(Scene 4. The conservatory. VIRGINIA sits unmoving before a tea-table. Enter LEONARD.)
LEONARD I see I am in time for tea. May I join you?
VIRGINIA I can’t stop you.
LEONARD
(daringly pulls his chair to the table)
How are you feeling?
VIRGINIA Like a helpless baby on the shore of life, turning over pebbles. The ocean tosses me pebbles and I turn them over, one by one. I’m naked, a child, and no one helps me.
LEONARD I want to help you. May I pour? Lovely cakes.
(he pours two cups, carefully serves her a cake, takes one himself, munches and sips)
Delicious. Sir George keeps an excellent cook.
VIRGINIA His brain is in his stomach. Or rather, he has a stomach instead of a brain but no one’s noticed. I’m afraid the tea is cold. They won’t let me have a spirit lamp in case I set the place on fire, like mad Mrs. Rochester in Jane Eyre.
LEONARD The tea is perfect. Oolong, I notice. May I sugar yours?
VIRGINIA You’re certainly sugaring everything else. Why are you in such a good mood?
LEONARD I’m happy to see you looking so well. What have you been thinking?
VIRGINIA That I want to write a novel about silence. Depression interests me. One could make a game of assembling the fractured pieces, capturing the things people don’t say. How deeply they drive themselves into me, those things people daren’t say aloud! It seems everyone is in agreement that the truth of women must be suppressed. Repress, control. If I am going to write all this I will need a different word than novel or people won’t know what to expect. Elegy, perhaps?
LEONARD You were born to write, Virginia. Your book is beautiful. I mean The Voyage Out.
VIRGINIA My book? My poor sad, dull novel which shall certainly be abused? A whole made painfully from shivering fragments. “The spring, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid on fields entirely careless of beholders.” I tried to speak truth but I collapsed under the burden of my failure.
LEONARD You can’t think how I envy you your spring of fantastic imagination. It’s beautifully written. But it’s so very sad. Tell me, why must Rachel die before the wedding?
VIRGINIA Because the fiancé is based on Clive and who would ever want to marry him?
LEONARD Nessa did.
VIRGINIA He kept his real face very well hidden. The things he says about me to others! Adrian showed me the letters!
LEONARD He’s angry because you refused him. Clive’s a monster. We’re in complete agreement. What if we eliminated monsters from your life? What would you write next?
VIRGINIA It’s not possible to eliminate monsters. Look at this new war they’re brewing. War is a stupid, violent, hateful, idiotic, trifling, mean, ignoble display. Why should I dare to love you when you will only fight and die, trodden underfoot in some soggy foreign field?
LEONARD
You won’t get rid of me that easily. Dr. Craig has given me a dispensation because of my tremor.
VIRGINIA
So you’ve seen Dr. Craig. Is he as stupid as the others?
LEONARD
He thinks we need to design a healthy life. I think so too. And because your healthy life is writing, I want to hear about what you’ll write next.
VIRGINIA (dreamily)
I want to write about the islands of light swimming through the grass. I want to show the peace, the unity in the smallest flower – but whenever I try the great ugly beast on the beach stamps and snorts.
LEONARD What beast?
VIRGINIA He is chained, but he pulls at his chain. I’m so afraid – he might escape.
LEONARD Is this a memory, Virginia?
VIRGINIA What have we but memory? Women are the beggars of every family; memory is our only treasure, the only dowry we inherit. Tell the truth, said father. But mother said sometimes a lie is better than the truth, because of feelings. You must spare people’s feelings, but only if they have the right feelings. What if their feelings are false to begin with? My feelings were never the right ones. Father was my writing teacher, did I tell you that?
LEONARD And what was his recipe?
VIRGINIA He said only write the truth and say exactly what you mean.
LEONARD If only that were possible! You saw how I botched my turn.
VIRGINIA But the truth is that when father died, I hated him. I was so relieved to be free of the exacting tyrant, the histrionic, self-pitying, violent, deaf, alternately loved and hated father. We all were. We fled that house, from a crypt slimy with fungus, disgusting with mold, gushing a sour stench of decay.
(A catch in her voice)
How we rejoiced! But in truth we had graduated from a life of suppressed rage into one of perpetual mourning. In my fantasies, Father confesses and repents his crimes, asking my forgiveness. But he could never do that, really. Everyone saw him as the pinnacle of reason and privilege, yet he felt ill-used by everyone he knew, even by life itself. I wonder, was he haunted by a devil, by some demon? Was it not he, himself, but something sitting on his shoulder that pecked at us so fiercely?
