Imaginary Friends (5 page)

LILLIAN
: Listen to this, you wrote this: “She married him as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved … someone else.”

MARY
: I also wrote, “It made no sense for me to sleep with him, so I married him so it would make sense.”

LILLIAN
: Bullshit. What about ambition? What about vanity? What about how pleased you had to have been that this brilliant man had chosen you? Or did you think it was only because you were “a princess among the trolls”?

MARY
: I didn’t write that about
myself
. I wrote it about a character in a short story.

LILLIAN
:
[Dismissively.]
It was fiction. Hmmph.

MARY
: Yes. It was.

LILLIAN
: You wrote fact and called it fiction—

MARY
: And you wrote fiction and called it fact.

LILLIAN
: Ooh ooh ooh, that is so painful.

MARY
: Was there ever a moment we could have been friends?

LILLIAN
: Hard to imagine.

They both think about it for a moment
.

When would it have been?

MARY
: Hard to imagine.
[Beat.]
But isn’t it odd? The two of us might never have become real writers if it weren’t for these two older men who came into our lives at almost the same moment. After we were married, Edmund led me to a small guest bedroom on the ground floor of his house. There was a desk and a typewriter. He put me in that room and closed the door, and I became a writer. I wrote short stories, and they were published, and one of them was called “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” It was about a young woman who meets a traveling salesman on a train, and they get drunk, and she wakes up naked in his sleeping berth. It was very shocking, it was, it was shocking, and because of it, I was a sensation, and I was twenty-nine.

LILLIAN
:
[Mae West again.]
“Hey, boys, come on over and I’ll show you my underpants.”

MARY
: Literally. In the story was a pair of underpants.

LILLIAN
: With a safety pin in them.

MARY
: You read it?

LILLIAN
: Of course I read it. Everyone read it.

MARY
: Did you like it?

LILLIAN
: Did I like it? After all those horrible things you said about me and my work?

MARY
: I was just wondering what you thought of it.

LILLIAN
: I liked it. I liked
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, too.

MARY
: Thank you. I liked
The Children’s Hour
.

LILLIAN
looks at her, surprised
.

Your plays were so well made. Too well made, really—there was way too much of the gun over the mantel in the first act being fired at the end of the play—

LILLIAN
: Let’s just go back to you liked it.

BARTENDERS
:

THEY CLASH, THEY LINK

MARY
: I did.

LILLIAN
: Thank you.

BARTENDERS
:

INCENSED IN SYNC

Both women start to say something, then change their minds
.

A SMOKE, A DRINK

LILLIAN AND MARY
:

AND YOU

MARY AND LILLIAN
:
[To a
BARTENDER
.
]
Bartender!

BLACKOUT
.

Reds
.

A huge red parachute silk curtain drops from the flies
.

ENSEMBLE
:

ARE YOU NOW
HAVE YOU EVER
STATE YOUR NAME
DO YOU SWEAR
GIVE US NAMES
WHO WAS THERE
WAS THERE ANYBODY ELSE
IT’S THE HOUSE
UN-AMERICAN
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN
DID YOU KNOW
WERE YOU THERE
I REFUSE ON THE GROUND
GIVE US NAMES
DO YOU SWEAR
ARE YOU NOW
DID YOU EVER
THE COMMITTEE IS IN ORDER
GIVE US NAMES
ARE YOU NOW
HAVE YOU EVER EVER BEEN
STATE YOUR NAME
SO HELP YOU GOD

We see
LILLIAN
and
MARY
dressed as young women
.

ANNOUNCER
: Are you now or have you ever been a member of the—

MARY
: Me? Are you serious? I was the palest of pinkos. I marched in the May Day parade in my prettiest dress. I became a Trotskyite almost by chance—

LILLIAN
: No one here even knows what a Trotskyite is anymore—

MARY
: No one here knows what a Stalinist is, either. She was a Stalinist. Tell them what you believed—

LILLIAN
: I never said I was a Stalinist.

MARY
: You’re dead. Tell them. What can happen?

LILLIAN
isn’t going to admit it
.

All right, then: had you been a Stalinist, what might you have believed?

LILLIAN
: The Stalinists believed that a certain amount of bad stuff was part of any revolution, and that it would eventually stop.

MARY
: And the Trotskyites believed that bad stuff was bad stuff and would lead to more bad stuff.

LILLIAN
: The Stalinists turned out to be wrong.

MARY
: So wrong. So very very wrong.

LILLIAN
: I said they were wrong.

MARY
: And we turned out to be right.
[Beat.]
Anyway, how I became a Trotskyite. It was 1936, I was living in New York, and everyone in New York was a leftist. I would never have made a true Marxist—it’s something you have to take up early, like ballet—but then the Moscow trials began. Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian revolution, was accused of being a traitor, and thousands of people were sent to Siberia or executed for being in cahoots with him. It was a monstrous frame-up engineered by Joseph Stalin, it was completely unjust, but the truth is that when it began, I didn’t know a thing about it because I was off in Reno, getting a divorce from my first husband. When I got back—

We hear the sound of argument and see a Village party. There’s a table with bottles and paper cups and a group of men intensely talking. One of them is
JAMES T. FARRELL
.

