Then he tucks his bare feet up onto his knees, in a half-lotus position. This son, who eschewed athletics and exercise during his childhood, who spent his teenage years sitting at desks, at tables, on couches and floors, surrounded by his helping ghosts, developing his remarkable computer program, is as flexible as a pretzel.
Joan wants to ask him what the sale of his company means for him, wants to know when he plans to tell his father. She would have gotten a phone call or an email from Martin if he already knew about it. And she hasn’t.
Martin will not be pleased by this news. He believes obligations and responsibilities are necessary to form a man, to make him good, to keep him solidly on his chosen road, the tenets of the navy vice-admiral at work. Long ago, Martin turned into a man of blacks and whites, who doesn’t understand those are shades, not real colors, and can’t understand people who know the right thing to do, and then do the wrong thing, inevitably hurting themselves, and others. He has no tolerance for what he views as self-imposed frailties. He sees Eric’s sabbatical, his flight to Dharamshala, as a correctable error, a blip that Eric will soon right, get back to his ship, regain the helm, steer Solve into its limitless future.
Joan sees all at once that Martin’s years of doctoring, the dreams and nightmares he claims to see when operating on his patients’ eyes, have not shored up his own internal reserves. He is more vulnerable than she, has always been so, the way he wants only to consider the good in others, denies the existence of weakness, of trouble, of conflict, does not view life and its humans through the prism she can access so easily, the dark, the sickly ironic, the tragedies she once mined in her work. He has needed to believe that Eric would be all right, that a crisis was not truly upon them requiring his intervention. She knew though, and she was there: Joan, the most mothering of anti-mothers, has always been there, for both of her sons.
She wants to ask Eric so many questions, but then he says, “I’m practicing yoga every day. Like you always have.”
She is here in India, the birthplace of yoga, and she has not sought out a class to take, and there must be dozens, has not, even in her pine suite, gone through the series of poses she knows by heart.
“It’s been a while since I’ve done yoga,” she says, wondering if Eric will find that strange, when its daily practice was her only enduring constant, a saving hour away from home, away from him and his cohorts, their equipment and meetings, her fears about what he, or the others, might be doing in secret.
“There’s a yoga place that I like. We’ll go together,” is all he says.
This son of hers is remaking his life, proof that such can be undertaken, that she might do the same with her own. She has the opportunity right this moment to reconfigure their relationship, to leave behind the old labels and their usual roles, to enter a new way of being that has little to do with her past as his mother, with his past as her troubled, intractable, brilliant son to whom she has never felt especially close, whose absorption of every atom in her world was so intolerable.
She wonders what she ought to say to him, how much she ought to tell him, whether they need to clear the air, say all that has never been said, if she should confess everything.
What would she say?—I am here in India because Daniel betrayed me; I’m sorry I loved him more than I loved you; I’m sorry he was so much easier to love than you were; I showed you my love when I sacrificed seven years of my life for you.
Eric has changed, by choice, lit up from within, with the kind of self-reflective wisdom she thought his genius would refuse. She is different too, even in just six weeks, though her own ultimate path is still murky and unclear.
There is no need to tell Eric how long she has been here; with that light in his eyes, he might already know. Why not begin anew in this beautiful place, by allowing him to take the lead, to follow wherever he wants to take her, to cede her role as battle-ax, detective-mother, battalion chief.
“I want to tell you how I got here,” Eric says.
She looks at him directly.
This might be the first time since his birth that their thinking is in sync.
He holds her eyes, which he never used to do, and says, “I started at the beginning with the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness. What I should say is I came upon The Art of Happiness by accident or The Art of Happiness found me. Do you remember the bench we always sat on in Oregon, when there was a break between therapy groups?”
Joan nods.
“Well, the day you left, I went back to our bench and found The Art of Happiness underneath it. It was just there on the ground, and I picked it up and started reading it. And I couldn’t stop reading it, and when I finished it, I researched it and learned it was the first book the Dalai Lama wrote. And somehow, through serendipity or luck, I had started at the beginning.
“Then I read his other books while I was at the center. How to See Yourself as You Really Are, The Good Heart, The Wisdom of Forgiving. I decided to skip Advice on Dying. Even though I was in rehab, I really hoped that’s not where I would end up.”
He looks at Joan to see if she’s caught his small joke. She has and he grins.
“Then I read Transforming the Mind. The strange thing was that just before I ended up in Oregon, I was researching the Dalai Lama. Everything about where he lived, Dharamshala, if it was a place I should come to, and then I found those books.
“As soon as I began reading his teachings, I knew I had to change everything in my life, sell Solve as I told you I wanted to do, figure out how to dedicate my life to others in a meaningful way. That’s why I came here, and why I started writing him letters as soon as I got here. I want help in making my intentions real.
“It’s great you’ve come here now, because earlier this week, I got a reply. I’m going to be meeting him. I don’t know when yet, but the letter said sometime in the next several months.”
“So you’re planning on staying here for at least that long?”
“Yes. But I might stay longer. Maybe forever. Would that be strange?”
Joan leans over and touches her hand to his cheek.
Did she last touch him in this intimate way the summer he went off to computer camp?
In Oregon, she’d kept her distance. Buying him the candy he wanted, new clothes from a local store, participating with him in the counselor-led meetings, participating in all the ways demanded of her, sitting with him on that bench while he talked, it seemed, about everything that had ever been in his mind since he was a child. She had been desperate for him to come through it, to have her fears assuaged about her own culpability. She had hugged him, and held his hand, but those touches, during those weeks they had been together, were still somehow removed from intimacy.
She realizes suddenly that Eric has ceased thinking of her as the enemy who wanted to hold him back, that he sees her now as a mother who wanted to save him. It is a stunning realization, and not anything she had imagined.