Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  No one but us, of course, had shown up: us, Jake, his current lover Humphrey, a painter named Stephanie, who was over from England and staying with Jake, and a woman named Isabella Gardner.

  Humphrey made us all drinks and we sat in the living room with ice streaking the big windowpanes on every wall, and the trees bending and the wind blowing and it was very cozy even with Lansky continually wondering aloud about how we were going to get home. About an hour or so into the conversation, however, it begins to become very clear to me that Isabella Gardner is insane. She is a short, somewhat dumpy woman, but with a fresh, open, corn-fed face and wide blue eyes. Most of the time, she sits smiling beatifically, turning her intense gaze from speaker to speaker. But when Arthur tells a story about a rock concert he went to where tear gas from the riot outside (Arthur, by the way, is 33) seeped in and forced the audience to come pouring out, thereby routing the police, Isabella nods and smiles as if she knows all and says: “Oh yes, that happened to me once, too. My father was giving a concert, but then his intestines poured out on the stage and so I was arrested. Then the witches came.”

  There is a moment of embarrassed silence and then Arthur says: “Well—that sure tops my story.” Everybody laughs—Isabella, too—and the conversation goes on and a minute later I, for one, cannot be sure whether I actually heard Isabella correctly or not.

  But after a few minutes, Jake brings out the first copy of his new book, Castigating Croesus, for us to admire. It really is admirable, with woodcuts by Stephanie depicting, in a vague, suggestive way, the shadows of the Greek gods hovering over modern cityscapes. We pass the book around, oohing and ahing because this is what the party was for and now the bad weather has robbed Jake of the warmth, appreciation and stifled envy of his friends.

  When Isabella gets the book, she lays it on her lap and begins turning the pages, carefully smoothing them down with her open hand. Conversation progresses. Then Isabella says: “Ooh, there’s the autopsy.”

  Jake leans over to see with a worried look on his face.

  “They used to let me do it until I began to eat the brains,” quips Isabella. “I never made him suffer, though. I always sewed him up again before my mother got home.” She smiles rather beautifully at Stephanie, pinning her to the sofa in terror. “I didn’t know you were there,” she says.

  Lansky is now whispering feverishly to Elizabeth who is poking him in the ribs with her elbow. Arthur casts me a look and Jake is still trying to figure out how a picture of an autopsy got into his book. Only Humphrey is smiling, perfectly relaxed, and I begin to suspect that Isabella’s invitation is not without its motive vis à vis interpersonal relationships.

  Suddenly, Humphrey claps his hands together, and says, “Oh, I know, let’s play ‘Murder’!”

  “Murder,” for those who do not know, is a game in which each person gets dealt a playing card and the one who gets the Ace of Spades or whatever is the murderer. The lights are turned off and everyone runs around in the dark until the murderer taps him on the shoulder. Then he lies down dead until he is discovered, at which point the discoverer lets out a harrowing scream, the lights go on, and everyone tries to guess who did it. This is why Lansky’s eyes have turned the size of saucers and he is braving Elizabeth’s elbow in order to get in a few more frantic whispers.

  In truth, I am more than a little scared myself. I know exactly what is going to happen. The lights go off—wander, wander, wander—a shriek—lights on—to reveal someone’s decapitated body—mine, more than likely—with Isabella kneeling over it, smiling beatifically, if a tad bloodily, while she devours the victim’s brain.

  Still in all, even Lansky isn’t coward enough to protest aloud. The cards are duly dealt—I get an eight of hearts—and Humphrey gleefully kills the light.

  My plan is simple. Keep track of Arthur and, when the lights go out, throw myself, trembling, into his arms and wait for the ordeal to end. In the event, however, Humphrey hits the switch and we are plunged into a forest darkness deeper than I have ever known. Arthur is gone. I am lost, wandering about with my hands out in front of me, bumping my shins against all manner of unseen terrors.

  I wander this way for three weeks—or possibly five minutes, I cannot tell—with shadows flitting on every side of me, making me jump, and an occasional maniacal giggle by way of reassurance. I wander by the kitchen and hear a drawer open, cutlery rattle: Isabella is getting herself a butcher knife, no doubt, so I betake the vessel of the muse to distant territories, wandering into a room with which I am unfamiliar.

