Picking Bones from Ash (21 page)

I passed through the heavy double glass doors to the back of the shop and François’ office, with a small library of glossy-spined books and two wooden filing cabinets. On one wall, a white-and-indigo
noren
curtain displayed a design of dragonflies caught in a basket. Hidden behind this was a door, which opened to a staircase that led up to the kitchen of our house. The library and living room, which was nearly overrun with books and magazines, were on the same floor, and beside them was a dining
room furnished with a rich saffron-and-mustard-colored rug from Turkey and a brooding table from China. Upstairs, on the third floor, were several additional rooms, one of which belonged to me.

Sondra left my father not too long after we had returned from the New York trip. I never really knew what set her off. I simply came home from school one day to find her in tears, bags packed and apologizing to me over and over again that she just “had to follow her intuition” and that she “couldn’t take it anymore.” One day, she insisted, I would understand. From then on, it was just François and me.

So it would have stayed, had it not been for an unexpected visitor one afternoon not long after my twenty-first birthday.

I came home after my usual Sunday trip to the library with a bag full of photocopies and books. I opened up the dark-green door to our shop and made my way through to the back where I could see my father’s foot sticking out through the entrance to his office.

There, seated on a Ch’ing dynasty
huang-li
chair beside my father, was Snowden-roshi.

He was still very fair with pale, pure skin that blended easily into his light hair, cut short in the manner of a priest’s. This paleness only offset his blue eyes. When they held still and took me in, as they did now, I felt a gentle pressure as though two snowflakes had landed on my skin.

“Darling,” my father stood up and kissed me. “We have a visitor.”

“I hope you don’t mind too much,” Snowden-roshi recrossed his ankles. “I was in the area and suddenly realized how much I wanted to see you.”

“Of course we don’t mind,” my father replied. “We can cook an extra crab and you can join us for dinner.”

We exchanged pleasantries.

François commandeered Snowden-roshi’s shoulder and steered him around the store, lustily pointing out the Chang Dai-Chien paintings on the wall. I kept expecting Snowden-roshi to speak to me, but he didn’t. Still, I was keenly aware of him and how he glided noiselessly over the wooden floor, long fingers cradling a bowl or tracing a line of paint across a dish.

“Rumi,” François said, “let’s show Snowden-roshi how much your powers have improved.”

We went to the back-room office, and François pulled back a silk cloth to reveal a four-panel Japanese screen.

The screen was a Zen-style landscape, a valley town tucked in between bulbous, cerebral mountain peaks. The artist had rendered the entire scene with black ink on paper, varying the pressure of his brush. Here the mountains were stormy, there the air was clear. The detail of a bridge leapt out starkly in one spot, while tall, mysterious peaks receded into infinitely lighter shades of gray.

“Rumi has the brightest eye of anyone I know.” François smiled. Then he looked at me. “There’s one correction I had to make. Can you find it?”

I studied the screen, looking for a spot where the gray did not recede seamlessly, or where the artist’s brush seemed to have been momentarily possessed by another hand. “It’s a warm black,” I said.

My father nodded eagerly. “The artist wanted you to feel introspective. But he did not want you to be left cold.”

“Mmm.”

I could hear my father breathing, and could feel Snowden-roshi’s eyes searching the screen, trying to see as I did.

A small patch of paper near the middle spine did not have the same sheen as the rest of the screen and interrupted the whispering voice of the ink. But my father’s work had been steady, blending in well with the rest of the piece. “You did a good job matching the color and the strokes.”

“Yes.” My father nodded. “It was as though the original artist and I were briefly speaking the same language. It was a joy to repair. A conversation in mist and mountains. Can you give me a date?”

“Seventeenth century. Early.”

“That’s my girl.” He nodded proudly and I beamed. “It should go for a good price. There’s a gentleman who lives not far from here who has asked me several times to ring him when I come across just such a piece. Now, let’s see. I have something over here.”

He placed a Chinese box in my hands.

I undid the ivory clasp and looked inside. Nestled in the satin pillow was a piece of jade in the shape of a cicada. I put the box down on his desk.

“You don’t like it?” François was incredulous.

