Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  Seven

  “I have a theory,” I say, “that Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is really about psychotherapy.”

  Blumenthal shifts. “Humbug,” he says.

  “No, really. It’s a spiritual classic. On the anniversary of his death—which is also the anniversary of the birth of the Son of God—Marley, the phantom father, comes to warn Scrooge of the ultimate fate of anal retentive characters like himself. Scrooge consults Dr. Spirit, who at first appears to him as a vague mixture of feminine and masculine qualities that will guide him into the past. ‘Long past?’ asks Scrooge. ‘No, your past,’ answers the doc. Off Scrooge goes to see himself rejected by his father, and only allowed to approach him again under the auspices of his sister—in other words, he has to repress his masculine rage against the old man and his desire for his mother, and thus the pleasures of life. This is why he hates his nephew: because he is proof of his sister’s sexuality—the process he’s come to associate with castration and death. Freud’s—sorry, Scroogian slip—Scrooge’s masculinity reemerges in his adolescence, represented by good father Fezziwig, and he gets engaged. But slowly, he must hold more and more of himself in in order to keep both his rage and femininity from reemerging. He becomes a grasping miser, losing his fiancée, replacing Eros with Thanatos in the guise of the love of money.

  “At this point when Scrooge’s resistance breaks down, and he extinguishes the light of his past, transference occurs—Dr. Spirit becomes the jovial, all-powerful father bearing the phallic horn of plenty. Suddenly, through this attachment, the world seems bright again and full of cheer, and Freud—Scrooge—can mourn what his life would have been like if he had not been such a crazy by vicariously enjoying Cratchit’s poor but happy Christmas. Then, the shadow of another ill falls across his mind in the predicted death of Tiny Tim, through Scrooge’s own stinginess—the threat that he will perpetuate his father’s sins upon his proxy-son, and so continue the darkness of his non-life into eternity. At this point, he sees to his horror that Dr. Spirit is ageing; that the all-powerful father-God is only a human being. With which, Dr. Spirit parts his robes and, where his genitals should be, there is Ignorance and Want—Repression and the resultant twisted version of Lust.

  “It’s then that Dr. Spirit becomes the silent mirror of life-and-death itself, throwing Scrooge upon the fact of his mortality and thus an acceptance of his own responsibility for life as it is.”

  And so saying, I bury my face in my hands and weep. I weep and weep, the tears dripping through the cracks in my fingers. I weep for five minutes and my throat becomes sore from the heaving sobs. Then, with a harsh gasp, I sit up in the chair and peer, owly, through the blur at the Spirit of Therapy Yet To Come.

  Said Spirit shifts in his chair. “I thought A Christmas Carol had a happy ending.”

  I nod and laugh, sniffling.

  “Alistair Sim does a somersault, doesn’t he? Or is that ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’?”

  “Have you ever noticed that those two stories are mirror images of each other?”

  “No,” says Blumenthal. “Why are you crying?”

  “Because,” I say, pouting, sniffling, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweetest blouse with the maroon slashes on tan which I wore just for him. “Because I’m getting better. I can feel it. I’m saner. I’m calmer. I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m as light as a feather, as happy as a schoolboy …”

  “Giddy as a drunken man?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Maybe we should try electro-shock.”

  “I love you,” I tell Blumenthal, and he nods once with regal gravity. “And I don’t want to leave you, and in a few years, I’ll be all well, and then I’ll have to. Damn it!” I slam my fist down on the chair so that the pain goes shivering clear up to my shoulder. “That’s all it is, all it ever is: it’s one loss after another. It’s learning to love something, then giving it up. It’s loss, loss, loss, loss, loss. You lose the womb, and then your mother. You lose your looks, your children, your health, and then you lose your life. Everything you hold onto turns to poison and only the things you let go of become sweet and beautiful and melancholy, and I hate it. I hate it. Everything is either King Lear or Prospero: You either try too hard to hold on and you’re slowly reduced to nothing, or you give everything away, everything you love and you become a tragic magician. It’s an awful way to run things. The only state of mind with anything to offer is mourning. It stinks.”

  “Yes,” says Blumenthal.

  I glare. “Don’t say yes. What are you thinking?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.” I stick out my lower lip as miserably and adorably as I can. “Tell me.”