LEONARD Naturally he grieved when your mother died. He must have altered greatly then.
VIRGINIA My mother’s death was the greatest disaster that could possibly have happened. Father sat through countless meals groaning aloud about how he wished to die. Do you know, it is my worst fear that I will become like him. It is a fate more to be feared than madness, to my mind. He is inexplicable. Extraordinarily gifted, godlike, yet somehow childlike. There was an infantile fixation! Bubbling up from some dark place, I suppose, below the level of conscious thought. But he was protected by society, as we were not. In the privacy of our home he seemed unbound by any of the laws of ordinary people. Yet he desired constant pity! We were the ones forced to be self-controlled and coolly analytical, plotting ways to get around him. But when he shouted at Nessa I hated him so much I could have killed him myself. Our punishment came when Thoby died. Violet and Vanessa also were stricken with typhoid but only the sheltered males perished.
LEONARD Thoby’s death wasn’t punishment. Thoby died of a typhoid germ. If these men are fragile as you say, how could your father be the brute you dreamed of, stamping on the beach?
VIRGINIA All you men are brutes, with your gaming, your competitions, your subjugation and your wars. Men use knives, to cut things, to sacrifice, while women use needle and thread, to sew them up. But nothing’s as good once it’s been repaired. When my father threw a fish into the bottom of the boat, I felt I suddenly was that fish, flopping, gasping, drowning in the very air all had sworn was safe to breathe. I had more in common with waves and seabirds than with that man.
LEONARD Now Virginia, you mustn’t get excited.
VIRGINIA The great secret is not to feel. Strong feelings create an abyss between oneself and others. No one ever says anything they really mean. I am bored by men and their silly violence and wars. I detest the masculine point of view. I am bored by heroism, virtue and honor. Men’s acquisitive instincts cause them to desire other people’s fields and goods, to make frontiers and flags, battleships and poison gas, to offer up their own lives and their children’s lives. Why should I submit to them, why endure a lifetime of unpaid service to their shoddy interests?
LEONARD I agree we are a disgusting species. But man’s only locomotion is logic and reason. We must never give up.
(Curtain. Lights up on Scene 3, CONSULTATION ROOM of DR. CRAIG. LEONARD sits, head in hands.)
DR CRAIG Glad to see you, Mr. Woolf. I am eager to hear your opinion of the progress of our patient.
LEONARD Virginia and I have been talking and I must admit she does not sound altogether mad to me.
DR CRAIG My dear fellow, insanity of the mind merely means whatever derangement disables a person from thinking the thoughts, feeling the feelings and doing the duties of the social body in, for, and by which he lives. Insanity is nothing more than a want of harmony between the individual and his social medium. That individual sadly becomes a social discord of which nothing can be made.
LEONARD She speaks frequently of her home life where her brothers took advantage of her.
DR CRAIG You are referring to her delusions. You will have noticed that patients, particularly intelligent ones, are very cunning as they seek to involve their caregivers into sharing their beliefs of persecution and misfortune. It is much better not to allow oneself to re-hash a history that must remain forever uncertain but to forcefully insist on a calming, healthful daily regimen starting now.
LEONARD Surely, you’ll agree that being resentful of bad treatment hardly constitutes insanity.
DR CRAIG My dear sir, your wife is under doctors’ care because she tried to take her own life. We are obviously not dealing with a healthy person here. No, taken by themselves, delusions do not necessarily indicate insanity but when they are found in conjunction with broad evidence of failure to conform one’s general conduct to the ordinary rules of life and society such a diagnosis must be made. Clearly such an obligation places great responsibility on the keen insights and experience of professional men rigorously educated to the highest standard and admitted by the demanding qualifications of the Royal Society of Medicine. As a man of the world you must know that is always very common for weaker beings to resent those on whom greater fortune has been showered and to feel their gains are somehow ill-gotten. This resentment stirs up a host of fantasies that must be very firmly rejected. Successful work never leads to this disorder but unsuccessful work shows a very different etiology.
LEONARD But in the case of Virginia’s upbringing –
DR CRAIG Mr. Woolf, in every case the instinctive impulses of children must sooner or later clash with the social regime, to the infant’s sorrow and momentary discomfiture. Elders must be recognized as the authority in such matters or chaos would result. Therefore, no airing of childhood wrongs can ever constitute a fruitful line of inquiry.
