The Other Hand Clapping Page 6

  "Eleanor is my koan," he said out loud.

  The use of the koan was a relatively late development in zen, coming into vogue sometime around the thirteenth century. Usually it was an enigmatic statement by a master, or a bit of dialogue between master and student, or a seeming nonsense question, the most famous of which was, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" In the Rinzai school of zen, the koan was central to practice. As one sat, one was supposed to be absorbed into it, to breathe it, to sweat it, and to let it pervade one's whole being throughout the day, in all activities, and even in sleep.

  The master Larry studied with, however, was of the Soto school, which rarely used koans. As one teacher in that lineage put it, "Some people, when they sit, need something to occupy their minds, and that's all right. But the most important thing is the sitting." For Larry now to take on a koan on his own, without supervision, was risky. For him to turn Eleanor into his "irrational question" was extremely dangerous. But the notion gripped him with all the sense of rightness of a line of poetry, as well as making a kind of wild sense. It resonated with the long tradition in Buddhism in which women were seen as obstacles to enlightenment, except that instead of dealing with the problem by avoiding women, this would cut right to the heart of the matter, fusing his practice with his marriage.

  Larry lay in bed until almost seven, skipping his morning sessions, and then dressed, washed and shaved, and went into the kitchen for breakfast. Eleanor seemed not to be up yet, so he set her coffee to perking and fixed himself tea. He was having his fruit and yoghurt when she walked into the kitchen, looking somewhat hung-over.

  "Coffee's ready," he said.

  "Thanks," she said glumly, not looking at him.

  "Had a bad night?"

  She poured coffee into her cup and sat across from him. "Considering that my husband seems to be having a nervous breakdown, not so bad."

  "I'm sorry if I upset you." He smiled. "I just needed a good cry, that's all."

  "Rolling around in the dirt outside the house?"

  He shrugged. "You know how it is with emotional crisis. You don't always get to pick the time and place."

  "I thought your sitting was supposed to get you beyond all that weak human stuff."

  "Eventually. But first it's necessary to go more deeply into it."

  She sipped her coffee silently for a while, then glanced up at him. "You're obviously feeling better this morning."

  "I've thought a few things through."

  "Glad to hear it," she replied, not masking the sarcasm in her voice. "Maybe I should try that. But then, I guess I'm still under the delusion that we're working things out together."

  "I'm sure there are things you don't tell me," he said pointedly.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "You tell me."

  "You're getting weird," she said.

  She went back to the counter next to the sink to pour more coffee. Larry looked at her, aware as always of her beauty which included not only the wild-child face and hot-woman body, but the gracefulness and sureness of movement born of many years of training for the stage. But for the first time in his life he was also seeing her as an impersonal vortex of energy, as a principle. As a person she could be maddening or delightful, affectionate or hateful, faithful or wanton, and he would be vulnerable to all that. But as a koan, she could do nothing that would not feed his insight, intensify his meditation.

  She turned abruptly and caught him staring at her. "What's in that seething brain of yours now?" she asked.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Come on, Larry. I know you pretty well after all these years. And you look like you've come up with another one of your grand explanations. Are you going to share it with me or take it with you out to the woodshed where you bring all your real feelings?"

  "I've come up with a new idea for my practice, that's all. It's just technical stuff. I'm sure it wouldn't interest you."

  "I'm sure," she said, making no attempt to hide her displeasure. "But be careful."

  "Is that a threat?"

  Instantly her mood changed, one of those sudden shifts she did so well in a role, and it occurred to Larry that perhaps he served the same function in her worldview that she'd come to assume in his, that in the same way he saw her as a koan to be solved, she was treating him as a character to play against. But even as he formulated the thought, she walked over to him. "A threat?" she said. "What's wrong with you? I'm worried about you, I don't want to see you going round the bend. I figure you know what you're doing with this zen stuff, but sometimes I wonder if you aren't in over your head."

  Once more he was thrown off balance, touched by the seeming sincerity of her tone, but at the same time aware that that might be an act, a screen behind which she was making her own plans prior to some unilateral move. He had no doubt that she cared for him, as he did for her, but the twin courses of their lives might either shred that or render it academic at any time. He found himself gazing blankly at her as she stroked his face. "Where are you?" she said.

  He shook himself loose inwardly and took her hands in his. "Look," he said. "If I were a physicist or something like that, I'd be working on things in my lab that I couldn't really explain to anyone else. And they might be dangerous, but that would be my job. Please don't be worried. I'm all right. I just have to see something through."

  "O.K.," she said after a few seconds. "I'm trying to understand."

  "Thanks."

  She stepped away from him and looked over at the wall clock. "I have another all-day session, so I've got to leave now."

  "So early? It's not even eight."

  "Classes start at ten. I think I'll take a drive down to the reservoir first and clear my head out."

  "I don't want to feel that I'm driving you out of the house."

  "Silly, it's nothing like that." She put her cup in the sink, walked back to him, kissed him lightly on the lips, and went to the front door. "Take it easy today, all right?"

