Darling Clementine (4 page)

Instead, he comes over, kisses me lightly on the pudenda, and says, “Hi, honey, I'm home. Boy, you need a shave.”

At first, I think he is proposing something really interesting, but when this is followed by silence, I lift my head and see him standing over me, still dressed, his handsome face drawn and weary.

“Would you like to make a drink first how about?” he says with a little apologetic smile.

Now he is sitting on the sofa, which has been in the Clementine family for centuries, sipping a martini while I, who have been in the Clementine family for seven weeks, lie naked with my head in his lap, watching my breasts rise and fall and reflecting without rancor on the fact that it has been three full weeks now since I have consumed an alcoholic beverage of any kind.

“What did you do today?” says Arthur, stroking the hair on my forehead.

“I wrote a poem about that pigeon I saw in front of the museum I told you about? The one who had lost both his feet and he could fly but he couldn't walk. I'll bet he had a hard time landing, too, but that's not in the poem. What did you do?”

He heaves a heavy sigh. “Oh, we processed a couple of 15-year-olds who tossed an infant off a roof.”

“Oh God. Why?”

“There was nothing on TV, they said,” says Arthur. “The victim was one of the kids' younger brothers.”

Arthur is a little down about this, I can tell, and so after he finishes his drink, I minister to him tenderly, undressing him, sucking him, and finally sliding myself onto him until he rears up and shoots what must have been a very wicked day into my womb.

But behind the Florence Nightingale of sex there lurks a murky phantom of discontent. Because all I can think as I slide up and down that sleek, slim, long, white pole that I call friend is: Why do I always have to make the drinks? I don't even drink anymore. Why don't you make your own drinks? You think you're more important than I am because you process 15-year-old babykillers? Writing poetry about pigeons is no holiday, you know. Oily, dirty little birds.

Perturbation reigns. This is the first time I have ever gotten pissed at Arthur.

My mother did nothing. I don't want to give the impression that I am one of these people who blames her mother for everything that's wrong with me. Personality is a great mystery after all and what affects one person one way is not necessarily oh fuck it she was a bitch. Cold, beautiful, statuesque: I swear to God I never saw her lips part. She ground my father into the earth so quietly, so wittily, so subtly that he didn't know his balls were gone until she swallowed them—until she shit them, left them floating on the surface of the toilet water just so there'd be no mistake. I am done forgiving her. I will never be done loving her, but I am done forgiving her forever.

She sat … We lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. My father was a stock consultant and we were quite well-to-do, thank you very much, though not to say loaded. She sat, my mother did, in that colonial mansion he built for her, wrested for her from the rats scrambling all over Wall Street, she sat and she did nothing. She must have done something. She must have eaten and I can't remember her being fed by any of the countless Consuelas, or Rosas or Floras who knelt to wash her kitchen floor for her, but when I think of her I remember her sitting, erect, motionless, enthroned like a statue of Hatshepsut on a rosewood chair. I remember her profile, the lips set, her hands moving out to play Patience, to point out some chore for Consuela or Rosa or Flora, to hit me.

Actually, she only hit me once. I was three and had torn a page in a book—a copy of the
Inferno
, now I think of it, with the illustrations by Blake. I remember being fascinated with those engravings, those nude forms swirling in circles through the air as if torment were motion, and then the page tore and her hand shot out as if to move a red seven to a black eight and she backhanded me without a word and took the book away and lay it on the table before her, next to the cards. Later, I remember going upstairs to play with my brother's fire truck, running a little figure up the ladder, rising with him until I slammed my head on the edge of the end table where the fire was supposed to be. I started to cry, silently, and then I ran the figure up the ladder again and slammed my head again; then I just lifted my head and slammed it. Christ.

