Alysse Aallyn

Scene I

EVAN

I like women willful, late
For appointments,
fond of showy clothes and society, vague, drifting, dreamy,
yet of course all of that is tiresome.
But I don’t like competence, intellectual honesty, intelligent sensuality.
Women keep turning on me saying,
“You don’t love me.”
What good is it to have been so happy
when it ends so painfully?
I am a “crook”, a “torturer of women”,
“Murderer.” She has made me feel a monster.
Below the surface of the will
I feel deep animal distress, as if I had wives
Hidden away somewhere
To marry my present wife.

EVA
I find your misery gratifying.
When I was younger I used to
Accommodate everyone –
Now I’m recalcitrant.
You’re never out of my thoughts, but
Sadness dulls one.
Honestly, I always risk failing you,
Failing you in outstandingness.
You are extraordinary, I am extraordinary,
we have been extraordinary together.
We’re specimens under glass.
It hurts because the pin runs through both of us.
The agonizing force of missing you
Is sweeping over me.
We have eternity connecting us,
Backward & forward but
I can’t get anyone to believe it.

EVAN
Would my death simplify things?
My wife struggles with carrying the conversation
While I stare glumly at the rain.
We go to an expensive little restaurant
And pretend we are on a date to really talk.

EVA
That woman’s killing you.
Imagine if you were dead and your wife
Wrote a book explaining you
To everyone! That’s true suffering –
Fodder for the mealy-mouthed.

EVAN
My wife won’t be writing any books
About me or about anything. You’re the one
To write the book.
I feel safe in your hands.

EVA
Except I’ve told you over and over
You’ll outlive me.
You’re killing me.
Or your wife is.
I’ll die of my addiction –
We always do.
We prefer it.
Will you write about me?

EVAN
I’ve lied to everyone for
So long, I’m sure that truth
Is beyond me.

EVA
I’d rather see you dead at my feet
Than dead ON your feet.
That would be a mercy killing –
The last unbearable agony –
Wondering if you existed at all.
I have small talent for this.
I have disgraced my idealism,
Pretending boredom can be fruitful.
Waiting, waiting for you everywhere. I
Wake one day to find I’ve lost my looks, my hair,
fascination, brain – everything.

EVAN
You’re simply waking up
In an empty hotel.
The light is always different
The morning after.
This is what middle-aged people do.
I love the brutality of your world.
You never fade. You are my word made flesh.

EVA
You are my religion.
Until In fell in love with you I was 25 inside.
I lived in a world of dreams and theories.
Your experiences seem realer to me than mine.

EVAN
To have touched the same places
Is a bond between us.
Social instinct is my religion.

EVA
Middle-aged people go to weddings
Out of perverse fascination for the bride.
I was that bride –
My day was all champagne.
Anaesthetized
It doesn’t hurt so much.
Such a sense of enormity came over me
I almost fainted. I gave Allen the dirtiest look: “You caused this.”
Without wedding dress
I was a restless, dowdy snob.
People were falling in love left and right –
Even in decaying marriages.
I wanted that –
He read my subtext.
And I was caught.

EVAN
These dreary parties have a decaying effect.
My loneliness for you is like a whiplash.
Your absence is a bitter injury
But nothing can injure our love –
We’re too strong for them.
I’m silenced till I hear from you.
If I let myself go I would feel desperate.
I can’t bear you’re going to France without me –
isn’t love our country?

EVA
I won’t say “I’ll die if you don’t come”
Because I know you would come if you possibly could.
What a skeleton in the cupboard a wife is.

EVAN
Don’t be jealous of Elayna. You are the only goal
Toward which my life is tending.
You are the meaning of my life.
I could never live for work alone.

EVA
You enlarge my soul.
In your mind is my existence.
You’re more real to me than me.
I’m in a peculiar psychic state.
It’s an atmosphere of illusion.
I envy Elayna all the time.
It drips like an irritant over my nerves.

EVAN
What of Allen? You
Have your worse half too.

EVA
Oh, Allen spends his time lost in woods,
Falling in love with trees. He’s
No threat to anyone.

EVAN
To understand one’s destiny
One needs a framework for this mass of experience.
How can I live separated from you?
If I stopped caring for you
I couldn’t care for anything.
I need my wife, her whip-cracking organization.
I loathe living in the squalor I get into on my own.
Having breakfast OUT of bed is the last horror.
Miasmic feelings of impossibility and terror. Help me.

EVA
We help each other
By existing. Except for God I have no help but you.
Our love is growing more formidable as our unshakeable belief
Grows stronger. Like grace, it renews itself.
All yesterday I glowed. My inability to accept your wife
Is my deformity – help me with it.
The light of our love is the only light for me.