Darling Clementine (8 page)

No, we went to Rome, Arthur and I, the week before our wedding, and I dragged him up to see the little room where he died, Keats, at twenty-six, which I have just become. I tried and tried to conjure him there, him gasping on the tiny cot, “Take courage,” to Severn, the brave, kindly, mediocre artist who stuck by him to the last. “Thank God it's come!” Indeed, I pretended I
had
conjured him, and babbled on to Arthur that this was the little window he would drag himself to to look out on the watery white sweep of the Spanish Steps—all of Rome just beyond the reach of his fingertips and he who had seen a corner of the universe in a Grecian urn, with the whole history of the west taunting him, come out, come out, and see what you can make of
me
. “Thank God, it's come.”

The secret—that I even kept from myself for a while—is that the room left me cold, Johnny didn't come to me: the scene of his untimely martyrdom was a museum to me; worse, a museum of old furniture. I understand some people like these things.

Then we went to the Forum and I left Arthur alone and wandered by myself among the ruins and groves. I was hoping to be hit by inspiration, hoping to be able to scribble down some bit of brilliance while sitting on a toppled pillar, like Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla. But I am nothing if not an honest vessel of the muse, and when I rushed to an old wall, pen and matchbook cover in hand, with the line: “Oh, Apollo, whither have you fled?” I got the picture and gave it up. Just wandered amidst the scenery.

And so, of course, something did come to me out there, as when the Buddha, giving up, breaking his fast, plopped down beneath the Bodhi tree and entered nirvana. (You can't blame a girl for trying.) Something I didn't realize until a little later, and didn't completely realize until much later. At the time, I just saw the pillars and statues crumbling into the grass and the foliage, and reflected, somewhat pompously, not too much, on how man's work is just another work of nature, springing from his fingers like leaves from branches, falling like leaves, and how here, in the Forum, you could see that this was so in the marble overgrown with moss, overrun with beetles, the Senate of empire become the litter box of a thousand starving cats: no more, no less, than a feature of the landscape. Look on my works, ye mighty, and fertilize, fertilize.

It was the next day, I think, or the day after that that this reflection had its physical effect. We visited the Vatican, stood in self-conscious yet real awe beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, our eyes sweeping from creation to Judgment Day—pausing at a sybil here, the dangling skin of Dr. Blumenthal there. Afterward, with the light fading, that Italian light that ripples palely in the sky like water, we were taking a cab to some restaurant or other when Arthur saw the pyramid of Cephas, of which we had never heard. Good reason, too, as Cephas was a complete obscurity as far as I can tell except for his pyramid, a big, dingy affair. Anyway, we got out to look around and discovered that it overshadowed, the pyramid, the most gorgeous graveyard I had ever seen and, always something of a sucker for a good graveyard, I took Arthur in. It was the Protestant cemetery where the English buried their dead in the 18th century. It was one fantastic monument after another—mourning angels, urns, women weeping, the images of children who had died—crowded together amid bowing trees and heavy vines. It gave me the chills in a wonderful, ghostly way, and we roamed about on the lopsided flag passageways hand in hand, reading inscriptions to one another.

Of course, somewhere in the dark, distant plains and caves of Blumenthal Country, I must have known that Keats was buried here. Maybe that even added to the mingled sense of surprise and recognition I felt when I stumbled upon his grave in a plainer, less baroque section of the cemetery.

Keats had asked that only the words “Here lies one whose name is writ on water,” be inscribed on the stone, but his mourning friends could not bear the simplicity and added a lot of muck about how the anonymous “young poet” had asked for that inscription in “the bitterness of his heart,” complete with a broken lyre by Severn of which he later rightly repented. To make matters worse, some idiot had hung another inscription on a nearby wall more recently, an acrostic poem in which each line began with a letter of Keats' name. Can you imagine? “K is for the Krazy rhymes you gave us. E is for the era of which you wrote.” I reflected bitterly that no one had let him be, let him die with his own, real great misery spoken plain. Unable to bear his “Father, why have you forsaken me?” they had covered it over with graffiti, as Christ's was washed down, like a bitter pill, with bread and wine.

