Sweet Jesus

by Christine Pountney

  That was true. Hannah had heard it too.

  Parties are good for people, he said, but SUVS are killing the planet. He pulled his head back inside and Hannah walked up the clanging metal staircase to their apartment. If Norm heard her coming up the stairs, he’d go to the door and open it before she had a chance to put her key in the lock. She looked back over her shoulder for a moment.

  What the fuck are you looking at? the woman said. This is none of your goddamn business!

  You know, Hannah said, you’re making an awful lot of noise yourself.

  This asshole has me blocked in, she said, pointing up at the window the tattooed man had leaned out of.

  I don’t think that’s his car.

  Shut up, the woman said. I don’t have to listen to you. You’ll be gone in a couple of months. You people never stay for more than six months anyway. I used to own that building. I used to own the whole fucking block! But now the place is a dump and y’all live in these filthy apartments.

  Well, at least I don’t have a filthy mouth! Hannah shouted and turned towards the door and there was Norm. Crazy bitch, she told him, and Norm looked curious and amused. Oh, how she loved the face on him. She held it between her hands and Norm said, Get in here. He closed the door and slid his hands up under her shirt.

  Hannah ran her fingers through his thick black hair. You’re my little black rabbit, she said and soon they were in bed again. What a luxury liner this love was – high and solid and unsinkable, though Hannah drowned all the time. It was a willing submission, but it wasn’t subservient. It was increments of liberation. She was slowly uncovering Norm’s abundant permission to be more herself. She trusted that Norm really loved her. It was that simple, and that revolutionary.

  You need to call your sister, Norm said, stroking her face. It’s important. She was pretty upset.

  Really?

  Yeah, something’s going on over there.

  Are you being serious?

  Why? Why are you so incredulous all the time? It’s your sister. She called. It’s not bewildering. If I had to guess I’d say that she and Harlan were having some marital problems.

  Is that what she said?

  Not in so many words.

  What else did she say?

  Norm threw his hands up in surrender.

  Hannah pulled a face and got out of bed. She was naked and could feel Norm watching her. What are you lookin’ at, eh?

  You, he said. The soft, pliable mechanics of your body.

  Hannah looked pleased and did a little undulating dance. A moment later, she walked back in with the phone. Why is the phone covered in dirt? Hannah watched Norm cross his ankles and put his hands under his head in a posture of contentment.

  She dialled her sister’s number and went into the kitchen and noticed the fresh pot of soil on the table. Norm had a green thumb. He could coax anything to life. Except a baby, she thought and tried to banish the idea. She opened the fridge, taking out last night’s chicken and the dill pickles. She started opening a bag of bread, got Connie’s answering machine, and left a message. Norm came in just as she was hanging up the phone. Here, give me that, he said, taking the bread. I’ll do that. Norm was also, she thought, the Sandwich King.

  It was nearly midnight. Norm was slouched low on the sofa, one leg flung over its arm. He was reading Marcus Aurelius, Hannah a book by Paula Fox. There was a stillness between them that was comfortable. Hannah looked up from her book and found the mere shape of Norm’s leg in his blue jeans miraculously attractive.

  If we ever got married, Hannah said, do you think we’d be the kind of couple that wraps a few sandwiches in wax paper, rinses out the thermos, throws the sheepskin coats on the back seat of the car, and drives to the country while reading Out of Africa out loud to each other?

  Sure, Norm said after thinking about it. I hope so.

  Oh, Hannah said. She sounded disappointed.

  What’s wrong with that?

  It’s so bourgeois.

  Well, how would you have it?

  I’d have Captain Beefheart on the stereo, Hannah said. And a king can of Molson X in my hand.

  Norm looked at her then, as if he was seeing her again for the first time. The things you say, he said, they surprise me sometimes.

  I’m glad they do.

  Hannah crawled across the floor and up between his legs, resting her head in his lap. She looked up at his face and it seemed she’d known this face for a very long time. I’ve been looking for a face like this, Hannah said, all my life. You’ve got a big face, Norman Peach. A face like a tree.