Later on—I mean, years later, when I was fifteen, and I came home late from school, and she knew, I don't know how she knew, that I had done it, that Michael and I had gone to bed together though I don't think she could have known how miserably, how painfully, how joylessly, stupidly, bloodily we had accomplished our mission with Michael following his erection as if it were a rocket tied to his groin, dragging him along with hands over his eyes and me believing, oh, I don't know, that I had a soul, maybe, that the full, rounded breasts I had not asked for, the gaping, oozing scar between my legs, the curve of my legs, all of it, was not me somehow, when it was, it was all along, all of me, and whatever soul I had was not disconnected from it, but part of it, composed of it, so that when Michael, of the denims, the toughness, the sad, ridiculous burden of teen-aged masculinity broke the membrane finally after his knees were torn to pieces by the buttons of his mattress, when he jammed into me, was jamming into
me
, lying on top of
me
like a fallen building, pumping and gasping, “I'm sorry, I'm sorry,” while I tried to fight him off because I thought he was killing
me
and all my mother knew was that we had “done it” whatever that meant to her, whatever part of “it” meant to her that she was weakened somehow, that I had put one over on her, become part of the Big Cheat which surrounded her rosewood chair like an aura, which could only be avoided, placated, by absolute stillness, motionlessness, and here her own daughter … She said to me: “When you go to sleep tonight, I am going to come into your room with a pair of scissors and cut off all your hair.” Black jack on red queen. Hi, Mom, I'm home. What's for dinner?

She didn't do it, though I didn't sleep for a couple of nights. I suppose she was half mad by then between menopause and the smell of perfume that my father could never quite get off his clothing, poor man. Her own father had deserted her mother for another woman. Her mother had had to go to jail once—just for a night before my great-uncle bailed her out—because she refused to pay off her husband's debts with money she considered hers. Maybe I should forgive her in the name of history, for the way history has of appearing to us like a series of photographs in a row or a movie but being really one frame, one picture that has been exposed and exposed and exposed again by a shutter that never closes.

But verily, verily, I say unto you: My hair is auburn and cascades aver my shoulders like a river of honeyed wine. There is no other color on earth like the color of my hair.

God is not without something to say on this subject, though what the subject is I'm not too sure. The second time he called me was about two weeks after the first so it was still summer. I picked up the phone with my usual soft, deep, earnest, caring, “Lifeline,” and he says: “Get fucked.”

“If you are going to be abusive, I am going to have to hang up,” I say, which is what I've been taught to say in training.

“This is God,” he says sheepishly, by way of explanation, and I figure, oh well, if it's the Almighty, I'll take a
little
abuse. “I just don't want you to be too serene about this, and superior.”

“Got it,” I say. “I'm agitated and groveling, go on.”

“No, I mean: you are a woman. You're supposed to
like
getting fucked, but it's an insult. You shoot someone the bird, it's an insult, but you're supposed to
like
getting the bird. If you act tough, someone says, ‘You've got balls.' If you act tender, no one ever says, ‘Hey, you got real breasts, lady. You're what I call a cunt.'”

I laugh.

“I'm serious,” he says.

I stop laughing.

“No one ever compliments you by saying you're a cunt because it's an insult to be a cunt. It means you've got no balls.” He says this last so quietly, so sadly, that my heart really does go out to God, and I wish I could reach out and stroke his hair.

“Well,” I say, “it's an insult to be a prick, too.”

“You shouldn't curse,” says God. “You're a lady.”

He's right: I'd forgotten for a moment that I'm dealing with a psychotic.

“Anyway, that's why I've gotta kill myself,” he says. “To create Death again, to bring Death back into the world.”

I'm not entirely sure I get the connection but, on reflection, I am entirely sure I don't know what he's talking about, so I try to move us back to what I think is the subject.

“What you're saying is that out of your great power, your almightiness, something else is emerging. Something, in fact, you had to become almighty to suppress: something tender, that makes you afraid you're losing your ba—manhood.” Before I catch myself, I nearly shift in my chair.

“And don't tell me about the feminists!” God shouts.

“Oh no. As far as I'm concerned you should never have created those feminists,” I say. “And gnats.”

“They've just accepted the whole thing, just like they always did only now they figure if it's better to be a man, they will be—or ca-ca-ca-castrate the men, one or the other. I mean, who
says
it's better to be a businessman than a mother?”

