Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker (27 page)

“Go home,” said Zeus. “Put your head under cold water.” He escaped from the sanctuary into the study and slammed the door. The dog sat in the big leather chair behind the long desk. He cleared his throat. “I’d be glad to help with the sermon for tomorrow,” he said. “I think your topic has got to be change—the life-affirming nature of change, the Christian’s willingness to accept and nurture change.”

“That’s a lot of balloon juice,” said Zeus. He caught a look at himself in a long mirror that stood in a closet full of robes: a powerful, handsome, tanned fellow in a white collar. Not bad.

“You sure you want to leave tomorrow?”

“That’s the deal I made with Victor. Didn’t he tell you?”

“You couldn’t stay until Monday? This town needs shaking up. I always wanted to do it and didn’t know how, and now you could preach on Sunday and it’d be a wonderful experience for all of us.”

“You’re a fool,” Zeus said. “This is not a TV show. You people are dying. This is not a long-term problem, and the answer to it is not the willingness to accept change. You need heart but you’re Lutherans, and you go along with things. We know that from history. You’re in danger and months will pass and it’ll get worse, but you won’t change your minds. You’ll sit and wait. Lutherans are fifteen per cent faith and eighty-five per cent loyalty. They are nobody to lead to revolt. Your country is coming apart.”

The dog looked up at the god with tears in his brown eyes. “Please tell my people,” he whispered.

“Tell them yourself.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“Neither do I.”

“Love me,” Diane told Zeus that night in bed. “Forget yourself. Forget that we’re Lutheran. Hurl your body off the cliff into the dark abyss of wild, mindless, passionate love.” But he was too tired. He couldn’t find the cliff. He seemed to be on a prairie. In the morning, he hauled himself out of bed and dressed in a brown suit and white shirt. He peered into the closet. “These your only ties?” he asked the dog. The dog nodded.

Zeus glanced out the bedroom window to the east, to a beech tree by the garage, where a figure with waxen wings was sitting on a low limb. He said, silently, “Be with you in one minute.” He limped into the kitchen and found Diane in the breakfast nook, eating bran flakes and reading an article in the Sunday paper about a couple who are able to spend four days a week in their country home now that they have a fax machine. He brushed her cheek with his lips and whispered, “O you woman, farewell, you sweet, sexy Lutheran love of my life,” and jumped out of Wes and into the dog, loped out the back door, and climbed into Victor’s car.

“She’ll be glad to hear you’re coming,” said Victor. “She misses you. I’m sorry you’ll have to make the return flight in a small cage, doped on a heavy depressant, and be quarantined for sixty days in Athens, both July and August, but after that things should start to get better for you.”

At eleven o’clock, having spent the previous two hours tangled in the sheets with his amazing wife, Wes stood in the pulpit and grinned. The church was almost half full, not bad for July, and the congregation seemed glad to see him. “First of all, Diane and I want to thank you for the magnificent gift of the trip to Greece, which will be a permanent memory, a token of your generosity and love,” he said. “A tremendous thing happened on the trip that I want to share with you this morning. For the past week, I have lived in the body of a dog while an ancient god lived with Diane and made love to her.”

He didn’t expect the congregation to welcome this news, but he was unprepared for their stony looks: they stood up and pointed and glared at him as if he were a criminal. They cried out, “Get down out of that pulpit, you filth, you!”

“Why are you so hostile?” he said.

Why are you so hostile?
The lamp swayed as the ship rolled, and Diane said, “Why so hostile? Why? You want to know why I’m hostile? Is that what you’re asking? About hostility? My hostility to you? O.K. I’ll answer your question. Why I’m hostile—right? Me. Hostile. I’ll tell you why. Why are you smiling?”

He was smiling, of course, because it was a week ago—they were in Greece, and God had kindly allowed him one more try. He could remember exactly the horrible words he’d said the first time, and this time he did not have to say them and become a dog. He was able to swallow the 1949 wine, and think, and say, “The sight of you fills me with tender affection and a sweet longing to be flat on my back in a dark, locked room with you naked, lying on top, kissing me, and me naked, too.”

