Edgar Doctorow - Drinks Before Dinner

GIRL ( Simultaneously ) Your car!

EDGAR Exactly so. You are very fine children. I was sitting in my car. It was late at night, I was alone, I was waiting for the light to change at the intersection of Third Avenue and a Hundred and Twentieth Street. The street was quite empty and a wind was blowing sheets of newspaper across the avenue. The intersection was brightly lit by our modern anticrime amber streetlights. Every tenement and boarded-up store was lit in ghastly amber light. So that this whole ruined avenue was lit as for easier inspection and could be seen without shadow, without darkness, like the inside of an always lit prison cell. And then, standing at the driver’s window of my car, without my having seen him arrive, was a boy not much older than you, a boy with his palm out and this gun resting on his palm with handle toward me. He asked me if I wanted to buy it. I said “Yes!” He said, “Lay down twenty.” I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and he dropped the gun in my hand and he was gone. And I had the gun.

JOEL That is a most interesting story.

EDGAR Yes, I think so. I don’t know if it works, although it smells as if it does. There is a faint acrid odor at the muzzle. I have been wondering for days why I felt compelled to say yes when it was offered to me. I’ve been carrying it around ever since. Perhaps you can help me understand this.

JOEL What? But how can you expect us to help you understand anything. If you were holding a porcelain or a picture or a rare book, we might be disposed to be helpful. We would all sit around and wonder why you bought it and what it could possibly mean, and some of us would like it and others would not care for it, and we would give you all the attention you thought you needed but not more than we wanted to give. We could even do that with the gun if you put it down somewhere out of the way. But look at you: you have it in your hand. That hardly encourages us to be understanding and helpful.

EDGAR But I now realize, as I hadn’t since the night I bought it, that it is meant to be held in the hand.

JOEL All right, then let me hold it. I have a hand. I’ll hold it.

EDGAR We should consider that. But isn’t it the nature of a gun to be held in a hand that is inconsolable? Guns belong to the inconsolable Therefore you are not really trustworthy. It would not be true to the occasion for you to hold this gun. If there is any truth or meaning to be derived from the occasion, we would not find it by having you hold the gun. The occasion would be defeated.

( Long silence )

JOAN I think it is important for everyone in this room to remain quite calm while Edgar explains to us what he is trying to say. It may be a joke in poor taste for him to hold a gun and say things in this way, and perhaps later we may make him understand this. But everything seems to be fine as we sit here with our drinks. This is a dinner party, after all; we all know each other and respect each other and there may be a constructive lesson for all of us in this, so let us hear what he has to say.

EDGAR Yes, do let us hear. But you may disagree with me as vehemently as you wish. Disagree, argue, object — nothing, I assure you, will enrage me as much as a patronizing, officious remark of my wife’s.

MICHAEL What do you mean by not defeating the occasion? How do we go about ensuring that? The final form of the occasion is not yet realized. Is that what you mean? That the guest of honor is still to arrive?

EDGAR We’ve been talking of matters of consequence and this is what has evolved. So my little arms deal wasn’t a separate event. Surely that is clear. It was not a separate inexplicable event. It was the beginning of something. I can tell you I have never owned a gun before and it generates in me a kind of nervous pleasure. It interests me to be holding this gun and I find myself interested in my ideas as I hold it. I am not bored holding it. And peculiarly enough, I look at you all and wonder why you don’t have guns, why we are not all holding guns. Isn’t that weird — it seems to me so much more natural a picture if we were all holding guns. This apartment should be filled with them. They should be stuffed in drawers and falling out of the medicine cabinets in the bathrooms, they should be in the children’s toy chests. If that is the feeling I have, perhaps we are meant to share what it is that is to happen from this gun. Only this evening did I feel moved to take it out of my pocket, so perhaps we are meant to share the occasion in some way. But if you isolate me because I am holding this gun, if you decide I am on the brink of madness, for example, or over the brink, that could be ruinous.

CLAUDETTE But what else can we think? What else are we to think as you brandish that thing and insist that the children and the staff be brought in here, and you wave that thing around until they are!

EDGAR That is your construction of what I did. I waved nothing. Your housekeeper came, I suppose, to consult with you and she has been too paralyzed to move since. Your children wanted to join us again. They are in the house and already implicated in whatever happens here. Shouldn’t they have some say in the matter?

CLAUDETTE Very well, will you permit them to leave? If they have a say, I have a say, and if I want them to leave and their father wants them to leave, if I should take them in hand and leave this apartment, will you stop us?

( Pause )

EDGAR I have not heard them say they want to leave. But if that is your instinct, you should follow it, if it feels correct, and I will see then what is correct for me.

(CLAUDETTE struggles with the idea of attempting to leave with the children. She cannot do it )

EDGAR Oh, what a shame. After all, Claudette, you invited me to dinner, you thought I was acceptable in your house, perhaps you thought I was amusing, perhaps you even had some affection for me. And now you have judged me to be not recognizably human. We must be careful. It is Joan’s nature to interpret her husband to the world in the worst possible light. Do you really see this as something hostile or mentally unstable? Does everyone else agree? Do you, Andrea? Michael, you could not agree with that.

MICHAEL Well, without question you’re committing a hostile act. But since you’re generally sensitive to the state of our culture and the way we live, I might make an argument for an ironically hostile act, one in which you are less personally involved than you appear to be, with some off-hand, distant, almost political cruelty about it. You appear to have hijacked a living room.

EDGAR Well, that’s better! After all, what would my destiny be, what could any of us hope for if it turned out that I had only gone crazy.

JOAN I cannot believe you would have come to this. But quite clearly, you have. Therefore there is something wrong with me. I am to blame. I thought there were limits to his dissatisfaction. I thought there were limits to his capacity for unhappiness. There are no limits.

EDGAR So what have I commandeered here? I think I might have chosen a room less trendy. White upholstered modules, lots of chrome and Lucite. A spot of color on the walls, a modest Léger, a dubious Mondrian. A view of the park. All very standard. All what they’re doing this year.

GRACE I feel I must speak. It’s bad enough to walk into a fine Fifth Avenue building with excellent security only to meet a gunman in the very apartment of my dear friends Joel and Claudette. But that he also feels free to malign their taste is inexcusable.

CLAUDETTE Grace dear—

EDGAR No, no, it’s all right. Grace feels that a gunman should know his place. But I live in an apartment like this. We all have apartments with beautiful things and we all have summer homes at the seashore. We all have cars like each other’s cars, we all have safe deposit boxes and we all have lives indistinguishable from each other’s lives. So what shall we do? We none of us know our place.