“Not me.”

“Who says it's better to wear a suit than a dress?”

“Not me.”

“What do businessmen do that's so important, anyway?”

“Damned if I know.”

“So now don't you see why I have to create Death?”

“Oh, I don't know,” I say without thinking. “Why don't you just create Love instead?”

And he begins screaming: “Love
is
Death, that's what I'm saying! Don't you understand anything, you stupid cunt?”

I have no answer. I wait in silence. Then, I hear something, a stuttering, a squeaking on the other end. God is crying.

“I'm so unhappy,” he says. “I'm so unhappy.”

“I know,” I say into the phone. “But it's all right, now. I'm here. I'm here.”

After a while, the sound begins to subside. “I think I have to go,” he says.

“Will you call back if you need to?”

“Yes.” I wait. He is still there. He sniffles. “You know,” he says. “You really are a cunt.”

I smile. “Thank you,” I say.

And he's gone.

There's something to be said, I guess, for God's theory, except I have a theory about theories, which is: theories are like a horse that can't swim: it will carry you to the River of Enlightenment, but it can't get you across. That takes experience: satori: a kick in the eye. Which is why we have art. And meditation. And psychotherapy. We already know how to spell the word “fist,” what we are looking for is a good punch in the mouth.

Just lately, to be honest, I have been regaling Dr. Blumenthal with nothing but theories: ideas, intellectualizations, thoughts, ponderings, little things I've noticed in my perambulations. Anything but life. This gives me a sense of power. I have a fantasy that slowly, almost without his knowing it, my subconscious is taking him over, growing up inside him like some sort of inflatable Blumenthal that will eventually break through his skin and replace the Blumenthal of the moment. Already, I notice, he is making little Clementinian slips: small things: he forgot to send me a bill one month, and once, when I told him a particularly terrible nightmare I had about being trapped in a roomful of mice, he said: “And so this really scared me—you.”

This, of course, is only to be expected. I am a poet, after all: my subconscious is everybody's problem.

This morning, the day after I got annoyed at Arthur, I am explaining to Blumenthal my theory about theories, called to the surface by my memory of God, called up in turn by my annoyance with Arthur, neither of which I have bothered to mention, they being secondary to my T of T's.

“This,” I explain, “is why I am trying to create a poetry of pure description, of objects, because these are the things that make up life and we never
see
them, not really. I have been living in Arthur's apartment going on three months now, and how often does it come to life for me, does it become real? How often do I really
see
the scroll of the mahogany legs of the sofa, the way the shag looks far away through the glass coffee table, even the Degas ballerina or the handmade colonial quilt on the bed. I mean, I make it every morning, but …”

“He has a Degas?” says Blumenthal, proving my point because that's exactly what
I
said when I first saw it.

“Yes,” I say, “it's a …”

“A genuine Degas? A real one?”

“Well, it's just a small one. His mother gave it to him when he graduated law school.”

“Wow,” says Blumenthal. “A real Degas, huh?”

Now, I am getting annoyed, but I manage to say with perfect calm: “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Yes,” says Blumenthal. He shifts in his chair. “I wish I had a Degas.”

“Well, then you make his lousy drinks.”

At which point, the session comes to an end.

Two weeks after I moved in with Arthur, I was invited to a party given by Jake Langley. Jake is a somewhat famous poet which, basically, means that his obscurity has limits, that it does not, in effect, threaten to collapse upon itself from its own density like a dead star. Jake lives in Westchester where he teaches, so Lansky, Elizabeth, Arthur and I all drove up in Arthur's car.

It was a dark and stormy night. Ice was streaking out of the black sky like falling daggers, and twice Elizabeth had to wrestle Lansky to the floor to keep him from offering Arthur money to get him to pull over. The last stretch was the worst because Jake lives in a cottage at the end of a dirt road, basically in the middle of the woods. When the lights of the cottage appeared to us through the gloom, Lansky made a sound like a cross between a church choir singing “Gloria in excelsis” and a mongrel dog baying at the moon.