CHAPTER 6:

It turned out that Cecelia had decided to bring along their new dog, Jasper Jr. named by Shelsa after our elderly mutt, Jasper Sr., a half-Doberman, half-Lab mix who was being minded by a kind neighbor at home. Their Jasper was a few inches shorter and a few pounds lighter but looked eerily like ours: short black coat with touches of bronze on the muzzle and breast. That same proud dignity. Karmic twins, as Cecelia put it. Jasper Jr., she told me, had been allowed onto the train only after a prolonged discussion between Rinpoche and the stationmaster. He’d make the trip up into the mountains with us, then ride back with them on Amtrak (dogs not usually allowed, but she had a letter of permission in her purse). Another Ringling Family Plan.

As the only guests that morning, we sat at two pushed-together tables in the breakfast nook, all six of us. Jasper was happily sniffing around outside. My sister’s husband sat directly opposite me. He had his daughter on his knee and was feeding her sips of coffee on an empty stomach.

“You’re gonna juice her all up, Uncle,” Anthony said.

Rinpoche laughed his mucousy laugh and reached out and squeezed Anthony’s bicep. “Strong!” he said. “After, you and me, we wessel.”

“Rinpoche, I don’t think that’s wise,” my sister cautioned. She did that sometimes, addressed her beloved by his title. ‘Volya’ just didn’t fit him as well, for any of us, and ‘Rinpoche’ actually meant ‘precious one’, so it made sense, I suppose, between wife and husband.

“And it’s ‘wrestle’ anyway, not ‘wessle’ Tasha said.

Rinpoche appeared unoffended. In all the time I’d known him, almost six years of living with my voluble sister and hosting American retreatants at the North Dakota farm, he’d made next to no progress in the language. Lately, in fact, he seemed to have lost grammatical ground. His mispronunciations were inconsistent and legendary. Sometimes he got it right, sometimes not. Wessle. Brother-in-waw. Brother-and-law. Wery. Very. He’d developed a penchant for convoluted phraseology like “Jeannie now is wery sick, couldn’t she?” I’d learned, on our visits to Dakota and in New York, to let it go. But Tasha often felt obliged to correct him, and he always thanked her and tried the proper pronunciation or appropriate grammar once, then forgot it instantly. He spoke, he claimed, eleven languages, four of them fluently—his native Ortyk, Russian, Italian, and English—so this trouble with pronunciation always seemed strange to me, an act, a game. Perhaps—who could ever know with Rinpoche—he was making some statement about the mutability of language itself, the way it can stand between raw reality and the mind. A tree, after all, was not a tree; that was merely its assigned label, in one of earth’s hundreds of languages. Death was not death; it was a mystery, a passage, ineffable.

Thinking this, I realized I was angry at him on that morning, and for no good reason, no good reason at all. He’d been exceedingly kind to Jeannie and me during her illness. He’d visited, soothed her in ways I couldn’t seem to, spoken privately with the kids in their worst hours. Since our previous road trip he’d taken me on as a private meditation student, a poor but fairly dutiful one, and sprayed nothing but patience and good humor in my direction . . . and that morning I was angry with him and trying to understand why. Maybe I’d expected the meditation lessons to take all the pain out of my life. Maybe I held that against him.

“Wessel,” he said, looking at my daughter with his eye-brows raised, his stevedore’s face, a face that never seemed to age, crinkled up in a pantomime of confusion.

“Wrestle. RRRRR. Are.”

“Waaah,” he said.

“Say ‘Rinpoche,’ Anthony suggested.

“Win—poach—hay.”

“Now you’re pulling my dick.”

“What this dick?” Rinpoche asked. He looked quizzically at my sister. “Dick, dick. What this is?” He’d been ignoring me the whole morning. One hug at the top of the stairs, and then what almost felt like the cold shoulder. As if he knew in advance that I’d be angry. Or as if he were disappointed in me, thought I should be more spiritually mature by now, should have learned the advanced dance steps of the soul. I should have been able to deal with death the way he seemed to deal with it, not ignoring it, not making light, but somehow, at the same time, the farthest thing from devastated. Hadn’t he been instructing me all these years—books, letters, meditation pointers, detachment, equanimity? What was my problem?