  "Sure."

  Eleanor turned and walked outside, and in a few moments he heard the car starting up and moving off down the driveway and over the dirt road through the woods.

  "Maybe I will take it easy today," he thought when the house was silent again. He made more tea and went into the living room to get a cigarette. He sat on the couch for a while, drinking and smoking, letting his new appreciation of Eleanor as the central focus of his meditation turn around in his mind. At one level, it was insanity; at another, a possibly unique effort in zen.

  He thought about the whole history of their relationship, remembering special moments that, in retrospect, seemed a kind of satori or enlightenment in their own right but which were always singular events, without continuity. He recalled a day they spent on a deserted stretch of beach on Fire Island, lunching on bread and cheese and wine, and then making love in the dunes. When they'd finished, Eleanor pointed at something a few yards away and shivered. It was a dead gull, its legs sticking out stiffly from the body, its neck an unnaturally graceful curve, its eyes closed. They went over and looked at it, both fascinated and repelled. "It's funny," Eleanor had said, "We were making love right next to it. Sex and death side by side." In that instant Larry had an insight for which he'd found no satisfactory terms until several years later. For him, then, all distinctions dissolved. Organic and inorganic, living and dead, sea and sky, all were one.

  As he played back the scene, however, another string of images intruded on the peaceful moment of memory. These showed Eleanor by the reservoir, only not simply gazing at the water and surrounding mountains, but lying behind the stone wall where the rowboats were kept, with the man from the night before, in another brief tryst, this time before class. She is face down on the grass, her jeans pulled down to her knees, allowing her to spread her thighs only slightly, and her buttocks raised as he takes her from behind, his erection jutting out from the open zipper of his slacks.

  But instead of being shattered by the vision as he was the pre
vious times he suffered such erotic seizures, Larry only smiled. "The koan gets laid," he said out loud. He put his cigarette out and congratulated himself on his ability to make the distinction between his feelings for Eleanor as a woman and Eleanor as the concept that he had to transcend.

  In seeing her as an abstraction he also distanced himself from certain human niceties he would otherwise have observed, such as respecting Eleanor's privacy. Following the logic of his strategy, he got up and went into Eleanor's bedroom. He realized that what he was about to do was ignoble, but like a politician defending the invasion of another people, he excused his behavior on the grounds of consistency with a principle.

  The bed was unmade and the state of the sheets indicated that Eleanor had also had a restless night. On the floor by the side of the bed were the clothes Eleanor was wearing when she made her startling entrance, and he picked them up to examine them. The blouse did look like it had been torn by branches, but the jeans were dirty in only two places, the knees and the seat. Either she'd fallen twice, once forward and once backward, or else been kneeling and sitting, actions that suggested another scenario altogether. Next he pored over her panties. As with the pair he'd found in the laundry basket, the crotch was thick with dried secretions, so caked that he could discern fine hairline cracks in the surface, like splits in a mudflat abandoned by the tide and punished by the sun.

  He was about to lift them to his nostrils to sniff them when he caught sight of himself in the full-length mirror on the closet door. He saw a tall bald-headed man in a brown robe about to smell his wife's soiled underwear to find evidence of her infidelity, and the sudden absurd image shook his resolve. He dropped the clothing back on the floor and arranged the pile so it looked as it had before he'd picked through it.

  He glanced around the room. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He walked over to the dressing table, noting the array of homely items across the top of it ... lipstick, earrings, jars and tubes of various facial preparations, some rocks she'd found in the stream. Then, gingerly, he opened the two side drawers, one at a time. There was nothing of interest: some jewelry, scarves, a few brassieres she rarely wore.

  Next he opened the wide slim drawer above the space where the matching chair slipped in. At first glance he saw nothing but handkerchiefs and rolled-up tissues covered with dried cold-cream. He pulled the drawer out a few more inches and his eyes widened. He reached down and picked up a familiar object, a pack of Pall Malls, which had been Eleanor's brand when she used to smoke. For an instant he was puzzled, and then it was clear. Eleanor had a hidden stash also and, like him, had become a secret smoker. But even as he was registering the revelation, he saw something else at the back of the drawer, something that every instinct told him to leave alone. But he could not resist. It was a Polaroid photograph, lying face down.

  He turned it over. It was a shot of Eleanor. She was sitting in a large armchair he didn't recognize, in a room that was unfamiliar to him. She was wearing her halter and shorts, and one leg was raised over the side of the chair, making her prominent pubic bone the center of the picture. She had her hands clasped behind her head, raising her breasts. The effect was not lewd, but pleasantly sexy, like old Esquire magazine pinups. It was the kind of photograph a lover might take.

  But it was also a shot that a friend in the acting workshop might have snapped during a break, and Eleanor could always claim something like that. It looked recent, but she'd had the outfit for more than a year, and the photo could conceivably have been taken months earlier. As he stared at it, though, the skin on the back of his neck began to tingle and he was suddenly convinced that Eleanor had returned silently and was now standing behind him. He squared his shoulders, set his features, and turned around quickly. The room was empty.

