Sweet Jesus Read online

  Copyright © 2012 by Christine Pountney

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pountney, Christine, 1971-

  Sweet Jesus / Christine Pountney.

  eISBN: 978-0-7710-7124-9

  I. Title.

  PS8631.08356S84 2012 C813′.6 C2012-900967-9

  The author acknowledges the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council.

  McClelland & Stewart, a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  One Toronto Street

  Suite 300 Toronto,

  Ontario

  M5C 2V6

  www.mcclelland.com

  v3.1

  For Michael and Leo

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Acknowledgements

  1

  Zeus Ortega closed the door and leaned back against it, giving his weight over to its solidity. He wore his clown costume. With the inside of his wrist he held a warm flat pizza box propped against his hip. He shouted, Someone order an extra-large quattro formaggio?

  His boyfriend, Fenton Murch, was in the bedroom, sitting up on the waterbed, a thick fall issue of Vogue open on his lap. Look at this stunning photograph, he said, smacking the magazine with the back of his hand. The woman on the page swung around to glance over her shoulder, as if in flight, pursued through an Italian cemetery. She wore a voluminous mauve dress with a silver-grey taffeta waistband tied in a hefty bow that sat like a gargoyle on her lower back. Brown hair pinned up in a large heart-shaped chignon, teased to look like a bird’s nest. The problem with being sick, Fenton said, is it takes all the fun out of being shallow.

  Zeus put the pizza on the waterbed and Fenton flipped the box lid and yanked off a slice, considered it for a moment, then took a small bite. He licked a finger and flicked to the next page of his magazine. He hardly even looked at Zeus these days. He’d lost all of his tenderness.

  Zeus went into the bathroom, peeled off his wig, and scratched his head furiously. He looked under his fingernails – a whitish paste of dead skin. Even in the midst of life, we are in death. Tucked into the frame of the bathroom mirror were two quotes. The first was from Groucho Marx – A clown is like aspirin, only he works twice as fast. The second was Samuel Beckett – No matter, try again, fail again, fail better. Zeus reread them now and pledged his allegiance, once again, to the likelihood that no plan he made would ever come to fruition.

  He woke the next morning to the radio. Someone was conducting an interview next to his head. There had been violent protests against an upcoming gay pride parade in Jerusalem and the reporter was asking a rabbi for his opinion. This is not the homo land, the rabbi said, this is the holy land. The rabbi was taking a blithe dismissive stance in contrast to the reporter’s earnest concern. Zeus didn’t like his tone. He rolled over – as well as you can roll over in a waterbed – and brought his hand down on the alarm clock. The interview was cut short. Silence bloomed. The bedroom smouldered with dirty-grey urban daylight.

  There was comedy in the rabbi’s line, but Zeus didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. Shouldn’t a rabbi show more decorum? Or was it true, as Fenton’s father had once told him over dinner, that a line is a line is a line. Don’t fuck with the joke, Fenton. Sometimes it’s all you’ve got.

  What? Fenton had said. You think belligerence is some kind of protection?

  You prefer I should be meek? His father was piling mashed potatoes onto his plate. Don’t be such a putz. It’s balls, Fenton. That’s what you’ve got to have if you want to get anywhere in this life. You think the meek will inherit the earth? Since when did my son convert? And you’ll pardon my blunt Jewish belligerence, but do you see the Christians behaving meekly today? Hell no, dropping bombs all over the Middle East.

  So are the Jews, Fenton said.

  The meek shall inherit nothing, his father said, but their own demise.

  And so it had gone, a typical Sabbath meal at Fenton’s parents’ place.

  Thing is, thinking back to the rabbi, Zeus couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He made an irritated noise with his tongue, and Fenton – who was lying on his stomach beside him with his head sideways on the pillow – said, I know, I know, without opening his eyes. He lives in a country where his neighbours want to kill him, and he doesn’t have anything better to do than worry about a frivolous gay parade of men in leather chaps and feather boas.

  Leather chaps and yarmulkes, Zeus corrected him.

  Bare bums, but thine head shall be covered.

