A Single Eye (19 page)

Leo continued to wheeze. The soup continued to cool. I busied myself bringing in wood and attempting to start the fire, concentrating on leaving air space underneath. It took me nearly every bit of newspaper in the room to get the logs to catch. I had the impression Leo opened his eyes once and made a soft appalled sound but I couldn't be sure. When I turned around his eyes were closed but he was facing me. I suspected I, too, had been making soft grumpy noises. But when the logs began to burn and I could actually feel the fire cut through the chill in the room I was flying high.

“If only we had marshmallows,” I said aloud.

Leo's eyes flickered open. I took that as a good sign. “I've brought you soup from lunch. It's lukewarm. I could put it in your teakettle and heat it over the fire.”

Leo groaned. It was the same sound as before, only louder. “Kettle's for tea.”

“Okay, then let's eat it as is. You feel well enough to sit up?”

He nodded slowly. I don't know whether I was more surprised or elated. I knelt behind him and pushed him up. He was solid for a little guy. Sitting, he automatically crossed his legs, and I tucked the top blanket around him.

He asked, “How long have I—”

“—been asleep? It's work period. Afternoon tea will be in about an hour.”

“You go, then.”

“We'll see.”

“Go,” he said in his roshi voice.

I nodded, figuring I'd decide later. Now that he was upright, he looked weaker, paler. I was afraid he'd drop the soup bowl and sodden lumps of cauliflower onto his blankets.

He must have had a similar thought. He said, “Just broth.”

I poured, and we consumed, he sipping tentatively, me watching him between big gobbled mouthfuls. I ate my soup, his rejected vegetables, and three slices of bread and had hope of a cookie at the end of work period. He sipped as if checking his innards after each swallow to make sure of the next bite's welcome. He was eating, but he wasn't talking.

I wanted to say, “What the hell is going on in this place? What do you
think
happened to Aeneas? Maureen called him the devil. What did Aeneas do when you took your eye off him? What were you all hiding? Not only that but what about the purloined Buddha that reappeared? And why did you leave the altar empty during the opening ceremony? And the biggie: Why did one of your own students poison you?” But shaky and stubborn as Leo looked I'd be lucky to get one answer out of him, and, I was guessing, it wouldn't be to any of those pointed questions. I waited till Leo put down his bowl.

“Roshi, you said I should be your eyes. There's a lot going on here. For instance, you've been poisoned. So, who should I be watching?”

“Watch yourself.”

“Roshi, I'm not asking a Zen question, I need practical advice!”

He caught my eye and said nothing. His silence said: Zen is life as it is; what can be more practical than that? But I didn't have time to deal with that, not now.

Before I could adjust my question, he said, “You're upset. Why?”

I stared at him as if he was crazy. “You've—been—poisoned!”

“No. Something else. Something personal to you. What?”

I flushed; I could feel my face flame as red as my hair. Was my pique that obvious?

“Gabe said he brought me a letter, left it on my bed. But Amber said there was no letter. If she had seen a letter she would have tracked me down and demanded I read it aloud to her. Gabe must have put it in the wrong cabin. Now I won't get it till dinner.”

“What does it say?”

I stared, shaking my head. I might as well have Amber for a teacher! “Who's it from?”

“Leo,
Roshi
, I don't have the letter. How could I know?”

He tapped his head.

I shrugged.

“Help me lie down.”

I thought he meant: end of discussion. But when I shifted him back down he was dead weight and I realized how weak he really was. I tucked the blankets back around him, stoked the fire, dealt with the chamber pot, packed up the dishes, and started toward the kitchen.

People were settled into their tasks now, shaking out the mats on the zendo porch, shoveling rivulets of mud that had overtaken the paths. Work period provides new and often foreign venues in which to observe one's reactions. The path shoveler, a lawyer from Vermont, was having the opportunity to see his hour as not merely non-billable, but as a nuisance to everyone who needed to cart supplies along his path. As a member of the landscaping crew wheeled his barrow by, the shoveler was able to experience being the victim of a splashing with no recourse, legal or even verbal. In a similar position I had managed to nurture a rage for an impressive number of days, until, quite suddenly, I had realized that stopping work, stepping back, even being splashed were as much parts of the job as the shovelfuls of mud. After that, I'd viewed egotistical directors differently, taking their unnecessary demands and nuclear tantrums as all part of being a stunt double. In theory, anyway.

The Vermont lawyer stepped aside silently as a gray-haired guy with a less lowly job bustled by with his supplies. But by the time I came abreast, he let out a mighty sigh and made a show of sweeping back his shovel, sending a spray of water over his feet.

I didn't laugh, not from virtue but because I was still fuming at Leo and his bizarre reaction to my letter. My feet were smacking the wet path with each step, sending angry sprays in their wakes. The bowls rattled on the tray. At the bathhouse I stopped, took a deep breath, and determined at least to
appear
under better control. Veering toward the kitchen I walked more slowly, listening to the rain tapping on my shoulders.

Somewhere between bathhouse and kitchen it became clear just what Roshi meant about my letter. The letter could be anything! It could be an offer to change my long-distance phone coverage, to contribute to NOW, subscribe to
Harpers
for twelve dollars a year.

That was all Roshi had meant.

Or was it?

