“Nice attitude,” I said.
Art nodded. “It’s at least comforting to note that assholes appear to be widely dispersed across this great country of ours.”
“Lieutenant’s thinking of sending someone down there. Maybe speed things up a bit.” Micky sounded skeptical.
“Who’re you sending?” I asked.
Micky pointed at Art. Art pointed at Micky. They both said, “Him.”
Sarah Klein ate delicately, but with a determination I admired. I had screwed up enough nerve to ask her out for dinner, and, to my surprise, she said yes.
They were piping piano music into the room, and the low-level murmur of other diners and the tinkle of silverware made a pleasant background noise. It was a place Sarah suggested, near where she worked. She directed the research department for a commercial publishing house, and she sometimes took clients there. It was nice.
Part of my enthusiasm was for her, of course. But restaurants are always exciting to the Burkes. We didn’t go out much as kids: my parents had six children. They entertained at home and during those occasions all offspring were banished to the basement or the backyard, forbidden entry into adult territory. On the odd times we would go out, all the young Burkes pilfered the table, cramming their pockets with sugar packets. You could only eat so many, but they were free.
So aside from the sheer pleasure of being with an interesting woman, the little Burke deep inside me sighed with a visceral pleasure at the mere motion of opening the menu.
We had white wine, and you could see the glint of Sarah’s teeth as she brought the glass up to her mouth. I yearned for beer, but sipped at the chardonnay with all the couth I could muster.
“How’d you end up in research?” I asked her. “You seem…” I thought about a good way to say it, “… such a people person.”
She cocked her head and smiled. “I had a literature degree, but my parents made me minor in marketing. I spent a few years trying different things, living on the West Coast, but really mostly just hanging around the man I was with…” She waved a hand in dismissal.
“Oh,” I said, ever the master of small talk.
Sarah looked at me very intently, her eyes slightly wide. “When that ended, I was sort of left to create my own life for myself. All over again.”
“Hard work,” I offered.
She shrugged and took a drink. “Yes.”
“Most things worth doing are hard,” I said.
She smiled at me then. She had broad cheekbones and a pointy chin, a heart-shaped face that seemed made for smiling. “Are you speaking from personal experience, Burke?”
I grinned in mute acknowledgment, then asked, “Is that when you started kyudo?”
I was curious about Sarah. The martial arts world is generally male-dominated. There are increasing numbers of women in some arts, like aikido and, these days, kendo, but, for the most part, skilled and devoted female students are a rarity. It’s a shame—they make excellent students and learn faster than men. The most dangerous judo player I ever met was a woman. I can still remember the grim look of satisfaction in her eyes as she choked me into semi-consciousness when I was still a novice. Yamashita makes a real effort to encourage women students, but they’re few and far between. And yet here was one.
She was working diligently at her salad, but managed to explain. “I think for women a real challenge is learning how to define yourself on your own terms, you know? I spent a number of years essentially thinking of myself as someone’s partner… And when I left, there was this big hole to fill.”
“How’d he feel about it? The guy you were…” I trailed off, unsure how to put it.
“I was with,” she said. “Living with.” I nodded. “He’s not a bad guy. A little self-absorbed. He’s not completely… reconciled, I guess, to my leaving.”
“But you are?”
“Another hard thing in life, Burke.” Her chin stuck out a bit in determination.
“Ah,” I ate some salad.
The silence could have been awkward, but Sarah carried on. “So when I got my present job—you would not believe how poorly people write…” She saw me smirk and corrected herself. “OK, maybe you would—it was like starting over again. On being me. Alone.” She smiled self-consciously. “You know, Burke, I have a hard time imagining you working at a college.”
She was good at steering a conversation. I didn’t mind that she wanted to avoid more discussion of a touchy subject.
I thought of my work at the university and how increasingly distant it seemed from the important things in my life. “You’re not alone,” I said.
“No, I mean… Travis has been talking to me about –Yamashita’s dojo and how it’s really for elite students…”
“Travis? Stark? You see a lot of him at the Dharma Center?”
Her eyes dipped for a minute. “He’s around a bit. They’ve got a residence floor for visiting students and he’s been staying there. He comes down to watch kyudo sometimes.”
