Darling Clementine Read online

  I stood up and smashed the scotch bottle on the edge of the lampstand. The crash, the glass, the spraying liquor terrified me, and my hands shook as I pointed the bottle at him and screamed, “Put it back!”

  “What are you, fucking crazy?”

  “Put it, put it, Gordon, put it!”

  “Put down that bottle, girl.”

  “Put it or I’ll kill you, Gordon,” I said, and I was sober as a judge.

  He put it down. He hesitated for a moment, but then he smirked and snorted and he dropped it back into the drawer. I couldn’t move. I stood there trembling, clutching the broken bottle in both hands, pointing it at him.

  Gordon shot his cuffs. “You’re crazy, baby,” he said. “This is over for me. This is over for this boy right here.” He started swaggering toward the door.

  “Don’t leave me,” I whispered, starting to cry, following him, as he walked, with the jagged edge of the bottle.

  “You’re crazy, girl, you need help,” he said.

  “Please, oh please, don’t, don’t go,” I said, pointing the bottle at him.

  “You’re fucking out of your mind,” said Gordon—and that’s how it ended: with me pointing that broken bottle at the slamming door, and begging him not to go.

  Or not quite. That is, I suppose, it really ended when, after the door shut, I fell back into the chair, moaning, beyond tears, just moaning like a creature in pain, and then suddenly doubled over, clutching my stomach, with the worst cramp I have ever had, and then, relaxing, became aware of the dampness that had gathered in my underwear, and so knew that my period had begun.

  Elizabeth, I guess, was angry at me over the scene in the Black Coffee because she didn’t come to see me for over a month. Most of that time I spent drunk. One night I spent with a man named Hank, a married executive-type who had sex with me, I think, after I’d taken him back to my apartment and passed out.

  When Elizabeth finally did come by, I guess she could see that I wasn’t in the best of shape, but she held her tongue because I told her that Gordon was gone and I guess she thanked heaven for small blessings. She made us coffee, of course, and stayed to chat for a long time. But all through the conversation, I kept feeling myself floating away from her, away from her and everything as if the world were a dock and I had not been properly secured. I wanted to call out, to call to Elizabeth to bring me back in, but I knew if she did, if I got too close, she would see me for the horror, the monstrosity I really was; she would see that I was not fit for humankind and push me off again, this time forever.

  When she finally left—she had stayed much longer than she’d meant to, and she had to meet Lansky for dinner, and when she finally left, I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands dangling between my knees, just staring at the portfolio case she had accidentally left behind. I’m sure I must have stared at it for hours.

  I was in love with my therapist and yet aware that I must one day lose him to my own redemption; I was haunted by not-funny memories of not-funny Gordon, and less-funny thought of deadpanned Dad; the U.S. had overturned the government of Nicaragua and the Russians, let me tell you, were miffed; I wanted to have my beloved husband’s baby and was worrying at my motives like the proverbial dog avec proverbial bone—and this was the week God decided to crack open like one not-very-cosmic egg and lay his woes upon my elegantly shaped head. Which only goes to prove the old saying I just made up that trying to live as if tranquility were the status quo is like treating the surf as a lake disturbed by occasional waves. It’s the surfboard we want, my darlings: the method.

  So—God. He called me down there in the cluttered, white cubicle in the basement of St. Sebastian’s and it was, as they say, intense from the very start. I answered the phone to find only the sound of weeping, and when I asked who was there, received a piteous, terrified wail for answer:

  “This—is—G-a-a-a-ad!”

  “What?” I said. “What’s—what? What’s the matter?”

  “Oh, something. Oh, something awful is going to happen. Oh, if only I hadn’t loved you, Sam. If only I didn’t love you.”

