A Single Eye (39 page)

“Yes.”

“It devastated him. He needed to get away, emotionally . . . geographically. When we got here there was nothing but a couple tents. Not even the zendo. Barry was a city chef. This was definitely not his kind of place.” She gave a small, unsteady laugh that belied her tone. “But it was what he needed. So I stayed for him, to draw him back here.” She glanced toward me, as if for confirmation of her decision. “Not entirely, I'm not saying that. I had, uh, a career problem; I was not in great shape. A summer in the country; it sounded good. He couldn't get out of the city and I knew if I went back we'd both get onto other things and forget about this idea of a monastery in the woods. So I stayed. It was to be just for a while, you see.”

Her arms hung loose, swung gracefully; each of her steps seemed both relaxed and considered. I could see her as a dancer. When she continued speaking, her voice seemed unnaturally calm and steady, as if she was in a coffee shop chatting with friend. “We didn't think things through,” she said. “There can be a boy's camp quality to a place like this. That first year Leo and I and others—never more than four or five—worked all day every day, hard physical work. Everything was a trial. We were sleeping in tents, trying to cook in a tent, building the zendo, trying to sit zazen when it was too cold to sit still. And then it rained hard for a solid week and we talked about going to a motel, and when we finally gave in and decided to go, we all squeezed into the truck cab, and found the road had washed out.”

“Was one of those people Aeneas?”

“Not then. He showed up at the end of the rainy season, when we were desperate to get the zendo built, so we could live in it. So then we worked like crazy again. And Aeneas was great for that. He seemed like a quiet city boy—didn't know shit about building, but he had a good sense of geometry, which is what you need to construct a dome, and he would do anything you asked, cart loads up the hill all day, hold the other end of boards, stand patiently while one of us figured out a problem.” She paused and looked at me. “You're going to say, we should have spotted his disorder. Yes, we should have. But, you know, it's hard to spot a problem when you're overworked and exhausted and it doesn't seem like a problem at the time. Maybe it occurred to each of us that Aeneas was strange, but, if so, it was the last thing we wanted to mention, not and have him leave. We needed him.”

Carefully I pulled the sleeping bag in closer around my legs. Cold as it was in the tower I'd have liked the bag around my shoulders, but I didn't want to chance diverting her. She still walked as if inured to the cold, but her steps were steadier, as if each admission was a weight removed.

“And then when other people came, to them Aeneas was one of the ‘old guard' and it wouldn't have seemed their place to criticize him?” I guessed.

Maureen nodded. “But when the construction binge was over, the same qualities that made Aeneas valuable to us became a problem. He was erratic. Most of the time he would sit quietly, but there was his compulsiveness, his following you around—”

“By you, do you mean yourself?”

“Yes, me, definitely. But everybody. He was like a lost kid who will follow whoever feeds and comforts him. If Leo hadn't been drunk none of this would have happened. The thing is that Leo can drink a lot and look okay. When we were building, we were too busy to require judgment calls from him; it was easy for him to slip under our radar. So when Aeneas had one of his outbursts or got odd, we assumed it was okay with Leo.”

“Odd?”

“Well, he followed me too close, too often, like an adoring toddler. He'd pick up things that weren't his and put them down somewhere and the person who owned them would assume they were lost, or worse, stolen. He ruined our first big pot of stew by tossing in coffee grounds. We were mad enough then, you'd think that should have alerted us. But we were too busy building or clearing or hauling and we didn't have time to fuss about Aeneas. It all came to a head . . .” she stopped, one foot still well in front of the other. She swallowed and then seemed to force herself to go on. “It was the last full day of the Japanese roshis' visit to this country. They had been to a conference of Zen dignitaries of some sort in San Francisco and the trip to our monastery opening was an afterthought, a courtesy to some roshi they knew in New York.”

I gasped. The roshi in New York had to be Yamana-roshi, and these events six years ago were the crisis that kept him from for his long-awaited trip back to his family temple in Japan—the trip he had had to cancel, forever. He had said he'd vouched for Leo, but this was more like sponsoring him, linking their names, melding their reputations like black paint into white. Outside, the wind snapped something against a window. Leaves, ripped from their moorings, swirled and were gone.

But Maureen had been pacing away from me. She hadn't noticed my reaction. Now she turned and began the steps back north.

“Something sparked Aeneas that night. If I had to guess, I'd say liquor, maybe one of the visiting roshis was drinking sake and poured him a cup, or maybe he came across Leo's—Leo would never have given him liquor; he knew better than that. But the result was Aeneas went out of control. He put on Leo's robes, and ran barefoot through the quad, screeching. The Japanese just heard him and saw the robe and, of course, they assumed Leo was on a drunk. Aeneas tore through the zendo, knocked over the oil lamps—it took Rob days to clean the kerosene off the floor and we were lucky the building didn't burn, after we'd spent months building it. He'd picked up a manila envelope somewhere and he was waving it around. From the zendo Aeneas looped down, broke the roaster Barry'd managed to bring with him from the city, and knocked Gabe flat on his back and smashed his laptop.

“Leo must have heard Gabe swearing. He came racing out and after Aeneas. Everything was chaos. Rob had discovered the kerosene on the zendo floor. The Japanese roshis were trying to get into the zendo for some kind of departing ceremony and not understanding why Rob was keeping them out. They didn't speak much English, and it was clear they just thought he was being rude. Gabe was carrying on about losing irreplaceable records. Barry was probably in mourning—he was just about broke and the chances of getting another roaster were nil.”

“And you?”

