Darling Clementine (3 page)

I am ceaselessly tingling, frustrated—because I am also, suddenly, very shy—but also awake to the pleasure of anticipation. Forever will I love and he be fair. I begin wearing skirts for easy access, fantasize—prowling the streets, studying the crotches—of leaving my panties at home, of bending over, lying back, opening my mouth anywhere and everywhere for the feel of the sudden thrust, thrust, the easy slide of a pink, hard, salty, mushrooming prick. What a world of pleasure it is.

Anyway, about this time, I volunteer for the hotline. I do this on an impulse after seeing a sign in the YMCA where Lansky's latest is being performed, but it is pretty clear to me: I am beginning to identify with Dr. Blumenthal or, at least, need to feel myself in a position of power over others as he is over me. Whatever.

The hotline—Lifeline, it is called—is a place for people to call when they are suicidal or depressed. In a six-week training course, we are taught to listen sympathetically, not to give advice, try to draw out the painful issues—stuff I feel I have already picked up from watching Jimbo do his thing.

I am set to work in a little cubicle in the bottom of St. Sebastian's on West 48th Street near Tenth Avenue. My shift is Thursday from two to six and my partner is a dried out stick of a woman named Patricia who speaks through her nose. Most of the people who call are chronic—depressed, complainers. I listen and try to be friendly, though I find myself analyzing them, which we are not supposed to do. The truth is, I find it very relaxing: the only four hours in the week when I am not thinking about my own problems. I also hope it will give me some material for poetry.

It is, I think, sometime in July when I get a call from a man with a deep, dull voice and a heavy Queens accent. I am still thinking about penises, though not as much as before, but that is what I am thinking about when he calls and says:

“Who's this?”

“This is Samantha,” I say earnestly. “What's your name?”

“This is God,” he says. “Call me God.”

I should say at this point that I have always considered myself a very spiritual person, although just lately I have begun to notice that the larger part of my spirituality consists in the fear that God will give me cancer if I am bad. Every time I get a stomach ache, which is frequently, I am convinced that it is a tumor, and it is then you will find me kneeling under the altarpiece of St. Thomas' Cathedral, bargaining away my freedom of thought for a few more years of cohabitation with my uterus. I am, in short, very superstitious—knock wood—and when this caller tells me he is God I find myself entertaining the proposition that he really is. He doesn't sound much like Him, on the one hand; on the other hand, the idea that the source of creation is located somewhere around Flushing really does explain a lot.

“How can I help you?” I say.

“I'm gonna kill myself,” says God.

“Uh huh.” He says nothing. I try wit: “Some people say that God is already dead.”

Monotone, I get: “No, but I will be if this keeps up.”

“What seems to be the problem?”

“Oh, you know, it's like first you're eternal, it's great, you're always creative, but you're always destructive, too. Everything keeps changing. I want something solid, some joy, laws. So right away I'm making laws, I'm also making time, I'm getting imprisoned in the senses. It sucks.”

To be frank, I am already bored with this: God calling up a suicide hotline is not so much a philosophical irony as it is a one-liner. As he speaks, I am casting about for ways to elicit some humanity from this poor bastard, something interesting. Suddenly, it comes to me. Of all the Lifeline volunteers, this guy has called the one person who might be able to help him. This has never happened before and I am very excited by the sense of power it gives me.

I throw out a feeler. “I pity you,” I say.

“That's just it!” he says excitedly. “I pity myself, and pity divides the soul.”

I've got him: he's been reading Blake! Well, no wonder he's gone crazy. “You feel another part of you coming out,” I say.

Sullenly; caught: “Yeah.”

“What you might call a feminine part.”

A pause. “What did you say your name was?”

I grin. “Samantha. Sam. What did you say your name was?”

I hear him sigh. “Listen—could you just call me God for now?”

“Sure.”

“I gotta go, okay?” Another pause; longer. “Are you there all the time?”

“Thursdays, two to six,” I say.

“I'll call back, okay?”

“Okay, God,” I say, and he hangs up.

