The Escape

Tuesday was Christmas, so Nicole’s usual meeting at the Zendo had been moved to Christmas Eve. Her entire week revolved around the arrival of this day, her visit to the center, her meditation on the rubbery hand-me-down yoga mats, her Master passing by like a chill wind. The other practitioners sat kneeling or cross-legged around her, known by their breath and their bodies, strangers otherwise. Same laboring quest for quiet, same mixture of dread and delight. But this night Buffy had invited everyone to a holiday party in the city after class, and she was determined to be sociable. She came late and teetered on a high, precarious stoop after pushing the doorbell, not sure if this was the right house among the line of matching townhouses. Then Buffy’s blond head bobbed into the window frame. “Nicole! What a surprise! I’m so glad you’ve come.”

She left her coat in the foyer and followed Buffy through a smart black-and-white tiled hall to the living room. Space was dear in these Back Bay apartments, but the ceilings were high, the crown moldings and many-paned windows old and elegant. “Look who’s joined us,” Buffy said to the gathering in the living room, and Nicole waved, feeling their surprise. She remembered walking into cozy Christmas homes like this one as a child, her brother, Paul, too skinny for his suit, she itching at the toilet paper her mother had stuffed into the sleeves of her party dress. She remembered yanking up the crotch of the white tights that crept closer to her knees every year. Then, too, the adults had greeted her with a benevolent boredom before she found herself picking at the seam of a fancy couch in the corner, waiting for it all to be over.

Buffy poured her a glass of wine. “How is your work, Nicole? Remind me, what do you do?” Buffy was always kind in an absentminded way. When they were all putting on their coats after a session, she asked the people around her, “How was that for you today? How was that for you?” She was a little bony for forty, spare as a marathoner, dressed now in a red skirt suit with large gold buttons, touching Nicole’s elbow like an old friend.

“Oh, mainly I work in sales. For a shoe store,” she added, naming the place but dropping the “Discount” from the title.

“Sounds like a hard place to stay Zen,” someone else said, and Buffy inserted, “Try my house when the kids get home from school!” The kids were there, actually, a girl and a boy fondling the presents under the Christmas tree. They didn’t look up or seem bothered. People lounged around the room or hovered in the doorway.

They commiserated cheerfully about how hard it was to find time in the day to meditate. What is the thing that pops up in your mind?

Commercial jingles, several said. Television plots. Is that a freckle or a mole? The relentless urge to check one’s phone for new messages. “The thought I have most often,” said Nicole, “is me telling myself, ‘Stop thinking.’” That made them laugh. She smiled in confusion, looking away. She knew she was an oddity, but she hadn’t expected to be entertaining to George and Amy and Buffy, all of them watching her, imagining what her life might be like. She had been in the Zendo longer than any of them; she’d met her Master when her father died, ten years ago. She’d never missed a session since. Heads often turned to see her at the back of the room, chanting words in Japanese or Pali she knew better than Hail Marys now.

“I can’t stop looking at the Master half the time,” said Frances. She was in her thirties and appeared younger: something bubbly and teenaged about the lift of her shoulders, her ready blush. “He’s not bad to look at!”

They debated whether the Master could be called handsome. He was like a surf instructor, ruddy and muscular. No, more like a man who’d spent years in the Himalayas: weathered and beaten up, but in a romantic way. He had a face with history, which men wore well.

“Wasn’t he married before he became a monk?”

“He’s not a monk,” Helen said. She was a slim girl in a little black dress with spotted stockings and a high heel dangling from one raised foot. “He’s a sensei, a teacher. He doesn’t have to be celibate.”

“But was he married?”

“He told me he’d lived a pretty wild life before his ordination. A bit like Siddhartha himself.” A corner of Helen’s mouth turned up. Nicole watched the spiked heel of her shoe jouncing on the end of her toe, threatening to fall. The others spoke on around them while they gazed at each other. She admired the lean smallness of Helen’s body, couldn’t help thinking about the way her own had softened and expanded these past few years, as though she had been left in water overnight.

“I’d agree he’s not bad to look at. And the gravitas that comes from being so spiritually accomplished—”

“I’m not convinced he is that spiritually accomplished. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’ve advanced tremendously since I started working with him. But as for his own level of attainment . . . ”

“In Japan, the priests can marry, you know.” “But not the nuns.”

“Does he speak Japanese?”

“I thought you had to give all that up to be truly wise. Sex and love and all of it. I thought that was why we were all doomed.”

The couples and groups shifted, forming and re-forming. Buffy slunk from person to person with a bottle, or waved them to the hors d’oeuvres. Nicole watched the conversation move from mouth to mouth, feeling full of her own self, the things she could say to surprise them if she were a little more reckless. Earlier that day, she’d told her Master about the party. “I know about it,” he said. “I was invited. But it’s not appropriate for me to attend.”