LEONARD It seems the situation was so severe that Dr. Savage was consulted at the time –
DR CRAIG My good fellow, it would be better for you to face the fact that delusions never require any other support than the conviction of the deluded. A man may believe, for example, that his head has been opened, his brains removed and some other substance substituted. That is a very common delusion, I can assure you.
LEONARD Virginia is an intelligent woman. I believe she must be handled intelligently. I may even say she has a touch of genius. In fact, I believe she is the only true genius I have ever met.
DR CRAIG Are you arguing that geniuses are in some way above or beyond the law, Mr. Woolf? I certainly hope you are not.
LEONARD Her family was considered the highest intellectual intelligentsia of their day. It seems obvious to me –
DR CRAIG What is obvious to me, is that the degree of education and the social status of the person whose conduct is under consideration are indeed important facts, for habits that would be decidedly eccentric in the upper classes may pass unremarked in the lower reaches of society. The sex of the patient is even more critical to diagnosis. Outbursts of emotional weeping in men, for example, are a symptom of grave import but among women occasion no remark. Any woman’s effort to escape her true femininity places her moral hardihood at peril. Imagine some up to date woman adopting a divided skirt under the belief that it is a healthier form of apparel and permits greater freedom of action. Very well. But should she indulge in so subversive a notion as to think that male attire is even more hygienic and to actually carry her belief into practice, the arm of the law will at once reach out to warn her. If the warning is not heeded, society will place her in safekeeping until she has learned to conform to the ideas of the majority. This is the situation in which your wife finds herself at the current time. Before her marriage, I am given to understand that your wife frequented a rather louche artistic bohemia. Now that she is a married woman you have acquired a unique opportunity to place her feet on a more secure footing. I understand you have rejected the possibility of committing her to an asylum but want to give her another chance in the wider world. It is accordingly crucial that you not indulge her in useless analysis of who or what was at fault in her upbringing but encourage her to commit to a fresh new life, with you, where she submits to a healthful pattern which you will lay out for her.
LEONARD What you say makes a good deal of sense, but Virginia has always had her own ideas about everything. Her reading alone, even from childhood has been voluminous. I think I can say that she’s read everything and everybody.
DR CRAIG Now I think you are laying your finger on a much likelier culprit in your wife’s hysteria than the boyish behaviors of exuberantly boisterous, youthful males. Most women’s minds are simply not capable of absorbing and processing the histories and theories of men who lived in more pernicious times. As a Cambridge graduate you do not need me to point out which books might be especially dangerous. We may even disagree on which authors have a nihilist or even Bolshevik bent. But if you are committed to keeping your wife out of the asylum you must make it your life work to supervise your wife more closely in future. I understand there is family money?
LEONARD Some money. We will both need to seek employment.
DR CRAIG I think you will find your wife far too fragile for the hurly burly of economic exchange. These patients are frequently considered brilliant in conversation. But on inspection this seeming brilliancy will be found in large measure to be due to the unconventional nature of their chatter. Patients such as your wife are often considered more entertaining when ill than when in health for through loss of control they make remarks which the healthy would fear to utter. A sane person is inhibited in both speech and action. I think you must reconcile yourself to having a saner, healthier but possibly duller wife who partakes of a less unsettling society.
LEONARD But can it ever be right to subject an intelligent person to regimes designed for the mad?
DR CRAIG My dear sir, there is really no distinction between physical disease and mental disorder. Mrs. Woolf must learn to practice equanimity and you are the best judge of how to assist her in that course. In any given individual where nothing more than exaggerated and uncontrolled normal characteristics may constitute mental disorder, we realize how narrow is the margin between those whom we call the sane and the insane. You are her husband. Have faith in your power to exercise benevolent dominance. It is a husband’s obligation.
LEONARD But Virginia is so sensitive! I am concerned –
DR CRAIG I cannot suggest too strongly, my dear sir, that you focus more on your wife’s bowels than on her brains. Constipation is not only a common symptom of the insane, it is the rule rather than the exception. Another symptom which appears early and which stands out in strong relief, is hypersensitivity. To me this is the symptom of all symptoms which may occasion unsoundness of mind.
