Bruce Wagner - The Empty Chair

Anyway, are you hungry? Did anything I say make sense to you, Bruce? Let’s walk for just a bit— [We did, circumnavigating the tent in ever-expanding circles in the cold night air until we were far enough away from the fire to be enveloped in the off-putting, syrupy darkness] I’ve spoken in so many people’s voices over the last few days that I’m hoping you’ll indulge me a few remarks that are wholly my own. What a concept, huh? [Queenie went quiet — I presumed to gather her thoughts. There wasn’t enough moonlight to see her face let alone its expression. She walked farther away, huddling into her cape and scarves. Slowly and unobtrusively, I moved toward her to catch up. She was crying] Whoa. O! — no — I’m okay. I am. It’s just that… I don’t know — suddenly I got so sad. O Jesus. It just kind of hit me! I guess I’ve been holding it in. I guess I’ve been — whoa! Sorry! I’m crying like a freakin’ baby over here… I guess there’s something so— beautiful about it. The whole deal… “The figure in the carpet.” I know Kura must have seen it too, I mean, the beauty. Had to have, in the end. At the end… ’cause he wasn’t a dummy. He was no dummy , not my Kura! It’s just so… it’s all so compelling , don’t you think, Bruce? No? “The gangster and the guru”—ha! Call Hollywood, somebody! But oh my god, such anguish in the last half of his life. The last third. Especially that last year or so… boy oh boy oh boy. And all because he thought his teacher had betrayed him! That’s a hell of a resentment to carry… thirty years , that’s how long it took, it took thirty years for the mouth of the snake to clamp on its tail and complete the circle. [looks up] You know, I’ve always loved the stars. Loved, loved, loved. I was intrigued by the constellations early on because of my name. That’s ego for ya. Learned everything about them — when they were visible, when not, what part of the sky — knew all the myths behind them. So that’s what I did with those three, from the penthouse. When I got back from Delhi… on one of those freezing, crystal clear New York nights when the sky looks like — a painted Jesus on black velour. Looked up and figured out who would go where. I conjured the Great Guru— “The Teacher”—sitting on his galactic throne; the American—“The Supplicant”—kneeling at his guru’s feet. And there was Kura—“The Guide”—completing the trinity. No Catholic reference intended.

I was going to miss her, not just for the surreal opulence of the experience she provided but for her passion and intelligence, and capaciousness of Spirit. She truly was unforgettable.

I had planned to leave the next day, though when morning came, one of the staff delivered a string of characteristically charming, seductive, handwritten notes to my tent. (From the inside, one would never have known it to be a tent, such was its luxurious construction and design.) Queenie forbade my departure, insisting she still had vital information to impart. What followed came the next evening over dinner. The detail she subsequently provided — that “single, religious detail” alluded to in the foreword of this book — rocked my world, as Queenie might have said.

I have never recovered, nor hope I ever will.

I got curious about something. A few months after Kura died, I rang the Paris office to speak to his secretary. I was already in possession of the diaries; we just never had any real reason to talk until now. Justine was hired around the time he returned from Bombay so she’d worked for him about 20 years. I gleaned from his pages that they were devoted to each other. Maybe they used to fuck or maybe she just loved him. If she did, that would have gone unrequited, ’cause I was certain he didn’t have any love left to give. Not that kind anyway.

After expressing belated mutual sympathies, I casually asked if the chair had ever found its way back to the village. She was perplexed. “What chair?” she asked. I flashed that Kura may have written down his plan without ever having had time to implement it before he died… though if that were true, wouldn’t Justine have read about it in the diaries? She had all of the volumes at hand too because I insisted she make copies before sending (I was afraid the originals might be lost in the mail en route. I was always paranoid about that sort of thing). Maybe she wasn’t the kind of gal to read her deceased boss’s true confessions, but feminine instincts told me otherwise. Another possibility was that she had read them but was playing dumb because she thought I’d judge her as a snoop.

So I gave her a leg up by tactfully mentioning the very last page of the journal, in which her employer expressed an urgent desire to have a certain courier return a certain chair to a certain province wherein lay nestled a certain village, and so forth. Her voice quavered; she admitted to being so busy with legalities in the wake of his passing that she hadn’t been able to “properly” read the facsimile, at least “not all the way through.” I suppose I’d embarrassed her (not my intent), as there were only two options ultimately to be taken — at least committed to — i.e., to read the damned thing or not. But I’d caught her off-guard and now she risked looking like she didn’t really give a shit about his posthumous memoirs. The more I downplayed my question, the more lugubrious she became. It got worse by the moment — I could hear her barely suppressed panic at having maybe taken a giant dump on her loved one’s final request. Now I was committed, and walked her through. “Did there happen to be a wooden chair near Kura’s desk when they found him?” Again, she was stymied. (The when-they-found-him actually provoked a cough.) I bullet-pointed that he wrote in his diary that a chair had been removed or at least a chair had been intended to be removed from the office closet, and so on and so forth. After a long pause, Justine said “Ah, oui!” a bit too stagily but unmistakably thrilled to be in the affirmative mode. There was a chair, she said, a very odd little chair… Was anything taped to it? No, she said tentatively, “nothing to my knowledge. ” The footfalls of panic returned. Well, I said, maybe it might be good to have a look? Long pause. She said the closet had been “cleaned out” and I knew she regretted the words as soon as they came from her mouth. One of Kura’s pet peeves was giving too much information, a lesson she must have learned well but had forgotten in the heat of the moment. She said she’d look into it “thoroughly” as soon as we hung up.

Justine called back three days later, sounding truly distraught. She feared the chair was aboard a ship, on its way to America! She added to my confusion by saying, “It was in the closet… and that fact alone should have made it exempt. It should never have been touched. O, it’s my fault, Cassiopeia, all my fault!” When I asked what the hell she was talking about, I got pitched into a primer on Kura’s recycled goods empire, one of whose entities shipped donated clothes and furniture to needy countries that paid by the pound. (Yawn.) Apparently, back when it was politically unpopular, Kura had a brainstorm that the U.S. would eventually be a bigger importer than exporter. As usual, he was ahead of the curve; by the time his theory bore out he had already laid the groundwork. He’d cultivated high-level relationships in Washington for years, delivering full containers to the States at no cost (to his great tax advantage)… which was more than I cared to know. But what could I do? Justine was like the proverbial dog on the pant leg. She ended the conversation by swearing that she would not rest until she learned the exact whereabouts of that freakin’, fucking chair.