Linda Rosenkrantz: Talk

VINCENT: I think there’s a goodness about the people who can love, I don’t know about the object. There’s more goodness in you … You see you can’t admit it because that would mean you’re completely wrong. I’ll tell you something, your love is really very egotistical, because it’s always for people who are fantastically less than you and destroyed and distraught. And by loving them, you’re helping them; it’s egotistical because it makes you something more than you are. Love someone equal to you and see if you can give something to that person.

EMILY: Well I’ll go along with that, but I don’t understand how it relates to what you want me to learn about people being bad.

VINCENT: Oh listen, I didn’t say that, it was Marsha. I certainly don’t think Michael Christy is a bad person.

EMILY: I think Zeke Sutherland is like fifty times worse than what’s- his-name, Michael. I really do.

VINCENT: That’s like taking two defective apples out of a bushel and saying one’s better than the other.

EMILY: I think Zeke socially is one of the most evil people in the whole world. He makes anyone who speaks to him feel like a piece of shit.

MARSHA: I agree. He’s awful. And yet he’s loved too. Believe me, I love him still, even though I think he’s evil.

VINCENT: You see, Emily, I’m not talking about Christy, I’m not talking about anyone specific. I’m talking about you; I’m talking about setting up situations in which you cannot have a positive love relationship, you can only have a negative one.

EMILY: What is a negative love relationship?

VINCENT: One in which there is no return.

EMILY: Oh Philippe loved me, darling, he really did.

VINCENT: I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about this past year, about you now , the length of time I’ve known you, and it seems to me a year is a long enough time to use as a barometer about one’s life, particularly at this crucial point, when you’re thirty years old.

EMILY: No, because this year has still been all about Philippe.

VINCENT: All right, so maybe we should put off this conversation until next summer.

EMILY: Is that true or isn’t it, Marshie, about this whole year?

VINCENT: Well that’s saying a lot about you, because this goes back again to how you let men completely destroy you and activate your whole life. The idea that someone you stopped seeing more than a year ago determines everything you do the whole following year, that makes his role in your life very positive. So when you talk to me about Philippe being a rat and weak and everything, I say Philippe’s a pretty genius of a kid.

EMILY: Darling, Michael Christy is about Philippe, he’s not about Michael.

VINCENT: I don’t think Philippe or Michael are about anything, I think it’s all hang-ups about your father. That’s what’s negative about these relationships. Love should be in terms of you and the other person. You know, there are certain people, like Genêt and Bacon, who probably can’t love, but they still function and have a strangely positive perverted kind of life. Your life is not that positive. And you know I wouldn’t be saying all this if I didn’t think you had fantastic potential. You’re like a gigantically big bud that you look at and say oh my God, this is going to make a big beautiful flower some day. But you know the thing about that bud? It’s got funny little bugs crawling all over it.

EMILY: I’m trying to think how old I was. I guess between the ages of five and twelve. I went to this school for very bright little girls and boys, and they had this bus that used to pick us up, called Jaybees.

MARSHA: The bus had a name?

EMILY: Yeah, it was a private bus that used to pick you up at your door. I lived at 10 East 79th Street, and I was picked up about a quarter of nine every morning, as the bus went along its selective route, picking these high-minded children up for school. All my friendships were formed on that bus. For instance I had one friend who was horrible, he was very rich and very fat, and his mother made him a lunch which he promptly ate as soon as he got on the bus.

MARSHA: What did he eat at lunchtime?

EMILY: Bought a school lunch. So he had breakfast, then he had his bag of lunch on the bus about a half-hour later, and then he had his regular lunch during lunch period. Also I remember there was this guy named Ernest Enfield who was absolutely madly in love with me. He was a shy, retiring boy and also a brat. But really very nice. He used to antagonize the teacher, Barbara Mulligan.

MARSHA: The teacher?

EMILY: Yes, I had a teacher named Barbara Mulligan. She used to bring liverwurst sandwiches that were mixed up with mayonnaise and chopped pickles and she would eat them on this strange kind of tired-looking bread. It was very sad, she wrapped them in waxed paper. I couldn’t stand it. She was very skinny and she wore those heavy brown cotton stockings. One day she slapped Ernest Enfield across the face and I cried, because I really liked him. Anyway, I had all kinds of friends on that bus. There were twin girls who were both fat, Florence and her sister. I don’t know if they were twins or just looked like twins, but they had long blond hair that kept getting longer and longer. I saw one of them a couple of years ago in Central Park and she still had the long blond hair, I think it’s been growing ever since. So. The girl who got on the bus with me, who lived in my house, was named Wilma. She was very pretty because she was already mature, in a way that I didn’t know anything about. Her mother wanted her to be a little lady and she was very feminine. She used to wear a certain kind of cologne and she had short little hair that was in Shirley Temple ringlets. She was very sweet. She had a much better time usually than I did because her mother was very good to her. She had a doll collection. I had only one awful doll, and whenever we played dolls, she naturally always had the better doll. Finally one day, her mother said listen, I’ll take you two girls to a wig house and you can buy wigs for your dolls. So I went with Wilma and she picked out a wig and I picked out a wig. She picked out this absolutely gorgeous wig with red hair that you could wash and set.

MARSHA: Um.

EMILY: You could braid it, you could put it up or wear it down, you could have bangs, you could curl it, you could wear it straight, you could have a ponytail, anything. And I picked out a really ugly wig. I mean I didn’t know any better. I picked out this sad little wig and when we got home and started playing with our dolls, I began to realize how fantastic her wig was, Wilma’s wig.

MARSHA: Yeah.

EMILY: We kept playing and the weeks went by. Wilma had always coveted this collection I had of glamour girl trading cards. I had all those Esquire girls and Varga girls. There was one called The Lace Shawl , which was sort of a very old-fashioned girl wearing a lace shawl except she was nude. And Wilma really liked my collection. It was the only thing I had that I was proud of, that I had made an effort on, that was individual, that was mine. She really wanted it and I really wanted that gorgeous doll she had with the red hair. So one day, we were playing in her house, we made the trade: I gave her my whole collection of glamour girl trading cards and she gave me the doll with the red hair. I took that doll upstairs, I washed its hair, I set it, I combed it out, I set it again, I gave it this hairdo and that hairdo, and when I went to sleep that night I put the doll on the pillow right beside me. I was madly in love with that doll. The next morning the phone rang, I was getting ready for school, the phone rang and I heard hello? It was my mother. Oh yes, Mrs. Hargarther.