LEONARD Virginia becomes so excited when I approach her –
DR CRAIG I will prescribe Hyoscynamine. It is a wonderful relaxant which has given excellent results in quieting the most difficult patients.
VIRGINIA Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.
LEONARD I’m not lying when I say I want you to get well more than anything I’ve ever wanted in my life.
VIRGINIA Don’t bother making me feel guilty, I already know I’m wasting your life. If only I weren’t so stupid a Mandrill, so unworthy of her poor, virtuous outsider Mongoose who is so thin, who trembles so much and who tries so hard. You have headaches too, you suffer from recurring malaria. Why should you toil so that I can be idle? I know these doctors’ bills are crushing us. Nessa sold the silver, I sold the jewelry, Thoby sold the Thackeray letters. What’s left, Leonard? Will you scheme with them to isolate me until there’s nothing left?
LEONARD I can earn money writing. I’ve proved that. You can earn money writing, you’ve proved that. But to get back in the fight we must be hardy and strong.
VIRGINIA I should never have married you. What kind of a wife can I ever be? Save yourself, Leonard. It’s too late for me. Let the wind blow, let the poppy seed itself, let the carnation mate with the cabbage. Let the swallow build her nest in the drawing room where the thistle thrusts between the tiles. Let all civilization be like broken china tangled over with blackberries and grass.
LEONARD That you demand so much of existence, still fighting as you sit among George’s flowers, shows you’re feeling better. What we must do is keep up the strengthening. A few more days, Virginia.
VIRGINIA But how can I return to you? There’s the undisputed fact of my sexual cowardice. Perhaps it’s really nothing but my terror of real life that keeps me in this nunnery. I tried telling my parents but they didn’t want to hear. Parents have forgotten their own childhood. Or they don’t want to remember.
LEONARD What did you try to tell them? You can say anything to me.
VIRGINIA I saw the spirits of evil as soon as I could speak, but because I was a girl child I was not supposed to know. Each child hugs its vice, brooding over the swollen vein, the bruised flesh that was white and sweet but yesterday.
LEONARD I told my parents that life is unquestionably vile and humanity’s nothing but an ant heap. Parents never want to hear that.
VIRGINIA That’s what I love about you, Leonard. You at least will speak the truth. Sometimes.
LEONARD It’s a fallacy to think that children are happy. They’re not. I never suffered so much as when I was a child. Children never forget injustice. But here is the heart of it, Virginia. What we write depends upon what we think. What “spirits of evil” did you see?
VIRGINIA Going to practice Dr. Head’s talking cure on me, are you? Is that the plan? I could make up a dozen stories – I see a dozen pictures. But when I open my mouth I am locked up and shut away. What is my true story? Something lies deeply buried. Shall I grasp it or let it mortify in the depths of my mind? I want to describe the world seen without a self. But I am afraid that there is no future. There are no words.
LEONARD There are words, and there is a future we shall make. Tell me. Tell me everything.
VIRGINIA When I was young, I dug furiously to uncover myself. When I discovered that I was me and not anyone else it seemed a wonderful achievement. Once I sat beside my stepsister Stella on roots as hard as skeletons, and the next day she was a skeleton. It’s strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners or in dreams. Don’t you remember that morning at breakfast when I saw my mother? You said she wasn’t there.
LEONARD I saw nothing.
VIRGINIA Cambridge educated everything but your eyes. What is the hope of talking to you? That was the morning was when I first became aware of the enemies who change but are always present; the forces we must fight even though we suffer terribly becoming separate bodies. Don’t you recognize the enemy advancing against us, pawing at his pavement? It is death. Death is the enemy.
LEONARD Marriage is the opposing force against death. A marriage of true minds can fight all enemies. Once upon a time we shared our thoughts, and fell in love. I needed someone who could hold her own, and there you were. You are the only wife I ever wanted, the only woman I have ever loved. Please, Virginia, I want you to come back to me.
VIRGINIA
(dazzled)
Oh to be a wife, to be wanted, would be so complete! Is it possible, Leonard, after the terrors, the disgusting dangers we have seen?
LEONARD If it isn’t I don’t want to live either.
(She holds out a hand to him. They clutch hands briefly)
VIRGINIA Sit down, Leonard. You look silly on your knees.
