Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  Barrow: I’m so bored.

  Dolmen: Should we do something?

  Barrow: Yes, let’s.

  Dolmen: What should we do?

  A pause.

  Barrow: We could go home.

  Dolmen: Yes, that’s an idea. Oh wait: is it five yet?

  Barrow: Where’s the clock? I can’t find the clock!

  Dolmen: There’s no God!

  Barrow: I’m so bored.

  In the year and a half I was with the company, not one story I recommended was ever bought by the bosses in California. Through me, these stories flowed, were transformed into synopses, and vanished into an abyss wherein echoed words like, “Too downbeat. Not cinematic. Too internal.” Odd, because I had taken the job because the real world demands you make money, even if you are a poet, and yet nothing I did ever had the slightest effect on a single other human being.

  All of which I suppose is by way of getting round to the subject of money, which is I think the world’s excrement and is, as I say, always a problem for a poet, Daughter of Eros that she is.

  I quit my job when I married Arthur. Arthur is one of the Philadelphia Clementines so even though he works for the city, he is well-to-do. I always joke that the Clementines made their fortune in gold mines, but the fact is the money is so old no one can remember where it came from and it is just attributed to some form of vague plunder which occurred back in the days when plunder was something simply everyone was doing. Now, I am Samantha Clementine, living off their riches, and about fifteen dollars a month for my poems. From plunder to poetry, that is the way of the world.

  Today, February 22nd, there is a big headline on the front page of the Times, which either means something very important has happened, or they didn’t have enough stories to fill up the page and so had to stretch one. The headline reads: “Soviets Accuse U.S. of Mining Nicaraguan Ports.” And under that: “Sec. of State Flies to Geneva.” At first, I think the Sec. of State is running away, dumping the whole mess in the lap of the President, who has already absconded to Camp David for another vacation. Wouldn’t it be funny if the whole thing fell to the White House janitor: “I got ten thousand square feet of rug to vacuum. When am I mining harbors, in my sleep?” Anyway, the Sec. is really going to meet with the Soviet Ambassador, so it is all under control and I draw the veil on their tender reunion in order to move on to this far more interesting piece: “Scientists Say Ten Percent Of The Universe Is Missing.” Now, this could be serious, although it’ll probably turn up when they clean. Without this ten percent, apparently, the universe will just keep expanding and expanding until everything turns to ashes and dies. This is too much for these scientists to bear and they are desperately inventing theories as to where this ten percent could be. With the added weight, the universe will expand to a certain point, and then come together again into a sort of primordial spaulding which will explode and start the whole process over again. This the scientists can live with, though I personally recommend short-term investments. All this just goes to prove that science is no more than the search for reassurance from the perceived world that our a priori intimations are valid. Once we understand that perceptions and intimations are one, the scientists can go home and, even as things stand, it seems to me, the Secretary of State should relax and try to get in a little skating.

  Don’t get me wrong: it’s not that I mind being a housewife. We only have a two-bedroom apartment to begin with, and a maid comes in once a week to clean. (Arthur calls her “a woman,” as if that were a job description: she is a maid, which, now I think of it, means the same thing.) In fact, it is this that worries me: there is not really that much for me to do. I write poetry every morning after Arthur goes to work, but I am done by about one, and then no matter how much I linger over the Times and my carrot salad, by two-thirty I am beginning to feel like a scientist contemplating a universe with ten percent missing. I mean, I am beginning to feel as if maybe I am not a very important person.

  Last night, Arthur comes home, and we have a conversation that brings this to light. I have seen him getting out of the cab (we live on Fifth Avenue and 81st, doncha know) and so when he comes through the door, I am draped naked over an armchair that has been in the family for centuries, with my legs spread and my open cunt just at the right level for him to make a beeline into ecstasy.

  Instead, he comes over, kisses me lightly on the pudenda, and says, “Hi, honey, I’m home. Boy, you need a shave.”

  At first, I think he is proposing something really interesting, but when this is followed by silence, I lift my head and see him standing over me, still dressed, his handsome face drawn and weary.

