Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  It wasn’t long after that, come to think of it, that Arthur broke my goddamned mug.

  Arthur is explaining his feelings on the international situation to Jones and his wife Sheila, and me, too. We are in the Wicked Wolf, one of my favorite restaurants in Yorkville, and I am having the duck. Jones’ thin, very black face, is hanging heavily on Arthur’s words; nodding, serious. Sheila and I are eating daintily and silently—but I, at least, am listening, pleased with myself because I have read the paper today—May 21st—and know that the Cubans are about to send supply ships to Nicaragua as a challenge to the embargo. I also know that some women have real problems with excess facial hair, but no one is talking about this.

  “Look, I don’t want empire-building anymore than you do,” says Arthur, “and you know how I feel about this president. But the world just isn’t the same as it was before World War II, and isolationism—even pacifism—are not viable options. The Russians are bad people, Jones, and they’re not fucking around.”

  Jones nods, once, like Zeus. “I agree.” A baritone: it is as if one of the heads of Mt. Rushmore spoke. Jones is a turnon.

  “So I don’t see how we can reasonably cede countries in our own hemisphere without damaging the balance of power beyond repair. And I don’t think it’s that big a risk either. No one is going to start hurling nukes over Nicaragua.”

  Jones rears, considers, then pronounces. “They are another country. They have the right to make their own decisions.”

  “But who makes them?” says Arthur, excited. “Government, rebels? And if one side is supplied with Russian guns, what about the other? If they’re not supplied, too, it’s the Soviets calling the shots.”

  Jones considers again, but says nothing. Sheila looks up from her chef’s salad. Sheila is a beautiful woman who looks African and wise and wears dresses with lots of hot, dark flowers printed on them so she looks like a tribal queen.

  “I think,” she says softly. “I think this is the end of the world.”

  “Shut up, woman!” Jones shouts, grabbing her around the throat and throttling her while she laughs. “I hate it when nigger women speak.” Jones folds his hands before him. “You were saying, my tender raven?”

  Arthur laughs and shakes his head. Jones is always like this. He is insane.

  Sheila is still laughing but she also says: “I really do, though. I really do. I think these people, this administration, I think they think God is on their side, and they’re really going to do it. I think they think they’re going to destroy the world and then be glad-handed into heaven.”

  “Haven’t you castrated the black man long enough?” says Jones.

  “Eat your roast beef, Jones,” says Sheila, and to us: “He lets it get cold, then he doesn’t like it and he gets hungry when we get home and I have to cook for him.”

  “Damn right,” says Jones, eating his roast beef, muttering around it. “Shoulda changed my name to X.”

  “X Jones,” says Arthur. “I like that.”

  “And then I thought: why?” says Jones.

  “XY?” says Arthur.

  “And then it came to me in a flash: Z. Jones Z. Jonesie!” He starts to sing: “Jonesie, what a hard-loving machine bonesie, Jonesie …”

  “I’m not cooking tonight, Jones,” says Sheila.

  Jones slams his palm down on the table. “Music is part of our culture, girl. Don’t you try to rob me of my heritage.”

  “I think,” I begin tentatively.

  “Speak to me, tender white flesh,” says Jones.

  “I think,” I say, “that Arthur is right and not right. That, as things stand, we have to defend Nicaragua and that Sheila is right: it will probably end the world: if not this time, then the next. I think we can’t tinker with the machinery to save ourselves, lean on this argument or that argument, this philosophy or that. I think the machinery is fueled by death and we have to tear it down beginning with our own consciousness. As long as there are popsicles and subway tunnels, or sidewalks or radios—I think we’re doomed by the human personality. We’ve confused the fact that our disease is inevitable with the question of whether or not it’s incurable, and Freud, Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare—we’ve swallowed them all and turned them all into our own sick, doomed selves.”

  Jones considers. He leans across the table to Arthur and whispers, “Tell me: exactly what is it that emanates from between her thighs that has given you the power to dominate western civilization.”

  “Beats me,” says Arthur, “but she sure took the fun out of this conversation.”