(She looks away. LEONARD sits)
VIRGINIA I used to make the family laugh. They thought me clever. But when I chased the evil spirits through a hole in the escallonia hedge, I resolved to tell the exact truth and write down the phenomena I’d seen. But no one believed me, and at that moment the laughter turned against me. I said, must not we find some way to get outside ourselves, to give our brains a wider scope? My parents declared God was dead and the world empty and meaningless. Father said to be weak is to be wretched. He said that Society is a ravenous appetite, and Nature is a state of war. You’ve laughed at me behind my back, I know you have. You, my own husband, want to get rid of me, to lock me up forever and steal my money.
LEONARD I love you, Virginia. Maybe it’s a bad thing to love you as much as I do – it cuts me off from the outside world. But the outside world is worthless and your world is so rich. When I went away to school for the first time I was shocked and appalled by the horrifying corruption of dirty-minded schoolboys. It marked me. Then I realized all of humanity are mean, nasty, untruthful, cowardly, and cruel. Perhaps I’ve been searching for a world that doesn’t exist.
VIRGINIA Perhaps we both have.
LEONARD If you will care for your health – if you will allow me to care for your health – you’ll recover. As you’ve recovered before.
VIRGINIA Nessa won’t rest till I’m brought low. When she was ill with typhoid Savage wanted to put her in a home but I backed her up! I told Savage I would care for her. Now look at what she’s done to me. You betrayed our secret, telling Nessa I’m a frigid failure as a wife. She told Clive and now everyone knows. They’re all laughing, jeering. plotting behind my back. You were sent to Ceylon to break the natives and now you’ve been sent to break me. I have been derided, insulted, sacrificed and betrayed, by all of you.
LEONARD Virginia, I am on your side. My eyes were opened in Ceylon. I was an anti-imperialist wallowing in the fleshpots of imperialism. But I changed. Now I support the independence movement with all my heart. All problems can be solved by science and logic, Virginia. It was I who was a failure as a husband. It was my marital duty to arouse you but you seemed so afraid of me. At my wit’s end, I asked your older sister for help.
VIRGINIA Does she offer lessons in humiliation? She knows how better than anyone. Is it my fault that I hate my legs being pried apart? I should never have married you, but I couldn’t bear to remain a spinster. I was struggling at everything, and you seemed so different. You said you liked women. You said you admired women’s minds.
LEONARD It’s true. Women feel more deeply, think more deeply, talk more deeply.
VIRGINIA Yet men demand obedience. You want me to obey you but I never will. You know nothing about me. Did you know that before I tried to die I read a book? Would you like to know which one?
LEONARD Which book did you read?
VIRGINIA It was your book. Your book that I read.
LEONARD My book?
VIRGINIA Your book about me.
LEONARD (a gratified author, in spite of everything)
You read The Wise Virgins? What did you think?
VIRGINIA So you admit it’s about me!
LEONARD Virginia, please. I’d love to discuss my book with you.
(She hesitates, turning away her face, then facing him with rage)
VIRGINIA
You locked me away so I’d never find out!
LEONARD You were ordered rest cures long before you met me! I don’t believe in guilt or blame. Honestly, I wanted you to read my book as soon as you were well.
VIRGINIA I won’t be stamped and stereotyped. You have publicly lampooned me as a frozen, dowdy, fussy, futile woman.
LEONARD Not true at all. I called you my Aspasia.
VIRGINIA “Cold and snowy, like the rocks.” You said.
LEONARD I’m a bad writer. I agree. I’ve got nothing of your genius. I can never explain what I really want to say. If it’s any comfort to you no one else likes or understands it either. Sales are awful. All I was attempting to do was contrast the world of a poor Jew from Putney with the rarified aristocratic Olympus for which he yearns.
VIRGINIA You hold my world in contempt because you can never be a gentleman.
LEONARD Virginia, you hold “your world” in contempt.
VIRGINIA And then the hero marries the other girl. The stupid, cow-eyed one! It’s a betrayal.
LEONARD It’s just a bad novel, I’ll give you that. Don’t laugh at me. Not everyone is born with your gifts. Consider my perspective. Any rational mind must inevitably face disillusion and depression. I tried to show how poor Harry just couldn’t escape his past. He couldn’t but I think we can. I probably shouldn’t have published it but Arnold was willing and I couldn’t bear to waste all that work and all that suffering.
VIRGINIA What can you, a prizewinning Apostle from Cambridge, an imperialist potentate of a subject country, possibly know of real suffering?