  You get two skull caps with every pair, and Zeus held up his hands like bear paws to imply the buttocks.

  Fenton snorted, then started to cough and rolled onto his back. Zeus leaned against him to kiss him.

  Get off me, Fenton snapped in a voice that suggested he was in some kind of pain.

  Zeus backed off. He’d never known Fenton to be so fragile. The truth was, Fenton had never been one to readily give into weakness. The idea of weakness had never impressed him, never sidled up to him or bowled him over, so it astonished Zeus to realize that weakness had snuck into his lover’s body.

  Fenton pushed the duvet down to reveal his thin, pale chest. He was slight, but his body had always been strong. He had milky white skin and cinnamon-coloured hair. He was older than Zeus by twenty years and beginning to show signs of aging, but everything about him, to Zeus, still epitomized beauty. Zeus wanted to help but he didn’t know how. Fenton had gone to see the doctor a few weeks ago and come home saying that the only thing he needed was a little more bedrest. They’d always given each other a lot of freedom, but there seemed to be other short absences recently that Zeus couldn’t account for.

  He sat up and sank deeper into the mattress. Maybe you should go see the doctor again, he said, and Fenton grunted a small, stubborn refusal into the air.

  Don’t you have to go to work or something? Fenton said, and eventually Zeus stood up. The mattress sloshed, rocking Fenton like a canoe. Zeus went over to the antique vanity with the oval mirror and sat down on the low upholstered stool that was faded and threadbare. He contemplated the pots of makeup, the wigs, the noses. A child’s black tutu that Fenton sometimes wore around his neck.

  It was Zeus who had wanted to be the sad clown – mute, naive, pining for love, the butt of jokes – with a white face and tears painted down his cheeks. He’d wanted to mime with exaggerated pathos all the suffering he understood with his prodigious talent for empathy – which more often felt like a burden than a gift. But, at the age of twenty-two, he was too good at the physical humour. He had to ham it up, be jolly, do somersaults, and trip over trolleys. He took off his sleeping shirt and began tucking his black hair under a nylon cap. Then he pulled on his wig with the rubber bald top, making its ring of smoky orange hair sway and hover around his head. Leaning towards the mirror, he painted on his elaborate dark eyebrows, like the silhouette of two birds facing each other, then the big white sausage of a grin, around which he dabbed a grey five o’clock shadow. Lastly, he applied the glue and, holding it in place for a moment, affixed his red latex nose, slightly oblong and shaped like a big toe.

  He stood up and double-checked his wig and makeup, thinking agai
n how boyish he looked for his age. He walked over to the bed in his underwear and sat down and stroked Fenton’s curly hair. For the last three years, the two of them had been working as therapeutic clowns at the children’s hospital in Chicago – for the last year or so, almost exclusively in palliative care, where their characters had begun to take on an otherworldly aspect, as if they belonged somewhere outside the normal standards of decorum and their purpose was to soften the transition between worlds by messing with the rules. You sure you can’t come to work today? Zeus felt a bit fragile himself.

  I’m working on a part, Fenton said. It’s called the invalid.

  Zeus shook his head. Too close to the bone, he said.

  That’s all I know, too close to the bone.

  And it was true. Fenton played the bleeding heart, the melancholic. He was the one who got to paint his face white and put inverted triangles under his eyes and make a fetish of his sadness. His wig also had a bald spot, but the hair was grey and he wore a loose white satin jumpsuit. The kids took one look at him and felt their lot improve. He’d curl up in a fetal position on the colourful carpet in the common room and they’d go up to him and put their tiny hands on his shoulder and intone the mantras they’d heard all their short lives. It’s gonna be okay. Don’t be sad.

  C’mon, Fenton. We still haven’t done the baby swap.

  They had worked out a routine. They would take the babies out of the parents’ hands, the babies who weren’t hooked up to IVs or life support systems, maybe even a healthy visiting sibling, and switch them around. It was a variation of the hat trick. You take one man’s hat and give it to another, take his hat and give it to a third. You take that man’s hat and give it to the first. Fenton and Zeus had wondered how it would play out. Even if it was unnerving, they found the riskier the skit, the greater the catharsis – the more release it offered by way of coming crash-bang head-on with the wretched injustice these parents faced, having brought a baby lovingly into the world only to see it succumb to some virus, heart deformity, organ failure, car wreck.

