Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  “Everything that’s good and beautiful, you destroy. Nothing is safe. Whatever’s golden, you turn to shit.”

  Arthur has fished the chip out of the soapy water and is holding it out to me as an offering.

  “What am I supposed to do with that?” I screech.

  He looks at it quizzically, gets my point. I drive it home.

  “It’s a chip! A chip! It’s just a chip, no more than that,” I say. I hurl the mug at him—clumsily because my fingers get stuck in the handle. He catches it. “Go ahead—there may still be some beauty in it—why don’t you shatter it? Shatter it!” And, crying, I rush into the bedroom.

  Arthur follows me, saying, “Sam!” He sits beside me on the bed, leans over me. I am rigid as a board, staring up at him.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “I bought that with the money from my poem,” I say.

  “I know, I understand,” he says, despairingly, helplessly.

  I love him so much, this man. “I want to go to bed and hurt you,” I say.

  Arthur’s eyes shift to one side, but he nods. We are naked in a moment and I am on him, pummeling him, slapping and pinching him. I spank him as hard as I can, shocked by the loud cracks but I can’t stop: I need to see his ass turn red. Finally, I climb on top of him, dip my fingers in my cunt to lubricate them and shove them up his ass, first one, then two, then three. I pump into him while he grunts. I reach around and grab his erection and squeeze it, hissing, “Look, you like it. You’re a whore, you’re a slut, you’re a cunt. You love it. Take it.” I am planning, as I say, to catch his scum in my hand and then jam my fingers in his mouth, but I come before he does, and when he does, I am spent and wasted; I do not want to do it anymore.

  Arthur rolls over on his back with a sigh. He stares at the ceiling. I think he is shocked—because he liked it, because I have shown myself to him and I am ugly—I don’t know and I don’t want to think about it. I am too happy. I feel giddy and thrilled.

  He glances at me where I lay grinning.

  “Does this mean I don’t have to buy you a new mug?” he asks.

  I laugh. “Go to sleep, love,” I say.

  Assholes. I wake up the next morning thinking about assholes: shit and assholes. Assholes and shit. I am depressed. I am ashamed when I wake up. No, it is not shame: it is panic. I am afraid. Something bad is going to happen to me today, I can feel it. With sudden terror I realize that I have a shrink appointment today. I run to the calendar—Animals of the Bronx Zoo; Hippos for March—I do not have a shrink appointment, Blumenthal’s away: I have till Friday.

  I think of assholes. Assholes and shit. Arthur’s asshole—a pink-brown bud as he lay under me with his hips raised by a pillow and his legs spread: he looked like a great, docile cow. This thought makes me horny. I want to fuck him again when he comes home—he has left for work early to deal with the crisis. Then I remember: I can’t: shrink on Friday. I don’t have to talk about it, I think. It’s my money: I can say whatever I want. But I’m not horny anymore.

  I sit down to write, but the minute I open my pad, my belly bloats and I rush into the bathroom and have diarrhea. Shit and assholes, assholes and shit.

  I go out for a walk. It is very cold and the wind is blustery and makes my cheeks sting.

  I find myself thinking of God. God has not called for a while, I realize: almost two weeks. And for two weeks before that, I have got nothing from him but more Blakian craziness. I’d thought we were beginning to get past that.

  About a month after he first started calling me—I remember it was August because Blumenthal was away and I had walked to St. Sebastian’s looking up at the sky to see him and the other psychiatrists flying in a wedge-formation for the Hamptons—we had something of a breakthrough, God and I.

  I am listening to him rattle on about this and that and frankly I am having a hard time keeping my eyes open. Working on the hotline has given me a certain sympathy for Bloomie who has also on occassion had to fight to stay awake while I talked. Still, I am glad God can’t see over the phone because this never fails to hurt my feelings.

  God is chatting away gaily: “Moving grim over the plains of Orfalon, I witness Oouoh—” (The female principle, I gather) “—birthing from her mouth a snake wearing a mitre which coils around the calves of Marcodel, and enters his nether regions to snare his soul.”

  “Painful,” I say.

  “You’re telling me,” says God. “His soul comes rushing from his belly in torrents and he builds a church with barred windows.”

