Darling Clementine (20 page)

“Did your mother ever—catch you—doing something?”

“Never, but Frenchie and the forger bought it on the Rhine.”

“Seriously.”

“Okay. You mean, I take it, something of the sexual persuasion.”

“I do.”

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” said Arthur. “She walked in on me once when I was playing doctor with Claire Rutherford.”

“Not the infamous Claire Rutherford?”

“Terror of Europe, the very one.”

“How old were you?”

“Six, seven, eight, I don't know.”

“You don't remember?”

“Seven.”

“What did she say?”

“‘Oh, Doctor, Doctor!'”

“I mean your mother, bobo.”

“Oh.” Arthur considers. His toes wiggle pleasantly against my fingers. “I don't rightly recall,” he says. “Something about ‘that nice Schweitzer boy.'”

“No.”

“No. I don't know. I think she asked us if we wanted milk and cookies, and we did.”

“She broke it up.”

“What was she going to do?”

“Don't get defensive,” I say.

He doesn't answer me and I am glad because it was a creepy thing to say.

“Were you embarrassed?” I asked him.

“Tolerably. All those naked chocolate chips blossoming wantonly beside the creamy white milk …”

“All right, all right.”

“Yes. I was embarrassed, and Claire was mor-ti-fied. But we'd been pretty quick about covering up and, anyway, to be quite frank, it was bloody well worth it.”

“Did your father have a chat with you?”

“Yes.” Arthur laughs fondly; my lucky Arthur. “He waited just long enough so I was supposed to not think it was connected to the event, if you get my drift.”

“Nice try, Dad.”

“Yeah.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, the usual in his own inimitable fashion. ‘Dashed fine thing, this sex business, dashed fine, what?'”

“But …?”

“But—we gentlemen must be considerate, sensitive, steadfast, loyal, true—and try to remember that every cunt has a human being attached to it.”

“Chester didn't say that.”

“Chester didn't say that.”

Taking off the mouse ears and tossing them to the floor, I lift my head to look at him. He is watching me quietly, hands folded on his abdomen. He is smiling wryly, and yet not warily, not cautiously. He is simply watching me, waiting.

“Have you slept with a lot of different women?”

“You're the seventeenth.” Pure Arthur.

“Were any of them as good as me?”

“Not one.”

“Arthur.”

“All of them.”

“Arthur!”

“Some of them.”

“
Arthur
!”

“I pass. Try History for 80, Art.”

“Arthur, do you think people have souls?”

“Well,” says Arthur, considering. “I deal with lawyers all day, but I suppose it's possible. What do you mean, exactly?”

“Well, I mean, do you think it's possible that, say, two twins could have exactly the same upbringing and yet be entirely different?”

“Oh—you mean, like, do they have some ground level—essence to begin with?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah, I suppose. Theoretically.”

“I suppose,” I say, “since you can't have a soul without a body, and you can't have a body without a unique personal history, you can't have a soul without a unique personal history and the question becomes meaningless.”

“That was my next guess,” says Arthur, snapping his fingers.

I sigh. He watches. He smiles. He waits.

“Arthur,” I say, “I want to have a baby.”

“Really? Is Blumenthal allowed to do that?”

“Not with Blumenthal!” I wail. “With youmenthal.”

“With mementhal?”

“I'm serious.”

“Yes, well, it would be rough if we had to tell the poor tot we were just kidding, wouldn't it?”

I pinch his toes. He says ouch.

“Do you think I'd be a good mother?” I ask.

“Great.”

“Arthur.”

“Awful.”

“Arthur!”

“Great-awful.”

“The York-Lancaster conflict.”

“What was the War of the Roses?”

Now, it is my turn. I smile at him. I wait. Finally, Arthur pulls his feet free, and sits up on the edge of the couch. He stares at the coffee table for a long moment, a-think. Then he looks up at me.

“Tell you what, Sam,” he says. “Let's not.”

“Not …?”

“Let's not have a baby.”

“Ever?”

“No—right now.” He stands up and starts to unbutton his shirt—he has already taken off his tie. “Let's not have a baby right this minute.”

I consider, then sit up and begin undoing my blouse. “Do you think we shouldn't?”

