Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

EMILY: Okay, what can we talk about?

VINCENT: What book was I reading recently? Oh yes, it was Mailer, An American Dream , and the strangest thing, he fucks a girl in it, it was his wife, and they both know that they made a baby right in that second.

EMILY: I’ve heard that before.

MARSHA: I’ve felt it but it hasn’t been true.

EMILY: I’ve known it and the guy’s known it, but the baby hasn’t known it.

VINCENT: Let’s pretend we don’t see them.

EMILY: Why, what are they doing? What are they doing?

VINCENT: They’re leaving.

EMILY: We’re not saying goodbye to them. Did you say hello to them?

VINCENT: No.

EMILY: I think that was the height of rudeness, their not saying goodbye.

VINCENT: Darling, they’re very corny, cheap people. Why don’t you get it through your head?

EMILY: He’s corny and cheap and he’s also the man I gave up my husband for.

VINCENT: Tell me, this Roy Husband of yours, I’m very curious about him. Was he a wonderful person?

EMILY: Fantastic.

MARSHA: No he wasn’t.

EMILY: No he wasn’t.

MARSHA: He had no soul as far as I could ever see.

EMILY: He had a soul.

MARSHA: Is there any more lemonade?

EMILY: Yeah, tons.

VINCENT: What was your responsibility to him? Your relationship?

EMILY: We were in love with each other, we were both our first loves.

VINCENT: What was the age?

EMILY: The age was twenty.

VINCENT: Was he good in bed?

EMILY: As a matter of fact, he wasn’t bad for that age at all.

VINCENT: Are you kidding? That’s the age when they’re supposed to be good. Passion. I consider passion the important thing, not know-how.

EMILY: I don’t. I consider sensual involvement.

VINCENT: That’s passion.

EMILY: I have terrible regrets about it at this point.

VINCENT: About the divorce?

EMILY: Yeah, because even though never in a million years would I have wanted to stay married to Roy, he was rich.

MARSHA: Oh God, if you have one single regret about that, you don’t deserve our friendship.

VINCENT: You know the thing about you, Emily, you really want to be rich. But for all the wrong reasons, for comfort and security.

EMILY: I want to be rich for one reason only: money. Not so people will think of me as rich, but so I can have whatever I want.

VINCENT: Like what?

EMILY: There’s a certain kind of Jaguar car I’ve always wanted, that has a wooden inside, four doors, it’s very, very small.

VINCENT: I know the car.

EMILY: Well I want that car, I really love that car. You know what happened to me, Vinnie? I was at someone’s house the other night and a girl offered to drive me home. She was a lesbian, she had just been rejected by some woman, and I said fine. She told me to wait a second while she went down to the garage. She was a very simple girl. She came back up in this car, it wasn’t even black, it was so fantastic, it was very, very dark blue. I said where did you get it? She said my boyfriend gave it to me for my birthday.

MARSHA: Maybe you should become a lesbian.

VINCENT: If you were rich and I was a homosexual, you could buy me a car. You know something, if we had money, we’d all be very good to each other.

EMILY: Hey, look at that handsome creature over there. Hi, Mister Man, want to be my new hub-hub? I would now like to make some announcements. The month of September is going to bring important tidings for all: the opening of a show of a fine young painter, Vincent Miano, and the publishing of a major breakthrough American novel by Miss Marsha Zoxbaum. More important will be the month of October when Zinner Gallery will surrender cunning Timothy Cullen to another gallery higher up on the artistic spectrum. Then in November we will have the death of Miss Emily Benson, because she just couldn’t face all her friends becoming so famous.

VINCENT: There isn’t an iota of truth in that, is there, Emily, my darling?

MARSHA: My average relationship with a man, actual talking to each other, loving each other, relating to each other, sleeping with each other, is usually one to two weeks in duration. The amount of time I spend feeling rejected, crying over it, not seeing him but living it out, is three to four years.

EMILY: When I was going over the Emil Reinhardt affair with my doctor, he said it sounded like a threepenny novel.

MARSHA: My doctor says my life is a soap opera.

EMILY: Mine said threepenny novel.

MARSHA: Soap opera.

EMILY: His grasp of dialect is different. Anyway, the point is that my syndrome is just the opposite of yours. The most important thing for me is what I trump up before I sleep with a man, like what was going on when I met Emil Reinhardt, the perfumed missives and secret assignations and the ricochet rendezvous. When we finally did make it, it was great, but I really liked the foreplay better than the act itself. Then I went on for two years moaning and groaning for all I was worth. And it wasn’t worth that much.

MARSHA: I’m more involved in aftermath and afterbirth; you’re involved in the pregnancy.

EMILY: What does it mean? Take Timothy Cullen. You met Timothy Cullen, you said this might be a healthy specimen, I’m giving him a chance. He’s Irish, he has a moustache.

MARSHA: Dark glasses.

EMILY: French clothes. He dances. You had a whole thing about how healthy you thought he was. Soon as he met you he wanted to go to bed with you, you wouldn’t go to bed with him, right?

MARSHA: Then I started building up a dread.

EMILY: The actual pattern is the first week he loves you, you don’t love him. Second week he gets the idea you don’t love him and he stops loving you. You get the idea he’s not loving you and you start loving him. Third week: zero.

MARSHA: Where are we now, six months later?

EMILY: It ends with you’re still in love with him, because it’s unresolved. He feels rejected, he finally gets the message you don’t want any dirty part of him, cunning as he is.

MARSHA: You know what sticks in my mind? Do you remember there was one night in the Dom, it was in the first week when he was in love with me, and his eyes didn’t leave the nape of my neck the whole entire evening? Every time I sensed him coming near me, I zooped up and sat somewhere else.

EMILY: As long as you didn’t Zeke up, you’re okay.

MARSHA: I couldn’t stand the pressure, the clinging.

EMILY: He was clinging?

MARSHA: He was clinging. He was calling me up constantly, what are you doing tonight, where will you be tomorrow, where are you every minute of the day?

EMILY: Remember the night you called him twenty-five times? More than twenty-five times. He was out all night, you didn’t know where, and you kept calling him every two seconds?

MARSHA: The next morning was the big break-up. He found his Marie.

EMILY: Marie the dawn is breaking. Marshie’s heart. Go on.

MARSHA: Where? He’ll be coming back any second.

EMILY: What if Zeke Sutherland fell in love with you, what would happen?

MARSHA: Even Zeke Sutherland made me nervous when he liked me. But I couldn’t get too nervous because he got nervous so fast I didn’t have time.

EMILY: I got nervous to death with Michael Christy. I rejected him.

MARSHA: Then you have the same pattern, that the actual relationship is minimal in the gestalt of the whole thing. For me, the actual relationship is something to get over with so I can drop into the mud and my heart can pound dialing a certain number I’m not supposed to dial. That’s the essence of it.

EMILY: So all they really are are vehicles for acting things out.