  You have to hand it to Marcodel: he is nothing if not resourceful.

  Even as I doze, I am searching through my mind, riffling the pages of remembered Blake for something that will unravel this and lead us back to the personal. Ever since his “I’m so unhappy” outburst weeks before, he has been up there in the unreachable ether.

  “Marcodel must be pretty ticked off about you creating Oouoh,” I say.

  And suddenly, we come down to earth with a sickening thud.

  “Yes, he has transformed his body into the weapon and will bring Death back into the world. Of his eyes he makes the sight, and of his mighty thighs the stock. His arms are the barrel, and his organ he has placed into the chamber of his heart …”

  I am awake. I sit up so fast my reclining chair snaps up late and slugs me in the back. I gasp and dried-up Patricia gives me a wintry smile—her only kind—from the desk across the room.

  “Marcodel’s become a high-powered rifle,” I say. To be honest, I don’t know what a high-powered rifle is, but I have never heard of a low-powered rifle so it’s my best guess.

  God goes right on: “Yes, and Oouoh laughs, her teeth silver, glinting …”

  “God,” I say, “where is Marcodel now?”

  “In the closet, where would he be? And her silver—her teeth—where was I?”

  My mind, as they say, is racing: an apt metaphor: I can feel it rushing over an empty expanse, searching for an idea that will stop him before he goes on again and I lose him for the rest of the call.

  “And Oouoh, where’s she?” I say desperately.

  He’s annoyed: “On the plains of Orfalon, I told you.”

  “Specifically.”

  “Well, you remember after she became a shadow, she sprang from my nostrils …”

  “Um, I forget,” I say. “Tell me about when she became a shadow.”

  He clears his throat to get his God voice back. “A black spot appearing on her gall-bladder began to grow from my rage into a shadow that engulfed her white skin …”

  I am thinking: Oh Christ, a rifle. “I don’t know, God, old friend,” I say, stalling for time. “That must have been some rage. To give her cancer, I mean.”

  There is a silence. I feel as if I have hooked into a running marlin and am now water-skiing over the waves behind him.

  “Well, she shouldn’t have done that,” God whines. “I mean, do you think she should have hurt me?”

  I clear my throat to get my concerned voice back. “No,” I say. “She shouldn’t have hurt you, God. What did she do, exactly?”

  “Why are you always bothering me, Samantha? Why are you always bothering me?”

  I sigh. “Because I don’t want to read in the papers that you put Marcodel in your mouth and fired his cock into your brain.”

  “I can’t,” he cries—it is a sound of heartbreaking anguish. “I can’t trust you.”

  “Trust me,” I say.

  “Do you think she should have hurt me?”

  “No.”

  I listen to the sound of his breathing.

  “I have to go now,” he says.

  “Don’t. Don’t go.” More breathing: he is about to hang up. Trying to attach myself to the sound of my voice, trying to fling myself with my voice over the wires to him, I whisper: “She’s dead, God. It’s over.”

  “It’s not,” he whispers in answer. “She came back.”

  He hangs up.

  On the morning after t
he mug, I do not want to think about what happened next. So I run the conversation over in my mind, and I head downtown toward Elizabeth’s.

  “Was Christ gay?” I say when I come through the door of the Lansky-Harding apartment.

  Lansky, I am happy to find, is just on his way out to a rehearsal. He kisses me on the cheek and says, “Sure. That’s why when Pilate saw him, he said, ‘Eck! A homo!’”

  He goes out, and I am left there with my question unanswered: Elizabeth, in her smock and holding a paintbrush in her hand, is on the phone with her mother.

  I stand around with my hands in my coat pocket. I wander around her easel and study the work in progress: a still life—the flowers and Lansky’s pipe are posing on the table by the window. It isn’t bad but I am feeling critical, and thinking that Elizabeth is right when she says she was born to teach great painters not to be one. I’ve never seen her teach, but I bet she’s good.

  When she hangs up, she says, “Jeeze, it’s ten degrees in Topeka, Allie says.” Elizabeth is from Kansas.

