Darling Clementine

  My vagina is raw and sore from last night’s exertions. Somehow, I feel that rawness, that soreness will be my best protection, my buckler, through whatever is to come. Mark, of course, will be there, too; Mark and Maureen and Bert, but somehow, as long as I can still feel Arthur in me, I will be upheld in this and more than this. Maybe that’s what she is whispering to him across the imitation stick shift: “Be with me.” And he: “I will.”

  A passage, my soul, to India!

  “Pull over again, would you, darling?” I say. “Quick!”

  They are streaming off the porch of the old manse, the old colonnaded white manse, onto the lawn. Mother is pecking Arthur on the cheek, Mark and Maureen are kissing me—I am introducing them to Arthur and exclaiming that Bert has grown and the last time I saw him he was no bigger than. Dad has his hands in his pockets and is leaning back, smiling, as if he is discussing Wall Street with Mark and I have a sudden flash—a sort of sense that he is malevolent, bursting on my consciousness like a firework until I snap it off, reminding myself of turning off the TV during the fireworks titles of Walt Disney’s “Wonderful World of Color.” What is the answer?

  Mother does not kiss me. Mother never does. She squeezes my shoulder and says, “You look gray, dear. Are you all right?” I tell her I was carsick and, as we all climb the porch and head for the door, she begins telling Arthur a story of how I wet my bed once when I was five or something—her way of belittling me, de-sexing me, but there is that rawness, and then Arthur is cutting her off, telling her a story of how he wet himself—his way of telling her that he has laid aside childish things and she should do likewise, and she says, “Well …” as if she really has something important to do and disappears indoors before the rest of us and even as Mark grabs Arthur’s elbow to start the masculine joust which thrills and terrifies me at once, my cunt feels Arthur’s cock giving me the okay sign with a big grin and wiggling its eyebrows like Groucho Marx. The notion of a penis with eyebrows like Groucho Marx strikes me as extraordinarily refreshing and healthy and I am silently passing the high-sign on to the Dr. Blumenthal of the mind as Maureen, Father and Bert surround me and carry me into the darkness of the house.

  Indoors, everything is passing gay. There are tortes and danishes and coffee, sweet coffee, beautiful black coffee, my pal of pals, and we are all having conversations which are allowed to progress even to the point of laughter before my mother interrupts with something like, “Oh, Todd Billings died,” or, when she has run out of corpses, “Oh, John, would you mind emptying the litter box, I forgot.” My mother is afraid of laughter because, I guess, the gods might hear it and—do what? What can the gods do to us for our laughter that they do not do to us anyway? Mother knows.

  There are two basic conversations going on at once and I am in the unfortunate position of having to talk in one while wanting to listen to the other. In my conversation, which I have been dreading, Maureen, leaning forward, elbows on knees, face intense, is asking me about my book (yes, well, the fact is: my poems are to be published in a book), and I am explaining about the award (I sort of won the Whitman award last week) and I am joking that I hope it is published before the war so that when the cockroaches evolve into archaeologists they’ll discover the fragments, and Maureen is saying, “Oh, but you must be very pleased,” and I am disarmed and say, “I am. I am pleased,” at which point, my father, dandling Bert between his knees, says, “So—is there any payment for this?” and the firework of his malevolence blows up again—someone keeps turning on the TV—until I snap it off—and I hear myself say, “A little, but I don’t worry about that too much because I’m wealthy,” and he: “You mean, Arthur is wealthy,” and I give him a veritably Arthurian grin and say, “Dad, I hate to be the one to break this to you, but Arthur and I have gotten married.” This week on Walt Whitman’s Wonderful World of Dolor: Minnie suddenly realizes that not all her problems are with Mother Mouse, who breaks in at this point to tell Maureen for the fortieth time that she only has our word for the fact of our being married, not having been invited, you see, to the wedding, and Maureen quips—yes, the dear girl quips, I didn’t know she had it in her—that maybe we’ll produce the license later, then turns to me, elbows on her knees and says, “So this award …” And I want to kiss her on her quipping lips for extricating us all from this ugliness with a California-bred sensitivity which, like most forms of tenderness, is always an admirable quality when it appears in someone else and is directed towards yourself.

