feeling there might be something on the other side, waiting to show itself to me.

All through spring and half the summer I thought about
that “something,” wondered, pondered, let the episodes of doubt wash over me and leave me slightly less steady on my feet. I knew I’d have to go to North Dakota, but all through May, June, and part of July I was somehow able to pretend to myself that it would be a quick, easy, painless errand, just a tiny glitch in the predictable pattern that was my life.

FIVE

In New York,
over the course of the month of August, you go from the feeling that summer will never end, to the feeling that it has. But before it ends, the publishing world slips into a kind of hibernation: the more successful editors, agents, and authors flee Manhattan for the Hamptons, the Vineyard, the Cape, the Berkshires, Upstate. Skinny sons go out for football and come home starving, scratched up, elated. Daughters work the mall job and the babysitting job and are lulled to sleep at night by visions of their very own car. Suburban wives garden and chauffeur, shop and cook, and lie in the sun at the tennis club pool. And suburban husbands, of course, naturally, it goes without saying, pack up one of the family cars with a suitcase, maps, a couple of sport coats, and head off, where else? To the prairies of western North Dakota.

It was an uneventful leave-taking. Just after breakfast I knocked on Anthony’s door and stepped into his “own private space” to say good-bye, only to find my son all but
unconscious on the bed, face down on the sheets in nothing but a pair of blue Bronxville Broncos gym shorts. Natasha was away on a lucrative four-day babysitting junket for friends of neighbors who had a house on Block Island and tow-headed boys who could shout “GIVE IT TO ME! NOW!” in three languages. And Jeannie was off making breakfast for a friend who’d had some kind of stomach surgery and could not yet cook or drive. We’d had a nice meal the night before (shiitake risotto and chocolate pudding), and said our good-byes then, so I was set for the road. Still, I procrastinated just a bit, waved at my son’s backbone and said a silent farewell, took my time going downstairs.

The refrigerator hummed. A lemony morning light fell across the tablecloth, touching a vase of homegrown flowers there and the scattered pages of the
Times
. So thoroughly had the domestic life enveloped me over the past, what, twenty years, that I felt, once I’d at last closed the back door behind me and was striding toward the driveway, that I was peeling away several layers of skin and setting off into America’s dusty center in my bare raw flesh.

But I went. Out the driveway. Right on Palmer, through the center of town, and then down Highway 87, past the Hall of Fame for Great Americans, along the Harlem River, and over the George Washington Bridge. I was headed toward the city of Paterson, New Jersey, where Spanakopita Cecelia lived. My sister, the odd duck.

There was the excitement of the road, there was the sadness at leaving Jeannie and the kids and Jasper behind. There were the miles of crowded expressway. And then, as I took the Main Street exit (
PATERSON: MAKING EVERYONE WELCOME
, the billboard said) and turned into a Latin stew
of discount shops and grand old buildings and went past the Greater Faith Church of the Abundance, a creeping dread worked its way up from the soles of my running shoes. Out of embarrassment, I’ve so far refrained from saying how my sister makes her living. Here’s a hint: After working my way through downtown Paterson, I turned onto her street, and there, jutting out toward the road like a garish fingernail, was a lavender and cream sign.

CECELIA RINGLING

TAROT AND PALM READINGS

PAST-LIFE REGRESSIONS

SPIRITUAL JOURNEYINGS

Journeyings,
I thought.
Journeyings
was perfect.

This lifestyle of hers had been a stone in my parents’ sensible work shoes from the day Cecelia moved east and had business cards printed up. Their idea of “journeyings” was to drive to Minot in August for the ox pull at the state fair. Their idea of “spiritual” was a trip to the Lutheran church in Dickinson on Sunday mornings, where they would hum along with the hymns and endure the sermon, have a buffet lunch afterward at Jack’s Café, then drive back to the farm and the real business of life. “You mean,” my father said to my sister once, when we were both visiting, “you mean to say you make a living telling people what they used to be a thousand years ago?”

I pulled in just beyond the sign and drove all the way to the end of the driveway so that the car would not be visible from the street. Foolish, of course, because the chances of anyone in Paterson recognizing my car or me were one in a hundred thousand. Still, around the office I have a certain reputation for being the no-nonsense midwestern type, and
it wouldn’t do to be seen going in for a past-life regression on my first day of vacation.

Before getting out of the car I sat still and took a few slow breaths. I told myself what I had been telling myself all spring and most of the summer, ever since I’d picked up the phone and given my sister the big news that we would be driving to North Dakota together: I would be kind. I would be patient. I would rein in the side of me that wanted to mock and ridicule. I would indulge, to a fair degree, Cecelia’s odd culinary habits. I would remember that she adored my children and that my children had adored her since the days when they could not yet properly pronounce her name.

Ten days. Separate motel rooms. I would be kind.

But when I got out of the car and turned toward the house, I saw that she was sitting on the edge of her shabby deck, barefoot, and that she was not alone. I felt myself flinch.

Cecelia and her companion were not touching, but they were sitting in what seemed to me an intimate posture. I immediately girded myself, tried to keep a pleasant, open-minded expression on my face. My sister got the good looks in our family; I got the good sense. She has beautiful, wheat-colored hair, a large, happy mouth, and eyes—brown like Pop’s—that give off a kind of shine you usually see only in the eyes of young children. There is a kind of structural perfection to her features, if that’s the right way to put it, and it has always made me think of Michelangelo working with marble, and always made other men think of ways they might convince her to take off her clothes.

