Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

EMILY: I’m listening, I’m just getting my cigarettes.

VINCENT: I didn’t know you had them there. Is that where you hid them, you bitch?

EMILY: I didn’t hide them; they were on my bed and someone kicked them off. I’m listening, darling.

VINCENT: It’s true, you need someone to treat you badly, you all do.

EMILY: All right, go ahead, darling.

VINCENT: The thing is this, Marsha begins at the point where her father let her down. She gets him though, now in the form of a lover, into bed, and then she starts to devour him.

EMILY: Does she really?

VINCENT: Yes. She’s outside so I better whisper — she’s probably within earsight if she keeps this quiet.

EMILY: I think she’s in the car.

VINCENT: No, they came in.

EMILY: Can I look out the window and see? Go ahead, I’m listening to what you’re saying because I’m actually amazed by it.

VINCENT: It’s absolutely brilliant.

EMILY: They’re still out there in the car.

VINCENT: She begins to devour these men, she clings, she hangs on, she’s inseparable, she sucks, she’s parasitic.

EMILY: Does she care?

VINCENT: She panics.

EMILY: Does she care?

VINCENT: And she does all this not to win the man, but to lose him. It happened at such a crucial point, the thing with her father, that it’s not something she can get over, she wants it repeated because she’s a masochist.

EMILY: You know what masochism is, don’t you? It’s a striving for pleasure.

VINCENT: Do you know what sadism is?

EMILY: It’s a striving for pleasure, they both are. Masochism has nothing to do with pain; pain is recognized as an area of pleasure. In other words, Marsha gets pleasure from rejecting the man and being rejected by him — you have to understand that.

VINCENT: Here she comes — she’s listening. I wouldn’t listen to this if I were you, because it’s the truth about you, Marshie.

EMILY: Being rejected is love, it’s as simple as that, it’s the way the father showed love.

VINCENT: Exactly. However, it’s neurotic because she thinks she doesn’t want it and it becomes unpositive and clogged as a flow. It’s not a love flow.

EMILY: It’s not, it’s a need flow.

VINCENT: A hate flow, a way of getting even.

MARSHA: What are you saying about me?

EMILY: Shall we play her the last part of the tape?

MARSHA: Play it — I can take it.

EMILY: Okay.

VINCENT: The thing is this, Marsha begins at the point where her father let her down. She gets him though, now in the form of a lover, into bed, and then she starts to devour him.

EMILY: Does she really?

VINCENT: Yes. She’s outside so I better whisper — she’s probably within earsight if she keeps this quiet.

EMILY: I think she’s in the car.

VINCENT: No, they came in.

EMILY: Can I look out the window and see? Go ahead, I’m listening to what you’re saying because I’m actually amazed by it.

VINCENT: It’s absolutely brilliant.

EMILY: They’re still out there in the car.

VINCENT: She begins to devour these men, she clings, she hangs on, she’s inseparable, she sucks, she’s parasitic.

EMILY: Does she care?

VINCENT: She panics.

EMILY: Does she care?

VINCENT: And she does all this not to win the man, but to lose him. It happened at such a crucial point, this thing with her father, that it’s not something she can get over, she wants it repeated because she’s a masochist.

EMILY: You know what masochism is, don’t you? It’s a striving for pleasure.

VINCENT: Do you know what sadism is?

EMILY: It’s a striving for pleasure, they both are. Masochism has nothing to do with pain; pain is recognized as an area of pleasure. In other words, Marsha gets pleasure from rejecting the man and being rejected by him — you have to understand that.

VINCENT: Here she comes — she’s listening. I wouldn’t listen to this if I were you, because it’s the truth about you, Marshie.

EMILY: Being rejected is love, it’s as simple as that, it’s the way the father showed love.

VINCENT: Exactly. However, it’s neurotic because she thinks she doesn’t want it and it becomes unpositive and clogged as a flow. It’s not a love flow.

EMILY: It’s not, it’s a need flow.

VINCENT: A hate flow, a way of getting even.

MARSHA: That’s very interesting because it’s more or less just what I was talking to Tim about in the car.

VINCENT: What did he say?

MARSHA: Nothing, he just agreed with everything I said.

EMILY: He had no reaction?

VINCENT: It wasn’t about him, why should he have a reaction?

EMILY: There is something I’m sure he feels, that in a way all this stuff sounds very pat, almost as if there were no room to say anything.

VINCENT: But why should he have something to say? This is about Marsha.

MARSHA: Isn’t he involved with me?

EMILY: Vinnie, you’re saying a crazy thing — why shouldn’t he have anything to say?

VINCENT: I mean there are certain things people have nothing to say about. You talk about a baseball game and what will I have to say about that?

MARSHA: Am I a baseball game? This is supposedly a subject he has some interest in. I asked what he thought the dynamics were, if I reject the man or if I work it so that he rejects me and he said I probably do force the man to reject me, but that I have to be aware of what other things are going on in the mind of the man. But I think all men are the same and they can all be manipulated.

VINCENT: Oh, you don’t manipulate, darling.

MARSHA: You can make any man reject you if you want to be rejected.

EMILY: Isn’t it a chemical thing? I mean can’t you make each man reject you in a different way?

MARSHA: Sure, I’m very clever about it. I’ve dealt with each man differently, but I’ve gotten them all to toss me out.

EMILY: Your dealing with Tim isn’t that.

MARSHA: I’m suffocating him.

VINCENT: Now wait a minute — some of them you tossed out.

MARSHA: Listen, I may have made the final gesture of tossing Eliot out, but he had been tossing me for four years. I had worked that rejection to the bone.

EMILY: I just don’t understand how your relationship with Tim is suffocating him.

MARSHA: You want to know how I’m doing it? With a lot of affection, with what he imagines are tremendous demands upon him, possessiveness, getting upset if I know about the other people he’s sleeping with. And he also has the feeling I’m thinking about marriage all the time. I asked him when he got here yesterday if he missed me and he found that tremendously suffocating.

VINCENT: You know what it is? It’s not all those words you’re saying. It’s that the man responds to the demonstration of your undisciplined feelings; it’s not because you said did you miss me, it’s the subtext. You give yourself up completely to the man and that’s too much for any human being to take. As soon as Tim came, Marsha turned into a completely different person. And this has nothing to do with competition on my part, no matter what you think. I’ll tell it to you in a basic animal way. He came in sick, he was like an animal who is ill goes over and lies in a corner, which he did, alone, out in the backyard. He’s lying there, and you interpret what you as the woman must do for the man, heal and console and caress. So you went over, a physical action which put you almost on top of him.

MARSHA: He told me to get down on the blanket because he couldn’t see me with his sore neck.