Ideas of Heaven Read online

  On the way to find something to eat, I passed a storefront temple with a slender golden Buddha sitting in it. A Cambodian place, as far as I could guess from the writing. The Buddha looked quite settled on his lotus, with his hands curved in his lap. Stiff but poised. He wasn’t longing for anything, I knew that much. He’d cast aside his ego (whatever that was) a while ago. And he’d said anyone could do this, which I could hardly believe. Though people in a large part of the world did believe it.

  Well, I thought on the way home, what would be left without longing? It gave me something to ponder, something new at least, while I was buying my bachelor meal of charcuterie and bread and grapes and walking into my empty house. I forgot about it while I ate and watched the news on TV. But I didn’t forget. Before I went to bed, I got out a book on Asian religion I’d had since college and read around in it. So what would be left? Everything just the same, nothing special, various sages had apparently said, in their cool and shrugging way. But without fear or clinging. This last phrase, from a Theravadan commentator, did sink into me.

  All weekend I kept sneaking back to the book, though it often put me to sleep. But how radical it was. I’d had no idea. The self is a delusion—millions believed this? I was a tourist in these neighborhoods, a rube scratching his head, but I had the traveler’s reward of an opened imagination.

  On Monday, on the way home from school, I stopped in at a bookstore and bought another book, this one written by an American who’d been a monk in Thailand. And in the night, when I couldn’t sleep, that was what I read. I found comfort in the flavor of it, even if I did not exactly swallow it whole. I told no one what I was reading, so I would not have to exaggerate my agreement or talk it down either. It was my secret habit.

  So that was what I did in the two months while Marc was away. I listened to music and I soaked myself in paragraphs that had the exquisite preposterousness of possible accuracy. Part of me waited for Sylvie to come back. Every day I had to remind myself not to wait.

  MARC MUST HAVE been waiting too, at Yves’s in Lille. When he came home in August, he had grown taller in a way that made his head look small on his body. When I asked if he still hated people who happened to be Muslims, he seemed surprised—and disgusted with me for posing such a question. “It’s a religion,” he said.

  “You’re not going to fight anymore?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t believe you’re even asking.”

  I was afraid of outbreaks of revenge from the others, but in school the kids who had once been his friends left him alone, and he kept to himself, for the most part. Every so often he brought home one of the squeaky, round-faced boys in his class who were the furthest from puberty, and they played endless board games, games Marc had liked when he was younger. He’d call me over to watch them. He had decided to be younger. He nagged me to go to the park with him, he was impatient when I was on the phone. I had to get used to his hovering. At night we sat on the sofa, watching Lucky Luke and Jolly Jumper cartoon videos together. At least we had our own pocket of privacy, our living room as a retreat from the maelstrom of whatever Paris was doing outside. When a bomb exploded aboard a French plane in Niger, I didn’t tell Marc about it; why should I? He already didn’t feel safe, and both of us had had enough of history. I was doing my best not to think about anything beyond what to make for supper and where Marc had lost his sweater. I didn’t want to hear about someone else’s bloody outrage over some murderous stupidity in the past.

  This was an odd state of mind for someone who taught history for a living and went forth every day to explain to sixteen-year-olds why they should care about the Hundred Years War. My student Xing Yao wrote, “The war was caused by greed over Flemish wool. Joan of Arc was not greedy, however. She rode a spooky white horse and heard the dangerous voices of ghosts. The English had to burn her to get rid of the ghosts.”

  When I read this paper and was stumped over what to correct, it struck me that it was probably very much like what Marco Polo had written about China. He saw it his way. Polo didn’t mention bound feet or calligraphy or the Great Wall—proof, many scholars thought, that he was never in China—and no Chinese had bothered to record any Polo serving as an official in Yangzhou. But I thought that each side might simply have been caught up in noticing what it wanted to.

  I had a new feeling for Marco Polo’s dislocation, since I was now a wanderer in the bleached and trackless deserts of mourning. Sylvie would have been interested in this feeling. No one else would care—I had a gush of self-pity, for all my unaired thoughts. Years of them stretched ahead.

