VINCENT: How many bathing suits?
MARSHA: About four. Suddenly I get a brilliant, intuitive idea. I’m in the bathroom and I scream Mother! What is this? My God! There are these marks on my back, I must have some horrible disease! I come out very upset, she looks and she says what are you getting so excited about, Marsha? It’s nothing. You must have sat near a venetian blind or something and gotten sunburned. She completely brushed it off, because I was so upset.
VINCENT: How did you know she would fall for it?
MARSHA: It was a desperate stab.
VINCENT: It’s the most gutsy thing I’ve ever heard you do, Marshie, it really is.
MARSHA: If she had seen them by herself, she would have become panic-stricken. Once Eliot tried to tie me up in my apartment with stockings and scarves and things because I didn’t happen to have any ropes on hand. He hung me up on the bathroom door and I was terrified because it kept swinging. You know I’m afraid of heights.
VINCENT: I think it would make me laugh.
MARSHA: I’m telling you, I laughed so hard the golf balls were bouncing out of my mouth.
VINCENT: Did he laugh?
MARSHA: No! He was dead earnest.
VINCENT: Did he get an erection watching you in pain?
MARSHA: Yeah, the bastard.
VINCENT: And what would happen?
MARSHA: It ended up in fantastic fucking. The time I passed out, we wound up in the shower together and it was very very wild ecstatic lovemaking, one of the great moments of my life. Except I was worried about my hair getting wet.
VINCENT: With your mother coming the next day.
MARSHA: He also had a pair of handcuffs, and one night he was kidding around and he handcuffed my hands behind my back. Then he said he was going out for the evening. I said you can’t leave me like this. He said just go out and ask someone in the street to unhook them. When he left, my reaction was so abnormal, you know I immediately forgot about the handcuffs? I remember there was a New Republic lying there, and first of all I got a cigarette into my mouth somehow and lit it with my foot, completely calm. Then I started reading an article about Medicare, turning the pages of the New Republic with my teeth, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. It’s really amazing.
VINCENT: It really is. What is he doing now, Eliot?
MARSHA: He’s still prosecuting perverts in court.
VINCENT: They must have written that song for him—“Beat me Daddy, Eight to the Bar.”
13. EMILY RETURNS
VINCENT: Emmy, can I imitate how I got when I thought about your coming? I’d be with Marshie in a room and I’d burst out MY EMMY’S COMING FROM WOODS HOLE! HI EMMY! HI! I’ve been doing it all week and now here you are completely different, serious and sober, just sitting and saying I have something interesting to discuss with you.
EMILY: You don’t like it that I’m calm.
VINCENT: I love it that you’re calm, but I’ve been practicing my HI EMMY all week.
EMILY: I’m glad, sweetheart. I’ll be up tomorrow, give me a little time.
VINCENT: Before we go any further, can I just say one thing, Emily, because it involves you? The steak, the onions and the cucumber salad are fantastic things. Okay, Em.
EMILY: I want to know what you think of Emil Reinhardt, Vinnie, just from seeing him on the beach. Do you find him attractive?
VINCENT: Not at all. I know you both do, but I find him totally unattractive, I really do. Big fake, with that long cigarette holder.
EMILY: Vinnie’s saying something that’s very true. He is a terrible phony.
VINCENT: You’re always talking about how elegant he is. I’m sorry. To me he is physically one or two steps above a pharmacist in a fancy Madison Avenue pharmacy, involved in whether or not he has the right amount of candies on the counter next to the cortisone. I mean courtesans.
EMILY: He’s a deeply elegant man.
VINCENT: Don’t make the mistake of thinking that every man you’ve been to bed with was something special, Emily.
EMILY: Vinnie darling, Emil Reinhardt wasn’t a casual meaning in my life. He was very important.
MARSHA: Do you know what Joan calls him? That poor, poor soldier.
VINCENT: Prussian soldier, that’s exactly what he is.
EMILY: You’re actually judging him on a very pure level, Vinnie. His insecurities are so fantastic that he projects this pose, and I can understand your seeing it.
VINCENT: That’s an excellent word; it’s all pose.
MARSHA: A lot of your men have that quality in common.
EMILY: Michael Christy has a pose?
MARSHA: Philippe does.
EMILY: Michael Christy doesn’t have pose one.
VINCENT: Look, I don’t want to encourage any sentimental feelings of Emily Benson toward Michael Christy, I really don’t, because I think he’s bad news for you, but he is not posed, he’s the real thing. Change the subject, Marsh, before she goes into a reverie. Let’s talk about really elegant people.
MARSHA: Okay, do we know any?
EMILY: Emil Reinhardt is an elegant person.
VINCENT: Well then we can’t have this conversation, because I’m sure he’s not.
EMILY: If he isn’t, I don’t know who is. Vincey, I don’t want your corn to get burned. Take it off the fire, darling. Who do we know who’s elegant? Nico is very elegant.
VINCENT: You know who I really think is elegant? That British wife of Reinhardt’s, Diana. You meet her and you know she could be the highest royalty.
EMILY: Throughout their whole marriage, she has made his life elegant, that happens to be true, although Emil is an elegant man.
VINCENT: I was looking at it from the other angle, how he may have put oil into her pure water. I find him so absolutely vulgar, I mean he could be a German.
EMILY: He is German. Vinnie, I have to tell you something. I’ve known Emil Reinhardt for a long time, through some very strange things. I gave up my marriage for him. I have a weird relationship with him now, I can’t say we’re friends, I can’t say we’re lovers, but he is an exceptional man. I can still see him as someone I could marry, have a life with. But I also see what you see in him and I don’t like that either. I’m not going to marry Emil, I’m never even going to sleep with him again, I know that. You know what he told me one night? He’s such a peculiar mixture of being elegant and also very frank.
VINCENT: You see, that’s where you’re wrong. You think that façade is elegance; I’m talking about it as an inner thing.
EMILY: My father, by the way, was a very elegant man, in relation to certain sensual needs, like his food, his newspaper, his cigars.