  Calmly dropping my jaw to my chest, I suavely slapped my reddening cheek with one hand and dropped back in my chair with a poise that I must say was commendable. I realized then the shock, the shock and the control, that must have lain behind that one grave Blumenthalian nod when I told him of my love for him. He must be used to it by now, but then—maybe it is always a shock to be loved—or maybe it was just me, just the shock of the similarity between what I had said to Blumenthal and what God was saying to me. I had neither the time nor the courage to face, for the moment, the psychic implications of being thrust, for this particular nonce, into Blumie’s shoes, and so I contented myself as I began to recover, with wondering whether, out of this chain of secrets, of dark terrors, forged between God and me and Blumenthal, and maybe his therapist and maybe his therapist’s wife and maybe his therapist’s wife’s mother and maybe his therapist’s wife’s mother’s priest and so, possibly, back to God—whether out of this chain we might yet forge another chain, a better one.

  I used an old jogger’s trick—taught to me, of course, by an old jogger—which is to control your breath and speak clearly so the fellow ahead of you won’t know how winded you really are.

  “Do you think that it’s wrong to love me, God?” I asked.

  “Something terrible will happen, and I shouldn’t have done it, but I didn’t know, I didn’t know …”

  “Didn’t know …?”

  “That it was wrong, that something so terrible would happen if she found me.”

  “Your mother.”

  He only sobbed.

  “Because she found you loving someone?”

  He croaked on an intake of breath: “Yes.”

  “A girl? A boy?”

  “Myself!” he wailed.

  “She found you masturbating, and she punished you.”

  Another choked: “Yes.”

  “How? How did she punish you, God?”

  He started shrieking at me, and I felt his hysteria run into me and become, in part, my own. “I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t! I can’t!”

  What’s funny—not hilarious funny, but odd funny—is how minor, really, another person’s secrets seem for the most part. I never did find out how God’s mother punished him, but I did assume a terrible abuse—and God knows that parents are capable of it with that little helpless ball of not-themselves in their power and yet out of their control. Yet even if it was as bad as I could imagine—and I have, I suppose, quite an imagination—it somehow did not seem commensurate with what became of him. Human childhood, I am convinced, by nature creates neurosis, the neurosis of life dying to its infinite possibilities. There is no way—this, I think, is what Blumenthal was trying to tell me—no way to raise an enlightened child, even if you raise a relatively well-adjusted one like Arthur. But can this dreadful place, this earth, these babies starving under Arthur’s eyes in Africa, these Judy Honeggers blown to kingdom come, these missiles stationed nose to nose, these gas chambers, these empires, this history, be nothing more than an immense construct atop the little moment when a child’s fingers are yanked away from his own flesh? It does not seem possible that so great and terrible a cathedral could be built on the head of a pin but, on the other hand, once it has been accomplished, once you have prayed in the cathedral, have worked there, once you have been married in it and had children and had children die there and slid your parents into its vaults, once you have waged war for control of the cathedral, debated the best course for the cathedral’s future, written a thousand articles for the cathedral’s newspaper—how, then, do you begin to pull the pin free?

  “God,” I said, into his sobbing.

  “I love you, Sam, that’s all: I just love you.”

  “Tell me what she did to you,” I said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you couldn’t bear it.”

  “But I
will.”

  He paused, catching his breath. I waited, having already lost mine.

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

  “God …”

  “I think—I’m sorry—I think I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  And I was silent. I sat there, feeling myself losing him, and simply couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “I love you, Sam,” he said again.

  And then I thought of something. “I love you, too, God,” I said—happy, especially considering Dr. B. and me, to discover that it was the truth.

  “I have to—I have to do it,” he said—and he hung up.

  Well, I wandered about, and I wandered about and I wandered about some more in the summer evening. And as I finally headed up Fifth Avenue for home, the sky was hanging onto the daylight by its fingernails, as it will in early July, and the air was riffling the sodden heat with a breeze from the East River.

  I came into the apartment to find Arthur lying on the couch, reading some court papers and wearing a Mickey Mouse hat. He glanced up and said, “Ah!” and continued reading.

  I sat down on the edge of the couch, my shoulders hunched, head hung, staring at the floor. Then I took a peek at the hub.

  “Nice hat,” I told him.

  He tried to look up at it. “It’s for you. I got it for you for your birthday.”

