“I realize you’re omniscient, but let me say what’s on my mind,” he said. “Enough with the mounting and coupling. Keep it in your pants. What are you trying to prove? You’re a god, for Pete’s sake. Be a little divine for a change. Knock it off with the fornication, O.K.?”
“You want to see a magic trick?” said Zeus. And right there at the table he turned the young lawyer into a pitcher of vinaigrette dressing and poured him over the spinach salad and told the waiter, “Take this garbage away, Dimitri, and feed it to the pigs. And bring me a beautiful young woman, passionate but compliant, with small, ripe breasts.” It was his usual way of dealing with opposition: senseless violence followed by easy sex.
Hera was swimming laps in the pool at her summer house when she got the tragic news from Victor, Alan’s partner. She was hardly surprised; Alan was her six-hundredth lawyer in fourteen centuries. She climbed out of the water, her great alabaster rump rising like Antarctica, and wrapped herself in a vast white towel. “Some god!” she said. “Omniscient except when it comes to himself.” She had thought she understood Zeus’ fascination with mortal women until the day he tried to explain it to her. “The spirit of love is the cosmic teacher who brings gods and mortals together, lighting the path of beauty, which is both mortal and godly, from one generation to the next,” he offered. “One makes love so that people in years to come can feel passion at the sight of flowers.”
She said, “You’re not that drunk—don’t be that stupid.”
When Victor told her that Alan was gone, eaten by pigs, she vowed to avenge him, but the next day she was in Thebes, being adored, when Diane sailed into the harbor at Rhodes aboard the S.S. Bethel with her husband, Pastor Wes. Zeus, who was drinking coffee in a dockside café with the passionate, compliant woman and was a little bored with her breasts, which now seemed slightly too small and perhaps a touch overripe, saw Diane overhead as the Bethel tied up, and he felt the old, familiar itch in the groin—except sharper. He arose. Her strawberry-blond hair and great tan made his heart come over the top of the Ferris wheel. She stood at the rail, in a bright-red windbreaker, furious at the chubby man in the yellow pants who was laying his big arm on her shoulder—her hubby of sixteen years. She turned, and the arm fell off her. Zeus paid the check and headed for the gangplank.
Wes and Diane were on the final leg of a two-week cruise that the grateful congregation of Zion Lutheran Church in Odense, Pennsylvania, had given them in tribute to Wes’s ten years of ministry, and last night, over a rack of lamb and a 1949 Bordeaux that cost enough to feed fifty Ugandan children for a week, they had talked about their good life back in Odense, their three wonderful children, their good health and good luck, their kind fellow-Lutherans, and had somehow got onto the subject of divine grace, and that led into a discussion of pretentious clergy Diane had known, and that led to a twelve-foot dropoff into the wild rapids of a bitter argument about their marriage. They leaned across the baklava, quietly yelling things like “How can you say that?” and “I always knew you felt that way!” until the diners nearby were studying the ceiling for hairline cracks. In the morning, Diane announced that she wanted a separation. Now Wes gestured at the blue sea, the white houses, the fishing boats. “This is the dream trip of a lifetime,” he said. “We can’t come all this way to Greece just to break up. We could have done that at home. Why are you so angry?” And then the god entered his body.
It took three convulsive seconds for Zeus to become Wes; it felt to the fifty-year-old minister like a fatal heart attack. Oh, shit! he thought. Death. And he had quit smoking three years before! All that self-denial and hard work—and for what? For zip. He was going to fall down dead anyway. Tears filled his eyes. Then Zeus took over, and the soul of Wes dropped into an old dog named Spiros, who lived on the docks and suffered from a bad hernia.
The transformation shook Zeus up, too. He grabbed at the rail and nearly fainted; in the last hour, Wes had consumed a shovelful of bacon and fried eggs and many cups of dreadful coffee. The god was nauseated, but he touched the woman’s porcelain wrist.
“What?” she said.
The god coughed. He tried to focus Wes’s watery blue eyes. “O Lady whose beauty lights the darkening western skies, your white face flashes when I close my eyes.”
She sighed and looked down at the concrete dock. The god swallowed. He wanted to talk beautifully, but English sounded raspy, dull; it tasted like a cheap cigar.
“A face of such reflection as if carved in stone, and such beauty as only in great paintings shone. O Lady of light, fly no higher, but come into my bed and know eternal fire.”
“Where’d you get that? Off a calendar? Be real,” she said.
The dumb mustache, the poofy hair, the brass medallion, the collapsed chest, the wobbly gut, the big lunkers of blubber on his hips, the balloon butt. The arms were weak, the legs shaky. The brain seemed corroded, stuffed with useless, sad, remorseful thoughts. He wished he could change to somebody trim and taut, an athlete, but he could feel the cold, wiggly flesh glued on him and he knew that Hera had caught him in the naked moment of metamorphosis and with a well-aimed curse had locked him tight inside the flabby body, this clown sack. A god of grandeur and gallantry living in a dump, wearing a mask of pork.
Just below, the dog sat on his haunches—a professional theologian covered with filthy, matted fur, and with his breakfast, the rancid hindquarters of a rat, dangling from his mouth.
“Look. That poor old dog on the dock,” said Diane.
“When you open your thighs, the soft clanging of bells is heard across the valley, O daughter of Harrisburg. Come, glorious woman, and let us waken the day with the music of your clamorous thighs.”
“Grow up,” she advised.