For better or worse, the number of men (and perhaps a few women, who knew?) favored by that good fortune is not a small number. Which is not a problem for me—I am
the farthest thing from prudish, and, in any case, not one to throw such stones. Before I met and started dating Jeannie I had my wild times, let’s leave it at that. The issue was not quantity, but quality. In high school, when she could have had a date with any boy in the sophomore, junior, or senior classes, her preference was the window-smashing, car-crashing, drug-loving son of the mayor. In college, it was a boyfriend old enough to have personal memories of the Civil War. After college, a motorcyclist with crossbones tattooed on his neck. Then, in this order: a yoga master who bilked the ashram and was chased back to Delhi in disgrace; a dreadlocked bicycle repairman/poet with pet piranhas; a septuagenarian orchestra leader participating in the first studies of male-enhancement medications and not shy about introducing that topic into dinnertime conversation at the Ringling home. It was, I often said to Jeannie, a serial menagerie of masculine misfits.

And we met them all. They came for visits and stayed a night or two, or five. They came for Thanksgiving and Christmas and Fourth of July and Buddha’s birthday. Jeannie cooked for them. The kids loved them (especially Jack or Jacques, the bicycle fixer, who gave them free tune-ups on their ten-speeds, riding crazily around the block in high-speed test runs, hands clasped behind his matted curls, legs pumping furiously as he sang Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry”). To each of them I was unfailingly pleasant and welcoming.

I should pause here for just a moment and say this: I enjoy the variety of humanity. I am not one of these people who wants everyone to live the way I live. What causes more trouble on our troubled earth than people like that? The Homogenists, I call them.
Look at me!
they say.
I’m
happy! I’m right! I’m law-abiding, productive, and pleasing to God! All you have to do is live like I do and we’ll have world peace!

And if you don’t live like them they’ll slaughter you.

I am the farthest thing from a Homogenist. I love my life but I’m not foolish enough to believe that everyone else would love it. Certainly not Cecelia. I just wanted some stable, long-term companion for her, someone the kids could call “uncle,” someone who wouldn’t disappear one day, leaving behind his greasy wheel sprockets, list of metham-phetamine customers, or broken viola strings. My parents had wanted the same thing for her, and it made me sad that they’d died without ever seeing it.

As I walked toward Cecelia and her new beau, I began to think that this time she’d outdone herself, eclipsed her personal record for the most unusual lover. Because, as my sister stood up, and then the man beside her stood up, I saw that he was wearing a dress. Or what appeared to be a dress. A gown perhaps. A robe. The robe was deep maroon with gold or saffron trim and wrapped around him in a mysterious way so that it seemed to hold itself up by magic.

My God, I thought, Aunt Seese is dating the Dalai Lama!

But not really. The robe was messier, and there was something in this fellow’s bearing that reminded me more of a long-haul truck driver than a peaceful monk. True, his head was shaved, but he wasn’t smiling. He was two or three inches shorter than my sister and built like a middle linebacker, with a wide rough face that could have belonged to a man of thirty-five or a man of sixty. It was almost as if he were a combination of all his predecessors: part yoga
master, part biker, with a glint in his eyes like that slimy orchestra guy.

Cecelia swished toward me in her long hippie skirt and hugged me warmly but too long, throwing a little back massage into the bargain. When we finally parted, she hooked me by one arm and half-turned toward the World Wrestling Federation cross-dresser. “Otto,” she sang, “this is my guru, Volya Rinpoche. Rinpoche, this is my darling brother.”

Rinpoche bowed slowly, then brought a thick calloused paw out from beneath his skirts and gave me a crushing handshake.

Cecelia turned to me, cheeks aglow, and pronounced this memorable sentence: “Otto, sweetheart . . . Rinpoche is going on the trip to North Dakota.”

And I, of course, pretended not to hear.

SIX

I decided, as I
sometimes do (I suppose I’ve learned this in business, I’m not particularly proud of the tactic), to delay. Though I had figured on losing only ten days, round-trip, to the North Dakota errand, and though—with the packed car, full tank of gas, and a driving schedule all worked out in my mind—I had an itch to get on the road and put some miles behind us, I decided it couldn’t hurt to linger for an hour or so at Cecelia’s and see if she’d let logic prevail. This was a tactic I often used with her. She would come for a visit all excited about teaching Anthony to knit (because such activities should not be, she said, “gender specific”), or instructing me and Jeannie in the fine art of Wanna-Panna meditation (because she’d just taken it up and it had deepened all her relationships), or training our half-Doberman, Jasper, to eat vegetarian (because it would speed up the “transit-time” of his digestion and help him live longer), and, over the years, Jeannie and I had learned not to confront these initiatives head on. Instead of getting into an
argument, we’d slip Jasper a quarter pound of bacon just before his tofu treat mix, and so on. It was all harmless enough, and I’d figured out that while my sister was consistently wacky, her wackiness was inconsistent, her interests as fleeting as a bumblebee buzzing around your ears. Swat at the bee and you risked a sting; ignore it and let it do its buzzing, and soon it would be off to other pastures.