Losing Clementine Read online

  “Bribery, Dr. Gothenburg?”

  “You didn’t return my call. I raised the stakes.”

  I set Chuckles down and rubbed the ball of my shoulder. It was going to be diet kibble for him.

  “You know, this is the second time this week I’ve found someone I’ve fired leaning against my door. The pattern is starting to concern me. I think it’s a sign I’m not being forceful enough.”

  “Would you like to talk about that?”

  He’d come from his office. You could tell because he was wearing his work uniform. Dark slacks, pastel shirt, and tie. He had a weekend uniform, too. Gray T-shirt and dark jeans in the summer, fine-gauge sweater in the winter, or what passed for winter in Los Angeles.

  “If I wanted to talk about it, I wouldn’t have fired you.”

  “Okay. Who else did you fire?”

  “Jenny.”

  “I liked Jenny.”

  “A little too much.”

  “That’s not fair. Why did you fire her?”

  I ignored the question. Chuckles reached a fuzzy white paw through the carrier’s gate and batted at Miles’s shoe. Traitor, I thought.

  “I’m going inside now.”

  Miles was bent forward playing swat-the-paw with my cat. When I put my key in the lock, he folded up his twelve miles of arms and legs and got to his feet.

  “Am I coming in?”

  “Depends.”

  “State your terms.”

  “You can come in as friend and chef. You may bring the green leafy things. Leave the psychology crap out here.”

  He pretended to consider my offer. It was a bad bluff.

  “Deal.”

  “Carry the cat. The bastard weighs a ton.”

  Inside, I pulled off my boots and rolled up the frayed edges of my jeans to my calves. Miles freed Chuckles, who ran under the bed to collect his dignity, while I slipped my dark gray work apron over my head. When it settled around my neck, Miles’s lips were on mine. They were dry but soft, and he tasted like peppermint. He ran his tongue between my lips, and I let him in. He slid his hands under the back of my T-shirt and then down into the low-slung waistband of my jeans. I didn’t wear them tight, and he got his hands in up to his wrists, his fingers cupping the bottom of my ass.

  I backed out of the kiss. I wasn’t sure if I’d also broken up with him when I’d fired him.

  “Are you helping with dinner?” he asked, opening his eyes slowly like a sun-drunk lizard.

  “No, I’m smoking.”

  I took a step back and pulled the small jar of green buds from my jeans pocket along with a sheaf of rolling papers the girl behind the counter had thrown in for free. Once I’d owned a very pretty blue glass pipe, but that was a couple of cities, many domiciles, and a marriage ago. I might still have it. I might have donated it to the Goodwill. It was impossible to know.

  “That’s new,” Miles said.

  “No, it’s old. The habit, I mean, not the pot. The pot is fresh.” I held it up for his inspection. The sappy crystals sparkled under the kitchen light. “I can’t remember why I stopped.”

  He took the sack of groceries into the kitchen. “Because it makes you paranoid?”

  “Nope.”

  I laid a paper out on the counter and crumbled the stinkweed into it. It smelled sweet and herbal like the shop. Miles watched.

  “I haven’t rolled a joint since high school,” he said.

  I twisted the ends closed.

  “Hand me a lighter out of that drawer there.” I pointed, and he obeyed.

  I flicked the flame to life and brought it to the joint, inhaling. The smoke was smoother than I remembered it being. No burning, no coughing. I held it for a count of three and then blew it out through my mouth, using my lips and tongue to make rings that floated up and disappeared in the late afternoon light streaming through the window.

  “Show-off.”

  Miles had pulled a brown onion from the bag and sliced off its hairy end. I held the joint out to him, and he took it. A large pot of water had materialized on the stove, and a fire was on high underneath it.

  “Don’t tell my patients.”

  “No patients here,” I assured him.