  There, she grabs me. Someone grabs me, and at first it doesn’t matter who because whether he is going to kill me or not is irrelevant: my heart has stopped. Then, to my unutterable relief, I see the gleaming eyes and horror-stricken face of Lansky.

  “You’re dead, Sam,” he whispers. “Wish I was.”

  I know what he means. I am so glad to be dead I want to kiss him. Now I can sit down against a wall, safe from harm, and wait until I or some other fortunate is discovered and the lights come on again.

  I sit down against the wall, facing the room’s only door, which I see as a rectangle of the dimmest gray in the blackness. I wait. Minutes go by—slowly, but a lot more like minutes than when I was wandering around with that knife-wielding father-killer on the loose. No one can come through the door without my seeing them. I wait and wait.

  Then, a silhouette on the dim rectangle. It pauses, enters. It is Arthur!

  “Arthur! Arthur!” I hiss. “Over here!”

  He comes over, pausing on the way to bark his shin and curse. Then he is standing above me.

  “Sam?”

  “Arthur! Scream,” I say. “Discover me, so they’ll turn the bloody lights back on.”

  “What’s the matter, Sam?” he says. “Scared?” He kneels down in front of me.

  “Yes, I’m scared! Why would I want you to scream if I wasn’t scared, you idiot?” say I.

  I feel Arthur’s hands on my jeans, unzipping my fly, passing inside, down over my pubic hair to my vagina, which begins to gush at once in my high-pitched state of jumbled terror, relief, frustration and excitement.

  “So you want me to scream,” says Arthur, several of his fingers, maybe his whole hand, swimming into this hot fountain between my legs.

  “Yes!” I hiss, but I am giggling now. Panting and giggling.

  “What will you give me?” says Arthur.

  “Anything, anything.”

  “Will you marry me, Sam?”

  “What?” I have an orgasm: a small one, but elegant and I am amused by its presumption.

  “I love you, Samantha,” says Arthur. “Will you marry me?”

  “Oh. Oh, Arthur.” I am gushing, it seems, from both ends. “Oh yes. Yes.”

  His hand slips out of my cunt and he lets out a shriek so loud, so high-pitched that I am sure it will shatter one of the two glass candle holders that Jake is so proud of.

  There is the sound of footsteps approaching. Lights go on around the house. Quickly, I zip up my jeans. Lansky—in an effort, no doubt, to avoid the appearance of guilt—is the first into the room. He snaps on the light. The glare hurts my eyes and I turn to one side.

  And I am face to face with the beatific smile of Isabella, who has been sitting not six inches away from me all this time.

  My reaction to this little revelation, I suspect, takes care of the other candle holder.

  It just came to me with a great shock that Arthur’s name is Arthur. Or not exactly a great shock, so much as a sort of reverberating pip! but all the same what makes it so shocking, or so pipping, is that that is King Arthur’s name, too, the pip here deriving from the fact that I am, or was, something of a King Arthur fanatic.

  The craze has passed now but there was a time—it’s so odd that this did not occur to me before—when Arthur, King not my, inhabited all my days. It began about five years ago, while I was still in school, when Richard Burton brought the revival of the Lerner and Lowe musical “Camelot” t
o Lincoln Center. To be exact, it began when Burton, who was much shorter than I had imagined and seemed to me to have something of an oversized head, peered lugubriously off-stage and sang:

  “Don’t let it be forgot,

  That once there was a spot,

  For one brief shining moment,

  That was known

  As

  Camelot.”