  You’ll have to settle for the country house, Fenton said. The country house was a small painted wooden house on wheels that blew bubbles out of the chimney. Zeus would pull it down the hall on a string and pretend not to notice how the kids came to their doors or sat up in their beds to watch his progress. Then he would disappear into a closet and maybe come out riding a stretcher.

  Zeus got dressed, then came back to the bed. He wore high-top sneakers, an old-fashioned black morning jacket with tails, and a pale yellow shirt with a polka-dot tie. His pants were tapered and grey, six inches too short, and patched with velvet squares of ruby and plum. Can I get you anything? he asked, bending to fill Fenton’s ear with his warm breath. I hate to see you like this.

  Fenton was silent, then he adjusted himself on the bed, and Zeus got up and poured him a glass of water from the kitchen tap, placing it on the bedside table. Then he put on his beige trench coat, tossed a red wool scarf around his neck. He felt scared for the first time.

  Outside, the world felt unknowable, incomprehensible. Zeus bought a bottle of apple juice at the corner store and headed for the train station. How do you sift through the memory of so much history to explain the moment you have arrived at? Fenton had introduced him to clowning not long after they met, five years ago, when Zeus was hanging out on the university campus. He was seventeen and working as a bike courier and used to eat lunch at the student union cafeteria. The food was cheap and he liked the boisterous atmosphere and the cozy feeling he got from infiltrating the sanctuary of a more privileged class of people. He’d get a burrito and a rice pudding, and sometimes even sit in on a class, clicking up and down the lecture hall stairs in his bike shoes and leggings, carrying his filthy canvas bag.

  One day Zeus reached for a bowl of rice pudding inside one of the cafeteria’s refrigerated glass cases and took hold of someone’s hand. It was Fenton’s hand and the last portion of rice pudding on campus and they’d both glared at each other like gunslingers, then broke out laughing. Zeus tossed a coin and lost, but then Fenton invited him to share it. Fenton must have sensed an outsider and started to vent. Can you even tolerate what these people take for granted? he said, waving his spoon at the room. Rugby and cheerleading and overpriced textbooks?

  Fenton was back at school, attempting to please his father by doing a law degree. He already had an MA in art history and been halfway around the world. They arranged to meet for lunch the next day. They sat and talked for hours. Fenton told him later he’d loved Zeus’s curiosity and determined independence, a lightness about things that seemed to cover something needy and sad. After a while, their friendship took a romantic turn.

  It would be hard, years later, to separate the birth of their romance from their initiation into the world of clowning because it was around this time that Fenton was walking through a park in Chicago’s West Town and came across a small crowd gathered to watch a short film projected on the cement wall of an old warehouse. It was black-and-white footage from the 1950s, a brief skit of two clowns, dressed like tramps, trying to share, with as much exaggerated dignity as they can muster, a bottle of vodka in the open air, under the watchful eye of a policeman. When at last the bottle is empty and all the vodka gone – after using it first to wash their hands, then gargle with and spit on the ground, to prove to the policeman that it’s just water – they still haven’t drunk a drop. In the end, all they have to share is a crust of bread. Fenton discovered later it was a clip of Yuri Nikulin, the famous Russian clown, and his partner, performing with the Moscow Circus, but at the time, he had simply been entranced. He told Zeus that nothing he’d ever seen had so thoroughly captured the struggle between pleasure and authority, or expressed the poignant and humiliating nature of life, and what could be more noble – or more representative of his own truest feelings – than to become a clown?

  The movie haunted Fenton for days. He seemed constantly distracted. Then he seemed to reach a state of contentment that was almost conceited. He stopped going to class. Zeus didn’t know where he was spending his days. What the hell’s the matter with you? he yelled.

  I’ve joined the Chi-Town Clown Academy, if you must know, Fenton said. And he knocked Zeus between the eyes with the heel of his hand. Who’s the comedian now, eh?