  We smoked and he chopped and I watched. I turned on my computer to play some R&B. The Temptations sang over the sizzle of onions in butter on the stove. Miles unbuttoned one of his shirt’s middle buttons and tucked the end of his tie inside. My head was warm and not quite attached to my neck. He laid two pink, fleshy chicken breasts onto a blue plastic cutting board and sliced them both across their middles, pressing them open like a book. He opened a frosty bottle of white wine and poured some into the pan.

  “Your glasses still up here?” he asked, opening a cabinet.

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  He took two down and filled them. I took a sip from mine, then carried it with me as I floated on bare feet across to the canvas sitting on the easel. I gathered my hair into one hand and pulled the elastic that was always on my wrist around the ponytail. I picked up my pencil from the worktable, took up my glass again, and began to sketch and drink.

  I laid lines over the long-dry background paint. Starting at the bottom where it was grayest, I drew a head bent over forelegs. Back hooves up in the air, arching through the yellows, and a tail curled wild like a comma, pointing at the bluest of the blues.

  Ben E. King was begging his woman to stand by him.

  The back line of the animal from the nose to the paintbrush tuft of fur at the end of the tail was a serpentine S. I went over it again, smoothing it out. Underneath that curve were the bent legs and blowing nostrils, all angles and violence and sharp edges.

  I stepped back and emptied the last of the wine into my mouth. I liked my drawing. It could’ve been the booze and the weed, but I still liked it.

  “That’s what we call flow, Elaine Sacks. So fuck you.”

  “What?” Miles asked. I had forgotten he was there.

  “Nothing.”

  I took my empty glass and set it next to the chopping board for a refill. Miles had garlic cloves minced fine and was sprinkling coarse salt onto the board. He lifted the bottle of wine, now half-empty, and poured one-handed into both our glasses. The chicken had disappeared into a skillet, and I could see the surface of the water pot bubbling away. I drank more wine and unscrewed the top from the bottle of weed before deciding I didn’t want any more before dinner and put it away.

  Miles squinted at the canvas. The lines were hard to see from there.

  “That looks different from your usual stuff.”

  “I’m entering a new period.”

  “That’s exciting.”

  I made noncommittal noises. Miles didn’t know much about art, which was fine. That was my work. Of course, we couldn’t talk about his work, either. Miles mostly wanted to talk about movies and baseball, neither of which I watched much.

  He opened a box of angel hair pasta and dumped a sheaf into his left hand, then broke it in half before dropping it into the water. He picked up his own glass of wine and reached for my wrist. I let him have it. He pulled me close and pressed me to his hip. I was still wearing my apron, and it kept his leg from slipping between mine. He bent down and kissed behind my ear where the hairs that were too short to go into the ponytail lay in wisps. I didn’t lean into him and didn’t pull away, choosing a neutral ground.

  The chicken breasts were dredged and simmering up to their waists in a creamy sauce. Capers bobbed around the edges. Miles dipped a soupspoon into the pan, blew on the tasting of sauce, and held it out for me. It was lighter than it looked and a little acidic. Not just wine. Lemon, too, I thought. I was hungry. Those cookies were a long time ago.

  Miles patted my butt, dismissing me from his side, and reached for a pasta serving spoon. He fished out a thin strand, tried it between his two front teeth, and then lifted the roiling pot and carried it to the sink. He leaned back out of the steam as he poured.

  When the phone rang, I didn’t pick it up
. It rang until we were both hostage to listening to it, just waiting for the machine to pick up.

  “Ms. Pritchard, my name is Michael Ma from the Times. Your assistant, Jenny Pritchard, contacted me. I’d like to talk to you about some of the work being shown at the Taylor Gallery right now. If you could return my call at your earliest possible convenience.” He left two numbers.

  “What’s that about?” Miles asked.

  “No idea,” I said, even happier than usual he didn’t know about my work. “Let’s eat.”

  I cleared my laptop off the small dining table, and he replaced it with two plates of pasta and chicken. I brought up the rear with the wine and salads. We hadn’t turned on any light, and evening was falling like a cosmic dimmer switch.