“‘Dick’ is a very rude word for a man’s penis,” my sister explained patiently, as if there were other very rude words for a woman’s penis. “Your nephew is being uncouth and saying things he shouldn’t say in front of his young cousin.”

“Sorry.”

The inn’s daytime clerk—a dreadlocked, elaborately tat-tooed twenty-year-old who, after asking Rinpoche to sign the guest register that morning, had sliced the page out of his book with a Swiss Army knife and taped it to the wall beside the reception desk—interrupted this conversation with refills of the miraculous coffee. He had Bob Marley’s hair and Justin Bieber’s face, and a way of speaking that matched Cecelia’s like a sibling. “Going up to the Cascades today?” he inquired, in a singsong, optimistic rhythm.

I nodded, attempted a smile. He filled my cup with a reverent gesture: the liquid was melted gold, a precious thing, as fine as the pamphlet promised. “Little vacation from the hectic other side?”

“Family trip,” I said.

When he stood there, wanting more, Natasha filled in the blanks. “We’re going out today to spread my mother’s ashes.”

“Cool. Your mom must have been a great lady.”

Tears sprang into Natasha’s eyes as if a switch had been thrown behind the gray-green circles. I ground my teeth hard enough to make free-trade porcelain. Bob Bieber didn’t seem to notice. “Your dog’s cool, too, dude.” He seemed to be speaking to me. I was “dude” here to everyone, the mellow surfer-dad up from La Jolla for the coffee and cold waves. “He’s like, what? Lab or something?”

“Half Doberman.” Be careful, I was tempted to say, or he’ll bite your dick off.

“Dasper,” Shelsa said.

“Cool name.”

Leave us, leave us, leave us! I thought. But the gregarious fellow didn’t move. Shelsa had taken to fingering her scram-bled eggs and Rinpoche was holding her, watching, smiling. His style of childrearing seemed to belong to the school of affectionate lassitude. He spoke to her as if she were his equal, a fellow traveler, a full soul, and held her, tickled her, and made her laugh as if there were nothing more precious to him on this earth. What would you do, I found myself wondering, if you had to watch her die? What would happen to all the spiritual talk then, the detachment, the inner peace?

It was a terrible thought, shameful and petty, a kidney stone of distilled bitterness. Me at my worst. It pains me to confess it, but pain or no, I am going to be honest here; I promised myself that. I’m going to show myself with all my warts and sins, though I confess to a tremendous desire to tell this story with gold dust on all of it, to be the man Rinpoche kept assuring me I was, a helper to Shelsa in her important work, a seeker on the verge of a great spiritual awakening, a Bronxville saint.

The young waiter didn’t appear to understand that he should leave now, that we were a family in mourning, that his presence among us was as welcome as a fluorescent bulb at 4:00 a.m. It seemed to me that he was ogling Natasha—whose nicely proportioned breasts, gift from her late mother’s DNA, were pressing out against a cashmere sweater, color of sapphire. What else, what deadly poison, had been passed down in that gene pool? “We’re, like, honored to have you here,” the young man said, as if speaking to them.

Shelsa patted the last yellow bubbles of egg, small living ducklings, then looked up at the waiter and said “Dick” very clearly, and a great burst of laughter went up around him and he stood there, smiling, shaggy, confused, forgiven.