Sarah was wearing an open-necked shirt. She had an elegant neck, but I noticed a slight flush rising on her skin. I figured maybe it was the wine. But I wasn’t interested in discussing Stark, and she seemed happy to oblige. “We were talking about you,” I prompted.
The waiter brought us our dinners and there was a pause as we arranged cutlery and passed things around. At one point, our fingers touched and I smiled into her brown eyes. She smiled back, but went to work on her steak.
“Well, anyway,” she continued, “the job is OK, but it’s just a job.”
“If it were fun,” I commented, “they wouldn’t have to pay you.”
“But, you know, it’s not me,” she said. “I mean, there’s more to life… there’s got to be more to life... more to yourself… than just that.”
I nodded. Every day when I pick up a sword, I think the same thing. It’s what keeps me coming back to Yamashita’s dojo.
“Out in California, there is no shortage of exotic disciplines. I’d done some yoga and meditation. Once I left and came here, I heard about the archery from a friend of a friend,” she continued. “Someone who had studied dance at NYU and got interested in Asian performance arts. And I went to watch. And… I liked it.”
“What do you like?” I said.
She rolled her eyes in thought. “I like… the pace of it,” she said slowly, reflectively. “The sense of calm and isolation. There’s a grace to the art. Have you ever tried it?” I shook my head no. “It’s really hard to do. And I like that as well. Something you can bury yourself in that also becomes a part of you.”
I grinned in appreciation, hearing echoes of things that I had thought for years.
Sarah seemed surprised that she had said so much, and skillfully turned the conversation around to me. I told her a bit about Yamashita and my job at the university. She had dessert, of course, and as I watched her eat it was hard to figure out which of us was enjoying the meal more. I told her a little about the case I was working on.
“Strange mix of things, Burke. Did you ever imagine you’d end up doing what you’re doing?” she asked. She cupped her face in her hands and her eyes were clear and wide.
I thought about what I had imagined for myself: a life of learning, surrounded by books. Teaching. Somehow, the image of Hoddington, a still form in a room full of paper, kept intruding. “No,” I said ruefully, “I don’t think I could ever have imagined something like this.”
She put her hand out and touched mine. Her hand was small and delicate, but warm. “Life is full of surprises, isn’t it Connor?”
We lingered for a while over coffee. I watched her stir her cup and smiled at a sudden realization. “I’ll bet,” I said, “that I know what you really like about kyudo.”
“Oh yeah?” she said, and her hair brushed across one side of her face as she tilted her head in amusement.
“Sure,” I told her. ‘’I’ll bet you like it when the arrow
thunks
into the target.”
Sarah Klein raised her eyebrows. “Maybe,” she smiled.
I took her home to her apartment in Chelsea. She didn’t offer to have me come up. I didn’t ask. But I did tell her I’d like to see her again and that I thought we had a lot in common.
“That,” she said and made an amused expression with her mouth, “remains to be seen.” There was a flash of her white teeth and a wave of her hand.
I smiled all the way back to Brooklyn.
The next morning, I went to see Yamashita’s Tibetan friend. It was a nice change of pace. I had slept badly, with jumbled dreams of calligraphy. I then spent the drizzly hours right after dawn serving as Yamashita’s training dummy, taking spectacular falls on a hard wooden floor. There was a spot on my shoulder where the uniform seam had started to rub the skin raw from taking a few too many forward rolls. But I had watched some of the novices wince and rub their own shoulders that morning and so I acted as if I felt nothing out of the ordinary. Pride is an Irishman’s anesthetic.
I made my way through the dense streams of city workers. They moved with tense, quick strides along invisible routes mapped out and refined through long practice, the issue of commuting reduced to a time/distance problem. I walked, loose-limbed and disconnected, along the sidewalk. They flowed around me like water. The air, too, was wet: the cloud cover had crept down into the spaces between the high-rises, and the upper floors of the city had been swallowed up in mist.