Arthur had respectfully moved away to leave me alone at the desecrated shrine of my fallen idol. As the gloaming deepened, I turned and saw the grave of Severn, who had lived into his 80's, long enough, said the stone, to see “his friend lionized,” and then been buried here beside the youth who had fallen to his care through accident and kindness, whom he had nursed to the end of his life when he himself was just at the beginning of his life, who, in the few months they had known each other, had cried out the pain of his obscurity into the painter's ear and so kissed him with immortality.

And in that space between the graves, that empty, somehow human space, Keats came to me; not Keats the Lord, but Keats the man, wavering, electric if invisible, from his own stone to that of him who had been not his St. Peter, but his friend.

I was, that is to say, touched by a mortal sadness: the orphan Keats; Keats five foot tall; Keats doomed, as Seamus Heaney says, to the decent thing; psychologically paralyzed when he needed to find work; one of his brothers dying, one of them cheating him, “Oh, would that anything good had ever happened to me or my brothers!”; Keats hysterically in love, chaste, panicky, confused; hungry for fame: “Wasting his salvation on a fierce miscreed”; Keats writing the odes of April, singing only as birds sing, naturally; Keats, I imagine, all in all: Keats the Beautiful Neurotic. A guy.

Then the rippling purple light folded over me and the moment ended.

“What do you think this weekend, hon?” calls Arthur, from where he is lying on the couch under a tent made of the newspaper he is holding above him. “‘Cats,' or ‘La Cage Aux Folles'?”

Thinking of Rome, as I say, reminds me of Keats, and thinking of the similarity between Keats and Christ reminds me of the similarities between Rome and America. Greece and Rome, I should say, and England and America. It sometimes strikes me that, taken at their broadest outlines, the histories are identical. A loosely-connected empire built on naval power, a people with a democratic nature, great writers and, I mean, how
can
you tell a faggot from an Athenian?—anyway, Greece, and later England, giving way to this great thump and thunder of a garish yet wan republic, its artistic heart self-conscious, inferior, imitative of the old, dying democracy, but its real passion for building, making, taking—Italo-American yang to Greco-English yin—its canvas of conservatism (remember the speeches of Augustus, all old-fashioned values, and religion and decency while taking the freedoms of the people one by one) pulled away to reveal the pit of empire: wars of self-defense leading to distant wars—“if we don't stop them now, here, then when, where?”—so big, so husky, finally, that when it falls, the known world tumbles with it into darkness …

Who knows? Perhaps, even as we speak—though, really, it is too early: we are not an empire yet—but one could imagine, in Israel, a child is being born in a manger who pronounces miraculously, in his first wail: “When I have fears that I might cease to be …”

Sometimes, I wander the streets of Manhattan, and imagine I am a tourist of the future, observing the ruins, imagining the archaic customs. Once, when a new archbishop was installed, I stood outside St. Patrick's Cathedral and watched an endless procession of white-robed acolytes bearing candles and wafting down 49th Street from Madison Avenue under the spires, buttresses, icons, in through the massive doors, down the aisles, under the vaulting arches to the brilliantly lighted altar. Protestors stood on the streets with signs opposing the archbishop's stand against abortion, and others in favor of it.

This is what they will see—if there are any of them left to see it—this is what they'll remember, as they look at the jagged heaps of rubble—an old temple of a dead religion: These were their rites and customs, they will say. Maybe they will be able to imagine it even. But will any of them know that most of us were going to work, or lunch or school the day they laid the little bishop in his niche like a porcelain statuette? Will any of them realize that one of us was imagining that she was they?

I wonder if the Clementines have a plot in the shadow of the old manse, where some future poet—some Chinaman or someone from the moon—will stand uncoupled from the suffering of his kind and see suddenly my radiant and human presence trembling between the stone marked “Arthur,” and the one that bears only an engraving of an empty checkbook, and the inscription: “All in all, I'd rather be in Philadelphia.”

I wonder at the way we expand on the coattails of our weaponry, as if we are afraid to build or discover something before we are absolutely positive we can blow it to smithereens.

I wonder: “Cats” or “La Cage Aux Folles.”

