The clappers sounded again—three clacks—as I stepped out of the shed, ran under the overhang and into the office. Six or seven minutes to find a photo from the opening ceremony, make some sense of it, and get to work meeting before Rob started wondering about me. After that, there’d be Roshi’s fire to conquer. All before I could grab a minute to slip into my cabin for my letter.
The office was the size of the two-car garage I had slept above at a friend’s house. Two Japanese screens—black on white with one red accent each—divided the area into a large and small room. The larger part was a surprisingly appealing space crowded with two soft and shabby leather chairs, sagging damask couch, and a heavy round oak coffee table strewn with magazines like Wind Bell, Turning Wheel and Tricycle, Zen magazines, but magazines, nevertheless. A huge stone hearth took up the entire end wall. It was a raised hearth, with a granite ledge in front where the cold, wet, tired, lonely, or frustrated Zen student could sit, hug knees to chest, and let his back get dry and warm to roasting. When the chill was gone, he could reach over to a little cabinet beside the hearth, grab one of the four mugs and pour himself a cup of tea from a pot heating on a hook over the fire.
Four mugs. Leo, Maureen, Barry, and, more lately, Rob. So they were the only residents. But who were these people? I tried to squeeze a sense of them from the room.
It was such a bare bones place, and yet the only spot of comfort in the whole monastery complex. Everything here must have taken on overwhelming importance. The arrival of each chair and rug must have been cause for celebration, with Barry, Maureen, and Rob running excitedly to the parking lot as Leo pulled up with the green leather recliner in the back of the pickup. Maureen would be the one to climb right up, plop in it, and give the thumbs up. Barry would give a great sigh of appreciation that would shake his bear-like body, and Rob—
No wait, I had the picture wrong. It would be Rob driving the truck, because it would be Rob’s money from selling his law practice in San Francisco or from ongoing, much smaller legal fees up here that would have made possible the purchase of even a used recliner. And Maureen might still clamber up and plop into it, but she wouldn’t be like a kid getting a gift beyond her imagining. She’d be the kid allowed to ride her cousin’s new dirt bike, play with her friend’s beautiful doll, sit in the chair given by the friend who would disdain her pleasure in it. Every time she or Barry sunk down, it would be an indictment of their unseemly attachment to comfort. Rob’s austere patronage would forever hang over it.
I had never done without, but as the youngest I had worn clothes that had been through three sisters, and not recently. “This is a perfectly good sweater,” Mom had said as she held out a woolly item out of style longer than I’d been alive. Cold or dowdy had been my choice, and I’d been cold a lot. I’d envied my only-child friends. And I’d resented each of my sisters individually as the damp wind chilled an arm for Katy, the other arm for Janice, and my whole back for Grace. There’d been days I sat shivering, ignoring the teacher in every class till lunch period, as I wholeheartedly resented. So I could imagine what Barry and Maureen felt.
I had wanted to come to sesshin, but by the time it was over I’d be dying to go home. The idea of living here permanently was ghastly. And living here, alone, with three other people not of my choosing—It made me want New York so much my lungs hurt. And it made me think of those four in a different light. The commitment they’d made so they could practice Zen awed me. Even Rob. Because of them, the rest of us could drop in for sesshins like this. What could it be like day after day, year after year out here? Had two of them had passionate encounters on that sagging damask couch? Screaming fights over the magazine-strewn table? Whatever, the strength of their commitment to this monastery amazed me.
The clappers sounded again. No time for speculating. I made a beeline back into the office section and tried the central desk drawer. It slid right open, revealing nothing but pencils, pen, paperclips, letterhead, and an array of rubber bands that made me sure no incoming band had ever been discarded.
The clappers hit, softer in the distance. The timekeeper was already moving toward the meeting site.
The left-hand drawers held old schedules, lecture notes, and pages of notes I couldn’t decipher. But there, under those sheets, enlarged but not framed, were photos labeled “Opening.” Three of them, eight by tens. I pulled them out and glanced hurriedly at each. They looked to be of the same subjects, taken in succession the way you do just to make sure you get one shot in which no one moved. I chose the one on top, the one someone eyed last. Aeneas would be in this picture, as would the person who killed him.
The picture showed about twenty people pressing in together in three rows in front of what looked like a huge half ball that had to be the unfinished zendo. The porch hadn’t been built yet and the crawl space under the zendo was visible. Sun shone bright, glistening off the shaved heads of the two elderly, tiny Japanese dignitaries in the front, a younger, larger one in the middle row, and off the long blond hair of the woman beside him. A breeze had lifted her fine hair and held it out like a bridal veil. There was a fragile, delicate, almost translucent quality to her skin and her unexpectedly bared forehead. Her dark, wide-set eyes and too-wide mouth looked tentative. I couldn’t stop staring at her. Maureen. She could have been the daughter of her present self. The difference wasn’t one of wrinkles or sun damage, but something hard to tether to words. When she ran across the quad yesterday her connection to the earth had appeared tenuous. A mere six years earlier she had looked as if floating on a wind current was her natural state and rarely would her feet graze the soil.
As I scanned the other figures in the photo, I realized the reason I was drawn to Maureen was that everybody in the photo had been drawn to her. Barry, at the end of a row, was eyeing her quizzically. Rob—it took me a moment to place Rob because in the photo he looked like a mix between present-day Rob and Justin—was smiling at the camera but his shoulders were turned toward her as if to allow him to shift his gaze the instant the camera shutter closed. Leo stood in front of her and was leaning toward her. And the Japanese teacher next to her stared outright, smiling like a possessive child.
