Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  When he finished, I glanced at him. “Okay,” I say, “so he wasn’t a lunatic.”

  “That wasn’t him, nimwit. That’s Keats. That’s ‘Ode To A Nightingale.’”

  “So why …” I spoke a lot of two-word sentences the whole time I dated Jerry.

  “Someone who can pull off a stunt like you did should be a writer.”

  “I am …”

  “Not if you don’t read this stuff you’re not.”

  I raise a haughty chin at the quad. “I’m not a slave to the past. I find it restricts my natural flow.”

  “And I find that’s so much horsesquat,” comments Jer. “Look, I’m not telling you you should learn this. I’m telling you you should eat it; you should sleep with it. It ought to be part of you. I don’t care if you can discuss it—who cares if you can discuss Paris or snow on the branches of trees, as long as you see it, as long as you look at it, and say, ‘Wo!’”

  I am icy. “Oh? And what else should …”

  “You should let me take you to dinner.”

  He was my first love; he was the first boy I ever really loved. And once I was sure that this was it, that he was the one I wanted to marry, to have children with, to become famous with, I would have done anything to please him, to make him smile at me.

  He smiled at me when I read the classics. Dickens, as it turned out, was not overrated, and Blake, forsooth, was the single sanest man who ever trod the earth. And Keats—oh, Keats; oh, my Johnny boy: I think one of the happiest moments of my life—one of the only happy moments of my life before the advent of der Blumenthal, was the night Jerry fucked me while I lay on my stomach and read “Ode On A Grecian Urn” for the very first time. I did not understand it then, but the way the totality of the visions rocked in and out of me so gently, the way the sweep of the lines caressed my bottom and my thighs, and the specific images gripped me by the shoulders for the conclusion—well, I knew what poetry was that night, I tell you. It was the first orgasm I had ever had outside of masturbation, one of the only orgasms I ever had before St. Blumenthal touched me and made me whole. It hit me right about “More happy love,” and carried me in little waves clear to “Beauty is Truth.” And the best thing was that, after I had gotten myself stimulated enough for him to enter me, I hardly had to think of being branded at all.

  Mostly with Jerry, I fear, it was all make-believe, to please him: crying oh, oh, oh, oh, while thinking, “Don’t brand me, memsahib,” just to keep from drying up on him like an old well. I told myself it didn’t matter: it was a spiritual love; women’s sexual feelings are less urgent, less physical than men’s. “Go!”—cried Blake’s Enitharmon while I cringed—“and tell the Human Race that Woman’s love is Sin!” But I did love him in my fashion, and by the time he left me, western literature lay curled within my womb like the fetus of my own future creations.

  I fear I blame my mother for ending the romance. She hated Jerry from the minute she saw him and, when my mother hates you, it is like trying to function with a steady current of electricity running through your ears. Jerry knew he was up against a harridan, and he loved me and was determined to oppose her, but I think that, after a while, it just wore him down.

  It was, not to put too fine a point on it, his masculinity that offended her. He was a very manly man and there was something witty and rock hard down deep in those soulful eyes of his. It reminded me of that scene in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia,” when Peter O’Toole is called insubordinate and replies, “Oh no—it’s just my manner, sir.” Jerry had fuck-you eyes.

  She hated him, my mother. She called him scum. She said, “He’s the take-you-and-goodbye type, I know him.” She even said, “What else does a brilliant boy like that want with you?” And once, she threw a glass across the room and screamed, “I hate him!” This was the first summer we were together, when Jerry would come to pick me up in his Kharmen Ghia and we would drive to his apartment in the city and I would stay all night, trying hard not to think about the morning, about walking into the house again, guilty and happy, to find her waiting there.

  I think what finally tore it was the time Jerry brought me home at four o’clock in the morning. We snuck in quietly, but she was there, bathrobed, red-eyed, a dragon in a web of old injuries. She ignored him, stepped up to me and said, “Whore!” and raised her hand to slap my face. Jerry stepped between us, his arms at his sides, and just stared at her silently with those brown, damp, soulful, fuck-you eyes. And her hand fell, and she went to bed and I knew I would never stop loving him, and I don’t suppose I ever have.