  “That must hurt the crops or whatever they do there,” I say, a bit sullenly. “I know here the Broadway shows are withering on the vine. Actors falling to the ground—they can’t harvest them fast enough.”

  Elizabeth smiles and goes into the kitchen to make us coffee.

  “Do you think Christ was gay?” I call after her.

  “Well, those velour shirts were sort of suspicious, but who can tell these days,” she calls back.

  I follow her. “I mean all that passivity. Turn the other cheek. What if someone slaps your wife or your kid, then whatta you do?”

  Elizabeth shrugs. “What’s the difference? He got his.”

  I walk over to the sofa and flop down on my back. “Jews are weird,” I say under my breath but loud enough for her to hear.

  Elizabeth glances at me, smiling as if she knows I have come over to start a fight but her boundless patience is going to outlast me.

  “I mean, all they ever think about is shit,” I say.

  “I know,” says Elizabeth. “Who can forget Freud pounding on the bathroom door, shouting to Einstein, ‘Comink out, Al?’” This, she explains, is a joke with Lansky. I sniff, as if to say: So now he’s got you doing it.

  Undaunted, though, I press on: “I mean it. Did you ever consider shit, real shit, the true meaning of shit?”

  Elizabeth sighs over the patter of dripping coffee.

  “I mean, when you think about it: shit is entropy,” I say. “And entropy is time, the difference between past and present. And time is death. Shit is the token of our death. So are children.”

  “Children are shit?”

  “Well, it’s all confused in our minds.”

  She laughs. “I’m thinking of a mother throwing out the baby and taking the diaper to the park.”

  I am in no way deterred. “We deny shit, we transform our fascination with it. We say that shit parts from the body as the body parts from the soul.”

  “I never say that.”

  “We invent the soul, we deny flesh with the illusion of pure intellect, and then we disguise our shit as gold—we spend our lives fondling useless things: like money, say. Our eyes to heaven and our hands in shit.” I sit up on the couch as Elizabeth brings in the mugs. She sits in the chair opposite me and lights a cigarette.

  “You’re too deep for me, Sam,” she says.

  “Well, look at the Jews,” I say, ignoring the pink that is rising to her cheeks, or, that is, wanting to reach out and touch that pink but ignoring it instead. “What are they good at? Intellect. They’re all so brainy. They practically invented the soul in the west. And money—disguised shit. On top of which, they all have stomach aches half the time, which proves my point.”

  Behind the tendrils of smoke floating by, Elizabeth’s eyes have taken on the consistency of diamonds, and I make a resolution not to say what I was going to say next.

  And then I say it—casually—my mug to my lips. “Isn’t that a perfect description of Lansky?”

  It’s an exciting moment, vibrating, dangerous. And then I see Elizabeth’s face and body relax: it is like watching lush waves of beryl sea o’ertop a rock wall. She sighs and shakes her head, as much as to say: Poor Sam.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Lansky, as far as I can tell, is not the Jews. Lansky is Lansky. And Lansky I love.” This last she says with an apologetic gesture of the hand.

  I lie down on the couch again, holding the warm mug on my stomach. “I’m depressed,” I say.

  “Tell me all, old girl.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe Arthur trusts me too much. Maybe he’s too … I don’t know.”

  “Passive?”

  “I think he believes that, ultimately, everything I do will lead to beauty.” I do not look but I sense Elizabeth is smiling. “I even asked Dr. Blumenthal if he thought I’d made a mistake getting married.”

  “What did he say?”

  And then we both answer in unison: “Do you think you made a mistake?”

  I laugh. I look at her. She is smiling. “Are you really in love with the Lansk?” I ask.

  “Yup. Actually, I shouldn’t be flip: I have given the question a good deal of thought.”

  “And the answer was?”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you going to marry him?”

  “He hasn’t asked me,” she says—coyly, I think. “I think he worries that when the critics pull up in their black Roadster and spray the street with tommy gun fire, I’ll be hit accidentally.”

  I am thoughtful, watching the steam rise from the mug on my stomach. Elizabeth leans forward in her chair. “Samantha,” she says, “when God in this bowling alley bowled the sun, He made Arthur for you and you for Arthur. I’m sure of it. Trust me.”

  I moan. “Will you be my therapist?” I say.