  Clown academy? It seemed like the most outlandish place for a man of Fenton’s temperament and background.

  That’s right, Fenton said. I’m studying to be a clown.

  You’re already a clown, Zeus said with a sneer.

  You should come with me.

  Ha ha.

  Fenton shoved his hands into his pockets. I think it’s a good fit.

  And if the shoe fits.

  The shoe will never fit! Fenton said, throwing his hands into the air. That’s the whole point. Fitting implies a level of comfort and respectability this profession will never allow, or even endorse. And I happen to be in full agreement with this line of thinking. Wear your underwear on the outside of your pants the next time you go to the corner store to get a carton of milk and you’ll see what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the soul here, Zeus! The power to transform lives, provide relief, to point out the silly path towards decency. I’m talking about being an outcast, a social critic. I’m talking about saving lives!

  Okay, okay, Zeus said. Take it easy. You’re freaking me out. Zeus chewed his lip.

  You have to come with me, Fenton had said. I know you have this in you too.

  And so Zeus had gone with him and fallen, as Fenton predicted, under the academy’s spell. He loved the crazy antics and the open expressiveness of clowning, and finding a place to belong, where loyalties were formed around common goals and common opinions, and not because of blood ties, or the lack of them. Besides, it’s where Fenton was spending his time, and Zeus wanted to be with him. As he did now. But, over the last few months, Fenton had grown so listless he seemed indifferent to everything, even to his art. He’d lost muscle
mass. His movements had become rigid and tentative. About a month ago, Zeus had seen Fenton cry on the shoulder of a bald child with a tube coming out of her nose and both arms wrapped in bandages. Her mouth had a mashed look and her eyes were too big for their sockets. They’d sat side by side on the edge of her bed, his head on her shoulder, while she held a pale hand to his white cheek. It was like being comforted in hell.

  Or maybe this had been a dream.

  It was as if only a thin membrane separated him from his subconscious these days. He’d woken up two days ago and heard himself say, Where’s the other man? Lately, his dreams had become very ordinary. One night he dreamt about sharing a doughnut with Fenton, and the next day didn’t know whether or not this had actually happened.

  The L-train was coming.

  He saw the silver square of its flat face shift slightly from one side to the other and knew that it was barrelling down the tracks. The screech of its brakes as it came into the station was an angry lament that reminded him of his own frustration. Zeus got on the train and stood by the doors. Dressed even as he was, most people didn’t seem to notice him. He was always stunned by what other people ignored. He tried to cheer himself up by pulling a pocket watch, the size of a cup saucer, out of his pants and opening it up. A small brown terrycloth dog, perched on top of a flexible wire and attached at the base to a wind-up mechanism, sprung up and flew around in circles, chasing its own tail. Zeus shrugged and closed the lid and wound it up again. He leaned away from his pocket and, holding it open, lowered the watch by its chain back into his pants. This normally got a laugh. Sometimes someone would throw a few coins at his feet and he would make a show of fawning over the money, clasping his hands together against his chest like an ardent suitor in a silent film, but never stooped to pick it up.

  Halfway to the hospital, a man got up from his seat and lumbered towards the doors. When the train stopped, he swung out onto the platform, hesitated, then swung back into the train. Zeus thought the man must be drunk, but he smelled reassuringly of aftershave. The man sat down again. His dark hair was pulled back into a short comma at the base of his skull, and he wore a gold corduroy jacket over a white shirt with a maroon tie. He removed a bottle of cologne from his pocket. A cut-glass bottle with a German label in blue and gold. He yanked off the atomizer nozzle and took a swig. Now Zeus realized the man’s hands were dirty, his fingernails cracked. His clothes were scruffy and stained. Zeus had let his sense of smell obscure his eyes. This was an observation Fenton would normally appreciate, but Zeus wondered if he’d even bother telling him when he got back home tonight. He felt a pang of something like feeling sorry for Fenton, but then he recoiled. You can’t pity a clown. As soon as you pity a clown, he’s done for.