Darling Clementine (11 page)

I would sit behind some blue-haired dame whose family had been and would be Unitarians since and until Emerson admitted he had erred; I would listen to Goodwin, Godwin, Woodwind torture himself from the pulpit over even the symbols of nomenclature—“God, or, if you prefer, eternity, or, if you prefer, that for which we have no name …” (And what then: do you look up to the sky, with your arms spread, grunting, “Uh. Uh.”?); I would stand behind the blue-haired saint and sing and I would feel refreshed, noble, inspired in mind—but not swept away, connected; for what was I to be connected to? What of flesh was there for me to pull out of the great blackness of eternity that had opened before me when God had not killed Judy Honegger? Was I suddenly to fall to my knees and cry, “Yes! Yes! God is a strand of blue hair! I see all!” There was no bush for me to set ablaze, no flame for me to light it with.

Still, I clung to the church as if it were a piece of driftwood on the open sea. Membership Sunday approached—in late February, I think—when newcomers declared themselves a part of the church in a simple, unsymbolic ceremony. Those interested had to schedule an interview with Nudnick and I did so.

I sat in front of his desk, wearing a pleated, plaid skirt no less, crossing my legs this way, crossing them that. He was so young—and good-looking in a boyish way, too. His eyes so sympathetic. But he was still a preacher, and I could not help but think of hiking my skirt to my waist and shouting, “How about some of this? Hubba hubba!”—an urge which comes over me during all my dealings with men of the cloth.

“So you're a poet!” he said, smiling kindly. “We love to bring creative people into our community.” When I only smiled, and clutched my hands together to keep them from straying to my skirt, he offered: “The church paper frequently publishes verse.”

Immediately, as my heart sank, my mind rose to the occasion and began to compose:

I saw a ginko leaf

Upon the sidewalk

Gleaming in the sun after a little rain.

Oh, curling globes of greenery,

What richness in your muted pales

Communes so with the soul of man

In unproclaimed theolatry?

“Actually,” I said, trying not to laugh, not to hurt the poor thing, “I was more interested in your charitable work, your food-for-the-hungry program. I wanted to join your Contemporary Issues Committee, and I can probably do some of the signs for your Tuna Casseroles For Peace Day demonstration. Also, you mentioned during the announcements that you needed someone to collect articles for the study group on Nicaragua and I can't,” I said, shaking my head, laughing even as my eyes filled. “I simply can't. I'm sorry. I can't.”

Godbole smiled at me and nodded. “I know, Samantha,” he said quietly. “I know you can't. But I appreciate your trying.”

I couldn't speak. I made a gesture of defeat with my hand.

“If there ever comes a time, though,” said Goodguy, “we're here.”

I nodded. I stood.

“You're a nice man,” I said.

Goodbye shrugged. “Each personality is its own path into the infinite. I would never try to interpose myself between a fellow mortal and eternity.”

I smiled. “Hubba hubba,” I said.

So, of course, it was Zen. What else? I came upon it in Campbell first, but within a week, I had gone through Suzuki, and a few other motorcycles. I went and attended a few sessions of
sesshin
at the East Side Zendo and Racquet Club and spoke with the roshi Ono Yokisonyu, or whatever he was called. He invited me to join the meditants arranged on their thin mats, thin cushions under their bums, their legs crossed, ankles on thighs, eyes half closed. He taught me how to count my breaths to ten, to concentrate on nothing but my breath. I sat and arranged myself, yanking my ankles up.

Zen seemed suited to me because it is the belief in direct experience. It is both too complex and too simple to explain but basically it is to religion what therapy or analysis is to your own understanding of your problems. It cannot be told, it can only happen. There are no beliefs, no tenets; only the breath, counting the breath, following the breath.