  “Would you like to make a drink first how about?” he says with a little apologetic smile.

  Now he is sitting on the sofa, which has been in the Clementine family for centuries, sipping a martini while I, who have been in the Clementine family for seven weeks, lie naked with my head in his lap, watching my breasts rise and fall and reflecting without rancor on the fact that it has been three full weeks now since I have consumed an alcoholic beverage of any kind.

  “What did you do today?” says Arthur, stroking the hair on my forehead.

  “I wrote a poem about that pigeon I saw in front of the museum I told you about? The one who had lost both his feet and he could fly but he couldn’t walk. I’ll bet he had a hard time landing, too, but that’s not in the poem. What did you do?”

  He heaves a heavy sigh. “Oh, we processed a couple of 15-year-olds who tossed an infant off a roof.”

  “Oh God. Why?”

  “There was nothing on TV, they said,” says Arthur. “The victim was one of the kids’ younger brothers.”

  Arthur is a little down about this, I can tell, and so after he finishes his drink, I minister to him tenderly, undressing him, sucking him, and finally sliding myself onto him until he rears up and shoots what must have been a very wicked day into my womb.

  But behind the Florence Nightingale of sex there lurks a murky phantom of discontent. Because all I can think as I slide up and down that sleek, slim, long, white pole that I call friend is: Why do I always have to make the drinks? I don’t even drink anymore. Why don’t you make your own drinks? You think you’re more important than I am because you process 15-year-old babykillers? Writing poetry about pigeons is no holiday, you know. Oily, dirty little birds.

  Perturbation reigns. This is the first time I have ever gotten pissed at Arthur.

  My mother did nothing. I don’t want to give the impression that I am one of these people who blames her mother for everything that’s wrong with me. Personality is a great mystery after all and what affects one person one way is not necessarily oh fuck it she was a bitch. Cold, beautiful, statuesque: I swear to God I never saw her lips part. She ground my father into the earth so quietly, so wittily, so subtly that he didn’t know his balls were gone until she swallowed them—until she shit them, left them floating on the surface of the toilet water just so there’d be no mistake. I am done forgiving her. I will never be done loving her, but I am done forgiving her forever.

  She sat … We lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. My father was a stock consultant and we were quite well-to-do, thank you very much, though not to say loaded. She sat, my mother did, in that colonial mansion he built for her, wrested for her from the rats scrambling all over Wall Street, she sat and she did nothing. She must have done something. She must have eaten and I can’t remember her being fed by any of the countless Consuelas, or Rosas or Floras who knelt to wash her kitchen floor for her, but when I think of her I remember her sitting, erect, motionless, enthroned like a statue of Hatshepsut on a rosewood chair. I remember her profile, the lips set, her hands moving out to play Patience, to point out some chore for Consuela or Rosa or Flora, to hit me.

  Actually, she only hit me once. I was three and had torn a page in a book—a copy of the Inferno, now I think of it, with the illustrations by Blake. I remember being fascinated with those engravings, those nude forms swi
rling in circles through the air as if torment were motion, and then the page tore and her hand shot out as if to move a red seven to a black eight and she backhanded me without a word and took the book away and lay it on the table before her, next to the cards. Later, I remember going upstairs to play with my brother’s fire truck, running a little figure up the ladder, rising with him until I slammed my head on the edge of the end table where the fire was supposed to be. I started to cry, silently, and then I ran the figure up the ladder again and slammed my head again; then I just lifted my head and slammed it. Christ.

