MARSHA: Depends on my body.
EMILY: I think Emil Reinhardt wears the right kind. I don’t like those short things with the jock straps underneath, I think they’re disgusting. Who’s got the nicest body here?
MARSHA: Who cares?
EMILY: I’m curious to see what Nathan Fass looks like in a bathing suit. He says he can’t keep the women off him.
MARSHA: He’s got a tight body.
EMILY: Yeah, he must do very well on this beach; he’s the only man available.
MARSHA: Here comes your boyfriend, Emil, without Diana. Talk to me, quick, so it isn’t so obvious that I’m staring at him. He’s ignoring us and walking over there.
EMILY: How do you know he saw you? Chances are he didn’t, he doesn’t see that well. Hey, where are all these people running? It’s beautiful, isn’t it, all the people running?
MARSHA: I just figured out what’s making the spray — the ocean.
EMILY: I know, it’s spraying our freshly shampooed, freshly non-set hair. They’re all running — it must be a sea animal.
MARSHA: Shark. Now they’re coming back and grabbing their children.
EMILY: They’re all shadows, everybody running. Do you think it’s a whale?
MARSHA: Shark. I love the sunshine that’s not here.
EMILY: It’s terrific. Ma vie que continue. You know this dream I had last night was really weird. Some incredibly rich guy asked me to marry him and I realized after about maybe fifteen minutes that that was exactly what I was going to do, and I was going to do it in direct relation to the rejection I had just gotten from Michael Christy. Then I thought about the things I was going to do for my mother, I was going to buy her things, take care of her. Where’s that fucking Nazi?
MARSHA: Who?
EMILY: Reinhardt, with his towel and everything. He’s looking around, I don’t know if he sees us. You know why I’m really on the beach, the main reason? Therapy for my cold.
MARSHA: Bullshit, the same sun is in back of my house.
EMILY: Completely different sun; this is white sun. Meanwhile the kids have just ruined the whole Emil Reinhardt setup. I can’t see thing one.
MARSHA: Shall we take a little stroll around?
EMILY: Around every which where?
MARSHA: Yeah, down to the water.
EMILY: He could really see me now if he had normal eyes and if the kids weren’t blocking his total view. If he was Clark Kent with X-ray vision, he could see me. Oh, there’s a woman who looks just like Mike Christy. See, with the pink robe and the big sunglasses?
MARSHA: Hey, I don’t blame you for liking this guy, the guy with the nose.
EMILY: Yeah, he’s great, isn’t he? One of the nicest guys on the beach.
MARSHA: If not the.
EMILY: He’s not too hairy, he’s not too old. The new ideal man: he shouldn’t be completely bald, he shouldn’t have to wear glasses all the time, he shouldn’t be too tired after dinner, he shouldn’t lose too many jobs inside of a year, shouldn’t smoke more than six packs of cigarettes a day, shouldn’t forget your name more than every now and then, shouldn’t be too queer. Shouldn’t have too many alcoholic binges, too many crying jags.
MARSHA: Shouldn’t have too much possessive resistance.
EMILY: Too many pairs of the same tassel loafers, too many La Costa shirts.
MARSHA: What’s that?
EMILY: Those tennis shirts with the alligators on them. Shouldn’t have too many friends named Shep, Myron,
MARSHA: Armand. He shouldn’t wear white socks with his tassel loafers.
EMILY: He shouldn’t smoke pot all day and sleep until five in the afternoon. You know I’d really like to talk about love for a second, Marshie, because I’ve said a lot of very twenty-nine-year-old drunken things this summer. But I can say right now that I don’t want any more married men and I don’t want any weak men and I don’t want any men that I’ve ever known before. I think I’m just about ready to find someone who’s healthy enough to take the chance of getting married to me.
MARSHA: Amen.
27. MARSHA AND VINCENT DRIVE BACK TO NEW YORK
MARSHA: I’m beginning to think that everything in my life happens offstage, it’s all reverberations and echoes and filters, and that’s exactly what my book is too. Essence is always avoided.
VINCENT: Yes, but that isn’t a defect of the book. If anything, that’s what’s beautiful about it. I think all great art comes from people’s inabilities to do what they want to do, and your book is completely organic to what you are, it’s a very dependent book on other personalities, on the people close to you.
MARSHA: Right.
VINCENT: It’s a very passive book on your part, and yet it’s very positive, just as you are positive but passive. This book is completely you. We all laughed while you sat on the beach knitting while Emmy and I taped your book — you do lie back and let people do things for you. And I’m not saying this to knock you, I’m saying that because you are this way, and because you’re also a writer and a creative spirit, you’re making something new and valid out of your own defect, which is what all great art does. Do you think the Beatles know how to drive a car?
MARSHA: Sure.
VINCENT: They must have learned before they got famous, don’t you think? They wouldn’t have had time since. You know I’ve really gotten cool on Clem. And it’s not because I’m hurt or anything either, I’ve just begun to find him unattractive as a person. Isn’t that awful?
MARSHA: Why is it awful? The same thing happened to me — you won’t think it’s the same — but it happened to me very suddenly with Eliot Simon. For all the years after I stopped seeing him, my feelings were still colored by an emotional residue, but then finally I was able to see him for what he was — not a particularly good or exceptional or even interesting person.
VINCENT: It’s really very funny.
MARSHA: Six months’ time heals all wounds. I had a dream once where I went cross-country in a toll booth. It had wheels. You’re in a terrible mood, aren’t you?
VINCENT: State or mood?
MARSHA: State. You just used a certain tone which I know I have only when I’m completely tense, you have to force the words out, there’s a cut-back in the voice, it’s way down in the back of the throat. Did you ever have any physical psychological things? When I was going with Eliot, I had pains in my legs all the time. I couldn’t sleep because I was so conscious of my knock-knees knocking into each other all night.
VINCENT: Nico says I should never wear sunglasses because they hide my eyes. There was an awful lot of garlic in that chicken yesterday.
MARSHA: Just two cloves.
VINCENT: Have you ever cooked anything that really came out well? I’ve never tasted one dish that you made right, never.
MARSHA: Darling, that’s a very rude thing to say. You always give me stringy stringbeans and scrambled eggs with brown edges.
VINCENT: Wouldn’t it be awful if you spent your whole life believing you loved white meat of chicken and vanilla ice cream, then you reached the age of thirty-two and suddenly realized that you loved dark meat all along and chocolate ice cream and you hadn’t ever had them, and you felt that the years had passed you by?
MARSHA: But you must have liked vanilla too if you were eating it all that time.
VINCENT: I’ll bet you anything it’s psychological types, liking only white meat and vanilla ice cream.
MARSHA: No, I like chocolate and white meat. When I was a child I despised anyone who liked chocolate and now it’s the only kind I like. Slow down, I want to see the dwarf in the back of that truck.