Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

MARSHA: And what does that accomplish? She goes druggily through life and then what?

EMILY: Look, darling, first of all if you’re on drugs for a year and a half and you go off them you’re not back where you started because the whole chemistry has changed. Drugs are therapeutic. Don’t forget Joan has had six years of analysis and she has responded to it, she’s not completely lost. I think there should be no more ports in the storm for her; at a certain point in your life you either sink or swim. There should be no more crutches, no father’s money, no good mother handing out money — which there still is. You know Joan and also you — it’s ironically not true of me because of the circumstances of my life — have never—

MARSHA: Been loved?

EMILY: No! Have never had the doors closed. Her father dies, terrible tragedy, blablabla, but she had money — sixty, seventy thousand dollars. She insisted on going through every penny of it, every cent. She insisted on going through it and then her mother came to her rescue, different men came to her rescue. She lived very well, she didn’t give a shit, and now she’s crying poverty.

MARSHA: She doesn’t know what she’s doing. Vinnie asked her if she was really going to enroll in Columbia this fall to become a social worker and she said she can’t. She said she has to go the hilt of the way with acting, she has to go the hilt of the way with becoming a whore, she has to go the hilt of all possible ways, and if she dies doing it, then she will. Then, if she still survives, and they don’t work out, maybe she’ll go to Columbia and become a social worker.

EMILY: Go the hilt of the way with becoming a social worker.

MARSHA: Let me ask you something. Do you think you’re going to start drinking again?

EMILY: You mean back to that alcoholic behavior stuff?

MARSHA: Yeah.

EMILY: Do you think I am?

MARSHA: No, do you?

EMILY: I obviously don’t. Look how thin I am, look how everything I’m doing.

MARSHA: Yeah, but it can be very hard to hold on.

EMILY: It can be. You know I had a terrible feeling, I was looking at myself in the mirror and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I’m a loser.

MARSHA: You’re not basically a loser, but I think you can be one if you don’t start moving right now.

EMILY: As a person, I’m a winner.

MARSHA: Yeah, and as a person, I’m a loser.

EMILY: Why?

MARSHA: Because for so many years I got myself into those put-down positions, I slept all the time, I had a loser job — but I’m getting out of it, I’m not going to end up a loser. A loser doesn’t work as hard as I am now.

EMILY: You’re not a loser, darling.

MARSHA: No, but I could have been, at a time when you couldn’t have. Now I think I can’t be one and you can , if you choose to.

EMILY: You don’t think I’ll choose to, do you?

MARSHA: Would I be wasting my time on you if I did?

EMILY: It’s funny because I don’t really doubt myself, I just know how fucking difficult life is and I know the nature of my sickness, the psychotic way I behave when I’m drunk. I finally owned up to all that, I finally fessed up.

MARSHA: You certainly were denying it before Woods Hole. I didn’t know who you were the Fourth of July.

EMILY: That’s part of the superego thing you do and Joan does too and I never do. You can doubt a friend, you can all of a sudden question and I can’t question at all. I never, never, never question.

MARSHA: What?

EMILY: Loyalty or who that person is. I would know it was you no matter what crazy things you did, and I’d know you’d come back.

MARSHA: I knew you’d come back too, but I didn’t want to be around in the meantime.

EMILY: I’ve got news for you, Marsha, I’m going to make a tremendous effort in the fall.

MARSHA: I think you have to do it now , get some ideas in your head right now , when it’s warm and you can lie on the beach and think about it and not have to take the time in the fall.

EMILY: I know all that, but I’m very paralyzed. I really need the therapy to help me out of this fucking paralysis. I’m not saying I’m a weakling, but I do need it. You know I’m really wondering, when I talk about myself and my life, I’m wondering who would be able to love a crazy person like this?

MARSHA: Me too. That’s why I was very depressed at the beginning of the summer, because I have come face to face with myself, listening to the tapes and all.

EMILY: Vis-à-vis , as they say in French?

MARSHA: One to one.

EMILY: We really have.

MARSHA: Yeah, and it’s pretty scary.

MARSHA: I would put them in two categories: sort of basic, fundamental things, and then the secondary pleasures.

EMILY: No, I don’t want to say primary and secondary, I’ll just list the things that give me real pleasure, simply that. Like being massaged, I love to be massaged.

MARSHA: I do too.

EMILY: I love to be kissed.

MARSHA: Just kissed, any old way?

EMILY: No, I love to be beautifully and deeply kissed.

MARSHA: By someone you’re fond of.

EMILY: By anyone at all. And there’s a certain kind of man’s body I love — it’s a body on which clothes just hang because he doesn’t care about them, but that looks beautiful in bed. It’s a secret body. I love people with secret bodies, secretly beautiful.

MARSHA: I love mayonnaise on my arm, that’s one of my great pleasures.

EMILY: Leave it there, it’s good for suntan cream.

MARSHA: What do I love? I love to laugh more than anything.

EMILY: I haven’t quite finished with me. I love to watch nice men’s bodies walk down the beach.

MARSHA: I love hair, men’s hair. I love to touch it, all kinds, thick and wiry like Timmy’s, thick and soft and curly like Zeke’s.

EMILY: And your Daddy’s, perchance? I love lying on my back and also lying on my stomach. I love lying near the blue-green waters of the Mediterranean, looking up at some town like Positano and knowing that I’m going to have a glass of cold white wine in about half an hour.

MARSHA: I love mountains that go right into the sea, Taormina, all those corny things.

EMILY: Corny things are the most beautiful. Like rich tropical islands.

MARSHA: I love to dance when I’m high, hate to dance when I’m sober.

EMILY: I like to screw when I’m high too.

MARSHA: I like to be high, a certain amount of high.

EMILY: Right, I like that very much. I love to write well, I love to act well, I like to dance well.

MARSHA: You like to do things well?

EMILY: I like to do things well.

MARSHA: Everyone does.

EMILY: I like to go to a party where I know a lot of people and go around saying hello. That gives me a lot of pleasure.

MARSHA: I like it when people remember me because they usually don’t.

EMILY: I love, love to see a good movie, a good play.

MARSHA: I love the sun right this minute.

EMILY: I love good acting. I think I love good acting almost more than anything else.

MARSHA: I love good writing — it really gives me orgasmic pleasure. But there’s very little good writing in the world.

EMILY: Let’s see, I love Fitzgerald— Gatsby is one of my favorite books, and Tender Is the Night ; the Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, The Sun Also Rises , the poem Kaddish . I love Proust, Chekhov, Ibsen, Strindberg, Durrell, Robert Creeley, I like Rilke, I like Martin Buber, the idea of I and Thou, even though I don’t know much about it. I like Bob Dylan and I love the Beatles. I like Frank Sinatra. I have a couple of favorite songs in the word, I think one of them is “Speak Low” by Kurt Weill.