Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  “I do, Lansky,” Elizabeth whispered.

  “So do I,” he said. “Absolutely.”

  Which apparently satisfied heaven and the state of New York and they were hitched. See Buck and Allie’s snapshots for details.

  Then, Arthur had to run to a bunch of meetings, and Buck and Allie went out to have a gander at the big city, and Mr. and Mrs. Lansky (the elder) went out to have breakfast which, Mrs. Lansky gave us to know, should have been provided for, and Reb and Preacher, I guess, headed to Atlantic City to play the dinner shows.

  I walked outside with the new Mr. and Mrs. L., and we waited on the sidewalk in the morning sun for their cab to arrive. They were bound for the airport and thence Switzerland, which had triumphed over Lansky’s Australia where he thought the fallout would come last.

  Lansky (Mr.) glanced at his watch. They only had five hours to make the airport, which is twenty minutes away. Elizabeth had traded breakfast for Australia.

  “Listen,” I said, “I’m going to miss you guys.”

  “You won’t have to if that cab doesn’t show,” said Mr.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” said Mrs.

  My eyes filled with tears. “I better go,” I said.

  Lansky came over and took me by the shoulders. “Listen,” he said, “if we don’t all meet again …”

  “Sweetheart!” said Elizabeth.

  “Well,” said Lansky, “things are like that.” And they were. “I just want you to know, Sam, that you’re the closest potential cloud of radioactive vapor we have, and if you survive to write my biography, remember—I was the one who said we should have gone to Australia.”

  I threw my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “Go safely, Lansky, and come back soon,” I said.

  “Vaya con dios, Cutes,” he said, and I released him and he turned away from me before his own tears could overflow and he walked to the corner to watch for the cab, and to leave Elizabeth and me alone.

  Elizabeth took my hand and smiled.

  “All well?” she asked.

  “All well.”

  “We have a date for dinner and married-lady gossip in two weeks, right?”

  “Two weeks,” I said.

  “So stop crying.”

  “Right. You, too.”

  “Right.”

  “You saved my life,” I said.

  And she gave me a classic Lansky shrug. “It was a slow day.”

  The cab arrived and Lansky Mr. hailed it with all kinds of fantastic gestures while simultaneously running back for the luggage and screaming for Lansky Mrs. to hurry up.

  “Well,” I said to her, “if this is the age of anxiety, I think you just married into royalty.”

  I threw myself into her arms and we embraced for a second of dying clarity.

  “Oh God,” I said, “can you bear how much I need you?”

  “Yes,” said Elizabeth.

  I let her go. The Lanskys got in their cab, and while Mr. checked to see if his traveller’s cheques were still in his shoe, Mrs. leaned out the window and waved to me.

  “Send us a postcard from Nirvana, Sam,” she called, and the taxi pulled away into the traffic, and then turned the corner and was out of sight.

  So now, I am all alone. It is about eleven in the morning, I am too depressed to work, and Arthur will not even be in his office till after lunch so I can’t call him to chat, and there’s no earthly chance I’m going to start reading the newspaper, so I decide to walk up to the fifties and over to Third and see if there is an early movie showing.

  I am in luck. By the time I get up there, the first showing of “The Twelve of Us,” starring Tom Safire, one of my favorites, is about to begin. The Friday noon movie in New York is what I call the poet’s screening, as the audience generally consists of five lean, bearded young men and two scrawny blonde women with close-cropped hair, all of them telling themselves, as the lights fade, that indolence is part of the art form, while three executives who are supposed to be at working lunches sidle to their seats in the deepening dark. At any rate, there’s no line for tickets, and I walk up to the booth and the woman says, “How many?” though I’m standing there by myself, and I hear myself say to her:

  “The great beast dies.”

  And as the woman stares at me as if I had said nothing—because I have not said “one” or “two” or “when’s the next showing?” the only sounds of which her cockleshell ears can make sense, I think: Oh shit, a poem.

  This is the last thing I want. That is, what I want is to go to the movies. I assure myself that it is merely the tip of the thing surfacing and that it will be days, maybe weeks, before the rest clears—and, for some not very subtle reasons, I think of the fact that my mother damn near gave birth to me in the cab because she refused to believe she was really in labor and, determined, I say:

  “One, please,” and reach for my purse as the ticket sticks out of the slot like a clown’s tongue, and I think: The great beast dies, and vestal whores …

  “Thank you,” I say, taking the ticket—their breasts are bared and they are reaching upward, I can see them.

  “Wanna pay?” says the woman in the glass cage.

  I am flustered. “Oh, of course,” I say, and put the ticket back on the counter as a sign of honesty and good will and return my attention to my purse and snap it open and think: The great beast dies and vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted to the holocaust skies, raise up their arms …

  It is coming, as my mother herself might have said, too fast, and I already begin to fear that my mind will not be able to reach the end, tethered, by the fear of forgetting, to the beginning, and I give the ticket lady a smile and say, “Shit. Excuse me,” and turn to walk briskly out onto the sidewalk.

