Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  “It’s hard to say,” he says. “Depends on whether or not I can find my branding iron.”

  I laugh again.

  “I know it’s here somewhere,” he says, very serious, looking around.

  Now, I am laughing more than crying, because this is not what I expected at all. When I’m finished with everything—crying, laughing, nose-blowing—I look at him, and I don’t know what to say. I’m embarrassed—but it feels good to be embarrassed, it feels human, as if I have never felt human before.

  Dr. Blumenthal shifts in his chair. “Tell me about the suicide attempt,” he says.

  The fact is, as I am very careful to explain to him because I want to be as honest about everything as I can, I don’t really know whether I meant to kill myself or not or whether I just meant to pretend to kill myself. This is a big problem with me: I am never sure if I’m pretending to be something or if I am or if there’s a difference.

  Take my drinking, for example. For a while, I wanted everyone to think of me as this tough, cynical, hard-drinking gal who just doesn’t give a damn. So I put on a good show, drinking, puking, the whole bit whenever I get a chance. By the time of my suicide attempt, I am up to almost a fifth of scotch a day, and I still think it’s just an act to get my friends to respect and pity me.

  On the other hand, there’s sex: I have often played the hyper-experienced, seen-everything dame who has slept with more men than I care to count when really, there have only been four men in my entire life—and one was a bit of an if—excluding Arthur, and the only way I could get myself to come—even to get wet sometimes—with any of them was by thinking up elaborate fantasies like the one I described to Dr. Blumenthal.

  As for my suicide attempt, what can I say? Here I still am, of course, but on the other hand if it hadn’t been for Elizabeth, who knows?

  I did have half a fifth of Clan MacGregor in me, and I did take an entire bottle of Demerol, which is God knows how many thousands of milligrams. But when I lay back on the bed, I was anticipating how good it was going to feel to have all my friends weeping over me when they found my body in the morning, and the exclamations of gratitude that would pour forth from them when they took me to the hospital and brought me back to life.

  I do know for certain, I tell Blumenthal, that I was not expecting anyone when Elizabeth came in a few minutes later. Elizabeth Harding (of Lansky fame) is an art teacher at The School of Visual Arts. She is 33, and I would describe her as being very together. Actually, I would describe her as a goddess, my second mother—which is giving the first too much credit—my guiding light, but anyway, you get the idea. She is tall and thin and has long brown hair which is very silky and falls down her back and all these wonderful character lines on her face that make her look very kind and wise.

  She comes in, using her key and calling: “Cover him up, Sam, I left my portfolio here and I need …”

  I am trying to get out of bed but there is an anvil on my forehead. I smile at her and lie back.

  Elizabeth comes over to the bedside, looks at the bottle of Clan MacGregor and the bottle of Demerol.

  Then she says: “Shit.”

  She grabs me by the shirt collar with both hands and hauls me out of bed. She yanks me into the bathroom—I have not even got my feet under me, they are just skittering across the floor. She grabs my face in her hands, and pulls my head down over the toilet. With one hand, she squeezes my cheeks until my mouth opens, with the other, she sticks her fingers down my throat while I claw at her arms trying to stop her.

  I vomit—tons of undigested capsules and amber scotch—I vomit forever, all over the toilet, over Elizabeth, over myself. Finally, I am on my knees, retching, and there is nothing left.

  Then Elizabeth grabs me by the hair and says, “Get up,” and pulls me to my feet. I see her face is very red and her cobalt eyes are burning. I do not think I have ever seen her this angry. She slaps me in the face so hard my head snaps back, my hair flying. I put up my hands but she knocks them down and slaps me again. I am crying and groaning—I feel awful—and Elizabeth is screaming, “How dare you?” over and over again in a voice that does not even sound like hers. She cuffs me a good one on the side of the head, and then she throws me against the wall and screams, “I’m sick of you, Sam. Go to hell. Do you understand? Just go to hell.” She does not seem to know what she’s saying.

