Darling Clementine

by Andrew Klavan

  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.

  I was starving and went down to the Mississippi where there was a little cafe that sold these wonderful little cakes called beignets and small cups of chicory for almost nothing. Under the green awning, you could sit at an outdoor table and look at the early risers walking by the river—the big river, wide and dead-panned and dark.

  The place was crowded and so they were seating small parties together. That’s how I met Arnold Long, a reedy southern boy with his blond hair in a crewcut and blue eyes that he narrowed when he listened to you as if he had to squint to see your words.

  He saw my hand was trembling when I reached for the last of my three beignets, and when he asked me how I was enjoying Mardi Gras, though I smelled like beer and garbage and my hair was dangling in knots around my dirty face, he could tell from the way I answered that I was not your average person of the streets. I thought he might be gay, and I was certain he was kind, so when he asked me if I would like a place to freshen up, I told him that I had always depended on the kindness of strangers, and went back with him to this wonderful little hotel-apartment in the Quarter with a balcony onto the courtyard and a little verdigris mermaid sitting in the stagnant water of the idle fountain below.

  I showered and washed my underwear and my blouse in the sink. Arnold made me three eggs and four pieces of toast all of which I devoured. Then, wrapped in his bathrobe, I sat next to him out on the balcony, our feet up, cups of coffee balanced on our middles, and between my fits of raw, angry hacking, we talked. Arnold was a graphic designer, freelance, and did some work with the publishing companies down there, so I told him my experiences and he listened with his eyes narrowed and laughed sympathetically.

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “but I think I may have run away from home.”

  “Not cut out for the literary life,” he said.

  “But that’s not the literary life,” I cried, sending myself into another fit of coughing. “That’s just the point. What will I write poetry about: ‘My boss is like a red, red rose’?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I wouldn’t know, really, about anything,” he said in his soft drawl. “In fact, ignorance of life is my major character trait. Also,” he smiled, “my peculiar charm.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, “it seems to me that all American literature is either Ernest Hemingway or Emily Dickinson.”

  “A charming couple. We must have them by.”

  “One of them expanding his life until his work becomes a bloody echo, laughable; and the other cowering away, churning out those perfect little things, better and better. The life is nothing, the work is all, or vice versa, no in-between.”

  “My philosophy is sort of similar,” Arnold said. “The life is nothing, and the work’s not so hot either.”

  “It’s all sex anyway,” said I with the sweeping gesture to go with it. “American literature scuttles in terror between Jake Barnes and a tightly shut door.”

  I was trying to figure out what I meant by that when Arnold murmured into his coffee. “Ah, now we begin to get into the area of my expertise.”

  I reached out and put my hand on his wrist. “It’s all right, you know,” I said. “I’m not expecting anything.”

  He smiled. “Good. Then you’re in for a predictable evening.”

  There was that awkward moment that night when we went to bed, when I stepped out of my clothing and stood before him, aware of the heaviness of my breasts and my bottom, aware they threatened him. I felt relaxed and in charge and when he climbed under the covers beside me, I held him to my breast and fell asleep.

  I did not wake up until noon, but I felt much better, my sickness reduced to a head cold, my throat a little sore. I think I half expected to find Arnold sitting on the edge of the bed weeping, or maybe dead of a gunshot wound in the bathroom, but he came in off the balcony, cheery enough, when he saw me stirring.

  “Scarlett,” he said, “I’m sorry about last night, and I’ll never trouble you with my presence again.”

  I knew I was in love with him, had known last night as I drifted off, had felt, in fact, as I was drifting off, that I was falling into something that did not even aspire to tragedy but was instead sentimental, unhappy and more dangerously melancholy than I cared to think. I told myself, as I looked at him standing there, slim and fit in sweater and chinos, handsome and boyish and hurt, that it was only the Mardi Gras, that things moved so fast in that mob, in that haze of liquor and fever. But it has never taken me more than a minute to fall in love with someone, truth be told—and long, dismal months to climb out.

  I spent the next two days with him, and we saw the end of the Mardi Gras together. There was never really any question of my staying, though I kissed him as the last parade went by, as the plastic beads rained and rattled down around our heads in sprays of pastel colors, and I said, “I love you,” and he said bitterly, “Yes, I am easy to love.”

  I did try on our last night together. We agreed to try, to be relaxed, no sweat, no foul. But relax is exactly what a limp penis will not let a man do. Or that is, so relaxed is it, so calm seeming as if to say, “Hey, you guys wanna have sex, go on ahead, it’s cool, don’t mind me, I’ll catch some z’s,” that the whole rest of his body becomes taut and feverish as if to compensate. Anyway, we did it, or something like it, slick with sweat, gasping for air, so relieved, finally, by that little burst of scum from the insouciantly half-hard wand that we embraced each other laughing, and talking afterwards, volubly, ceaselessly, to cover any attempt on the part of shame or dissatisfaction to stand up where the other wouldn’t. And then it was morning and we found that even the bittersweet drama of our parting had been swallowed up, threatened with ridicule by the semi-consummated sheets, as if our friends had gathered in the courtyard for a chivari, pushing our faces in our failure. It was when I got home after that, after I had secured my job at the movie house and begun writing poetry full-time, that I also started my really heavy drinking.