  He smiled grimly. He'd have felt foolish if she'd actually caught him there, but he didn't regret his action. He put the pack of cigarettes back and slipped the photograph, face down, behind it, then shut the drawer and, looking around to see that everything was as he'd found it, left the room.

  "I've gone this far, why not take it further?" he thought. "If I'm to penetrate the meaning of the koan, perhaps I should pursue it. Perhaps I should pursue her."

  He went into his room and changed into jeans and a shirt and put on a pair of socks and work boots. He was now moving outside anything that might be construed as zen practice by any orthodox master. But then, zen also had a tradition of totally unconventional masters who urged their students to be wild, to disregard the formal teachings and rituals, to find their enlightenment on the wing.

  "Anyway, it's time I met the great Mr. Moorman," he concluded. He went outside, kicked the motorcycle into life, and rode down the side of the mountain, in search of he didn't know what.

  7

  As Larry maneuvered the winding turns, shifting and braking, he wondered at the wisdom of his impulse. He had no specific goal and didn't really expect to catch Eleanor at some indiscretion. Rather, he hoped to absorb some of the texture and mood of her life in the workshop, to pick up some clue, however vague, about her inner directions. At home, confronting her directly, he would only see the mask she chose to wear for him. But while she was involved with others he might peer into her from an angle. He was a bit nervous about just barging in unannounced, but Eleanor had told him early on that that would be all right since Alec thrived on unexpected developments.

  He also wondered what Shido, the master who ran the zen center, would say to his current notion of treating Eleanor as a koan. On the occasion of his formal talks, Shido refused to deal with details of life problems. His only response to any situation was the recommendation to continue sitting. "This is our faith," he stressed, "That in sitting everything becomes clear and the power of the true self emerges."

  Larry had tended to think such advice a bit simple-minded at first, until he learned of the enormity of Shido's own accomplishments. He'd run four monasteries in Japan, managing some two thousand monks. He came to the United States not speaking a word of English, and within five years had established a thriving zen center in the city and built a monastery in the Catskills. He'd had four books published and was honored as a teacher by leaders of most religious groups. He was also married and had three children. Yet he rarely spoke, and when he did it was to say only the simplest things. All of his achievements seemed to flow effortlessly from the practice of spending many hours each day doing nothing but sitting.

  As Larry reached the bottom of the mountain, he realized that Shido would consider his present state of mind one of lunatic agitation and tell him to get back to his meditation room. "Well," Larry thought, "At least I'm sitting, even if it is on a motorcycle."

  He turned right and headed toward the town of Phoenicia, some ten miles away. Eleanor had given him directions to Alec's shortly after she'd been there herself for the first time, and they involved a right turn into the hills that rise up from the river running through the village. From that point on he had to stay alert through several cutoffs until he was chugging along a dirt road that had no name. When he arrived at the large house, he pulled in among the ten or so cars parked in front of it and switched off the engine.

  The house was far up into the hills, at least a mile from any neighbor, and almost that distance from the main road. It was one of those huge disjointed structures of about eight or nine rooms that must have been popular around the first few decades of the century. He walked up to the front door and knocked. Fifteen seconds passed with no answer. He knocked again, and again there was silence. Shrugging, he tried the knob and pushed the door open. He stepped inside and walked through a long foyer that opened onto a very large living room.

  "Hello," he called out.

  There was no reply and he stood there for a few moments wondering what to do when, through the wide glass sliding doors that made up almost an entire wall of the room, he saw a man darting out from behind a tree, pausing to look around in every direction, and running back into the woods. Larry waited to
see whether any more apparitions would appear, and after a while decided to sit and wait.

  Aside from a beat-up easy chair and two straight-back chairs, there was no furniture in the room. A dozen large floor pillows were strewn about and he decided to use one of those. He took off his boots, sank onto one of the pillows, folded his legs in a lotus, and settled in to see what might happen next. Ten minutes passed and Larry began to feel as though he were sitting in meditation instead of as in a waiting room. In that context, the strange surroundings and the fact that he was there in some undefined pursuit of Eleanor faded into the background and he was left with the pure awareness of his posture and breath.

  He lost track of time and space and was roused from his concentration only by the sense that someone else was in the room, and had been in the room for several minutes. He shook his head slowly, rocked from side to side, unlocked his legs, and looked around. In one corner of the room stood a man sporting a white beard and mane. He was short and stocky, with a thick chest and a full belly that bulged over the waist of his shorts. He was barefoot and holding a frosted can of beer.

  "Bravo!" the man said.

  Larry stood up. "I wasn't aware I was in a performance," he replied.

  "In this house, everything's a performance."

  "Really," Larry said, dryly, a bit miffed at having been watched and judged.

  "I'm Alec," the man said, coming forward and extending his hand. They shook hands and he went on, "You must be Larry."

  "How did you know?"

  "Eleanor's talked about you, of course. And who else would be sitting in a full lotus in my living room, with a shaved head yet?"