VINCENT: Here she comes — she’s listening. I wouldn’t listen to this if I were you, because it’s the truth about you, Marshie.
EMILY: Being rejected is love, it’s as simple as that, it’s the way the father showed love.
VINCENT: Exactly. However, it’s neurotic because she thinks she doesn’t want it and it becomes unpositive and clogged as a flow. It’s not a love flow.
EMILY: It’s not, it’s a need flow.
VINCENT: A hate flow, a way of getting even.
MARSHA: That’s very interesting because it’s more or less just what I was talking to Tim about in the car.
VINCENT: What did he say?
MARSHA: Nothing, he just agreed with everything I said.
EMILY: He had no reaction?
VINCENT: It wasn’t about him, why should he have a reaction?
EMILY: There is something I’m sure he feels, that in a way all this stuff sounds very pat, almost as if there were no room to say anything.
VINCENT: But why should he have something to say? This is about Marsha.
MARSHA: Isn’t he involved with me?
EMILY: Vinnie, you’re saying a crazy thing — why shouldn’t he have anything to say?
VINCENT: I mean there are certain things people have nothing to say about. You talk about a baseball game and what will I have to say about that?
MARSHA: Am I a baseball game? This is supposedly a subject he has some interest in. I asked what he thought the dynamics were, if I reject the man or if I work it so that he rejects me and he said I probably do force the man to reject me, but that I have to be aware of what other things are going on in the mind of the man. But I think all men are the same and they can all be manipulated.
VINCENT: Oh, you don’t manipulate, darling.
MARSHA: You can make any man reject you if you want to be rejected.
EMILY: Isn’t it a chemical thing? I mean can’t you make each man reject you in a different way?
MARSHA: Sure, I’m very clever about it. I’ve dealt with each man differently, but I’ve gotten them all to toss me out.
EMILY: Your dealing with Tim isn’t that.
MARSHA: I’m suffocating him.
VINCENT: Now wait a minute — some of them you tossed out.
MARSHA: Listen, I may have made the final gesture of tossing Eliot out, but he had been tossing me for four years. I had worked that rejection to the bone.
EMILY: I just don’t understand how your relationship with Tim is suffocating him.
MARSHA: You want to know how I’m doing it? With a lot of affection, with what he imagines are tremendous demands upon him, possessiveness, getting upset if I know about the other people he’s sleeping with. And he also has the feeling I’m thinking about marriage all the time. I asked him when he got here yesterday if he missed me and he found that tremendously suffocating.
VINCENT: You know what it is? It’s not all those words you’re saying. It’s that the man responds to the demonstration of your undisciplined feelings; it’s not because you said did you miss me, it’s the subtext. You give yourself up completely to the man and that’s too much for any human being to take. As soon as Tim came, Marsha turned into a completely different person. And this has nothing to do with competition on my part, no matter what you think. I’ll tell it to you in a basic animal way. He came in sick, he was like an animal who is ill goes over and lies in a corner, which he did, alone, out in the backyard. He’s lying there, and you interpret what you as the woman must do for the man, heal and console and caress. So you went over, a physical action which put you almost on top of him.
MARSHA: He told me to get down on the blanket because he couldn’t see me with his sore neck.
VINCENT: All right, then everything I’m saying is wrong. But it’s not, it’s a total thing I’m talking about. There is no area in which the man is safe. As I once said to you — this is something famous from our very first close conversation, Emily — I have always maintained that in a love relationship, a relationship which is on a bed physical and in public erotic because it can’t be expressed, the one area of independence between the two people has to be the bathroom. Like for someone to be taking a shit and the other one to come in to wash or talk is very very bad, because the civilized animal has got to have the sense of freedom and privacy.
MARSHA: That’s what Tim was saying. He said he has the feeling that wherever he is, whether it’s at a party or on the beach, he’s under my eye the whole time. If he’s dancing with another girl, he looks over and sees me watching him dance with the girl.
VINCENT: It’s true, you are watching him, you are.
MARSHA: It’s true. He said he came in a wounded animal yesterday, very conscious of the pain in his back and sort of hoping to get it healed here. He was happy he’d be able to take a bath, that I would help him through this thing etcetera, but that suddenly I began to make his pain a psychological rejection of me, which I know it was.
VINCENT: No it wasn’t, you see, and if it was, it became that because you wouldn’t be content with it unless it was.
MARSHA: At the beginning of the relationship, you know, he was suffocating me. His eyes were always on me. I couldn’t stand it, I was ready to run out of the room.
VINCENT: All right, then he leaves, he loses interest and you go after him. So what is the lesson to be learned? The lesson to be learned is to always be cool and leave loveplay for the bed. Love is not play; love is hard work and it’s strategy and it’s not being yourself, not giving vent to every feeling you have.
EMILY: No, you’re making a mistake, darling; you’re talking about edifice, you’re not talking about structure. There are certain structural things that go on between man and woman that have to do with elegance, all those things we talked about when Joan was here, that kind of deep, personal subjective respect. You know Marsha has a tremendous need for freedom, much stronger in a way than Tim’s.
MARSHA: That’s true.
EMILY: So when she’s watching Tim on the dance floor, it’s not about checking out the areas in which he’s unfaithful, it’s like her almost making checkpoints on her new freedom list. I think if you ever looked at Tim Cullen dancing with another girl, Marsha, and found him totally loyal to you, you’d be suffocated out of your mind.
MARSHA: I would, I’m definitely looking for him to be unfaithful.
VINCENT: But he has been faithful, he’s been terribly faithful and loyal.
EMILY: Even if he slept with other women, he’s been very faithful.
VINCENT: In his friendship, in his love, fantastically loyal. I’m talking about spiritual love loyalty.
EMILY: He’s very innocent.
MARSHA: He said one thing that really got to him last night was when he went into the bedroom to lie down and I came in and turned on the phonograph, then he went into the other room, and I followed him in there. I lay down beside him, knowing full well he can’t sleep when anything is really touching him. We both tried to take a nap, then I started jumping up and down dancing to the music.
VINCENT: You see on both sides it’s absolute panic. In the face of a love object, she panics in a very assertive, physical advancing way; he panics in just the reverse way. I don’t know Tim that well, but I know myself and I know lots of other people, so I’ve learned certain things, and I think one of the basic reasons he withdraws from her, besides his basic need for independence, is that he doesn’t think that much of himself. I mean he knows he’s a good sculptor and everything, but he has great doubts and insecurity, and he’s shy, he had a late beginning. You know I’m crazy about him, but the fantastic tension in his back yesterday showed me he’s not a flowing thing. So he meets a person, and he loved her at the beginning when she was distant because this made sense to him, just as all his parental love figures were distant and not loving. But then after a while she’s all over him, she can’t be away from him for one second, and so he thinks she must be less than me if she thinks I’m this fantastic guy I know I’m not. Therefore she must be nothing, so how can I love her? I better find someone who’s cool and distant again — I mean how can I love someone who loves an untruth?