Darling Clementine (2 page)

Enter the fellow in the polo shirt and Harvards who later turns out to be my Arthur, and is now walking briskly to our table, slipping between the chairs of the customers, smiling and excusing himself like the perfect gentleman I later find out he is. Arthur steps between Shithead and Lansky, glances at the former briefly, smiles, says, “Pardon me,” then hands Lansky a business card.

“My name is Arthur Clementine,” he says, in a deep, dare I say melodious voice that makes my nipples tingle. “I'm with the Manhattan D.A.'s office. Just make sure you don't swing first or anything, and after he beats you up, we can pretty definitely send him to prison.”

Arthur smiles and says “Excuse me,” to Shithead again, bows his head to me like a cowboy tipping his hat, and strides back to his chair by the wall.

Suddenly, Lansky is beautiful; Arthur has made him beautiful. As Shithead stands dumbfounded, Lansky slips Arthur's card into his shirtpocket, leans back, folds his hands on his concave stomach, and smiles—smiles—at him.

“I just want to tell you,” he says, “that I'm a psychiatrist, and I think you're a latent homosexual.”

I laugh as loudly as I can.

Shithead, red-faced, sputters: “All right, Jew-boy, go ahead: hide behind the law.”

At which, Lansky lets out a peal of wild, high-pitched laughter which I have no doubt will reverberate in Shithead's ears as he jerks off in his lonely dorm room that evening. After a few more curses, Shithead slinks away and I think it is then that I know I am going to marry Arthur. Because Arthur made Lansky beautiful; because Arthur wields the law against villainy, which means that he knows and accepts the world-as-it-is, which I do not, and because he made Lansky beautiful which means he understands that beauty transforms everything, even evil, into itself; and I am determined that I, and I alone, am going to be made beautiful by Arthur and give him the power of my beauty in return.

As soon as I get Lansky to stop trembling, I stand up and walk across the room to where Arthur is sitting; quickly, before I lose my confidence. He looks up: blue eyes. I extend my arm firmly.

“Allow me to shake your hand,” I say, “and give you a blow job.”

I am a little concerned about this approach because Arthur, as I say, is an attorney, but he laughs outright and takes my hand and within an hour I am gleefully gulping down the chances of millions of potential Clementines to inherit the family fortune.

That's what I mean about Arthur: hidden depths.

Today is Monday, January 7th. In the newspaper, the president says he will not compromise on the military budget, the arms talks have broken down in Geneva, the governor proposes a tax cut, a rebel in El Salvador tells his story, a fundamentalist group is pocketing the money they're supposed to be sending to the starving people in Ethiopia.… That's all I can do. I have never been much for reading the paper, but when I said that to Arthur, he raised one lush eyebrow at me and said, “You should.”

All day, I walk around repeating it to myself over and over so I will still have it when he gets home from work: “Budget, Breakdown, Tax Cut, Rebel, Fundamentalist. Budget, Breakdown, Tax Cut, Rebel, Fundamentalist. Budget, Breakdown, Tax Cut, Rebel, Fundamentalist.”

When Arthur comes through the door, I run into his arms, crying, “Did you read about that big tax cut for the rebels? And how about those fundamentalists?”

But he has already hoisted me over his shoulder and is carrying me to the bedroom.

First I will tell you about my therapist, and then I will tell you about God. My therapist is named James—Doctor James—Blumenthal. About a year ago, I walked into his office, which is on Park Avenue and 86th Street, and sat on the brown easy chair, facing him.

“My name is Samantha Bradford, and I am 24,” I said to him. “My usual sexual fantasy has to do with being branded.”

“Please don't smoke in here,” said Dr. Blumenthal—I had just put a cigarette in the corner of my mouth. “I have a problem with ventilation,” he said. I put the cigarette back in the pack (that night, I had a dream about that: trying desperately to stuff the cigarette back into the pack, but it was too big) and went ahead.

“Usually,” I said, “I fantasize that I am walking down the street when a black limousine pulls up beside me, two men jump out, drag me inside and drug me. When I wake up, I'm on an island—I don't know where, but it is a place immune to international law. A handsome millionaire has bought the island—he's a dark, bearded man in his fifties but in good shape, though sometimes—” I added, “he's someone I've met or seen or a movie star, but anyway, he's assembling a seraglio and he wants me to be in it. He commands me to take my clothes off or be killed so I have to do it, and then I have to bend over this sort of bench contraption and just lie there while he takes a red-hot brand and burns his initials into my ass. Usually, if I'm masturbating or having sex, I come then—with the image of me kicking and screaming and being branded, and then, as I'm coming down from the orgasm, I see myself lying across my master's lap or at his feet, all tamed and passive while he fingers me or fucks one of his other odalisques.”

