Darling Clementine (16 page)

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 chat,” 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.”

Seven

“I have a theory,” I say, “that Charles Dickens'
A Christmas Carol
is really about psychotherapy.”

Blumenthal shifts. “Humbug,” he says.

“No, really. It's a spiritual classic. On the anniversary of his death—which is also the anniversary of the birth of the Son of God—Marley, the phantom father, comes to warn Scrooge of the ultimate fate of anal retentive characters like himself. Scrooge consults Dr. Spirit, who at first appears to him as a vague mixture of feminine and masculine qualities that will guide him into the past. ‘Long past?' asks Scrooge. ‘No, your past,' answers the doc. Off Scrooge goes to see himself rejected by his father, and only allowed to approach him again under the auspices of his sister—in other words, he has to repress his masculine rage against the old man and his desire for his mother, and thus the pleasures of life. This is why he hates his nephew: because he is proof of his sister's sexuality—the process he's come to associate with castration and death. Freud's—sorry, Scroogian slip—Scrooge's masculinity reemerges in his adolescence, represented by good father Fezziwig, and he gets engaged. But slowly, he must hold more and more of himself in in order to keep both his rage and femininity from reemerging. He becomes a grasping miser, losing his fiancée, replacing Eros with Thanatos in the guise of the love of money.

“At this point when Scrooge's resistance breaks down, and he extinguishes the light of his past, transference occurs—Dr. Spirit becomes the jovial, all-powerful father bearing the phallic horn of plenty. Suddenly, through this attachment, the world seems bright again and full of cheer, and Freud—
Scrooge
—can mourn what his life would have been like if he had not been such a crazy by vicariously enjoying Cratchit's poor but happy Christmas. Then, the shadow of another ill falls across his mind in the predicted death of Tiny Tim, through Scrooge's own stinginess—the threat that he will perpetuate his father's sins upon his proxy-son, and so continue the darkness of his non-life into eternity. At this point, he sees to his horror that Dr. Spirit is ageing; that the all-powerful father-God is only a human being. With which, Dr. Spirit parts his robes and, where his genitals should be, there is Ignorance and Want—Repression and the resultant twisted version of Lust.

“It's then that Dr. Spirit becomes the silent mirror of life-and-death itself, throwing Scrooge upon the fact of his mortality and thus an acceptance of his own responsibility for life as it is.”

And so saying, I bury my face in my hands and weep. I weep and weep, the tears dripping through the cracks in my fingers. I weep for five minutes and my throat becomes sore from the heaving sobs. Then, with a harsh gasp, I sit up in the chair and peer, owly, through the blur at the Spirit of Therapy Yet To Come.

Said Spirit shifts in his chair. “I thought
A Christmas Carol
had a happy ending.”

I nod and laugh, sniffling.

“Alistair Sim does a somersault, doesn't he? Or is that ‘It's a Wonderful Life'?”

“Have you ever noticed that those two stories are mirror images of each other?”

“No,” says Blumenthal. “Why are you crying?”

“Because,” I say, pouting, sniffling, wiping my nose on the sleeve of my sweetest blouse with the maroon slashes on tan which I wore just for him. “Because I'm getting better. I can feel it. I'm saner. I'm calmer. I'm happier than I've ever been. I'm as light as a feather, as happy as a schoolboy …”

“Giddy as a drunken man?”

“Uh huh.”

“Maybe we should try electro-shock.”

“I love you,” I tell Blumenthal, and he nods once with regal gravity. “And I don't want to leave you, and in a few years, I'll be all well, and then I'll have to. Damn it!” I slam my fist down on the chair so that the pain goes shivering clear up to my shoulder. “That's all it is, all it ever is: it's one loss after another. It's learning to love something, then giving it up. It's loss, loss, loss, loss, loss. You lose the womb, and then your mother. You lose your looks, your children, your health, and then you lose your life. Everything you hold onto turns to poison and only the things you let go of become sweet and beautiful and melancholy, and I hate it. I hate it. Everything is either King Lear or Prospero: You either try too hard to hold on and you're slowly reduced to nothing, or you give everything away, everything you love and you become a tragic magician. It's an awful way to run things. The only state of mind with anything to offer is mourning. It stinks.”

“Yes,” says Blumenthal.

I glare. “Don't say yes. What are you thinking?”

“You don't want to know.”