I was saying something along the same lines. Stab had started to cry as well. Jesus kept doing what he was doing, with a gentleness you don’t often encounter in a big man.
“Ma, what?” I said, pretty weakly I guess, because I was as puzzled and upset as the rest of us. In the circles in which I traveled, you didn’t often see a man washing a woman’s feet in a public place. “It’s something he wants to do. It’s his way of saying thanks.”
She was shaking her head at me, hard.
“Ma, it’s all right,” I repeated.
“No it isn’t, Russ,” she answered, but the words didn’t come out straight like that; they came out in bursts of sound from underneath the wave of tears and sorrow: “No … it is … no it isn’t.… No, Russ, it isn’t! Arnie, it isn’t. It’s from the Bible. This is what he did in the Bible right at the very end. Now he’s going to say he’s going away to a place where we can’t follow!” Her voice lifted and broke on the last syllable.
It was like talking about someone who wasn’t in the room. Jesus was so focused—head down, hands working—that he seemed almost to be inside my mother’s feet. But when she spoke those words, I noticed a peculiar twist of the muscles at the corners of his mouth, and when I saw that reaction I felt like the door had been thrown open and a gust of ten-below-zero air had blown onto the back of my neck. I got down on one knee so that my face was at the same level as Jesus’s. I took a risk and put a hand on his shoulder, and I said, “Is she right?”
For a few seconds he ignored me. He concentrated on the second foot, washing between the toes, then rinsing and drying them. With that same exquisite gentleness he squeezed her foot in both hands and set it down on the carpet. Another wave of sobbing spilled out of my mom. “Is she right?” I repeated. “Was what you did today some weird way of preparing us?”
Jesus slowly turned his head toward me, and in his eyes I could see something I had not seen there before. It was as if they opened into a series of deep brown worlds, one standing behind the next, each larger and wider and more complicated than the one before it. The special feeling of friendship I’d had with him in the desert, and in his hotel room that afternoon—it was there all over again, except this time magnified by a factor of ten, as if he was seeing through me and through me and through me, reading the pages of my future and my past, seeing everything and bathing it in understanding, forgiveness, and love. He was the Jesus I’d grown up imagining, except he didn’t care as much about my sins as that Jesus did.
“I am expecting the best of you,” he said quietly, and while this “you” clearly meant all of us, the word just about knocked me over.
I shivered, I couldn’t control it. I needed five or six seconds to recover. I said, “You didn’t come all this way to leave us again, did you?”
His face was as still as the sky on a winter night, full of this massive, sparkling openness. Dark and light at once. He said, “It is not something you can understand.”
“Try me.”
“I have to fulfill the prophecy.”
“To hell with the prophecy. There is no prophecy this time. Nothing’s written down, nothing’s set in stone.”
Stab was hugging him from the other side now, also on his knees. My mother seemed like she was going to faint. I was aware of Zelda leaning down toward him, and the others at the table crowding around. Ada Montpelier was bubbling over nearby, and Dukey was trying, in his own way, to comfort her. “It’s nothin’, it’s okay, he’s all right.”
“Everything is fine as it is,” Jesus said. “Everything plays out as it should.”
“But are you going?”
Jesus paused and drew in a slow breath. “Don’t be foolish,” he said.
At that moment I could feel … this sounds weird, but I could feel him coming back into the room. It was as if, after he’d started washing my mom’s feet, he had expanded in three dimensions, turned himself into something larger than his body, something gigantic, something loving and terrifying at the same time. Much later I would remember the part of the Last Supper where he was reported to have said, “This is my body, and this is my blood,” and it gave that passage new meaning for me, as if his disciples were on the slow side, mentally, and full of fear, and he was trying to convey to them the idea that a being as great as the Jesus-spirit could not be encapsulated in a human body. I believe now that he was preparing those disciples, trying to get them to focus on something other than the physical dimension.
“So you’re not going anywhere?”
“Don’t be foolish,” he repeated. “Where could I go?”
“See, he’s all right,” Dukey said with a laugh, as if trying to convince himself.
Stab stood up and started doing an awkward dance around the room. He bounced on one foot and then bounced on the other foot, like some kind of Native American warrior celebrating peace. They were happy sounds coming out of my brother’s mouth, but underneath the happy sounds I could tell he was afraid his world was going to fall apart.
“All right then,” I said, trying for a lighter tone and half succeeding. “It was nice what you did. I appreciate it. My mom appreciates it. But you scared us.”
“Resist fear,” Jesus said. “Fear is always in the future. Cut through it. Resist it.”
Wales piped up, “Now that we know you’re going to be around, tell us one thing. Are we going to win?”
“Without question,” Jesus said, and we cheered loudly. But there was a false note to that moment. I have gone back over it a hundred times. I remember that Zelda and I let our eyes meet for a second and then had to look away from each other. Norm Simmelton started to speak and abruptly stopped. I believe that, deep down, we all knew something, we sensed something. When Jesus washed my mother’s feet, I don’t think he was expecting the best of us, I think he was expecting too much of us—he was assuming we had learned, by the parable of his presence in a political campaign, that we were supposed to figure things out for ourselves. That we were on our own in a certain way. That we had some power and control over our spiritual fate, a power we did not know we possessed. That we might even have a little godliness in us.