  When she is through yelling, she turns and walks right out the door, slamming it behind her. I hear her footsteps going down the stairs, and I slide down the bathroom wall to the floor, sobbing because I am all alone in the world and no one loves me.

  Finally, I grab hold of the sink and pull myself to my feet, still sniffling. I stagger into the other room, and stand there for a minute not knowing what to do next—almost as if there’s a script for this but I’ve forgotten my lines.

  Then there are footsteps on the stairs again. Elizabeth comes back through the door, and just stands in front of me, looking at me. She is crying, too, and trembling—with rage, I think. I hang my head. I am ashamed though I don’t know why she’s so mad at me. I am also afraid she will hit me again.

  She hits me again, so hard this time I just topple right over like a young dogwood I once saw blown down in a hurricane back home. I fall over on the bed and lie there sobbing. Elizabeth storms into the kitchenette and begins to make coffee.

  It is Elizabeth who gives me Dr. Blumenthal’s name, which she got from her therapist. I tell her I cannot afford therapy, but Elizabeth says Dr. Blumenthal will lower his rates to accommodate me because he is interested in the creative mind. I tell her that therapy will tamper with my muse, but she forces me to admit that death might do the same thing. I tell her that therapy will not work unless I want to go, but she says that’s too bad and this therapy will have to work because she wants me to go. I do not protest very much after that because I feel I have made a terrible mess of things, but it does take me more than a month to make an appointment with Dr. Blumenthal.

  When I leave Dr. Blumenthal’s office after that first visit, I feel as I have never felt before in my life. It is March, and the sky is blue and the air cool, and Park Avenue is a great row of brilliantly green traffic lights running down to the Helmsley Building and the Pan Am Building rising behind that and there are clouds sailing over them that seem to me like the ships of some ghostly nation migrating to a new country, a new life that will set its people’s history on a fruitful and promising course. Suddenly, I realize that I have never written a good poem, never had a fulfilling orgasm, never truly tasted the sweetness of chocolate ice cream, or seen the clouds or the buildings or the trees, or known peace—and that all this unhappiness has been unnecessary—completely unnecessary when there all along sat Dr. Blumenthal waiting to take it off my shoulders.

  I am not a fool, I know that this elation will not last, that there is all manner of work to be done, of terrors to be faced, of dragons to be slain before I ever see this golden country again. But now that I have seen it, I will keep it in my mind and remember it so I will know what I am fighting for, where I am traveling.

  I leave Park Avenue behind, and head for Third where there is a Baskin Robbins. I must have some chocolate ice cream—quick, before it melts.

  Which brings me to God and penises. After three months or so of seeing Dr. Blumenthal twice a week, I find I am thinking about penises constantly. Not thinking about them exactly, more like singing about them, dreaming about them, inhabiting the idea of them. To be honest, this has never happened to me before, even when I was a teenager. In fact, I feel like a teen-ager as I walk the streets of Manhattan, secretly staring at businessmen’s zippers, blushing, smiling. Cocks. Before, I always thought of them—I did not realize it before but—with some distaste, as if they were an exposed piece of intestine or a dangling blood vessel. Now, they appear to me like lovely, spreading oak trees, or tender stalks shooting out of the earth, only I am not thinking of trees or stalks—I am thinking about pricks. Sleek, silky, hard, pink, salty,
motile, probing—certain words, begin to make me crazy. Pink. Hard. Mushroom. The word spurt mentioned casually in conversation makes me lick my lips and go all drowsy. “Hey, Sam, let’s spurt over to the hardware store for some salty, pink mushrooms. Sam? Sam?” I begin to write odes. I have never had much use for the ode before.

  I am ceaselessly tingling, frustrated—because I am also, suddenly, very shy—but also awake to the pleasure of anticipation. Forever will I love and he be fair. I begin wearing skirts for easy access, fantasize—prowling the streets, studying the crotches—of leaving my panties at home, of bending over, lying back, opening my mouth anywhere and everywhere for the feel of the sudden thrust, thrust, the easy slide of a pink, hard, salty, mushrooming prick. What a world of pleasure it is.