  Later on—I mean, years later, when I was fifteen, and I came home late from school, and she knew, I don’t know how she knew, that I had done it, that Michael and I had gone to bed together though I don’t think she could have known how miserably, how painfully, how joylessly, stupidly, bloodily we had accomplished our mission with Michael following his erection as if it were a rocket tied to his groin, dragging him along with hands over his eyes and me believing, oh, I don’t know, that I had a soul, maybe, that the full, rounded breasts I had not asked for, the gaping, oozing scar between my legs, the curve of my legs, all of it, was not me somehow, when it was, it was all along, all of me, and whatever soul I had was not disconnected from it, but part of it, composed of it, so that when Michael, of the denims, the toughness, the sad, ridiculous burden of teen-aged masculinity broke the membrane finally after his knees were torn to pieces by the buttons of his mattress, when he jammed into me, was jamming into me, lying on top of me like a fallen building, pumping and gasping, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” while I tried to fight him off because I thought he was killing me and all my mother knew was that we had “done it” whatever that meant to her, whatever part of “it” meant to her that she was weakened somehow, that I had put one over on her, become part of the Big Cheat which surrounded her rosewood chair like an aura, which could only be avoided, placated, by absolute stillness, motionlessness, and here her own daughter … She said to me: “When you go to sleep tonight, I am going to come into your room with a pair of scissors and cut off all your hair.” Black jack on red queen. Hi, Mom, I’m home. What’s for dinner?

  She didn’t do it, though I didn’t sleep for a couple of nights. I suppose she was half mad by then between menopause and the smell of perfume that my father could never quite get off his clothing, poor man. Her own father had deserted her mother for another woman. Her mother had had to go to jail once—just for a night before my great-uncle bailed her out—because she refused to pay off her husband’s debts with money she considered hers. Maybe I should forgive her in the name of history, for the way history has of appearing to us like a series of photographs in a row or a movie but being really one frame, one picture that has been exposed and exposed and exposed again by a shutter that never closes.

  But verily, verily, I say unto you: My hair is auburn and cascades aver my shoulders like a river of honeyed wine. There is no other color on earth like the color of my hair.

  God is not without something to say on this subject, though what the subject is I’m not too sure. The second time he called me was about two weeks after the first so it was still summer. I picked up the phone with my usual soft, deep, earnest, caring, “Lifeline,” and he says: “Get fucked.”

  “If you are going to be abusive, I am going to have to hang up,” I say, which is what I’ve been taught to say in training.

  “This is God,” he says sheepishly, by way of explanation, and I figure, oh well, if it’s the Almighty, I’ll take a little abuse. “I just don’t want you to be too serene about this, and superior.”

  “Got it,” I say. “I’m agitated and groveling, go on.”

  “No, I mean: you are a woman. You’re supposed to like getting fucked, but it’s an insult. You shoot someone the bird, it’s an insult, but you’re supposed to like getting the bird. If you act tough, someone says, ‘You’ve got balls.’ If you act tender, no one ever says, ‘Hey, you got real breasts, lady. You’re what I call a cunt.’”

  I laugh.

  “I’m serious,” he says.

  I stop laughing.

  “No one ever compliments you by saying you’re a cunt because it’s an insult to be a cunt. It means you’ve got no balls.” He says this last so quietly, so sadly, that my heart really does go out to God, and I wish I could reach out and stroke his hair.

  “Well,” I say, “it’s an insult to be a prick, too.”

  “You shouldn’t curse,” says God. “You’re a lady.”

  He’s right: I’d forgotten for a moment that I’m dealing with a psychotic.

  “Anyway, that’s why I’ve gotta kill myself,” he says. “To create Death again, to bring Death back into the world.”

  I’m not entirely sure I get the connection but, on reflection, I am entirely sure I don’t know what he’s talking about, so I try to move us back to what I think is the subject.

  “What you’re saying is that out of your great power, your almightiness, something else is emerging. Something, in fact, you had to become almighty to suppress: something tender, that makes you afraid you’re losing your ba—manhood.” Before I catch myself, I nearly shift in my chair.

  “And don’t tell me about the feminists!” God shouts.

  “Oh no. As far as I’m concerned you should never have created those feminists,” I say. “And gnats.”

  “They’ve just accepted the whole thing, just like they always did only now they figure if it’s better to be a man, they will be—or ca-ca-ca-castrate the men, one or the other. I mean, who says it’s better to be a businessman than a mother?”

  “Not me.”

  “Who says it’s better to wear a suit than a dress?”

