The Book of Guys

by Garrison Keillor

  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, not at his witty stories but at his ardor. 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 blue wicker lounge beside the pool—her caramel skin set off by two red bands of bikini, her perfect breasts, her long, tan legs with a pale-golden fuzz. Her slender hands held a book, The Concrete Shoes of Motherhood, and she read it as he spoke to her.

  “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. “I’m not interested. Beat it.”

  He lost eighteen pounds. He ran ten miles every morning and swam in the afternoon. He shaved off the mustache. She refused to look at him, but, being a god, he could read her thoughts. She was curious about this sea change in her husband, his new regimen, his amazing discipline. She hiked over the dry brown hills and he walked behind and sang songs to her:

  Lady, your shining skin will slide on mine,

  Your breasts tremble with gladness.

  Your body, naked, be clad in sweet oils,

  And rise to the temple of Aphrodite,

  Where you will live forever, no more

  Lutheran but venerated by mortals. This I pledge.

  She pretended not to hear, sweeping the horizon with her binoculars, looking for rare seabirds. Zeus thought, I should have been a swan. Definitely 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. But when it comes to lyrics, you’re no Cole Porter, pal.”

  VI. The Great Lover Tries Again

  She wouldn’t let him touch her until they got on the plane back to America and they had eaten the lasagna and watched the movie and were almost over Newfoundland. The Fasten Seat Belts signs flashed on and the pilot announced that they would be passing through a turbulent period and suddenly the plane bucked and shuddered in the boiling clouds, and Diane reached over and grabbed him as the plane tipped and plunged and rattled, and people shrieked and children cried. “If this is our time to die, then I want you to know that they were good years, they really were,” Diane said, kissing him. “I love you, Wes. I’m crazy about you.” Her kisses were hot and excited, and soon she was grabbing him and groping under his sportcoat, digging her sharp tongue into the corners of his mouth and writhing in his arms and groaning and saying his name, but Zeus was unable to respond somehow. His divine penis was as limp as an empty balloon. He tried to encourage it by thinking of smokestacks, pistols, pedestals, pole vaults, peninsulas, but nothing worked. Her hands reached for his zipper but he fought her off. “Not here, people are watching,” he muttered, and then the plane hit the concrete at Kennedy and bounced and touched down and rolled to a stop, and Diane shuddered and said, “I can’t wait to get you home, big boy.”

  In the terminal, Zeus felt so weak, he could not carry their bags through customs. They fetched the dog, who emerged from the baggage room dopey and confused and out of sorts. He bit Zeus on the hand. Zeus limped to the curb and collapsed into the back seat of a van driven by a burly man named Paul, who, Zeus gathered, was his brother. Paul and Diane sat in front, Zeus and the dog in back. “Wes is pretty jet-lagged,” Diane said, but the man yammered on and on about some football team that Zeus gathered he was supposedly interested in. “Hope you had a great time,” said Paul. 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 was gloomy all the way home.

  VII. The Husband Disappears

  When Paul pulled up to the double garage behind the green frame house and Diane climbed out, the dog squeezed out the door behind her and tore off down the street and across a playground and disappeared. “Sweetness!” she screeched.

  Paul 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 now realized, he couldn’t get out of Wes and back into Zeus. There was, however, no way to explain this to Paul.

  “You seem a little—I don’t know—distant,” said Paul.

  “Just tired,” said Zeus.

  They circled the blocks, peering into the bushes, whistling for the dog, calling his name, and then Paul 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, crying, “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 your own neighborhood—” He was a small dog, but he sobbed like a man—deep, convulsive sobs.

  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 lawyer, in a blue pin-striped suit and two transparent wings like a locust’s.

  VIII. The Lover’s Feet Held to the Fire

  Zeus tried to turn him into a kumquat, but the lawyer 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.”

  “Okay. Then see how you like these potatoes.” And Victor 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 percent!” 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.

  IX. Trapped

  For three days, Zeus was flat on his back, stunned by monogamy: what a cruel fate for a great man! The dog Mojo barked and barked at him, and Diane waited on him hand and foot, bringing him bad food and despicable wine; wretched little children hung around, onlookers at the site of a disaster, children who he had to pretend were his own. They clung to him on the couch, fighting over the choice locations, whining, weeping, pounding each other. They stank of sugar and yet he had to embrace them. 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 at them. “You are vile and disgusting. I’m sorry but it’s the truth. I’m dying. Let me die in peace. Bug off.” The older boy wept: something about a promise, a trip to see a team play a game, 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 divine 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.

  From outside came a burst of fierce barks and a brief dogfight and then yelping, and Diane tore out the door and returned a moment later with her husband, wounded, weeping, in her arms. “Oh, Sweetness, Sweetness,” she murmured, kissing him on the snout, “we’ll make it up to you somehow.”

  Later, Penny, the fat girl, asked Zeus 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. Your politicians are habitual liars and toadies, and the writers are arrogant hacks,” he said. “The country is inflamed with debt and swollen with blight and trash and sworn to flaming idiocy, and there is no civility left except among drunks and cab-drivers.”

  “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. So he did. 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.

  X. The Wife Courts the Lover While the Husband Watches

  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 Zeus was worn out. Nonetheless, he allowed himself to be undressed and helped into bed, and then Diane slowly undressed, letting her white silk slip slide to the floor, unhooking her garter belt and stripping the nylons slowly from her magnificent golden legs, unsnapping the brassiere and tossing it over her right shoulder, and stepping out of her silver panties. Then, naked, she stood a moment for his admiration, and turned and went into the bathroom.

  “Relax, she’ll be in there fifteen minutes if I know Diane,” said the dog, sitting in the doorway. “She likes to do her nails before making love, I don’t know why. Anyway, let me give you a few pointers about making love to her. She comes out of the gate pretty fast and gets excited and you think you’re onto the straightaway stretch, but you’re not—she slows down at that point, and she doesn’t mount you until you’re practically clawing at the walls.”

  “She mounts me?” asked Zeus.

  “Yes,” the dog said. “She’s always on top.”

  When Diane emerged from the bathroom, she found Zeus in the living room, fully dressed, trying to make a long-distance call to Greece. 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.

  XI. Last Chance

  The next morning, Zeus 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—how it teaches us not to confuse being with having—the Christian’s willingness to accept and nurture change…. I’ll work up an outline for you.”

  “That’s a lot of balloon juice,” said Zeus. “If I weren’t going home tomorrow, I’d give a sermon and tell them to go home and hump like bunnies.” He caught a look at himself in a long mirror: a powerful, handsome, tanned fellow in a white collar. Not bad.

  “You sure you want to leave tomorrow?” asked the dog.

  “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 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 percent faith and eighty-five percent 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.”

  “Good for them. 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.

  XII. The Lover Leaves, the Husband Returns

  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.”

  XIII. How the Husband Saw It

  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 tried to seduce her.”

  He didn’t expect the congregation to welcome this news, but he was unprepared for the
ir stony looks: they 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? Okay. 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—and they were still in Greece, the big fight was still on, 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.”

  So they did, and in the morning the boat docked at Patmos, and they went up to the monastery and walked through the narrow twisting streets of the village, looking for a restaurant someone had told them about that served great lamb.

  XIV. What the Lover Learned

  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?”