  On a Saturday afternoon when Marc was at soccer practice, I went to the Cloud Mountain Chan Buddhist Center near my school to learn how to meditate. It was the one unfalse thing I could think of doing to help myself, and an excitement rose in me as I went into the room, which was in the back of a Chinese bookstore. If this gave me any relief at all, I was going to be very grateful. People were sitting cross-legged on squares of foam rubber—plenty of French people as well as Asians—and a young Chinese woman smiled and gestured for me to take a chair in the back. How sweet she was. A thin elderly man with black-framed glasses gave the instructions in Chinese and a boy in jeans translated them into French. I might have gone to a more European group, but I liked this. The meditation guidelines were familiar from my reading, and I was suddenly very sure that it was all going to be very easy, like resting on buoyant air.

  When the gong sounded, I was enormously pleased to be there. I counted each breath in and out, I tried to have no thoughts at all. Why hadn’t I come before? To be acutely conscious but free of my grasping, chattering self was a glorious project. I could not do it for more than about ten seconds. I supposed I had been warned of its difficulty. Who can think about not thinking? I began again, over and over. But I did not expect what happened. While the other beings in the room breathed softly and evenly, I was close to moaning aloud because I could not stop remembering that Sylvie was ashes. In this room of breathing strangers, I was seething with humiliation, to think that my wife had been murdered while I was lying on a pile of cushions at home, reading about a soccer match. As if I had been forced to watch her blown to bits, while I ate an apple, an idiot on a sofa. To be here now with this fuming in me, surrounded by rows of silent people who did not have to bear it, was insufferable. I despised all of them—why were they making me stay?—and I could not wait until the gong sounded, though I did wait.

  I stayed for the Dharma talk too, because no one else left; what a fraud I was. I got away finally as people were passing out tea and cakes—they were a perfectly kind group—and I was never doing anything like this again. I went home so heavy with disappointment that I could barely make my way down the steps of the Métro. I hadn’t needed one more thing to fail me.

  MARC CAME HOME saying, “Soccer is a stupid game,” which meant he’d had a bad day. In the kitchen he peeled the fruit while I made our routine weekend meal of boudin cooked with apples. I had enough to do, didn’t I, just watching over him. He was not difficult these days but he was too quiet. My sister Dominique, whose own teenagers were shoplifters and fire-setters, said he’d become like a nice dog you didn’t notice. After dinner he and I started to put together a castle out of a kit; it was a model of the Château de Chambord, with seventy-seven wooden parts. I tried not to worry about what Marc was going to do when he had to be more than thirteen.

  It took days to finish the castle and then Marc surprised me by giving it to Clotilde, Sylvie’s mother. He said she liked elegant things, which was true. Her face lit up at the gift; I had rarely seen her that delighted, and certainly not in recent months. I wondered then if he was going to be like Yves.

  Marc had certain traits of Yves’s—a taste for ridiculously detailed projects like the castle, a resistance to other kids’ opinions, a niceness with his older relatives. What did this mean? In Lille Marc had gone to Mass with his cousins, but when I asked if he wanted to go in Paris, he said, “Are you nuts
?” If he had a streak of piety, it was going to surface outside the family’s legacy.

  As perhaps mine was, my streak. My thirst. In my sleepless nights I had begun to read certain books again, those explanatory texts that tried to bring the Dharma to the postmodern European reader. I had the imprecise but lasting sense that they were doing me good. The writers could not stop talking about impermanence. And its relentless presence in every single thing (why was this news?) gave me less reason to feel my own loss as exceptional. It was a help to me to feel that Sylvie consumed in flame was not exceptional, though I could not have told anyone why. It saved me from a kind of vanity.

  As Marc grew older, he had Yves’s thin neck and square, stiff shoulders, and his hair was in the same limply short cut favored by gawky boys thirty years before. His physique underwent hormonal changes with a determined neutrality; he looked like a child but with a man’s voice and body hair. He spent many of his waking hours in computer games. Girls liked him, as time went on—they phoned him with gossip about cliques and pleas for advice. What ruses girls had to resort to. He talked to them for hours, so he could not have been annoyed at their phone calls. A few of the boys he knew were already sexually active, but he was waiting, I could see, to step into any sort of drama. I hoped not waiting forever.