LEONARD Virginia, I’m a Jew from Putney. All my life I’ve been spat upon. Job is the only book of the Bible I ever understood. Who ridiculed who first? I trained myself to avoid personal feeling. Admit you despised me. Your set. You made me into a joke.
VIRGINIA My set despises everyone. That’s what we do. It’s self-defense, from growing up amongst the most monumental hypocrites.
LEONARD You despised me personally. Be honest. You hated kissing me. You could barely bring yourself to marry me.
VIRGINIA But I did it, didn’t I!
LEONARD You wanted to shock them. You were competing with Nessa to see who could be most scandalous.
VIRGINIA I wouldn’t dare compete with Nessa. Competition is a male thing. It’s a brutal, endless game. I think all competition should be abolished.
LEONARD But it’s all you ever do! Your flirtation with her husband –
VIRGINIA (cringes visibly)
Oh God, not that. Somehow that memory turns a knife in me more than anything. How it catches at me, the fangs of that old pain. I know I lost Vanessa forever. She will never forgive me. I simply couldn’t comprehend why she married such a strange, intolerable creature with his twitching pink skin and a jerky laugh. Before Clive, Nessa and I drifted together on a sea of seducing half-brothers, hiding together beneath the dining room table. We spoke a special animal language.
LEONARD But you were no longer children. Vanessa waited till twenty-eight to marry.
VIRGINIA Who would willingly grow up? I never wanted to. As soon as you’re pushed out of the nursery, the happy moments vanish. Vanessa was the bowl of golden water that brims but never overflows. I lie prostrate at her shrine and still she won’t forgive me. When she brought home friends from the Slade they laughed at me behind the door. You can’t think what it feels like, having one’s self so thoroughly extinguished.
LEONARD I do know it. That was my exact experience at both St. Paul’s and Cambridge. St. Paul’s was a disgusting brothel, but at Trinity I met G. E. Moore. He taught me how to ask the important questions.
VIRGINIA
And what are the important questions?
LEONARD The most important question is why. Why can’t Vanessa forgive a mere flirtation? She must know by now that Clive sets out to bed every woman he meets. You at least resisted him.
VIRGINIA But I did wrong. Clive and I made common cause against my sister, his own wife. Some things should be sacred.
LEONARD
Wasn’t it true that he respected your intellectual work more than he could ever appreciate Vanessa’s daubs?
VIRGINIA Leonard! How can you!
LEONARD
If it’s the truth, shouldn’t we say so?
VIRGINIA
I tried speaking the truth, yet here I am locked up among the imbeciles. And weren’t we just arguing whether all imbeciles should be killed?
LEONARD You’re hardly “locked up with the imbeciles” at Dalingridge Hall!
VIRGINIA You’re wrong. In this castle beats the very heart of idiocy and evil. Aren’t you the one who said the most dangerous imbeciles are running the nation? Here I am at home among the hunters, where the miner sweats and dies and maiden faith is rudely strumpeted.
LEONARD But you used to love George! He told me you’d make an adorable wife.
VIRGINIA Perhaps I’ve been given too much time to think. Get a sense of proportion, the doctors keep telling me. So now I stare for the first time into the very mouth of doom. Look your last on all things lovely.
LEONARD Virginia, if you don’t want to be called crazy, you really must explain yourself. Whatever do you mean?
VIRGINIA George behaved little better than a brute. He never let me alone for a moment. That he was the pet of duchesses hardly excuses him. And yet it was Gerald who broke my hymen, when I was six years old. It’s a painful process. and now I freeze like ice. Give up on me, Leonard, there’s no awakening the dead. I’m ruined by incest, I’ve even desired my own sister. I’m locked up because I stew in murder, just as Laura did. I long to slice Gerald’s fat, transparent flesh, to take a rifle and shoot George directly in his smug, piggy face. Or could I bag him with a net and killing bottle? And why shouldn’t I turn on my tormentors? I suffered, I was helpless, why should I be the one forced to writhe with shame? I longed to be petted but instead was trapped in a cage with lions as sulky and angry as they were ferocious. I’m just a little monkey and little monkeys are too easily squashed and trampled. It’s too late for me, Leonard. My body is spoiled forever by George and Gerald.
LEONARD (shocked)
George? Gerald? These are pillars of society, your own half-brothers! It’s so unbelievable.
