Maybe having slept in Dorothy Parker's bed had something to do with my understanding of Zen. "Did you know that Hemingway called her Dotty?" My colleague, Klaus, said. I shook my head.

Our company in Berlin had sent us to a conference in Minneapolis. I'd stopped over in New York the week before and had been earbashing Klaus about the high point of my detour - the Algonquin. Klaus was nice: tall, easygoing in a shy kind of way. We'd shared a bed at past conferences and already at this one. He must have had more than a soft spot for me because it had only taken him a day to come out with the Dorothy snippet. And he didn't mind admitting when he was wrong. He'd heard of the Algonquin, he said, but thought it was a big national park in Canada until his research told him it was a hotel in the Big Apple.

It was a hotel where writing women had stayed. I was a woman and I wanted to write. Dorothy Parker was dead, but I thought if I could just spend one night in the suite that bore her name on a small oval plaque on the door, if I could sit on her sofa, talk to the faces in the black and white photographs on the wall, drink her port - she must have loved port for why would they have placed a crystal decanter with two matching glasses on the side table? - yes, sleep in her bed. If I could do all that then maybe the muse would fill my soul. He would stroke me, caress me, squeeze passion through me and words, words would flow from my fingers. But I had a day job, a high flying career and so my trysts with the muse could be nothing but the stolen moments of one-night stands. Zen in New York.

Dotty had managed. Why else would Erica Jong, Edna O'Brien and how many others have wanted to sleep in a dead woman's bed?

"You coming to the AT&T cocktail?" Klaus said.

He liked doing things like that, changing track in the middle of my train of thought to bring me back to the waiting room of a station in the middle of nowhere. And if nowhere was everywhere?

"Nope," I said. "I'm going to the wrong side of town - to a lit-Zen gathering."

Klaus' eyebrows shot up and his mouth turned down slowly as he ran a hand through his shaggy blond hair in his usual gesture of intense concentration.

"There's a writer I want to hear. You wouldn't know her, "I added quickly before his mind started searching his own database.

"Zen?" he said. "Isn't that all about meditation? Faith, doubt, perseverance?"

I stared at him, wondering how he did it. I knew little about Zen apart from having heard of a Japanese monk who spent his life raking a garden of pebbles. And there was that book about motorbikes I never got around to reading. "Faith, doubt, perseverance. Sounds sort of like writing."

Now Klaus shook his head. "Have a good time, Dotty," he said as I wondered if he were giving up the fight against the other "man" in my life. He'd once asked me if there were someone else. Not in the way you mean, I'd replied.

I don't know what it was about Dorothy Parker's bed that got me going. Maybe the old lamps by the mirror, that must have been converted when gaslight became electricity? Worlds away, I thought and suddenly felt homesick for my mother in Australia. She'd been alone now for ten years since the death of my father. I'd visit her every Christmas and we'd talk and she'd tell the same old stories. I remember asking her if there'd been life before or beyond my father. What I meant, I guess, was if there'd been passion or if there were still room for it. She didn't answer.

"Why not write it down? Dear diary or something."

"You know I can't write in English and I have almost forgotten my German."

I bought her a Walkman, one of those expensive ones you can record. "Just say it," I said.

It was about eight months later, just before I left Berlin for the States, that the tape arrived. I'd listened to it on the plane and that night in Dotty's bed, I played it again.

My mother's voice crackled as she spoke and I had to smile. "Zen we were ..." ("Zen" was her compromise for what she always considered a flaw in the English language. "Why should I learn to lisp?" she would say.) She spoke of her village in Saxony at the time when electricity had just been put in. "It was a marvel," she said. "But we hardly used it. We'd still sit outside summer evenings and knit by the light of the full moon. Electricity was too expensive to waste on things like that." Then she spoke of a dance in the village, of a young soldier who came. They fell in love. She made plans: where to place a vase of wild daisies; what table to buy for the kitchen of one of the cottages reserved for the officers.

Then the news came. Friedrich was dead. His regiment had been out on manoeuvres and his horse had stumbled. Friedrich had died of a broken neck. My mother went back to the cottage that was never to be theirs. "Zen we were ..." and then the tape stopped.

All this and more raced through my mind at the packed Zen centre in downtown St Paul. Entrance had cost all of $25. In my tubed office skirt I crept barefoot towards one of the few chairs. I sat creaking after a week of hard days and nights as folks twisted serenely on the floor with their eyes closed. Meditation, I thought. At the snap of a finger? Other eyes scanned the room just as mine did. Gong. Then silence and my chair creaked again.

The writer I had come to hear waffled on between gongs for all of ten minutes. Writing, she said is no longer all, it is Zen that is all. Zen we were ...

Don't get me wrong. I have nothing against Zen or against monks raking gardens of stones. But when at the end a young man came towards the writer with a question - he was six-foot tall, nervous before the great - and she did not deign to get up, but stayed squatted serenely in front of her tea, his pain, through his shyness and height, through having his question answered with only a smile, his pain sounded louder than any gong and echoed behind him as he withdrew.

My heart leapt and I longed to run after him, take his arm, reach up and cradle his cheeks in my hands. I wanted to tell him, no, please don't stop. Don't let anyone make you stop.

Then on the threshold, neither in the hall, neither out, he turned and stared straight at me. "It will kill me," his mind said to mine. I sat still on my chair - it did not creak - and my lips mouthed the words: "But if it doesn't?"

The young man's reply, still a question, was written in his eyes: "It will make me strong?"

I nodded slowly. He smiled and lingered a moment, then he turned and went to the exit, his shoulders straight, his head held high. Zen we were ...

Zen she was, I was. Before becoming aware of wanting to be? Gong.

As I left in the flow of transfigured faces and stepped into the black night to catch the last bus, I thought of Klaus. He'd say I'd gone to the wrong conference, that drinks had been free at AT&T. Maybe he wouldn't say anything at all. Maybe he'd say I'd just slept in the wrong bed.