Women and Children First (2 page)

Finally Walter looked at his watch and smiled and hit a kind of mini-gong. There was a lot of shoulder shifting and neck rotating. Walter handed out a mimeoed sheet. “I think this explains itself,” he said. “We’ll use the next hour to talk about the dharma. Then a short break, then a half-hour sitting meditation, then individual sessions with the Lama, then final meditation. Then dinner—and a party!”

Walter let the smiles die out. Then he said, “I thought we might begin by talking about suffering and desire.” He spoke with the faintest trace of an accent, every slow, soft word a testament to how unhurried and at peace he was. Whenever he quoted the Buddha, his voice got even lower. “What it all boils down to is, suffering comes from desire.”

Ceci thought of Walter’s wife, sulking while he chatted up the German woman; her only desire was for her husband not to flirt with a woman who, though elderly, still had terrific cheekbones. But didn’t that prove it? Suffering came from desire. Even the memory of desire was enough. When Ceci remembered her husband, there were certain places, certain nights and times she was careful to avoid. But finally you couldn’t predict when your own desires would jump up out of nowhere and hurt you. On the bus down from New York, Ceci had sat across the aisle from a mother and her beautiful four-year-old son. “Kitty cat,” the mother called him. “Sugar pops.” She kept stroking his hair, patting his head, scrubbing her knuckles along the back of his blue satin baseball jacket. Ceci had had to watch that.

Walter said, “The way to stop suffering is to give up our attachments. Attachments to things we want. To what we already have and are afraid of losing. And what’s left is: living right. Dying right. Following the dharma without attachment or desire.”

The kid in the ponytail said, “I hear where sometimes the Ethiopians don’t
want
the rice anymore. They tell the planes not to come. They know they’re dying; dying’s their business and they want to get on with it.” There was an uneasy silence. No one looked at anyone else.

“Everyone suffers,” said Walter. “As most of you know, I escaped from Budapest in 1956 and never saw my family again. My wife lost both parents within the last five years. Only through the dharma have we learned to let go of all that.” Ceci waited for something to follow this astonishing statement, but there was only another of those long silences Walter used for subject changes. Walter said, “At first I didn’t believe it either. But what made me give it a chance was how scientific it was. This many mantras will get you that far. It’s all a matter of dosage. Why
shouldn’t
the repetition of words have a biochemical effect? All I can tell you is, it works.”

Walter asked Beth to say a little about various meditation practices. Beth picked up a stack of 8
X
10 glossies; on each was a Tibetan tanka of a Buddha. Beth was even more soft-spoken than Walter, so that many of the older people had to lean forward to hear. Beth jackknifed forward, gesturing prettily, thumb and forefinger joined like a Balinese dancer as she explained what each Buddha did. The pictures were passed around.

“This is the Medicine Buddha,” said Beth. “The healing Buddha. This Buddha seems to have an especially large following around here.” It took all Ceci’s self-restraint not to stare at her fellow Buddhists. Which ones needed healing? And what from? How ironic that now, filled with new curiosity and concern, she could not—for obvious social reasons—even turn around.

The monastery was on a mountaintop. During the break, people walked outside. It was early April, chilly. The Buddhists puffed out their cheeks and chafed their upper arms. There was a view of three states which everyone stood facing. Ceci admired it for a moment and then thought: What now? The sound of the loudest gong yet floated out over three states, and everyone filed back indoors.

Windowless, draped in red and gold silk, one whole wall occupied by a multitiered altar holding dozens of brass Buddhas, vases of flowers, candles, and smoldering incense holders, the temple was surprisingly convincing. Even the incense smelled venerable and antique. On one wall was a large painting of an orange-robed lama, youngish and rather plump, with the beaming, cherubic face of those fish-riding babies in popular Chinese prints. There was nothing from modern life but a large canister vacuum cleaner, propped up in the corner—useful, no doubt, for the trails of uncooked rice on the carpet.