  The point being that the great civilization of the Round Table had fallen because Lancelot and Queen Guinevere had been at it and, anyway, I wept, I don’t mind confessing. I went home and began reading. I read T. H. White’s Once And Future King, and then Tennyson’s “Idylls,” then Malory’s Morte, then Chrétien De Troyes’ romances and then Geoffrey De Tours’ History—down, down, down into the funnel of time, hoping, I think, to find that springboard of truth on whch I could vault back to the pageantry and romance of Richard Burton singing, hauling credulity with me by the collar. I have always been something of an exacting romantic. Instead, what I got was “Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.” I was far from where I’d started by then, because what I really loved was Arthur the wise, Arthur the grave, Arthur the tragic (Burton, in short) and this was just knight stuff, but I hadn’t got past the first line—which was something like “Since the siege of Troy …” when up turned my springboard where I had least expected it. It was this: civilization falls when Woman, lovely Woman, chooses youth and virility over wisdom and age. God-Satan, Laius-Oedipus, Menelaus-Paris, Arthur-Lancelot, Lansky-Shithead, the wise father or the virile son: that was the choice that was put before us from Eden on, and all we ladies had to do was get just a dose of the hots for the young stuff and you could say your bye-byes to sweet paradyes. This, I confess, was way too deep for me because it was not just father-son, but, by corollary, mind-body, brow-groin, soul-flesh that was at issue here; and as a representative of those who had to point the finger like some matron in front of a shelf at the supermarket and say, “Oh, I’ll take this one,” I felt as if I had just discovered that all detergents cause cancer and the only really good way to get your clothes clean is to rub them in grass and chant.

  Because it struck me in a flash (i.e., developed as a thought over the period of the next few days) that it was all an illusion. A terrible mistake. When men say: “Men are rational, women passionate,” what they really mean is, “I am rational until I see a dame and then I can’t think straight,” just as when a woman says, “Men are domineering and insensitive,” she means, “I am in charge until a man comes by and then I have an urge to submit, and turn to him for validation of myself.” Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere were all parts of the body politic—a psychomachy—which led me to believe that we cannot see anything in our opposite but ourselves. We can’t. We Kant. We cant. And so if rationality looking at passion is really passion looking at rationality and vice versa, if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, absence, cunt, woman are, as they say, truly one, why do I begin to feel that marrying Arthur, that marrying Arthur was … what? A betrayal? A mistake? A loss?

  Blumenthal is a geek and he can just shut up, too. We are not talking about my father. (Aren’t we?) Not yet we’re not, kiddo. I have theories you haven’t even dreamed of yet. Wait’ll you get a load of my resolution of the Plato-Aristotle dilemma. And, anyway, there was a moment, there was a day, a night, when we came home from Jake’s when we had sent Elizabeth up the stairs with Lansky, a dishrag of exhausted terror, in her arms, and gone home, when I jumped and panted like a terrier over my darling, crying, “Why? Tell me why. Why do you love me? Why do you want to marry me?” when I had it, when I knew.

  Arthur said, “I’m not what I appear, Sam. All I know is you are something I want to be part of me forever.”

  I was finished. This is a lawyer, mind you, talking like this, looking boyish and wounded and powerful—and he was right. I was the song inside of him, I knew that, and I thought I could no more sing it without him than the muse could sing without the poet. We were—picture the two links coming together with a flash—we were the chain of eternity.

  What I’m trying to say is that we made love that night as I have never before or yet again. It’s not that I can’t describe it, I can: it was flesh, it was matter, it was hand, tit, prick, cunt, lips, eyes, breath. It was there, present, everlasting, unholy. It was not rational nor was it passionate; it was not even man or woman, heterosexual or homosexual; but it was not selfless because there was no self to be less. We were on the bed and he was pumping into me and I had my hand on his buttock and was crying out and the sound and the motion and the flesh and the feeling. Civilization did not fall but only because it had never stood, was a great lie, built atop a landfill of orgasms and purposeless pleasure. I had no mother, we were my mother; I had no father, we were my father. There could be no mistake, no betrayal, no loss: This was love; carnal knowledge; knowledge of the instant, all there was. And for one brief shining moment that was known, I came a lot.

  Three

  If there is anything on earth I hate, it is Dr. Blumenthal. All I want is to be an orchid, and he keeps asking me about my old man.

  “He fucked me,” I say finally; insouciantly is the word I want.

  “Did he?” says Blumenthal.

  “Every night,” I say. “He came into my room and did it to me.”

  “Really?”

  “No,” I say sullenly. “No, he never did that really.”