  Anyway, about this time, I volunteer for the hotline. I do this on an impulse after seeing a sign in the YMCA where Lansky’s latest is being performed, but it is pretty clear to me: I am beginning to identify with Dr. Blumenthal or, at least, need to feel myself in a position of power over others as he is over me. Whatever.

  The hotline—Lifeline, it is called—is a place for people to call when they are suicidal or depressed. In a six-week training course, we are taught to listen sympathetically, not to give advice, try to draw out the painful issues—stuff I feel I have already picked up from watching Jimbo do his thing.

  I am set to work in a little cubicle in the bottom of St. Sebastian’s on West 48th Street near Tenth Avenue. My shift is Thursday from two to six and my partner is a dried out stick of a woman named Patricia who speaks through her nose. Most of the people who call are chronic—depressed, complainers. I listen and try to be friendly, though I find myself analyzing them, which we are not supposed to do. The truth is, I find it very relaxing: the only four hours in the week when I am not thinking about my own problems. I also hope it will give me some material for poetry.

  It is, I think, sometime in July when I get a call from a man with a deep, dull voice and a heavy Queens accent. I am still thinking about penises, though not as much as before, but that is what I am thinking about when he calls and says:

  “Who’s this?”

  “This is Samantha,” I say earnestly. “What’s your name?”

  “This is God,” he says. “Call me God.”

  I should say at this point that I have always considered myself a very spiritual person, although just lately I have begun to notice that the larger part of my spirituality consists in the fear that God will give me cancer if I am bad. Every time I get a stomach ache, which is frequently, I am convinced that it is a tumor, and it is then you will find me kneeling under the altarpiece of St. Thomas’ Cathedral, bargaining away my freedom of thought for a few more years of cohabitation with my uterus. I am, in short, very superstitious—knock wood—and when this caller tells me he is God I find myself entertaining the proposition that he really is. He doesn’t sound much like Him, on the one hand; on the other hand, the idea that the source of creation is located somewhere around Flushing really does explain a lot.

  “How can I help you?” I say.

  “I’m gonna kill myself,” says God.

  “Uh huh.” He says nothing. I try wit: “Some people say that God is already dead.”

  Monotone, I get: “No, but I will be if this keeps up.”

  “What seems to be the problem?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s like first you’re eternal, it’s great, you’re always creative, but you’re always destructive, too. Everything keeps changing. I want something solid, some joy, laws. So right away I’m making laws, I’m also making time, I’m getting imprisoned in the senses. It sucks.”

  To be frank, I am already bored with this: God calling up a suicide hotline is not so much a philosophical irony as it is a one-liner. As he speaks, I am casting about for ways to elicit some humanity from this poor bastard, something interesting. Suddenly, it comes to me. Of all the Lifeline volunteers, this guy has called the one person who might be able to help him. This has never happened before and I am very excited by the sense of power it gives me.

  I throw out a feeler. “I pity you,” I say.

  “That’s just it!” he says excitedly. “I pity myself, and pity divides the soul.”

  I’ve got him: he’s been reading Blake! Well, no wonder he’s gone crazy. “You feel another part of you coming out,” I say.

  Sullenly; caught: “Yeah.”

  “What you might call a feminine part.”

  A pause. “What did you say your name was?”

  I grin. “Samantha. Sam. What did you say your name was?”

  I hear him sigh. “Listen—could you just call me God for now?”

  “Sure.”

  “I gotta go, okay?” Another pause; longer. “Are you there all the time?”

  “Thursdays, two to six,” I say.

  “I’ll call back, okay?”

  “Okay, God,” I say, and he hangs up.

  I feel wonderful—I have helped someone—I have connected—someone needs me. This in itself, I tell myself grandly, is a more interesting aspect of God: the idea of two human beings connecting, interlocking, becoming a whole. It is an act of love, I keep repeating to myself: an act of love.

  I am still thinking about this when I walk into Dr. B’s the next morning: an act of love. I tell him about God which I figure is all right because, even though Lifeline is totally confidential, so is therapy, though I can’t help thinking I am becoming part of a long chain of dark secrets that will end with everybody knowing everything.

