The Swami Buchu Trungpa

Her mother had been sober for seven months when Nora moved to Paris with her employer, a man from Queens who had changed his name from Jim Schwartz to Swami Buchu Trungpa twenty years earlier. Around the same time, he’d quit his job as a mechanic at a Saab dealership on Long Island and reinvented himself as a spiritual adviser and yoga instructor. His father owned the dealership, and although the swami had never admitted it to Nora, she had a feeling his father wasn’t unhappy to see him go.

Whatever his previous disappointments might have been, he’d done well as a spiritual adviser, having steadily acquired supporters and acolytes over the last two decades. With Nora’s assistance, he was now preparing to open a juice bar and yoga studio in Paris’s eleventh arrondissement on the Boulevard Voltaire with money he’d inherited from one of his longtime followers—an undertaking he’d told Nora had first occurred to him during a week-long retreat in the Berkshires that she remembered chiefly for its bad weather and the raccoons nightly ransacking the trash.

She had lived for a year in Paris during college and for two more years in her late twenties. Buchu was relying on her to obtain the necessary commercial permissions in France and to handle the legal protocols, which were intentionally onerous. Before they’d left New York, her job with Buchu International was part-time assistant and full-time girlfriend. Now she was full-time at both, and she knew others wondered how long she would last in either role after they settled in Paris. She didn’t really care what other people were saying, however—she was moving back to France, something she’d wanted to do for several years but hadn’t known how to orchestrate without a partner or an employer, and now she had both.

Regina, Nora’s mother, did not like the swami, who reminded her of Nora’s father, both in looks and temperament. Nora didn’t see the resemblance, but Regina accused her of not wanting to see it. Her mother was also upset that Nora was now a long plane ride away. Regina was busy in Portsmouth with her friends and hobbies and AA meetings, living off money inherited from two dead husbands, but it didn’t matter—she wanted Nora closer.

“You can come visit me anytime,” said Nora. “And stay as long as you’d like to.”

“But not with you and the swami botulism,” said Regina. “He’d have a fit if I showed up on your doorstep with my big wheelie bag.”

“Don’t call him that, Mom,” said Nora. “He wouldn’t mind you staying with us for part of your visit.”

Her mother snorted. “A day or two is about all I can imagine him allowing.”

“You could stay with us for a week. That’d be fine.” But she knew her mother was right—Buchu wanted privacy and his living quarters were his most sacrosanct space. Three days would probably be his limit, and Regina could be trying company with her strident opinions and her aversion to crowds and unfamiliar food. She was also more snappish than usual as she clung to her recent sobriety.

“There are a lot of former drunks in Paris, I was happy to discover,” said Regina. “I can find English-language meetings in the city every day of the week.”

“Give us a couple of months to get situated,” said Nora. “It’s only been four weeks since we got here, and the amount of paperwork I have to do to open the studio is mind-boggling.”

“I thought you were opening a fast food place.”

“It’s a juice bar. It’ll be downstairs from the yoga studio. I told you that.”

“I’m not sure who you think is going to buy your overpriced potions,” said Regina. “I wouldn’t.”

“You don’t have to. It’d be a very long trip for you for a spirulina smoothie.” Nora was standing in one of the two west...