The Maureen in the photo was the just-born gazelle, struggling to stand on quivering legs. All around her were hands eager to be extended, to draw her up, draw her in, to keep her in their corral. I wondered if she had been aware of the affect she’d had with that seductive combination of ephemeral beauty and need.
No, it was the door. It banged open. The photo slapped onto the desk. For a moment I couldn’t fathom the woman in the doorway. Unable to stop myself, I did the worst thing possible: I stared at Maureen standing rain-bedraggled and rushed in the office doorway, then back at the picture of her six years earlier. My mouth was actually hanging open. I knew, in that way you can see screens of truths lined up like computer windows, that my shock was not for the reason she would assume, and that I would never be able to convince her of that and she would always think I was horrified at the aging of the startling beauty in the photo.
I wasn’t. The girl in the photo was a white bud just beginning to open and the woman in the doorway, dripping and draped in an old brown anorak was the open rose. Maureen’s face was still thin, her cheekbones clear, but her skin had a firmness to it. The spidery lines around her dark eyes suggested life lived, not merely hoped for, and the set of her mouth evidence of opinions developed. Her skin was no longer alabaster but the not-quite-faded tan of the outdoors woman. Her hands were not out to be held, but out pointing to the pictures. It was only then that I realized she had spoken.
When I looked up blankly, she repeated, “What are you doing with those?’
I must have blushed three shades of purple, as if she’d caught me going through her e-mail. I opted for truth, of a sort.
“I’m taking them to Roshi.” And before she could ask why, I held the photo out to her and asked, as innocently as I might had Roshi sent me for the photos of the opening, “Who’s who here?”
Her eyes did not widen in surprise nor cloud with sadness as they might have on seeing long forgotten pictures, but there was no way to tell whether she had glanced at them yesterday, or studied them a year ago. She ran her finger across the figures, naming names unfamiliar to me. The only ones I recognized were Leo, Rob, Barry, and Gabe, looking even brattier at that earlier age. I wouldn’t have recognized Amber under one of the worst permanents in hair history, a huge, dry, blond bush. She was staring at the Japanese teacher diagonally in front of her, the roshi who was staring possessively at Maureen.
Pointing to the bald figure in front of Amber, Maureen said, “Aeneas.”
“That’s Aeneas?” I said, shocked.
The Japanese roshi wasn’t Japanese or a roshi. Shaven-headed, round-faced with eyes half-closed, Aeneas blended in with the Asian roshis rather than with the Americans. From appearance he was the last person in the world to lose it after the ceremony they’d all been planning for months. I peered closer and could see that the similarity was not so much of features, but of stance, of expression, of entitlement. Now that I knew he wasn’t a roshi, I assessed him differently and thought there was something of a junior high school eagerness to the way he looked at Maureen. He could have been about to raise his fingers behind her head to make devil horns, or, as easily, use those fingers to grope her.
Then I realized the mistake I had made—one any fresh viewer would. It wasn’t Maureen at all who was the center of attention. It was, standing close beside her, Aeneas. Barry was eyeing him quizzically as if unsure what his motivation was. Rob was keeping watch out of the corner of his eye as if he knew only too well what Aeneas was up to. Aeneas was definitely leaning toward Maureen, but now I could see her shifting away. And Leo? Damn. I couldn’t read him any better in that frozen moment than I could now. Still, whatever their individual fears, they were all focused on Aeneas.
“Maureen,” I said, “you remember this picture being taken, right?”
“Yes.”
“In a group photo the photographer is usually shouting, ‘Bunch together, so we can get everyone in.’ But you’re leaning away from Aeneas—”
She leaned away from me and if expressions could lean away hers would have now. In the distance the clappers struck, or perhaps it was a branch creaking in the wind and rain.
“Maureen? What was it about Aeneas?”
“. . . devil.” Her voice was almost a whisper.
“Devil?” Surely I had misheard.
“You know the story of the man who buys a devil in a cage.”
She jolted back again, this time from her own words. And then she was gone.
The man is in the bazaar, in Japan maybe. Long ago. A stranger is selling a devil in a cage, cheap. The man haggles a bit, but the devil is a very good buy. Smugly he pays and takes the cage, ready to leave. But the seller stops him and says, “This is a very fine devil; he’s smart; he will work sunrise to sunset and never need to rest; no job is too menial for him, none too difficult. But there is one thing you need to remember: each morning when you let him out of the cage you must give him a list of tasks that will keep him busy all day long till you put him back in his cage at night. He must never have free time. He is a fine worker, and a very good devil, but he is a devil, after all.”
The buyer nods perfunctorily and carries the devil home in the cage.
The next morning, the man gives the devil a list that covers an entire page: scrub the walls in every room, clean the bathrooms, prepare all meals, rake the yard, scrub out the iron pots. And the devil works steadily from dawn to dusk.
On the second day, the man gives the devil an equally long list of jobs and the devil works equally hard.
And so it goes, day after day, month after month. The man is very pleased with his devil and thinks how lucky he was to have come across him so fortuitously in the bazaar.
But one afternoon the man runs into an old friend in a bar, and the two of them get to talking of old times and drinking sake: they have dinner, toast each other, go on drinking and talking hour after hour. Night passes, and the sun rises before the man stumbles home. As he nears his house, he smells smoke. Suddenly, he remembers the devil, and the warning the seller in the bazaar gave: You must give him a list of tasks that will keep him busy all day long till you put him back in his cage at night. He must never have free time; he is a devil, after all.
The man quickens his pace, stumbling into a run, fearful for his house and what his uncaged devil has done. The smoke is thicker. He rounds the corner onto his street.
But his house sits where it had always been, fine and unharmed.
Sweating with relief, the man walks through his house, out into the back yard. There he finds the source of the smoke. The devil is standing by a fire, roasting the neighbor children on a spit.