Then, I stared Dr. Blumenthal directly in the eye—sort of defiantly, you might say. Dr. Blumenthal is in his late forties. He has a broad, mushy face, all pockmarked as if he had a bad case of acne when he was young. His hair is kind of grayish yellow, and very fine and falls over his forehead. Whenever he talks, just before he does, he always shifts his body in his chair as if to get more comfortable. He has a shapeless body, I guess: just a rumpled gray suit growing out of the chair.

So I look him in the eye, and he shifts a little and says:

“So what seems to be the problem, Samantha?”

I start to cry. Elizabeth told me I would and I swore not to, but there it is. I think it was the way he said my name, as if I were a friend who had come to him for help.

“I tried to kill myself a while ago,” I say, choking and sniffling.

Dr. Blumenthal shifts, looking concerned. “Did you succeed?”

“What?” I start to laugh at the same time I am sobbing and sobbing. Then it comes rushing out of me: “I don't want to die. I don't want to die, I'm so afraid. Can you help me?”

“It's hard to say,” he says. “Depends on whether or not I can find my branding iron.”

I laugh again.

“I know it's here somewhere,” he says, very serious, looking around.

Now, I am laughing more than crying, because this is not what I expected at all. When I'm finished with everything—crying, laughing, nose-blowing—I look at him, and I don't know what to say. I'm embarrassed—but it feels good to be embarrassed, it feels human, as if I have never felt human before.

Dr. Blumenthal shifts in his chair. “Tell me about the suicide attempt,” he says.

The fact is, as I am very careful to explain to him because I want to be as honest about everything as I can, I don't really know whether I meant to kill myself or not or whether I just meant to pretend to kill myself. This is a big problem with me: I am never sure if I'm pretending to be something or if I am or if there's a difference.

Take my drinking, for example. For a while, I wanted everyone to think of me as this tough, cynical, hard-drinking gal who just doesn't give a damn. So I put on a good show, drinking, puking, the whole bit whenever I get a chance. By the time of my suicide attempt, I am up to almost a fifth of scotch a day, and I still think it's just an act to get my friends to respect and pity me.

On the other hand, there's sex: I have often played the hyper-experienced, seen-everything dame who has slept with more men than I care to count when really, there have only been four men in my entire life—and one was a bit of an if—excluding Arthur, and the only way I could get myself to come—even to get wet sometimes—with any of them was by thinking up elaborate fantasies like the one I described to Dr. Blumenthal.

As for my suicide attempt, what can I say? Here I still am, of course, but on the other hand if it hadn't been for Elizabeth, who knows?

I
did
have half a fifth of Clan MacGregor in me, and I
did
take an entire bottle of Demerol, which is God knows how many thousands of milligrams. But when I lay back on the bed, I was anticipating how good it was going to feel to have all my friends weeping over me when they found my body in the morning, and the exclamations of gratitude that would pour forth from them when they took me to the hospital and brought me back to life.

I do know for certain, I tell Blumenthal, that I was not expecting anyone when Elizabeth came in a few minutes later. Elizabeth Harding (of Lansky fame) is an art teacher at The School of Visual Arts. She is 33, and I would describe her as being very together. Actually, I would describe her as a goddess, my second mother—which is giving the first too much credit—my guiding light, but anyway, you get the idea. She is tall and thin and has long brown hair which is very silky and falls down her back and all these wonderful character lines on her face that make her look very kind and wise.

She comes in, using her key and calling: “Cover him up, Sam, I left my portfolio here and I need …”

I am trying to get out of bed but there is an anvil on my forehead. I smile at her and lie back.

Elizabeth comes over to the bedside, looks at the bottle of Clan MacGregor and the bottle of Demerol.

Then she says: “Shit.”

She grabs me by the shirt collar with both hands and hauls me out of bed. She yanks me into the bathroom—I have not even got my feet under me, they are just skittering across the floor. She grabs my face in her hands, and pulls my head down over the toilet. With one hand, she squeezes my cheeks until my mouth opens, with the other, she sticks her fingers down my throat while I claw at her arms trying to stop her.