  A few weeks ago, on their way back from a bar where they’d met up with some friends, including a woman Norm had dated for a while, Norm had said, What if I made out with another woman? What if I find another woman attractive? Do you want to hear about that?

  Not really, she said. She was that happy. She was feeling that strong. I mean, I know you’ll have feelings for other women. That goes without saying. I just don’t want you to indulge those feelings under the pretext of being honest. So no, Hannah said, I don’t want to hear the whole truth about how you feel. I want to hear what I deserve to hear.

  It was this big love that was making her wise. She was opening the gate and letting her maturity wander out onto sunny pastures. Norm took her back to bed. He turned her over. She was lying on her stomach and Norm was on top of her. He fit the contours of her body like a hand on a breast. His breath was warm on her cheek. His cock was like a torch filling her with light.

  Tell me something, he said.

  I want to have a baby with you, baby.

  I know you do. Now tell me something I don’t already know, he said. Tell me what this feels like.

  Norm’s request made her feel self-conscious. Hannah’s mind went blank and she felt dull, uninteresting, like she was letting him down. She wanted to say something smart, something beautiful, to capture the moment. She didn’t answer Norm right away, and then she forgot to answer him at all. She gave into the gentle, absent-minded rhythm of their bodies. She hardly even noticed when, after a while, she said, Your skin’s so warm, babe. I can hardly feel it against my own. I feel like there’s no one here but me.

  The next morning, Hannah went up behind Norm, who was doing the dishes, and rested her cheek between his shoulder blades. She’d never known a body to give off so much literal good feeling. His body made hers buzz, made it feel urgent. He was the only man she’d ever wanted to have a baby with – she’d waited so long and been so careful about this, not getting pregnant. And now her whole body was singing, it’s time. Singing it like a holy-roller gospel choir. They’d joked so often about having a child. Norm called him Lefty. If they burnt a piece of meat, Norm would say, Lefty’ll eat it. So Hannah suspected him of wanting a baby too, beneath the obvious resistance. Whenever she brought up the topic in a serious fashion, he’d ask her to stop pressuring him, but she needed him to make a decision soon. She was thirty-six years old. Last night, she’d had another dream about having a baby. It was theirs – plump, about seven years old at birth, with an old man’s face and the small busy hands of a squirrel. Hannah closed her eyes and said, So, Norm, are we ever going to have a little chomper or what?

  Why do you always make it sound like an accusation? he said.

  Do you know how ruthlessly I’ve been trying to be patient here?

  But you mention it all the time.

  Babe, I’m carrying around a very painful hope.

  Hope, Norm said, can make even a kind person disregard all manner of cruelty.

  Hannah stood back. And how quickly hope, once spurned, can grow barbed and attack the tender spot where it’s been harboured. You can be a pompous ass sometimes, she said, you know that? What’s cruel about wanting to have a baby?

  Norm sighed at the cupboards. Hannah knew he was longing for more physical space, some sort of escape.

  I seem incapable of wanting a child, he said. And I would rather be alone than unhappy.

 
; You’re not happy with me? Hannah said. Her skin was prickling.

  No, I’m happy with you, he said. All I’m saying is, maybe I’m destined to be alone. Because, while the thought of it makes me very sad, it’s not at odds with my constitution.

  Hannah felt disoriented.

  I can’t do it, Norm said. I don’t think I want to have a baby right now.

  But you might at some point?

  I can’t say. I don’t know.

  You don’t know?

  Norm shrugged, and the fact that it seemed so willful – like a decision, not an incapacity – as if he was feigning helplessness – infuriated her. His refusal struck her as close-minded, a stubborn lack of effort. She felt betrayed. But we’ve had a running joke, she said. The whole time we’ve been together. You’ve laughed every time I’ve asked you.

  Because you ask me in your baby voice.

  I use that voice, she said, to express my most – there’s nothing lighthearted about it!

  Norm curled his hands over the edge of the sink. He looked down at the last grey bubbles on the surface of the dirty dishwater.

  I want you to think about this, Hannah said.

  I have thought about it, he said. I can’t do it.