The lawyer and the dog rode to the airport in the limousine, and somewhere along the way Zeus signed a document that gave Hera half his power and promised absolute fidelity. “Absolute?” he woofed. “You mean ‘total’ in the sense of bottom line, right? A sort of basic faithfulness? Fidelity in principle? Isn’t that what you mean here? The spirit of fidelity?”

“I mean
pure,
” the lawyer said.

Zeus signed. The lawyer tossed him a small, dry biscuit. Zeus wolfed it down and barked. In the back of his mind, he thought maybe he’d find a brilliant lawyer to argue that the paw print wasn’t a valid signature, but he wasn’t sure. He thought about a twenty-four-ounce T-bone steak, and he wasn’t sure he’d get that, either.

1990

SUSAN SONTAG

THE VERY COMICAL LAMENT OF PYRAMUS AND THISBE

(AN INTERLUDE)

W
ALL:
Thus have I, Wall, my part dischargèd so; And being done, thus Wall away doth go.

—A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
Act V, Scene 1.

T
HISBE:
It’s not here anymore.

P
YRAMUS:
It separated us. We yearned for each other. We grew apart.

T
HISBE:
I was always thinking about it.

P
YRAMUS:
I thought you were thinking about me.

T
HISBE:
Ninny!
(Gives him a kiss.)
How often have I reassured you. But I’m talking about what I didn’t say. With every sentence I uttered, there was another, unspoken half sentence: “And the wall . . .” Example: I’m going to the Paris Bar.

P
YRAMUS:
“And the wall . . .”

T
HISBE:
Example: What’s playing at the Arsenal tonight?

P
YRAMUS:
“And the wall . . .”

T
HISBE:
Example: It’s terrible for the Turks in Kreuzberg.

P
YRAMUS:
“And the wall . . .”

T
HISBE:
Exactly.

P
YRAMUS:
It was a tragedy. Will it be a comedy now?

T
HISBE:
We won’t become normal, will we?

P
YRAMUS:
Does this mean we can do whatever we want?

T
HISBE:
I’m starting to feel a little nostalgic. Oh, the human heart is a fickle thing.

P
YRAMUS:
Thisbe!

T
HISBE:
Not about you, belovèd! You know I’ll always be yours. I mean, you’ll be mine. But of course that’s the same, isn’t it? No, I’m thinking about . . . you know. I miss it a little.

P
YRAMUS:
Thisbe!

T
HISBE:
Just a little.
(Sees
P
YRAMUS
frowning.)
Smile, darling. Oh, you people are so serious!

P
YRAMUS:
I’ve suffered.

T
HISBE:
So have I, in my way. Not like you, of course. But it wasn’t always easy here, either.

P
YRAMUS:
Let’s not quarrel.

T
HISBE:
We
quarrel? Never!
(Sound of wall-peckers.)
Listen! What an amazing sound!

P
YRAMUS:
I wish I’d brought my tape recorder. It’s a Sony.

T
HISBE:
I’m glad you can buy whatever you want now. I didn’t realize you were
so
poor.

P
YRAMUS:
It was awful. But, you know, it was good for my character.

T
HISBE:
You see? Even you can feel rueful. An American artist warned me last year, You’ll miss this wall.
(She spies some wall-peckers spraying their hoard of pieces of the wall with paint.)
They’re improving it.

P
YRAMUS:
Let’s not be nostalgic.

T
HISBE:
But you agree there’s something to be said for it. It made us different.

P
YRAMUS:
We’ll still be different.

T
HISBE:
I don’t know. So many cars. So much trash. The beggars. Pedestrians don’t wait at corners for the green light. Cars parked on the sidewalk.

Enter the
S
PIRIT OF
N
EW
Y
ORK.

S
PIRIT:
O city, I recognize you. Your leather bars, your festivals of independent films, your teeming dark-skinned foreigners, your real-estate predators, your Art Deco shops, your racism, your Mediterranean restaurants, your littered streets, your rude mechanicals—

T
HISBE:
No! Begone! This is the Berkeley of Central Europe.

S
PIRIT:
Central Europe: a dream. Your Berkeley: an interlude. This will be the New York of Europe—it was ever meant to be so. Only postponed for a mere sixty years.

