Sweet Jesus (16 page)

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.

F
enton’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 name, 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.

I am honoured to be here in your house of worship, he said in a gentle voice, to remember a dear friend. We were very fond of Fenton at our temple, where he was a devotee for over three years. His humour and humility was an inspiration to us whose great aim in life is to end all suffering
through enlightenment and achieve nirvana, or the deliverance of the mind.

The rabbi came over and stood with them, and the monk continued.

But the Buddha also emphasizes the importance of the present life. In Buddhism, we find all social, economic, ethical, and intellectual aspects. How similar to Judaism, I thought, with its numerous directives on how to lead a spiritual life.

The monk passed his garland of flowers to the rabbi. But the Buddha speaks not
only
of the present life, he said. There were lives before birth and there will be lives after death. This is what we call re-becoming. We do not use the word
reincarnation
. When one attains nirvana, there is no more rebirth. We saw in Fenton many qualities of the Buddha. May he reach nirvana! Or failing that, find a good home for re-becoming.

The rabbi thanked him and the monk bowed slightly, then left. Zeus watched as the door opened and the monk was subsumed into the maw of daylight, then closed again, gathering in its oak-panelled arms all the respectable darkness of the synagogue. The rabbi walked over to the bima, where he laid his wreath of fragrant flowers. Zeus suddenly wanted to talk to the monk, but when he reached the door and looked out, he was already halfway down the street. Zeus took a few steps out into the cold air, bent forward with his hands on his knees, and tried not to hyperventilate.