Read Online Dinner with Buddha by Roland Merullo - Free Book Online

radar, he’d locked onto a pure truth and was trying to figure the right way of showing it to someone with limited vision.
    â€œYou now, I think, having to give up the sugar, the cake, the ice cream, the candy bras.”
    â€œCandy
bars.
”
    â€œGive up now, my smart friend. Three weeks, maybe four.”
    â€œWhy, because I’m fat?”
    â€œNo, no!”
    â€œBecause I’m at an age when I need to start worrying about dental hygiene?”
    â€œBecause I want that you see the open space when there’s no trill.”
    â€œWhat’s in there?”
    â€œHa!” he said, his one-syllable laugh. “This is the big question! . . . You anytime see the wery small smile on Buddha’s face?”
    â€œSure. Plenty of times.”
    He wrapped an arm around me and pulled me close against his shoulder. “That’s what’s in there, man!”

Seven

    From that conversation we proceeded directly to dinner. I should interject here that whenever I left greater New York in those days I almost always experienced a dark and haunting trepidation, the fear of a restricted diet, the deep worry that I wouldn’t be able to eat the kinds of food I was accustomed to eating. Mexican, real Italian on Arthur Avenue in the Bronx, French, Thai, dim sum on Mott Street, Japanese, Brazilian, Malaysian, Indian, and so on. Unlike several of the other married men I knew, I’d been perfectly content to make love with one woman. Beyond the occasional twinge of lust brought on by some Manhattan beauty, I felt very little urge to sleep around. Jeannie was beautiful to my eye, imaginative in conversation and in bed, and I had, with her, the kind of soul connection that no amount of passionate one-night stands could equal. I was content. I felt lucky, blessed to have her.
    With food, however, it was precisely the opposite: I craved variety. Vietnamese, Burmese, Afghani, Nepali—New York offered eateries that spanned the entire global spectrum, and two or three times a week I took advantage of that. It was medicine for me. I was afraid to be without it.
    By and large, to my way of thinking, the American West was a culinary desert. There were exceptions, yes, spots of color in a vast gray smock of beef and starch. But the settlers thereabouts were white people with pronounceable names, and such people—my own family among them—preferred a diet as steady and solid as their habits of work. A decent marinara was, to quote my mother, “spicy,” which was a code word for
inferior.
A nice hot chana masala, say, or a good Moroccan stew—these pleasures were seen, by the longtime inhabitants of the American West, in something like the way the
Kama Sutra
would be seen by missionaries. Sinful, unpatriotic, spiritually perilous.
    I confess that I’ve blocked out the name of the restaurant where the four of us ate dinner in Deadwood, Colorado. There was salmon on the menu, I remember that, and flies everywhere—not uncommon in the West in summer. And I remember, too, that when I asked our waitress if it was fresh salmon or frozen she looked at me as if I were her guest at a dude ranch and I’d asked if geldings had testicles. “Hon,” she said, by way of an answer, “this is South Dakota.”
    â€œThe pork chop then, please.”
    I noticed on that first visit to our table that she was flirting with Rinpoche. “I’m a woman who likes a smooth head,” was one line, and “You’re Sioux, I bet. I’ve always found that Sioux men fit me nicely.”
    Apparently, they didn’t get many Rinpoches in Deadwood, and apparently she thought Seese and I were a married couple (we both wore rings; Rinpoche did not), parents of Shelsa, and Rinpoche was an honorary uncle visiting from the reservation. It’s possible she’d been drinking. On subsequent trips to our table she put a hand on Rinpoche’s shoulder, touched his arm. He seemed