A Single Eye (8 page)

“By which, he means, don't figure you're going to get another cup,” Maureen commented from her end of the kitchen. “The rest of us get cocoa very occasionally, as a great treat, but not the roshi's special cocoa. So enjoy.”

Zen teaches us to be in the moment and a moment of the Roshi's Special Reserve cocoa was just the one to be with. I stepped outside and sat on a bench between the kitchen doors and looked over my steaming cup at the people strolling across the knoll and at the great trees beyond. It says something about the illusory nature of fear that the forest didn't seem so bad now that I had a cup of cocoa in hand. But sitting here wasn't walking into the woods. I had arranged my life so that the possibility didn't arise.

I sipped slowly, trying to focus entirely on the taste. But the woods teased and jeered. I'd survived the ride in the open bed of the pickup; maybe this was the time I'd get over my childish fear. Slowly I raised my eyes and stared at the line of trees at the far side of the quad a quarter mile away. No reaction! I took a long relieved swallow, finished the cup, and with bravado turned to the trees just beyond the kitchen. My stomach lurched, my gaze went blurry. The cocoa cup jolted and I had to grab to keep from dropping it.

“. . . way to the cabins?”

I breathed in thickly, slowly, so the movement took all my attention.

“Are you okay?”

“Oh, sorry,” I said, in a voice that couldn't have sounded as constricted to her as it did to me. “Maureen?”

The blond woman from the kitchen nodded. “I wanted to make sure you knew the way to the cabins.”

“I was just . . . Thanks, yes, it'd be great if you pointed me there. Let me take my cup into the kitchen,” I said, grabbing for time to pull myself together.

When I came back outside, with the roshi's thermos in hand, Maureen was shifting her wraith-like body from one long thin leg to the other. She was as dissimilar to bear-like Barry as two people could be. Like a young gazelle's, her feet seemed to hit the ground solely so she could spring off. As soon as we were clear of the building, the wind smacked our faces. It was one of those damp winds that chill you so slowly you don't realize it till you're iced to the bone and you feel like you'll never be warm again. The down jacket that had been a burden as I pushed the wheelbarrow was now barely adequate, but she, in tan drawstring pants and a black short-sleeved T-shirt, seemed oblivious. Goose bumps bloomed on her arm but they might as well have been body paint for all the attention she paid. She turned toward me and the fading light showed spidery lines around her eyes and mouth, sun scratches. She wasn't as young a gazelle as I had assumed. A bit older than I. Forty probably. And yet, as she bounced from foot to foot, she seemed years younger, lithe, free.

“Tell me how things work here.”

We headed across the knoll. “Parking lot, where you arrived, is down there to the right. Meditation hall—zendo—is that round dome up to the left. Whole place is like a baseball diamond, only much bigger. Cabins are first base, zendo's second, kitchen's third. The office is home, and the parking lot, well, imagine the shortstop between third and home. When we built the zendo having it at the top of the quad, near the top of such a steep hill, seemed wonderful. But I'll tell you, uh—”

“Darcy.”

“Maureen,” she said, apparently not registering the number of times I'd heard it. “There are plenty of mornings when I'm headed up there in the dark and rain at quarter to five, that I wish we'd had the humility to put it in the middle.”

“So you live here all the time?”
Don't they ever let you off the Styx, Charon?

“The whole six years, since the beginning. I was here the first summer, before the Japanese roshis came for the official opening.”

Dusk was edging toward night and a heavy mist was beginning to gust. I pulled my down jacket tighter around me, glanced over at Maureen shifting foot to foot, blond hair tossing, the wind flapping her T-shirt over her pert nipples. Clearly she had plenty still to do before sesshin started and no time to chat.

“You've been here since the beginning,” I said. “You must have known everyone then, Rob, Leo, and, well, Aeneas—”

She jerked back, looked down at her T-shirt, yanked at the hem. “And Barry, too. You're wondering about Barry's kitchen, right? How come the rest of the place looks like a scout camp and Barry's chocolate kitchen could be in the Saint Francis Hotel?”

Aeneas was sure a sore spot. She hadn't seemed jumpy until I mentioned his name. I was dying to ask what she thought his disappearance meant. But she wasn't likely to tell me any more than Leo had. So I made do with seeing where she'd go with her detour about the kitchens.

“Yeah, how come the differences?”

“Because Barry's gourmet chocolates sell for a bundle and he gives the money, at least most of it, to the monastery. At that level of ‘gourmet,' his old world machinery makes a big difference. Rob paid for those machines, plus the generator in the kitchen and the running water in the bathhouse, which was probably way more important to him.” She laughed awkwardly, and I silently added:
Tight ass that he is
.

My silence seemed to unnerve her even more and she said quickly, “That's okay. Rob can laugh about it now, when he has to. Early on, one of the students went into town and made six copies of his picture, framed them in those cheap paper frames and hung them in the place of honor over each toilet. We all bowed to him before and after.”