Everyone found a pillow on the floor. When the gong sounded, Ceci closed her eyes, and, as Walter had suggested before the break, tried to meditate on her question for the Lama. But when everything settled down, the only thing she registered was her own perfume. That had been a mistake. She imagined a company stumbling onto an indelible perfume, forced to recall it after consumer complaints, leaving thousands, including Ceci, permanently marked. This was what she was thinking about when Walter hit the gong again and said, “You’ll see the Lama’s appointment schedule posted in the hall. But please, come half an hour early. Remember: Tibetan time.”

According to the schedule, the Lama would be seeing someone every five minutes for two hours. Ceci thought: Why, he’s the Tibetan Dr. Ruth! When she saw her name at the bottom of the list—not near the bottom, but actually last—she lost all hope. She taught school. She knew how it felt to repeat yourself, day after day: Don’t hit. Share. Clean up. How the Lama must wish for a tape of himself saying, “Suffering is desire.”

Ceci went for a walk in the woods but felt self-conscious, as if someone were filming her. She didn’t know when to start or stop or what to look at. After a few minutes she came back in and sat with the Buddhists waiting to see the Lama. They talked and talked right up to the Lama’s door. But afterward, they were silent and slinked away, avoiding eye contact like moviegoers after a film that has moved them too deeply to speak.

Ceci was the last one in the lobby. She could have used this moment of solitude and peace to prepare; instead, she tortured herself wondering what airport she was in long ago when everyone else was called for a flight and the place emptied out and she realized that the plane she was about to take was a lot smaller than she’d thought. Finally Ceci heard her name, and she entered the Lama’s red and gold room.

At the moment Ceci walked in, the Lama was looking at his watch. Ceci caught him at it, and he laughed. Ceci laughed too, then was amazed to discover that she was on the verge of tears. She was just so disappointed. But what had she expected? For one thing, someone older. Only now did it occur to her that she’d had no clear picture of the Lama. Now she recognized him from his portrait, the baby-faced one, but in some new adolescent stage—gawky, thin, with the skinny head, dark-rimmed glasses, and flattop crewcut of a guy in a fifties high-school yearbook. Some strain around the Lama’s eyes convinced her that she had been correct, that right now the Lama felt just as she did by this point in the school year: drained, longing for it to be over, unable to even fake interest when another child came for help.

Ceci’s mind raced wildly over everything she had to tell the Lama—an exhausting story, she saw now, endless and impossible to get through. Walter had mentioned that if they didn’t have a specific question, they could simply throw themselves on the Lama’s wisdom and ask for any advice that might help. Now Ceci considered doing that. But the Lama kept staring at her, his gaze so direct that Ceci could only return it in small doses.

After a while Ceci said, “My husband broke up with me at a sushi bar. We were sitting side by side. The sushi chef wasn’t watching exactly, but he was there. My husband told me that he was moving to Arizona; then he ordered another cucumber salmon-skin roll. It was early for dinner. Only one table was full. Four young people, a girl and three guys—Wall Street types. I’d seen them on our way in. It had surprised me to see them so early, at such an unchic Japanese place uptown. After my husband said what he had to say, I didn’t feel like talking, so we eavesdropped on their conversation about how hard it was to meet someone in the city. And I was so filled with hate for them, such bubbling-up, boundless hate. There was nothing wrong with them, they weren’t obnoxious. I just hated them for being young. And I thought: Oh, I’ve changed. I am exactly the kind of person you tell you don’t love anymore, sitting shoulder to shoulder with at a sushi bar.”

The Lama’s expression shifted slightly, crossed some nearly imperceptible line between boredom and relief. He looked at Ceci a few seconds longer. “There is a simple meditation called the meditation of loving kindness,” he said, with hardly any accent. “Its aim is to increase your compassion. You just breathe in and out. You breathe in the suffering of those you want to help, and the suffering goes straight to your heart and destroys whatever is most self-loving and self-cherishing. And you breathe it out as white light, which goes to whoever needs it and gives them what they want.”

Well, it sounded as if it couldn’t hurt, but finally, what was the point? What did it have to do with Ceci or anything she had told him? How could breathing white light in and out help her, or anyone? How could her disappointment be translated into compassion, and what good was compassion without action? Don’t send white light, she thought. Send money. She wanted her fifty dollars back.