  Meanwhile, Arthur and Mark.

  Mark: So—I hear you’ve been getting your face in the papers lately.

  Arthur: Ah, well, you shouldn’t waste time reading the funnies …

  Mark: Five big-time mobsters, was it?

  Arthur: Let’s see: Flattop, Joker, Lex Luther, The Riddler and Mr. Mxzlptlk—yeah, five.

  Mark: This should increase your chances of running for D.A., shouldn’t it?

  Arthur shrugs.

  Mark: Doesn’t that create tension with your boss?

  Arthur (more seriously): Actually, I think he’s running for Congress.

  Mark: Well, then: D.A., Governor; who knows I could be the First Lady’s brother.

  I spill coffee on my dress at the thought of my becoming First Lady, but on the other hand, a whole generation of women modeling themselves on me might be a lot more interesting than Jackie Kennedy’s pillbox hats.

  Then Mark says: “Until these thugs are set free on technicalities. Then the whole house of cards comes tumbling down, right?”

  Arthur shrugs again. “I’ll always have my membership in the Thomas E. Dewey fan club.”

  As I picture future generations of female poets vomiting in the weeds beside the Arthur C. Clementine Thruway, it occurs to me that both these conversations, the one I am talking in and the one I am listening to, are really one conversation. They progress thusly: Bring up our achievements, override our modesty until we admit our pride in them, then cut us down. Mark’s apple, apparently, has not fallen far from Dad’s tree.

  “So, Mark,” I call across the room. “How’s the computer business?” because I know that what is really bugging Mark is that Arthur is a big-time crimebuster while he is in “systems” and feels like a wimp just as my father is angry because I am a poet and he thinks that means I think his life is a waste whereas in reality (while that may be true, I’m not sure) he is only projecting, doncha know, his own opinion of himself onto me, half hoping, half fearing I’ll confirm it. Now, Mark is sort of withering as Arthur expresses the interest in his business that he evinces toward everyone because he’s that kind of guy, which makes me positively burst with the knowledge, which I cannot reveal, that one of his Mafia biggies has cracked and is pouring out enough information by the minute to completely change the balance of Law vs. Organized Crime to the Law side, and that I, for one, think “The President’s Commission on Sexual Sanity, Mental Health and Spiritual Enlightenment” has a positively nifty ring to it and that I, having rescued my beloved for the nonce from the familial hostilities, allowing him to drink his coffee in peace, can hear my cunt calling out to his cock, “Say-hey, buddy, slap me five! Oh. Well, slap me one!” and I am warming to the fact that, despite my passion for my shrink, I seem simultaneously to be falling head over heels in love with my husband, dear boy that he is, just as Inez or Ramona or Consuela or whoever serves the Birthday Brunch.

  My mother is sixty. Her hair is cut short now, and it is gray. She wore it longer in her youth. Her watchful, wary, frightened eyes live in a deepening nest of wrinkles, wrinkles written by her fear; and the lines of a lifetime’s tension are scrawled at the corners of her mouth. The flesh of her hands is sagging a little, and I see liver spots on the backs, between the prominent veins. Am I surprised to see my mother has grown old? A little, not much. It happened quickly, overnight, it seems, and yet it seems, too, that she has always been old, acted old, like a person effacing herself to keep others from doing it to her. I think, perhaps, that she is more surpris
ed than I. All her life she has paid off Death—or whatever it is she fears that is the mask of Death—with little superstitious terrors, with a minimum of motion to slow down time, with a profession of hatred for Eros, like the teacher’s pet sneering at the class buffoon. And yet Death has taken all this motionlessness and fear as a mere payment of interest and is still coming, coming, coming to collect the principal. Had she stolen her life outright, had she claimed her existence as her own and paid nothing—for possession, after all, is nine tenths of the law—had she lived gaily, playfully to the very edge of things, Death could do no more than he already will.

  When the cake comes in, I walk to the head of the table, and bend beside the rosewood chair, and kiss her cheek and say, “Happy birthday, Mom. I love you.”

