Free Darling Clementine by Andrew Klavan Page A

I? I know they are scared and bewildered, too; they too are trying to hold on to themselves. What, indeed, are they to say if their Catullus, with his big balls jouncing and his prick high, comes their way? “Does this mean we cannot keep our winter coats? Or wear the golden collar on our throats?”
    No, we went to Rome, Arthur and I, the week before our wedding, and I dragged him up to see the little room where he died, Keats, at twenty-six, which I have just become. I tried and tried to conjure him there, him gasping on the tiny cot, “Take courage,” to Severn, the brave, kindly, mediocre artist who stuck by him to the last. “Thank God it’s come!” Indeed, I pretended I had conjured him, and babbled on to Arthur that this was the little window he would drag himself to to look out on the watery white sweep of the Spanish Steps—all of Rome just beyond the reach of his fingertips and he who had seen a corner of the universe in a Grecian urn, with the whole history of the west taunting him, come out, come out, and see what you can make of me . “Thank God, it’s come.”
    The secret—that I even kept from myself for a while—is that the room left me cold, Johnny didn’t come to me: the scene of his untimely martyrdom was a museum to me; worse, a museum of old furniture. I understand some people like these things.
    Then we went to the Forum and I left Arthur alone and wandered by myself among the ruins and groves. I was hoping to be hit by inspiration, hoping to be able to scribble down some bit of brilliance while sitting on a toppled pillar, like Shelley at the Baths of Caracalla. But I am nothing if not an honest vessel of the muse, and when I rushed to an old wall, pen and matchbook cover in hand, with the line: “Oh, Apollo, whither have you fled?” I got the picture and gave it up. Just wandered amidst the scenery.
    And so, of course, something did come to me out there, as when the Buddha, giving up, breaking his fast, plopped down beneath the Bodhi tree and entered nirvana. (You can’t blame a girl for trying.) Something I didn’t realize until a little later, and didn’t completely realize until much later. At the time, I just saw the pillars and statues crumbling into the grass and the foliage, and reflected, somewhat pompously, not too much, on how man’s work is just another work of nature, springing from his fingers like leaves from branches, falling like leaves, and how here, in the Forum, you could see that this was so in the marble overgrown with moss, overrun with beetles, the Senate of empire become the litter box of a thousand starving cats: no more, no less, than a feature of the landscape. Look on my works, ye mighty, and fertilize, fertilize.
    It was the next day, I think, or the day after that that this reflection had its physical effect. We visited the Vatican, stood in self-conscious yet real awe beneath the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, our eyes sweeping from creation to Judgment Day—pausing at a sybil here, the dangling skin of Dr. Blumenthal there. Afterward, with the light fading, that Italian light that ripples palely in the sky like water, we were taking a cab to some restaurant or other when Arthur saw the pyramid of Cephas, of which we had never heard. Good reason, too, as Cephas was a complete obscurity as far as I can tell except for his pyramid, a big, dingy affair. Anyway, we got out to look around and discovered that it overshadowed, the pyramid, the most gorgeous graveyard I had ever seen and, always something of a sucker for a good graveyard, I took Arthur in. It was the Protestant cemetery where the English buried their dead in the 18th century. It was one fantastic monument after another—mourning angels, urns, women weeping, the images of children who had died—crowded together amid bowing trees and heavy vines. It gave me the chills in a wonderful, ghostly way, and we roamed about on the