MARSHA: Yes you would have.
VINCENT: I would have gotten better differently. Do you know why you lose men, Marshie? Because you completely hang on to them.
MARSHA: I know, but I can’t help it.
VINCENT: You’ve got to help it, darling.
MARSHA: My religious adviser, Merrill Johnston, will guide me through it.
VINCENT: You just said something very profound and you didn’t even realize it.
MARSHA: Emily once told me she couldn’t marry anyone who hadn’t been analyzed and I said that reeked of fanaticism.
VINCENT: Analysis is the substitute for religion.
MARSHA: Oh God, we’ve known that since time immemorial. Don’t sexual organs look clammy?
VINCENT: That’s the silliest thing I’ve ever heard — it’s the other way around. There are more sexual organs than clams in the world.
MARSHA: Oh no.
VINCENT: Oh yes. You have to plant clams, you don’t have to plant sexual organs.
MARSHA: Yes you do.
VINCENT: You have to tune them up, that’s all. Actually, you know, this should be a first course.
MARSHA: Did you ever stick flowers in your nose when you were a child, so you’d have that sweet smell with you all day?
VINCENT: That’s right, Marsha, encourage the bugs and animals to come.
MARSHA: I’m feeding the flowers a few crumbs. That’s more than you do — you pull them out by the roots. That was sinful; you really destroyed a landscape today. You may have created something on canvas, but you destroyed a landscape.
VINCENT: You have to destroy in order to create beauty.
MARSHA: That’s a pseudo-intellectual cliché.
VINCENT: Sure, call Picasso and Nijinsky pseudo-intellectuals. Listen, we could still go and buy more clams.
MARSHA: Why do we want more clams?
VINCENT: Because we’re not satisfied with our dinner.
MARSHA: Yes we are. Do you like this lettuce? Doesn’t it taste fresh? You don’t get this in the city.
VINCENT: No, but I’m not crazy about this brand.
MARSHA: This Campbell’s lettuce?
VINCENT: Do you like my laugh a lot?
MARSHA: Do you?
VINCENT: It’s a ripple.
MARSHA: It is. Oh — I got a card from Emily this morning. They’re having a nice quiet time in Woods Hole, her and Joan, and everyone’s in love with her.
VINCENT: Emily does think everyone likes her.
MARSHA: You know I once made up a classic analogy about that. Say I wake up in the morning with a big pimple on my face. I’d say oh my God, I can’t go out of the house, I look awful, the whole world will be looking at me. She wakes up with the same pimple. She looks in the mirror and she says hmmm, I look rather Italian today.
VINCENT: She does have a fantastic mechanism for turning negative things to positive.
MARSHA: Yeah, but when she finds out the truth, it hurts her doubly.
VINCENT: No it doesn’t, because she never accepts the truth, or if she does it’s only for a slight second, then she’ll put it completely out of her mind. And in a percentage way, she’s right. Because most people are too timid to say hello to anyone first, so when Emily is friendly to everyone, the people who might think she doesn’t like them and in turn not like her, when she comes over to them, they like her. So in the long run she probably wins out and has more people liking her. If that’s what she cares about, and it is.
MARSHA: Here, finish it up. The last one is the best.
VINCENT: That’s nice, it’s very positive that you like the last one, Marsha. Most people only like the first.
12. MARSHA TELLS VINCENT ABOUT HANGING ON A WALL
MARSHA: What’s the most perverse thing you’ve ever done?
VINCENT: Sexually?
MARSHA: Of course sexually.
VINCENT: Going to bed with a pair of twins and an animal.
MARSHA: What kind of animal?
VINCENT: No animal really, just a pair of twins.
MARSHA: That’s not so perverse.
VINCENT: They also happened to be in love with each other. I know what yours was, my poor darling — hanging up on the wall, that bastard Eliot.
MARSHA: Let’s not mention any names, but it’s true he may have had something to do with it.
