Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

VINCENT: All right, then everything I’m saying is wrong. But it’s not, it’s a total thing I’m talking about. There is no area in which the man is safe. As I once said to you — this is something famous from our very first close conversation, Emily — I have always maintained that in a love relationship, a relationship which is on a bed physical and in public erotic because it can’t be expressed, the one area of independence between the two people has to be the bathroom. Like for someone to be taking a shit and the other one to come in to wash or talk is very very bad, because the civilized animal has got to have the sense of freedom and privacy.

MARSHA: That’s what Tim was saying. He said he has the feeling that wherever he is, whether it’s at a party or on the beach, he’s under my eye the whole time. If he’s dancing with another girl, he looks over and sees me watching him dance with the girl.

VINCENT: It’s true, you are watching him, you are .

MARSHA: It’s true. He said he came in a wounded animal yesterday, very conscious of the pain in his back and sort of hoping to get it healed here. He was happy he’d be able to take a bath, that I would help him through this thing etcetera, but that suddenly I began to make his pain a psychological rejection of me, which I know it was .

VINCENT: No it wasn’t, you see, and if it was, it became that because you wouldn’t be content with it unless it was.

MARSHA: At the beginning of the relationship, you know, he was suffocating me . His eyes were always on me . I couldn’t stand it, I was ready to run out of the room.

VINCENT: All right, then he leaves, he loses interest and you go after him. So what is the lesson to be learned? The lesson to be learned is to always be cool and leave loveplay for the bed. Love is not play; love is hard work and it’s strategy and it’s not being yourself, not giving vent to every feeling you have.

EMILY: No, you’re making a mistake, darling; you’re talking about edifice, you’re not talking about structure. There are certain structural things that go on between man and woman that have to do with elegance, all those things we talked about when Joan was here, that kind of deep, personal subjective respect. You know Marsha has a tremendous need for freedom, much stronger in a way than Tim’s.

MARSHA: That’s true.

EMILY: So when she’s watching Tim on the dance floor, it’s not about checking out the areas in which he’s unfaithful, it’s like her almost making checkpoints on her new freedom list. I think if you ever looked at Tim Cullen dancing with another girl, Marsha, and found him totally loyal to you, you’d be suffocated out of your mind.

MARSHA: I would, I’m definitely looking for him to be unfaithful.

VINCENT: But he has been faithful, he’s been terribly faithful and loyal.

EMILY: Even if he slept with other women, he’s been very faithful.

VINCENT: In his friendship, in his love, fantastically loyal. I’m talking about spiritual love loyalty.

EMILY: He’s very innocent.

MARSHA: He said one thing that really got to him last night was when he went into the bedroom to lie down and I came in and turned on the phonograph, then he went into the other room, and I followed him in there. I lay down beside him, knowing full well he can’t sleep when anything is really touching him. We both tried to take a nap, then I started jumping up and down dancing to the music.

VINCENT: You see on both sides it’s absolute panic. In the face of a love object, she panics in a very assertive, physical advancing way; he panics in just the reverse way. I don’t know Tim that well, but I know myself and I know lots of other people, so I’ve learned certain things, and I think one of the basic reasons he withdraws from her, besides his basic need for independence, is that he doesn’t think that much of himself. I mean he knows he’s a good sculptor and everything, but he has great doubts and insecurity, and he’s shy, he had a late beginning. You know I’m crazy about him, but the fantastic tension in his back yesterday showed me he’s not a flowing thing. So he meets a person, and he loved her at the beginning when she was distant because this made sense to him, just as all his parental love figures were distant and not loving. But then after a while she’s all over him, she can’t be away from him for one second, and so he thinks she must be less than me if she thinks I’m this fantastic guy I know I’m not. Therefore she must be nothing, so how can I love her? I better find someone who’s cool and distant again — I mean how can I love someone who loves an untruth?

MARSHA: That’s also something I share.

VINCENT: Well, for that matter of fact, almost all sensitive, advanced people have something of it, but in your two cases, it’s exaggerated.

EMILY: But Marshie, you know very well that in our relationship, which is basically a love relationship too, you’re completely non-smothering and independent, very ungiving essentially. It’s a totally autonomous relationship.

MARSHA: Something else interesting came up with Tim this morning. I asked him what he thought I liked about him, and he said his forgiveness, and he was right, because the one moment when I really loved Timothy Cullen was when he forgave me.

EMILY: Forgave you for what?

VINCENT: When she threw him out on the Fourth of July and he was willing to come back and forgive and forget.

MARSHA: I was flowing over with love for him when he came back that next day and forgave me. Something came up with my doctor once about this — I had had that pat theory of my father rejecting me at some point, turning off without my knowing why, and so all my life since, I’ve had the feeling that if only some man would come along and punish me once and for all — that’s why I let Eliot hang me on the wall probably— then the guilt would be expiated and my father would love me again. And Merrill Johnston said maybe the same thing could be accomplished if you were forgiven instead of punished. I think it must be true, because when Tim forgave me, I really felt the most freeflowing love I’ve ever felt. It wasn’t any of that hysterical stuff — it was a moment of pure true love.

EMILY: That’s marvelous. Vinnie, are you going to stay and eat with us?

VINCENT: No, I have to go home. To paint, now that it’s dark.

MARSHA: We never should have let Nathan Fass come over here last night.

EMILY: It was really incredible. Vinnie said he felt he was attacked by him on the most crucial, primary level as a man, that his life was threatened.

MARSHA: What do you mean, his life was threatened?

EMILY: That his free spirit as an artist was in danger, that Nathan was cutting it down, this soaring spirit that he doesn’t know anything about.

MARSHA: What have you got in there?

EMILY: Tea.

MARSHA: That’s a very expensive antique pitcher and you put tea in it?

EMILY: It’s very pretty, isn’t it a nice thing to put tea in?

MARSHA: Yes. So what’s going to happen to Vinnie today? Will he be able to paint?

EMILY: He’s out of his skull. Look, let’s discuss it on this level: you and Vince both seriously threatened with the end of the friendship. Vinnie lost his father just before the summer, he’s afraid of losing Nico because of the heterosexual shift with his doctor; he’s being threatened with the loss of love objects all around, and last night Nathan Fass comes along and threatens to kill you off too. That’s why Vinnie feels he was stabbed in a life way.

MARSHA: Have you told him what you think?

EMILY: No, I’m still working it out. I talk a lot, but I think a lot too. Last night, Vinnie was really threatened with the loss of you, which your eventual marriage will mean to him someday, just as it will to me. When I was with Philippe, darling, you had to give up a great part of me . Our relationship changed, didn’t it?