VIRGINIA George drowned us in kisses, me and Vanessa. Each kiss was an amputation. I used to sign my work, “One of the Drowned.” Oh, those horrible parties! The oppressive gatherings of Stephenses ground one to a pulp. Because I wanted to discuss Plato I was told I had no conversation. George was so angry! After I removed my ball gown and stripped off my gloves and stockings, he would come into my room and lock the door.
LEONARD But how can any of this be true? How could nobody have noticed it?
VIRGINIA Everyone did notice it. People contrive to bend it to the conventional heroic shape because he kept insisting on the purity of his love. I saw him kissing Countess Carnarvon behind a pillar at the opera! And now she’s his mother-in-law. I asked to join the British Sex Society, dedicated to the study of parent/child incest, but they wouldn’t let me in. Now that you know, you’ll have to spit in George’s face at the club.
LEONARD We don’t belong to the same clubs.
VIRGINIA Then when you thank him for this execrable house, challenge him to a duel. Will he at least feel some regret? Will he take the pigeon gun and blast himself instead? Then the aristocracy will hate me because it’s all my fault. Yet is it not a noble work, letting light in upon the evil Duckworths? Probably he’ll feel nothing. Possibly some vague imbalance.
LEONARD Let’s try to be objective, Virginia.
VIRGINIA If only I could! What a luxury that would be! How I hunger for the objectivity of beloved Macaulay or the stern analysis of cherished Carlyle. Lockhart’s ten volume Life of Scott was the best present I ever received. Reading relieves all my pain, but they won’t let me read anything here. In spite of them I’m continuing to learn. Only life itself matters, nothing but life – and the process of discovery, the everlasting perpetual process, and not the thing itself at all.
LEONARD
Virginia, I am speechless.
VIRGINIA
Now you know how it feels. I used to think it would be enough to have someone share my loneliness. But if no one believes me, the solitude is total. The Duckworths are guilty of nameless atrocities, and you’re complicit. You locked me away here, so I couldn’t speak. As soon as I open my mouth they try to destroy me. It’s a conspiracy of hush.
LEONARD If this is something you’ve only just remembered how can it possibly be true? It sounds mad.
VIRGINIA I don’t think memory is always at the forefront, Leonard. There’s only so much a human being can bear. Memory comes and goes. One requires tools to think with, to make sense of one’s experience, and these tools are alternately dull and sharp.
LEONARD Well, there are some things no one wants to think about.
VIRGINIA It’s clearer in my mind than the bad, stodgy meal I was force-fed yesterday. Our summer place at St. Ives, in the dining room; I must have been six years old. Eighteen-year-old Gerald lifted me up to a high ledge and explored my private parts. I fought and I struggled but I couldn’t get away. I could see his face in the dining room mirror. It was the face of a demon. I’ve seen that face since, on the drooling men who expose themselves in the park. Now I no longer look in mirrors. I can’t cross a puddle. The depth looks back at me, concealing malicious, hairy arms to reach out and grab. I can’t go forward, I am stuck in the loop of the six, no power even to lift my legs.
LEONARD The loop of the six? I don’t understand.
VIRGINIA
I was learning numbers. Six was my number. But I couldn’t close the loop.
LEONARD
This was Gerald you say? But Gerald is your publisher!
VIRGINIA I know! If I am not a madwoman, then the world itself is mad. What was I to do? I wrote a book and my incestuous brother was a publisher! Who else would even look at my work? When I delivered my manuscript to Gerald I was in such acute despair – so near the precipice!
LEONARD Did you tell anyone?
VIRGINIA I told Nessa and she told Dr. Savage. Who is an idiot, as you well know.
LEONARD I can’t believe it. Gerald seems so – so – well, ordinary. So completely controlled.
VIRGINIA Get out of here! I’m sorry I told you. I wish I was dead!
(She is tearing at her own throat – he rushes forward to hold her hands down, lifting her body out of the chair)
The use of force is all you know!
LEONARD Virginia, I love you.
(He kisses her neck, she becomes a dead weight. He lowers her carefully into the chair, arranges a blanket on her knees)
VIRGINIA When you touch me, I feel nothing. My body goes dead. That’s how I froze when George came into my room, night after night.
LEONARD Oh, Beloved!
VIRGINIA Don’t. He called me that. I don’t want to be loved, I want to be believed.
(Scene 2. The Conservatory at Dalingridge Hall. VIRGINIA sits slackly in an old-fashioned wheeled chair, gazing into nothingness.)