People got up off the floor. My mother put her shoes on. The waiters carried away the water bowl and soap and towel, and came back with tea and rice pudding, and we took our places again and acted like we were an ordinary campaign staff on the eve of an election, nothing more than that.
“Your missing the last press conference hurt us today,” Zelda had the courage to say.
Jesus gave her the look he had been giving me when we were kneeling beside each other on the floor. I saw it register on her beautiful face—the fear, and then something covering over the fear. I wondered if he were preparing each of us in a different way—Zelda and me with this mysterious signal, my mother with the foot washing.
“I know,” he said. “Awkward for you, wasn’t it.”
“Very much.”
I thought Jesus might apologize—something I’d never heard him do. Instead he reached across the corner of the table and took hold of her wrist. She put her hand over his. I was not jealous in the slightest. “You know,” he said, “they don’t let presidents play touch football in the mud. I knew it would be my last chance for anything like that, and if I had told you in advance, what would everyone have said?”
“No freakin’ way we would’ve let you go,” Dukey yelled. I noticed that, since he’d seen Jesus washing my mother’s feet, he’d been touching Ada almost continuously. This was rare for him. Though I don’t think he was mean to her, there was almost no public tenderness between them, not in touch or words, and not much either between Dukey and his son. It would have been too much of a risk for him, doing that and letting people see. It would have been the psychological equivalent of walking around without his flak jacket on. Now, suddenly, he had an arm around Ada and was massaging her shoulder with the fingers of one hand. She looked like she was being fondled by an alien. So maybe Jesus had sent them a message, too.
>
“Exactly,” Jesus told him. “You would have tried to stop me.”
“At least you should have let some of the guys go down there with you. Safety’s sake.”
Jesus smiled at him, indulgently, I thought.
The Simmeltons wanted to pick up the tab, but Jesus wouldn’t let them. He produced a roll of bills from his pants pocket and pushed it into the hands of the host, who bowed to him as he went out the front door.
In the limousine convoy on the way home, we were sitting in our usual positions, Zelda and I across from Jesus and Stab. I could feel Jesus looking at me, but I kept my eyes turned away. I was trying to figure out what had happened, what he had actually told us, if he had promised us anything, if my intuition was on target or way off. I tried to catch Zelda’s eye, but she was talking to a reporter on the phone, trying to smooth over her candidate’s earlier no-show.
There was a dark stretch of highway, the exit ramp, and then I watched the bleak city of West Zenith roll into view, the storefronts with sheets of metal covering their windows, the shadowy alleys, the street people huddled in blankets in doorways, the idling cars and young men avoiding the light. I thought about what Jesus had said to me once: earth was the dimension of pain. I thought about Wales, on the beach in San Diego, saying we had to learn to say yes to everything.
When we pulled up to the hotel, Zelda stepped out, and then Stab. For a moment Jesus and I were left alone in the backseat. I motioned for him to go first, and I was able then to meet his eyes. He looked at me, looked into me again, put his hand on my knee and said one word.
“Courage.”
VERY LATE THAT NIGHT, when we felt we’d done everything we could to prepare for voting day, Zelda and I lay beside each other beneath the sheets of the hotel bed, warm skin against warm skin. Neither of us could sleep. Neither of us had said a word about what had happened that evening in the Taj Mahal. As if to avoid talking about it, we’d sat up in our room watching TV until almost two a.m. The pundits were predicting that, despite his election eve antics, Jesus was still favored to win the popular vote, perhaps by as much as five percent, but the electoral college was absolutely uncertain. Alowich was probably out of it, but Maplewith might have the edge over Jesus, depending on how things played out in half a dozen key states.
“You can’t sleep either, right?” Zelda asked quietly in the darkness.
“Not even close.”
“You know what I wish, Russ?”
“What?”
“I wish we were able to not worry. I wish we could have the attitude that, no matter what happens tomorrow, we’ve been privileged to do this, to be around him, to meet the people we’ve met in the last few months. I’d like it if we could just be grateful for that, whether we win or lose or … no matter what. Before he came into our lives we were doing pretty well … I was happy, you were happy … but I feel like a whole other dimension of ourselves has been opened up now. Look at how much he’s given us, each one of us. And what did we do to deserve it? Nothing, really.”
For a moment or two I lay there without speaking. I could hear the elevator doors closing in the hallway, the faint sound of a siren in the street below. I could feel the warmth of Zelda’s leg against my skin.
“Do you ever wonder,” I asked her, “why he came to us? I mean, look at it: me, my mom, my dad, Dukey McIntyre, for God’s sake. We’re not exactly the twelve apostles and Mary Magdalene. Jesus coming to West Zenith, to be with a pack of jokers like us! Don’t you ever wonder?”
“He had to pick someplace. He had to choose some people.”
“I know, but it’s not like we’re particularly holy or smart or that we’ve done some great work in our lives.”