  This was new. Norm’s certainty seemed to be coming out of nowhere and it seemed to her it couldn’t be influenced. It seemed to have no real source or discernible cause. Nothing to attack or criticize. It made Hannah panic. Her hope had given her such confidence, and to feel that she’d been so far off the mark. She wanted to hit him.

  The way Norm looked at her made her wonder if her face had turned ugly at that moment. Why are you asking me to prove my love in such a predictable way, he said, when neither of us aspires to be conventional?

  Is your life so precious, she said, you can’t afford to?

  Actually, money is an issue, Norm said. Neither of us has any of it, unless one of us produces a bestseller. I have the teaching, but it’s not a full-time career. I know what it feels like to be miserable, Hannah, and I’m happy right now. I don’t want to jeopardize that.

  Maybe a baby would make you even happier.

  Maybe, Norm said, cupping his hands as if they held the answer. But I suspect the opposite. Why can’t you just accept that this is my decision?

  Because I don’t think this is inevitable! I think the opposite is inevitable.

  Norm closed his eyes and exhaled. I don’t want to force you to make a decision you don’t want to make either. You could have kids with somebody else.

  Somebody else?

  The room shrunk, then restored itself. A passing streetcar made the apartment tremble. I’ve come through everything in my life to arrive at this? Hannah thought. I’ve always wanted to have kids, she said carefully. I took it for granted that I would. But I wasn’t reckless. It was never the right time. Not until now. But now, suddenly, I’m not allowed? It’s the last thing I expected. To be denied when I had finally arrived at what I thought was the right place. You’ve broken my heart, Norm.

  Hannah stood there for a while longer. When she understood that Norm wasn’t going to say anything, she felt an awful pressure, like lead being packed behind her eyes. She left the kitchen and fell onto the futon.

  She was still crying when he brought her a cup of coffee with steamed milk and two pieces of toast, cut on the diagonal and fanned out on a plate with a royal blue napkin wrapped around a silver knife, and a little jar of jam she’d saved from a hotel and left in the door of the fridge, to be forgotten until now. She was sitting so limply on the edge of the bed, it was as if she sat there only by coincidence of her vertebrae being stacked. She felt drained and exhausted. This was a new kind of grief he was causing her, and he must have known it, because he looked so sorry. The plate was a peace offering. A delicate, artful arrangement of remorse.

  Hannah pushed her hair back and wiped her face. Norm sat down beside her and she leaned her head on him as she ate, feeling her jaw push into his shoulder as she chewed. She understood some things were over now, and that her life would take a new direction. She didn’t know where or how, but she was toying with the newness and the adventure of it, instead of dwelling on what she was about to lose. She was in a dream state. It wasn’t that bad, but it wasn’t real either. She could be civil and magnanimous because it was all melodrama anyways. It was a play, for the meantime. A piece of toast. How nice.

  When she was finished, Norm got up and said he was hungry. He was teasing her now. You ate, but I didn’t.

  That’s because I was crying, Hannah said, poised and haughty as a child. And the crybaby gets the loaf.

  Fenton’s parents came to the hospital every day, and stayed for long hours, camping out at a hotel room nearby. Any number of a dozen relatives also came and went, people Zeus had never met before but with whom he might share a colourless meal on an orange tray in the cafeteria downstairs. Fenton’s sister, Becca, came with her new son, Max, but found it too hard to spend time in palliative with a newborn. She stayed for an hour, then Fenton told her to take Max home. This is no place for a baby, he said, and Rebecca started to cry. Max looked so much like his uncle, but no one dared remark on it. Only Fenton had, once, into the waxy flower-bud of Max’s ear, whispered, Are you my reincarnation?

  No one questioned Zeus’s presence at Fenton’s bedside except for one elderly aunt who insisted on expressing her objection. Did we not give him everything a boy could want? she shouted, out in the hall. Fenton could have been a Supreme Court judge! But no, he had to go join the circus. You think this is funny? Do you have any idea what kind of people join the circus? Who is this man anyway? Why is everybody calling him Zeus? And why does he keep holding my nephew’s hand?