“Funerary objects make me …”

“Funerary objects,”
he interrupted. “Good lord, you sound like a college textbook! The cicada is a magical creature. The Chinese believed it could impart immortality.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that this was stuck in the mouth of some dead person?” I asked.

“It could have gone in other orifices.”

“Fran
çois
.”

He picked up the cicada with his bare hands. “See how beautifully it is carved?” He took my hand, uncurled my fingers, and placed the little amulet in my palm. Then he rolled the cicada over with his thumb and forefinger.

“It’s beautiful,” I finally admitted.

“A date, Rumi?”

I gazed into the cicada’s eyes and could hear it humming, an archaic orchestra that sounded like the wind and reeds. “Han.”

“Ah. Have a look again.”

“Han,” I repeated.

My father was frowning. “No, I don’t think so …”

I racked my mind for technical information. “Aventurine in the cracks. So it was polished with quartz, not a modern tool.” The words tumbled out of my mouth.

François took the cicada from me and inspected it intently with a small collapsible magnifying glass he kept in his pocket.

“Hmm.” He put away the glass and slipped the cicada back into its box. Then he nodded and said, “About two thousand years old, is our Mr. Bug. Think of everything that has happened in all that time,” he said softly.

“Empires.” Snowden-roshi nodded, glancing quickly in my direction.

“Men’s fortunes.” My father beamed, clapping his friend on the shoulder.

I stood in place, smiling nervously at them both.

We locked the shop, set the alarm, and passed through the
noren
to the staircase. In the kitchen on the second floor, François wrangled the crabs into boiling water while I made a salad. I was grateful for this domestic distraction. I didn’t fully comprehend what had happened a moment ago with the Han jade. What was more, I feared François’ reaction to my not responding the way he’d wanted me to. And yet, I’d been
right
. He had been wrong.

Fortunately, the conversation burbled along in a polite and banal fashion with Snowden-roshi at the helm. He told us about his impending move from Los Angeles for a new job at the Stillness Zen Center in San Francisco. We laughed over a terrible pun Snowden-roshi made about mistaking the
term
tao
for Dow. After a couple of hours had gone by, we retired to the living room. Snowden-roshi stretched his legs and walked around, looking at the objects in our personal collection.

“You have an altar,” he said to my father, inspecting the makeshift structure: a Chinese table with a small Edo-period Buddha, incense burner, and candles.

“Yes.”

“Do you give incense every day?”

“No.”

“I would have expected a picture of Satomi,” Snowden-roshi said softly.

“As I said, we aren’t Japanese.”

“But she was.” Now I felt the cool and insistent probing of his blue eyes on me. “You’ve grown, Rumi.” He smiled. “You’re quite accomplished now.”

I blushed.

“Connoisseurship is like learning to play a musical instrument. Start training young and the mind is flexible enough to develop a true instinct.” My father said this proudly.

“Some of my parishioners go to Japan and report that they simply feel at home once they land there. An intensive Buddhist study—a very old tradition, mind you—prepared them for the unique beauty of Japan.”

“American Buddhism is not at
all
like the Japanese version,” François retorted. “The Japanese turn to Buddhism for clearly defined services—funerals, for example. Americans think that Buddhism is some sort of alternative approach to living.”

“It
is
an alternative.” Snowden-roshi twirled his wineglass slowly with his fingers.

“Yes, but that automatically gives it a meaning here that it didn’t have in its homeland.”

“I think it’s a wonderful way for people to naturally appreciate something that might otherwise seem foreign.” Snowden-roshi smiled and turned to me. “What do you think, Rumi? Do you enjoy Japan?”

“I’ve never been.”

Snowden-roshi stared. “Surely you have plans to go?”

I looked at François. “I … I don’t have any plans,” I said.

“What a pity. Here you are immersed in all these things which …,” he hesitated for just a moment, “
with
which you have a personal connection.
I should think you’d be a little bit curious.” He took a long drink of wine and pretended to need several minutes to inhale its perfume.

“I rely on Rumi to run the business when I’m away,” François declared cheerfully. “
I’m
the traveler in the family, you see.”