She knew he wanted his students to think of him only in the specific context of the Zendo. He took pains not to be seen outside on the street or wearing civilian clothes. He stood in the front room or in the private meeting chamber; that was it.

“What if you came as my guest? If we came arm in arm?”  she asked.

He almost smiled. Oh, she could make him smile from time to time. She held these moments close to herself, like a drawer of knives she could pull open and examine. “Nicole” was all he said.

She imagined telling her Master she was leaving. “This isn’t helping my spiritual progress anymore,” she’d say. “After we fuck, I’m in the wrong headspace all day.”

Someone was passing around a joint, and it finally reached Buffy. “Jesus,” she said. “Can I put the kids to bed first?”

She led the children away, and when she returned, she took the joint and pulled on it wearily. Amy patted her on the head. “Oh, to be a mother.” Amy was in her sixties, thin and drawn and with coarse white waves of hair. Nicole remembered her announcing her reason for first coming to the Zendo: she had thyroid cancer and found meditation helped her with pain. Later the cancer came back and she joined the sangha officially, taking refuge with them, as the saying went. She wore heavy dark mascara that made her look striking and Goth, and helped to hide the sunkenness of her eyes. She seemed to have shrunk a little each time Nicole saw her, swaying on her mat by the window, but her look grew more fierce and militant. She burned with a clear and dangerous light.

“Nicole, you’ve been studying with our teacher for longer than any of us, I think,” Buffy said. “Would you call him a true master?”

Now the eyes swung to her. Nicole leaned forward in the deep plush seat, pressing her hands between her stockinged thighs. They must think of me as a nun, she thought: a silent vessel, emptying herself year by year. “I would. I do.”

That was the problem, really.

It was a strain, talking about meditation and the cold, clean promise of the Middle Path when they were by a warm fire drinking wine. The conversation shifted to traffic, then real estate; how real estate was affecting politics; how politics were affecting real estate. Nicole emptied her wine glass and set in on a refill when Buffy passed with the bottle. Now they were Bostonians again, not Zen students; snow was falling outside the window. They were abashed Christians and lapsed Jews admiring the hand-knit stockings and the gently spinning ornaments on the tree. Now they could only talk the way you must when you are in a cable-knit sweater at a holiday party, passing a brass tray of cookies.

Presently she stepped out onto the stoop. She was not a smoker but she always enjoyed smokers’ lonely company; after a night class in her community college days she’d sometimes lean on a wall with them and chat, looking at the world from its fringe. She had come back to Boston then, twenty-two and trying to return to a semblance of orderly life while the other night students, parents already with fulltime jobs, laughed exhaustedly together.

George was out there, finishing a smoke; he smiled briefly. “Merry Christmas, Nicole.” He stamped his cigarette into the snow and went back in.

It was cold enough to stop the breath in her lungs, but she did not go back in yet. If she’d gone back in, perhaps nothing would have changed for her that night. But she liked the stillness of the dark street, the shady promise of a few dim stars. In small wedges of the posher neighborhoods, Boston looked like a brick-lined alley in a Sherlock Holmes novel. The streetlamps were old and ornate, the stone steps worn and scooped in the middle. Christmas trees glowing in houses, snow gathered in the thick greeny pane of every window.

She went to close the door behind George and found Helen there, trembling with her cigarette to her lips. “How do you put up with people like that?” she asked.

Nicole crossed her arms, tried not to shiver. Helen always flustered her. “Buffy’s a very kind person. Not everyone has to be the same as you. When you get older, you learn that.”

“Blah, blah, blah.” Helen laughed, low and throaty. “You know these people. Walking clichés, all of them. With their Christmas trees and their Buddha ornaments. But you’re not one of them. I’ll tell you where you’re going next.”

“Where?”

“My house. I’m having a few people over.” Helen waved to the lit window. “Not any of them.”

“It’s late.”

Helen went on as if she hadn’t spoken. “I’m going to leave, and then a little later you’re going to come.” She was scribbling her address on a piece of paper, pressing her cold little hand into Nicole’s. “I want my friends to meet you.”

• • •

Now, wrapping her bronze Buddha head in bubble wrap, stuffing the space around it in the box with socks, she wondered why she’d agreed, why she’d obediently collected her coat and followed. Was it curiosity? A delusion that she was still twenty and not thirty-two? A grim determination to prove herself game?

When she was seventeen, she’d smoked pot even though it made her sick because her boyfriend’s friends were watching, waiting to see whether she was cool enough to join their company. When she was twenty-two and a new Zen student, and her Master swept by in her third hour of meditation, she’d sit straighter, hide the tightening ropes of pain in her spine. There were these tests you had to pass to prove your worth; all your life you’d keep jumping through the hoops to show you could.

Reprinted from The Devoted by Blair Hurley. Copyright © 2018 by Blair Hurley. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.