EMILY: I though you already whipped up such a terrific dinner.
MARSHA: This was after dinner. He’s bringing me peaches and peeled grapes and everything else. Then he comes and sits and stares at me while I’m taking the bath.
EMILY: Did he give you bath salts and peppers? Go ahead, he’s staring at you in the bath.
MARSHA: He’s staring at me as I wash and I’m hiding myself among the bubbles. The next night, the same thing happens.
EMILY: Wait a second. Did you fuck?
MARSHA: Yah, and I think he even looked at me while we fucked.
EMILY: Why did you fuck?
MARSHA: Yah, while we fucked, he even glanced my way.
EMILY: Why are you fucking, why are you doing it? Not while: why?
MARSHA: Are you kidding? This is the love of my life, he finally falls in love with me, what do you want me to do? Keep taking baths? The next day it’s the same thing, he’s calling me up at work, I come home, repeat performance at night, he doesn’t want to see anyone but me.
EMILY: He just wants to sit and stare.
MARSHA: He’s still staring at me.
EMILY: Even on the phone?
MARSHA: So for about two days he doesn’t want me to go to work, staring on the phone and everything. The third day I go to work, I’m waiting for the normal ten calls, I get…
EMILY: Zero.
MARSHA: And I panic. Finally, as I’m ready to leave work, I call him. The service tells me where he is, at one of his basketball friends’. I call him there and he says darling — he’s crying — darling? Just the way it came, that’s the way it went. Our love.
EMILY: Did he really say that?
MARSHA: He really did. I breathed a huge sigh of relief, went home so I could suffer in private, and lived happily ever after.
EMILY: And that was it? You never loved him again?
MARSHA: Of course I did, immediately thereafter. Picked right up, took me about twenty minutes: he never loved me, I love him so much.
EMILY: And you believed it and felt it and everything?
MARSHA: Sure.
EMILY: So sad. You know you really were mad about him.
MARSHA: There are still some vestiges, like I just realized looking at that Spearmint gum — that’s the only kind of gum I can chew, because it was his favorite.
EMILY: I saw you sneaking some Frosty Mint in the supermarket today.
MARSHA: That was for you, darling.
EMILY: It was for me, all for me? How come there seemed to be a couple of pieces empty and gone when we got home?
MARSHA: I chewed them for you too.
8. EMILY RELATES HER PSYCHEDELIC EXPERIENCE TO VINCENT
EMILY: You know I’ve taken LSD. And let me tell you, at a certain point — it’s really impossible for you to understand, you might be able to comprehend it in your head, but you can’t experience it — all of a sudden my mind was where this boyfriend was, where that best friend was, all of a sudden I didn’t understand their sickness, I had it. I was there, right where they were. If I took it now I could go maybe where Michael Christy is. It’s incredible. I for instance thought of Jonquil. Jonquil my cat: instant tears, instant total emotional value of the thought. My mind the next moment is on that bathing suit on the line and it’s hysterically funny to me that the bathing suit is drying there, and I can feel the pull, the water going into the air.
VINCENT: My God! How fantastic!
EMILY: The next thing I’m a mother in her loneliness, and there’s a whole kind of gloomy feeling, but there’s no working yourself into, it’s instantly touching all the notes of the instrument.
VINCENT: Then when you talk about love, you’re talking about like total empathy and compassion.
EMILY: No, not compassion, because compassion is to a certain extent identification and a kind of tolerance. This was feeling that my blood wasn’t the blood that made up Emily Benson and the cells that were all locked inside her life; it was an extension of humanity, like I was part of Marsha, we weren’t separate people, we were all part of each other, somehow sliced off by maybe a knife.
VINCENT: Right.
EMILY: But that everything was touching and I was intimately a part of every pulsebeat of every sun that came up on everybody’s life. There was a huge opening of the sky, I saw God, I had a tremendously mystical experience. I was deeply moved, deeply in love. And when I say love, it’s not like on the level we know from analysis. It was the absence of all anger, the absence of all conflict.
VINCENT: But that’s what you’re working toward in analysis.
EMILY: No no no, that’s not what you get from analysis. Analyzed love is not the absence of all those things, it’s after dealing with them. Under LSD, they didn’t even exist. You see it wasn’t a love in which there was present such-and-such, but rather an absence of anger, of aggression, of conflict, of identification, of need, of unfulfillment, of frustration — all those things we feel go into love, because love is based on so much else. I don’t think love is some kind of pure fucking quality, you know. Actually, the only thing that comes close to expressing the kind of feeling I had is “Seymour, an Introduction” by Salinger, that’s the only thing that approaches it. It has nothing to do with thinking things out. It’s like if you’re in a warm bath, your reality is that the body is in warm water.
VINCENT: I know.
EMILY: Yeah, you get it, darling.
VINCENT: But I think you can also arrive there in other ways.
EMILY: I’ve been there, but only under the most extraordinary circumstances, the most temporal.
VINCENT: After you come down, is the experience very meaningful? In other words, do you think I should take the trip?
EMILY: The LSD trip? I don’t know, a lot of people have asked me that. I’ll tell you, Vinnie, the experience was fantastically extraordinary, and I would never undo it.
VINCENT: That’s good.
EMILY: I would never undo it, but I would never tell you to do it.
VINCENT: I’d be afraid of the cataclysm, the black depression coming in on me. I’ve had enough of that.
EMILY: I had blackness then like I’ve never known blackness in my life, because when I started coming down, and I saw I’d written all over Philippe’s body and on the walls with a ballpoint pen This stone is love, God is in this pebble, and I really knew when I wrote it what the fuck I was talking about, and then I started to come down and I said who wrote this?
VINCENT: Oh my poor darling.
EMILY: And all of a sudden I said my mind, I’m losing my mind. There’s nothing more frightening. Like no matter how drunk you are, how insane, there’s always some core that you know in yourself to be you?
VINCENT: Right. And you lost that.
EMILY: And that went. But if you could take it with a doctor, then I’d say definitely take it.
VINCENT: Actually, truth is both those things, you’ve got to accept both that huge love and the total absence. One is no more true than the other.
EMILY: You know I’m not at all sure, Vinnie — this is a very strange thing I’m coming to — I’m not at all sure that the way it’s worked out socially, in terms of civilization, I’m not so sure that men and women can love each other and grow families, that naturally these things work out.
VINCENT: Civilization is completely artificial, I’ve always said that.
EMILY: The working out of structure is a decision and civilization surviving is a decision.
VINCENT: And even love isn’t natural.
EMILY: I’m not sure it is. Not that it’s strictly synthetic, but I’m not sure it’s a built-in thing, that whole marriage system of society our lives are based on. Even yours.