Darling Clementine (6 page)

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 coverup 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.

“Everything that's good and beautiful, you destroy. Nothing is safe. Whatever's golden, you turn to shit.”

Arthur has fished the chip out of the soapy water and is holding it out to me as an offering.

“What am I supposed to do with that?” I screech.

He looks at it quizzically, gets my point. I drive it home.

“It's a chip! A chip! It's just a chip, no more than that,” I say. I hurl the mug at him—clumsily because my fingers get stuck in the handle. He catches it. “Go ahead—there may still be some beauty in it—why don't you shatter it? Shatter it!” And, crying, I rush into the bedroom.

Arthur follows me, saying, “Sam!” He sits beside me on the bed, leans over me. I am rigid as a board, staring up at him.

“I'm sorry,” he says.

“I bought that with the money from my poem,” I say.

“I know, I understand,” he says, despairingly, helplessly.

I love him so much, this man. “I want to go to bed and hurt you,” I say.

Arthur's eyes shift to one side, but he nods. We are naked in a moment and I am on him, pummeling him, slapping and pinching him. I spank him as hard as I can, shocked by the loud cracks but I can't stop: I need to see his ass turn red. Finally, I climb on top of him, dip my fingers in my cunt to lubricate them and shove them up his ass, first one, then two, then three. I pump into him while he grunts. I reach around and grab his erection and squeeze it, hissing, “Look, you like it. You're a whore, you're a slut, you're a cunt. You love it. Take it.” I am planning, as I say, to catch his scum in my hand and then jam my fingers in his mouth, but I come before he does, and when he does, I am spent and wasted; I do not want to do it anymore.

Arthur rolls over on his back with a sigh. He stares at the ceiling. I think he is shocked—because he liked it, because I have shown myself to him and I am ugly—I don't know and I don't want to think about it. I am too happy. I feel giddy and thrilled.

He glances at me where I lay grinning.

“Does this mean I don't have to buy you a new mug?” he asks.

I laugh. “Go to sleep, love,” I say.

Assholes. I wake up the next morning thinking about assholes: shit and assholes. Assholes and shit. I am depressed. I am ashamed when I wake up. No, it is not shame: it is panic. I am afraid. Something bad is going to happen to me today, I can feel it. With sudden terror I realize that I have a shrink appointment today. I run to the calendar—Animals of the Bronx Zoo; Hippos for March—I do not have a shrink appointment, Blumenthal's away: I have till Friday.

I think of assholes. Assholes and shit. Arthur's asshole—a pink-brown bud as he lay under me with his hips raised by a pillow and his legs spread: he looked like a great, docile cow. This thought makes me horny. I want to fuck him again when he comes home—he has left for work early to deal with the crisis. Then I remember: I can't: shrink on Friday. I don't have to talk about it, I think. It's my money: I can say whatever I want. But I'm not horny anymore.

I sit down to write, but the minute I open my pad, my belly bloats and I rush into the bathroom and have diarrhea. Shit and assholes, assholes and shit.

I go out for a walk. It is very cold and the wind is blustery and makes my cheeks sting.

I find myself thinking of God. God has not called for a while, I realize: almost two weeks. And for two weeks before that, I have got nothing from him but more Blakian craziness. I'd thought we were beginning to get past that.

About a month after he first started calling me—I remember it was August because Blumenthal was away and I had walked to St. Sebastian's looking up at the sky to see him and the other psychiatrists flying in a wedge-formation for the Hamptons—we had something of a breakthrough, God and I.

I am listening to him rattle on about this and that and frankly I am having a hard time keeping my eyes open. Working on the hotline has given me a certain sympathy for Bloomie who has also on occassion had to fight to stay awake while I talked. Still, I am glad God can't see over the phone because this never fails to hurt my feelings.

God is chatting away gaily: “Moving grim over the plains of Orfalon, I witness Oouoh—” (The female principle, I gather) “—birthing from her mouth a snake wearing a mitre which coils around the calves of Marcodel, and enters his nether regions to snare his soul.”

“Painful,” I say.

“You're telling me,” says God. “His soul comes rushing from his belly in torrents and he builds a church with barred windows.”

You have to hand it to Marcodel: he is nothing if not resourceful.

Even as I doze, I am searching through my mind, riffling the pages of remembered Blake for something that will unravel this and lead us back to the personal. Ever since his “I'm so unhappy” outburst weeks before, he has been up there in the unreachable ether.

“Marcodel must be pretty ticked off about you creating Oouoh,” I say.

And suddenly, we come down to earth with a sickening thud.