There was this girl, this young woman, named Judy Honegger, who played the violin. She was from Boston. She had a clean, fresh face and the picture of her on the front page of the
News
was obviously from her graduation so sometimes, at least, I can say with certainty, her hair was light and shiny and her smile outgoing and bright.

She studied music at Juilliard. I didn't get the feeling she was Isaac Stern or anything, but I could see her giving a recital and playing in small concerts for a while before she got married and taught music and showed her kids the pictures of her in her black dress.

Anyway, she was killed instead by a sniper with a high-powered rifle who lay on the rooftop of the brownstone across the street from her apartment on West 102nd and waited for her to come home from a date.

This was about a week after I first met Arthur and about a week before I moved in with him. I hadn't heard from God, at that time, for I don't know how long.

I loved a boy named Arnold Long, but he was sort of gay, which maybe, as, yes, I have already admitted to Dr. Blumenthal, had something to do with it. I was 22 and had graduated from Barnard magna cum laude (“Why not summa?” queried Pops) and had worked for a publishing house for almost eight months which is to say I had died and gone to hell. Publishing is no business for anyone with organs. It is all airy men and lonely, bitter women playing tough; lunches that last for hours; exercise classes during work. “It was a Freudian nightmare,” I told D.B. “From weak father and cold, angry mother to a whole
world
of weak fathers and cold, angry mothers sweeping around, immobile and everywhere at the same time, like, like … well …”

“All right, all right. Blake's engravings of Dante,” said Blumenthal. “So you met Arnold there.”

“Oh no,” say I, grinning uncontrollably because he has made A Mistake. “Leave Freud behind, we're moving into Tennessee Williams now.”

Blumie shifts. “Oh, what the hell, let's take Freud with us, he's never been to Tennessee.”

It was in New Orleans, actually. What happened was I quit my job. It's February. I took $200 out of the bank, walked to the bus station, bought a round trip to New Orleans, got on the bus with Herodotus and nary a change of clothes, and was gone, gone, gone to the Mardi Gras.

I was drunk for three days beginning from the minute I hit the French Quarter. I was carried by throngs of people, in a haze of sweat and noise and jazz. Debutantes threw plastic beads off wrought-iron balconies and our hands flew up to catch them, empty hands stretched toward the gold lamé gowns. Parades went by, people dressed as Bacchus, as nymphs, satyrs—and they threw plastic beads. I drank in bars, in cafés, listening to jazz and folk music. I drank in a topless bar and paid a woman a dollar to dance naked on my table. I slept in doorways and the police came and thwacked me on the bottom with their sticks and told me to move on, so I slept in the bus station where I could show the cops my return ticket and they would leave me alone. Then, in the morning, I would walk all the way down Canal Street, past the bars, the whores, stepping over fistfights in the streets, my blisters singing a veritable opera of pain, all the way back to the Quarter where the edge of the crowd would slowly gather in about me and carry me away from bar to club to jazz cave, from wine to whiskey to huge paper cups frothing over with beer.

It rained and I caught a fever and so the drunken haze became a haze of sickness. I was broke now—I had two dollars which I hung onto for a while—and I kept opening my purse to make sure the return ticket was there. One night, I slept in the stadium at Tulane—for fifty cents, we were allowed to bed down on the concrete under the piers. The place was just a black mass of sleeping bags, but I had no sleeping bag, and I woke up in the first dawn with my raincoat wrapped around me, shivering so violently I thought I would die. The young man next to me opened his sleeping bag—he was all wild black beard and wild black hair—and I climbed in, ready to trade for a little warmth, not wearing my diaphragm, which was also in my purse, not caring, vaguely afraid of disease, not caring. But the young man wriggled his arm around me, and zipped up the bag so that we were pressed tightly together in the canvas cocoon, and whispered, “Don't worry. I'm a student. Go to sleep.” What his being a student had to do with it, I wasn't exactly sure, but I fell asleep against his chest and woke up from deep unconsciousness two hours later, and watched as he rolled up his sleeping bag, as he waved, winked and went away.

I was a little more clear-headed then, though my lungs felt like they were filled with lead. I rode the streetcar named “Desire”—so crowded that I didn't have to pay—back into town.