Fierce Pajamas: An Anthology of Humor Writing from The New Yorker

by Finder, Henry

  Zeus didn’t think he could. He felt weak and listless. Diane carried the bags, and he led the dog, who emerged from the baggage room dopey and confused. Zeus collapsed into the back seat of a van driven by a burly man named Vern, who, Zeus gathered, was his brother. “Wes is pretty jet-lagged,” Diane told him, but the man yammered on and on about virtually nothing. “Hope you had a good trip,” he said. Yes, they said, they had. “Always wanted to go over there myself,” he said. “But things come up. You know.” He talked for many miles about what he had done instead of going to Greece: resodding, finishing the attic, adding on a bedroom, taking the kids to Yellowstone. Do we have kids? Zeus wondered. “Four,” said the dog, beaming. “Great kids. I can’t wait for you to meet them, Mister.” Then he dropped his chin on the seat and groaned. “The littlest guy is murder on animals. One look at me, he’ll have me in a headlock until my eyeballs pop.” He groaned again. “I forgot about Mojo. Our black Lab.” His big brown eyes filled with tears. “I’ve come home in disgrace to die like a dog,” he said. “I feed Mojo for ten years and now he’s going to go for my throat. It’s too hard.” The god told him to buck up, but the dog brooded all the way home, and when Vern pulled up to the garage behind the little green house and Diane climbed out, the dog tore off down the street and across a playground and disappeared. Vern and Zeus cruised the streets for half an hour searching for the mutt, Zeus with gathering apprehension, even panic. Without Wes to resume being Wes, he figured, he couldn’t get out of Wes and back into Zeus.

  Vern went home for a warm jacket (he said, but Zeus guessed he was tired and would find some reason not to come back). The god strode across yards, through hedges, crooning, “Sweetness! Sweetness!” The yards were cluttered with machines, which he threw aside. Sweetness!

  The dog was huddled by an incinerator behind the school. He had coached boys’ hockey here for ten years. “I’m so ashamed,” he wept. The god held him tightly in his arms. “To be a dog in a foreign place is one thing, but to come home and have to crawl around—” He was a small dog, but he sobbed like a man—deep, convulsive cries.

  Zeus was about to say, “Oh, it’s not all that bad,” and then he felt a feathery hand on his shoulder. Actually, a wing. It was Victor, Hera’s old lawyer, in a blue pin-striped suit and two transparent wings like a locust’s. Zeus tried to turn him into a kumquat, but the man only chuckled. “Heh, heh, heh. Don’t waste my time. You wanna know how come you feel a little limp? Lemme tell ya. Hera is extremely upset, Mr. Z. Frankly, I don’t know if godhood is something you’re ever going to experience again. It wouldn’t surprise me that much if you spent the rest of recorded time as a frozen meatball.”

  “What does she want?”

  “She wants what’s right. Justice. She wants half your power. No more, no less.”

  “Divide power? Impossible. It wouldn’t be power if I gave it up.”

  “O.K. Then see how you like these potatoes.”

  He snatched up the dog, and his wings buzzed as he zoomed up, and over the pleasant rooftops of Odense.

  “Wait!” the god cried. “Forty-five per cent!” But his voice was thin and whispery. On the way home, he swayed, his knees caved in, he had to hang on to a mailbox. For three days, Zeus was flat on his back, stunned by monogamy: what a cruel fate for a great man! Diane waited on him hand and foot; children hung around, onlookers at the site of a disaster. They clung to him, they squeezed in next to him on the couch, fighting over the choice locations. They stank of sugar. He could not get their names straight. Melissa and Donnie (or Sean or Jon), or Melinda and Randy, and the fat one was Penny, and the little one’s name began with an “H”. He called him Hector, and the little boy cried. “Go away,” the god snapped. “You are wretched and vile and disgusting. I’m sorry. It’s the truth. I’m dying, I think. Let me die in peace. Bug off.” The older boy wept: something about a promise, a trip to see something, a purchase—Zeus couldn’t understand him. “Speak up!” he said, but the boy blubbered and bawled, his soft lemurlike face slimy with tears and mucus. The god swung down his legs and sat up on the couch and raised his voice: “I am trapped here, a being fallen from a very high estate indeed—you have no idea—and what I see around me I do not want.”

  Everybody felt lousy, except Diane. “It’s only jet lag!” she cried, bringing in a tray of cold, greasy, repulsive food, which he could see from her smile was considered a real treat here. He ate a nugget of cheese and gagged.

  “You’ll feel better tomorrow,” she said.