When you sit in the lotus position, eyelids drooping, the mind goes blank. It is an experience like darkness, or a silent phone after someone has hung up. You breathe in a fairly complicated fashion, pressing in with your abdomen, and soon your flesh begins to tingle, and you feel a rush of pleasure—or, at least, I did. I became afraid—I could feel, like a lump of lead in my head, the resistance to letting go completely. I understood where the Devil in literature had got his trickster nature as my mind devised a thousand strategems to keep my concentration from my breath alone. I would breathe and become intensely aware, and would think, “I am intensely aware,” losing it, and think, “Don't think that,” losing it and then “Don't even think that,” losing it, and then, “I've lost it,” losing it again. My resistance to release was like a circle of logic from which the only way to break through is to leap the circumference—leap in slow motion, following the breath. I grabbed the breath and held on. Satan, unable to trick me, now cracked the surface of hell and released my demons. Terrible images arose in my mind: my mother with an erection approaching my father on his knees; myself biting off my brother's balls, and my brother was Arthur, then Dr. Blumenthal; the plaster of my face cracking to reveal my mother beneath. I garnered my courage, grabbed hold of the breath, held on.

The images lifted. Blackness. Solid. Pure. My vagina was suffused with heat, with moisture. The lips between my legs seemed to be parting like a door, at once inviting and wonderful, and dark and terrifying. Suddenly, it was not just my vagina, but my whole body; and not sexual in the usual sense, but libidinous, total, useless, playful—this tingling, clownish pleasure everywhere. Suddenly, a car honked on the street outside and it was part of my being. Suddenly, my head reached into heaven. Suddenly, my anus loosened and extended into the earth. Suddenly, a muscle in my thigh tore and I screamed so loudly that the others around me awoke and old Yokisonyu rushed to me with his chin sagging in wonder, crying, “
Kensho? Kensho?
” and I cried, “Doctor! Doctor! Aaaah!” and was lifted under the arms and carried out to the vestibule where I lay groaning until Arthur came for me.

It wasn't long after that, come to think of it, that Arthur broke my goddamned mug.

Arthur is explaining his feelings on the international situation to Jones and his wife Sheila, and me, too. We are in the Wicked Wolf, one of my favorite restaurants in Yorkville, and I am having the duck. Jones' thin, very black face, is hanging heavily on Arthur's words; nodding, serious. Sheila and I are eating daintily and silently—but I, at least, am listening, pleased with myself because I have read the paper today—May 21st—and know that the Cubans are about to send supply ships to Nicaragua as a challenge to the embargo. I also know that some women have real problems with excess facial hair, but no one is talking about this.

“Look, I don't want empire-building anymore than you do,” says Arthur, “and you know how I feel about this president. But the world just isn't the same as it was before World War II, and isolationism—even pacifism—are not viable options. The Russians are bad people, Jones, and they're not fucking around.”

Jones nods, once, like Zeus. “I agree.” A baritone: it is as if one of the heads of Mt. Rushmore spoke. Jones is a turnon.

“So I don't see how we can reasonably cede countries in our own hemisphere without damaging the balance of power beyond repair. And I don't think it's that big a risk either. No one is going to start hurling nukes over Nicaragua.”

Jones rears, considers, then pronounces. “They are another country. They have the right to make their own decisions.”

“But who makes them?” says Arthur, excited. “Government, rebels? And if one side is supplied with Russian guns, what about the other? If they're not supplied, too, it's the Soviets calling the shots.”

Jones considers again, but says nothing. Sheila looks up from her chef's salad. Sheila is a beautiful woman who looks African and wise and wears dresses with lots of hot, dark flowers printed on them so she looks like a tribal queen.

“I think,” she says softly. “I think this is the end of the world.”

“Shut up, woman!” Jones shouts, grabbing her around the throat and throttling her while she laughs. “I hate it when nigger women speak.” Jones folds his hands before him. “You were saying, my tender raven?”

Arthur laughs and shakes his head. Jones is always like this. He is insane.

Sheila is still laughing but she also says: “I really do, though. I really do. I think these people, this administration, I think they think God is on their side, and they're really going to do it. I think they think they're going to destroy the world and then be glad-handed into heaven.”

“Haven't you castrated the black man long enough?” says Jones.

“Eat your roast beef, Jones,” says Sheila, and to us: “He lets it get cold, then he doesn't like it and he gets hungry when we get home and I have to cook for him.”

“Damn right,” says Jones, eating his roast beef, muttering around it. “Shoulda changed my name to X.”