  BERNARD SOMETIMES ASKED if I didn’t want to start seeing a woman sometime. I didn’t. When we were in clubs, listening to an alto sax move around a familiar tune, I’d remember the lyrics—mon dieu, mon dieu, mon dieu, laissez-le-moi encore un peu, mon amoureux—and they seemed demented, like lines a figure from Marc’s space-aliens game might shriek, sheer blaring urgency. In the smoky darkness, I glanced at the profiles of women at nearby tables, their slender, soft bodies tucked casually into their clothes, and their femaleness was admirable and extreme and too raw to me.

  I WAS MARC’S chief companion in these years. We’d watch the TV news and invent scripts of the announcers’ real thoughts (they tended to fixate on their bodily functions), and Marc did a clumsy but really quite funny imitation of Jacques Chirac. We were beside ourselves one night over an interview with an aging actor who was wearing what seemed to be a satin jumpsuit. An ego positively gets in your way as you get older, I thought, watching the actor flip back his shock of hair. “An Elvis manqué,” Marc said. At least he didn’t say anything like that about me. For the most part, I wasn’t giving him a florid repertoire of pretenses to point out.

  Sometimes in the evenings I took myself out to hear talks by a very famous Vietnamese monk with a settlement near Bordeaux or a Parisian from a Zen order brought to France by a missionary Japanese monk in the sixties. When I came home from these talks, Marc would be asleep in his room in front of the computer, his cheek on his desk. I’d wake him, and if he swore he’d finished his homework, we’d grill demi-baguettes stuffed with Nutella in the sandwich press, Marc’s favorite snack. I loved those ends of the night—my head still aerated from the talks and Marc babbling about Nintendo and the two of us bent over the comradely mess of oozing chocolate.

  Past midnight on one of these nights, I was in bed in my room when I was awakened by what seemed to be the noises of sex, muffled gasps and sighing groans. Could Marc have someone with him? My own sweet boy, what secrets he kept. But the cries, I soon knew, were from the floor above me, the bedroom of a twenty-year-old girl who worked in a bank and lived at home. Marianne must have smuggled in a lover while her family was out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to overhear the pleading whimpers of a girl I saw every day in the hallway. But I was amused too. Oh, good for her. I thought they’d better hurry up before her parents walked in, and they did seem to be picking up speed. I could tell they were trying, without much success, to be quiet too. How cute that was, their inept stealth.

  They went on just a while longer—the raised volume of their last stages must have been what had broken my sleep. When they were silent, it occurred to me that all this sex pulsing through the ceiling had not made me think of Sylvie, and so I remembered her then, the lost sensations of her, and I thought of Edmée too. But listening to the couple’s cries had not made feel me lonely, though I had much to be lonely about. Or even left out. Why hadn’t it? Instead I had been amused. I had become someone who was amused by these things. As if my own long story was just another story.

  IT WAS AN interesting feeling, that amusement, and I had it at other times during these years. It might have come to me naturally, but I gave the Buddha credit. Once when I was signing up for auto insurance, I told the woman at the desk “deceased” when she asked “spouse’s name,” and she gasped and said, “I’m so sorry. Excuse me. So sorry.” And I thought—the world is full of husbands whose wives are gone. She’s been at her desk so long the news hasn’t reached her. I had to joke with her about my birth date to lighten things up, but I was already light. Or once when I was teaching my class, the students were arguing about the Baader-Meinhof Gang, and one of the boys said, “I admire the beauty of their convictions and to blow people up is not the worst evil,” and there was a sudden silence. The students all knew about my wife. I was the only person in the room who was free of wretched embarrassment. I led them back to some earlier line of debate (could the cruelties of capitalism be checked by threats? more readily thirty years ago or now?) but even the defiant ones were still fidgety and dumbstruck. So I talked, my breath an easy wind we all floated on.

