Darling Clementine by Andrew Klavan Read Free Book Online Page A

and then Geoffrey De Tours’ History —down, down, down into the funnel of time, hoping, I think, to find that springboard of truth on whch I could vault back to the pageantry and romance of Richard Burton singing, hauling credulity with me by the collar. I have always been something of an exacting romantic. Instead, what I got was “Sir Gawain And The Green Knight.” I was far from where I’d started by then, because what I really loved was Arthur the wise, Arthur the grave, Arthur the tragic (Burton, in short) and this was just knight stuff, but I hadn’t got past the first line—which was something like “Since the siege of Troy …” when up turned my springboard where I had least expected it. It was this: civilization falls when Woman, lovely Woman, chooses youth and virility over wisdom and age. God-Satan, Laius-Oedipus, Menelaus-Paris, Arthur-Lancelot, Lansky-Shithead, the wise father or the virile son: that was the choice that was put before us from Eden on, and all we ladies had to do was get just a dose of the hots for the young stuff and you could say your bye-byes to sweet paradyes. This, I confess, was way too deep for me because it was not just father-son, but, by corollary, mind-body, brow-groin, soul-flesh that was at issue here; and as a representative of those who had to point the finger like some matron in front of a shelf at the supermarket and say, “Oh, I’ll take this one,” I felt as if I had just discovered that all detergents cause cancer and the only really good way to get your clothes clean is to rub them in grass and chant.
    Because it struck me in a flash (i.e., developed as a thought over the period of the next few days) that it was all an illusion. A terrible mistake. When men say: “Men are rational, women passionate,” what they really mean is, “I am rational until I see a dame and then I can’t think straight,” just as when a woman says, “Men are domineering and insensitive,” she means, “I am in charge until a man comes by and then I have an urge to submit, and turn to him for validation of myself.” Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere were all parts of the body politic—a psychomachy—which led me to believe that we cannot see anything in our opposite but ourselves. We can’t. We Kant. We cant. And so if rationality looking at passion is really passion looking at rationality and vice versa, if the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, absence, cunt, woman are, as they say, truly one, why do I begin to feel that marrying Arthur, that marrying Arthur was … what? A betrayal? A mistake? A loss?
    Blumenthal is a geek and he can just shut up, too. We are not talking about my father. (Aren’t we?) Not yet we’re not, kiddo. I have theories you haven’t even dreamed of yet. Wait’ll you get a load of my resolution of the Plato-Aristotle dilemma. And, anyway, there was a moment, there was a day, a night, when we came home from Jake’s when we had sent Elizabeth up the stairs with Lansky, a dishrag of exhausted terror, in her arms, and gone home, when I jumped and panted like a terrier over my darling, crying, “Why? Tell me why. Why do you love me? Why do you want to marry me?” when I had it, when I knew.
    Arthur said, “I’m not what I appear, Sam. All I know is you are something I want to be part of me forever.”
    I was finished. This is a lawyer, mind you, talking like this, looking boyish and wounded and powerful—and he was right. I was the song inside of him, I knew that, and I thought I could no more sing it without him than the muse could sing without the poet. We were—picture the two links coming together with a flash—we were the chain of eternity.
    What I’m trying to say is that we made love that night as I have never before or yet again. It’s not that I can’t describe it, I can: it was flesh, it was matter, it was hand,