R. MacAvoy - Tea with the Black Dragon

“An imperial dragon?” she questioned in turn.

He turned full toward her. “So you know about the dragon of five fingers?”

She laughed at the eagerness in his words. “Oh, I’ve been around the block once or twice. The black dragon is a scholar. He was claimed as the ancestor of every ruling family of China. The black dragon lives forever.”

He met her eyes as he added, “But I will not.”

Martha’s chin rose and she spoke with conviction. “Living forever,” she began, “is what makes all dragons delusion, whether they’re green, red or black. Life is a moment long, no more. If you hold on to it, you’re lost!”

Gently he withdrew his hand and lay it on his lap. He leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes to the light.

“I hold on to everything,” he remarked. “I always have.”

“Back when you knew Bodhidharma?”

“Yes, Martha.” His eyes opened and one neat brow went up. “Did you think I lied to you?”

“And the son of Thomas Rhymer? The fairy host?” she pressed him.

“I did not claim to be an eyewitness to those events. I just repeated the story as told.” He smiled broadly. “Meeting the man who sat in front of a wall—the one you call Bodhidharma—changed a life which till then had been devoted to the traditional pursuits of dragons.”

“Which are?”

“Mmph! Scholarship, calligraphy, collecting objects d’art…”

“That’s all? Sounds pretty thin.”

“Also devouring oxen, tigers, and occasionally people.” His smile remained intact.

“Better… I wouldn’t mind living like that,” said Martha.

“Yes, it is agreeable, on the surface. But I developed a fascination for man—tiny, helpless, short-lived creature that he was—because he created the beautiful things I could only copy. And hoard. Dragons, you see, are not very creative. We have never been great painters or poets, but instead great collectors. I wished to know what it was that gave man the power to do what he does—to paint, to write poetry, to sit for nine years facing a wall…” His words trailed off.

“Bodhidharma told me, Martha, that he was seeking truth. I thought about that for quite some time. I went from teacher to teacher. At first my quest was to find out what there was in man to make him act so strangely: to desire an abstract nothing with a passion that should be reserved for gold. But eventually I came to see that I would only find out the truth about man by finding man’s truth itself!”

Long’s right hand played with the whistle of the teapot. His teeth shone and his opaque eyes were dancing. “Dog breeders grow to look like dogs,” he said. “And slowly, over centuries, I became like the creature I studied, growing apart from my own kind.

“If I met a dragon now, I’d have nothing to say to him!”

“Cats don’t like cats,” interjected Martha.

Mayland Long shot one mischievous glance at her and was obliged to look away. He was grinning hugely.

“I have spent decades in frozen caves in what is now Nepal,” he announced. “I have coiled by stone beehive cells in Leicester. I have corresponded with the Dean of St. Paul’s. Not the present dean, of course…”

“Of course not. You mean Donne.”

He grunted assent. “The men I sought were those who seemed to have found what Bodhidharma found beneath the cave wall. That indescribable formless whatever… truth! Around me my kind faded. I hardly noticed. Dragons are not social by nature. (I am the exception.) My interest—my obsession—kept me alive. But I did not find truth,” he concluded, without irony.

Martha Macnamara lay her hands against his face. “Don’t you know that you yourself are the truth walking?”

He kissed the palm of one hand, then the other. “A dragon cannot make sense of such a statement,” he said.

“But now…”

The moment’s silence was filled with the sleepy drone of the rain. The circle of light was small.

“I know,” he began slowly, “that you are my master.”

She laughed. “If you insist. But I would rather be your mistress.”

“That too.”

Thunder rolled in the distance. Mayland Long turned to the window. He walked over and pressed his hand against the glass. “It rarely thunders in California. The night I lost—that I became a human being—it crashed incessantly.

“I had heard about a Taoist teacher who was very wise. His name was Yung Chung-jo; he was a retired military man. When I found him he was sitting on a bare hilltop, wearing his tattered old dress uniform. He had come there in order to die.

“He was not afraid. I coiled about him and shielded him from the rain.

“I told him about my search, where it had begun and where it had led me. I told him what scriptures I had read, and in which transcriptions, for I had learned all the major human languages to aid me in my task. I listed the names of all the teachers I had had previously and repeated the advice they had given me. I wanted to be clear and exact with Yung, because I had failed with so many before.

“And the old man laughed at me—he laughed as I think only the Chinese can laugh, when they mock a person. It’s terrible, the way they can laugh. It can reduce one to…”He glanced toward Martha and continued gently. “You are laughing at me now, Martha. That’s all right. I know what sort of fool I am.”

“Then he told me he was not destined to be my master, because he was dying. He said my master would be one who had more chi—more strength—than I. And he foretold that when I met my master, all I had gathered would be taken from me.”

“He sat in the rain through the night, while I slept coiled about him. In the morning, when I awoke, I looked like this, and in my arms I was holding a dead dragon.”

“It must have hurt, to become human,” she whispered, holding out her hand to him.

Mr. Long came back into the light. “It still hurts,” he said.

Lightning snapped in the sky and again thunder rumbled. “What shall I do, Martha? Where shall I live? How shall I spend my time?”

Martha Macnamara took a deep breath and sat straight in the chair. She was wearing her respectable tweeds. “I am not the Queen of Elfland,” she began.

“You are more beautiful, Martha. And you possess more chi.”

She ignored the interruption. “But if you come with me I will treat you better than she did the Rhymer.”

He pulled her to her feet and kissed her, slowly and with great concentration. Their hands were bathed in yellow light. Their faces, above the lamp, were shadowed. “Still,” he whispered in her ear, “he came back with truth on his tongue.”

She giggled. “It doesn’t belong there.”

“Then what will my mistress teach me?” He kissed her cheek, the corner of her eye, her forehead…

Martha Macnamara took a step back and looked up at Mayland Long. “Why, to play the piano, of course!” She held up his dark slender hand. “How wonderful!”