  The great beast diesov,

  And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

  To the holocaust skies

  Extend their arms …

  And that’s it. With the pressure of decision off me, the thing stops cold. I know if I can jot these lines down, it will either continue or announce itself finished for now—but am I carrying a pen? You jest, my Lord. Can I buy a pen in the middle of Manhattan? Not unless I can find a blind man fast. There is, however, a tobacco nook on this block and dangling from the cash register on a tired string is the pencil for marking lottery tickets and a man—father of five, beats his wife, is frittering away the rent—is painstakingly carving the number of pages in Rousseau’s Confessions next to the number of movements in Haffner’s Serenade or whatever when I mutter my apologies and snatch it from him for a moment in order to scrawl what I’ve got on the little piece of cardboard in my Kleenex pack.

  I get as far as “The great beast dies,” when the gambler finally manages to blink and say “Hey!” at the same moment—but that’s okay, writing this down is enough to let me know: it’s coming, all of it, and I’ve got to get home.

  I hail a cab and collapse into the back with a sigh of relief: cabbies always carry pencils to keep their trip sheets with, and I am safe till we get home. Again, with the pressure lifted, the first lines of the poem just sort of float there on the surface of my mind like the first risen timber of a sunken ship. We sputter through the thick lunch hour traffic until we get to Park and then we breeze uptown.

  I have been holding back, but as we turn onto 81st Street, I let myself go and am paying the man as I get—always going back to the beginning to make sure I haven’t left anything behind:

  The great beast dies

  And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

  To the holocaust skies,

  Extend their arms

  For the fragments of his body’s empire,

  Falling and falling.

  I am in the tortured throes of the realization that I am going to have to move the period back to empire and use falling and falling as the transition into my next thought or be caught in the prologue forever, when I step out of the cab and look up to see three—count ’em—three police cars with flashers
swirling, crowded together in the space before the awning of my building. My muse—no fragile darling and generally startled into speech—is startled into silence as I run forward to investigate.

  I have always, in these instances, an immediate assumption that whatever is happening has something to do with me which usually vanishes as common sense prevails. Common sense is prevailing when the doorman turns and sees me and shouts to the army of cops at die elevator, “Here she is.”

  I am surrounded by our men in blue and am between beginning to fear that Arthur is dead and becoming absolutely positive that Arthur is dead when one of them says,

  “Are you Samantha Clementine?”

  I’m positive. “Yes,” I plead.

  “Do you know a man who calls himself God?”

  My mind snaps clear: The great beast falls … “Yes.”

  “Would you come with us please?”

  “Of course,” I say firmly: Falling and falling until this eye, this shattered eye …

  I am in the back of the patrol car and off we zip, sirens blaring. I have never been in a police car before, let alone with sirens. It is fun.

  “What’s happened?” I call to the two men in front: dark-haired, heavy-bearded veterans both. This shattered eye has sprinkled on the grass.

  The cop in the passenger seat calls back to me: “This guy God walked into a daycare center an hour ago with a high-powered rifle and started screaming. He’s got two teachers and nineteen two and three-year-old kids in there, and he says he’s gonna kill ’em if he doesn’t talk to you.”

  The cop driving shouts back: “He says he’s gonna kill ’em after he talks to you, too.”

  I think: Has sprinkled on the grass, yet nothing is in fragments that we knew … I think: Oh, shut up.

  “You got my name through Lifeline?”

  “Yeah,” says passenger cop. Traffic is stopping for us and we are speeding across the 59th Street Bridge toward Queens with a cop car before us and one in back for escort. It is quite thrilling. “Hey,” he says, “you’re not Andy Clementine’s wife, are you, in the D.A.’s office?”

  “Yes,” I shout. “Arthur.”

  “Yeah, right, Arthur,” he says, and smirks at his partner who smirks back.

  In my hyper-attuned state, I somehow understand this joke at once—with the same sense of excitement and clarity I felt when halfway through The Ambassadors I realized that Lambert Strether was so named because he was a proxy Christ and the two Mary’s and his selfless mission and everything all fell into place and, anyway, the point is that if Arthur is Andy, Jones is Amos, and this is New York’s finest’s revenge for their work in indicting their grandma-killing confrère. When the thrill of revelation dies—fast—gloom descends: I am in hostile territory, among dangerous men. Arthur is traveling from meeting to meeting. Elizabeth is waiting in the airport for the three o’clock flight to Geneva. I am alone.

  Belligerently, I jut my chin and think:

  The great beast dies,

  And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

  To the holocaust skies,

  Extend their arms

  For the fragments of his body’s empire,

  And ceremonies will begin at noon

  To obscure the faded thrill

  Of his falling and falling.

  This eye, this shattered eye,

  Has sprinkled on the grass,

  Yet nothing is in fragments that we knew,

  And where his phallus fell,

  There grows a naked tree,

  And you and I, we scrambled to the top like monkeys …

  We are in Queens: I do not know where we are. All Queens is divided into one part to me: two-family brick houses with little yards and laundry fluttering on the lines between one woman’s daydreams and another’s despair. But then, we are on a Main Street, a long business district. I am struck for some reason by a store that sells Indian saris and home appliances. And then, we turn a corner, and there are four million police cars, and policemen and women in uniforms and plainclothes crouching behind the cars, and many of them are pointing rifles at a little white two-storied barracks across the street that has a large picture window on the second story, and a door on the first with a rainbow painted on the sign above it and the words, “Rainbow Daycare Center” in different colored letters.

