Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

MARSHA: Only for about ten years.

VINCENT: The thing is the older we get the less energy we have. An artist is already an accelerated, intensified human being and you cannot spend eight hours painting and then be a good, creative father.

MARSHA: Well you’re not ever going to be a father, so what are you talking about?

VINCENT: Who knows? Anyway that’s not the point. I said something to my analyst and she said you’re right, or did I say it to Nico and he said you’re right? I think I said it to Nico and he said I was right. But when you’re going through a good creative period, you have very light sexual needs and when you’re going through a bad creative period they’re very strong. That is to say the creative act is sexual and the sexual act is creative.

MARSHA: The fun of this dinner is reaching over and pulling the clams out.

VINCENT: If Tim asked you to marry him in September, would you?

MARSHA: No, I’d say I’d try living with him.

VINCENT: You would live down in his dirty loft?

MARSHA: No, but I’d see him a lot and test it out. I couldn’t rush into marrying him, Vinnie.

VINCENT: I wouldn’t want you to, hon, I don’t think you should.

MARSHA: I mean it’s dangerous.

VINCENT: When I was a little boy, each child in my family was allowed to have whatever they wanted for their birthday dinner and—

MARSHA: You had clams?

VINCENT: I would have steamed clams and something else, I don’t remember what, and then pineapple upside-down cake.

MARSHA: Let’s not talk about pineapple upside-down cake.

VINCENT: Why, don’t you like it?

MARSHA: You only threw one in my face after I made it for your birthday, if you recall.

VINCENT: Well, you didn’t make it the way I wanted, and I was almost dead with hepatitis, which you didn’t even appreciate.

MARSHA: Who cares? I baked you a cake and it was beautiful, there was absolutely nothing wrong with it.

VINCENT: It wasn’t right, it wasn’t upside-down.

MARSHA: It was so!

VINCENT: It wasn’t like my mommy’s.

MARSHA: Well maybe she made it wrong. Do you realize that I used to come see you every single day when you were in the hospital?

VINCENT: God, if we talk about that some more. So what if you did? You worked just down the street.

MARSHA: It was still a drag.

VINCENT: You didn’t enjoy seeing me?

MARSHA: No, you were nasty and abusive.

VINCENT: I was not. You were my girl — I wouldn’t have gotten better if it hadn’t been for you.

MARSHA: Yes you would have.

VINCENT: I would have gotten better differently. Do you know why you lose men, Marshie? Because you completely hang on to them.

MARSHA: I know, but I can’t help it.

VINCENT: You’ve got to help it, darling.

MARSHA: My religious adviser, Merrill Johnston, will guide me through it.

VINCENT: You just said something very profound and you didn’t even realize it.

MARSHA: Emily once told me she couldn’t marry anyone who hadn’t been analyzed and I said that reeked of fanaticism.

VINCENT: Analysis is the substitute for religion.

MARSHA: Oh God, we’ve known that since time immemorial. Don’t sexual organs look clammy?

VINCENT: That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard — it’s the other way around. There are more sexual organs than clams in the world.

MARSHA: Oh no.

VINCENT: Oh yes. You have to plant clams, you don’t have to plant sexual organs.

MARSHA: Yes you do.

VINCENT: You have to tune them up, that’s all. Actually, you know, this should be a first course.

MARSHA: Did you ever stick flowers in your nose when you were a child, so you’d have that sweet smell with you all day?

VINCENT: That’s right, Marsha, encourage the bugs and animals to come.

MARSHA: I’m feeding the flowers a few crumbs. That’s more than you do — you pull them out by the roots. That was sinful; you really destroyed a landscape today. You may have created something on canvas, but you destroyed a landscape.

VINCENT: You have to destroy in order to create beauty.

MARSHA: That’s a pseudo-intellectual cliché.

VINCENT: Sure, call Picasso and Nijinsky pseudo-intellectuals. Listen, we could still go and buy more clams.

MARSHA: Why do we want more clams?

VINCENT: Because we’re not satisfied with our dinner.

MARSHA: Yes we are. Do you like this lettuce? Doesn’t it taste fresh? You don’t get this in the city.

VINCENT: No, but I’m not crazy about this brand.

MARSHA: This Campbell’s lettuce?

VINCENT: Do you like my laugh a lot?

MARSHA: Do you?

VINCENT: It’s a ripple.

MARSHA: It is. Oh — I got a card from Emily this morning. They’re having a nice quiet time in Woods Hole, her and Joan, and everyone’s in love with her.

VINCENT: Emily does think everyone likes her.

MARSHA: You know I once made up a classic analogy about that. Say I wake up in the morning with a big pimple on my face. I’d say oh my God, I can’t go out of the house, I look awful, the whole world will be looking at me. She wakes up with the same pimple. She looks in the mirror and she says hmmm, I look rather Italian today.

VINCENT: She does have a fantastic mechanism for turning negative things to positive.

MARSHA: Yeah, but when she finds out the truth, it hurts her doubly.

VINCENT: No it doesn’t, because she never accepts the truth, or if she does it’s only for a slight second, then she’ll put it completely out of her mind. And in a percentage way, she’s right. Because most people are too timid to say hello to anyone first, so when Emily is friendly to everyone, the people who might think she doesn’t like them and in turn not like her, when she comes over to them, they like her . So in the long run she probably wins out and has more people liking her. If that’s what she cares about, and it is .

MARSHA: Here, finish it up. The last one is the best.

VINCENT: That’s nice, it’s very positive that you like the last one, Marsha. Most people only like the first.

MARSHA: What’s the most perverse thing you’ve ever done?

VINCENT: Sexually?

MARSHA: Of course sexually.

VINCENT: Going to bed with a pair of twins and an animal.

MARSHA: What kind of animal?

VINCENT: No animal really, just a pair of twins.

MARSHA: That’s not so perverse.

VINCENT: They also happened to be in love with each other. I know what yours was, my poor darling — hanging up on the wall, that bastard Eliot.

MARSHA: Let’s not mention any names, but it’s true he may have had something to do with it.

VINCENT: How did he ever get you to do it?

MARSHA: He didn’t get me — I got him. He had told me about this terrible hang-up hang-up of his which I just couldn’t reconcile with my sweet Jersey City loveball Elie. Then, on New Year’s Eve, which wasn’t long after he rejected me for no reason at all, I called him up and said he was really missing some great action. He had a girl at his apartment — it was even her birthday, the poor thing. He kept calling me Arthur on the phone, can’t we possibly wait, Arthur, and work on the case tomorrow? I said no because I couldn’t bear to be alone on New Year’s Eve and I was desperate enough to do anything. So he ditched the girl and came running over with a briefcase full of legal briefs and took me back to his house.

VINCENT: Where did he live?

MARSHA: East End Avenue. And he had this whole apparatus set up on the wall, these hooks at the bottom and the top.

VINCENT: Did he put them in himself?

MARSHA: Well the apartment didn’t come equipped, if that’s what you mean. The thing was you would stand with your legs stretched apart, with your feet on piles of books. He tied your ankles with ropes, he attached the ropes to the hooks, and then he took the books away, so that you were all completely stretched, trying to touch the ground.