EMILY: I want to hear Dionne Warwick, I really do.
MARSHA: I’m sorry.
VINCENT: What is this, Marsha, you’re braindraining us? I’ll bet you don’t even know what the brain drain is.
MARSHA: What?
VINCENT: No one understands anything here. The two of you may be marvelous women, intuitive intelligences and all that, but you don’t know anything about the outside world. Really ignorant. The brain drain refers to the scientists leaving England because they get higher wages from universities here.
EMILY: Very interesting.
VINCENT: Just because there isn’t a name personality involved, darling, it can be interesting. You know you’re a very beautiful person, Emily. I can’t get involved with you because you’re too beautiful.
EMILY: Who the fuck wants you to get involved with me?
VINCENT: Maybe I want to.
EMILY: Then don’t warn me, I don’t need preludes and prefaces.
VINCENT: What do you want? Epilogues?
EMILY: Either commit yourself or don’t, but don’t give me a four-act play about it.
VINCENT: Anyhow, I wouldn’t want a woman who’s slept around the way you have and who uses the word fuck so much.
EMILY: What he says in jest, does he mean in jest?
VINCENT: What I say in jest, I mean in jest.
EMILY: Vinnie, did you ever hear the story of how Marsha and I got to Stromboli? Listen to this. I was dead sick in Positano, the doctors were coming every day and Marshie was bringing me rice with butter. I was dying, but I knew if we didn’t get out of there pretty quick, she’d kill me first, because she was so unhappy and I was too. Someone told us to go to the Stromboli Islands, they said they’re like deepest Africa, Greek, passionate, blabla, so we said okay. The next day I went to call Philippe and I fainted in the telephone office, they had to carry me out on a stretcher. But in the morning I woke up, I said Marsha don’t worry, we’re leaving. We got to Naples, we had lunch in some place where there was an air-conditioner backwards, it was blowing this shit smell into our noses.
VINCENT: Was it really a shit smell?
EMILY: It was unbelievable. We got onto the boat — I had lost about twelve pounds — big huge boat, I’m falling on the floor every here and there, dragging the big rubber what-do-you-call-it, materassino.
MARSHA: We carried it from town to town.
EMILY: And at some point, Marsha’s in the bar asleep, and I blow the thing up to lie near the water, because I’m so fucking sick, Vinnie, you don’t know.
VINCENT: Yes I do.
EMILY: And in the middle of the night, some marino shakes me on the shoulder. I wake up and I go huh? He says vieni con me. He wants to fuck me, I should go with him to his cabina. That’s all I need, I’m almost puking over the side of the deck, with the sharks and the fins and the dolphins swimming around. Then a little later I’m sound asleep and all of a sudden I get it into my head I’ve got to find my Marshie.
VINCENT: Why?
EMILY: Because I miss her. I’m sick, it’s three o’clock in the morning, I find my Marshie curled up with her bowlegs around some bar stool and I say Marshie, come out onto the deck. She walks out and immediately falls back to sleep on my materassino. Then I’m talking to a Milanese journalist and the Milanese journalist falls asleep. So I’m all alone again on the fucking side of the ship because I’ve been so sick, dawn is slightly coming up, I look and I see a black cone jetting out from the land, from the sea, into the gray sky. I say to myself this is incredible, it’s Stromboli. I wake Marshie up and we look, the boat comes a little bit closer and it’s the scariest fucking thing I’ve ever seen, this black volcanic island.
MARSHA: I’m giving these pants into the laundry.
EMILY: You know, Vinnie, I just decided that I’m never listening to you again, I’m serious.
VINCENT: She interrupted you, I didn’t.
MARSHA: He didn’t. It was my fault, I’m sorry.
EMILY: It has nothing to do with interruptions, it has to do with straight brown hair in front of a tanned forehead and an open mouth and a lying soul.
VINCENT: And very good teeth.
EMILY: Nice teeth. Are you listening to my story?
VINCENT: I’m not carrying your extras to the laundry, Marsh.
EMILY: I think it’s important to discuss your laundry, much more important than Stromboli.
VINCENT: Marshie, the pictures in this album don’t look anything like you, you look much older younger.
MARSHA: Can I ask you something? If I haven’t been to the beach in a week, how come I’m full of sand?
EMILY: Because you haven’t been to the beach in a week.
VINCENT: Marshie, you are unbelievable. Your face changes from hairstyle to hairstyle. What was this dark mark you used to have on your face? I’m sorry, it’s no longer there.
MARSHA: It is so, it’s my mole, hon. I pluck it every Thursday.
VINCENT: When you look at this album, do you think the things you wrote in it were a lot of hogwash and bullshit?
MARSHA: I can’t stand them.
VINCENT: Boy, we’ve all changed so much. That’s why when I look at teenagers, I admire them because of their youth, but I know that their minds are shy. Marshie, you look horrible in these pictures. You’ve gotten so beautiful. Look, Clem lifting you up. In Siena, they must have thought Clem and I were gorgeous.
EMILY: What a time to go through her album. It’s such a bore.
VINCENT: You know I just looked at this picture of Clem and I got sad for the first time since we broke up. This is where all the zinnias were planted, Marsha, next to the herb garden. And look at this picture of little Sam Gold.
EMILY: Not so little.
VINCENT: He was the most intelligent man you were ever involved with.
EMILY: Can we name our men and their professions and what they looked like?
MARSHA: Okay, Number one: Jewish ne’er-do-well.
EMILY: Stanley Siskind. It has to be real number one, not guys who just put it near but never really got it inside, it has to be a real prick going into a real cunt, not any fooling around like coming between the breasts. I had about three of those.
VINCENT: You have such big breasts to come between?
EMILY: All right, you start. Number one?
MARSHA: I told you, Number one: Jewish blond ne’-er-do-well.
EMILY: Number two, I have no matches.
MARSHA: Number two, Sam Gold. You?
EMILY: Handsome man with a huge head.
MARSHA: Roy Imber.
VINCENT: This is a very hostile game, because I’m left completely out of it.
EMILY: Aren’t you looking at the fucking album and not saying anything to anyone? Number three?
MARSHA: Catholic on call at Mount Sinai Hospital.
VINCENT: You slept with Bill Meehan? What kind of dick did he have?
MARSHA: I just remember there was a big scar above it.
EMILY: I’d like to sleep with Bill.
VINCENT: Would you really? Would you like to suck him off too? Have you ever had sperm go into your mouth?
MARSHA: Of course.
VINCENT: I asked Emily, not you.
MARSHA: I suck Tim Cullen off.
VINCENT: No wonder he doesn’t respect you.
EMILY: Why, is it wrong to suck a man off?
VINCENT: You shouldn’t do it too often. Don’t forget in English there’s an expression “you dirty cocksucker.”
EMILY: Michael Christy made me do it all the time.
MARSHA: So does Tim.
VINCENT: Then you’re both involved with the wrong men.
EMILY: All men want it, Vinnie, they all want everything, and so do we.