  “Well—” Blumenthal heaves a big sigh. “I’m sorry, but, really, what I was thinking is that what Lear held onto and Prospero let go of were their daughters—that they were both the fathers of daughters.”

  “Oh God!” I throw my hands up. “How could you be thinking that? What sort of man are you?”

  Blumenthal scratches the pulpy wad of his nose. “What would a real man be thinking?”

  “You should be thinking,” I say, “‘Here is some beautiful young stuff who loves me slavishly, how can I abuse the therapeutic situation and get myself some nookie?’”

  I laugh. He smiles. “So,” he says, “I’m either a rapist or a weakling.”

  “Right.”

  “Like your father.”

  “Right.” He doesn’t answer. I look at the ceiling. “That shit. Why didn’t he want me?” I say, calmer now. “The minute I became a woman, he dumped me like a hot potato. It’s like you get your period and the bell goes off and no more Daddy. And it’s worse when he’d been so nice to me before that, telling me stories. He had these stories about the people who live inside soap bubbles—I used to blow bubbles by the hour trying to see them—he sang me songs; he was in securities and he used to come home from the office and make up songs to sing me.” I keep staring at the ceiling and I whisper:

  “‘Samantha Bradford, you are so cute.

  And your toes are tiny to boot.

  And your fingers are tiny to glove.

  How wonderful you are to love.’

  He used to sing that to me when he dressed me to go out in the snow. I could smell his aftershave. He was like … He was like … He was like a mother to me sometimes.”

  “Was he?” says Blumenthal.

  “He was all there was,” I say. “He was the only game in town. He was a father to my brother. He let my brother be like him. He took my brother places; fishing. But he wouldn’t let me—he wouldn’t let me love him in the end. That was all I wanted, all I wanted to do, and he wouldn’t let me.” I have calmed down completely now. “He still won’t,” I say. I rub my eyes. “He still won’t.” I look at Blumenthal, finally. “When will it all be over?” I ask him. “When will these people stop running my life? Most people aren’t tormented by their parents like this.”

  “Most people are insane. You’re merely neurotic. Count yourself lucky.”

  “That’s not true, you’re just saying that. Most people are normal.”

  Blumenthal shrugs.

  “I want to have a baby,” I say.

  “I’m sorry, but the Board of Regents would take my license.”

  “Not with you, Shrink. With my husband. What’s-his-name. John Kennedy. Superman. I love him so much. I want to have his child.”

  “Have you discussed this with Clark?”

  “Arthur—oh. No. Well, I mean, we’ve talked about it. We both want kids …” I feel like I’m trying to pop the question. I pop it: “Do you think I can handle it?”

  He gives this a fairly long think for him. Maybe twenty-thirty seconds. Then, very carefully, he says, “Sometimes people—all people, but I happen to see it in patients a lot—want to have kids as a way of remaking themselves. Which is great unless the kid has some silly notion of being him or herself in all his teary, snotty glory. Then you get
what, in technical parlance, we call: a problem. I’ll tell you this much: kids play every string of you. No matter what your child-rearing philosophy is, they’ll be affected by every part of you right down to your toes. You can’t protect them from yourself. Other than that, I think I have to let you and Supe make the decision.”

  I nod. More than anything else, I am trying to fight the sinking, sick feeling I get in my stomach as I realize that Blumenthal has children. That he is a father. He is a man. He is a human being. “Do you know the way to San José?” I ask.

  “Pardon?”

  “Nothing. Oh, Jesus!” I cover my eyes. “I can’t stand it. I can’t stand any of it.”

  “Bear but a touch of my robe,” says Blumenthal, “and you shall be upheld in more than this.”

  “Oh,” I say, laughing. “Oh, you dirty old man!”

  I went to the march yesterday: U.S. out of Nicaragua. No one had any clue we were going to invade, and so it was amazing that such a huge number of people showed up. Fifth Avenue was, as they say, a sea of humanity, heads, banners, children on the shoulders of their fathers—a ceaseless flow. The cameras on top of their vans peered down at us with their single, black eyes and we raised two fingers in the peace symbol for the folks back home. We sang, “We shall overcome,” and “Kumbaya.” It made me melancholy. I wanted to sing, “And did those feet, in ancient times, walk upon England’s mountains green …?” I mean, something radical, something new. It was all the sixties, a poor imitation of the sixties. I guess I went less because of the Nicaragua coup, than because of the Soviet troops massing in Germany. I wanted them to see that not all of us were for this. That some of us read Blake and were for Mental, not Corporeal, War. I can just see the Commissar or whatever with his ear glued to the TV speaker, saying, “Wait a minute, Comrade. Someone is singing the prologue to ‘Milton.’ Call back the bombs.”

