Linda Rosenkrantz: Talk

EMILY: That’s what’s not bad about him.

MARSHA: Do you like bald men?

EMILY: My father was bald.

MARSHA: I didn’t ask you that.

EMILY: You mean just as a sensory thing? No, do you?

MARSHA: I’m beginning to.

EMILY: It’s a good thing too. You know Vinnie’s right about this definitely being a middle-class family, coupled situation. I think the real emotional, intellectual upper class are people who don’t group to begin with. But the beach is still a nice collection of people, basically very varied, very heterogeneous. It’s nothing like say Jones Beach, where people are strangers.

MARSHA: No, it’s a personality beach.

EMILY: It’s a party, with the pretense of being a beach, a kind of fantasy charade of people’s projections. Like when I see Keira walk by, what I see is a poster-flyer of his show. Look at him. He’s walking up and down like he’s at a cocktail party. He only makes contact with people to revitalize the image he has about himself. It becomes so-and-so, Painter, or so-and-so, Author, not so-and-so who may have problems with his wife. But you still very well might meet somebody when you’re out here by yourself.

MARSHA: Yeah, if there’s anyone here to meet.

EMILY: Uh-oh, there’s what’s-her-name — Merle.

MARSHA: Who?

EMILY: Philippe’s sister-in-law. Over there — to the left and to the water. Look, her kid’s crying and she’s giving him one of her talks.

MARSHA: Man-to-man.

EMILY: “We are all grown-ups and we must be mature,” blablabla. Don’t look. She knows enough not to come over here, doesn’t she?

MARSHA: Of course.

EMILY: Meanwhile she’s coming over. You’re what they call in piena vista .

MARSHA: Where is the water coming from?

EMILY: Probably the shithead’s giving me a spraygun. This guy over here’s got an erection.

MARSHA: All right, so tell me about the life you’re going back to.

EMILY: I’m getting sprayguns like crazy here. I may be lying down any minute, I have a feeling it’s warmer down there. You want to know about my life in New York?

MARSHA: Yeah, don’t you?

EMILY: Well, I’m going to get the money people owe me, number one. I’m going to hit class and hit an agent. I’ll see what’s happening, put out feelers, find out what the story is, go up for things. Meanwhile I don’t have a dime, meanwhile I’m seeing my doctor, meanwhile I’m thinking of getting a nine-to-five job along with everything else. Meanwhile I’m spending a lot of time alone.

MARSHA: You are? You’re out of Sick Joan?

EMILY: Totally out of Sick Joan. I’m going to be spending a lot of time in my apartment, in my darkroom, typing up my letters. These are things I can do, that I’m interested in doing. I’m not going to run away from them, but you know I do have a fantastic facility for running away. You might call me the genius kid.

MARSHA: I well might.

EMILY: I knew Joan would never stay in that hospital. But why was she calling me out here? What was in the heart that was being poured into the phone? How did she sound?

MARSHA: Sober. I hated lying to her that you weren’t here.

EMILY: I know. When she used to call me in Europe, I very often wouldn’t talk to her. She’d call me at five o’clock in the morning, after she’d been drinking all night or all week.

MARSHA: I bet Philippe loved the calling.

EMILY: Drove him wild, wall-to-wall crackers. I still don’t know whether she belongs in a hospital. You know she has a facet to her sickness, I don’t know how common it is, but it’s very alienating, and that is she plays on it all the time, the tune of her sickness, that’s the song she sings, I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m sick, I’m an alcoholic, I’m drinking myself to death, I’m suffering, I know all about pain. To spend a lot of time with her when she’s like that is to get ultimately very depressed.

MARSHA: Immediately, I’d say.

EMILY: You get immediately depressed. You know I was thinking something very interesting about your trusting me now, knowing I won’t get drunk, the way I did before Woods Hole. It was that the demon in me, that terrible thing that had to be expiated, was made visible in the form of Joan, which is why we had to drive her out when she was here. It’s almost true, isn’t it?

MARSHA: It is.

EMILY: I think that on so many levels, almost anything can be true.

MARSHA: What language are those guys speaking?

EMILY: I’m trying to figure it out. It sounds like Afghanistan or something. Marsha, say you got married to a man who lived very far away, like in Japan or Africa, and you went off with him, maybe you’d come home once a year for a visit. I’m sure you would , because your father, if nothing else, would pay for you to come home once a year. Can you imagine how your relationships would change? To me, to Vinnie, to everyone?

MARSHA: I’d like it.

EMILY: You would? That’s very positive. I couldn’t ever marry a person who didn’t speak English, not for anything. I suffered like a lunatic with the language when I was in Europe, you know.

MARSHA: I know. You just have a conversation with words and you really can’t tell what people feel about themselves or about you.

EMILY: That’s very true. I remember, because I’m a person who first of all, aside from being very verbal, tends to be expansive and my use of words is very peculiar to me, I was completely frustrated in French. I almost preferred to say the simplest things. It’s such an entirely different sensibility anyway. I sometimes get the feeling that in a way the pain of analysis in us is the equivalent of the war experience to the Europeans.

MARSHA: What do you mean?

EMILY: Well, the American sensibility is fairly flat, the nuance of it, the cadence, the depth; it doesn’t have the tradition or the culture or any of the things of history that the European has, right? But what we do have is a certain kind of psychological awareness that somehow corresponds. I’d like to know who that man with the moustache is.

MARSHA: He keeps looking over here every minute.

EMILY: I’m definitely suspicious of men who hide behind moustaches and beards from now on.

MARSHA: Darling, that man has five children — what do you want from him?

EMILY: I was talking philosophically, generically. I’m steering clear of them, except that my analyst has a moustache.

MARSHA: What kind?

EMILY: Completely uneducated and unpretentious; the kind of moustache a man just has on his face, that looks like it’s part of it.

MARSHA: Do you really think they have a beautiful life, that gorgeous beard and his wife?

EMILY: I wouldn’t want to be her, but at the same time there is something beautiful about it, that she’s married to him and they have those children they love, that he carries into the water on his shoulders. I need that, I want it desperately.

MARSHA: I don’t want it desperately anymore.

EMILY: I never wanted it desperately before.

MARSHA: She’s horrible, that wife. Did you see her hit the little boy?

EMILY: I don’t have to, darling, I know that girl from years ago. She just wrote a book on Chekhov.

MARSHA: What could she possibly know about Chekhov? Emily, your hair is turning white, golden white. What I have to do is get to work on the whole superego area.

EMILY: I was the first person to point it out, wasn’t I?

MARSHA: Yeah, but at the same time Tim had put this big photograph of me up on his wall and said it was like his conscience looking down on him.

EMILY: But I stated it very simply, that you function as a superego.

MARSHA: All I do is tell him what he should do, what he should do, what he should be doing.