  For the most part, Fenton’s family spoke in the gentle, hushed tones of people who realize the end is near and refuse to let anything petty mar the tender atmosphere. There were gifts of muffins and hot coffee, and somebody replaced the empty kleenex box with a fresh one, and somebody else took care of the flowers, pulling out the wilted lilies and leaving the hardy ginger.

  Fenton’s condition got worse faster than anyone could have predicted. The pneumonia was deep in his lungs and he was too weak to fight it. If only he’d come in sooner, the doctors said. He died just days after arriving in hospital. Zeus stood next to his bed and watched the flame that animated his lover’s body sputter and go out. Fenton’s parents were there. His mother raised her face to the ceiling. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. His father let out a terrible choked sob and lurched towards the bed, coming in between Zeus and Fenton’s body. At some point, a nurse touched Zeus lightly on the waist to move him aside. She removed Fenton’s IV and turned off some machines. She looked at Ronald Murch to get the okay, then closed his son’s eyes forever.

  Zeus left alone and walked home, feeling his way along the street with his skin, like some blind, transparent fish plucked from a deep, frozen pool in a dark cave. Trembling uncontrollably, he spotted Fenton four times. Each time in error. Each time feeling his heart leap into his throat with a longing that was so painful it forced him to clutch his chest and sink down onto the pavement, where people rushed past him, thinking he must be drunk.

  ~

  Without Fenton, the apartment took on an eerie menace – the wigs, the Vaudevillian posters, Fenton’s little black slippers. Zeus felt things had to shift immediately. He needed to open the windows, let the air in. He started to strip the bed. He threw off the duvet and yanked the bottom fitted sheet. It ripped in the corner, near where Fenton’s head used to rest. Zeus picked Fenton’s pillow up off the floor and sat down on the waterbed and held it for a while, bobbing gently. He smoothed the old stained pillow across his lap, then laid his hand in the hollow that Fenton’s head had made.

  Reaching to unhook the torn corner of the bedsheet, Zeus felt something tucked into the space his weight had pried opened between the wooden frame and the mattress. He pulled it out. A small envelope, yellow with age and creased. There was Fenton’s na
me, in a hand he didn’t recognize. Zeus opened it and pulled out a card with Hebrew writing on one side, framed by scrolls and doves and harps. The other side was written in English. There is a time-honoured Jewish tradition associated with childbirth, for the mother to have with her a Shir LaMa’alot card during labour and delivery. After birth, the card is placed in the baby’s bassinet in the hospital and later, in the baby’s crib at home. I will lift mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.

  Zeus looked up and heard his own sorrowful breathing. His body rocked slightly, with each beat of his heart, his stubborn blood pushing through him rhythmically.

  The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in.

  Fenton had kept this card all his life, Zeus thought. He should have had it with him at the hospital. I should give it to his mother.

  Zeus started to cry. His going out and his coming in. Somebody had been watching over Fenton all his life. All Zeus seemed to know was newness and change, and loss. He didn’t want to give the card back to Ruth. He wanted to keep it for himself. He wanted to pretend it was his own, that he’d had it since birth. That his own mother had given it to him. Where was she now? Where was Rose? She waited in hope, Zeus knew, for him to call her. That’s what she always said. Call me anytime, okay? She loved hearing from him. The door is always open, she’d say. That was something – a kindness she’d always shown him. Rose had wanted to rescue him and perhaps she had, from something worse than what he’d had to endure in Toronto. Perhaps she was all he had now, as good as he could do. Suddenly, he wanted to hear her voice. He wanted to say hi, and sob into the phone that his one true love was dead, that his best and only love was gone.

  People gathered for the funeral. Zeus stood at the back of the synagogue and greeted old friends from clown school, nurses who worked at the hospital, and couples whose children he and Fenton had known and had also passed away. It was a big crowd to handle. Zeus accepted their condolences with a dullness that nobody held against him. Just before the service, a Buddhist monk showed up like a giant tiger lily in his orange robes. He stood near the door with a garland of pink and yellow flowers and caused a flurry of people to turn their heads. Zeus walked over and the monk asked if he could speak to Fenton’s father. Zeus got Ronald and together they listened to what the monk had to say.