Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

EMILY: That’s what my analyst says. But Nathan Fass says you can’t tell anything about anyone until you’ve been to bed with them. I do think it’s a bad idea, doing it immediately, but how can you avoid it? You want to do it, you know he wants to do it, and yet you have to go into some prudistic ethic, to say I believe in waiting three and a half weeks, we don’t know each other well enough?

VINCENT: You mean you think you have to do it the first night? I’m sorry, I see men that I don’t even do it with the first night, or the second or the third. I don’t mean to be cocky, but I do know what it’s about. Going to bed in our society as it’s set up now means for the woman to give herself up completely to the man. But the thing is she can go to bed the first night and remain independent. But if you surrender totally like Marshie does, then it’s no good.

EMILY: What do you mean?

VINCENT: The morning after she makes him a big breakfast and gets very upset if he doesn’t call two hours after he leaves.

MARSHA: The first night is the only time I do care about them, because it’s a new name on my list.

EMILY: No, let’s say I meet Michael Christy, right? And I fall madly in love with him and he falls in love with me.

VINCENT: We’re not talking about a Michael Christy, we’re talking about casually meeting someone you’re attracted to, who’s attracted to you.

EMILY: You don’t go to bed with him, you’re absolutely right, because you don’t want to make it serious before you know where you are. That’s a safeguard. But what about someone who is obviously going to be meaningful?

VINCENT: I don’t believe there is anyone who’s obviously going to be meaningful. I think it’s all chance and what you bring to a thing. Loves aren’t made in heaven, you know.

EMILY: I’m not talking about loves made in heaven, I’m talking about the whole gestalt.

VINCENT: The gestalt of it is that it’s completely what one does with it.

EMILY: Yeah, but what one does is what one is .

VINCENT: And one is many, many people, so what one does is many different kinds of things. Like if you decide to stay at one party instead of going to another one, if you stop at one street corner or another, you’re going to meet someone else, and that person can be the person of your life. I met Nico completely by chance, I met Clem completely by chance. Anyone you’ve ever been involved with, you’ve met completely by chance, and that doesn’t mean if you hadn’t gone to London last year and met Nathan Fass and Michael Christy, you might not have gone someplace else and met two other people who would have been just as meaningful. We’ve all got this fantastic capability, that’s the whole myth about love. Love is a completely fake idea, and it’s one more thing that’s ultimately going to go. Love is based on fears and irrational things, people’s needs; it’s got to do with one’s self, it has nothing to do with the other person and it’s absolutely foolish to think it does. All love can do is help one be productive and get through life.

EMILY: Yeah, but you’re leaving something out.

VINCENT: What?

EMILY: There is also love. I don’t mean romantic love, I mean Zen love, love on a larger level.

VINCENT: I’m not leaving it out. My point is that there is love, but there is no one love.

EMILY: I don’t believe in destined romantic love either. When you can really love, you can love anyone, the object is almost anonymous.

VINCENT: In the city of New York, with its ten million people, there are at least—

EMILY: Ten thousand.

VINCENT: Ten thousand, that was the figure I was going to say, there are at least ten thousand people in any minute that you could fall in love with, who would be equal to your love and who would really be the person that you should love. Like if you went to Henry Geldzahler’s party for Andy last year, that was a group of let’s say six hundred people throughout the evening.

EMILY: Three hundred.

VINCENT: All right, then I’ll just half my figure. There must have been at least three new people there who, if I had been independent and alone, I could have made it with for at least seven months in a love relationship. And you too and you too.

EMILY: So the art world isn’t as closed as we thought.

VINCENT: The only thing about the art world which isn’t good for you and Marshie is that the men in it are too much like yourselves. Oh, if only I hadn’t eaten all those gingersnaps last Friday night. Remember when you arrived last Friday night, Em? It seems like so long ago.

EMILY: Vinnie, was that really last Friday?

VINCENT: Look at Jonquil, she’s so elegant. She unnerves me, she’s so elegant. Are raisins fattening? Tell me the truth.

EMILY: They’re fattening as hell, they’re 100 % carbohydrates. Ten raisins are about twenty carbohydrates, loaded with sugar. You’re not allowed to have any.

VINCENT: Thanks for all the milk, cheap bitch. Did you ever see a color like this coffee? It’s raw umber. You could learn a lot about being a woman from Jonquil. Very independent, but when she wants to be, she’s very affectionate.

EMILY: I want to hear Dionne Warwick, I really do.

MARSHA: I’m sorry.

VINCENT: What is this, Marsha, you’re braindraining us? I’ll bet you don’t even know what the brain drain is.

MARSHA: What?

VINCENT: No one understands anything here. The two of you may be marvelous women, intuitive intelligences and all that, but you don’t know anything about the outside world. Really ignorant. The brain drain refers to the scientists leaving England because they get higher wages from universities here.

EMILY: Very interesting.

VINCENT: Just because there isn’t a name personality involved, darling, it can be interesting. You know you’re a very beautiful person, Emily. I can’t get involved with you because you’re too beautiful.

EMILY: Who the fuck wants you to get involved with me?

VINCENT: Maybe I want to.

EMILY: Then don’t warn me, I don’t need preludes and prefaces.

VINCENT: What do you want? Epilogues?

EMILY: Either commit yourself or don’t, but don’t give me a four-act play about it.

VINCENT: Anyhow, I wouldn’t want a woman who’s slept around the way you have and who uses the word fuck so much.

EMILY: What he says in jest, does he mean in jest?

VINCENT: What I say in jest, I mean in jest.

EMILY: Vinnie, did you ever hear the story of how Marsha and I got to Stromboli? Listen to this. I was dead sick in Positano, the doctors were coming every day and Marshie was bringing me rice with butter. I was dying, but I knew if we didn’t get out of there pretty quick, she’d kill me first, because she was so unhappy and I was too. Someone told us to go to the Stromboli Islands, they said they’re like deepest Africa, Greek, passionate, blabla, so we said okay. The next day I went to call Philippe and I fainted in the telephone office, they had to carry me out on a stretcher. But in the morning I woke up, I said Marsha don’t worry, we’re leaving. We got to Naples, we had lunch in some place where there was an air-conditioner backwards, it was blowing this shit smell into our noses.

VINCENT: Was it really a shit smell?

EMILY: It was unbelievable. We got onto the boat — I had lost about twelve pounds — big huge boat, I’m falling on the floor every here and there, dragging the big rubber what-do-you-call-it, materassino .

MARSHA: We carried it from town to town.

EMILY: And at some point, Marsha’s in the bar asleep, and I blow the thing up to lie near the water, because I’m so fucking sick, Vinnie, you don’t know.