Darling Clementine (10 page)

I was scared. Would he call? Would he tell me? And what would I do, sworn to secrecy. If only it had not been true, I could have enjoyed the romance of it. True, I felt like a little girl, unable to cope. I went for days without writing, feeling that it was children's rhymes compared to the real world of policemen and district attorneys, newspaper reporters and high-powered rifles. God had shot down a young woman and I was to blame. Maybe my probing had set him off. Maybe Judy was a replacement for me. It was distinctly not funny.

I went to St. Thomas' and prayed. On my knees, tears in my eyes. “Oh God, don't let it be God, God. Make it not God, God. God, God, God.”

I watched Arthur, day after day. I had lived with him a week, I was in the first flush of living with him. Well, not flush—more like bloom, a burgeoning moment that would culminate the night of Jake's party.

It was two days before that that they arrested the man who had shot Judy Honegger. A thirty-two-year-old black man with a wife and three kids. He had gone nuts after losing his job in a shoe store. God, I felt certain, was a white man, unmarried. But still, I followed Arthur around the apartment for an hour, saying, “Are they sure?”

“What's with you, angel?” said my brand new Arthur. “You afraid you're next?”

“Did he mention God?”

“Yeah, he said, ‘God, they fired me from that shoe store.'”

“Marcodel?”

“Who?”

“Did he have a name for his rifle?”

“Spot, I think. Samantha …” He took me by the shoulders in witty-but-earnest Arthurian fashion. “It's him. We got him. It's just a guy.”

But I did not feel safe until the next morning, in the basement of St. Sebastian's, when the phone rang and I picked up to hear a long silence. I knew that silence right off: it was God, at last.

“Samantha,” he said tentatively.

And I started scolding him. “God! Where have you been? Do you know how worried I was?”

And he started whining. “I had to go to the hospital. I got hit by a rock.”

“Oh, God,” I said. “I'm sorry.”

“These guys, they threw a rock at me and it hit me and I had to have stitches.”

“Aww,” I said.

There was a silence. I was so happy and relieved to hear from him, I had to keep myself from talking. Then he said: “I missed you, Samantha.”

“I missed you, too, God.”

His voice brightened. “I got a job, though.”

“Did you? That's wonderful! Doing what?”

“Hurling fireballs at the angels of Olagon.”

“Hey, there's a growing field.”

I heard his breathing for a long moment. “They called me a pansy,” he said then.

“The punks who threw the rock.”

“Yeah. They were leaning against a car, and they started saying things. They called me a pussy. They said I walked funny.”

“I'm sorry that happened,” I said.

“So I shouted, ‘Rauss, Scheisskopf!' And they threw the rock.”

I wanted to say something, though I had nothing to say. Sometimes, with God, I found myself falling in love with the tenderness and authority in my own voice, and hoping he would say something with which I could sympathize.

“That's German,” he said.

“I'm sorry to hear that,” I said, then slapped myself on the forehead for an idiot.

“I knew a German lady once. She taught me.”

“Oh?” said I, casually gagging with excitement.

“She taught me songs, and how to do a somersault. I can do a somersault. She built blocks with me. I think—” He stopped. I held my breath. He held his breath. Then we held each other's breath—the silence seemed to go on that long. “I think, maybe, she taught me how to use the potty, I'm not sure. I don't remember. She went away when I was three or so. She married a guy.”

I thought of Bert then, as it happens. Little Bert smiling, crying, talking, laughing, loving with his whole body, investing his whole body in those portions of the world he loves. What, then, if that body were stripped away from him? I thought of Michael, wrestling his way into me, tearing aside my maidenhead like a curtain. What then if behind the curtain was just a darkness in the shape of a human, a holy emptiness into which life could be tossed like a coin into a wishing well, and yet find no flesh, no hand to hand you back the wish. And then again—then again, if we were to reach into that hole, that absence, if we were to grasp some old humanity by the lapels and haul it back into being, what cancers, also, what sufferings, shames and pains would we haul back with it. It is easier, I think, to sing the praises of the flesh into that eternal nothing, to sing and raise our virginity like a policeman's hand. Oh, my cunt, my forgotten orchid, it is easier, far easier to mourn you, far easier, still, never to remember …

These thoughts were interrupted by a tiny voice over the phone, a little voice singing as if in the distance, hollow over the phone as if it were at the bottom of a well.

“Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles. Uuuuber aaaalles …”

“Oh hon?”

I creep, I creep from the kitchen, coffee mug in hand. I see Arthur lying on the couch, his legs extending from under the raised tent of the newspaper.

“Oh hon? Oh hon?”

I creep, I creep, my hands trembling, remembering God as he was that day he did not kill Judy Honegger. I believe in nothing now, it occurs to me. It occurs to me—quite suddenly—that that is it: that is the light, the little candle burning at the bottom of the darkness of my bourgeois existence. That, finally, was the Poet's gift in the Roman graveyard: Negative capability. “To follow the Tao is simple,” says Lao Tse. “You need only give up all your opinions.” Deep down, that candle of unbelief is burning, unnoticed, forcibly unnoticed even by me lest I extinguish it with a frightened hand. But I will not extinguish it; I will cup my hands around it; I will fan it when I can; I believe in nothing; I will believe in nothing; I will dump this cup of coffee on Arthur's head.

But as I approach the couch, I have another flash of recognition. That is: I notice the newspaper that Arthur is holding is upside down, that the headline, which stretches in two lines full across the top of the page—odd for a Saturday—the headline reads: “.ecnaifeD swoV abuC .tsetorP steivoS .augaraciN fO ograbmE sredrO tnediserP”

“Oh hon?” says Arthur.

Holding the coffee mug in one hand, I reach out with the other and tear the paper away.

There is Arthur. He is wearing his sunglasses upside down. A pencil is sticking out of his ear.

“Or,” he says, “we can stay home and eat each other out until we croak.”

I lean back on my hip, and sip some coffee, considering.

Five

My Search For God. By Samantha Clementine.

After God did not kill Judy Honegger, I became angry and guilty at once. Angry because I had fallen on my knees in St. Thomas' Cathedral, mewling and whining and pleading like the coward I am. And guilty because it had worked, and if I rebelled now, God might take it all back again.

I was caught in a bind, because the point was: If God had not killed Judy, then God had. If God was innocent, God was guilty, if you get my drift. If I was indebted to God for saving me from God, then the God to whom I was indebted was not the sort of God to whom I wished to be. And it's no good talking about free will either. Whatever free will Judy Honegger had had was in a little pool in the gutter of 102nd street. Not that Judy meant much to me, but when a violinist gets killed, somebody has to take the fall.

More than anything, I think—or think now—it was humanity I was looking for, connection in aspiration, voices raised together in holy song. Whatever experience of the mystic I had had—in session with Blumenthal sometimes, sometimes on the hotline, sometimes, especially that one time after Jake's party, in bed with Arthur, in Rome—had all depended on connection, human connection. And if humans connect in religious circumstances—what then?

Now, my parents are Episcopalian. We went to church on Easter and Christmas. The whole business was so hypocritical and ridiculous that the religion had died on me like an old man on top of a whore, and I was determined to squirm out from under the dead weight.

So when Arthur and I returned from Rome, I began attending Catholic services, dragging myself out of bed on Sundays to sit in the eerie draught of the voluminous St. Elmo's Cathedral. I followed the liturgy, reveling in the guilty thrill of a new creed—though Catholicism, God knows, is not all that different from the other, which maybe added to the kick: it was like changing sides in an internecine feud. I invested the symbolism with my soul, hoping to bring it to life without losing my sense of the world, without placing all my bets on heaven or eternity. I developed, that is to say, a theory:

The Father, if I recall it rightly, was Being; Jesus was Consciousness; the Holy Ghost was the world created by the interaction of the two. Each person of Godhead was necessary: Being, eternally creative, had to make consciousness by its own laws (“And God so loved the world …” I was riddled with biblical quotations.); Consciousness, by necessity, by the fact of its perception, created the big HG, which, in turn, transformed God and Free Will and Eternity into realities. When faced with Pure Being, Consciousness,
by necessity
, I say, saw God. This was the meaning of Moses at the Burning Bush: faced with a vision of the true nature of being as Life-Fertility-Space (The Bush) coexisting forever with Death-Destruction-Time (El Flamo), Moses immediately demanded that its voice (God) proclaim its name (I AM). In other words (words), Being, faced with Consciousness, developed an I. Professor Clementine, in her book
My Secret Loves
, notes that this theme is echoed in the
Bhagavad Gita
, no matter how you pronounce it, when Vishnu shows Arjuna his true self as Life-Death-Space-Time united, and Arjuna begs him to assume the form of Vishnu again. Einstein also had something to say on this subject, but I forget what.