Life is illusion
.

I stopped dead. A guy with his parka hood drooping low on his face smacked into my shoulder, mumbled, and rerouted himself.
Life is illusion
is one of the basic Zen tenets. I had created my own illusion, and now I was racing around acting on it. A better Zen student would have taken time to let this discovery sink in. I, alas, was not that student. I couldn't resist trying to answer Roshi's practical questions. Who did I think my letter was from? What did I think she was saying?

She
was saying.

I started to laugh and then almost choked.
She
could only be my mother. Mom, why did I think it was from Mom?

But the letter hadn't come from San Francisco. Gabe had been sure of that.

I smiled. Knowing Mom she would have figured a letter mailed in San Francisco would linger a day from box to post office to main post office before even crossing the Golden Gate. She'd have maneuvered to get it to a post office north of the Gate to give it a head start. There might have been a lunch in Sausalito with my sister, Katy, inasmuch as they were going there anyway.

Two women squeezed by me on the path. I stepped off it into the mud. My running shoes squished into it; I ignored it. Mom was the only one who would worry about her tough stunt-double baby up here in this strange place. Mom worried about anyone who had to venture beyond the San Francisco city limits.

No, wait, that wasn't right. The letter in my illusion wasn't filled with worry, it bubbled with urgency, something she could tell only to me. Mom had worked hard to be a good parent to my older siblings and their success had rewarded her. But I was her child of menopause, her “joke from God,” and lots of rules got jettisoned in my upbringing. Each of my sisters had had to cook one dinner a week solo. But I got to help Mom and grump and gossip and share secrets the other kids never guessed she had. What couldn't she wait to tell me now? That, I didn't have to ask myself twice. I was smiling again. She was telling me—again—about the Big Buddha Bakery on Irving Street. Thirteen or fourteen years ago, when I was living in Chicago, I'd said was I going to check out a Zen center and she had sent me a newspaper clipping with a picture of the green, big-bellied Buddha painted on the bakery window. I was twenty-five and outraged, and more so because I feared I would be sacrilegious to crumble up and toss a picture of the Buddha. When I flew to New York to sit my first sesshin with Yamana-roshi, Mom couldn't resist a later shot of the Big Buddha, who had lost some of his paint by that time. I had barely moved to New York to become his daily student when a copy of the picture arrived with a note saying, “In case you don't remember! Laugh.”

I stepped back onto the path, squishing with each step now, still smiling at the memory—no matter what the letter really was, it couldn't warm me as much—and yet, it left me out of focus. I was here smiling at the thought of Mom and her sweet idiosyncrasies, and at the same time, I burned with the same indignation I had when I was twenty-five. There had been some scandal about the bakery but Mom had only mentioned that in passing, because what amused her was the big-bellied olive green Buddha painted on the window of the bakery. Mom had remarked, dryly, “That shade of green is an unfortunate color for an eating establishment.”

I washed out Roshi's and my dishes in the kitchen, amidst students slipping in for shots of caffeine before the afternoon sit.

“Did you find your letter?” Amber whispered as I was putting the bowls away.

“No, but I can imagine what it was.”

“What?”

I could see in her face what Roshi must have seen in mine, the letter taking intriguing form in her mind. But his teaching was for me, not necessarily for her.

I said, “A reminder about the Big Buddha Bakery.”

“You mean the poisoning?”

C
HAPTER
S
IXTEEN

“P
oisoning in the Big Buddha Bakery?”

Amber leaned toward me and grinned in a way that reminded me she wasn't much older than a teenager. She looked about to divulge a really really cool piece of gossip about the scuddiest geek in the class, a piece of gossip her friends had already yanked and pulled in every direction till it was too old and thin to taste. But now, here was I, a new audience.

“Yeah. It was in all the papers. Thing was it was a long time ago. I was in, lemme see, seventh grade, I think. ‘Cause when I heard it I was so freaked I dropped all my books and that was the year I had serious Spanish and world history, and that history book was so big I could've been carrying the whole world around and when I dropped it it just about broke my toe. It was sprained and I had to wear sandals for a month and this was January. I mean my feet were soaked. I mean I didn't eat peanuts for a year after that.”

“Peanuts?”

“Shhhhh!”

It must have come from as many directions as Amber's answer was taking. Barry was tapping his mouth in the other end of the kitchen; Maureen was at the door, glaring; one of the cooks held his wooden spoon clear of his pot and stared, another chopped louder. Work period wasn't quite over. Amber had no business being in the kitchen at all now, much less gossiping there. I put my palms together and bowed an apology to all of them. They were right. I nudged Amber and she bowed, too. But her heart wasn't in it.

“Outside,” I whispered to her and she followed me around the corner of the kitchen, onto the muddy thatch of weeds. Her face was flushed with excitement.

“You didn't eat peanuts for a year?” I prompted. “Tell me about the Big Buddha Bakery.”

“Now?”

“Quickly.”

“You dragged me away from a chance at coffee for
that
?”

“What else?” I said irritably.

“Well, I mean, you know, you've got connections and all here, I figured, well, that you'd have something for me, I mean, like chocolate.”

Frustrating as she was, she was such a little kid I had to keep myself from smiling. And yet, I could see her point. I'd felt just like that about my letter.