  “Not me.”

  “What do businessmen do that’s so important, anyway?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  “So now don’t you see why I have to create Death?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” I say without thinking. “Why don’t you just create Love instead?”

  And he begins screaming: “Love is Death, that’s what I’m saying! Don’t you understand anything, you stupid cunt?”

  I have no answer. I wait in silence. Then, I hear something, a stuttering, a squeaking on the other end. God is crying.

  “I’m so unhappy,” he says. “I’m so unhappy.”

  “I know,” I say into the phone. “But it’s all right, now. I’m here. I’m here.”

  After a while, the sound begins to subside. “I think I have to go,” he says.

  “Will you call back if you need to?”

  “Yes.” I wait. He is still there. He sniffles. “You know,” he says. “You really are a cunt.”

  I smile. “Thank you,” I say.

  And he’s gone.

  There’s something to be said, I guess, for God’s theory, except I have a theory about theories, which is: theories are like a horse that can’t swim: it will carry you to the River of Enlightenment, but it can’t get you across. That takes experience: satori: a kick in the eye. Which is why we have art. And meditation. And psychotherapy. We already know how to spell the word “fist,” what we are looking for is a good punch in the mouth.

  Just lately, to be honest, I have been regaling Dr. Blumenthal with nothing but theories: ideas, intellectualizations, thoughts, ponderings, little things I’ve noticed in my perambulations. Anything but life. This gives me a sense of power. I have a fantasy that slowly, almost without his knowing it, my subconscious is taking him over, growing up inside him like some sort of inflatable Blumenthal that will eventually break through his skin and replace the Blumenthal of the moment. Already, I notice, he is making little Clementinian slips: small things: he forgot to send me a bill one month, and once, when I told him a particularly terrible nightmare I had about being trapped in a roomful of mice, he said: “And so this really scared me—you.”

  This, of course, is only to be expected. I am a poet, after all: my subconscious is everybody’s problem.

  This
morning, the day after I got annoyed at Arthur, I am explaining to Blumenthal my theory about theories, called to the surface by my memory of God, called up in turn by my annoyance with Arthur, neither of which I have bothered to mention, they being secondary to my T of T’s.

  “This,” I explain, “is why I am trying to create a poetry of pure description, of objects, because these are the things that make up life and we never see them, not really. I have been living in Arthur’s apartment going on three months now, and how often does it come to life for me, does it become real? How often do I really see the scroll of the mahogany legs of the sofa, the way the shag looks far away through the glass coffee table, even the Degas ballerina or the handmade colonial quilt on the bed. I mean, I make it every morning, but …”

  “He has a Degas?” says Blumenthal, proving my point because that’s exactly what I said when I first saw it.

  “Yes,” I say, “it’s a …”

  “A genuine Degas? A real one?”

  “Well, it’s just a small one. His mother gave it to him when he graduated law school.”

  “Wow,” says Blumenthal. “A real Degas, huh?”

  Now, I am getting annoyed, but I manage to say with perfect calm: “Are you trying to tell me something?”

  “Yes,” says Blumenthal. He shifts in his chair. “I wish I had a Degas.”

  “Well, then you make his lousy drinks.”

  At which point, the session comes to an end.

  Two weeks after I moved in with Arthur, I was invited to a party given by Jake Langley. Jake is a somewhat famous poet which, basically, means that his obscurity has limits, that it does not, in effect, threaten to collapse upon itself from its own density like a dead star. Jake lives in Westchester where he teaches, so Lansky, Elizabeth, Arthur and I all drove up in Arthur’s car.

  It was a dark and stormy night. Ice was streaking out of the black sky like falling daggers, and twice Elizabeth had to wrestle Lansky to the floor to keep him from offering Arthur money to get him to pull over. The last stretch was the worst because Jake lives in a cottage at the end of a dirt road, basically in the middle of the woods. When the lights of the cottage appeared to us through the gloom, Lansky made a sound like a cross between a church choir singing “Gloria in excelsis” and a mongrel dog baying at the moon.