I feel wonderful—I have helped someone—I have connected—someone needs me. This in itself, I tell myself grandly, is a more interesting aspect of God: the idea of two human beings connecting, interlocking, becoming a whole. It is an act of love, I keep repeating to myself: an act of love.

I am still thinking about this when I walk into Dr. B's the next morning: an act of love. I tell him about God which I figure is all right because, even though Lifeline is totally confidential, so is therapy, though I can't help thinking I am becoming part of a long chain of dark secrets that will end with everybody knowing everything.

“He was lucky you knew your Blake,” says D.B.

“Yes—well: I'm a poet,” I say superciliously—because Doctor B is
not
a poet, you understand.

His gray suit shifts in his chair. “I've never really understood Blake,” he says—sheepishly, as if he is confessing something.

This just hangs there in the air for a few moments while I am feeling something inside me like one of those slow motion pictures of the underwater atomic bomb tests—something rising from the depths, mushrooming, spurting into the air. My lips begin to tremble and my eyes get moist. I have not cried since that first visit four months ago, and I do not want to now; it is one of my few bastions of pride still left standing with this man.

“There's something I haven't told you,” I say, and I hate the little girl tremor in my voice.

“Oh?”

“Something about my fantasy—the one I told you about, about being branded. I haven't had it in a long time. Well, not as much. I used to always have it, I hardly ever do anymore. But back when I had it, back then—it wasn't always a man with the branding iron. It used to be.” Fuck it: I'm crying. “When I started first having the fantasy it was. But then more and more, I started thinking about a woman.…”

I think this is disgusting enough for one session, but Blumenthal says: “Anyone in particular?”

I shake my head. “No,” I say. Then I say, “Yes. Sometimes. Elizabeth.”

“And when you tried to kill yourself?”

“I knew the portfolio was there. I knew she'd left it there.”

“You wanted her to find you.”

“I wanted her to show—” Why is it so hard to say? “I wanted her to show that she loved me.”

“By getting angry at you.”

“What?” I am sobbing.

Blumenthal shifts. “You wanted her to show that she loved you by getting angry at you.”

I frown—I can only describe it as petulantly—at him, jutting out an accusing chin. “Are we talking about my mother?”

“Are we?” he asks, which is exactly why people hate psychiatrists.

I slump. “I guess we are,” I say.

Which really does explain a lot, also, about my feelings toward Lansky, when you come to think about it, since he is living with Elizabeth now, which sort of puts him into my father's position—wimpy, but all-knowing—and then Shithead comes along, just this ignorant, ravenous, representative of sheer Power, and there am I, caught between them, tongue-tied, frozen—and then, suddenly, a third choice, another way of loving: Arthur, descending with the law like Apollo before Orestes, so that I need be neither a scarred victim nor a mutant oppressor, but something else entirely: an orchid, a giant orchid blossoming out of the pines.

Oh, I am
so
glad to have found Arthur!

Two

For money, I used to work as a reader—a story analyst, it is called—for a movie studio. What I did was read books and screenplays and then write synopses of them and say whether or not they would make a good film. This is a wonderful job for a poet, as you can make your own hours and take on as much or as little work as you need. Sometimes, though, I used to feel as if all the stories of the world were being laid at my feet—all the fantasies, the rage. Especially after I began seeing Dr. Blumenthal, I began to feel that every novel was simply an expression of someone's twisted personality. I would read a thriller, for example, about some knife-wielding maniac butchering up women and I would know that that was something going on in the author's mind—although it must have been going on in the audience's minds, too, or no one would buy it. Every now and again, I would read a good book that would disprove my theory: that is, it was still about the author, but it was about everybody, too, and thinking about the author was just a way of avoiding thinking about yourself. Anyway, I can see why people like to make movies instead of writing books: you can always blame a movie on someone else.