  She smiles vaguely in my direction, then turns to my father at the other end of the table and says, “Did you remember to drain off the boiler, John?”

  The next day, I hear from God again, under rather comic circumstances if you go in for the comedy of despair.

  Patricia, across the room, has caught a long one and for the last half hour the only line open is mine and it is ringing continually. First, I get Melinda, or as we call her in the trade, the Rape Lady. Melinda calls every day just about and always begins by saying, “I’ve been raped,” which is always true because she continues to date her rapist, who continues to force himself on her in every way known, so to speak, to man. Melinda is always very upset about this, but every time you suggest that she give this creep the scramola, she becomes furious and abusive and says things like, “What the fuck do you know about it, you fucking whore?” (Fag for the gents.) On top of this, she has the annoying habit of playing her radio very loudly, so that today, for instance, as she is weeping absolutely copiously over Joe’s latest atrocity, which, I confess, is grimly original even for Joe, in the background I hear Tom Frankson singing “Popsicle Toes,” and I am very close to laughing which would make looking in the mirror something of an impossibility for the next few days.

  Now, because of her frequent calls, and her tendency to get nasty, Melinda has been limited by our supervisor to one fifteen minute call a day, and when her time is up, I tell her I must go. She is furious and calls me names, and eventually I am forced to apologize and hang up. Melinda retaliates with silent calls—i.e., phoning over and over and breathing into the phone—while in the background now, Sammy Davis Jr. is doing “The Candy Man”: “Who can make a rainbow? Sprinkle it with cream …?” The problem with these calls is you have to keep answering and hold on until you’re sure it is not someone else, someone desperate, trying to find the courage to speak. With Melinda, fortunately, the radio is a giveaway—who else listens to that station? Finally, the phone rings, I pick up, and indeed it is someone else. It is Guy or, as we call him, the Cancer Guy. Guy is also a daily caller, who is worried that he has cancer. Primarily, he worries that he has it in his testicles, but occasionally he’ll throw us a lung or gall bladder just to keep us interested. Does Guy ever go to a doctor? Surely you jest. What he does is repeatedly ask us whether he has the disease or not, and when we refuse to diagnose him, starts whining, “You aren’t helping me, you’re supposed to help me, why don’t you help me,” which, I admit, broke my heart the first hundred and fifty times I heard it. Guy, too, has been limited to fifteen minutes a day (and has, like Melinda, been barred from every other hotline in the tri-state area, which we, in our good-heartedness, never do) and, when I end the call, goes into his litany: “Just tell me this: Do you think I have cancer?”

  “I’m not a doctor, Guy.”

  “You’re not helping me …”

  Until I have to hang up. The minute I do, Melinda starts calling again (Dionne Warwick: “Do You Know The Way To San José?”). And when I hang up on her, Guy calls back: “Just—do you think I have cancer?” The next five minutes pass in this fashion. Ring. Lifeline. L.A. is a great big freeway … Click. Ring. Lifeline. Do you think I have cancer? Click. Ring. Lifeline. In a week, maybe two, they’ll make you a star. Click. Ring. Cancer? Click. Ring. San José? Click. Ring. Cancer? Click. Ring. San José? Until, finally, I lose my temper. The phone rings, and I grab it and scream:

  “No!”

  For the next few seconds, I am unsure whether I have cured Guy or left Dionne stranded on Ventura Boulevard. Then, a little voice asks:

  “Sam?”

  And it is God.

  I sigh. “Oh God, God,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

  “Is someone bothering you?”

  He sounds very protective and I can just see the headlines: “Rape Lady And Cancer Guy Gunned Down By God.”

  “No, no, I just—thought it was someone else,” I say. And quickly: “So how are you?”

  There is a pause while, I imagine, he decides whether or not to let this drop. Then: “Frankly, Sam, I’m very concerned about the international situation.”

  “Well, we all are, Sweetie. It’s very tense.”

  “I think the end is coming.”

  “Well—we hope not.” I can’t do much better than that. What do you say when the world is such that a psychopath’s concerns become entirely reasonable?