S
PIRIT OF
N
EW
Y
ORK
vanishes.

T
HISBE:
Well, I suppose it won’t be too bad. Since New York isn’t America, this city still won’t be—

P
YRAMUS:
Sure, provided it stays shabby as well as full of unwelcome foreigners.
(Sighs.)
Let’s not be too hopeful.

T
HISBE:
Oh, let’s be hopeful. We’ll be rich. It’s only money.

P
YRAMUS:
And power. I’m going to like that.

T
HISBE:
We’re not getting anything we don’t deserve. We’re together. We’re free.

P
YRAMUS:
Still, everything is going too fast. And costing too much.

T
HISBE:
No one can make us do what we don’t want as long as we’re together.

P
YRAMUS:
I’m having a hard time thinking of those less fortunate than we are. But sometimes we’ll remember, won’t we.

T
HISBE:
I want to forget these old stories.

P
YRAMUS:
History is homesickness.

T
HISBE:
Cheer up, darling. The world is divided into Old and New. And we’ll always be on the good side. From now on.

P
YRAMUS:
Goethe said—

T
HISBE:
Oh, not Goethe.

P
YRAMUS:
You’re right.

T
HISBE:
In Walter Benjamin’s last—

P
YRAMUS:
Not Benjamin, either!

T
HISBE:
Right.
(They fall silent for a while.)
Let’s stroll.

They see a procession of venders, including some Russian soldiers, coming across an empty field.

P
YRAMUS:
And to think
that
was no man’s land.

T
HISBE:
What are they selling?

P
YRAMUS:
Everything. Everything is for sale.

T
HISBE:
Do say it’s better. Please!

P
YRAMUS:
Of course it’s better. We don’t have to die.

T
HISBE:
Then let’s go on celebrating. Have some champagne. Have a River Cola.

They drink.

P
YRAMUS:
Freedom at last.

T
HISBE:
But don’t toss your can on the ground.

P
YRAMUS:
What do you take me for?

T
HISBE:
Sorry. It’s just that—I’m sorry. Yes, freedom.

C
URTAIN.

1991

POLLY FROST

OFF-RAMP

I
USED
to speak the language of the patriarchy.

RICK, my stepfather, taught me Latin names for all the bones in his right foot. When I helped my first boyfriend with his high-school homework, he insisted I do it in baby talk.

And then there was Lyle. He came into the Carl’s Jr. that Rick and my mom run near Flagstaff, Arizona, one day in late August. All summer we fed tourists after they were Grand Canyoned out. Hundreds
—thousands—
of exhausted, screaming kids and their zombified parents. I was nineteen. Lyle was sitting alone that afternoon, staring at me while I loaded French-fry bags.

“Tell that creep he’s got to give up his table,” Rick said. “He’s been there fifteen minutes.”

I went over to where Lyle was lounging. “My stepdad thinks it’s impolite to digest your food,” I told him.

Lyle looked deep into my eyes. “Doreen,” he said, reading my nameplate. “I have news for you, Doreen. You are not who you think you are. You are not a fast-food server—you are an inspiration from the divine. You have made me want to create again.”

“I have?” I said. “Are you an artist?”

“I could be,” he said, “if you would be my muse.” He paused and played with his straw. “Do you know what a muse is?” I shook my head. “A muse is a woman who makes it possible for a guy to carry out his life’s work. But muses don’t have names like Doreen.”

He stood up and left. I ran after him.

“Then who am I?” I asked in the parking lot.

“Henceforth,” he said, “you shall be Rawnee.” He spelled it in the dust on his van.

I’D never been with anyone who lived for his art before. The people I knew all picked up after themselves. But Lyle couldn’t function without me. And I thought I was discovering capabilities in myself I hadn’t known were there, like paying bills.

We went through my junior-college savings fund in two weeks.

One night Lyle drove off without saying anything. I was terrified that he wouldn’t come back, that he’d find another muse. At 3
A.M.
he returned, carrying a huge cardboard box. “All the really creative people have to be subsidized,” he explained. He knifed open the carton. Clothing labels spilled out onto the shag carpeting of the tiny house we were renting. “You and me are about to get a little grant from Mack Ropington,” he said.