“Absolutely.”

My breasts are free. He is stepping out of his pants.

“How don't we do it?” I ask.

“We just—” Visionary in his jockey shorts, he raises his hands before him and gazes dreamily over my head. “—we make love to each other with every pore. We make love to our lost selves through each other. We let our penis and vagina expand over every inch of us until it doesn't matter which part of us is where or even if it's my part or your part, and if we finally do release, it will be all of us, both of us, blown away into forever for no earthly reason but the fun of it!”

“Why, Arthur!” I say, pulling my jeans and panties off just as fast as I can. I jump to my feet. We stand before each other, naked—naked, and totally at a loss.

“How do we start?” I ask him.

“How's this?” he says, and he sticks his elbow in my ear.

I fall to the couch laughing, and he is on top of me laughing, kissing me and laughing, kissing me everywhere and laughing and laughing and already with thee, Arthur: Tender is the night!

Eight

This is what happened to me on Friday, the thirteenth of July: the day most people remember as the day the leaders of the great nations first exchanged threats of holocaust.

For me, it was, to begin with, the day Elizabeth and Lansky were married in a brief ceremony at eight a.m. at the U.N. chapel with both a minister and a rabbi presiding. Buck and Allie were there, looking, respectively, ovoid and shapeless, but smiling nonetheless and saying, “Yep, our little girl,” a lot. Lansky's parents were there, too. They sat in the back pew because they didn't want to be any trouble. She was a very big woman who sat erect with her hands folded in her lap, trying to look like everything on earth was going exactly the way she had planned and arranged it, though it seemed to these hyper-sensitive eyes that she was unhappy about the whole thing: angry and afraid. Lansky's father, a series of sagging eggs placed one on top of another, wore a black suit, a wrinkled nose and a strained smile: he looked, throughout, as if he had just bent over to smell a rose and found a piece of shit in the middle of it.

Arthur was on don't-worry-Lansky detail, and I was saying fine-perfect-it's-beautiful-Elizabeth over and over and over again. She really was beautiful, too, in a knee-length, pink linen dress, and a lace posy in her hair. She was smiling so much that, at first, I thought she was just pretending to be happy. But she really was happy—she was just pretending not to be scared.

No one gave them away or anything, and there was no best man or maid of honor per se. Arthur and I were the witnesses and stood behind and to one side of the couple while they were joined by the two clergymen Lansk called “the reb and preacher show.” Lansky shook with terror and Elizabeth was as radiant as the sun and the only reportable highlight was when the rabbi asked Lansky if he planned to love and respect Elizabeth through sickness, health, wealth, poverty and the rest till death did they part and he said, “Do …? You're asking me? Yes. Absolutely. That's right.”

“I do, Lansky,” Elizabeth whispered.

“So do I,” he said. “Absolutely.”

Which apparently satisfied heaven and the state of New York and they were hitched. See Buck and Allie's snapshots for details.

Then, Arthur had to run to a bunch of meetings, and Buck and Allie went out to have a gander at the big city, and Mr. and Mrs. Lansky (the elder) went out to have breakfast which, Mrs. Lansky gave us to know, should have been provided for, and Reb and Preacher, I guess, headed to Atlantic City to play the dinner shows.

I walked outside with the new Mr. and Mrs. L., and we waited on the sidewalk in the morning sun for their cab to arrive. They were bound for the airport and thence Switzerland, which had triumphed over Lansky's Australia where he thought the fallout would come last.

Lansky (Mr.) glanced at his watch. They only had five hours to make the airport, which is twenty minutes away. Elizabeth had traded breakfast for Australia.

“Listen,” I said, “I'm going to miss you guys.”

“You won't have to if that cab doesn't show,” said Mr.

“Don't worry, darling,” said Mrs.

My eyes filled with tears. “I better go,” I said.

Lansky came over and took me by the shoulders. “Listen,” he said, “if we don't all meet again …”

“Sweetheart!” said Elizabeth.

“Well,” said Lansky, “things are like that.” And they were. “I just want you to know, Sam, that you're the closest potential cloud of radioactive vapor we have, and if you survive to write my biography, remember—I was the one who said we should have gone to Australia.”