This was wonderful! I was a Catholic!

I went to confession.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.”

“In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost …”

“It's been 25 years since my last confession.”

“Hit the highlights.”

“Uh, anal intercourse with a duck playing the kazoo.”

“Do three Our Fathers, four Hail Mary's, six choruses of ‘Fascinating Rhythm,' a buck and wing, and jump up and down swinging a rubber chicken over your head, crying ‘
Garçon, garçon, où est le château
?'”

I lapsed.

One Saturday, I went to see Lansky. Elizabeth let me in. Lansky was pacing back and forth across the room with the
Times
in his hand. The Supreme Court had just decided that it was all right to strip-search high school students as long as you beat them senseless first. It was the “reasonable torment” criterion. Lansky slapped the paper with the back of his hand.

“My God,” he shouted. “These people are Nazis.”

“Lansky,” I said, “I want to become a Jew.”

“Hold this,” said Lansky angrily. He pushed the newspaper into my hand. “Now slap it with the back of your hand and shout, ‘My God, these people are Nazis!'”

I slapped the paper and it flew up into the air, scattered and fluttered down in a hundred pieces like a Brobdingnagian snowfall.

A page of the business section landed on Lansky's head, folding down over his ears like a shawl.

He sighed. “Have you tried the Unitarians?”

Now, the Unitarians, there is no question, have the best music: Mozart, Luther, the Vedas, anything so long as it swings. They also have the best sermon titles. “The Triumph of Walt Whitman,” “The Holographic God,” “I Am Afraid,” etc. Also, the preacher is allowed to use the word “lover.” “… more sympathetic to your husband or wife or lover,” he will say. Very promising, all in all.

The problem was symbolism for me—or the lack of it. Around this time, I had started to read a lot of the works of Joseph Campbell—swallowing them like pills I was actually—and Joe—or, as he is known in academic circles, Big Joe, or even the Joester—has much to say on this subject. Symbols, it turns out—bread and wine, resurrection, burning bushes—are neither important in themselves, worthy of worship in themselves, nor needful of theoretical interpretation or explication. Symbols are living representations of the indescribable thing. Thus Big Joe, as I understand him. In other words, you don't have to actually believe in the transubstantiation of bread and wine, or to interpret it as, say, the guilt feast of the body of the slaughtered father-son: the thing is to feel it, to experience it, through the way it acts upon the network of your personality, as—well, as something that cannot be said in any other terms. Here is the leap of experience across the river of which the water-shy horse of theory is incapable. Symbols—metaphors, parables—are the key. (“He will open up his mouth in parables and utter things kept secret since the world was made …” Isaiah. “I got a million of 'em.” Durante.)

All this I say because, for a month or so, with the Unitarians, my pilgrim heart found a resting place. The big church on 85th Street, with its enormous windows letting light in through the clinging vines. The hymns—“Morning Has Broken”; God, I love that hymn—the kindly, intelligent minister with his halting authority, the impression he gave that he would only guide you by the light of his own uncertainty—all this filled me with a sense, not of peace, but of nobility, of the nobility of not knowing, of declaring myself a searcher, of humility in the face of eternity, and yet the assurance of my right to inhabit this corner of it. In other words, if I had been fashioned to have a religion, an organized religion, I would have been a Unitarian.

But I was not so fashioned. The symbols got me—the lack of them—even the symbols that somehow symbolized the absence of symbols. I would climb the stairs to the broad, open doors of the church, and as the minister shook my hand—he always remembered my name; I've forgotten his: Goodwin, I think—as he shook my hand, I would look up at the pillars flanking the door and note ruefully that they were in fact pilasters, made of white plaster and capable of supporting nothing. The ivy climbing up the wall was newly planted and, when I went inside, the cross above the altar—a vague representation of a cross made with gold wire—proclaimed its inadequacy. Where was the plaster Jesus? His grotesque agony, his blood, his pain? If the only religion you can stomach is not a religion at all—then why bother?