I vomit—tons of undigested capsules and amber scotch—I vomit forever, all over the toilet, over Elizabeth, over myself. Finally, I am on my knees, retching, and there is nothing left.

Then Elizabeth grabs me by the hair and says, “Get up,” and pulls me to my feet. I see her face is very red and her cobalt eyes are burning. I do not think I have ever seen her this angry. She slaps me in the face so hard my head snaps back, my hair flying. I put up my hands but she knocks them down and slaps me again. I am crying and groaning—I feel awful—and Elizabeth is screaming, “How dare you?” over and over again in a voice that does not even sound like hers. She cuffs me a good one on the side of the head, and then she throws me against the wall and screams, “I'm sick of you, Sam. Go to hell. Do you understand? Just go to hell.” She does not seem to know what she's saying.

When she is through yelling, she turns and walks right out the door, slamming it behind her. I hear her footsteps going down the stairs, and I slide down the bathroom wall to the floor, sobbing because I am all alone in the world and no one loves me.

Finally, I grab hold of the sink and pull myself to my feet, still sniffling. I stagger into the other room, and stand there for a minute not knowing what to do next—almost as if there's a script for this but I've forgotten my lines.

Then there are footsteps on the stairs again. Elizabeth comes back through the door, and just stands in front of me, looking at me. She is crying, too, and trembling—with rage, I think. I hang my head. I am ashamed though I don't know why she's so mad at me. I am also afraid she will hit me again.

She hits me again, so hard this time I just topple right over like a young dogwood I once saw blown down in a hurricane back home. I fall over on the bed and lie there sobbing. Elizabeth storms into the kitchenette and begins to make coffee.

It is Elizabeth who gives me Dr. Blumenthal's name, which she got from her therapist. I tell her I cannot afford therapy, but Elizabeth says Dr. Blumenthal will lower his rates to accommodate me because he is interested in the creative mind. I tell her that therapy will tamper with my muse, but she forces me to admit that death might do the same thing. I tell her that therapy will not work unless I
want
to go, but she says that's too bad and this therapy will have to work because
she
wants me to go. I do not protest very much after that because I feel I have made a terrible mess of things, but it does take me more than a month to make an appointment with Dr. Blumenthal.

When I leave Dr. Blumenthal's office after that first visit, I feel as I have never felt before in my life. It is March, and the sky is blue and the air cool, and Park Avenue is a great row of brilliantly green traffic lights running down to the Helmsley Building and the Pan Am Building rising behind that and there are clouds sailing over them that seem to me like the ships of some ghostly nation migrating to a new country, a new life that will set its people's history on a fruitful and promising course. Suddenly, I realize that I have never written a good poem, never had a fulfilling orgasm, never truly tasted the sweetness of chocolate ice cream, or seen the clouds or the buildings or the trees, or known peace—and that all this unhappiness has been
unnecessary
—completely unnecessary when there all along sat Dr. Blumenthal waiting to take it off my shoulders.

I am not a fool, I know that this elation will not last, that there is all manner of work to be done, of terrors to be faced, of dragons to be slain before I ever see this golden country again. But now that I have seen it, I will keep it in my mind and remember it so I will know what I am fighting for, where I am traveling.

I leave Park Avenue behind, and head for Third where there is a Baskin Robbins. I must have some chocolate ice cream—quick, before it melts.

Which brings me to God and penises. After three months or so of seeing Dr. Blumenthal twice a week, I find I am thinking about penises constantly. Not thinking about them exactly, more like singing about them, dreaming about them, inhabiting the idea of them. To be honest, this has never happened to me before, even when I was a teenager. In fact, I feel like a teen-ager as I walk the streets of Manhattan, secretly staring at businessmen's zippers, blushing, smiling. Cocks. Before, I always thought of them—I did not realize it before but—with some distaste, as if they were an exposed piece of intestine or a dangling blood vessel. Now, they appear to me like lovely, spreading oak trees, or tender stalks shooting out of the earth, only I am not thinking of trees or stalks—I am thinking about pricks. Sleek, silky, hard, pink, salty, motile, probing—certain words, begin to make me crazy. Pink. Hard. Mushroom. The word spurt mentioned casually in conversation makes me lick my lips and go all drowsy. “Hey, Sam, let's spurt over to the hardware store for some salty, pink mushrooms. Sam? Sam?” I begin to write odes. I have never had much use for the ode before.