Free Breakfast With Buddha by Roland Merullo Page A

last settled on fresh Pennsylvania trout, a salad, and half a bottle of Pinot Grigio.
    Buffalo on the menu—and we weren’t within a thousand miles of North Dakota.
    The wine arrived with a basket of warm rolls and what appeared to be about a pint of butter. I sipped, watched the water splash in the fountain. I thought about Natasha and Anthony and it was as if I could feel them in my chest, each of them there, all their past and all their future, right there.
    In the midst of this affectionate musing the salad was served. As I started in on it, I was visited again by a wave of loneliness, and by the feeling that had been bothering me over the past few months. Not loss, not mourning, just a sort of quiet knocking at the door of my contentment. I ate and drank and pondered it. With the children, with me—was something missing? Were Jeannie and I simply looking around us and judging things against the standards of our neighbors, and the kids’ schoolmates, and letting ourselves be satisfied with that? Friends of ours had taken their children and gone to live in India for a school year and had come back convinced that they had too much of everything, that America was largely lacking in any real spiritual dimension. But wasn’t that merely a kind of guilt talking?Would their having less make for the poor Calcuttans having more? And weren’t there different styles of spiritual living, each suited to its own cultural particularities?
    Aliana brought the trout, and as she set it before me, I asked about her studies and her plans, just the usual small talk that middle-aged people make with young adults. She turned a frank gaze on me and said, “I saw how my parents lived, you know, just getting money, spending money, worrying all the time. I wanted to figure things out a little before I started in on that kind of a life. I wanted, you know, to get the big picture in focus. My grandfather retired after thirty-five years of investment banking, left my grandmother, and sailed around the world for two years, trying to pick up younger women. It was kind of sad, you know? I didn’t want to follow somebody else’s idea of success and end up that way.”
    “And the course work is doing that for you? I mean, giving you the perspective you want?”
    She shook her head and smiled ruefully. “My boyfriend is doing that for me. He’s a yoga teacher. The course work is just, you know, blah blah.”
    “I know,” I said. “I remember it from my own blah blah days. Sometimes there’s something useful in there, though.”
    “Not yet.”
    She went to check on her other tables, leaving me with my uneasiness and the plates of food. It was a nice meal—trout dusted with almonds, mashed potatoes with some skin left on (the way I liked them), grilled asparagus—sufficient even for a picky New York food person, and, in almost every corner of the globe, luxurious. I sent a quiet thank you toward the plump fellow at the gas station, and pulled out his coupon, which proved to be past its date.

    I decided not to have dessert, left Aliana a fifteen-dollar tip on a fifty-dollar meal—because I liked her, was rooting for her, and because I have more money than I really need and remember what it felt like to have less—and went out and walked in the balmy air, up and down the commercial street in front of the hotel. Another Amish carriage clopped by with two beautiful children staring out the back window.
    And then, back up in room 212, I flicked through fifty channels looking for I didn’t know what. It was the usual messy stew: news, drama, stupidity, sports. I kept flipping. At home I would have been on the computer, or talking with Jeannie or the kids, or replacing a lightbulb, or lying on the sofa scratching Jasper’s belly and watching the Yankees. But the Yankees weren’t on, and I had decided not to bring my computer (Jeannie’s idea, actually— Get all the way away from work, she’d said), so there was a small emptiness where