  “Jesus said it,” I say. “He said, ‘Unless you become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.’ He didn’t mean obedient, blind followers. Little children aren’t like that unless they’ve been made like that. In fact, they’re narcissistic, wholly sensual, awake, aware. Jesus said to Peter, ‘You will be the rock,’ because the experience of the parables could only be passed on from person to person, not through institutions and ceremonies …”

  I pause for breath. Blumenthal shifts. “So how’s your sex life?” he says.

  This is about a week ago.

  I sigh. I say, “What do you want from me, Blumenthal?”

  “Have you ever noticed,” he says, “that whenever you get anxious about something, you tend to float away into the empyrean? To theorize, mysticize?”

  Have you ever noticed you have a wart the shape of Massachusetts under your left nostril? I want to say. Instead, I say: “Yes.”

  He shifts in his chair. “Some people drink,” he says.

  “I drink, too.”

  “Do you?”

  “No. Not anymore,” I say—ruefully a tad. “Not since coming here. And don’t smirk.”

  “Can I smirk after you leave?”

  “No.” I flop forward, elbows on knees. “Look,” I say, “I came here because I wanted the truth, to seek the truth, and …”

  “You came here because you were alcoholic, frigid and miserable. And because one of your fantasies started to surface and it terrified you.”

  That Bloomie. You gotta love him.

  He sits there in his leather swivel chair, deadpan, waiting for—what? For me to get teary and whine, “What a cruel thing to say?” No. He knows to whom he speaks. I look him dead in his droopy eyes.

  “The question, if I recall,” I say—and I mean, the chill is palpable, believe me—“concerned my sex life.” My spine straightens. I am a duchess. “It is problematical,” I say.

  I proceed to explain. “The problem is that everything Arthur and I do in bed seems to have a meaning, a psychological meaning that will come out later in therapy. Lately, therefore, while sex has been pleasant, thank you very much, more pleasant than it ever was before—before I started coming here, it has been, how shall I say, mundane.”

  “This is ever since the mug,” says Blumenthal, may his profligate Jewish soul burn in hell until I descend from the bosom of Abraham with a drop of water on my finger—although, now I consider it, this image from the gospel of Our Lord seems a bit charged itself: the Christian isomorph of “Suck a big one, bud.”

  Anyway, I sigh again but maintain my composure. “Correct,” I say. He is silent. “The act of sodomy disturbed me.”

  “Which?”

  “Both. All of it. The whole thing.”

  “Because you enjoyed it so much?”

  “Because—” dear boy, I almost add, my hauteur is rampant, I tell you. “Because it made me think—when Arthur did it to me—it reminded me of being branded. It was like a punishment.”

  “For?”

  “For the first time. For doing to him what … For trying to turn Arthur into a woman.”

  “Or yourself into a man?”

  “Mayhaps.” I am positively royal. “It made me think that maybe I had married Arthur because, somehow, I don’t know, he reminded me of—” Deep breath, back straight. “Of my mother.”

  Blumenthal shifts. “Your mother, if I remember rightly from
our earlier sessions, had a vagina, didn’t she?”

  “Quite so. I seem to be suffering from a certain amount of confusion on this whole point.”

  “A vagina’s no good?”

  “Well—” I defrost a bit, thinking. “I mean, without a penis somewhere in the equation, there’s no way to get back to her.”

  “Who?”

  “Your mother.”

  “Why do you want to get back to my mother?”

  “All right. My mother. Damn it, I mean, you men have it easy.”

  “Sure,” says Blumenthal, “we just fuck our mothers, conceive ourselves and live forever.”

  “Well, all right. But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Only the Jews could invent a science that works by answering questions with questions.

  I sigh, my shoulders sagging. “I’m beginning to think that maybe all this—this branding thing—it was just a way to keep from thinking about what I really want.”

  “Which is?”

  “To get back to her—my mother. Just a way, the branding thing, of keeping her down.”

  Quietly—almost tenderly—Blumenthal says, “But she came back, didn’t she?”

  “Yes. Elizabeth.”

  McB. rubs his nose for a considerable and breathless period.

  “How long have you been thinking about all this, anyway?” he asks.

