Darling Clementine (13 page)

“So when I got out, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I joined the Peace Corps.”

“What?” I say this loudly enough to shatter his ear drums, but he answers calmly.

“Yeah, it was the going thing for guilty rich kids. Change the world before you inherit it.”

I am about to read my dear husband the riot act. He has never told me this, that he was in the Peace Corps. For all I know, he could have been in Africa.

“They sent me to Africa,” he says.

Before I can start to scream at him, we reach our building and there is our doorman and we are smiling, arm in arm. Night, Mr. Clementine, Mrs. Clementine.

Upstairs, I make him a nightcap, but I also make him stay in the kitchen with me where I can keep my eye on him. He goes on.

“So—it was pretty bad, we saw some bad things over there, Jones and me.”

“Jones was there?”

“Yeah, that's where I met him. He was having the ‘black experience.' He told me that and I told him to take two aspirins and call me in the morning. We got to be friends.”

“So how come—” I say, handing him his drink, belligerent hand on jutted hip—“how come you guys don't sit around of an evening and tell old stories about Africa and the Raj or something?”

He shrugs, sips. “Sometimes we do. Sometimes, at work, one of us'll be reminded of something. It was pretty rough, we had a pretty rough time over there.”

We adjourn to the bedroom. I sit on the bed with my legs crossed under me. Arthur props himself against the window sill.

“So, anyway, after that …” he says.

“Wait a minute: not after that. That. Tell me that.” I am not smiling.

Arthur peers deeply into his bourbon, his forelock falling, if I may say so, at a rakish angle. He grimaces. “There was a famine. Lot of kids—we lost a lot of kids. We had to help the medical personnel—there were a lot of kids, women, men, just bones and flesh—well, you've seen it in the papers. But—I like kids, and Jones—well, you know Jones and his kid.”

I do know Jones and his son. They're a sketch. They're wonderful.

“So, anyway, the thing is, one day, we hear there's a cholera epidemic in a village nearby …” He looks up at the ceiling with a bitter smile. “Jesus. Fucking cholera, it's the dark ages.

“So, it's a couple of hours by truck over bad roads, but they need supplies—intravenous stuff and medicine, so they sent me with the truck …”

“Stop it, Arthur,” I bark at him. “They don't
send
you on trips like that.”

He holds up a hand. “Okay, Sam, you're right. Sorry. I volunteered. I took the truck. I stayed a few days to make sure they knew how to use everything. Jesus, they were dying so fast we had to pile them up in layers in the ditches.”

“Oh, Arthur …”

“Yeah, right, so, I don't know what I did, I must've done something stupid, drunk the water, I don't know. I'm halfway back, in the middle of nowhere; I got a fucking jungle all around me, and suddenly, I'm puking and shitting and God, it was terrible.”

I bow my face into my hands.

“So I went on a while, and then I got feverish and I couldn't drive. I'm delerious. I get out of the truck and start wandering around; I'm laughing sometimes; I don't know where I am. Finally, I fetched myself up against a tree. I'm in the jungle, I'm covered with shit and vomit and this horrible kind of, like, puss and blood mixed together, so I just sat down against the tree and thought: So long.”

I raise my face to look at him, my mouth set, my eyes swimming. There he is, my dapper Artie. He goes right on.

“But, seriously, folks: I knew I was gone. I had the only truck, night's falling—I mean, they knew I was supposed to be back, I'd radioed, but there's no way anyone's coming out in that jungle in the middle of the night on foot. Mostly, I think I was hoping I'd go before the animals came out. I was having this horrible fantasy of having to sit there helplessly and watch while some panther or something made a meal out of my leg. I did have—” He looks at what at this point is my grim visage and smiles pleasantly. “I did have a moment of clarity out there, though, one of those things they say you have when you're gonna die. I just saw everything, and it was okay, you know. I wasn't scared. It was all right. And I just sort of sat there peacefully, thinking, ‘You know, I'd have liked to have been a painter.'” He shrugs. “Then I died.”

“Arthur!”