Changpa Rinpoche’s Dharma Center was a three-story Manhattan brownstone, donated by an eccentric patron and converted into a cultural resource on things Buddhist. There was a martial arts center of the same type only a few blocks away. It had much the same layout and housed one of the nicest kendo dojos in New York. But the focus at DC, as people called it, was mostly on Tibetan Buddhism and meditation. On entering the main foyer, I was greeted by a tall young man with a long ponytail. He was watching the door, clearly on the lookout. For all I knew, the Buddha could be due back any minute. But his interest was obviously more practical. He was polite, but watched me intently while he called someone.
I got cleared and was directed down the hall to an office. I passed walls that were covered with Tibetan representations of the Big Guy. The droning gargle of Tibetan throat singing washed through the background from discretely placed speakers. And, on a banner, I read the calligraphy,
Om Mane Padme Om.
A prayer wheel was set into the office door’s threshold. You could spin it as you entered.
It was odd to see a monk dressed in the robes of his office sitting at a computer keyboard, but Changpa’s secretary was sitting placidly next to one, waiting. He peered myopically at me through glasses with dark, heavy rims. I looked around, half expecting Travis Stark and an army of bouncers to try to pin me to the wall and frisk me, but the office suite was quiet. It was an odd sort of concern for security they had here. But then it occurred to me that Stark was still training with Yamashita. I had to acknowledge the focused efficiency of my teacher at the same time that I wished he had let me in on the plan: he had arranged for me to visit Changpa while Stark was away, arranging it so both students could benefit from different masters without any possible tension.
I introduced myself. The Rinpoche heard my voice and emerged, beaming, from his inner office. “Dr. Burke,” he said, gripping my hand. “How nice to see you.” He ushered me into his room with a gentle, yet practiced authority. This was, after all, a man used to dealing with people. “Perhaps some tea?” he asked, and his assistant nodded and went off somewhere, probably to peer at a kettle while he waited for the water to boil.
Once we were alone, the lama’s voice grew quieter and more confidential. “I appreciate your coming,” he told me.
I nodded. “It’s the least I could do. Yamashita Sensei is very fond of you.”
He looked at me with a half smile. “He is a good man, your teacher. But I imagine his lessons are sometimes hard ones… in more ways than one.”
Was he looking at my shoulder?
I dismissed the thought. “You mentioned that you were having some problems here.” I let the statement hang in the air. Changpa nodded and sat back in his chair, gathering his thoughts. The walls were dotted with photographs of lamaseries, the temple complexes of old Tibet that rose from the stark sides of mountain slopes, dwarfed by the immensity of sky and rock.
“I find myself in a curious position, Dr. Burke,” the lama began. “I had imagined a life of reflection and quiet for myself.” He looked around the office: a large desk, an old wooden bookcase filled with odd-shaped volumes marked in gold Tibetan script on the spines, an old brown phone with multiple lines and an intercom button. He smiled at me sadly. “I am, it seems, a long way from the monastery.”
I nodded in acknowledgment. “Life is what happens while we’re making other plans.”
He sat forward. “I have been thrust, it seems, into the public eye for my support of my countrymen and my protests against the Chinese occupation of my homeland.” There were a few newspaper clippings on the desk, and I spun them around to see. Changpa before a bank of microphones, his glasses glinting. Changpa, his robes making him conspicuous in a crowd of protesters outside the Chinese Embassy on 12th Avenue. He sighed. “I assume this is somehow the cause of things…”
“Things?” I asked, ever the trained investigator.
Changpa touched the surface of the desk lightly, drawing the clippings toward him, and spoke precisely, as if contact with the print summoned forth the words. “The Center was broken into recently and my office ransacked. We keep nothing of value here and the police did not think the intrusion was a casual thing.”
“Why?”
“It seems that the security alarm for the building was very neatly bypassed. Nothing was taken that could have been sold on the street.”
“They left the computers and stuff?”
“Yes. Although they accessed the computer files, they left the machines themselves alone.”
I had to agree with NYPD on this one. “What else?”
“My assistant, Dogyam, has been followed to and from the post office on a regular basis.” He saw my questioning look. “We maintain a post-office box. It is more secure in terms of fund-raising. That way any donations are not left in the building overnight.” He described the not-for-profit agency he had begun to support Tibetan culture and religion and gave me an idea of his fund-raising activities.