Reading was not exactly up there with, say, being a cop for excitement. In fact, I have never seen people work less than in the movie business. Where I worked there was a Story Editor, a whiny princess named Dorothy, and her assistant (read: secretary), a nice-enough woman named Judy, and between the two of them I don't know how—or if—anything ever got done. Sometimes, I would come into the office to pick up my assignment and it would be like walking into a Beckett play:

On a bare stage: two desks, a movie poster hanging on the wall. At each desk, a woman sits. One is
Barrow
, the other
Dolmen
.

Barrow: I'm so bored.

Dolmen: Should we do something?

Barrow: Yes, let's.

Dolmen: What should we do?

A pause
.

Barrow: We could go home.

Dolmen: Yes, that's an idea. Oh wait: is it five yet?

Barrow: Where's the clock? I can't find the clock!

Dolmen: There's no God!

Barrow: I'm so bored.

In the year and a half I was with the company, not one story I recommended was ever bought by the bosses in California. Through me, these stories flowed, were transformed into synopses, and vanished into an abyss wherein echoed words like, “Too downbeat. Not cinematic. Too internal.” Odd, because I had taken the job because the real world demands you make money, even if you are a poet, and yet nothing I did ever had the slightest effect on a single other human being.

All of which I suppose is by way of getting round to the subject of money, which is I think the world's excrement and is, as I say, always a problem for a poet, Daughter of Eros that she is.

I quit my job when I married Arthur. Arthur is one of the Philadelphia Clementines so even though he works for the city, he is well-to-do. I always joke that the Clementines made their fortune in gold mines, but the fact is the money is so old no one can remember where it came from and it is just attributed to some form of vague plunder which occurred back in the days when plunder was something simply everyone was doing. Now, I am Samantha Clementine, living off their riches, and about fifteen dollars a month for my poems. From plunder to poetry, that is the way of the world.

Today, February 22nd, there is a big headline on the front page of the
Times
, which either means something very important has happened, or they didn't have enough stories to fill up the page and so had to stretch one. The headline reads: “Soviets Accuse U.S. of Mining Nicaraguan Ports.” And under that: “Sec. of State Flies to Geneva.” At first, I think the Sec. of State is running away, dumping the whole mess in the lap of the President, who has already absconded to Camp David for another vacation. Wouldn't it be funny if the whole thing fell to the White House janitor: “I got ten thousand square feet of rug to vacuum. When am I mining harbors, in my sleep?” Anyway, the Sec. is really going to meet with the Soviet Ambassador, so it is all under control and I draw the veil on their tender reunion in order to move on to this far more interesting piece: “Scientists Say Ten Percent Of The Universe Is Missing.” Now,
this
could be serious, although it'll probably turn up when they clean. Without this ten percent, apparently, the universe will just keep expanding and expanding until everything turns to ashes and dies. This is too much for these scientists to bear and they are desperately inventing theories as to where this ten percent could be. With the added weight, the universe will expand to a certain point, and then come together again into a sort of primordial spaulding which will explode and start the whole process over again. This the scientists can live with, though I personally recommend short-term investments. All this just goes to prove that science is no more than the search for reassurance from the perceived world that our
a priori
intimations are valid. Once we understand that perceptions and intimations are one, the scientists can go home and, even as things stand, it seems to me, the Secretary of State should relax and try to get in a little skating.

Don't get me wrong: it's not that I mind being a housewife. We only have a two-bedroom apartment to begin with, and a maid comes in once a week to clean. (Arthur calls her “a woman,” as if that were a job description: she is a maid, which, now I think of it, means the same thing.) In fact, it is this that worries me: there is not really that much for me to do. I write poetry every morning after Arthur goes to work, but I am done by about one, and then no matter how much I linger over the
Times
and my carrot salad, by two-thirty I am beginning to feel like a scientist contemplating a universe with ten percent missing. I mean, I am beginning to feel as if maybe I am not a very important person.

Last night, Arthur comes home, and we have a conversation that brings this to light. I have seen him getting out of the cab (we live on Fifth Avenue and 81st, doncha know) and so when he comes through the door, I am draped naked over an armchair that has been in the family for centuries, with my legs spread and my open cunt just at the right level for him to make a beeline into ecstasy.