“Welcome to the Zen Center at the University of Delaware! This booklet should explain some of what you need to know about who we are, the way we do things, and why. Or stay and observe, although we ask that you maintain respectful silence in the meditation hall if there is a session going on. Our rituals and routines are described and explained in this booklet beginning on Page 3, right after the weekly schedule. Please note there are special sessions for beginners, every Monday night at 8. Sunday Dharma talks are at 5pm, and open to the community.
Our director and head dharma teacher is Shindo Stewart Goodman. Shindo Stewart is an ordained Zen priest. He was the personal assistant to Hataka Sudo Roshi, at the Mt. Raymond Monastery in Oregon, then later followed him to Japan where he received his ordination and direct transmission. This is his fourth year as director of the UZC. We are happy to say he has revitalized our community, where his honesty, directness and humor are very much appreciated.”
Put Pick under oath and he wouldn’t be able to tell you how he got there. One minute he was in the lobby of the Sterling with a fax in his hand, and the next minute that same hand was on Griffin’s doorbell and Mary was there, and Pick was asking if there was anything she needed him to help her do around the house—like a kid from the neighborhood, looking to make a little extra spending money doing chores on the side. He saw how she looked at him, with the pure understanding of a mother; having gone his whole life without one, Pick had a fleeting but sour awareness of just how much he had missed. And how glad, and grateful he was, that his own children had Laura to look at them that way. He couldn’t remember ever telling her that.
Shit.
Mary said there was laundry to finish, and led the way down to the basement, where they turned on all the lights and folded every clean thing there was to fold. It was warm down there, rebelliously cheerful for a wet and gloomy day, with so much hard reality going on, right above their heads.
“Have you told Laura?” she asked him.
Pick nodded, but looked off—as if he’d done some distasteful but necessary task, like burying a kid’s dead hamster in a shoebox in the yard. He’d told Laura the broad strokes of what he’d learned so far; Carmine’s people had found out a good bit in a short amount of time, and Iris was able to fill in a lot of the rest from there. All of it, swimming in Pick’s head like eels in a barrel.
“She wasn’t surprised,” he told Mary. “She said she wasn’t surprised.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t know,” Pick admitted. “I’m trying not to think.”
“I’m not sure I believe that,” Mary answered.
“Desperate times,” Pick said.
Mary watched him with the laundry, and said she was impressed with his pace and efficiency. It was all the traveling, Pick told her, the packing and unpacking—this was just one of the many road skills he’d taken on as part of the job. Plus there was Carmine’s influence: if there was anything his father taught him, and stood there to make sure he mastered, it was how to properly fold a dress shirt. This was maniacally important to Carmine—an interesting selection for something to teach your child, when you’d left out nearly everything else.
“Delaware,” he said. “What Buddhists are in Delaware?”
“Universities,” Mary supposed. “College towns. Even Wilkes has a group. Every now and then they’re in Market Square. I’m always sorry when I don’t go talk to them.”
Pick wasn’t convinced. “You go to Delaware when you want to register your corporation—and you don’t even have to go there to do it, you just fill out a bunch of forms and pay the fees. I’ve done it a hundred times, for clients.” He shook out a towel, loving the whap it made: something sharp, and definite.
Not that Pick, if pushed, could tell you the right thing Goody could have been doing all this time. Only that this—running a campus Zen center out of a converted one-story bungalow—felt particularly not right. A normal street in a normal town. Shopping malls and gas stations. Teaching courses, giving talks. Community pot lucks and donations at the door. Probably doesn’t even own the bed he sleeps in.
“What’s the matter with Japan?” Pick asked. “What happened to going off into the mountains and meditating in caves?”
“From what I read,” Mary told him, “he did that too.”
It was true—the research had it covered. Once Goody’s movie had fallen apart, there was a short period of time that couldn’t be accounted for; after that, Goody didn’t just leave Los Angeles but had skipped the country entirely and made his way to Japan, where Roshi had returned after the temple at Mt. Raymond had gone under—largely because Goody’s earnings couldn’t help them keep the lights on, now that he suddenly wasn’t earning anymore. Roshi had gone back to the monastery where he’d gotten his own training, where his parents had dropped him off at the age of seven when they could no longer afford to feed him. Goody found him there, handed over his passport, and said he was ready now: he had nothing to gain, nothing to lose, nowhere to go, and nowhere to be gone from. There was nothing to remember and nothing to forget. There were only the vows, and he was ready to take them.
And so he took them.
“Last night I had this dream,” Pick said. “I was driving here, from the city. And Goody was with me.”