“X Jones,” says Arthur. “I like that.”

“And then I thought: why?” says Jones.

“XY?” says Arthur.

“And then it came to me in a flash: Z. Jones Z. Jonesie!” He starts to sing: “Jonesie, what a hard-loving machine bonesie, Jonesie …”

“I'm not cooking tonight, Jones,” says Sheila.

Jones slams his palm down on the table. “Music is part of our culture, girl. Don't you try to rob me of my heritage.”

“I think,” I begin tentatively.

“Speak to me, tender white flesh,” says Jones.

“I think,” I say, “that Arthur is right and not right. That, as things stand, we have to defend Nicaragua and that Sheila is right: it will probably end the world: if not this time, then the next. I think we can't tinker with the machinery to save ourselves, lean on this argument or that argument, this philosophy or that. I think the machinery is fueled by death and we have to tear it down beginning with our own consciousness. As long as there are popsicles and subway tunnels, or sidewalks or radios—I think we're doomed by the human personality. We've confused the fact that our disease is inevitable with the question of whether or not it's incurable, and Freud, Christ, Buddha, Shakespeare—we've swallowed them all and turned them all into our own sick, doomed selves.”

Jones considers. He leans across the table to Arthur and whispers, “Tell me: exactly what is it that emanates from between her thighs that has given you the power to dominate western civilization.”

“Beats me,” says Arthur, “but she sure took the fun out of this conversation.”

“Jesus said it,” I say. “He said, ‘Unless you become as little children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.' He didn't mean obedient, blind followers. Little children aren't like that unless they've been made like that. In fact, they're narcissistic, wholly sensual, awake, aware. Jesus said to Peter, ‘You will be the rock,' because the experience of the parables could only be passed on from person to person, not through institutions and ceremonies …”

I pause for breath. Blumenthal shifts. “So how's your sex life?” he says.

This is about a week ago.

I sigh. I say, “What do you want from me, Blumenthal?”

“Have you ever noticed,” he says, “that whenever you get anxious about something, you tend to float away into the empyrean? To theorize, mysticize?”

Have you ever noticed you have a wart the shape of Massachusetts under your left nostril? I want to say. Instead, I say: “Yes.”

He shifts in his chair. “Some people drink,” he says.

“I drink, too.”

“Do you?”

“No. Not anymore,” I say—ruefully a tad. “Not since coming here. And don't smirk.”

“Can I smirk after you leave?”

“No.” I flop forward, elbows on knees. “Look,” I say, “I came here because I wanted the truth, to seek the truth, and …”

“You came here because you were alcoholic, frigid and miserable. And because one of your fantasies started to surface and it terrified you.”

That Bloomie. You gotta love him.

He sits there in his leather swivel chair, deadpan, waiting for—what? For me to get teary and whine, “What a cruel thing to say?” No. He knows to whom he speaks. I look him dead in his droopy eyes.

“The question, if I recall,” I say—and I mean, the chill is palpable, believe me—“concerned my sex life.” My spine straightens. I am a duchess. “It is problematical,” I say.

I proceed to explain. “The problem is that everything Arthur and I do in bed seems to have a meaning, a psychological meaning that will come out later in therapy. Lately, therefore, while sex has been pleasant, thank you very much, more pleasant than it ever was before—before I started coming here, it has been, how shall I say, mundane.”

“This is ever since the mug,” says Blumenthal, may his profligate Jewish soul burn in hell until I descend from the bosom of Abraham with a drop of water on my finger—although, now I consider it, this image from the gospel of Our Lord seems a bit charged itself: the Christian isomorph of “Suck a big one, bud.”

Anyway, I sigh again but maintain my composure. “Correct,” I say. He is silent. “The act of sodomy disturbed me.”

“Which?”

“Both. All of it. The whole thing.”

“Because you enjoyed it so much?”

“Because—” dear boy, I almost add, my hauteur is rampant, I tell you. “Because it made me think—when Arthur did it to me—it reminded me of being branded. It was like a punishment.”

“For?”

“For the first time. For doing to him what … For trying to turn Arthur into a woman.”