Drinks Before Dinner (3 page)

EDGAR
   Maybe it is chauvinist to mourn the failure of love or the death of the presumption of love. But you seem capable, without any grant from me, of making your own moral distinctions and carrying on the progress of your own moral life. You don’t need permission from me. Surely what women have been saying in the past few years is that marriage proves nothing and sustains no one. Why do you fight it? What small damp hankie of domestic hope do you carry balled in your fist? How many friends of yours were separated last week? How
many divorced? We need a calculator to keep track of these things. Here is a husband with his vasectomy discovering the diaphragm in his wife’s purse. Here is a wife turning off the downstairs lights at dawn. Here they are arguing about what one of them said to the other. Here they are arguing about how much one of them drinks. Or how much one of them spends. Or here they are arguing about nothing at all, talking about nothing at all, in no apparent conflict at all. Here she is running to the bank with the passbooks. Here he is shouting at his lawyer. Marriages are bombed, machine-gunned, they fall away screaming with their arms thrown up.

ANDREA
   Oh, that is too frightening to talk about. It is true. And you always wonder when you are next, when your death of love is next, because the war is all around you.

EDGAR
   We’re all changing. None of us is exempt. It is happening to us all. How can I be a chauvinist if my personality no longer supports me, if it has failed, if my concept of the person has failed, if our reasons for the person are failing, and that all of us now in this country, fucking or being fucked, are persons whose being as persons has failed.

JOEL
   Is that all it is? For a moment I thought it was serious.

CLAUDETTE
   Tell me, Edgar, don’t you enjoy anything? Is nothing right? Is nothing good? Doesn’t anything give you pleasure? Perhaps these things you’re saying give you pleasure, perhaps you like to distinguish yourself by saying these things. But to me it’s like juggling or standing on your head—it’s impressive and distinctive, but of no demonstrable importance.

EDGAR
   But everyone knows what I’m saying. I can’t distinguish myself by saying these things. We are all saying them. Our novelists in books, our crooners in Las Vegas, our social workers and church spokesmen, our killers in saloons and our maniacs in wards—who is not saying
these things? We reward people who say these things in the right way. This is the culture of saying things, this is the society in which these things are supposed to be said. The very fact of our saying these things is part of what these things are. So what you see when you walk the streets are people rushing along like this with radios to their ears. They are listening to the radios as they walk. They watch television when they get home and turn on the record players while the television sets are going; they are trying to keep up. They are reading papers as they walk along listening to radios. They are stopping in front of appliance stores to watch the banks of TV sets while they listen to their radios with their newspapers tucked under their arms. They don’t know how to keep up. They are reading reviews of movies based on plays taken from novels. They are going to school to study the novels upon which films they have seen are based. They remember the films about the lives of the authors of the novels they study upon which the lectures are based. They are trying to keep up.

JOEL
   Well, if I understand Edgar correctly, he’s saying our culture consumes us. But didn’t people say that too in the eighteenth century when novels began to be published? He also says that passion does not last, but I am not sure it should. Can you imagine the effect of a constant lifelong passion on one’s prostate? He says our relationships are easily duplicated. But that’s what it means to have been evicted from Eden. So where’s the news in any of this? It has undoubtedly been true before our time that it appeared to somebody or other that nothing seemed to be worth doing. So it is tiresome to wring one’s hands over this. Perhaps something crucial has happened and we are becoming depleted persons in some way. But I look around and see so much unregenerate ego in human beings that I would welcome a loss of person for all of us, across the board. In fact, it is
hugely funny to me that Edgar, with his formidable ego and a mind given over to its own inimitable hysteria, should worry over his loss of character. It is enormously funny. A doctor learns early in his career, that most illnesses are imaginary. It is a form of narcissism, of course. People love themselves more in the fear of death.

ANDREA
   But he is talking of how we are compromised, and I understand that. I really understand that. The way we all duplicate each other. I really do understand that and feel that when I walk in the street and see other girls not only wearing my clothes but walking my walk. Oh, how I understand that. Life is becoming unclear. The lines are disappearing. I see women who are men and men who are women. I suppose I should say my idea of life is no longer clear. I see in old movies dead people who are still alive. They live in states of high drama. They have more life than I have.

CLAUDETTE
   Good, Andrea dear. Let it be that way. Drama is to be avoided. I want to live my life as undramatically as possible. I want to live quietly and watch my children grow and keep my family fed and clean and enjoy beautiful things, and not be hurt by anyone. Besides which, whatever we know about our lives, we go on living them. Isn’t that right? Even you, Andrea. Even Edgar. No matter what we say of it, life requires us to go on living it. It is the custom of life to go on with itself no matter what we say or what we feel. It has that aspect of requiring us to go on with it. Life is so totally careless of what we feel or what we know, or think we feel or think we know, that all our emotions and thoughts are continuously superseded by other emotions and other thoughts because life pushes on and forces us to continue living it. So that even if we are blissfully happy, it pushes on until we are not; even if we are in love, it pushes on until we are not; and even if we discover something marvelous or do something that
makes us famous, it pushes on. It just goes through a whole lifetime of our feelings, careless of all of them, not giving a damn for any of them, except I suppose our last feeling before we die. When we have got life to stop to accommodate our feeling, we die. And what we said about it and felt about it is gone, and what we thought is gone, and our anger is gone, and the expression of our eyes and the character of our smiles, that’s all gone. And if we knew how to embroider or sing “Bye Bye Blackbird,” that’s gone too.