“Your dad was brave in the war. He and your mom raised Stab with a lot of love. You went through what you went through with Esther and you didn’t turn permanently bitter. The Simmeltons grew up in the New York equivalent of Hunter Town, and somehow worked themselves out of that, and they’ve given away millions to good causes.”
“Right. And you were raised in foster homes and have spent your life since then helping people, and you put up with a guy like me. I know. But—”
“We’ve all lived good lives,” she said quietly. “We’ve all been heroic, in an ordinary kind of way.”
“Still … look at Wales, I mean. The guy watches football on Sundays with a glass of vodka in his hand. He goes fishing on summer weekends. He’s not exactly, you know, John the Baptist—”
“Maybe Jesus doesn’t want us to see people that way. Think about it. On the last day of his campaign he went and played football with those boys, and had his picture taken with them. Most people look at boys like that and without even knowing them think: gang members, criminals, people you wouldn’t want to meet in a dark alley. Most people look at your brother and immediately turn away, or they see him as an idiot who can’t be quiet when he should be, who has no real understanding of life. With Stab, at least, you see beyond the surfaces and so do I. Maybe Jesus is trying to show us he does that with everybody, looks past the exterior to something perfect inside. Maybe that’s what he’s trying to teach us, and if he’s president….”
Zelda stopped abruptly.
“I can only do that with very little kids,” I said, in a joking tone, because with the way she’d stopped after the words “if he’s president,” something cold had blown into the room again. “Babies, little kids. After they get to be about two, I start to see what’s wrong with them. Even with somebody I love, even with you—no offense—I can see that perfect part about one minute out of every hundred. I see it in myself about one day out of every two years, and as I get older I see it less and less. Today, when he disappeared, I sneaked down to the Wee Drop Inn for two hours and sat there drinking and watching TV, and I was so mad I stopped believing there was even anything good in him, never mind that he might be, you know, that he might be—”
“Sent from God,” she said.
“Exactly.”
After a while, Zelda turned onto her side and rested her cheek against my shoulder. “When I had my practice I often used to wonder what it was that made everybody hate themselves so much. Or not hate themselves maybe but have such a low opinion of themselves, as if there was a perfect standard they’d been told they were supposed to live up to, bodywise, brainwise, as parents, as lovers, as children. Sometimes I thought we had it upside down: we believed we had to be good so that we could love ourselves, instead of naturally loving ourselves and then naturally doing good because we loved ourselves.”
“You lost me,” I said.
“Every once in a while on this trip I’d see somebody—a waitress or a driver or someone in the crowd—remember the man who sold us those flowers in Chico?—and there would be an expression on their face.… It was as if, when they looked at Jesus they were seeing themselves, as if he were the manifestation of how they felt about themselves, deep inside. I think they’ve come to a place where they are perfectly at peace with their humanness.
“My mother says that, when she comes out of confession on Saturday afternoon, she feels holy. Is that what you mean?”
“I bet there is no way on earth your mother can be unkind to anyone or do anything hurtful while she is in that state of mind. She believes her sins are forgiven, really believes it, so she can forgive everyone else.”
“Even my dad … for a few hours.”
“I think Jesus has been trying to teach us something about that during this whole thing—the talks, the tricks he played, the courage, the calm, the warmth, the insistence on kindness, the turning our assumptions upside down. Disappearing today. Even that foot washing at dinner tonight. It’s all been one big lesson.”
I thought about that for a minute, feeling her skin against mine, and then the darkness and coldness beyond that. I thought about my father insisting on using the word rabbi or teacher, instead of God. And then I thought of the last thing Jesus had said to me before he got out of the limo. The foreboding that ha
d been at the back of my mind circled around and around and then pushed itself out into the air: “He’s going to be killed, isn’t he,” I said.
“I think so.”
“And we’re going to have to deal with that, and deal with the country we have, without him.”
“Yes.” Zelda reached her face up and kissed me, and we were silent after that for a long time, and eventually we fell asleep that way, holding on.
FORTY-ONE
The TV networks have this cute thing they do on Election Day. They get information from their own exit polls, people stationed at key precincts who ask certain questions of voters after the deed is done. To the networks’ credit, while the polls are still open, they hold themselves back from making projections based on this information. Once the polls close within a particular time zone or an individual state, the fun begins. When that happens, it sounds something like this: “ABC news is now able to project that Mickey Mouse will carry the state of Florida. So Florida, with its twenty-seven electoral votes, goes into the Mouse column.” And so on.
What’s interesting to me as a journalist is what they do before these projections can be made. Inevitably, they trot out some second-tier reporter, and give her a four-minute segment during which she can talk about the answers voters have given at the polling place. These answers can’t be anything as direct as who they actually voted for—it’s too early for that to be allowed on air—so they fall into the category of shocking conclusions like: “We found that voters who describe themselves as ‘very religious’ generally placed ‘values issues’ above foreign policy strength.” Or, “Our research has demonstrated that women aged twenty-five to forty, living in the suburbs, with between one and three children, whose husbands earn more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, who prefer to buy cars made by American companies, and who favor pantsuits when they go to the office, these women said, overwhelmingly, that environmental issues have gotten too much play in this election cycle.”
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