The Lama said, “Just give it a ten-minute try. Ten minutes for something that’s worked for three thousand years. What have you got to lose?” And Ceci thought: Why not? Really, ten minutes was nothing, nothing to lose. And what if it helped? She remembered how, in high school, she read
Franny and Zooey
and so loved the idea of a prayer becoming part of your heartbeat. Working its biochemical magic.

The others had started without her. Only for the briefest moment did Ceci let herself feel slighted. She tiptoed into the temple and settled onto a pillow near the door. She crossed her legs and thought of what the Lama had said and started breathing. First she concentrated on that—inhaling, exhaling—then moved gingerly, testing the water, toward suffering, toward how much you saw if you opened your eyes on an average day in the city, how much you never saw. She conjured up stories, that restaurant for the dying, photos, terrible images of violence and death and disease until she couldn’t hold her breath and breathed out, sending out health, long life, love, work—a miracle, if need be. She sent it streaming out into the world and even—this was the hardest part—to the others in the room, wishing for them whatever healing they sought in the Medicine Buddha.

She inhaled again and the images began to blur, growing brighter, coming up behind her eyelids, brilliant and warming. She felt slightly dizzy, surrounded by so much light, and yet she could still check back on herself, probing, tongue in sore tooth, for what hurt. And after some minutes it began to seem to her that her problems were, when one took the larger view, really very manageable, and rather small.

But though she kept breathing steadily, taking in and sending out, the light began to fade, gradually, as at dusk, when she used to read and not notice till her husband would come in and say, “You’ll go blind.” She breathed harder, slightly panicky now as the white light turned an odd shrimp color, then deepened to a dull blood red, and a memory stung her before she quite knew what it was.

It was something her husband once told her about his first astronomy job, as an observatory tour guide. The best part of that job, the part he never tired of, was helping the tourists see through the solar telescope, see the sun. It took quite a bit of focusing, and as the tourists struggled with it, he would look into their eyes and know exactly when they saw. Because at the moment they focused, the solar reflection flashed onto their irises: a brilliant, perfect, red disc of sun, shining at him from each eye.

G
ORDIE LIKES TO SAY
he can read the writing on the wall: Soon armies of upscale D.C. couples will be buying second homes in quaint Highland County, driving property values sky-high. They’ve already done the Blue Ridge. Janet can’t quite believe that the moving finger is writing about real estate, but she knows that for Gordie prophecy means advice. Janet rents a farmhouse in Highland and trucks in antiques which Gordie sells at American Beauty, his Georgetown shop. Gordie says that renters in Highland will soon be dinosaurs in museums; Janet should buy some failing crackerbarrel mom-and-pop store and turn it into American Beauty West.

They have just smoked a joint in Gordie’s bedroom in the basement of his shop. They are sitting cross-legged on his carved four-poster bed, amid the Chinese knickknacks, the Oscar Wilde bearskin rug, the moth-eaten taxidermy Gordie says is illegal even to own, and looking through a carton of antique nursery-rhyme illustrations, the remnants of some disintegrated kids’ book that someone recognized as beautiful and worth saving, and which Janet found yesterday at an estate sale in Slate Mills.

Janet turns a cardboard wheel, and beneath a cut-out window, a cow jumps over the moon. Next comes the laughing dog, then the hand-in-hand dish and spoon. Gordie says, “These are a gold mine. I can frame them—the perfect new-baby gift. Sure you don’t want to steal a couple for Kevin’s room?”

“Kevin?” says Janet. “Gordie, this is ‘Hey Diddle Diddle.’ Kevin’s got Tina Turner on his wall.”

“I had Tina Turner on
my
wall,” Gordie says. “Well, anyway, Ike.”

Janet would like to keep the page she is holding, but feels that her work gives her daily instruction in letting go. It would be easy for her to accumulate objects, to be buried beneath them. Yesterday she wondered how the elderly brother and sister who had come to supervise the estate sale, the disposal of their parents’ things, could sell these pictures at all—their childhood fantasy images, a dollar for the whole box. She kept reminding herself that there was a lesson here, that basically they were right.

“I’ll tell you something weird,” she says. “Last night I was spinning this ‘Hey Diddle Diddle’ wheel, just looking at it. Kevin was upstairs asleep. After a while I heard him come down. He said he’d had a great dream about a flying cow.”