Freed from him at last, finished with the sumptuous, all-local repast, we gathered our things and assembled on the lawn of the Inn at Chakra Creek. This was the day I’d been dreading. The saying of grace at table, the speeches at a colleague’s retirement party—any and all kinds of ritual or formality threw me back hard against the side of the North Dakota barn where my parents had stored hay and machinery. Their way of life was as orderly as the furrowed soybean fields, a formal, strict, Lutheran life ruled by ancient ritual that had ceased to have any meaning for me by the time the first hair sprouted above my upper lip. The inside of my father’s Buick—and it was somehow his car and not my mother’s—was immaculate. We sat in the same pew every week at St. John’s, dressed in carefully ironed clothing. We gave thanks before meals. Cecelia and I rose at five every summer day of our young lives and went through our assigned chores with the regularity of robots. For a long stretch of years, these rites had managed to keep chaos at bay, to render the weeks predictable with their pressed Sunday trousers and polished kitchen floor. And then, one cold morning—BAM!—a drunk driver plowed into the Buick on a country road, and none of that mattered anymore.

This particular ceremony, the idea of finding something to say to mark the spreading of Jeannie’s ashes, struck me as an impossible challenge. If you couldn’t capture “table” with a word, how were you supposed to say what she had meant to us? No, it would be at once too final and not final enough; it would hurt too much to speak.

Even just standing there trying to decide seating arrange-ments in the vehicles—even that put me on edge.

And, of course, Rinpoche chose that moment to challenge my muscular son to a wessling match. You bizarre man, I thought.

But Anthony loved it. A delighted smile lit his face. He stripped off his jersey and tossed it aside in a single motion. He faced his maroon-robed opponent in a crouch. Rinpoche was laughing, circling his hands like some kind of orchestra conductor gone mad. There seemed to be no tension in his body. He was a rubber man, on the medium-short side, chunky, thick-limbed, but pliable as the stem of a dandelion. Cecelia picked up her daughter and frowned. Natasha had her hips cocked, head tilted sideways, ready for disdain, laughter, or approval, whatever seemed the appropriate posture for viewing the spectacle of feather-fluffing masculine absurdity. The dreadlocked waiter had come to the doorway and was holding my sister’s forgotten sweater in his hand, watching the great spiritual master—his idol—whirl hands and laugh like a lunatic.

The combatants were standing on a patch of perfect lawn, one of them straight out of a prep school wrestling team, the other straight out of some Siberian Camp Sumo. The cairns stood at a safe distance. Rinpoche waved his hands and laughed but made no move forward, and I thought for a moment it had all been meant as a joke. But then Anthony made a charge, low, like a bull or a linebacker, muscles rippling, and somehow, in a tenth of a second, Rinpoche had him on his back on the ground and was leaning across him with all his weight, laughing and chuckling. It was Cassius Clay’s phantom punch in Lewiston; no one had seen it. Sonny Liston on his back on the canvas. No one, least of all Anthony, understood what had happened. The only sign of exertion on the winner’s side was that the maroon robe had ridden up the back of Rinpoche’s legs. We could see his wide ass. He was wearing what were known as commando underpants, a brief-boxer hybrid I’d never cottoned to. Red in color. The muscles of his legs were like iron.

I worried Anthony would be shamed, but he was laughing, too. “All right, okay. Get off. Man, you’re fat! No fair, you’re a different weight class.”

Rinpoche rolled back and forth across him, torso to torso, as if my son were some kind of foam cylinder in the gym. The otherwise mellow Jasper Jr. (Celia said she sometimes sang him to sleep) stood by and barked without enthusiasm, playing a role. Men wrestled. Women watched. Dogs barked. Shelsa climbed down out of her mother’s arms and ran over and jumped onto her dad’s backside. Anthony let out an “Oof!” and hugged her and laughed with his arms wrapped around Rinpoche, and I saw Tasha sidle over to the dreadlocked boy and accept her aunt’s sweater and thank him warmly.

 “Your husband’s a nut,” I said to Celia, trying to sail with the prevailing winds. My own words sounded sour and small in my ear.

“It’s just his way of cheering them up,” she said, but she was looking at the entangled bodies, not me, when she said it. She reached her hand sideways and took hold of mine, then looked. “Don’t,” she said, “be fooled.”

“Fooled how?”

She squinted. The narrowed eyes seemed to say: why are you pretending, Otto? She started to say something else, then stopped, and went to fetch her daughter.