“No, what really happened was actually funnier. I passed out, and the next time I look up, I'm staring into this huge, bright white light—I thought maybe it was the band of angels coming for to carry me home, but no such luck. It's a flashlight. It's Jones.” He shakes his head. “Indiana fucking Jones, man. He's got his shirt all torn up, he's got about forty-seven canteens strapped over his chest. And in his hand, he's got this humungous fucking machete, and he's pounding on his bare chest and laughing and screaming at me, ‘
This
is the fucking black experience! Now, let's get outta here fore we get eaten by some kinda creature or something!'”

I laugh, even though I am furious, because this is Jones. (Later, when I thank him for rescuing Arthur, he says, “Wouldn't leave you lonely, iv'ry thighs.”)

Now, Arthur drinks and I can barely open my teeth wide enough to say, “So you came back and went to law school.”

“No, are you joking? I went to Italy.” And when I look at him blankly: “I had to become a painter, remember. I had to be true to my jungle vision. The clarity was gone and the only part I could remember was about being a painter, so I went to Rome.”

“Rome?” I say, lips atremble. “
Our
Rome?”

He cannot meet my eyes. “Yeah. I guess your shrink would have a field day with that. But I was only there three months. Up in a garret most of the time, painting ruins, good God. Growing a beard. Jesus, I thought I was good. I used to step back from some of those canvases and think: ‘Jesus, Arthur, you're good!' My poor mother was probably going around to her bridge clubs telling her friends her son was going to be a painter ‘like that nice Angelo boy.'” He waves his hand. “So, after a while, I went to this guy there, Rossi, supposed to be the big mucka-muck: Well, he was. Showed him my canvases. Somerset Maugham, right? He says to me—I can't do Italian accents, but he says, ‘My friend, I like you very much. You are a good man. You are a bad painter, but you are a good man.' Of course, the minute he said it, I knew he was right. I was awful. Aaw-ful!” He smiles a slightly pained smile. He nods. “
Then
I went to law school,” he says. He drinks. “Like that nice Darrow boy.”

I am off the bed, standing before him, hands on hips, my face, I can feel it, red with fury and coming tears.

“Arthur!” I say, “why don't you paint anymore?”

He makes a little gesture with his hand. “Ah—I sketch a little.”

“Show me.”

“No, it's just …”

“Show me, Arthur!”

He heaves your basic heavy sigh of resignation, sets down his drink and goes to his briefcase which is on the floor next to the bed. He takes out his yellow legal pad and flips through the pages. He smiles at the page before him.

“I executed this masterpiece during that hearing last week.” And he hands it to me and, of course, it is me, in pencil, all flowing hair and sparkling eyes and a smile like an angel from heaven.

I stand there with the legal pad, trembling and crying.

“You know, it's funny,” says Arthur. “You don't really trust me very much.”

“Me?” I manage to sputter. “Me?”

“Yeah, I can see it. You keep thinking: Any day now, Arthur is going to creep into the bedroom at night and turn me into his little wifey, all—I don't know, bourgeoise and uncreative and servile: whatever. It's like you think I'm your mother or something. When all along,” he says, as I practically reel, “all along the whole point was that I knew you were the real thing the minute I set eyes on you. I mean, you know, it's not like I married you for your talent or anything—you're a poet all the way through, in every part of you. Your soul: I married you for your soul. Soul-wise, old sport,” says Arthur, “I figure you're going places I'll never even see unless I toddle back to the jungle and get cholera again. I figure the smarter move is just to love you—make it so there's only one soul between us sort of. I don't know, look, if it doesn't work, if to keep the thing alive, you have to blow …” He shrugs. “It'll break my heart, but maybe the brownie points'll take me to heaven.”

I can't stand it. I'm weeping. I spin around and march away from him, across the room. I spin around again, pointing my finger at him, shouting, “God damn it, Arthur! God damn it! We've been married for six goddamned months. Why didn't you tell me? Why the fuck didn't you tell me?”

For the first time since I have known him—since we have been together—since we have been—sharing living quarters—for the first time, Arthur's eyes fill with tears—I
see
Arthur's eyes fill with tears. He runs his hand up through his hair and shakes his head. He doesn't cry—I guess because he's a man or something—but he has to fight it. For all that, he looks at me steadily.