“Aha.” Snowden-roshi nodded, giving me a curious look as if to say, so that’s how it is.

That evening, before we all went to bed, I spoke to François and apologized for having embarrassed him over the cicada.

“Not at all,” he waved his hand and smiled. “It’s natural, I suppose, that I make a mistake every once in a while. Lucky for me that the piece turned out to be more valuable rather than less. It would have been worse if you had identified the screen, for example, as a fake.”

I smiled back at him, relieved that all was right again.

In the morning, Snowden-roshi invited us to a party. A number of potential donors for the Stillness Center were meeting at the Lorenzi Winery in Napa Valley and Snowden-roshi thought we might like to go. François demurred because of a scheduling conflict, and I was about to refuse the offer out of habit when Snowden-roshi made a special plea for me to accompany him.

“You’ll meet interesting people. And I’d much rather go to the party with an attractive young woman than all by myself.” He grinned.

“I’m not very good at parties.”

Lightning quick, his features changed. He dropped the seductive smile and became businesslike. “Think of it as work, then. You’ll have the opportunity to scout out potential clients.” Snowden-roshi looked at my father. “You did say that you needed to build the business a bit more. Improve your cash flow.”

“Yes, but it’s François who does that. Not me,” I explained.

“She has to learn to deal with the public if she’s going to take over your business one day,” Snowden-roshi protested to my father. “I understand why you want to protect her, but you can’t keep spoiling her like this.”

“I’m not spoiled …”

“She’s just very shy, Timothy,” François said.

Snowden-roshi shook his head. “It’s our job to help her out of her shyness.”

“
Your
job?” I asked.

“I’d appreciate it, François, if you would let me take Rumi.”

There was a silence, and then my father surprised me. “We could always use extra money, Rumi.” He nodded. “Why don’t you try your hand at finding us some clients?”

Later that day I found Snowden-roshi flipping through the clothes in my closet. When nothing he saw impressed him, he went out, returning a few hours later with a bag from a small boutique in which was folded a lovely dress made of blue silk, nipped at the waist, and with little cap sleeves.

“It’s expensive,” I protested to my father.

“I think you should at least see if it fits.”

So I changed. When I didn’t come out of the bedroom immediately, my father and Snowden-roshi insisted on coming in to take a look.

“I knew it!” Snowden-roshi declared.

“You look lovely, my dear,” my father said. Then he whispered, “The man is loaded. Let him buy it for you if he wants to.”

We drove to Napa in the late afternoon. The sun kissed the hills, which were covered with a soft down of aging golden grass. In Snowden-roshi’s little black sports car, we crossed the Carneros region, with its neat rows of grapes gently tracing the outline of hills, over to the wide mouth of the Napa Valley stretching open to welcome us to the land of modern-day Dionysians. Here majestic wineries had been crafted out of a romantic architectural imagination—a château, an asymmetrical mix of rectangles, a Spanish villa. We followed a small road into the eastern hills, winding between vineyards marked for Zinfandel and Cabernet, the leaves of the grapevines filtering the light till it took on an emerald hue. We parked beside a stucco building perched on a bluff. Snowden-roshi held my hand to help me cross a cobblestone path, which led through an iron gate to a wide balcony. The valley stretched below us, bordered by low, sleepy hills to the west. Hawks scanned the valley floor for prey. The wind rushed past our ears, as even and soothing as the sound of the ocean.

This was the Lorenzi Winery, one of the grand originals, started by two Sicilian brothers in the twenties and purchased and renamed in the seventies by Dr. Phillip Lorenzi. His wines had won prizes in Paris and were served in the finest restaurants in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

At Snowden-roshi’s urging, I accepted a glass of wine and soon all my
thoughts were tinted with rose. The catering staff whirled through the party on the balcony like finely tuned gears in a machine, bearing hors d’oeuvres on silver trays. I tasted caviar, delicate egg rolls stuffed with morels, and tender shrimp. The guests were all a lot older than I. They were educated and wealthy, judging by their alert eyes and relaxed physiques, the expression of people expecting to get their way in life without too much trouble. My new dress covered me like a talismanic shield, and I felt young and elegant.