  “He was lucky you knew your Blake,” says D.B.

  “Yes—well: I’m a poet,” I say superciliously—because Doctor B is not a poet, you understand.

  His gray suit shifts in his chair. “I’ve never really understood Blake,” he says—sheepishly, as if he is confessing something.

  This just hangs there in the air for a few moments while I am feeling something inside me like one of those slow motion pictures of the underwater atomic bomb tests—something rising from the depths, mushrooming, spurting into the air. My lips begin to tremble and my eyes get moist. I have not cried since that first visit four months ago, and I do not want to now; it is one of my few bastions of pride still left standing with this man.

  “There’s something I haven’t told you,” I say, and I hate the little girl tremor in my voice.

  “Oh?”

  “Something about my fantasy—the one I told you about, about being branded. I haven’t had it in a long time. Well, not as much. I used to always have it, I hardly ever do anymore. But back when I had it, back then—it wasn’t always a man with the branding iron. It used to be.” Fuck it: I’m crying. “When I started first having the fantasy it was. But then more and more, I started thinking about a woman.…”

  I think this is disgusting enough for one session, but Blumenthal says: “Anyone in particular?”

  I shake my head. “No,” I say. Then I say, “Yes. Sometimes. Elizabeth.”

  “And when you tried to kill yourself?”

  “I knew the portfolio was there. I knew she’d left it there.”

  “You wanted her to find you.”

  “I wanted her to show—” Why is it so hard to say? “I wanted her to show that she loved me.”

  “By getting angry at you.”

  “What?” I am sobbing.

  Blumenthal shifts. “You wanted her to show that she loved you by getting angry at you.”

  I frown—I can only describe it as petulantly—at him, jutting out an accusing chin. “Are we talking about my mother?”

  “Are we?” he asks, which is exactly why people hate psychiatrists.

  I slump. “I guess we are,” I say.

  Which really does explain a lot, also, about my feelings toward Lansky, when you come to think about it, since he is living with Elizabeth now, which sort of puts him into my father’s position—wimpy, but all-knowing—and then Shithead comes along, just this ignorant, ravenous, representative of sheer Power, and the
re am I, caught between them, tongue-tied, frozen—and then, suddenly, a third choice, another way of loving: Arthur, descending with the law like Apollo before Orestes, so that I need be neither a scarred victim nor a mutant oppressor, but something else entirely: an orchid, a giant orchid blossoming out of the pines.

  Oh, I am so glad to have found Arthur!

  Two

  For money, I used to work as a reader—a story analyst, it is called—for a movie studio. What I did was read books and screenplays and then write synopses of them and say whether or not they would make a good film. This is a wonderful job for a poet, as you can make your own hours and take on as much or as little work as you need. Sometimes, though, I used to feel as if all the stories of the world were being laid at my feet—all the fantasies, the rage. Especially after I began seeing Dr. Blumenthal, I began to feel that every novel was simply an expression of someone’s twisted personality. I would read a thriller, for example, about some knife-wielding maniac butchering up women and I would know that that was something going on in the author’s mind—although it must have been going on in the audience’s minds, too, or no one would buy it. Every now and again, I would read a good book that would disprove my theory: that is, it was still about the author, but it was about everybody, too, and thinking about the author was just a way of avoiding thinking about yourself. Anyway, I can see why people like to make movies instead of writing books: you can always blame a movie on someone else.

  Reading was not exactly up there with, say, being a cop for excitement. In fact, I have never seen people work less than in the movie business. Where I worked there was a Story Editor, a whiny princess named Dorothy, and her assistant (read: secretary), a nice-enough woman named Judy, and between the two of them I don’t know how—or if—anything ever got done. Sometimes, I would come into the office to pick up my assignment and it would be like walking into a Beckett play:

  On a bare stage: two desks, a movie poster hanging on the wall. At each desk, a woman sits. One is Barrow, the other Dolmen.