  “Sometimes I think sex was invented by bullies so tender men who made them look bad wouldn’t be able to reproduce,” I told Blumenthal when I told him, recently, about Arnold.

  “Surely,” said he, “you don’t mean bullies like me?”

  “Well,” I said, into the breach, “it’s not abnormal for people to say women like sex less than men, that it’s less of an urgent issue for them.”

  “No, it’s not.” He shifts. “It’s insane, but it’s not abnormal.”

  “Well, what am I supposed to do? I mean, is the outshot of therapy that I’m going to be reduced to an organ?”

  “Maybe an organ and a hand: floating vaginas never pay their bills.”

  I rear up in the chair. “I think you’re being s
mug and sexist,” I say.

  Blumenthal shifts. “Smug, yes. I apologize. Why sexist?”

  “Because you want to reduce everything to the physical to give men the advantage.”

  “Why does that give men the advantage?”

  “Well—” Frankly, it had seemed self-evident to me when I said it. “Well—they’re stronger for one thing.”

  “In some situations,” says Blumenthal. “And in others: not.”

  “They can rape you.” He says nothing. I feel my face get hot. I say sharply, “You’re trying to make me say that I feel men are better than women because they have penises.”

  “Got me,” says Blumenthal, and he snaps his fingers: a loud crack in the silent room.

  “Oh, hon. Oh, hon,” says Arthur.

  “Yes,” I call from the kitchen.

  “Which do you think?”

  “What are they again?”

  “‘Cats’ or ‘La Cage Aux Folles.’”

  “Musicals.”

  “Right. One’s T.S. Eliot, the other’s fags.”

  Decisions, decisions.

  I have a brother. My brother’s name is Mark. He is six years older than I. The Bloomster says I have ambivalent feelings toward him, but I disagree. I think I am quite bivalent. I hope he gets cancer, weeps because he is afraid to die, then dies.

  Mark works in California, with computers: systems; money. He is vastly intelligent, articulate, funny. He makes my mother smile when he teases her and taps her on the chin with his fist like Jimmy Cagney. He and my father stand together with their hands in their pockets and their backs slumped and discuss investment opportunities. Mark calls me “Squirt” and brings me presents: expensive hardcover books of poetry—the complete Ginsberg, the illuminated Blake—and when I see his face, which is handsome and dark, my heart leaps up and expands in my chest with love for him, and with having missed him. Cancer of the pancreas. Incurable.

  When he comes home, which is infrequently, he sits in the red leather wing chair, the one my father reads the newspaper in, and my mother actually goes into the kitchen (she must need a map to find it) and brings him crackers laid out in a semi-circle on a tray around a hunk of oniony cheese. His wife, Maureen, usually talks to me, as if it were her assignment, leaning forward on her knees, serious, nodding, asking questions. I think she read a poem once, I’m not sure. Perhaps she thinks I am the greatest rhymester since Guest. I like Maureen, I do, but the blankness in her baby blues when I mention the name of the journal that published my latest, the way she says, “Oh—yes—I think I’ve heard of that” (Christ, I never heard of it before they bought me), makes me want to lean forward, serious, on my knees, and say, “So what about thighs?” Maureen used to be an exercise instructor before she had Bert.

  Bert is my nephew whom I am supposed to love. Bert is two. I love Bert. He calls me “Ansam,” and I love the way he talks, smiles, cries with his entire body, leaning it forward to say hello, rocking it when he thinks something is funny, hurling it to the floor like a gage when he is mad. Even when he says he hates you, you are borne on his honesty as on a tide, carried away peacefully on the startling wings of the real. I peer into the brown ponds of his eyes and he seems, in his childish but tender way, to be telling me that my womb is plugged up so tightly that soon it will become a vacuum and I will collapse into it, crumble into it gray-haired like a piece of hollow plaster, like the woman leaving Shangri-la, or the vampire at the end of a horror movie, finally coming of age: the price of coming of age too late, centuries too late.

  My mother’s penis has plugged up my womb. There is no entry to my womb but through my asshole. (Thus this charming toddler. “Ansam. Ansam.”) My mother who is coming back from the kitchen sans assistance from Lewis and Clark. Who is bending over to present Mark with the semi-circle of crackers, the hunk of cheese, who is still, still slaughtering my father with her love of Mark. Handsome Mark who wins the bourgeois game hands down, whom I could only defeat through Buddhahood. Who has triumphed now. Satori!

  Whenever Mark stands up—even to go to the bathroom—I steal his chair. I do not mean to. I drift to it, my feet feel tired. I sit down with the red leather wings on either side of me. The toilet flushes. I tingle as Mark returns.