VINCENT: How did he ever get you to do it?
MARSHA: He didn’t get me — I got him. He had told me about this terrible hang-up hang-up of his which I just couldn’t reconcile with my sweet Jersey City loveball Elie. Then, on New Year’s Eve, which wasn’t long after he rejected me for no reason at all, I called him up and said he was really missing some great action. He had a girl at his apartment — it was even her birthday, the poor thing. He kept calling me Arthur on the phone, can’t we possibly wait, Arthur, and work on the case tomorrow? I said no because I couldn’t bear to be alone on New Year’s Eve and I was desperate enough to do anything. So he ditched the girl and came running over with a briefcase full of legal briefs and took me back to his house.
VINCENT: Where did he live?
MARSHA: East End Avenue. And he had this whole apparatus set up on the wall, these hooks at the bottom and the top.
VINCENT: Did he put them in himself?
MARSHA: Well the apartment didn’t come equipped, if that’s what you mean. The thing was you would stand with your legs stretched apart, with your feet on piles of books. He tied your ankles with ropes, he attached the ropes to the hooks, and then he took the books away, so that you were all completely stretched, trying to touch the ground.
VINCENT: Really? And you would hang up there?
MARSHA: Yeah, and he tied ropes around the wrists too, so your arms were stretched out, just like Christ. It was really very interesting.
VINCENT: He tied you with ropes?
MARSHA: Yah.
VINCENT: Did he pad them so they didn’t cut in?
MARSHA: You seem to be missing the point, sweetheart. He wanted it to hurt. He put golf balls in my mouth too but I kept spitting them out and they bounced all over the floor. It was very funny. I mean here I was in this ludicrous position and he’s going through all these things, he had lotions and potions that he rubbed on all my sensitive areas, wintergreen oil that athletes use, and he’s running around very busy, busy, busy. I was laughing — I though it was the most hysterical thing I ever saw — until all of a sudden I realized my God, my body is being stretched to death! So I passed out. I went totally unconscious.
VINCENT: Was anyone else there?
MARSHA: Of course not.
VINCENT: What about the sexual part?
MARSHA: To tell you the truth, I didn’t find it that sexual. I mean of course it was, the ecstasy of the pain and everything, but I didn’t really get the feeling he wanted me to have of being his slave girl. I had it much more once when he tied me up in bed and made me totally passive — I knew I couldn’t do any of my sick clinging behavior and I was glad; I was relieved of all aggressive possibility. I was there, I was a woman, a female object — he had to do everything. And in that moment I understood the whole dynamic.
VINCENT: He tied you in bed and then? Did he beat you up?
MARSHA: Yeah.
VINCENT: With what?
MARSHA: A leather strap.
VINCENT: Really hard?
MARSHA: As hard as he could.
VINCENT: And then?
MARSHA: And then I got up and had a glass of milk and a chocolate brownie. One time he told me he was going to beat me ten times and I said go ahead, I was being very stoic, like when my father used to hit me and I wouldn’t let myself cry. He couldn’t do it in the same place twice, because it would hurt too much, so he went down my back with these ten strokes. When he finished, he said I’m sorry, Marsh, but you didn’t react enough, I’m going to have to do ten more. Then I burst into tears, I knew I couldn’t take it, so he stopped. When it was over I felt very elated, filled with joy. But then all of a sudden I said oh my God, I just remembered that my mother’s coming tomorrow for me to try on some bathing suits she bought me — what should I do? She’ll see the welts all over my back. He said that’s your problem, darling. So the next day, sure enough, I wake up and there’s this systematic series of red brutal-looking welts down my whole back. What am I going to do? My mother’s coming in from Westchester just to bring the bathing suits, there’s no way I can get out of trying them on. So she arrives and I go into the bathroom and get undressed. I try on the first bathing suit and sort of edge out so she can’t see my back. I show her the front, I say I don’t like it and I edge back in. I’m dying. I don’t know what to do.