  “I have a vision,” says God, “of the anger of the serpent erupting. Of the church of Marcodel’s soul igniting into great clouds of noxious gas. Oouoh laughs and laughs at the triumph of Virgin Woman, as men embrace in passion, driving the organs of their individuality into the gap of the endless night. Hero after hero leans forward to kiss his reflection in the lake of fire and plunges into the abyss, screaming and screaming, while the daughters of Samooni dangle from the rotting branches of the trees in Central Park and plead for release until they wither and crumble to the ground where they are dashed to pieces by the acid rain. I see God pluck his heart from his own chest and laugh because it is the skull of man and he copulates with its eyesockets with his two-pronged organ, trumpeting the triumph of his nameless father’s rage. I see oceans rushing in over the borders of the land to clog the wailing mouths of babes with the bitter salt of unshed tears. I see no end to the silences of unlived lives trodding the empty air as mourning spectres. I see Carol Burnett with a bucket and mop.”

  “Cleaning up?”

  “No, I left the TV on. Hold it a second.”

  Well, I think as he goes to click off the set, that’s the last time I neglect to read the morning paper.

  He’s back. “So what do you think’s going to happen?” he asks.

  I had not been prepared for this, and I falter. For some reason, I am thinking of yesterday, as Arthur and I left my parents’ house to drive home. In the dark car, enjoying, this time, the mild night breezes, I look at my darling’s silhouette and say, “Do you really think you could be president?”

  He laughs. “I’m an assistant D.A., Sam. I think, if everything breaks just right, I could be D.A.”

  I cross my arms and huddle in the corner. “All right. Don’t tell me your hopes, fears, dreams and ambitions. I’m just your old wife, anyway.”

  He reaches from the steering wheel and pats my thigh. “I love you, old wife,” he says.

  “Do you talk to Jones about it?”

  “No. I don’t really think about it, sweetheart. Honestly.”

  “Well, so, think about it. I’m kind of interested.”

  “Okay.” He thinks about it in the dark. “I think,” he says finally, “I could one day be governor.”

  “Jesus! Really?”

  “My family is pretty big in the national party. If I make D.A., if things go well, if, if, if—I think I could get the nomination, and then it’s up to the voters. So—now you have 16 million ifs, and I get to be governor. Once you’re governor, you’re a possible candidate for president and, that’s it: straight from A.D.A. to the White House.”

  I consider this for a while. I watch the shadows of the blossoming willows by the road.

  “Then I think we should get a divorce,” I say.

  “Well, Sam, I’m glad we could have this little c
hat,” says Arthur.

  “No, I’m serious. You can’t be president weighted down by someone like me. I’ve got a psychiatric history, a drinking problem. If the public ever got ahold of my poetry, they’d think it was pornography.”

  “That’s six votes right there.”

  “I won’t stand in your way, Arthur.”

  “I appreciate that, Sam. But it’s a long walk to Manhattan, maybe we ought to give this a few more miles.”

  “I’m serious.”

  “You’re not serious. You can’t be serious,” Arthur says. “I resign the presidency.”

  “You can’t. I won’t let you.”

  “Well, there you are. I cannot continue without the help and support of the woman I love.”

  “Who said that?”

  “Dewey, I think. Maybe Huey, I’m not sure.”

  “Who was he, anyway?”

  “Look, Samantha, darling girl, light of my life,” says Arthur, “I have the mind, the talent and the tenacity to change the world for good, but I’m not going to give up the best blow jobs in America to do it, and if the public can’t accept that—oh, what the hell, by that time, we’ll all probably be living in mud huts wearing bones in our noses, anyway. I’ll have to run for totem. Wo!”

  Mouth agape, lips moistened, I have made a dive for his zipper, and he is screaming: “Oh, God! Chappaquiddick!”

  “Sam?”

  “What?” It is God, bringing me, smiling, out of this remembrance of dingus past. “Oh,” I say, “God.”

  “So?”

  “So what?”

  “So what do you think will happen to the world, Sam?”

  I shake my head; sigh; sigh. “Oh God, Gosh—I mean, gosh, God …”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “All I know is that it’s time for a change.”