  “Frankly,” says Elizabeth, sitting back with her hand on her middle. “I don’t think I could stand the cramps.”

  And so, when I have finished telling Dr. MacShrink all there is to know about broken mugs and Arthur’s asshole, and how I became the great and powerful Wizard of Shit, he shifts in his chair with his eyebrows lifting into the mulch of his forehead beneath the lock of gray-yellow hair and he says:

  “So what’s the meaning of life?”

  I stutter a lot because right now in the therapeutic process I am about twelve years old and find it very difficult to express myself. But basically, I say: “I got money for my poem, and I bought the mug, and Arthur broke it. I produced something—I made something—and he didn’t—give me—anything—what I wanted—”

  “Does that bring up any memories?” Thus D.B.

  “Absolutely not,” I say. He smiles. I say: “I wrote my first poem when I was twelve years old. It was called ‘Ode …’ No, I’m too embarrassed. ‘Ode On A China Vase.’ But—” I add in my defense. “It did have the line, ‘A dragon in a web of old injuries,’ which isn’t bad for twelve.” He does not react, so I give it up and continue. “Anyway, it was summer, and I didn’t go to camp that year, and my brother had a job and I didn’t, and I guess my Dad was annoyed with me for hanging around the house all day. So when I showed it to him, he looked it over, and he said, he said: ‘That’s nice, now why don’t you go get a job? People won’t pay for stuff like this,’ he said, too, I think.” My eyes fill with tears, but I do not really feel like crying so much as I feel heavy, pregnant with melancholy, with mourning I guess is the word. “He shouldn’t have said that, I don’t think,” I say. “It wouldn’t have killed him to say something nice. I mean, it’s no big deal, really, it was just—it hurt my feelings. I cried for three hours, off and on.” And suddenly I look at B. and say: “You know, he liked me when I was little. He really did. We were very close. It just—” The tears spill over. “It just wasn’t long enough. It just wasn’t long enough by half.” I shake my head. I am frowning. Frowning is not something one often does, but there it is. “He shouldn’t have said that. It hurt me. He didn’t h
ave the right. I mean, do you think he should have hurt me?”

  Blumenthal shifts in his chair. “No,” he says. “He shouldn’t have hurt you.”

  Which is why, if there is one thing in the world I love, it is Doctor Blumenthal.

  Leave Dr. B’s. Park Avenue. Suddenly, March seems the season of mourning. Not a bad feeling, really; better, I guess, than the alternative: playing it out over and over again, new actors in the same old roles; two, five, twelve years old forever. For a moment, I think: that’s what most people do. Then I ditch that with an effort. Life is not an argument with someone else. I am sad.

  Home. The newspaper. It’s almost Arthur time, and I haven’t read it yet. I take it into the bedroom and we lie down together. Plane crash: 64 dead, but they are all Mexicans, therefore I am immortal. Sir William Stokes, the actor, has also died at 81. I read his obit word for word and I am convinced by the end that he was the greatest actor who ever lived and that he would have liked me very much had we met and I would now be a great comfort to his mourning widow and be surprised to find that along with his children I was apportioned a small piece of the inheritance. Did his father encourage him? The paper does not say. Is that a prerequisite for greatness? Have I been ruined by a harsh remark—a whole attitude, truth be told, of envy, competition and hostility; unkindness? Am I really Clementine: drowning as my father digs into the great, golden asshole? The paper makes no mention of this, either. Newspapers, I decide, are shallow. One Brahman in the mountains of Tibet may be changing the universe with a single revelatory flash and what’s the lead story today? “U.S. Threatens To Blockade Nicaragua. Communist Arms Must Stop, President Says.” I do not read this article because the truth is I am completely confused by who the good guys and bad guys are, and it really does seem to me there is no hope for anything unless the veil of perception is ripped away, our whole attitude turned inside out, our cities, our armies, suddenly useless, dismantled, all of us wondering, “What did we build them for? I can’t remember.” Death is the founding father of civilization as it stands and so why read about one blockade or another when here my beloved Sir Billy is gone forever—how we laughed during the filming of “Christmas In Hartfordshire”! I will always cherish his memory.