  “I—I don’t know,” I say. “I think it first came to me when I was doing some, well, Zen stuff—meditation.” I am a little embarrassed that a sensible Episcopalian should be caught in the lotus position, but it is, shall we say, dwarfed by the context. “I’ve been thinking about it since, off and on.”

  “Ever occur to you to mention this to your therapist?”

  “Well, I …”

  “Tell me something,” says Der Doc, shifting some more. “We’ve talked about Arthur a lot; you’ve railed against him, sung his praises. But I don’t really feel like I know him. What’s he like?”

  I open my mouth. This seems to be a good start. I remain in this position for quite some time and yet, though I am listening very hard, I do not hear any words issuing forth. “Well …” I say, finally. “Arthur? What’s he like? You mean my husband?”

  Blumenthal puts his chin in his hand and the whole bottom part of his face folds up into a mass of soggy wrinkles. “Believe me,” he says, “King Arthur you’ve told me about.”

  “I—” I say, looking around—the desk avec Kleenex box (regulation psychiatric issue), the bookshelves, the curtained window, all the objects that have become so familiar to me. I am looking for Arthur. “I don’t know,” I hear myself say, and then, to make sure I’ve said it, “I don’t know.” Then something comes unbidden into my mind. Basic Freud—free association. I wonder if I have ever told Blumenthal my theory about Freud. I do not tell it to him. I present him with this unbidden, unwelcome guest. “You know, I guess I really …” I say. “I think all I’m trying to say …” I look at him. That old face, that funny, mulchy, comforting old face. “I love my mother,” I say.

  It is like a conjuring trick—speak of the devil and his horns appear. The words come out of my mouth and they are true—the difference between the word “fist” and being punched in the mouth. I love my mother. I mean, I always knew I loved my mother. But now, suddenly, I know I love my mother.

  And, of course, at the same moment, I realize that I—the child I was; still am—I have lost her forever.

  And so we conclude another episode of Samantha Clementine and James Blumenthal in “The Fabulous Circus of Doctor Unhappiness.”

  A symbolic interlude. I leave Dr. B’s office and walk into the park. I wander blindly, thinking of how I love my mother. When I look up, I am standing at the foot of the stairs leading up to Cleopatra’s needle, an Egyptian obelisk. I laugh at the phallic-mother symbolism, though I’m not sure exactly what it means. The needle stands surrounded by a grove of bushes and low trees. I laugh some more and decide, in the name of symbolic courage, I must go up into the grove. Suddenly, I remember that the place is supposed to be a hangout for rapists and homosexuals and I become afraid. Again, I laugh: Now I have translated my symbolic fear into a real fear. I am becoming Hester Prynne. In the name of real courage, then, I must go up into the grove with the obelisk in it.

  I climb the stairs, wary of attack. I come into the grove. It is empty, except for a young woman nursing a baby at her breast.

  I sit on the bench in the grove with the obelisk in it and the nursing mother. I cry quietly because, whatever happens now, I will never have had the love I wanted as a child.

  Ah, the hermaphroditic God. Ah, Big Joe, Joester: the hermaphroditic God, what? What?

  It was in a philosophic mood that God once said to me—just a day or two, in fact, before that visit to Blumenthal—said as I leaned my face wearily against the handset. “You know, we were all once both men and women.”

  “Were we?” I said, stifling a yawn.

  “Oh yes. In fact, it was, as I recall, the male appendage of Oouoh that fell off to become Marcodel. And as Marcodel parted from her, she, too, saw that Death must come into the world.”

  “A bad day all around, I guess.”

  “You know.” He chuckled. “Ever since then, she has been afraid of mice. She thinks they are her phallus, fallen off again, alive again. You should see her, standing on top of the mountain of Zugango with her skirts hiked: ‘Eeeee. Eeeee.’ It’s a panic.”

  “I imagine,” I said dully.

  I guess he heard it in my voice. “Are you mad at me?” he asked (hopefully?).

  “No, dear, I’m not mad at you,” I said. “I simply miss you when you are in the heavens.”

  “I … You want me to come down?”

  “For God so loved the world …” I said.