  Sometime during my final year, my father phoned me and told me that he and my mother would not pay for my college education if I was going to “waste my time” in school.

  “Fine,” I said, quite truthfully, “I’m getting my education from Jerry, anyway. He’s already asked me to move in with him.”

  They did not cut off my tuition—though my living funds were always a few weeks late after that.

  They did, finally, as graduation approached and I guess they began to panic, announce that they were cutting me out of their will. This is sort of the suburban parent’s equivalent of a first-strike nuclear attack. I wish I could say I didn’t feel it, I wish I could say I didn’t care. I wept in Jerry’s arms one long night—not, I pray, for the money: but for the knowledge that money was the only way of loving my parents knew, that they had essentially cut me from their moorings with a single blow. I would not have given in, of course. I was not stupid: I was not going to give up a man like Jerry for a woman like my mother—I thought. But when, weeping, I looked up at him, when I saw the helpless look in his eyes, the fury, finally, at the fact that he could do nothing to stop them from hurting me, to stop me from letting them hurt me, I would have known, if I had ever been in love before, that mother had won.

  She had won really, I guess, when she had twisted me to begin with, won when she had taught me to love the things that hurt me. No lover can ever be your salvation, really. Once, perhaps, women could ask that of their men as men asked it of God: “He for God, and she for God in him.” But those strange, thrilling, unequal, salvific, give-your-self-away relationships have fled to the hotlines and the couches—I don’t know: we await future developments. I just know that, then, it was not Jerry’s job to save me: it was his job to love me, and he did. When I didn’t save myself—oh, Blumenthal, you bastard, where were you then?—I made him helpless, and that was one way in which he could not live.

  Jerry and I moved in together after I graduated. We had Christmas together: a mysteriously melancholy Christmas, I thought at the time. But then came MLA, and in January he was offered a post at the University of Hawaii. He was honorable about it. He told me right after the new year—before the job offer—that wherever he was going, he was going alone. At first, he told me, he wanted to see how things worked out, but then I started to cry and he said, “This isn’t going to make it. I love you, Sam. But this isn’t the one for me.”

  He moved out, and the last time I saw him was when he came by to pick up his Hawaii letter.

  He stood on the stoop in the cold and looked up at me where I was standing in the doorway to the vestibule.

  “How are you, Sam?” he asked.

  And I smiled and said, “My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk. How’s by you?”

  A month later, I quit my job and headed for the Mardi Gras.

  “Does your mother like Arthur?” Blumenthal asks me.

  I consider. “My mother is sort of—stupefied by Arthur. He’s really taken the fire out of her. Like St. George slaying the dragon.”

  “That must be very satisfying for you.”

  “Sort of. I don’t know. Not really,” I say. “Sort of. Arthur has a way with her—she doesn’t know how to get at him. When he first met her—before we left for Rome, my mother actually said to him, this is unbelievable, out of the blue, she said, ‘So I guess you got something pretty cheap.’”

/>   “Meaning you?”

  “That’s how I took it—she’s very good at making you take her meaning without her ever having to come out and say it.”

  Blumenthal shifts. “And Arthur said?”

  I laugh. “Arthur laughed. But, I mean, like, a big horse laugh as if she had just said the wittiest thing in the world. He did everything but slap her on the back, and then he said, ‘Mm, what are these? Tortes? They’re very good.’ That’s the last really nasty thing my mother’s said to him, except after we had the Justice of the Peace service and didn’t invite anyone. She’s still a little sore on that point.”

  Blumenthal shifts one way, then the other on his chair: a double shift, very grave. “So how do we feel about this?” he asks.

  “Well—for a while, I didn’t get it, but I think maybe the thing is: Arthur’s very sure of himself. He knows she can’t do anything to him, in fact, and I think he just feels she’s a bitch and he doesn’t give a fuck what she says. Then again, I’m healthier, too, and Arthur just sort of expects me to work out my feelings about this with you. He’ll talk to me about it; he’s always on my side, but when he feels it goes down too deep, he always says, ‘Take it to Disneyland.’”

  “Disneyland?”

  “Here. Therapy.”