His innards rumbled, and a bubble of gas shifted in his belly—a fart as big as a child. He clamped his bowels around it and faced her and spoke: “Dear, dear Lady, O Sweetness—the cheerful face of amiable passion in a cold; dry place. To you I offer a thousand tears and lies, an earnest heart longing for the paradise that awaits us in a bed not far away, I trust. Look at me, Lady, or else I turn to dust.” His best effort. But the language was so flat, and the pastoral voice so clunky and ponderous.
“I could swear that dog is human,” she cried.
“Thank you, Diane,” said the dog. “I don’t know how I became schizophrenic, but I do know I’ve never loved you more.” This came from his mouth as a whine, and then he felt the rubber boot of a vicious dockhand kick him in the middle of the hernia. The woman rushed down the gangplank and knelt and picked him up and cradled him in her arms. She crooned, “Oh, honey, precious, baby, sweetness, Mama gonna be so good to you, little darling.” She had never said this to him before. He felt small and cozy in her arms.
THE dog, the woman, and the god rode a bus three miles over the mountain to the Sheraton Rhodes, the woman holding the dog’s head on her lap. She’d leave Wes and go back to school for her degree in women’s studies—the simple life of the student, a tonic after all these years of ordinary lying. The god vowed to fast until she surrendered to him. The dog felt no pain. He planned to find a pack of Luckies and learn how to smoke again.
The hotel room had twin beds and looked out on a village of stucco houses with small gardens of tomato plants and beans, where chickens strolled among the vines. Brown goats roamed across the brown hills, their bells clanging softly. Diane undressed in the bathroom, and slid into bed sideways, and lay facing the wall. Zeus sat on the edge of her bed and lightly traced with his finger the neckline of her white negligee. She shrugged. The dog lay at her feet, listening. Zeus was confused, trying to steer his passion through the narrow, twisting mind of Wes. All he wanted was to make love enthusiastically for hours, but dismal Lutheran thoughts sprang up: Go to sleep. Stop making a fool of yourself. You’re a grown man. Settle down. Don’t be ridiculous. Who do you think you are?
Zeus pulled in his gut and spoke. “Lady, your quiet demeanor mocks the turmoil in my chest, the rage, the foam, the wind blasting love’s light ships aground. Surely you see this, Lady, unless you are the cruellest of your race. Surely you hear my heart pound with mounting waves upon your long, passive shore. Miles from your coast, you sit in a placid town, feeling faint reverberations from beneath the floor. It is your lover the sea, who can never rest until you come down to him.”
“I don’t know who you’re trying to impress, me or yourself,” she said. Soon she was snoring.
“This is not such a bad deal,” said the dog. “For me, this is turning out to be a very positive experience on the whole. Becoming a dog was never my first choice, but now that I am one I see that, as a man, my sense of self was tied up with being an oppressor. I got separated from my beingness, my creaturehood. It is so liberating to see things from down here at floor level. You learn a lot about man’s relentlessness.”
They spent two sunny days at the Sheraton, during which Zeus worked to seduce Diane and she treated him like a husband. She laughed at him. The lines that had worked for him in the past (”Sex is a token of a deeper friendship, an affirmation of mutual humanity, an extension of conversation”) made her roll her eyes and snort. She lay on a wicker lounge beside the pool—her taffy-colored skin in the two red bands of bikini, her perfect breasts, her long, tan legs with a pale golden fuzz. Her slender hands held a book called “The Concrete Shoes of Motherhood.”
“Let’s take a shower. They have a sauna. Let me give you a backrub. Let’s lie down and take a nap,” he said.
“Cheese it,” she said. “Amscray. Make tracks. Get smaller.”
Zeus could hear his fellow-gods hooting and cackling up on Olympus. (The Father of Heaven! Shot Down! Given the Heave-Ho! By a Housewife!) He lost eighteen pounds. He ran twenty-one miles every morning. He shaved off the mustache. She refused to look at him, but, being a god, he could read her thoughts. She was interested. She hiked over the dry brown hills and he walked behind and sang songs to her:
She pretended not to hear, sweeping the horizon with her binoculars, looking for rare seabirds. Zeus thought, I should have been a swan. The dog trotted along, his hernia cured by love. She had named him Sweetness. “You go ahead and use my body as long as you like,” he said to Zeus. “You’re doing wonders for it. I never looked so good until you became me. No kidding.”
They didn’t make love until they got on the plane and were almost to America. They hit turbulence over Newfoundland. The plane bucked in the boiling black clouds, the seat-belt light flashed on, they tipped and plunged and rattled, people shrieked. “We’re going to die,” Diane said. “I love you. Let’s take our laps around the track, big boy.” So they undressed under the thin blankets, unfastened their seat belts, and made steady and joyous love, two travellers across life’s tumultuous sky joined in life’s great mutual gift, until, just as the plane hit the concrete at Kennedy and bounced and touched down and rolled to a stop, Diane shuddered and moaned and raked his back with her nails. She said nothing. She was clearly moved. Not until they were in the terminal and had got their bags and passed customs and come through the crowd did she whisper to him, “That was so nice I could do it again, I bet.”
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 lemur-like 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. Your 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 this 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 a 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.
♦
Published in the print edition of the October 29, 1990, issue. As part of an effort to make The New Yorker’s archive more accessible to readers, this story was digitized by an automated process and may contain transcription errors via The New Yorker, Zeus the Lutheran.