  I missed the sixties—that is, I was a child when all the anti-war protests and drugs and long hair were going on. All that history—it was just TV to me, most of it was not even that. Sometimes, that makes me sad, like the men you meet who were too young for World War II and too old for Korea and spend the rest of their lives with a chip on their shoulders, hoping someone will shoot at them so they can prove themselves or searching for adventures “like war,” or ashamed of their cowardice because they know, secretly, they don’t want to get shot at because, I mean, really, who does? I guess it’s just rare that we can indulge our love of violence—which, my theory goes, is just an attempt to repress our love of death by controlling the death of another—in a clearly justifiable way. It’s what myths are made of. King Arthur, the wild west, World War II: the moment when the good guys could slaughter the bad guys, and be right. I don’t know if I see the sixties like that, but it was a time, it seems to me, when people were willing to try something, to do something. It was an exciting time, and I wasn’t there.

  In retrospect, maybe the sixties were like son of World War II, a whole generation of men and women rebelling against their parents: the Fezziwig era, when we were engaged. Now, the slow roll into Scroogian anality and grasping: money has always been the symbol of this age, my age.

  And so—will Marley come? Will Tiny Tim live? I see an empty stool by the fireplace, and a crutch carefully preserved. But are these the shadows of the things that must be, or the shadows of the things that may be? We are marching, heaven knows where we are marching. We’ll know we’re there.

  People made speeches on a bandstand near the 42nd Street Library and the sound was broadcast through speakers hung on lampposts all the way up to the park. Some people were making real radical speeches—and bombing, pardon the pun. Their fists pounding the air, their faces turning red, their spit flying. “But we say—out now!” No applause. It was embarrassing. Others made special interest speeches: “We cannot end this threat to our earth until we solve the problems of the third world”; “colored people”; “women.” My heart sank: something is wrong with this, and it may be too late to figure out what. The only optimistic note was that, every time a virgin walks by the library, one of the stone lions is supposed to roar—and I, for one, didn’t hear a sound.

  The problem with the sixties, I think, was that we—they—mistook philosophy for ability. They cried “Peace,” they believed in peace, but there was still violence in their souls—maybe the very thing that made them cry and believe in peace to begin with. Did they think they could escape their fantasies so easily? Do we think we can bury them now beneath a cache of gold? Any more than they could slay them with the Nazis, or outlaws, or dragons? Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends …

  I left the march early. I rode up to my ritzy apartment, and watched the quiet avenue below and sipped tomato juice. I was humming to the Commissar:

  “I will not cease from Mental Fight,

  Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand,

  Till we have built Jerusalem

  In England’s green & pleasant Land.”

  I tried the radio, but there was nothing but news, and I already knew the news.

  Lately, I think of Gordon, who was unkind. Poor Gordon, half black, half white, all mean; clear, clear through. I met him in a bar. In that year or so after Jerry, I guess I met just about everyone in a bar. When I think about that time, it seems to me it all took place in a vast silence: the silence of my apartment in the Village, where I wrote the elegant philosophical verse, stripped of all flesh, gleaming like a polished skull. I remember Ted Hughes’ “Crow”: the severed male head being smothered by the disembodied vulva as God struggled to part them. My poetry then must have sounded something like the silent struggle of Hughes’ God.

  Mostly, I drank from a bottle in my room, so maybe, too, I remember the silent amber of the scotch in the bottle. I did go to bars—all the bars—and there was music there, terribly loud music, and lights, but I remember it all in shadowy silence.

  I met Gordon—Gordon Waters—in a tavern named The Stiff-Necked Giraffe, on the upper west side. I was drinking and guys were trying to pick me up, and I was doing what I always did then—leading them on, flirting, kissing them—then dumping them—saying bye with a finger to their chins, and a flick of my backside. I’m still not sure whether these were acts of anger or fear. Maybe both.