He started separating some towels according to which ones had the braided designs going down the borders and which didn’t. In his own house, he wouldn’t have noticed the distinction; Laura would, and now Pick wondered if he had been taking her for granted for that. And not just towels, but all the other stuff—tons of other stuff, the invisible routine things that people do, things that so rarely get affirmed. Pick got all the headlines in the family, that was for sure. But Laura was the story. And the story, that’s what lasts.
“I was the way I am now,” he went on. “But he was the Goody from back then—on a good day, on a day that he felt really on it. And he’s trying to tell me some bizarre theory kind of thing and we’re both laughing like crazy, but I can’t hear what he’s saying because it’s the dream—you know? You can hear but you can’t hear?”
Mary nodded; she knew. Everyone knows. “You miss him,” she said.
Pick shrugged. “He was really funny. He didn’t always come off that way, but he was. And he gave a damn about things. About me,” he said, “he gave a damn about me. I didn’t know what that was even like until then.”
“And yet you dread him coming here,” Mary said. She looked surprised at herself, for being that blunt.
Pick met her look, felt her encouragement to speak freely. “It’s like in High Noon,” he said finally. “All these bad guys are coming, and they’re gunning for Gary Cooper, and he knows it—where they’re coming from, when they’re going to get there, and what they’re going to do to him. He’s the loneliest guy in the world, knowing this.” He picked up a clump of socks; little static crackles while he separated them and sorted them out. “Only in this case, I’m not Gary Cooper. I’m still the guy they’re coming to get—but somehow, I’m the bad guy too—and they’re not. All of a sudden they’re the Magnificent Seven now, and I’m the evil sheriff.”
Mary shook her head. “You’re not any bad guy—for heaven’s sake Sandy. And nobody’s coming to get you—especially Stewart. You or anybody else.”
“So why do you think he’s coming here?” Pick wanted to know.
“Same as you,” Mary told him. “Because he was asked.” She watched him take that in. “Why, do you think there’s another reason?”
Pick shrugged. “I don’t know. All these years. You’d think we’d be off his radar for good by now.”
“Was he ever off yours?” Mary asked.
Pick looked down at the shirt he’d half-folded. He could feel her eyes on him. “This should be on a hanger,” he said.
Mary pointed over to an improvised coat rack, made from a dowel hung down between two ceiling beams. Pick took the shirt over, unfolding it along the way. Then, looking at it, it came to him that the next place Griffin might be wearing a shirt like this could be his own coffin. It sent a chill that Pick never wanted to feel again.
“Thank you,” Mary said. “You’re right. I don’t know why I’ve been folding them. The cleaner always returns them on hangers.”
Pick was about to ask why they didn’t go to the cleaners this time, but before he did it came to him: Mary was cutting back; circling the wagons around a future that was beginning to look pretty grim. This was the time of year to be thinking of Thanksgiving coming up, the whole holiday season; now she had a brand-new situation at hand. A long convalescence, at best—but widowhood was just as possible, and single motherhood, and middle age without the partner to whom she had pledged her life—so of course, why not, let’s just top it all off with money problems. And Pick knew—he’d dealt with insurance companies—no matter how you’re fixed, medical costs will run through a family like shit through a goose. And the Griffins, he suspected, were not braced for any of it. Few people were.
They were quiet for a while. A couple of car horns sounded outside, but the school itself was still; all the kids were hunkered down in classes. Pick found it hard to believe that he had once been one of them. He wondered what he’d have thought if somebody back then had told him what he’d be doing as an adult—took him by the hand, whisked him to the future, gave him a snapshot glimpse of his life right now—and then whisked him right back, before he even noticed he’d been gone. He knew that on the face of things he’d be proud. Hell, he’d built a life. A career, a family, a name in the community. In very many ways he’d become the guy in that movie he saw, and that was nothing to be ashamed of.
Underneath though. As a kid he would never have imagined how much could really be underneath. How could he? There are layers of things under layers of things under layers of things; all the stuff he’d pushed down and away, so he wouldn’t have to feel it. It was enough to scare the hell out of anyone, and that’s probably why they never let you know in advance. Nobody would ever sign up for that.
“I looked it up,” he said. “The kind of monk he is, they can marry. They don’t have to swear off relationships. They can have regular lives, and just be monks while they’re doing it.”
“So?” Mary asked.
“Come on—you read the book. I stole her, years later he steals her back. You couldn’t set the stage any better.”
Mary looked at him. “First of all, you can’t steal a person. Laura’s not a stereo. Also, keep in mind—you’re the one she married.”
“That’s the thing. Maybe I’m not so sure she’d go the same way today.”
“If you have to wonder that,” Mary told him, “then I’m not the one you should be talking to.”