Q. Y’know, you did such an incredible job reading that MMPI report, that, uh…that Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory report, that we probably should have just planned on letting you do the whole reading. I probably should have just stayed away altogether.
A. Oh, that’s ridiculous, Mark.
Q. No, seriously, I should have. It reminds me a little of that story about the conceptual artist…Do you know that story?
A. I don’t think so.
Q. There was this conceptual artist, this very brilliant, very enigmatic, intransigent, reclusive artist. And he was doing this, this astonishing project…it was called something like, uh, Outside-In…and it involved putting everything outside of the Whitney into the Whitney (this was the new Whitney down in Meatpacking). And by everything, I mean everything and everyone—the Pacific Ocean, the Alps, the Burj Khalifa, the Kurdish Peshmerga, the Pittsburgh Penguins, every single can of corned-beef hash and SpaghettiOs, every Depeche Mode CD, every Pole, Turk, and Inuit, every chicken, bear, water moccasin, tomahawk missile, Uber car, umbrella, iPhone, and flushable wipe, every canister of nerve gas and bottle of beer — every single thing and every single person on earth (including every other piece of art in the world too, of course, as well as a scale model of the museum and all its contents). It was without a doubt the most challenging installation the Whitney had ever mounted, costing, like, trillions upon trillions of dollars for insurance and shipping, with crews working seven days a week in eleven-hour shifts. And so…finally…this remarkable show opens. And everything and everyone in the world is in the Whitney Museum…Or so we think. Until a small child, a small, chubby naive child, looks up at his dad, tugging at his pants leg, and asks, “Where’s the artist?” Well…the artist — the great artist — out of shyness or modesty or perhaps out of a sense of superiority, an aristocratic de haut en bas disdain, has apparently refused to attend his own opening, fatally undermining the conceptual integrity of the entire project. And everything is removed and everyone sullenly files out, muttering to themselves, until the museum is completely empty…and the everything-and-everyone-in-the-world that was once inside the Whitney is now outside the Whitney.
A. That sounds like one of those folktales I used to read to you while you were eating. (MARK is gazing at his MOM, who’s gazing down at the floor again.)
Q. There’s a beautiful cliff behind the Walgreen’s on River Road in North Bergen…I was hoping maybe we’d get our picture taken there. The bush clover is splendid this time of year. (For a moment, they both seem lost in their own reveries.)
Q. I want to take a picture of us, okay? (He tries to stand so he can reach into his pants pocket and get his phone.)
Q. We’re kind of wedged in here…
A. Do you want me to…
Q. I think I can reach it without having to get up…
A. Should I…
Q. Got it. (He holds the phone out in front of them, having to extend his arm out over the threshold of the stall in order to fit them both in the frame.)
Q. Ready?
A. Not really.
Q. Smile… (We hear the cell-phone shutter click.)
A. I must look like a gargoyle.
Q. You look beautiful, Mom. Do you remember that story in the news about that North Korean general, Hyon Yong-chol…the one Kim Jong-un supposedly ordered executed by antiaircraft gun? I tweeted something like, uh…Being executed with an antiaircraft gun doesn’t seem like such a bad way to go. Beats becoming one of those “Fifteen Celebs Who Are Aging Horribly.” Well…you’re aging remarkably, miraculously…You know, I realized something tonight that I never ever realized before…I think we have a — what would you call it? — a shared expressivity, a shared expressivity both in terms of its sheer volume and its style…There’s like a…an isomorphism between the way you express yourself and the way I do…And, honestly, that’s something I don’t think ever occurred to me before tonight.
A. That’s such a wonderful, unexpected thing for you to say.
Q. Who are your favorite mother/son duos? Like in mythology or literature and history? (MARK’S MOM is surveying the craquelure, trying to discern one last face.)
A. Oh, I don’t know, sweetheart. Who are yours?
Q. I guess Jocasta and Oedipus, and Ma and “Doc” Barker and, uh…maybe Cher and Chaz Bono.
A. Okay…I might be going completely crazy here…but tell me that’s not Elston Howard.
Q. Elston Howard?
A. Yes…the catcher for the Yankees back in the, in the sixties.
Q. Where do you see Elston Howard?
A. Right over here…God, I used to love watching him. I love watching catchers anyway. And even before I really understood — I was young and it didn’t even occur to me very much — but the pain that they must be in virtually all the time, oh my Lord! To be in that position…It’s got to be devastating to your knees and hips.
Q. The position we’re in right now couldn’t be that great for our knees and hips…
A. He lived in Teaneck, y’know — Elston Howard. That’s another thing I’ve learned in my age now, now that I live in Bergen County…so many of the players, even now, live in Bergen County. The great CC lives close by…CC Sabathia lives close by, and his wife, Amber, is in lots and lots of charity events and things…
Q. They live in Fort Lee?
A. They might live in Tenafly…they live in one of the…obviously enough, in a gorgeous home, in a gorgeous place…it could even be Alpine or Demarest, but it’s one of the Bergen County places…My father, Raymond, by the way, liked baseball very much, of course, but he loved tennis, and he was quite a good tennis player, you know. Of course, anything you did, especially if you did it well — and you did most things well — he was just so proud of you that his chest, which stuck way out anyway, almost broke off from glee… (Water is beginning to seep into the bathroom and pool on the floor. The lights begin to flicker and dim.)
A. The image I have in my mind when I think of you and my dad is always the one of him taking you for a walk when you were very little, and you’re holding on to, I think, one of his fingers, and he’s walking with his chest way, way out. He’s so thrilled with “his boy.” You were his first boy. And what a boy… (And finally the lights go out.)
Part IV
~ ~ ~
Adjournment (When the lights come back on, we are in the corridor outside the ladies’ room. The door is closed. We hear the two of them still speaking from within… And, after several moments, LEYNER emerges, in a bathrobe, flushed from the exertion of the performance, his hair slicked back, daubs of cold cream dappling his face, like an actor who’s hurriedly refreshed himself in his dressing room before returning for a curtain call. A deep breath and a long, sighing, exhausted, but gratified exhalation, and then a wide grin — an implicit “I’m getting too old for this.” LEYNER is, of course, the same person as MARK [the former, in fact, merely the surname of the latter], and yet he seems distinctly different from the one wedged in that tiny stall with his mother, almost as if he’s somehow left him behind in there. [One can almost picture the two of them still in there, on their hands and knees, parsing the craquelure, interpreting their hieroglyphs…almost still discern the decrescendo of their everlasting repartee.] Clearly spent from the rigors of his role tonight, he now seems less fraught, unburdened somehow, more relaxed, ever so slightly out of character, even if this just means a self-awareness, a…a disengagement, a divestiture of one self to disclose a virtually identical self beneath.)