LENORE: What the hell does that have to do with anything?
JAY: The question makes you uncomfortable.
LENORE: No, it makes me feel like I just listened to a pretty meaningless and dumb question, which I’m afraid I think that was.
JAY: I don’t think it’s dumb at all. Aren’t you the one who complains of feeling pressured and coerced into feeling and doing the things you feel and do? Or do I have you confused with some other long/time client and friend?
LENORE: Look, maybe it’s just safe to say that I feel shitty because bad things are happening, OK? Lenore acts incredibly weird and melodramatic for about a month, then just decides to leave the place where she’s supposed to live as a cold-blooded semi-invalid, and to take people with her, even though she’s ninety-two, and she doesn’t bother to call to say what’s going on, even though they’re obviously still in Cleveland, see for instance Mrs. Yingst’s walker, which could only have gotten in my room at about six-thirty last night, and my father clearly knows what’s up, see for instance having Karl Rummage tell Mr. Bloemker all this stuff yesterday morning before anybody knew, and he doesn’t bother to let me know either, and takes off for Corfu, and I think someone may have given my bird Vlad the Impaler LSD because he’s now blabbering all the time, which he never did before, and it’s conveniently mostly obscene stuff that Mrs. Tissaw’s going to flip about and evict me for if she hears it, and my job really bites the big kielbasa right now because there are like massive mess-ups in the phone lines and we don’t have our number anymore and people keep calling for all sorts of bizarre other things, and of course no sign of anybody from Interactive Cable today, this morning, and then at the switchboard I get a lot of flowers and some supposedly humorously nearly empty boxes of candy, and it turns out they’re from Mr. Bombardini…
JAY: Norman Bombardini?
LENORE:… Yes, who’s our landlord, at Frequent and Vigorous, and who’s unbelievably fat and hostile, and as a fringe benefit also clearly insane, and thinks he’s doing me a huge favor, pardon the pun, by promising me a comer of a soon-to-be-full universe all for myself, and he claims he’s infatuated with me.
JAY: And then there is of course Rick.
LENORE: Rick is Rick. Rick is a constant in every equation. Let’s leave Rick out of this.
JAY: You feel uncomfortable talking about Rick in this context.
LENORE: What context? There’s no context. A context implies something that hangs together. All that’s happening now is that a thoroughly screwed-up life that’s barely hung together is now even less well hung together.
JAY: So the woman is worried that her life is not “well hung.”
LENORE: Go suck a rock.
Dr. Jay pauses. Lenore Beadsman pauses.
JAY: Interesting, though.
LENORE: What?
JAY: Don’t you think? Don’t you think it’s rather an interesting situation? Set of situations?
LENORE: Meaning what?
JAY: Meaning very little. Only that if one is going to feel shitty, to continue your use of the adjective, about not having enough “control” over things, and we of course admit freely that we still haven’t been able satisfactorily to articulate what we mean by that, yet, have we…?
LENORE: God, the plural tense, now.
JAY:… that it’s at least comparatively desirable to be impotently involved in an interesting situation, rather than a dull one, is that not so?
LENORE: Interesting to whom?
JAY: Ah. That matters to you.
LENORE: It matters to me a lot.
JAY: I smell breakthrough, I don’t mind telling you. There’s a scent of breakthrough in the air.
LENORE: I think it’s my armpit. I think I need a shower.
JAY: Hiding behind symptomatic skirts is not fair. If I say I smell breakthrough, I smell breakthrough.
LENORE: You always say you smell breakthrough. You say you smell breakthrough almost every time I’m here. I think you must coat your nostrils with breakthrough first thing every morning. What does that mean, anyway, “breakthrough”?
JAY: You tell me.
LENORE: These seat belts on the chair aren’t really for the patients’ safety on the track, are they? They’re to keep your jugular from being lunged for about thirty times a day, right?
JAY: You feel anger.
LENORE: I feel shitty. Pure, uncoerced shitty. Interesting for whom? JAY: Whom might there be to interest?
LENORE: Now what the hell does that mean?
JAY: The smell of breakthrough is getting weaker.
LENORE: Well, look.
JAY: Yes?
LENORE: Suppose Gramma tells me really convincingly that all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it?
JAY: What the hell does that mean?
LENORE: You feel anger.
JAY: I have an ejection button, you know. I can press a button on the underside of this drawer, here, and send you screaming out into the lake.
LENORE: You must be about the worst psychologist of all time. Why won’t you ever let me go with my thoughts?
JAY: I’m sorry.
LENORE: That’s why I’m here, right? That’s why I pay you roughly two-thirds of everything I make, right?
JAY: I’m honored and ashamed, all at once. Back to the Grandmother, and a life that’s told, not lived.
LENORE: Right.
JAY: Right.
LENORE: So what would that mean?
JAY: In all earnestness I say you tell me.
LENORE: Well see, it seems like it’s not really like a life that’s told, not lived; it’s just that the living is the telling, that there’s nothing going on with me that isn’t either told or tellable, and if so, what’s the difference, why live at all?
JAY: I really don’t understand.
LENORE: Maybe it just makes no sense. Maybe it’s just completely irrational and dumb.
JAY: But obviously it bothers you.
LENORE: Pretty keen perception. If there’s nothing about me but what can be said about me, what separates me from this lady in this story Rick got who eats junk food and gains weight and squashes her child in her sleep? She’s exactly what’s said about her, right? Nothing more at all. And same with me, seems like. Gramma says she’s going to show me how a life is words and nothing else. Gramma says words can kill and create. Everything.
JAY: Sounds like Gramma is maybe half a bubble off plumb, to me. LENORE: Well, just no. She’s not crazy and she’s sure not stupid. You should know that. And see, the thing is, if she can do all this to me with words, if she can make me feel this way, and perceive my life as screwed way up and not hung together, and question whether I’m really even me, if there is a me, crazy as that sounds, if she can do all that just by talking to me, with just words, then what does that say about words?
JAY: “… she said, using words.”
LENORE: Well exactly. There it is. Lenore would totally agree. Which is why it sometimes just drives me nuts that Rick wants to talk all the time. Talk talk talk. Tell tell tell. At least when he tells me stories, it’s up-front and clear what’s story and what isn‘t, right?
JAY: I’m getting a scent.
LENORE: I don’t think the armpit theory should be rejected out of hand.
JAY: Why is a story more up-front than a life?
LENORE: It just seems more honest, somehow.
JAY: Honest meaning closer to the truth?
LENORE: I smell trap.
JAY: I smell breakthrough. The truth is that there’s no difference between a life and a story? But a life pretends to be something more? But it really isn’t more?
LENORE: I would kill for a shower.