  Later, Penny, the fat girl, asked him if Greece was as dirty as they said. She asked if he and Mom had had a big fight. She asked why he felt trapped. She wanted to hear all the bad news.

  “I felt crazy the moment we landed in America. The air is full of piercing voices, thousands of perfectly normal, handsome, tall people talk-talk-talk-talk-talking away like chickadees, and I can hear each one of them all the time and they make me insane. You’re used to this, I’m not. What do you people have against silence? Your country is so beautiful, and it is in the grip of invincible stupidity. The President is a habitual liar and a hack, and the Vice-President is a raging idiot,” he said. “The country is inflamed with debt and swollen with blight and trash, and the government is in the hands of people who lack the brains and integrity to run a small plumbing shop, and they’ll be in power until 1997, and then it won’t matter much.”

  “How can you say that, Dad?”

  “Because I’m omniscient.”

  “You are?”

  “I know everything. It’s a fact.” She looked at him with a level gaze, not smirking, not pouting, an intelligent child. The only one prepared to understand him.

  “Do my homework,” she whispered. He whipped off dozens of geometry exercises, algebra, trigonometry, in a flash. He identified the nations of Africa, the law of averages, the use of the dative. “You are so smart,” she said.

  Diane packed the kids off to bed. “Now,” she said, “where’s that guy I rode home with on the plane?”

  How could she understand? Passion isn’t an arrangement, it’s an accident, and the guy on the plane was history.

  She wanted him to see a therapist, but Zeus knew he was going back to Olympus. He just had to talk Hera down a little.

  HE drove to the church, with Penny snuggled at his side. The town lay in a river valley, the avenues of homes extending up and over the hills like branches laden with fruit. The church stood on a hill, a red brick hangar with a weathervane for a steeple, a sanctuary done up with fake beams and mosaics, and a plump secretary with piano legs, named Tammy. She cornered him, hugged him, and fawned like a house afire. “Oh, Pastor Wes, we missed you so much! I’ve been reading your sermons over and over—they’re so spirit-filled! We’ve got to publish them in a book!” She squealed.

  “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)

  WALL: 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.

  THISBE: It’s not here anymore.

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

  THISBE: I was always thinking about it.

  PYRAMUS: I thought you were thinking about me.

  THISBE: 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.

  PYRAMUS: “And the wall . . .”

  THISBE: Example: What’s playing at the Arsenal tonight?

  PYRAMUS: “And the wall . . .”

  THISBE: Example: It’s terrible for the Turks in Kreuzberg.

  PYRAMUS: “And the wall . . .”

  THISBE: Exactly.

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

  THISBE: We won’t become normal, will we?

  PYRAMUS: Does this mean we can do whatever we want?

  THISBE: I’m starting to feel a little nostalgic. Oh, the human heart is a fickle thing.

  PYRAMUS: Thisbe!

  THISBE: 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.

  PYRAMUS: Thisbe!

  THISBE: Just a little. (Sees PYRAMUS frowning.) Smile, darling. Oh, you people are so serious!

  PYRAMUS: I’ve suffered.

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

  PYRAMUS: Let’s not quarrel.

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

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

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

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

  THISBE: 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.

  PYRAMUS: Let’s not be nostalgic.

  THISBE: But you agree there’s something to be said for it. It made us different.

  PYRAMUS: We’ll still be different.

  THISBE: 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 SPIRIT OF NEW YORK.

  SPIRIT: 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—

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

  SPIRIT: 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.

  SPIRIT OF NEW YORK vanishes.

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

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

  THISBE: Oh, let’s be hopeful. We’ll be rich. It’s only money.

  PYRAMUS: And power. I’m going to like that.

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

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

  THISBE: No one ca
n make us do what we don’t want as long as we’re together.

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

  THISBE: I want to forget these old stories.

  PYRAMUS: History is homesickness.

  THISBE: Cheer up, darling. The world is divided into Old and New. And we’ll always be on the good side. From now on.

  PYRAMUS: Goethe said—

  THISBE: Oh, not Goethe.

  PYRAMUS: You’re right.

  THISBE: In Walter Benjamin’s last—

  PYRAMUS: Not Benjamin, either!

  THISBE: 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.

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

  THISBE: What are they selling?

  PYRAMUS: Everything. Everything is for sale.

  THISBE: Do say it’s better. Please!

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

  THISBE: Then let’s go on celebrating. Have some champagne. Have a River Cola.

  They drink.

  PYRAMUS: Freedom at last.

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

  PYRAMUS: What do you take me for?

  THISBE: Sorry. It’s just that—I’m sorry. Yes, freedom.

  CURTAIN.

  1991