  “Why Disneyland?” says Blumenthal.

  “It’s where your fantasies come to life.”

  Blumenthal thinks about this for a minute, then starts to chuckle. “That’s very funny,” he says. It makes me feel ridiculously happy that Arthur can make Dr. Blumenthal laugh.

  “You know,” I say, “maybe Jerry wasn’t—secure enough, somehow. Maybe he wasn’t tough enough to win against my mother by not fighting. I mean, maybe he would have been less macho, or something, if he’d been surer of his own manhood. I mean, look at Arthur.” And I start to count Arthur off on my fingers. “Arthur goes tearing through jungles and whatnot to bring sick people medicine. He stands up to his boss to get a killer cop indicted. Yesterday, they indicted five Mafia bosses after an investigation he did almost by himself.”

  “Oh yes, I read about that in the papers.”

  “Front page,” I say, blowing up like a balloon.

  He lets me hang there for a minute. Slowly, I begin to deflate. I sigh, and roll my eyes.

  “So what’s wrong with Arthur?” he asks me.

  “Well,” I say, “I mean, he doesn’t exactly have fuck-you eyes.”

  A passage, oh my soul, to Mom! Passage! Passage! Soul! Soul! To! To! Singing my daze, I make a pact with you, Mother: I have detested you long enough.

  It is June 19th, my mother’s birthday. She is sixty and Arthur and I tumble into the car, bowing our heads low to make sure our hangovers clear the door frame. Arthur weaves crazily into the middle of Fifth Avenue and we are off. Singing the FDR Drive and the Triborough Bridge. Singing Westchester. A passage to more than Mom. Singing Walt Whitman! Singing Walt Disney! What is the answer?

  On the Thomas E. Dewey, we pull to the side of the road so that I may throw up into the weeds. I throw up in the weeds and shiver with nerves and old marijuana. I sing the body disgusting.

  I am Samantha Clementine. Earthy, sensual, sick as a dog. Of Manhattan the daughter. So why aren’t we going to visit Manhattan? What is the answer?

  “Uuuh,” I remark, folding myself into the bucket seat again. I glance through eyes lidded lizard-like at my life’s soul mate who pats me on the knee and says, “All right?” then toodles off down the Dewey, Huey and Louie, whistling, his brown forelock dancing dashing on his forehead in the pleasant June breeze through the window.

  Hard—yes, hard—to believe that this is the life of yesternight’s End Of The World Bash held at our pad boogie down and say yeah. This man—pickled in the case to your left—drank enough vodka martinis to erode the Gold Coast, to make Park Avenue a lost continent. Legal pad in hand, he went from one guest to another, sketching caricatures of our friends in the attitudes they would be in when the bomb struck. Lansky as ‘The Thinker,’ worrying that the audience to his play might drop off in the fallout; Jones, in war paint, standing in the jungle of Central Park with mutated beasts carousing about him, shouting, “Now this is the black experience!”; Jake, tapping his teeth with a pencil as he watched the blast, murmuring, “Dull. Dull and poorly conceived.”; Elizabeth, glancing at it out the window of her classroom, and telling her apple-painting students, “Never mind.” He did me, naked astride the mushroom cloud, but wouldn’t show it to anyone. He did Sheila, in Supergirl garb, protecting her son, but tore it up. By that time, the party was winding down anyway.

  It was a pretty successful bash all in all, the best I ever gave. To celebrate the “shots fired in anger,” as the newsmen called them, between Cuban and American ships in the Caribbean. Lansky and Jones, who had never met before, got along famously. Landlord and Othello, they called each other, and wound up crashed together in one corner of the living room, singing the theme to the movie “Exodus,” Lansky on libretto, Jones doing a sort of scat riff between each line:

  “This land …”

  “Sit-do-da-diddleothen dot!”

  “… is mine …”

  “Sharee-ee dow!”

  “God gave this land to me …”

  “Meedle-eedle-booten daten dow!” and so on.

  Elizabeth and I had a long chat in the bedroom about how things are going better between me and Arthur and how she and Lansky are discussing marriage—and kids, which Lansky worries will turn him into an old man with no talent, one glass eye and a limp.