“Well, what I'm telling you is what I heard. I wasn't there. The Japanese roshis had given us the maple, and I wanted to get it planted so they would see it on their way out. So I was down by the road getting ready to plant. I had the hole dug almost deep enough. I'd realized I needed some B-one liquid to ease the shock of transplanting when I put the tree in, so I started toward the shed. I was walking along the side of the road, in the shadows, when I spotted Aeneas running, arms flailing his manila envelope like a flag. It had been an exhausting weekend and the last thing I wanted was to have to deal with him, so I stepped back into the trees where he wouldn't see me.

He ran by, still in Leo's brown robe, and Leo came after, yelling like I'd never heard him. He spotted me, started toward me, then veered back after Aeneas. But he was so crazed it terrified me. I moved farther into the woods and stayed still, hardly breathing for—I don't know—ten, fifteen minutes, maybe longer. I could hear shouting, but it was all mooshed together with the wind gusting and rattling the leaves. It was getting dark and I needed to get that tree in. And enough time had passed that I was more curious than frightened, so I started back. The road was empty, the shadows almost black by then. I got all the way back across the bridge to the tree without seeing anyone.

“Leo must have made some sound, something that drew my attention. I don't remember hearing anything, but I must have. I walked back onto the bridge and looked down over the stone wall. Aeneas's body was lying face up on the rocks below and Leo's gin bottle was a few feet away.”

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY-ONE

T
he night currents sprayed the windows with leaves and pine needles. There was an odd groaning outside, as if from rusty cables being pulled beyond endurance. The fire tower seemed flimsier than ever, and colder.

I could picture Maureen six years ago, standing at the edge of the bridge, blond hair blowing like wisps of smoke, peering over that odd stone-wall railing that was wide enough to sit on in a place no one was likely to sit, but not high enough to protect one leaning over. Its width gave the illusion of safety, tempted the high-spirited to prance across it, denied the danger of the rocky stream bed thirty feet below. A fall would be lethal, even now, with the water providing some cushion over those sharply piled stones.

Maureen had been planting the tree, so she'd have been in a T-shirt, probably sleeveless, khaki work shorts, and work boots. The opening had been in April, too early for her to be tanned. The sallow white of her legs would have been tinted only by dirt from her dig. She had stopped working almost half an hour earlier. It was dusk then. Even she would have been shivering. Even before she saw Leo, and Aeneas's body on the rocks below the bridge.

The creaking of the stairs jerked me back to the present.

I wanted to wrap the sleeping bag around Maureen. But I sensed that she needed not merely to tell me what had happened, but to
be
back in it. So I left her cold.

“What happened then?”

“The bottom dropped out of the world. I felt it then, though I didn't think about it or understand it. But I did know it, you know?”

I understood in the general way one does, but I said, “How?”

“Well, it was odd that I came here at all. The idea of sitting still in meditation was the antithesis of anything I could have imagined as a dancer. When I was dancing I'd have been afraid that sitting still would tighten my psoas or gluteus medius muscles and inhibit my arabesques. Then, my life was arranged to prepare me to dance, to dance, to cool down after dancing, to think about dancing again. I came here for Barry, but I never thought I'd stay. I stayed not because of Buddhism or meditation, or Leo really, except in that he allowed one as unconnected as me to stay. I thought I was being an anchor for Barry, but the truth is I stayed because I couldn't think what else to do.”

The world was full of places to escape to, ninety-nine percent of them more comfortable than this. If she had endured even a month here to hold a spot for Barry, I would have been amazed. Six years' exile in the woods was too much for love, fear, or escape. Something about Buddhism or meditation or Leo must have hooked her. Now I watched her walking even more slowly, placing her right foot down, heel touching a beat before sole, moving south away from me, impervious to the sound of the wind, to the metallic creaking, the wavering light creating expressions of its own on her face as she continued on.

“But during that winter Leo talked about working for work's sake, and that made sense to me. It was the dance of work. In dance your spend twenty-three hours a day preparing for the one glorious hour you're dancing, and if you're in rehearsals, even during those hours you stop and wait, you watch and think how you're going to change to get the effect you want, and try and stop and try again, and maybe you get ten minutes max of the dancing that transforms you.

“But here everything we did was dance. Or it could be. I don't want to romanticize things. There were a lot of days I didn't manage any more than ten minutes of dancing here, either, but I knew what Leo meant. I knew I could have that kind of life. I knew I was home, and living with a master. And then Leo did the unimaginably vile.”

“He killed Aeneas?”

“He killed Aeneas.”

She was in front of the makeshift altar. She stared at the skull. The candlelight shone upward under her chin, her nose, her eyebrows, and up under her hair like a spotlight on the bottom of clouds.

“Why did you stay here after that?” I asked.

She turned and for a moment, before her face was in shadow, the candlelight revealed the desperate longing in her eyes. “Because I had been charmed with the concept of Zen rather than really understanding it. I had taken to heart what Leo taught about making everything dance. But it wasn't mine yet. And when Leo was unveiled as a phony, you understand what that meant, don't you?”

“Tell me.”

“That all that he said he ‘knew' he didn't know. He was just parroting things he'd read, or heard from other teachers who maybe didn't know either. He was . . . nothing.” She moved on, not more slowly now or faster, but with a relentlessness to her step and her voice. “And I was less than nothing. I had failed at dancing. Oh, maybe I could have succeeded if I'd gotten the right manager and gotten into the right company, but I hadn't been able to do that, and that's all part of the dance, too, isn't it?”