Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

VINCENT: Really? And you would hang up there?

MARSHA: Yeah, and he tied ropes around the wrists too, so your arms were stretched out, just like Christ. It was really very interesting.

VINCENT: He tied you with ropes?

MARSHA: Yah.

VINCENT: Did he pad them so they didn’t cut in?

MARSHA: You seem to be missing the point, sweetheart. He wanted it to hurt. He put golf balls in my mouth too but I kept spitting them out and they bounced all over the floor. It was very funny. I mean here I was in this ludicrous position and he’s going through all these things, he had lotions and potions that he rubbed on all my sensitive areas, wintergreen oil that athletes use, and he’s running around very busy, busy, busy. I was laughing — I though it was the most hysterical thing I ever saw — until all of a sudden I realized my God, my body is being stretched to death! So I passed out. I went totally unconscious.

VINCENT: Was anyone else there?

MARSHA: Of course not.

VINCENT: What about the sexual part?

MARSHA: To tell you the truth, I didn’t find it that sexual. I mean of course it was, the ecstasy of the pain and everything, but I didn’t really get the feeling he wanted me to have of being his slave girl. I had it much more once when he tied me up in bed and made me totally passive — I knew I couldn’t do any of my sick clinging behavior and I was glad; I was relieved of all aggressive possibility. I was there, I was a woman, a female object — he had to do everything. And in that moment I understood the whole dynamic.

VINCENT: He tied you in bed and then? Did he beat you up?

MARSHA: Yeah.

VINCENT: With what?

MARSHA: A leather strap.

VINCENT: Really hard?

MARSHA: As hard as he could.

VINCENT: And then?

MARSHA: And then I got up and had a glass of milk and a chocolate brownie. One time he told me he was going to beat me ten times and I said go ahead, I was being very stoic, like when my father used to hit me and I wouldn’t let myself cry. He couldn’t do it in the same place twice, because it would hurt too much, so he went down my back with these ten strokes. When he finished, he said I’m sorry, Marsh, but you didn’t react enough, I’m going to have to do ten more. Then I burst into tears, I knew I couldn’t take it, so he stopped. When it was over I felt very elated, filled with joy. But then all of a sudden I said oh my God, I just remembered that my mother’s coming tomorrow for me to try on some bathing suits she bought me — what should I do? She’ll see the welts all over my back. He said that’s your problem, darling. So the next day, sure enough, I wake up and there’s this systematic series of red brutal-looking welts down my whole back. What am I going to do? My mother’s coming in from Westchester just to bring the bathing suits, there’s no way I can get out of trying them on. So she arrives and I go into the bathroom and get undressed. I try on the first bathing suit and sort of edge out so she can’t see my back. I show her the front, I say I don’t like it and I edge back in. I’m dying. I don’t know what to do.

VINCENT: How many bathing suits?

MARSHA: About four. Suddenly I get a brilliant, intuitive idea. I’m in the bathroom and I scream Mother! What is this? My God! There are these marks on my back, I must have some horrible disease! I come out very upset, she looks and she says what are you getting so excited about, Marsha? It’s nothing. You must have sat near a venetian blind or something and gotten sunburned. She completely brushed it off, because I was so upset.

VINCENT: How did you know she would fall for it?

MARSHA: It was a desperate stab.

VINCENT: It’s the most gutsy thing I’ve ever heard you do, Marshie, it really is.

MARSHA: If she had seen them by herself, she would have become panic-stricken. Once Eliot tried to tie me up in my apartment with stockings and scarves and things because I didn’t happen to have any ropes on hand. He hung me up on the bathroom door and I was terrified because it kept swinging. You know I’m afraid of heights.

VINCENT: I think it would make me laugh.

MARSHA: I’m telling you, I laughed so hard the golf balls were bouncing out of my mouth.

VINCENT: Did he laugh?

MARSHA: No! He was dead earnest.

VINCENT: Did he get an erection watching you in pain?

MARSHA: Yeah, the bastard.

VINCENT: And what would happen?

MARSHA: It ended up in fantastic fucking. The time I passed out, we wound up in the shower together and it was very very wild ecstatic lovemaking, one of the great moments of my life. Except I was worried about my hair getting wet.

VINCENT: With your mother coming the next day.

MARSHA: He also had a pair of handcuffs, and one night he was kidding around and he handcuffed my hands behind my back. Then he said he was going out for the evening. I said you can’t leave me like this. He said just go out and ask someone in the street to unhook them. When he left, my reaction was so abnormal, you know I immediately forgot about the handcuffs? I remember there was a New Republic lying there, and first of all I got a cigarette into my mouth somehow and lit it with my foot, completely calm. Then I started reading an article about Medicare, turning the pages of the New Republic with my teeth, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It’s really amazing.

VINCENT: It really is. What is he doing now, Eliot?

MARSHA: He’s still prosecuting perverts in court.

VINCENT: They must have written that song for him—“Beat me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”

VINCENT: Emmy, can I imitate how I got when I thought about your coming? I’d be with Marshie in a room and I’d burst out MY EMMY’S COMING FROM WOODS HOLE! HI EMMY! HI! I’ve been doing it all week and now here you are completely different, serious and sober, just sitting and saying I have something interesting to discuss with you.

EMILY: You don’t like it that I’m calm.

VINCENT: I love it that you’re calm, but I’ve been practicing my HI EMMY all week.

EMILY: I’m glad, sweetheart. I’ll be up tomorrow, give me a little time.

VINCENT: Before we go any further, can I just say one thing, Emily, because it involves you? The steak, the onions and the cucumber salad are fantastic things. Okay, Em.

EMILY: I want to know what you think of Emil Reinhardt, Vinnie, just from seeing him on the beach. Do you find him attractive?

VINCENT: Not at all. I know you both do, but I find him totally unattractive, I really do. Big fake, with that long cigarette holder.

EMILY: Vinnie’s saying something that’s very true. He is a terrible phony.

VINCENT: You’re always talking about how elegant he is. I’m sorry. To me he is physically one or two steps above a pharmacist in a fancy Madison Avenue pharmacy, involved in whether or not he has the right amount of candies on the counter next to the cortisone. I mean courtesans.

EMILY: He’s a deeply elegant man.

VINCENT: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that every man you’ve been to bed with was something special, Emily.

EMILY: Vinnie darling, Emil Reinhardt wasn’t a casual meaning in my life. He was very important.

MARSHA: Do you know what Joan calls him? That poor, poor soldier.

VINCENT: Prussian soldier, that’s exactly what he is.

EMILY: You’re actually judging him on a very pure level, Vinnie. His insecurities are so fantastic that he projects this pose, and I can understand your seeing it.

VINCENT: That’s an excellent word; it’s all pose.

MARSHA: A lot of your men have that quality in common.

EMILY: Michael Christy has a pose?