One of the students? Aeneas? Or herself? I didn't ask what privileges Rob got in return for his money, but there was just enough of an edge to her voice to make me sure there were some. Life in a monastery is like a family and “Mom loves you best” isn't just for kids. Now the regal bully who yanked me out of the truck so he could wag his finger at the roshi made sense. If he owned half the place, no wonder he was so put out when Leo fired him as jisha. That had to be what caused that brouhaha in the truck. There was one question I wanted to ask about this Rob, but I couldn't bear to. Instead I asked, “Where'd a resident get the money for exotic chocolate machines and good plumbing?”

“Resident? Oh, Rob wasn't a resident. Back then he was still a partner in a San Francisco law firm. It was before he even moved to town up here. He's only been full time here for a year or so. This'll only be his second winter.”

Only his second winter!
Did the imperious Rob have a clue that he was lower tier?

Maureen shot a glance over her shoulder, as if sighting last-minute tasks. “I have to get—”

“But why?”

She turned back to me, her shoulders suddenly hunched against the cold she hadn't noticed before my question.

“Why would Rob spend all that money on a place he didn't even live at for years?”

“For the good of the monastery.”

“Generous,” I said in a tone that conveyed how little that word fit the man who had dragged me from the truck.

“Because he knew he
would
come to live here . . . eventually.”

Now things fell into place, into appalling place. “Because,” I said, “he's the one slated to succeed Leo when Leo leaves. After this last sesshin.”

Maureen crumbled forward. Her eyes went opaque, as if my words had knocked out the light behind them. She was shaking now, perhaps from the cold. She turned and strode away, not like a gazelle at all.

A great ball of loneliness filled Maureen Heaney's chest. It choked out her breath.
The last sesshin!
Why? Was Roshi leaving here? Was he closing down the monastery? What was he doing? A small cry erupted from her; she stopped, startled. Why wouldn't he tell her what he was up to? He had always confided in her. It had been she he'd eyed when he made a joke, she who'd brought him juice on mornings after, she who'd celebrated with him when he'd got sober. She who protected him. And now . . . nothing.

And Rob? No, that she couldn't think about at all.

She kept moving, overrunning the grounds, as if distance could lessen the pain. The chill air slapped her face, her bare arms, T-shirt–clad chest. How had she ever survived this isolated life? Ask her seven years ago if she'd like to live in the woods with three strange men and she would have laughed. She wasn't a nun, she'd had lovers and planned to have lovers, but in other ways she lived closer to the life of the convent than any other. The garden here, it was all hers. When she'd planted the lovely red Japanese maple, no one questioned the location, and no one offered to help. She liked that. And the feel of muscles on her back, her butt, her thighs and arms from that work. You'd never find it in a Zen book, she thought, but years of hard work and practicing being aware had made her sex life a whole lot better . . . when she had any sex life.

Now she couldn't imagine leaving here. She loved setting off through the woods at sunrise, walking long and without plan, till she collapsed. She was strong, a runner, a dancer still in every stride, and it was always close to noon before that moment of welcome exhaustion came. She napped, then ate, and she set about finding her way back to the monastery. In her early years here she had gotten lost and the thrill of fear was part of the experience.

Now, after six years, there was little to surprise her. But for the first time in years she felt fear again. This time it wasn't a game; there was no thrill, only dread, confusion, things swirling out of control.

Six years ago she'd made a choice. Maybe if she had done the right thing then . . .

C
HAPTER
S
IX

I
liked Leo; I liked him a lot. I really hoped that this last sesshin of his would be everything he wished for. As his jisha, I wanted to give his students the best access to him, to shield him from all distractions; I wanted him to be able to see into his students, to make their last sesshin with him here important.
Keep an eye open
, Yamana-roshi had said.
Be aware!
I'd do my best. And if the kind of problems Yamana-roshi foresaw arose, I would spot them.

It was already twenty to seven. I was cutting this close. Thermos of cocoa in hand, I took a deep breath and knocked on Leo's cabin door.

It swung open.

For a moment I thought I'd got the wrong place. The cabin looked empty, really empty except for an oil lamp, a narrow two-drawer dresser and a futon. The whole room—bare wood walls, no plaster—was the size of a one-car garage. The lamp sent dim waves of light over the bare floor and bare walls. Oil lamps cut the dark enough so you don't stumble over a book, but only a fool would try to read that book. It was a moment before I noticed the brown-robed figure beside the futon.

“Leo! I hardly recognized you!”

“Sensei,” he corrected.

I must have flushed neon red. “Or Roshi?”

He grinned and held out his hands for the cocoa, like a kid.

“This should be the worst mistake you make! I just don't want you to get into bad habits already. People aren't sure what to call the teacher. A lot of students don't even know what roshi means.”

Sensei means teacher. But roshi is more. People assume it's an administrative title, like abbot, or a rank, like lieutenant colonel. But roshi is a title of respect given by a teacher's students. It signifies a teacher who has experienced enlightenment and also one they trust can teach them.