  I could drink, though, I could hold my liquor, and so could Gordon. He was standing—short, slim, broad-shouldered, coffee-skinned, frizzy-haired—at the center of the bar, talking to the bartender, and the people standing around him were laughing. I edged closer, and ordered another drink, and Gordon saw me out of the corner of his eye, and began, I thought, to play to me. He was doing a routine—a comedy routine—about the dirty words you weren’t allowed to say on the radio. Gordon was a disc jockey at a jazz station, it turned out, but he wanted to be a stand-up comic. I don’t remember what he was saying—I was too busy paying attention to the way I presented myself—but it was fairly funny in a vulgar way—“So I called up the FCC, and we’re on the air, I say, so, ‘I forgot, man, could you tell me just which words were restricted, man,’ and he says, ‘Wuh-uh-wuh-uh—well, as you know, of course—’ he’s a white dude—’as you know, of course, anything having to do with, uh, poo-poo is a no-no.’ ‘Poo-poo no-no, gotcha, Jack.’” Well, everyone was laughing and I was drunk, and it seemed witty at the time.

  I would like to say that later—after he bought me the drink—after he’d said, “Hey, pretty lady …” and that little signal had gone off in my brain saying “I can handle this guy,” that lying signal that distinguishes between truth and bullshit as if bullshit were less likely to sweep you away just because you recognize it—I would like to say that I was not entranced by his job and the trappings of his job. After all, I’d been in publishing, was still in movies, I’d held glamour positions more or less. But there is something different about radio. Maybe it’s the music. Deep down, in his heart of hearts, beyond his desire for immortality, for sexual completeness, for the peace of death, deep down, everyone really just
wants to be a jazz singer. If, for one minute, I could stand on a stage and shout the words, “choinin’ and a-boinin’ funk!” into a microphone without someone shouting back, “Next!” I might well retire as from a job well done. Disc jockeys—they do something more recognizable, more approachable: they play the records: it is like standing in front of the mirror and mouthing the words; it is like masturbation: music from your fingertips.

  When, alone in my room around midnight, I would lay down my pen and turn on the radio and hear Gordon nearly whisper, “And now, here’s one for a very special little lady down in ye olde Greenwich Village,” and when Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong would come on with “Moonlight in Vermont,” I didn’t say to myself “Moonlight in Vermont? What have Gordon and I got to do with Vermont?” I simply felt I was being sung to and was singing; like the world was an old musical and love was the sudden ability to sing.

  I suppose I was in love again, although, at that time, it wasn’t really to the point to wonder. Everything was muzzy and mellow and amber and silent—I was drunk, in other words—and I would say it to myself—“I’m in love,” and I didn’t wonder—I felt hollow, but I drank and I didn’t wonder. It was all, really, panic in a cowl, because when Gordon would say, “Hey, baby, no strings,” I would nod with my eyelids half closed, and twirl a strand of auburn around my fingers, and lift my glass and say, “That’s right, man. Fuck all that.” But if he was silent for more than ten seconds, I would say, “So whatcha thinking over there?” If he said, “I really dig you, baby,” I would glow with it for hours, and then I would begin to ask myself, “That means love, doesn’t it? Dig. To dig. Or, at least, ‘like.’ What does ‘dig’ mean, exactly?” and I would subside into amber silence and wait, desperate without knowing I was desperate, just muzzy and hollow, for him to say it or anything like it, again. And when we had sex, which was only about once a week, when he would spread the lips of my vagina with his fingers, and then stroke me a few times until I was wet (and me with my eyes closed, desperately conjuring what was now a shadowy figure in a mask—but with suspiciously long hair and rounded figure—approaching with the brand—oh, the repressed is like a bola, wrapping itself around your throat tighter and tighter and tighter and tighter), when he would slip his small erection inside of me, bury his face in my hair, and pump for a minute and a half and squirt and roll over and say, “Hey, baby, that was fine,” I wanted, when it was over, to have clutched his buttocks to me, to have closed my legs and captured him inside me, to have never let him go. I began to forget to use my diaphragm now and then. And I stopped using it altogether after that night at the Komedy Klub. Oh, what a krummy night that was.