I threw my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. “Go safely, Lansky, and come back soon,” I said.

“Vaya con dios, Cutes,” he said, and I released him and he turned away from me before his own tears could overflow and he walked to the corner to watch for the cab, and to leave Elizabeth and me alone.

Elizabeth took my hand and smiled.

“All well?” she asked.

“All well.”

“We have a date for dinner and married-lady gossip in two weeks, right?”

“Two weeks,” I said.

“So stop crying.”

“Right. You, too.”

“Right.”

“You saved my life,” I said.

And she gave me a classic Lansky shrug. “It was a slow day.”

The cab arrived and Lansky Mr. hailed it with all kinds of fantastic gestures while simultaneously running back for the luggage and screaming for Lansky Mrs. to hurry up.

“Well,” I said to her, “if this is the age of anxiety, I think you just married into royalty.”

I threw myself into her arms and we embraced for a second of dying clarity.

“Oh God,” I said, “can you bear how much I need you?”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth.

I let her go. The Lanskys got in their cab, and while Mr. checked to see if his traveller's cheques were still in his shoe, Mrs. leaned out the window and waved to me.

“Send us a postcard from Nirvana, Sam,” she called, and the taxi pulled away into the traffic, and then turned the corner and was out of sight.

So now, I am all alone. It is about eleven in the morning, I am too depressed to work, and Arthur will not even be in his office till after lunch so I can't call him to chat, and there's no earthly chance I'm going to start reading the newspaper, so I decide to walk up to the fifties and over to Third and see if there is an early movie showing.

I am in luck. By the time I get up there, the first showing of “The Twelve of Us,” starring Tom Safire, one of my favorites, is about to begin. The Friday noon movie in New York is what I call the poet's screening, as the audience generally consists of five lean, bearded young men and two scrawny blonde women with close-cropped hair, all of them telling themselves, as the lights fade, that indolence is part of the art form, while three executives who are supposed to be at working lunches sidle to their seats in the deepening dark. At any rate, there's no line for tickets, and I walk up to the booth and the woman says, “How many?” though I'm standing there by myself, and I hear myself say to her:

“The great beast dies.”

And as the woman stares at me as if I had said nothing—because I have not said “one” or “two” or “when's the next showing?” the only sounds of which her cockleshell ears can make sense, I think: Oh shit, a poem.

This is the last thing I want. That is, what I want is to go to the movies. I assure myself that it is merely the tip of the thing surfacing and that it will be days, maybe weeks, before the rest clears—and, for some not very subtle reasons, I think of the fact that my mother damn near gave birth to me in the cab because she refused to believe she was really in labor and, determined, I say:

“One, please,” and reach for my purse as the ticket sticks out of the slot like a clown's tongue, and I think: The great beast dies, and vestal whores …

“Thank you,” I say, taking the ticket—their breasts are bared and they are reaching upward, I can see them.

“Wanna pay?” says the woman in the glass cage.

I am flustered. “Oh, of course,” I say, and put the ticket back on the counter as a sign of honesty and good will and return my attention to my purse and snap it open and think: The great beast dies and vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted to the holocaust skies, raise up their arms …

It is coming, as my mother herself might have said, too fast, and I already begin to fear that my mind will not be able to reach the end, tethered, by the fear of forgetting, to the beginning, and I give the ticket lady a smile and say, “Shit. Excuse me,” and turn to walk briskly out onto the sidewalk.

The great beast diesov,

And vestal whores, their bare breasts lifted

To the holocaust skies

Extend their arms …

And that's it. With the pressure of decision off me, the thing stops cold. I know if I can jot these lines down, it will either continue or announce itself finished for now—but am I carrying a pen? You jest, my Lord. Can I buy a pen in the middle of Manhattan? Not unless I can find a blind man fast. There is, however, a tobacco nook on this block and dangling from the cash register on a tired string is the pencil for marking lottery tickets and a man—father of five, beats his wife, is frittering away the rent—is painstakingly carving the number of pages in Rousseau's
Confessions
next to the number of movements in Haffner's Serenade or whatever when I mutter my apologies and snatch it from him for a moment in order to scrawl what I've got on the little piece of cardboard in my Kleenex pack.