“You never asked me, Sam,” he says. He frowns, shakes his head again. “Nah,” he says. “You never asked me.”

“Oh …” His pad, his picture of me, of that ideal creature, falls from my hand, drops to the floor. “Oh, Arthur,” I say, crying. I lift up my arms. “Come here. Come to me, baby,” I whisper. “Come to Mama.”

Six

I have always been something of an autodidact—is that how you spell it? I mean, despite my seven sisters' cum laude Jesus, oh cum, education, most of what I know I taught myself—or that is, I taught myself, and Jerry taught me.

It's not that my parents discouraged reading, it's that they only encouraged it in the abstract. Reading—with the capital R, was wonderful. Books, on the other hand, were a waste of time. Whenever my mother saw me reading one, she would say, “Practising for a hospital stay?” When my father saw me, he would say, “What's the matter? No one hiring after school workers?” I began to feel guilty—not about reading, but about my legs draped over the leg of the chair, the stillness, the non-workingness of my body. I could not figure out a way to read and be in motion at the same time, and so eventually, while I did not give it up, I read only books that could be considered work, and so got nothing out of them.

Grades, however, were a different matter. You were supposed to get good grades in my family, and the only time I can remember my parents showing any pride in me was when I got a good grade on something I hadn't studied: When, that is, I managed to achieve something without learning anything.

If you can write well, this is a breeze, especially in college English courses. The trick is this: when you write essays, stay on the offensive. Attack. Contradict. If you can manage to say, “I think Dickens is really overrated,” you will get straight A's and never have to read
David Copperfield
. Of course, you may also never
get
to read
David Copperfield
, but think of the money you'll save.

Say it airily (“My approach to the work may preclude an overview of the book's themes, but at the same time, the irrelevance of the plot should be self-evident.”); stick with all the prof's interpretations even while keeping him on the defensive for his slavish agreement with prevailing trends (“While Twain does manage to maintain his running parallel between the Mississippi and the flow of lifetime, to call this work great is merely to reiterate …”); and, above all,
don't like it
. (“Shakespeare? Ha!”)

My masterpiece in this line concerned, coincidentally enough, Blake's “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” which I was supposed to read for a class entitled, “Poetry and the Visual Arts,” that I took at Columbia. The essay question on the midterm was, “Measure the direct effect of Blake's ‘Visions of the Daughters of Albion' on the works of the pre-Raphaelite painters.” The problem was that all I knew about Blake was that he was both a poet and an engraver, and I hadn't the foggiest notion of whether “Visions” was a poem, an engraving, or what. Added to this was the fact that I had been mouthing off about Blake pretty steadily in class (“The man was clearly a lunatic—I think the fact that English professors don't understand him has kept him alive far too long.”) in order to so impress the professor—Ronald Kessler, his name was—that even if my total ignorance should reveal itself, he would not believe it. Ignominy was in the wings, waiting for its cue.

The challenge lay before me. Other students taking the test had lowered their heads in tears, and one woman had read the question, handed in a blank blue book and strode proudly out the door to break down in the hall. Ronald, all agreed, was a pisser. I, however, waded in.

“It is not so much the totality of Blake's ‘Visions' we need consider in comparing it to the pre-Raphaelites (whoever they were) as the specific images and (get this) the general sweep of the lines.” And I was off to the races.

About a week later, I am sitting on the steps of Low Library, under the statue of Alma Mater enthroned no less, and watching spring come, when a tall, thin young man in faded jeans and plaid shirt, with great black beard and soulful brown eyes, sits down beside me.

“Excuse me,” says he, “are you Samantha Bradford?” I am. “Well, I just want to tell you that I think you may be a genius. I'm sorry—” He held out his hand. “I'm Jerry Berkowitz, Kessler's teaching assistant.” My hand lies limp in his, as he says: “You just got a B-plus on your midterm.”

I rock my head back and forth modestly. “Oh—well,” I say.

“Yeah,” says Jerry. “I mean, that you could do that without even knowing whether it was a poem or an engraving—I think that's fabulous.”