Darling Clementine (15 page)

“Sit-do-da-diddleothen dot!”

“… is mine …”

“Sharee-ee dow!”

“God gave this land to me …”

“Meedle-eedle-booten daten dow!” and so on.

Elizabeth and I had a long chat in the bedroom about how things are going better between me and Arthur and how she and Lansky are discussing marriage—and kids, which Lansky worries will turn him into an old man with no talent, one glass eye and a limp.

Sheila and Jake chatted amiably together on the sofa about the end of life on earth as we know it, and Jake's new lover, Bernard, did a Greta Garbo that had us rolling in the aisles, and Mrs. McFigg, who's a bit of a prig, did a jig with a pig in a big purple wig—I
couldn't
have liked it more!

Anyway, I am reflecting rue-rue-ruefully as we zip up—who was Thomas E. Dewey, anyway?—the highway, that it was Arthur who did all the drinking, while I, with a restraint which, considering the context, was downright optimistic in its implications, had merely a civilized toke or two to be friendly, and it is he who is doing the zipping and whistling this morning while I am primarily consigned to whooping, gagging and the occasional musical groan.

“Nerves,” says Arthur, between renditions of “She's Leaving Home,” and “When I'm Sixty-Four.”

“Die, Arthur,” I whisper. “Die.”

Last night—ah, yesternight, between the reefer and the booze—when all our guests were gone, he fucked and fucked me in perfect, crazy bliss, his ass rising in roller coaster arcs, his stiff prick plunging, as the pornographers say, veritably plunging into me, driving me into the pitch blackness of pleasure. We slapped and scratched and bit and screamed the two of us, and even now, feeling the tad woozy though I do, I feel my cunt has been blown open, that its lips lie loose and ragged between my legs—that it and his limp cock are conversing feverishly across the imitation stick shift, uttering the words “en masse” while we—the rest of us—cling pleasantly uncommunicative to our simple, separate bucket seats.

I met a Whitman scholar once. After Jerry gave me
Leaves of Grass
, and I devoured it. It is rare in this vale of tears to feel that you have walked anywhere with anyone. I have walked, I know, with Blumenthal and maybe, through Blumenthal somehow, I will learn to walk with Arthur into the mystery. But I walked with Walt a ways, I know that, too. I remember sitting on the toilet, to be crude but honest, reading “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” which, for all I know, made me a living symbol of western civilization. I remember hitting the line, “Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all you cannot see me?” and immediately glancing down in dismay at the jeans around my ankles, feeling the seat burning a ring in my ass, the grainy details of defecation, and thinking a silent apology that he had found me like this. If I'd known he was coming, I'd have been naked, save for an ermine stole, hurling champagne glasses into the fireplace. Ah, sweet thief in the night! But then, who can imagine the Walt-man spinning away, hands to his eyes, crying in disgust, “Oh, Caelia, Caelia, Caelia …”? Perhaps, I mean, it was just as well.

Anyway, I knew that there was a Whitman scholar—Donaldson, his name was—at Columbia, and went to visit him at his office. I had this childish notion that a lifetime of studying the bearded great one would somehow be manifest in his face and conversation, would give him the power to inspire hope and inspiration, as t'were. Instead, I found Donaldson a grasping, climbing, bitter, back-biting academic in-fighter who tortured me for forty-five minutes with gossip about who was going to get tenure because he was sucking up to whom, and which was a homosexual, which explains the raves
that
particular piece of muck has been getting in
this
inverted journal; and why the fact that
he
had the goods on
him
had cost him the chairmanship that
he
got by a sudden unexpected change in his attitudes toward
this
… Oh God, it was dreadful, pitiful. I wanted to weep, to cry out “But—‘When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed!'” except I knew he would have none of it. I wondered if at some time in his undergraduate career, he had come upon
Leaves
and known, deep in his unconscious, his soul, that here was a book that transcended its good poetry and its bad poetry to become alive and so threatened to make him alive, too; if his destiny was then set in motion—to become, not Whitman's scholar, but his coroner, to throttle the play of poetry into the work of scholarship: to teach it, yes, but always while dissecting it past the danger of vitality until he had walled the great man up like Urizen in his cave. For the love of God, Montressor!

I am going to tell my mother I love her. I don't know why—my theory is that these things go beyond the individual parent, that they are matters simply between you and your introject: that the mother of Bloomenthal-land is simply part of me; that the mother of Greenwich, Connecticut is irrelevant. There is, in short, no need for this particular passage—but I am going to do it; maybe because Death is involved here somewhere, and Death seems to pick his teeth with my theories. Or maybe just because we have walked together, she and I.

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 surprised 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.