Darling Clementine (7 page)

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 have 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.

I turn to the gourmet column: “Taming The Recalcitrant Liver Paté.” I cannot cook well, and Arthur secretly wishes I'd learn, though he's never said so. The recipe down the side of the column blurs before me—not tears, just the limits of my willingness to comprehend. I reach for the clock radio and turn it on. The classical music station Arthur wakes up to: I haven't read the paper very well today but the station is owned by the
Times
so maybe it counts. They are playing a very comforting Mozart piece, violins, I don't know very much about this but I can float away with the best of them.

At six o'clock, the news comes on, and I think: “Oh good: information fast.” The announcer has that classical music station voice and sounds like a doctor telling you he's sorry, but six weeks is all you can hope for.

“The top story: A Brahman in the mountains of Tibet has changed the universe with a revelatory flash,” he says. Blockade, blockade, blockade, really.

Then: “The Manhattan District Attorney's Office announced today that they have begun a full-scale investigation into the shooting death last week of Renée Hines. The 76-year-old Mrs. Hines was gunned down by a police officer …” and so on. Then: “Assistant District Attorney Arthur Clementine told reporters he expects an indictment to be handed down shortly.”

I laugh. There's Arthur talking on the radio. “We expect an indictment to be handed down shortly,” he says. I applaud. Then back to Dr. Gloom. “Police spokesmen are saying the investigation has seriously lowered their morale, which may cause them to accidentally gun down other innocent people in the near future.” I boo-hiss. The weather: “March became a season of mourning today when memories of hostile fathers swept in over the coastal waters …”

The door clicks, opens, shuts. The star of our show is home. He stands at the foot of the bed looking down at me for a minute, then begins to undress. Arthur always begins with his tie, I've noticed. This is not a particularly significant detail, but it turns me on today for some reason.

“I heard you on the radio,” I say. There is now a very complicated, mathematical-sounding Bach fugue on. I pull my sweatshirt over my head and reach back to unfasten my bra.

Arthur, looking at my breasts, looks boyish, wondering. “We won,” he says, as if he can't believe it. “He killed that woman and we're gonna get him.”

I slide my jeans down. “Goes to show you: good always triumphs over evil in the end.”

Arthur stands naked before the bed: his pale skin, the slender thrill of his muscles. “It never does,” he says in the same tone of voice. “Never. But we're gonna get him.”

“Beat me, Arthur,” I say. “Bugger me. Make me your sex slave.”

“Oh, come on, Sam, I'm not into that stuff,” he says. He looks down. His cock has suddenly shot up like a rocket. He runs to the bathroom for the vaseline.

I am rueful, lying across his knee, coming at every other blow. I am rueful, cynical and worldly wise. I will go no more a'roaming (crack) in search of Death (whack) I will fight no wars (crack) no bulls, I will drink no liquor (slap) and take no drugs (crack) because Death is not just a radical (whap) he is also, maybe mostly, a bourgeois.

So I continue as Arthur hurls me onto the bed, asshole open and to the sky, the eye of heaven on earth. I go on as, greased, his prick wobbles into me and strokes deeper and deeper to the canonic rhythms of Bach, giving me a sense of security and a searing pain that does not give me pleasure, but is a pleasure in itself.

Stroke and anti-stroke, I continue: Death is a TV set. Death is a dollar bill. Death is a Communist revolution. Jesus Christ is Death. Death is the family, fidelity, promiscuity. I am coming and coming and coming. Death is a job. Death is modesty. Death is the vacuum cleaner of the loins sucking up all our pleasures into themselves. Death is birth and love and muzziness and faith and non-belief.

But most of all—oh, oh, most of all, my darlings—Death is fucking me right up the ass, and I love it, love it, love it!

Four

I am a bourgeoise. I will never attain Buddhahood. Such is life. Maybe I will be given Buddhahood for free, here on Fifth Avenue, maybe it will flash through the window and find me here amidst my comforts and I will be suddenly enlightened but still have air conditioning. Then I can appear on the cover of a book, a big closeup of my face, smiling. “Zen And The Art of Investment!” “Satori Through Money Management.” “Things and Tranquility.”

What am I to do with this ordinary life? Last Saturday, Arthur watched the Mets game on TV. I brought him a beer and a bowl of crackers. I lay with my head on his lap and he stroked my hair. What, oh what, will happen, I was wondering, when Arthur discovers that I
like
this, that I am contented as a cat, that despite the fact that my poetry is growing more and more radical, is being published like crazy, is being hailed in some circles suddenly as a new voice, that despite this,
I
am becoming more and more happy with the little pleasures, the carving on the scrolled leg of the sofa, the shows we can afford to go to see, the dinners out. What, oh, what, will Arthur do when he realizes that I am
not
his secret song, and never was. I am not even a Clementine of Philadelphia, merely a Bradford of Greenwich: I would be content with
less
than this, God help us.

Now and again, I hear my father snickering, and I rage, rage against the dying of the light. But then I think maybe the light is not dying, maybe there is more to come; maybe it was the wrong light—or maybe these are just the usual rationalizations of the 25-year-old encasing herself in amber like a fly. All I know is that if someone quotes Flaubert to me, that rot about bourgeois life leading to radical art, they will not take his throat from me until they pry my cold, dead fingers from around it.

Instead, I think of Rome a lot. I think of Keats. I used to think Keats was the Jesus Christ of poetry, crucified by the critics, his fiery particles snuffed out by their articles, rising up again to give us modern verse. But I do not hate the critics anymore. How can I? I know they are scared and bewildered, too; they too are trying to hold on to themselves. What, indeed,
are
they to say if their Catullus, with his big balls jouncing and his prick high, comes their way? “Does this mean we cannot keep our winter coats? Or wear the golden collar on our throats?”