EMILY: When I was going over the Emil Reinhardt affair with my doctor, he said it sounded like a threepenny novel.
MARSHA: My doctor says my life is a soap opera.
EMILY: Mine said threepenny novel.
MARSHA: Soap opera.
EMILY: His grasp of dialect is different. Anyway, the point is that my syndrome is just the opposite of yours. The most important thing for me is what I trump up before I sleep with a man, like what was going on when I met Emil Reinhardt, the perfumed missives and secret assignations and the ricochet rendezvous. When we finally did make it, it was great, but I really liked the foreplay better than the act itself. Then I went on for two years moaning and groaning for all I was worth. And it wasn’t worth that much.
MARSHA: I’m more involved in aftermath and afterbirth; you’re involved in the pregnancy.
EMILY: What does it mean? Take Timothy Cullen. You met Timothy Cullen, you said this might be a healthy specimen, I’m giving him a chance. He’s Irish, he has a moustache.
MARSHA: Dark glasses.
EMILY: French clothes. He dances. You had a whole thing about how healthy you thought he was. Soon as he met you he wanted to go to bed with you, you wouldn’t go to bed with him, right?
MARSHA: Then I started building up a dread.
EMILY: The actual pattern is the first week he loves you, you don’t love him. Second week he gets the idea you don’t love him and he stops loving you. You get the idea he’s not loving you and you start loving him. Third week: zero.
MARSHA: Where are we now, six months later?
EMILY: It ends with you’re still in love with him, because it’s unresolved. He feels rejected, he finally gets the message you don’t want any dirty part of him, cunning as he is.
MARSHA: You know what sticks in my mind? Do you remember there was one night in the Dom, it was in the first week when he was in love with me, and his eyes didn’t leave the nape of my neck the whole entire evening? Every time I sensed him coming near me, I zooped up and sat somewhere else.
EMILY: As long as you didn’t Zeke up, you’re okay.
MARSHA: I couldn’t stand the pressure, the clinging.
EMILY: He was clinging?
MARSHA: He was clinging. He was calling me up constantly, what are you doing tonight, where will you be tomorrow, where are you every minute of the day?
EMILY: Remember the night you called him twenty-five times? More than twenty-five times. He was out all night, you didn’t know where, and you kept calling him every two seconds?
MARSHA: The next morning was the big break-up. He found his Marie.
EMILY: Marie the dawn is breaking. Marshie’s heart. Go on.
MARSHA: Where? He’ll be coming back any second.
EMILY: What if Zeke Sutherland fell in love with you, what would happen?
MARSHA: Even Zeke Sutherland made me nervous when he liked me. But I couldn’t get too nervous because he got nervous so fast I didn’t have time.
EMILY: I got nervous to death with Michael Christy. I rejected him.
MARSHA: Then you have the same pattern, that the actual relationship is minimal in the gestalt of the whole thing. For me, the actual relationship is something to get over with so I can drop into the mud and my heart can pound dialing a certain number I’m not supposed to dial. That’s the essence of it.
EMILY: So all they really are are vehicles for acting things out.
MARSHA: Instruments on which to play my problems.
EMILY: Who said that?
MARSHA: Me.
EMILY: Very good. If art makes visible that which is invisible, you can imagine what problems do. Seriously, what if Zeke Sutherland at some point really turned around and did an about— I mean an a-belly face?
MARSHA: Well the classic example of that was Eliot Simon. Our relationship lasted about three weeks of love.
EMILY: Real love? Mutual give and take?
MARSHA: Mutual love. We met and we were stunned and knocked out by the presence of each other. Fantastic opening night scene: we stayed up until dawn and talked, getting to know you, getting to know all about you.
EMILY: Fantastic closing morning scene. Did you go to bed with him right away?
MARSHA: No, I was recovering from an abortion, I wasn’t allowed to. All right, so soon after he rejected me, and for two years I was moaning and groaning for all I was worth.
EMILY: It was worth two years.
MARSHA: I’m not so sure. Finally, at some point after years and years of this, he suddenly decides he’s in love with me. I must have told you that story.
EMILY: One morning he decides you’re the person he’s loved all this time?
MARSHA: He just looked at me and saw an entirely new person and fell in love with me.
EMILY: Who were you sleeping with at this point?
MARSHA: All his best friends.
EMILY: Oh. What number is he on the list?
MARSHA: About seven. So he wakes up that morning and he says a very strange thing has happened to me, Marsh. I said what? He said I fell in love with you during the night.
EMILY: All alone?
MARSHA: I was with him. So I said what? You’re pulling my leg, you’re not serious, you’re joking. And he said I mean it, I mean it more than anything I’ve ever meant. Please don’t go to work today, don’t get out of bed, don’t ever leave me. I want to be with you the rest of my life, I want to marry you.
EMILY: And you said—
MARSHA: I said sorry darling, you know I have to go to work.
EMILY: You can’t give up your job.
MARSHA: Right, I can’t risk my position in life. So I went to work and he called me I might say nine or ten times during the day. I have to see you tonight, I have to be with you, blablabla. I said I’m supposed to have dinner with my father. He said cancel it. I canceled it. I came home, and you know I had made him all these fancy gourmet dinners before — well that night I didn’t even feel like cooking an egg, I didn’t want to do thing one for him. I just wanted to be alone. I was very nervous.
EMILY: What were you nervous about, Marsha? Here the person you’ve always loved is finally loving you back.
MARSHA: Oh, guess I didn’t realize that. So when he came, I managed to cook some flimsy dinner, and he just sat there, staring at me all through it, he could hardly eat, telling me how he had never had such a fantastic day of work in his life, he had had this giant erection all day and he couldn’t wait to see me, but he had worked at fever pitch because his life’s dreams were all resolved now.
EMILY: Did you tell him there was only one catch?
MARSHA: I was ready to crawl into the wall. There was no fighting, nothing going on. He’s not baiting me, he’s very serious, very sober. We had absolutely no idea how to entertain ourselves.
EMILY: Why didn’t he simply put his arms around you?
MARSHA: He was just in love with me and I didn’t know how to deal with it so I took a bath. I said okay, I’m taking a bath now, a long bath. I go into the bathroom, and you know my tub, how it takes two hours to fill.
EMILY: Is it your bathtub or his?
MARSHA: Mine. He’s in my house, everything is for me.
EMILY: Life has changed.
MARSHA: Finally the bath is ready, the water has dripped in, and I get into it. My idea is to stay there as long as I conceivably can, for the rest of my life if possible. Then he walks in with a huge tray of snacks for me to eat in the bath.