JOEL
   So it is clear, then, that those who do best in life are those who get on with it. Life is surely merciful to those who get on with it. Yes. So that is what we do. We get up in the morning and go about our business. We get up and go to our jobs, if we have jobs, or to the unemployment lines those who don’t have them. And there is the holding of a job and then losing it, or the looking for a job and not finding it, and of course the getting of a job and hating it. All that is getting on with it. Meeting someone, making a marriage of whatever duration, is getting on with it. Having a job and having a family is surely getting on with it. And everyone each morning, no matter what his or her feelings, gets up and gets on with it. And that is what makes the romance of the cities.

MICHAEL
   I beg your pardon, did you say the romance of the cities?

JOEL
   Look at those lights. Isn’t that romance? Isn’t that human enterprise shining like a constellation? Don’t tell me I can’t walk in the park at night. We’re a great civilization. There was poverty and disease in Renaissance Italy. There was filth and degradation in Edwardian London. Were these not great civilizations? You feel the romance of the city by living in it. You feel it in the lights of the evening, you feel it in the day when everyone is going about his business. A person’s spirit is lifted by the doing of what everyone else is doing at the same time.
That is the appeal, for example, of public dancing. That is the appeal of soldiers marching. In this country we work on our own behalf but together with others who work on their own behalf. The spirit is lifted by the numbers of people working for their future in the same rhythms as others working for their future. The spirit rises on the numbers of people going about their own business together through the streets in the mornings at random speeds and in different rhythms of walking.

EDGAR
   Yes, so that the spirit is lifted that way, I can see that. It is lifted by the numbers of people walking to their places of business. I agree with that. It is lifted too by the numbers of derelicts marching through the streets to their places of business. It is lifted on the dancing steps of child prostitutes and in the happy song of their pimps. It is lifted on the merry tinkle of empty wine bottles breaking against the sides of buildings, it is lifted on the soaring coloratura of the police cars and ambulances and fire engines going about their business. And it’s lifted to its heights in the exhalations of the dying. People who die, as they are murdered in the streets at night or in the operating rooms of the hospitals in the early morning, release with their last scream the great hallelujah of their dying, and altogether the stabbed and shot and butchered and starved, the overdosed and run-over and burned alive, lift the rest of our spirits in their chorus of dying breath so that we may gaze down in philosophic happiness at the greatness of our civilization.

(
The sound of the doorbell
,
JOEL
and
CLAUDETTE
stand and look at each other
)

CLAUDETTE
   But he said he’d be delayed. (
She goes to the doorway
) No, wait, it’s Grace. Darling!

(
Everyone regroups for the new arrival
,
GRACE
enters and is greeted by
CLAUDETTE, JOEL
,
and then by
MICHAEL
and
ANDREA
.
EDGAR
and
JOAN
are, for a moment, alone
)

JOAN
   (To
EDGAR
) What has gotten into you! Are you aware of the pains they’ve taken to make this evening successful? You’re being awful! Putting everyone in a state, acting like some nasty destructive child—if you don’t stop, we’ll be asked to leave. In fact, I won’t wait to be asked.

(
The new guest
,
GRACE
,
is led toward them and
JOAN
puts on a smiling face
,
CLAUDETTE
’s
introductions are not here effusive. They are cursory first-name sort
.
GRACE
sits down and receives a drink. Almost everyone sits. There is an awkward silence
)

GRACE
   Has anyone seen the Hopper retrospective at the Modern?

JOAN
   Yes, isn’t it marvelous?

GRACE
   I was disappointed. I used to like Hopper. Now I find I dislike him.

CLAUDETTE
   Grace is a painter herself.

(
EDGAR
makes an incoherent sound
)

GRACE
   I beg your pardon?

JOEL
   Perhaps you can help us, Grace. This evening Edgar is in great pain. We’re trying to console him, but he’s inconsolable. Today he went about his business as usual, and tomorrow he will go about his usual business, but this evening he finds himself inconsolable. Of course, by his own admission he doesn’t know anything the rest of us don’t know, nor perceive anything we can’t perceive. We all know and perceive the same things. As a physician I probably have more of a reason than anyone to be inconsolable. I know of more disgusting and degrading means of dying than anyone else in this room could possibly know. Every day of the week I perform five or six operations of the same kind. I get up early in the morning to do that. Every day in the week thousands of physicians all over the country get up very early in the morning to do the same operations for the people who have come to us for the same conditions for which other people
have come to us. The admissions officers of hospital emergency rooms can calculate by the week and month and year how many knifings they will get, how many shootings, how many cardiac arrests, how many ODs, how many car wrecks. They know in advance. Cars go up on sidewalks, through store windows, they skid into each other in the rain, they collide at intersections, they crash head-on on the highways. It is very farcical what cars do. The run into lampposts or hurtle off bridges. Trains derail, buckle, plow into the rear of other trains. Airplanes take off and crash, and they crash on landing. They hit other airplanes in the air, they turn on their wingtips on the runway, they skid off the runway, they miss the runway altogether. Everything disastrous that happens to people usually happens to many people at the same time. They even get sick in great numbers, as in epidemics. You would think that illness was a personal thing and a matter of individual character, but people are poisoned in great numbers by the food they eat at the same dinners, or they get cancer together from working in the same factories. There is very little that people can do disastrously by themselves. Neither crashing in airplanes nor burning to death in tenements. Most of the time, these things are done by groups of people. And of course, war is done by groups of people, and the dying in wars is comprised of enormous numbers of people. In fact, that is the meaning of dying in wars, that it be done by the greatest possible numbers of people. So it is all very painful. There’s very little dignity possible and I find that quite painful. Nevertheless, nevertheless, I choose not to be inconsolable.