  “If I come down, something terrible will happen.”

  “What, dear? What do you think will happen?”

  “I don’t know. But something. Something terrible.”

  I smile. “Trust me,” I say. “I can handle it.” He is silent, and I remain smiling. Everyone thinks that, if they were to let go, the world would explode in the fireball of their passions. It is folks like Dr. B. who, by convincing us they can take the heat, allow us to reveal that it was only an imaginary fire to begin with.

  “Trust me,” I say again. I say this because it makes me feel like Dr. B. I say this, also, because I am a foolish little girl. I mean, everyone, deep down, has the illusion that their unleashed passion would incinerate the universe. Not everyone, on the other hand, has the high-powered ex-cock of Oouoh, complete with telescopic eyeball, sitting in his closet, waiting to be used.

  My cunt is an orchid. Sometimes. Sometimes it is a bleeding gash, the scar where my father tore my testicles from me by impregnating my mother, and then I hate him.

  Today, however, it is an orchid, an orchid in the auburn grass, in the pine needles of the forest floor. I am looking at it, so I know. I remember once a gyno (Dr. Ihatechu, the last male gyno I have ever had) placed a mirror in front of me all during the examination. I was mortified by my ugliness, my rawness. What seemed to be a twisted configuration of torn flesh and dried blood.

  But this morning—Arthur has just departed; I watched him from the window as the doorman hailed his cab—this morning, I am lying on the bed with my jeans on the floor and my t-shirt pushed up to my neck to bare my breasts, and I am holding the mirror, a rectangular hand mirror for eyebrow work, between my legs. I am watching my fingers fiddle with the lips—the petals, and the rose curves, and the clitoris in its comic-yet-ceremonial pink-brown cowl, and the black gap, the open pit of it, the emptiness that blooms inside me like the doorway to eternity, only it is not the doorway to eternity, it is my vagina, because I am not Woman, I am Sam, not the Eternal Feminine—because I have my own mother, my own Eternal beckoning to me from the dark recesses of life-and-death; and my problems are not the problems of the universe—thank you very much, MacBlume—they are mine, all
mine, my problems, my past, my mangled history, and I love them even as I mourn.

  My cunt is an orchid. I am sure of it, because I am holding the mirror.

  But flesh, my children—ooh, I dip my finger in deep and bring it out wet to massage my clit—flesh, my darlings, is only the vocabulary of life—that is the lesson for today, I think. Cunts and cocks and breasts and anuses and flesh are the ways in which we children speak. The illusion that I could ever have worked my way back into my mother is only the illusion that I could be born of myself, eternal and recurrent. If I were “healthy,” I would become my mother and love myself, live through Arthur and depend upon him, his cock, to fuel my self-love. I would take his cock into me, into me, into me—my finger is his cock now, kissing the clit—and then I would capture it and it would begin to grow and I would feel the self-love of motherhood. And when that child was born I would crush it to me to maintain the illusion of life—all my conscious care overthrown by the need of not dying, I would crush it to me.

  But the world is an illusion nestled in an illusion—the illusion that we need not die, need not love death and life as one. And I am not healthy, I will not be healthy because slowly, slowly, slowly I am becoming sane.

  I watch my fingers in the mirror as the petals of my cunt flow and close around them like water. I am not masturbating—I am making love to myself.

  But I do not come. Damn it, I’m breathless, but I cannot come. How all orgasms do inform against me! Now, I am thinking of a man, of Arthur; now of Jones, now of a blues singer I saw on the street.

  Oh, but what’s the point. They are all one. They are all Dr. Blumenthal. Oh, Doctor, Doctor. (Jimbo? Jim?) Talk dirty to me, Doc. Tell me I’m conflicted. That’s it. Force me, baby: make me turn verbs into adjectives. Do it. Tell me I have to resolve some issues—God, it’s meaningless, but I love it! Strip me, Doctor. Strip me of the only power I have left: the power of words. Tell me my head is in a bad place, put it in a bad place, oh, God, I want my head in a bad place. Ambivalence! Id, say Id to me. Ego—oh—oh—oh!