Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk

MARSHA: I am.

EMILY: Who helped you move all this stuff?

MARSHA: Tim.

EMILY: He’s a very good boy. What’s the name of this Sutherland sculpture?

MARSHA: Alice. You know the full name, don’t you?

EMILY: Alice, the Dawn is Breaking?

MARSHA: No, Zeke named it for me and what I represented to him: “A my name is Alice and my husband’s name is Alfred, we come from Alabama and we sell apples.”

EMILY: Oh I love that, it’s beautiful. Here comes the army of underpants, the army of drips, back into action. Onions she moves in from East Hampton, onions and a carton of Gauloises.

MARSHA: You’re what?

EMILY: Oy, the deafness, it could drive a person buggy. That’s definitely not your strongest sense, the sense of hearing. I lost mine with my ear infections, but I used to hear brilliantly, they would test me all the time.

MARSHA: Did you pass? What’s Vinnie doing tonight? Staying home?

EMILY: I think so.

MARSHA: I told Merrill Johnston today I feel very cool toward Vinnie, very unclingy.

EMILY: You feel that way toward everyone. You know your relationship with Vinnie did get a little weird this summer, you know that.

MARSHA: Yeah. Sick.

EMILY: I’ll tell you, Marshie, I still have some very bad problems and I don’t know what to do about them. Like the way I felt glad to see Michael again the other night? I did, Marsha, it’s like you with Tim, because they’re men we’ve gone to bed with and we’re certain they can function that way, they’re still alive. You know I really don’t have any opinions anymore, I just have ideas. From drugs and a lot of pot, the big thing I’m trying to find out now is what I feel, not what other people feel or what they think about me, I’m trying to find out what I feel vis-à-vis any particular stimulus or situation. For instance, in a love affair, in a relationship with a man, if I’m afraid of doing something because of being rejected, then I’m not dealing with my own feelings. I don’t see human behavior anymore in terms of passive and responsive; I see it only as active. And that’s maybe one crucial, definitive step I’ve been able to make towards being a woman. And I think that’s our business; if we have any business being anything, it’s being women. All I can say is I want a man in my life and I need one very badly. I’m lonely and I’m frail, but I think I’m strong enough to take on someone else’s demands, because I’m beginning to know what my own are. It’s very tough, Marshie.

MARSHA: It is. I don’t know where to store everything, Em.

EMILY: You definitely need a larger apartment.

MARSHA: Did I tell you my sister’s my new best friend?

EMILY: Is she really?

MARSHA: Sweet as sugar. She dragged all over town with me today, on buses, on foot, little pregnant baby. You know the saddest thing? The other night, when I was getting dressed at her house, she sat on the bed watching me like a little girl watching her older teenage sister. And there she was with a baby in her belly.

EMILY: Yeah, but you know babies in bellies don’t mean anything. As you well know , my Marshie, babies in bellies don’t mean very much at all. Is your sister bright?

MARSHA: I don’t know.

EMILY: She has a lot of the qualities of bright people, she’s sort of cynical and bored, negative, quick, but I’ve never heard any sustained thoughts come out of her head. What am I supposed to do about Joan now?

MARSHA: I don’t know, get rid of her, tell her we decided to go to the movies and she can’t come.

EMILY: Yeah. This chicken has a very Jewish smell. My mother used to make fricassee with meatballs thrown into it.

MARSHA: My mother did too, only with a brown sauce.

EMILY: That’s what this is — brown sauce. If you want me to throw in the meatballs, I will. I think I’m getting a maid. My apartment is so clean right now, so meticulous, it’s so neat and beautiful, just like this, it’s in exactly this kind of shape. But I don’t have time to keep it that way.

MARSHA: Who does?

EMILY: Nobody. I don’t want to shit away my evenings anymore, Marshie, I’m feeling extremely positive about life. Tiny little meatballs she used to put in. You know how many years it’s been since she put in those tiny meatballs?

MARSHA: Maybe she still does.

EMILY: My mother’s madly in love with me these days. I was going with my doctor today through the fantasies I have about being a star. You want to hear them? They’re so sad. I come out onto the stage, and all of a sudden this big hot wet black womb full of love, this theatre, bursts into applause. And who’s in the audience? You’re there, all my friends are, all the friends who love me and think I’m brilliant and talented but basically a flunky failure, they’re all in the audience. Michael’s in the audience, Nathan’s in the audience, my mother’s in the audience, the whole family scene is out there in the audience. Guess who isn’t?

MARSHA: Sick Joan?

EMILY: My doctor, he’s not in the audience. Why should he be? After all, I only have a limited amount of tickets for opening night. I was describing to him the nature of my present life being amorphous and plastic and without form and he said but it has great form; your masochism is its shape. And it’s true, my dollar-a-day allowance, my twenty-seven-dollar-a-month rent and my stealing, my incredibly impoverished sense of self have been so neatly and compactly worked into my mental bloodstream, it’s unbelievable. Before the summer, Marshie, I felt I was what my masochism was, that was the only identity I had, the fact that I was a loser. I had no hope. I never told you, but I was very suicidal. And you have to admit I had a lot of good company, a lot of sick people to keep me happy and on the swing. Pushing to the left was Sick Joan and pushing me to the right was that gorgeous series of deprived and risky men, Nathan, Michael, Philippe. I’m glad it’s over, Marsh. You know something? You look just like a little girl right now.

MARSHA: Tim Cullen said I look pretty in yellow. First compliment he’s given me since last February.

EMILY: What does he know?

MARSHA: He knows I look pretty in yellow.

EMILY: You do, it happens that you look very well in yellow, I wouldn’t shit you. Guess what color the sauce of the fricassee is?

MARSHA: Yellow.

EMILY: Completely brown, brown as a witch’s tit.

MARSHA: Oh lordy, here we go again. You know when I went to my doctor today, I told him how sick I think I am.

EMILY: Why?

MARSHA: Because I have no feelings, or at least I don’t come into contact with them, they’re all buried. It’s funny because I thought I was going to go in and tell him I had had such a constructive summer of working and studying myself and this and that. Instead all I did was qvetch about what a horrible person I emerged as on the tapes and how all the three of us talk about is sex and food and yet how I felt we were the only people who communicate in the whole world, blablabla. He said it must be very isolating.

EMILY: What must be isolating?

MARSHA: Just having you and Vinnie as people I can talk to.

EMILY: What’s this thing about not having any feelings?

MARSHA: Well, he asked me what I would feel like if I got married and had to give up Vince, and I said I wouldn’t feel anything.

EMILY: You told him what happened with Nathan Fass, didn’t you?

MARSHA: Yeah, but I blocked most of it out, I couldn’t remember the details. I had already told him on the beach anyway. I did say if I don’t care about Vinnie, who ultimately is the closest person in the world to me, who do I care about?

EMILY: He is? He’s closer to you than me?

MARSHA: In a way, yeah. He is a man. I mean you both are close, but actually, I think in terms of influence, he’s more important in my life.