  MARC STAYED WITH me, even after he had passed his matriculation exams. He continued to live at home while he studied computer engineering and looked, to the rest of the world, like a man. Over the years, I had learned not to make inquiries about girls, the one thing that led him to outbursts of hostile wrath. I didn’t care if he liked boys instead, but that was not a remark he liked either.

  But once he’d started going to the engineering institute, I heard him mention, without scorn, the names of people in his classes. Mathieu, Benoît, Victoire, François, Catherine. I came home from work one day to find a mixed group of three in the living room—a plump girl with huge earrings, a lanky boy with bleached hair, a bearded guy in a suit—listening to Afro-pop at top volume. They chatted politely with me; they were nice enough kids, but I had a strong urge to leave the apartment when they were there, an impulse they were delighted to see me indulge.

  And it was only a few months after this that Marc moved in with Catherine, the plump girl (who looked a bit like one of Sylvie’s sisters). They were not a couple, he told me—did people always have to be couples? Catherine lived in an apartment with many small rooms, on a run-down, lively street near the Gare de l’Est, not far from where I was taking a yoga class. I used to stop in to visit them on my way home, and I liked seeing Marc at his ease on Catherine’s lipstick-red armchair, his feet up on the matching ottoman, sipping her cups of hot chocolate. “Your father looks so young,” Catherine said. “You should try yoga too, you’re so lazy.”

  “My father is a monk manqué. He has unusual patience,” Marc said. “I’m already too great to need any exercise. A fitter version would be too much for the world.”

  Catherine snickered. They got along very well, whatever they were doing.

  I LIKED THE yoga and I wasn’t bad at it either. But I wasn’t used to being so near my body parts, stretching my nose to my knee or holding my buttocks in my hands to thrust my legs over my shoulders. The class was mostly women, of various ages, twisting next to me on the foam rubber mats as we shifted and reached and held our poses. The teacher, a Belgian woman who had taken an Indian name, would place her hand on my back or abdomen to correct me, and the contact always startled me; out of nowhere, the gentle flat of her palm.

  My balance was not bad and I could hold a shoulder stand for what I considered a valiant length of time. The pose felt like reverse flight, my feet pointing upwards to the celestial ceiling. One morning a woman in front of me teetered and almost fell on me, feet first. I whispered my forgiveness upside down, while she righted herself. She was the class’s voluptuous American, a woman close
to my age with a figure like Brigitte Bardot, icon of my boyhood—what riches was heaven showering on me? I had to laugh. I kept her giggling too, even after we were sitting again. She reacted well to silliness. Her French was good.

  There was no harm, I thought, in asking her to lunch. I was not surprised when she said yes—she was so bouncy and agreeable and American. But there was something smudged and sad about her, and I discovered at lunch that her marriage had ended not long before. “He wasn’t a cad,” she said. “People seem to want me to say that now. But I don’t.”

  I thought most Frenchwomen would have found something more biting to say.

  “Yes, well, I didn’t become French—my husband’s family would tell you that. I’m still a bad cook too. Can you believe it? But when I go home, they’ll think I’m a kitchen genius.”

  She was on her way home to the U.S., would be gone very soon. She would miss, she said, the good butter and the real tomatoes and the céleri-rave en rémoulade. She ate with childish gusto.

  “Well, don’t go then,” I said. She smiled wanly.

  What was she going home to?

  “Perhaps I’ll found a school of French yoga. Americans will think that’s very sexy. They think everything French is sexy.”

  “Well, it is,” I said. How roguish I was acting, all of a sudden.

  A man came into the restaurant with a dog, a large Alsatian shepherd we both petted as it went by. “At home I’ll have a dog,” she said.

  She sounded forlorn then. She pushed her straight, pale hair off her face as we watched the dog settle under the table. She was an old style of woman, tenderhearted and naïve in that opulent body, an answer to a dream I hadn’t had.

  I SAW THAT I was going to have to act quickly. Whatever we were doing we had to do soon, before she left. When I phoned her that evening, she was in her hotel room, reading, she said, a detective novel set in Miami, where she had once lived. I took her out to a film, a comedy about clever workers and a duped boss that we both liked. I sat in the darkened theatre, with more feeling in me than I needed (I thought), stunned to be seated again as a couple.