  I squeezed his thigh. “That was nice of you. My birthday’s in April.”

  “I couldn’t remember, so I panicked: I thought—if I don’t know when it is it might be today.”

  I laughed, then I sighed. I climbed over him and lay down on the couch with my head on the opposite arm, facing him, and my legs surrounding him as his stockinged feet pressed against my vagina, making me hum.

  He stripped the hat off and handed it to me and I put it on.

  “You look depressed,” he said.

  “I’m supposed to look like Mickey Mouse.”

  “You look like Mickey Mouse when he gets depressed.”

  “Easy with the big toe,” I said.

  Arthur set his papers on the floor. “How about a little tender loving cunnilingus?” he said.

  “Oh, you lawyers with your forked tongues.”

  But he didn’t move—which was pure Arthur: always the appropriate thing. In this case, to wait.

  I had my head leaned back on the arm, and was staring at the ceiling, warming to his toes. But now I took his foot in my hand and felt it waggling.

  “MacArthur?” I said.

  “MacMa’am?”

  “Did your mother ever—catch you—doing something?”

  “Never, but Frenchie and the forger bought it on the Rhine.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Okay. You mean, I take it, something of the sexual persuasion.”

  “I do.”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact,” said Arthur. “She walked in on me once when I was playing doctor with Claire Rutherford.”

  “Not the infamous Claire Rutherford?”

  “Terror of Europe, the very one.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Six, seven, eight, I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Seven.”

  “What did she say?”

  “‘Oh, Doctor, Doctor!’”

  “I mean your mother, bobo.”

  “Oh.” Arthur considers. His toes wiggle pleasantly against my fingers. “I don’t rightly recall,” he says. “Something about ‘that nice Schweitzer boy.’”

  “No.”

  “No. I don’t know. I think she asked us if we wanted milk and cookies, and we did.”

  “She broke it up.”

  “What was she going to do?”

  “Don’t get defensive,” I say.

  He doesn’t answer me and I am glad because it was a creepy thing to say.

  “Were you embarrassed?” I asked him.

  “Tolerably. All those naked chocolate chips blossoming wantonly beside the creamy white milk …”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Yes. I was embarrassed, and Claire was mor-ti-fied. But we’d been pretty quick about covering up and, anyway, to be quite frank, it was bloody well worth it.”

  “Did your father have a chat with you?”

  “Yes.” Arthur laughs fondly; my lucky Arthur. “He waited just long enough so I was supposed to not think it was connected to the event, if you get my drift.”

  “Nice try, Dad.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say?”

  “Oh, the usual in his own inimitable fashion. ‘Dashed fine thing, this sex business, dashed fine, what?’”

  “But …?”

  “But—we gentlemen must be considerate, sensitive, steadfast, loyal, true—and try to remember that every cunt has a human being attached to it.”

  “Chester didn’t say that.”

  “Chester didn’t say that.”

  Taking off the mouse ears and tossing them to the floor, I lift my head to look at him. He is watching me quietly, hands folded on his abdomen. He is smiling wryly, and yet not warily, not cautiously. He is simply watching me, waiting.

  “Have you slept with a lot of different women?”

  “You’re the seventeenth.” Pure Arthur.

  “Were any of them as good as me?”

  “Not one.”

  “Arthur.”

  “All of them.”

  “Arthur!”

  “Some of them.”

  “Arthur!”

  “I pass. Try History for 80, Art.”

  “Arthur, do you think people have souls?”

  “Well,” says Arthur, considering. “I deal with lawyers all day, but I suppose it’s possible. What do you mean, exactly?”

  “Well, I mean, do you think it’s possible that, say, two twins could have exactly the same upbringing and yet be entirely different?”

  “Oh—you mean, like, do they have some ground level—essence to begin with?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Yeah, I suppose. Theoretically.”

  “I suppose,” I say, “since you can’t have a soul without a body, and you can’t have a body without a unique personal history, you can’t have a soul without a unique personal history and the question becomes meaningless.”