JAMES T. FARRELL
: You can’t mean it—

MARY
: That’s James T. Farrell, who wrote
Studs Lonigan
—

JAMES T. FARRELL
: You can’t possibly read what Trotsky wrote and think there’s any way he collaborated with the Germans—

All the following partygoer dialogue is meant to overlap
.

PARTYGOER
#1: But Holtzman testified he met with Trotsky at the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen—

PARTYGOER
#2: But the Hotel Bristol in Copenhagen burned to the ground in 1912—

PARTYGOER
#3: So they couldn’t possibly have met at the Hotel Bristol—

JAMES T. FARRELL
: He’s being framed and he deserves a hearing. Surely he deserves a hearing. Mary thinks so, don’t you, dear?

MARY
:
[To the audience.]
I had no idea what they were talking about.
[To
JAMES T. FARRELL
.
]
Come again?

JAMES T. FARRELL
: Trotsky—

MARY
: Trotsky—

JAMES T. FARRELL
: Deserves a hearing. Don’t you think?

MARY
: Has something happened to Trotsky?

JAMES T. FARRELL
: Has something happened to Trotsky? She wants to know if something has happened to Trotsky—

MARY
: I’m sorry.

JAMES T. FARRELL
: Trotsky’s been falsely accused of plotting with the Nazis to murder almost everyone in the Kremlin. Sixteen Bolsheviks have implicated him, and they’ve all been executed. Trotsky denies the charges. So he deserves a hearing, right?

MARY
:
[To the audience re:
JAMES T. FARRELL
.
]
I liked him so much.
[To
JAMES T. FARRELL
.
]
Yes. A hearing. Absolutely. Everyone deserves a hearing.

JAMES T. FARRELL
: Not to mention asylum, don’t you think?

MARY
:
[Once again this is a surprise, but she’s trying to bluff her way through as best she can.]
Asylum. Great idea.

She and
JAMES T. FARRELL
toast
.
MARY
walks away from the party
.

A few days later I opened the mail and found a letter from a group that was demanding Trotsky’s right to a hearing and to asylum, and my name was on the letterhead. No one had even asked me. They had no right. So I decided to remove my name from the list that very minute. And I meant to. Truly I did. But I forgot. And then, after a day or two, the phone rang. It was a Stalinist I barely knew, calling to persuade me to resign from this committee I hadn’t even joined. I hung up, and the phone rang again, and again. “You must withdraw.” “There will be consequences.” “Think it over, Mary.” It made me very angry. So I never took my name off the list. And—
[Shrugs.]
that’s how I became a Trotskyite. I became a fanatic Trotskyite. I signed letters, I marched, I slept only with other Trotskyites—with a few exceptions—and I went to meetings where I was shouted down and accused of being the sort of person who “looked for pimples on the great smiling face of the Soviet Union.”

LILLIAN
: So you were an accidental Trotskyite, just as you were an accidental Mrs. Edmund Wilson. Just out of curiosity, what decisions in your life did you actually make?

MARY
: What I believe is that the decisions we agonize over are often the most insignificant—what to have for dinner, beef or chicken. What color to make the rug. But the big things almost seem to choose you. I was like “Stendhal’s hero, who took part in something confused and disarrayed that he later learned was the Battle of Waterloo.” I had no idea that I was making the most important decision of my life—to be serious, to be involved with public affairs, to be an intellectual. And I had no idea that I was choosing not just to be a Trotskyite but to be an anti-communist. Of course, I wasn’t a right-wing anti-communist like Senator McCarthy, I was a liberal, you understand the distinction—

LILLIAN
: Well, I don’t, as you know. I don’t understand that at all. Are you done?

MARY
waves to
LILLIAN
to proceed
.

I don’t have a little story that makes my politics make sense. But there was nothing whimsical about my ending up where I did, even though it’s hard to be explicit about why. But I suppose—growing up in the South, seeing the way blacks were treated—well, that’s probably too simple.… Once I was with Sophronia, and I refused to sit in the back of the bus. The driver threw us off, and Sophronia was very angry with me, because she thought I was showing off.…

MARY
: Ladies and gentlemen, Miss Rosa Parks—

LILLIAN
: When I got older and realized I probably would never make much of a radical, I was nonetheless attracted to them. And then I got involved with Hammett, who
was
committed, no question, and we all hated the Nazis and we all cared
about the workers.…
[Beat.]
Too simple, too simple.… And guilt, guilt played a part. Because I was successful during the Depression.…
[Beat.]
And, of course, I’d gone to Russia before the war, and it was hard to go there and not have feelings for the Russian people. They were our allies at the time. I wanted the revolution to work. Sue me.
[Beat.]
And I had a kind of impatience with … splitting hairs … with people who were always finding ways to get around believing in something, people who were looking for loopholes—

MARY
: Finding pimples—

LILLIAN
: Seizing on technicalities and using them as an excuse to avoid taking a position on something that was worth taking a position on. Which side are you on, boys, which side are you on. I didn’t want to be on your side, quibbling—it seemed like quibbling—I wanted—

MARY
: —to be one of the boys.

LILLIAN
: We all wanted to be one of the boys.

MARY
: I never wanted to be one of the boys—

LILLIAN
: But you wanted to be the only woman at the table, which is practically the same thing. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to be on the side of change and equality—

MARY
:
We
were for change and equality—

LILLIAN
: But it didn’t feel that way. It felt as if you were just a bunch of critics. Being against things was easy. I wanted to be
for
something. That was the hard part.