Darling Clementine Read Online Free PDF

family for centuries, sipping a martini while I, who have been in the Clementine family for seven weeks, lie naked with my head in his lap, watching my breasts rise and fall and reflecting without rancor on the fact that it has been three full weeks now since I have consumed an alcoholic beverage of any kind.
    â€œWhat did you do today?” says Arthur, stroking the hair on my forehead.
    â€œI wrote a poem about that pigeon I saw in front of the museum I told you about? The one who had lost both his feet and he could fly but he couldn’t walk. I’ll bet he had a hard time landing, too, but that’s not in the poem. What did you do?”
    He heaves a heavy sigh. “Oh, we processed a couple of 15-year-olds who tossed an infant off a roof.”
    â€œOh God. Why?”
    â€œThere was nothing on TV, they said,” says Arthur. “The victim was one of the kids’ younger brothers.”
    Arthur is a little down about this, I can tell, and so after he finishes his drink, I minister to him tenderly, undressing him, sucking him, and finally sliding myself onto him until he rears up and shoots what must have been a very wicked day into my womb.
    But behind the Florence Nightingale of sex there lurks a murky phantom of discontent. Because all I can think as I slide up and down that sleek, slim, long, white pole that I call friend is: Why do I always have to make the drinks? I don’t even drink anymore. Why don’t you make your own drinks? You think you’re more important than I am because you process 15-year-old babykillers? Writing poetry about pigeons is no holiday, you know. Oily, dirty little birds.
    Perturbation reigns. This is the first time I have ever gotten pissed at Arthur.
    My mother did nothing. I don’t want to give the impression that I am one of these people who blames her mother for everything that’s wrong with me. Personality is a great mystery after all and what affects one person one way is not necessarily oh fuck it she was a bitch. Cold, beautiful, statuesque: I swear to God I never saw her lips part. She ground my father into the earth so quietly, so wittily, so subtly that he didn’t know his balls were gone until she swallowed them—until she shit them, left them floating on the surface of the toilet water just so there’d be no mistake. I am done forgiving her. I will never be done loving her, but I am done forgiving her forever.
    She sat … We lived in Greenwich, Connecticut. My father was a stock consultant and we were quite well-to-do, thank you very much, though not to say loaded. She sat, my mother did, in that colonial mansion he built for her, wrested for her from the rats scrambling all over Wall Street, she sat and she did nothing. She must have done something. She must have eaten and I can’t remember her being fed by any of the countless Consuelas, or Rosas or Floras who knelt to wash her kitchen floor for her, but when I think of her I remember her sitting, erect, motionless, enthroned like a statue of Hatshepsut on a rosewood chair. I remember her profile, the lips set, her hands moving out to play Patience, to point out some chore for Consuela or Rosa or Flora, to hit me.
    Actually, she only hit me once. I was three and had torn a page in a book—a copy of the Inferno , now I think of it, with the illustrations by Blake. I remember being fascinated with those engravings, those nude forms swirling in circles through the air as if torment were motion, and then the page tore and her hand shot out as if to move a red seven to a black eight and she backhanded me without a word and took the book away and lay it on the table before her, next to the cards. Later, I remember going upstairs to play with my brother’s fire truck, running a little figure up the ladder, rising with him until I slammed my head on the edge of the end table where the fire was supposed to be. I started to cry, silently, and then I ran the figure up