  “That was my next guess,” says Arthur, snapping his fingers.

  I sigh. He watches. He smiles. He waits.

  “Arthur,” I say, “I want to have a baby.”

  “Really? Is Blumenthal allowed to do that?”

  “Not with Blumenthal!” I wail. “With youmenthal.”

  “With mementhal?”

  “I’m serious.”

  “Yes, well, it would be rough if we had to tell the poor tot we were just kidding, wouldn’t it?”

  I pinch his toes. He says ouch.

  “Do you think I’d be a good mother?” I ask.

  “Great.”

  “Arthur.”

  “Awful.”

  “Arthur!”

  “Great-awful.”

  “The York-Lancaster conflict.”

  “What was the War of the Roses?”

  Now, it is my turn. I smile at him. I wait. Finally, Arthur pulls his feet free, and sits up on the edge of the couch. He stares at the coffee table for a long moment, a-think. Then he looks up at me.

  “Tell you what, Sam,” he says. “Let’s not.”

  “Not …?”

  “Let’s not have a baby.”

  “Ever?”

  “No—right now.” He stands up and starts to unbutton his shirt—he has already taken off his tie. “Let’s not have a baby right this minute.”

  I consider, then sit up and begin undoing my blouse. “Do you think we shouldn’t?”

  “Absolutely.”

  My breasts are free. He is stepping out of his pants.

  “How don’t we do it?” I ask.

  “We just—” Visionary in his jockey shorts, he raises his hands before him and gazes dreamily
over my head. “—we make love to each other with every pore. We make love to our lost selves through each other. We let our penis and vagina expand over every inch of us until it doesn’t matter which part of us is where or even if it’s my part or your part, and if we finally do release, it will be all of us, both of us, blown away into forever for no earthly reason but the fun of it!”

  “Why, Arthur!” I say, pulling my jeans and panties off just as fast as I can. I jump to my feet. We stand before each other, naked—naked, and totally at a loss.

  “How do we start?” I ask him.

  “How’s this?” he says, and he sticks his elbow in my ear.

  I fall to the couch laughing, and he is on top of me laughing, kissing me and laughing, kissing me everywhere and laughing and laughing and already with thee, Arthur: Tender is the night!

  Eight

  This is what happened to me on Friday, the thirteenth of July: the day most people remember as the day the leaders of the great nations first exchanged threats of holocaust.

  For me, it was, to begin with, the day Elizabeth and Lansky were married in a brief ceremony at eight a.m. at the U.N. chapel with both a minister and a rabbi presiding. Buck and Allie were there, looking, respectively, ovoid and shapeless, but smiling nonetheless and saying, “Yep, our little girl,” a lot. Lansky’s parents were there, too. They sat in the back pew because they didn’t want to be any trouble. She was a very big woman who sat erect with her hands folded in her lap, trying to look like everything on earth was going exactly the way she had planned and arranged it, though it seemed to these hyper-sensitive eyes that she was unhappy about the whole thing: angry and afraid. Lansky’s father, a series of sagging eggs placed one on top of another, wore a black suit, a wrinkled nose and a strained smile: he looked, throughout, as if he had just bent over to smell a rose and found a piece of shit in the middle of it.

  Arthur was on don’t-worry-Lansky detail, and I was saying fine-perfect-it’s-beautiful-Elizabeth over and over and over again. She really was beautiful, too, in a knee-length, pink linen dress, and a lace posy in her hair. She was smiling so much that, at first, I thought she was just pretending to be happy. But she really was happy—she was just pretending not to be scared.

  No one gave them away or anything, and there was no best man or maid of honor per se. Arthur and I were the witnesses and stood behind and to one side of the couple while they were joined by the two clergymen Lansk called “the reb and preacher show.” Lansky shook with terror and Elizabeth was as radiant as the sun and the only reportable highlight was when the rabbi asked Lansky if he planned to love and respect Elizabeth through sickness, health, wealth, poverty and the rest till death did they part and he said, “Do …? You’re asking me? Yes. Absolutely. That’s right.”