  Everything happens very fast. I get out of the car and am whisked in a squadron of policemen toward a small grocery store across the street from the center that is apparently being used as command central. I see the faces of women—the mothers—drawn and sorrowful, skim past me. Then I have only time to feel the heaviness of fear sink down on top of me as I pass close by all those guns: pistols and rifles. There is something very substantial—untheoretical—weighty—and fatal—about a gun.

  I am in the grocery store—swept through the door—and a man is introducing himself as Captain Cerone. He is short for a man, about two inches taller than me: a substantial piece of black suit with close-cropped hair and worried eyes, and the scratchy jaw that seems to be a requirement for joining the force. Something, come to think of it, about all these men—men everywhere—big, burly men—with guns no less—is beginning to make me feel very beardless.

  I brace myself by checking on my poem: it is still there. The captain has me by the elbow and is guiding me with a sort of weary chivalry past the tomatoes and the dairy freezer to the deli counter behind which is the phone. He is giving me instructions but at this point I am in a daze—depressed, frightened, girlishly inadequate, frightened, teary, frightened, frightened—and can’t make sense of them. Cerone is reassuring me and I hate him for it, but then he calls me Mrs. Clementine and I feel reassured. I try to think if I have heard any of his instructions: I remember I am not supposed to promise God anything and to keep him calm, but that sounds like the Old Testament to me. Then—too quickly, far too quickly—someone is putting the telephone receiver—and the lives of nineteen babies—into my hand.

  I hold the phone to my ear. Someone guides me to a stool and I sit down behind the butcher’s block. There are yellow legal-size papers scattered before me and a few pens. I eye the pens hungrily and lick my lips.

  “Hello?” I say.

  There is a long silence. I see men’s faces intent all around me—bodiless, floating, judging. Then: “Sam?”

  I feel myself relax at once. There is only the phone—the darkness of the phone and voices—there is only me and God. I am on familiar ground.

  “God,” I say, trying to take on my usual tone of control, “Sweetie, what are you doing?”

  “Well,” he says, “what I thought is I figured I’m going to first kill all these kids and these two teachers and then myself.”

  I fight off the urge to scream something sensible like “What?” and say: “Okay. Why are you going to do that?”

  “It’s just time,” he says—and there is an authority, a self-assurance in his voice that I have never heard before. That and the fact that I do not hear any children crying in the background turn my heart into an anvil. “It’s just time to stop all this nonsense,” he says, “and do the job. She shouldn’t have hurt me and the missiles and I’m going to stop it and bring it back.”

  Paralyzed, I’m brilliant. “You sound very upset,” I say.

  “No. The world’s a daisy. Don’t pull that Lifeline shit on me, Sam.”

  I do not apologize. We are battling for control of the situation, he and I, and I care about God, and if he wins, he loses.

  “All right,” I say, “then why do you want to talk to me?”

  “Well, if you don’t want to, hang up.”

  We both wait a bit, and then I say firmly: “Why do you want to talk to me?”

  And another beat, more dangerous. If he answers my question, he cedes a little authority to me. I half expect to hear the shots go off. I sit there like a statue.

  “I wanted to say goodbye,” he says.

  “I think maybe you want me to forgive you,” I answer.
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br />   “I don’t want to die alone, Samantha.”

  “I don’t want you to die at all.”

  He yells—but it is a yell of anguish, which I take to be a good sign. He yells: “I can’t! I can’t! I have to! I have to!”

  I don’t know what this means—perhaps, in the stress of the situation, I have forgotten—and in the absence of an answer, I think: Brimstone vapors pluming from the gaping lips and curling through the canyons of the ear that lies there on its side …

  “Sam?” he says softly.

  Reflexively, I reach for a pen and begin to snap its point in and out with my thumb.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I think I have to go now,” he says.

  “I think the first thing we have to do,” I say quickly, “is get those kids out of there.”

  He is silent.

  “Okay?” I say. “They have nothing to do with this, God.”

  “Oh, Sam.” His voice breaks. “I’m sorry. Forgive me, okay?”

  “I’m your friend, God.”

  “You’re my only friend.”

  “We have to get those children out of there before they get hurt.”

  He yells again, crying now: “That’s all you care about. What is that, the fucking maternal instinct?”

  “Well—” I say steadily, “do you think it’s right to kill children?”

  And I realize by the swiftness of his answer, by its tone of rehearsal, that this is what he’s been waiting for, this is the crux of his self-justification. “It is when God does it,” he says.

  My own stupidity, and the petty pleasure he gets out of catching me up, makes me mad. “Damn it,” I say, “I’m not so thrilled when He does it, and you’re not God.”

  Cerone’s eyes expand to the size of Frisbees and he gestures at me with both hands to calm down. To hell with Cerone.