Breakfast With Buddha Read Free Page B

Tasha or Anthony there to scratch him behind the ears as they lay on the couch in the TV room. Aside from the occasional skunk, there was no danger lurking for him in the darkness, nothing to fear. He hadn’t known his parents, or siblings, didn’t have children, probably didn’t worry about what would happen to his loved ones and to his soul after he died. Off in the distance, beyond our little stream, we could hear traffic on the Hutchinson River Parkway, a steady drone of tires and engines, even at this hour. Everyone going, I thought, always going, always hurrying, but headed where?
    “You know what you need?” Jeannie asked, after a while.
    “What? To drive my loony sister to North Dakota and back?”
    “Yes, but before that. You need to retire early and go upstairs with your extremely affectionate wife.”

FOUR
Sometimes, after making love with Jeannie, I’d lie there beside her and feel as though the multifarious complexities that surrounded our life had been whisked away like particles of fog on a warm wind. Mind would be clear, body at peace. A fresh optimism would bloom along the windowsills of the bedroom, laying its frail, scented wreath across the sheets and pillows, and I would be clear-minded and capable, and what had to be done would be obvious, and my ability to do it beyond doubt.
    That, or something like it, is what happened on the night I’ve been describing here. Before the lovemaking there was the sour taste of obligation postponed, there were the stunted conversations with the kids, two of the three people I love most on this earth, and there was the patio sadness yawning off toward a meaningless eternity.
    After the lovemaking there was the calm understanding that the trip to North Dakota would be only ten days, two weeks at most, that my odd sister was a good-hearted soul. Jeannie and the children would survive perfectly well withoutme. Little chance I’d enjoy the trip—even postcoital calm doesn’t turn a tree root into a truffle—but it seemed at least possible that, by getting so far away from the ordinary routine, I might gain a new perspective on things.
    It was a wonderful feeling, really, that sleepy, sure state. I think sometimes that our national obsession with sex (and if you don’t think there is a national obsession with sex, just browse the magazine racks in the local chain bookstore) is really nothing more than a profound spiritual longing in disguise: the desire to exhaust all other desires and feel loved and sated, at peace with our fragmented modern selves, linked to those around us. At peace, at rest.
    I wonder, sometimes, if the same deep desire lies at the heart of addiction to drugs, to drink, to eating, to work: are we all just desperately looking for some strategy that will get us past the shoals of modern existence and safely into that imagined, calm port? But those strategies—injecting heroin, say, or spending eighty hours a week at the office—work for a time and then stop working. Eventually the bill comes due. It occurred to me, as I faded toward sleep, that, while I wasn’t addicted to anything (well, good food, perhaps), I had devised a strategy of my own, a weaving together of favorite pleasures—food, family time, sex, work I enjoyed, tennis, vacations, TV, reading. They made a harmless enough tapestry, a pretty landscape of pleasure speckled with moments of selflessness, annoyance, worry, fear. But it was a strategy all the same, and it had started to wear thin, and then my parents’ dying had punched a hole in the worn section. That night, I had the feeling there might be something on the other side, waiting to show itself to me.
    All through spring and half the summer I thought aboutthat “something,” wondered, pondered, let the episodes of doubt wash over me and leave me slightly less steady on my feet. I knew I’d have to go to North Dakota, but all through May, June, and part of July I was somehow able to pretend to myself that it would be