  “I have a constant need for approval, so you have to tell me you love it,” he said.

  “I love it.”

  “You haven’t tasted it yet.”

  “You’re right. It could be crap.”

  “My ego feels much better now.”

  “Good.”

  I spun my fork in the pasta, sopping up some of the sauce and capers. It was not crap. It was the best food I’d eaten since Dolma’s. I cut a triangle-shaped bite off my chicken and tried that. It was tender and moist and not blue, which was a step up from any of the poultry in my house.

  “Clementine, will you have sex with me tonight?”

  I finished chewing my chicken and took a sip of wine. I had an empty stomach and a few glasses and a joint in me. My decision-making skills might not have been tip-top, but what do you expect of a girl who fucks her shrink?

  “I have a constant need for approval,” I said, “so you have to tell me it’s great.”

  “It’s great,” he said.

  “You haven’t tried it yet.”

  “You’re right. It could be crap.”

  20 Days

  It was crap.

  I woke up with a dull thudding in my temples, a serious case of dehydration, and a crushing weight on my chest, which turned out to be Miles’s arm.

  He had the most hairless body I’d ever been with. There were only a few wisps in the required places: under his arms, on his groin. Even his thighs were smooth. Light brown, soft hair only appeared below the knee, like it just couldn’t be bothered to climb any higher. He had apathetic follicles.

  The sex had been terrible the night before, and no amount of ego stroking could fool either of us into thinking it was anything else. We had fallen asleep out of sheer embarrassment. When your eyes are closed, you can pretend you’re not thinking about him lying on top of you, floppy and limp as a giant gummy worm, trying to shove it in with his hand because surely, surely, it would get hard then.

  Maybe, I thought, he won’t wake up and look at me. Maybe he will have died in his sleep.

  “Hi.”

  Damn.

  “I have to pee,” I said.

  I got up and locked myself in the bathroom. A man with dignity would take the opportunity to throw on his boxer shorts and sprint out into the hall clutching his tie and undershirt. But Miles wasn’t a man with dignity. He was a therapist. He would want to talk about it. He would want to tell me about his feelings and for me to tell him about mine. There would be hugging. If I didn’t already want to kill myself, I would then.

  Safe inside my tiled sanctuary, I did pee, and just to extend it, I stayed on the pot and read the back of both the shampoo and conditioner bottles on the edge of the tub. Rinse and repeat for best results. Then I brushed my teeth, which was over too quickly, so I flossed and inspected my gums for obvious disease. When that was done, I washed my face and thought about popping a zit on my chin that was still in the infant phase, but then I figured it might not heal in time for my death. I wanted to go out with good skin. I dabbed some cream on it instead. I didn’t have a watch, but I figured I’d been in there seven minutes, maybe eight.

  I turned on the shower.

  When I opened the bathroom door, wrapped in a towel and with comb marks in my wet hair, Miles was still there, dressed in yesterday’s work clothes and sitting at the table. He’d helped himself to a bowl of cereal and was reading one of the magazines I kept to disassemble for my work. I didn’t like that he’d touched my materials. It was like having him paw through my underwear drawer.

  “All right,” I said, “but next time, I’m going through those filing cabinets in your office.”

  “What?”

  He looked up from the copy of Architectural Digest. His hair was damp on top, and I pictured him patting down his cowlick in the kitchen sink.

  “You went through my work stuff. I’ll go through yours.”

  He looked down at the article in front of him. “It’s a magazine.”

  “It’s my materials.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, flipping it closed and pushing it across the table toward me. “I didn’t know.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  He pressed his lips together and made that small fake smile that means you’re being called an asshole. “I apologize.”

  I opened the fridge and pulled out a loaf of bread. My mother had kept bread in the fridge to keep it from molding, which had the unfortunate side effect of turning it into dehydrated carbo-jerky. But you had to hand it to her, the bread did not mold. I put two dried slices in the toaster, unwrapped the towel, and used it to wring the drips out of my hair.