  “Scram, Squirt,” he says.

  I cede the chair, the lips of my cunt tingling, my ass tender and pink, feeling as if I have been well and truly fucked. A koan presents itself: how triumph over a man who has the authority to decide whether or not you have triumphed over him. I dub this “The Ice Cream Koan,” a pun that means nothing. Kensho!

  He rarely beat me. He was too much older to look back long enough to know I was there. That’s not true. He defended me from bullies. Once, we were ice skating and a bunch of big-kid boys made fun of me. I was ten. I had everything: the cute little hat with the beanie, the pompon skates. But I couldn’t skate well, and the boys, four of them, Mark’s age, made fun of me, and also said I had a nice ass. Mark went after them on the ice—all four of them—and they ran. Mark went after them like a racer, and then, on a sharp turn, lost his footing. His legs went up in the air, his ass cracked against the ice, his face blank, an utter fool, and the boys laughed. I have never loved him so much. His pride was most of him at sixteen. “C’mon, Squirt,” he said, arm around my shoulder, “let’s go home and hammer the dents out of my butt.”

  By the time the fights with my parents came, the long, long fights of adolescence: “How will you live? You need job training! What were you doing with that boy? I will cut off your hair,” my brother was in college in Santa Barbara. “Fuck ’em, Squirt,” he said over the phone. “Write poetry.” And for long minutes at a time, I caught hold of that voice like a rope and pulled myself to the open air hand over hand. If everything had just not been so easy for him, I could have loved him unequivocally, bivalently, oh, with radiant bivalence. As it stands, he is a major obstacle in my new career of quiet darkness, of comfortable despair. What will happen when he meets Arthur? Oh dread, oh fear, oh terror. Arthur may shrink to ten inches, his voice a squeak as Mark pats him on the head. Arthur may put his hands in his pockets and slouch back and dicuss investment opportunities. Arthur may cut him to ribbons with a few swipes of his rapier. What will happen then?

  All good things will crumble with a muted roar and forth I will break like a griffin with my mother’s face, phallus straining.

  “Squirt? Squirt! Aaaagh!”

  “Oh, hon?”

  I pour some coffee in a mug. I am going to dump it on Arthur’s head.

  “Let’s see,” I sing out. “‘Cats’ or ‘La Cage.’ I’m thinking, Lamb.”

  Maybe he will melt away, all this will melt away like the Wicked Witch of the West. Maybe not a griffin but a child will arise from beneath, proclaiming life with its whole body. Maybe, on the other hand, I will chicken out and save myself.

  “Hon?”

  “Coming,” I sing out. “Coming.”

  I walked in terror like the night, I lived scared for what seemed ages. Waiting for God to be arrested for shooting Judy Honegger with Marcodel, the rifle. I could see the Medical Examiner digging the spent penis out of the dead woman’s neck. “Looks like Marcodel’s to me.” A trail leading straight to heaven.

  I was scared. Would he call? Would he tell me? And what would I do, sworn to secrecy. If only it had not been true, I could have enjoyed the romance of it. True, I felt like a little girl, unable to cope. I went for days without writing, feeling that it was children’s rhymes compared to the real world of policemen and district attorneys, newspaper reporters and high-powered rifles. God had shot down a young woman and I was to blame. Maybe my probing had set him off. Maybe Judy was a replacement for me. It was distinctly not funny.

  I went to St. Thomas’ and prayed. On my knees, tears in my eyes. “Oh God, don’t let it be God, God. Make it not God, God. God, God, God.”

  I watched Arthur, day after day. I had lived with him a week, I was in the first flush of living with him. Well, not f
lush—more like bloom, a burgeoning moment that would culminate the night of Jake’s party.

  It was two days before that that they arrested the man who had shot Judy Honegger. A thirty-two-year-old black man with a wife and three kids. He had gone nuts after losing his job in a shoe store. God, I felt certain, was a white man, unmarried. But still, I followed Arthur around the apartment for an hour, saying, “Are they sure?”

  “What’s with you, angel?” said my brand new Arthur. “You afraid you’re next?”

  “Did he mention God?”

  “Yeah, he said, ‘God, they fired me from that shoe store.’”

  “Marcodel?”

  “Who?”

  “Did he have a name for his rifle?”

  “Spot, I think. Samantha …” He took me by the shoulders in witty-but-earnest Arthurian fashion. “It’s him. We got him. It’s just a guy.”

  But I did not feel safe until the next morning, in the basement of St. Sebastian’s, when the phone rang and I picked up to hear a long silence. I knew that silence right off: it was God, at last.

  “Samantha,” he said tentatively.

  And I started scolding him. “God! Where have you been? Do you know how worried I was?”

  And he started whining. “I had to go to the hospital. I got hit by a rock.”

  “Oh, God,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “These guys, they threw a rock at me and it hit me and I had to have stitches.”