  “You sound sorry,” says der doc, shifting.

  I shrug. “I remember it—him doing it. As if it happened. I have a visceral memory of it. It was what I expected in a way, like a rite of passage. My period, learning to drive, my father making love to me. It’s hard to explain.” I give him my steely, blue-eyed glare: I have a top-notch steely blue-eyed glare. “It’s like now, though. I’m sitting here, you’re sitting there—and I feel like you’re fucking me good and proper.”

  Blumenthal shifts. “Why should that bother you? You’re a woman: you should enjoy a good fuck.”

  Have I described Blumenthal’s voice? It’s a real Jewish whine, a real nasal, wimpy, don’t-let-them-hurt-me whine. It’s ridiculous. The fact is, I do feel somewhat titillated sitting there; my skin warm, my muscles relaxed: a little breathless altogether.

  Harshly I say: “So God tells me.”

  Blumenthal glances over his shoulder, as if he might have left the window open. “How’d God get in here?” he says.

  “Arthur broke my mug,” I tell him.

  Blumenthal puts his hand out flat and indicates the web between index finger and thumb. “Put your hand like this,” he says, “and slam it once real hard into his throat.”

  I laugh. “Fuck you,” I say.

  “No, no, I’m the Daddy,” Blumenthal says. “I do the fucking.”

  I have to tell him: Christ, it’s as if he knows. “I did it to Arthur.” He doesn’t answer. “I gave it to him up the ass. With my fingers.”

  “Does that upset you?”

  “It was wonderful. I wanted to make him drink his own come but I didn’t.”

  Blumenthal hangs there like: in the Sistine Chapel (Arthur and I honeymooned in Rome the week before we got married) there’s one part in the Last Judgment which is supposed to be a self-portrait of Michelangelo: it’s the flayed skin of St. Bartholomew being held by himself, dangling down, a face and body collapsing into folds of loose flesh: Blumenthal hangs there like that.

  I jut my chin out at him. “He broke my lousy mug,” I say.

  The mug in question was a thing of beauty and a joy for about a week. I had bought it with the ten dollars I received from “Heat Winds, A Quarterly,” for my rhymed satire beginning,

  “Their romance could ne’er endure,

  The odor of his love’s manure …”

  It was a simple coffee mug but had a glazed finish of robin’s egg blue which transfixed my eyes and, anyway, I liked it.

  Arthur comes home—this is about five days ago—and he’s all fired up because he has just been battling an attempted coveru
p in the upper echelons of city politics. The D.A., it seems, was contemplating knuckling under to pressure from on high to decline to prosecute a cop who had apparently—allegedly—gunned down a black grandmother who had been trying to escape from a supermarket with some goods she had neglected to pay for. The woman had a knife, but he shot her four times, and Jones, who is black and Arthur’s colleague and our friend, smelled racism and Arthur sided with him and the D.A. had actually called him into his office, Arthur, and made an appeal to his whiteness and there had been offers of resignation and ever-so-subtle threats to approach the press and golly weren’t it dramatic as all get-out I hope to tell you.

  So anyway, I am so depressed by the time dinner is over that Arthur offers to wash the dishes—with that Philadelphia-bred look of benign puzzlement on his craw that makes me feel he is cross-examining me on the witness stand—and about five minutes later I hear the chunk of robin’s egg blue glaze against porcelain and a curse and I know the mug is chipped.

  It occurs to me even as I go flying into the kitchen that somewhere in my mind I had always known he was going to break it, known as I bought it, even before. I tell you, as my soul prepared to enter the about-to-be fertilized egg in my mother’s womb, it was muttering, “Well, okay, but he’s going to break my mug.”

  I snatch the poor thing from his brutish hands and cradle it in my own. There is a thumbnail-shaped chip in the rim. My eyes fill.

  “You broke it,” I say, trembly.

  “Yeah, sorry. I’ll get you a new one.”

  “You’ll get me!” I cry, my hair flying. “This was mine. You had no right: it wasn’t yours to break.”

  Arthur’s lawyerly eye notes that I am upset. “Uh-whuh-uh,” he says.