  Miles watched and chewed cereal.

  “I think we should talk about last night.”

  I looked into the toaster. The little coils were red hot, but it would be another minute before my food was done. That’s what I got for cooking.

  “You know, I really don’t want to.”

  “I think it would help.”

  “Help what?”

  “Help us get past it.”

  “We are past it. Time is funny that way.”

  “You can’t joke your way out of this.”

  My toast popped up. I stood at the kitchen counter naked and spreading half-liquefied butter from the glass covered dish that lived next to the stove, no doubt growing dangerous levels of bacteria. I added orange marmalade and smeared it all the way to the edges.

  Miles waited while I chewed, which is something they don’t tell you about fucking a therapist. They’ll just let that silence hang forever until you fill it with something they can write down in their little notebook.

  “You couldn’t get it up. What do you want to talk about?”

  “I’ve been having a very stressful time in my practice. I’ve been worried about you. I smoked some pot.”

  “You just wanted to give me your list of excuses?”

  “I don’t want there to be any uncomfortableness between us.”

  I’d already felt the uncomfortableness between us when he’d tried to shove his limp dick into my cootchie. I didn’t want to feel that uncomfortableness between us again, either.

  I ate more toast, decided I was thirsty, and went fishing in the icebox for orange juice, which I drank out of the carton.

  “You used to use a glass,” he said.

  “I’m economizing.”

  “Do you have any tea?”

  “Yes, but I don’t have a teapot or cups.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “I threw them out the window.”

  Miles put on his concerned therapist face. “I’m not going to ask you why, but if you want to tell me, that’s okay.”

  I didn’t want to tell him, so I ate more toast and drank more juice and pressed my butt up against the edge of the kitchen counter. That would probably leave a mark.

  “Did you ever think about your breakfast being redundant?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I mean because you eat orange marmalade and drink orange juice.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “No.”

  “Clementines are a variety of orange. Did you know that?”

  “What are the odds I didn’t?”

  “Why are you so hell-bent
on picking a fight with me?”

  Fair question with an obvious answer. Because I wanted him to leave.

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. He got up from the table and brought his bowl to the sink next to my left hip. He stood very close to me but without touching while he rinsed the bowl and left it upside down in the bottom of the drain. He dried his hands on the tea towel hanging from a drawer pull and finally looked at me. We were the same height and stood there eye to eye.

  “Can I come back sometime?”

  “As my shrink?”

  “Can I come back as your shrink?”

  “No.”

  “Can I take you to dinner then?”

  “Possibly. I’ll call you.”

  “Today?”

  “Yes.”

  He headed for the door, patting Chuckles, who had curled up in a chair, on the way out. The phone rang as he was going. I answered it, and we didn’t say good-bye.

  “I found some stuff. You can have it if you want it.”

  I looked at the microwave clock. Aunt Trudy would be on her fourth cup of coffee, standing in the kitchen with the avocado green wall phone and wearing her swimsuit. She wore the same one every day and washed it once a week.

  “I’m in the process of simplifying at the moment. What stuff?”

  “Your mother’s and father’s things. If you don’t want it, I’m putting it out in the garbage now. The trash men haven’t come yet this morning.”

  “I’ll be there this afternoon.”

  I turned up “Soul Man” on the radio and swayed in the driver’s seat on the way to the cemetery. The station went into some old Ray Charles, and things got even better. This was definitely one of the things I was going to miss when I died.

  The entrance and exit of the main drive were split by a green, green grass median and a guard shack. I couldn’t imagine why you’d need to guard a cemetery. Perhaps it was to prevent zombie corpses from escaping. I pulled up and rolled down my window.

  “Here to see a man about a horse.”

  The dark-skinned, uniformed man pressed a button and waved me through without looking up once to check for zombies.