  Sheila and Jake chatted amiably together on the sofa about the end of life on earth as we know it, and Jake’s new lover, Bernard, did a Greta Garbo that had us rolling in the aisles, and Mrs. McFigg, who’s a bit of a prig, did a jig with a pig in a big purple wig—I couldn’t have liked it more!

  Anyway, I am reflecting rue-rue-ruefully as we zip up—who was Thomas E. Dewey, anyway?—the highway, that it was Arthur who did all the drinking, while I, with a restraint which, considering the context, was downright optimistic in its implications, had merely a civilized toke or two to be friendly, and it is he who is doing the zipping and whistling this morning while I am primarily consigned to whooping, gagging and the occasional musical groan.

  “Nerves,” says Arthur, between renditions of “She’s Leaving Home,” and “When I’m Sixty-Four.”

  “Die, Arthur,” I whisper. “Die.”

  Last night—ah, yesternight, between the reefer and the booze—when all our guests were gone, he fucked and fucked me in perfect, crazy bliss, his ass rising in roller coaster arcs, his stiff prick plunging, as the pornographers say, veritably plunging into me, driving me into the pitch blackness of pleasure. We slapped and scratched and bit and screamed the two of us, and even now, feeling the tad woozy though I do, I feel my cunt has been blown open, that its lips lie loose and ragged between my legs—that it and his limp cock are conversing feverishly across the imitation stick shift, uttering the words “en masse” while we—the rest of us—cling pleasantly uncommunicative to our simple, separate bucket seats.

  I met a Whitman scholar once. After Jerry gave me Leaves of Grass, and I devoured it. It is rare in this vale of tears to feel that you have walked anywhere with anyone. I have walked, I know, with Blumenthal and maybe, through Blumenthal somehow, I will learn to walk with Arthur into the mystery. But I walked with Walt a ways, I know that, too. I remember sitting on the toilet, to be crude but honest, reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which, for all I know, made me a living symbol of western civilization. I remember hitting the line, “Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?” and immediately glancing down in dismay at the jeans around my ankles, feeling the seat burning a ring in my ass, the grainy details of defecation, and thinking a silent apology that he had found me like this. If I’d known he was coming, I’d have been naked, save for an ermine stole, hurling champagne glasses into the fireplace. Ah, sweet thief in t
he night! But then, who can imagine the Walt-man spinning away, hands to his eyes, crying in disgust, “Oh, Caelia, Caelia, Caelia …”? Perhaps, I mean, it was just as well.

  Anyway, I knew that there was a Whitman scholar—Donaldson, his name was—at Columbia, and went to visit him at his office. I had this childish notion that a lifetime of studying the bearded great one would somehow be manifest in his face and conversation, would give him the power to inspire hope and inspiration, as t’were. Instead, I found Donaldson a grasping, climbing, bitter, back-biting academic in-fighter who tortured me for forty-five minutes with gossip about who was going to get tenure because he was sucking up to whom, and which was a homosexual, which explains the raves that particular piece of muck has been getting in this inverted journal; and why the fact that he had the goods on him had cost him the chairmanship that he got by a sudden unexpected change in his attitudes toward this … Oh God, it was dreadful, pitiful. I wanted to weep, to cry out “But—‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed!’” except I knew he would have none of it. I wondered if at some time in his undergraduate career, he had come upon Leaves and known, deep in his unconscious, his soul, that here was a book that transcended its good poetry and its bad poetry to become alive and so threatened to make him alive, too; if his destiny was then set in motion—to become, not Whitman’s scholar, but his coroner, to throttle the play of poetry into the work of scholarship: to teach it, yes, but always while dissecting it past the danger of vitality until he had walled the great man up like Urizen in his cave. For the love of God, Montressor!

  I am going to tell my mother I love her. I don’t know why—my theory is that these things go beyond the individual parent, that they are matters simply between you and your introject: that the mother of Bloomenthal-land is simply part of me; that the mother of Greenwich, Connecticut is irrelevant. There is, in short, no need for this particular passage—but I am going to do it; maybe because Death is involved here somewhere, and Death seems to pick his teeth with my theories. Or maybe just because we have walked together, she and I.