“Yes, he has transformed his body into the weapon and will bring Death back into the world. Of his eyes he makes the sight, and of his mighty thighs the stock. His arms are the barrel, and his organ he has placed into the chamber of his heart …”

I am awake. I sit up so fast my reclining chair snaps up late and slugs me in the back. I gasp and dried-up Patricia gives me a wintry smile—her only kind—from the desk across the room.

“Marcodel's become a high-powered rifle,” I say. To be honest, I don't know what a high-powered rifle is, but I have never heard of a low-powered rifle so it's my best guess.

God goes right on: “Yes, and Oouoh laughs, her teeth silver, glinting …”

“God,” I say, “where is Marcodel now?”

“In the closet, where would he be? And her silver—her teeth—where was I?”

My mind, as they say, is racing: an apt metaphor: I can feel it rushing over an empty expanse, searching for an idea that will stop him before he goes on again and I lose him for the rest of the call.

“And Oouoh, where's she?” I say desperately.

He's annoyed: “On the plains of Orfalon, I told you.”

“Specifically.”

“Well, you remember after she became a shadow, she sprang from my nostrils …”

“Um, I forget,” I say. “Tell me about when she became a shadow.”

He clears his throat to get his God voice back. “A black spot appearing on her gall-bladder began to grow from my rage into a shadow that engulfed her white skin …”

I am thinking: Oh Christ, a rifle. “I don't know, God, old friend,” I say, stalling for time. “That must have been some rage. To give her cancer, I mean.”

There is a silence. I feel as if I have hooked into a running marlin and am now water-skiing over the waves behind him.

“Well, she shouldn't have done that,” God whines. “I mean, do you think she should have hurt me?”

I clear my throat to get my concerned voice back. “No,” I say. “She shouldn't have hurt you, God. What did she do, exactly?”

“Why are you always bothering me, Samantha? Why are you always bothering me?”

I sigh. “Because I don't want to read in the papers that you put Marcodel in your mouth and fired his cock into your brain.”

“I can't,” he cries—it is a sound of heartbreaking anguish. “I can't trust you.”

“Trust me,” I say.

“Do
you
think she should have hurt me?”

“No.”

I listen to the sound of his breathing.

“I have to go now,” he says.

“Don't. Don't go.” More breathing: he is about to hang up. Trying to attach myself to the sound of my voice, trying to fling myself with my voice over the wires to him, I whisper: “She's dead, God. It's over.”

“It's not,” he whispers in answer. “She came back.”

He hangs up.

On the morning after the mug, I do not want to think about what happened next. So I run the conversation over in my mind, and I head downtown toward Elizabeth's.

“Was Christ gay?” I say when I come through the door of the Lansky-Harding apartment.

Lansky, I am happy to find, is just on his way out to a rehearsal. He kisses me on the cheek and says, “Sure. That's why when Pilate saw him, he said, ‘Eck! A homo!'”

He goes out, and I am left there with my question unanswered: Elizabeth, in her smock and holding a paintbrush in her hand, is on the phone with her mother.

I stand around with my hands in my coat pocket. I wander around her easel and study the work in progress: a still life—the flowers and Lansky's pipe are posing on the table by the window. It isn't bad but I am feeling critical, and thinking that Elizabeth is right when she says she was born to teach great painters not to be one. I've never seen her teach, but I bet she's good.

When she hangs up, she says, “Jeeze, it's ten degrees in Topeka, Allie says.” Elizabeth is from Kansas.

“That must hurt the crops or whatever they do there,” I say, a bit sullenly. “I know here the Broadway shows are withering on the vine. Actors falling to the ground—they can't harvest them fast enough.”

Elizabeth smiles and goes into the kitchen to make us coffee.

“Do you think Christ was gay?” I call after her.

“Well, those velour shirts were sort of suspicious, but who can tell these days,” she calls back.

I follow her. “I mean all that passivity. Turn the other cheek. What if someone slaps your wife or your kid, then whatta you do?”

Elizabeth shrugs. “What's the difference? He got his.”

I walk over to the sofa and flop down on my back. “Jews are weird,” I say under my breath but loud enough for her to hear.

Elizabeth glances at me, smiling as if she knows I have come over to start a fight but her boundless patience is going to outlast me.

“I mean, all they ever think about is shit,” I say.

“I know,” says Elizabeth. “Who can forget Freud pounding on the bathroom door, shouting to Einstein, ‘Comink out, Al?'” This, she explains, is a joke with Lansky. I sniff, as if to say: So now he's got you doing it.