Darling Clementine Read Free Page B

go to hell.” She does not seem to know what she’s saying.
    When she is through yelling, she turns and walks right out the door, slamming it behind her. I hear her footsteps going down the stairs, and I slide down the bathroom wall to the floor, sobbing because I am all alone in the world and no one loves me.
    Finally, I grab hold of the sink and pull myself to my feet, still sniffling. I stagger into the other room, and stand there for a minute not knowing what to do next—almost as if there’s a script for this but I’ve forgotten my lines.
    Then there are footsteps on the stairs again. Elizabeth comes back through the door, and just stands in front of me, looking at me. She is crying, too, and trembling—with rage, I think. I hang my head. I am ashamed though I don’t know why she’s so mad at me. I am also afraid she will hit me again.
    She hits me again, so hard this time I just topple right over like a young dogwood I once saw blown down in a hurricane back home. I fall over on the bed and lie there sobbing. Elizabeth storms into the kitchenette and begins to make coffee.
    It is Elizabeth who gives me Dr. Blumenthal’s name, which she got from her therapist. I tell her I cannot afford therapy, but Elizabeth says Dr. Blumenthal will lower his rates to accommodate me because he is interested in the creative mind. I tell her that therapy will tamper with my muse, but she forces me to admit that death might do the same thing. I tell her that therapy will not work unless I want to go, but she says that’s too bad and this therapy will have to work because she wants me to go. I do not protest very much after that because I feel I have made a terrible mess of things, but it does take me more than a month to make an appointment with Dr. Blumenthal.
    When I leave Dr. Blumenthal’s office after that first visit, I feel as I have never felt before in my life. It is March, and the sky is blue and the air cool, and Park Avenue is a great row of brilliantly green traffic lights running down to the Helmsley Building and the Pan Am Building rising behind that and there are clouds sailing over them that seem to me like the ships of some ghostly nation migrating to a new country, a new life that will set its people’s history on a fruitful and promising course. Suddenly, I realize that I have never written a good poem, never had a fulfilling orgasm, never truly tasted the sweetness of chocolate ice cream, or seen the clouds or the buildings or the trees, or known peace—and that all this unhappiness has been unnecessary —completely unnecessary when there all along sat Dr. Blumenthal waiting to take it off my shoulders.
    I am not a fool, I know that this elation will not last, that there is all manner of work to be done, of terrors to be faced, of dragons to be slain before I ever see this golden country again. But now that I have seen it, I will keep it in my mind and remember it so I will know what I am fighting for, where I am traveling.
    I leave Park Avenue behind, and head for Third where there is a Baskin Robbins. I must have some chocolate ice cream—quick, before it melts.
    Which brings me to God and penises. After three months or so of seeing Dr. Blumenthal twice a week, I find I am thinking about penises constantly. Not thinking about them exactly, more like singing about them, dreaming about them, inhabiting the idea of them. To be honest, this has never happened to me before, even when I was a teenager. In fact, I feel like a teen-ager as I walk the streets of Manhattan, secretly staring at businessmen’s zippers, blushing, smiling. Cocks. Before, I always thought of them—I did not realize it before but—with some distaste, as if they were an exposed piece of intestine or a dangling blood vessel. Now, they appear to me like lovely, spreading oak trees, or tender stalks shooting out of the earth, only I am not thinking of trees or stalks—I am