LEONARD How are you today, Virginia? Sleep well?
VIRGINIA
(galvanizing)
How can there be sleep for those of us who see the flesh melted off the world? Have you come to gloat over the shattered splintered fragments of my body? You care nothing for what they do to me! You macerate my soul. With sleep comes horrible dreams. I was trapped in a drainpipe with the savage hairy man who squats, gobbling and belching, dabbling at my entrails. Soon I will be shrouded in snail slime sticky from the hollow stalk. Get away from me! I don’t want to see you!
LEONARD
(humbly)
I’ve brought chocolate creams. You used to love those.
VIRGINIA You are a shadow. You torment me with shadows of the people I might have been, all my unborn selves. Go away, Leonard. Your cause is hopeless.
LEONARD No cause is hopeless as long as we can talk.
VIRGINIA I have nothing to say to you. Your kind disgusts me.
LEONARD You can’t realize how utterly you would end my life too if you died or ever dismissed me. Aren’t I still your precious Mongoose? Aren’t you my beloved Mandrill?
VIRGINIA Any real relationship between men and women is unattainable. It’s all nonsense and lies.
LEONARD Weren’t we going to create our own special relationship? A real marriage, unlike everyone else’s, a vital, living thing. That’s what we promised.
VIRGINIA And then you brought me to George’s house, you traitor.
LEONARD Officialdom requires certification following suicide attempts! You’d be a ward in chancery! This is the only way!
(He seems about to sit down, she stops him)
VIRGINIA If you sit I’ll start screaming and I won’t stop.
LEONARD I’m so afraid of the future, Virginia, if you can’t get strong.
VIRGINIA You want me to tolerate filthy fingers stuck down my throat! That’s what it comes down to, isn’t it?
LEONARD Is eating chocolate creams so terrible?
(He offers the box)
VIRGINIA Don’t come near me.
(He sets the box on the little table, kneels)
LEONARD I would grovel to you and kiss your toes if you would only listen to me, Virginia. Aren’t you better now? Aren’t you getting stronger? Look, you’re free and out of your straps. You’re sleeping some and eating a little. Have the hallucinations gone away?
VIRGINIA I’m terrified of sleep. I’m terrified of chloral and the nightmares it provides. When I wake at night and understand all the terror, violence and unreason still presiding over the universe it is worse than death. I am nothing. I am nobody. I am I-less.
LEONARD Didn’t you always say that only writing that brings order to madness? You called art humanity’s one defense.
VIRGINIA Art is a conspiracy among the civilized. Yet how can we call people civilized who insist on enslaving half their populace? Behold myself, empty-handed and force-fed, by your order. I know I have a good mind, but you have surrendered me to the very people bent on destroying it.
LEONARD Civilization is largely humbug, Virginia. That may be the only thing I’ve learned. I always felt I’m playing a part upon a stage. You’re the only honest person I’ve ever met and now you’re at risk. I just want you to get well, Virginia, so we can plan our hundred books.
VIRGINIA You care nothing for my plans! Shall I ever write again one of those sentences that gives me the most intense pleasure? For years now, people jerked wires to make me jump like a jack in the box when all I want is peace. I long to be ten miles beneath the sea. Here I am stuck in polar ice, harassed by barbarians.
LEONARD Your ice drifts toward home.
VIRGINIA
I have no home.
LEONARD
You will get well and our life will become possible again. As soon as you gain weight and master some calm and some cheer, we are free!
VIRGINIA Calm and cheer in a world like this one! Don’t treat me like some retarded infant. When we walked together at Asheham you inveighed against the world as a stupid, corrupt brothel.
LEONARD And I still believe that. I wanted to go into politics but politics is brutal and discouraging. Now I think I must change the world through workers’ cooperatives. We must stand up against all the evils that we see.
VIRGINIA You said writers are born to be unhappy.
LEONARD I fear to some extent that must be true. It’s harder on you, because you’re a sensitive, poetic writer. But if we swear to support each other –
VIRGINIA My punishment is unending. Mother didn’t approve of school for girls. Boys should go everywhere and know everything, and girls should stay home and know nothing. All my brothers were sent to school, where I must say they did horribly. George and Gerald were incurably stupid and Thoby jumped out a window rather than write his prep. But I learned Greek! I learned Latin! I read every book in Father’s library, all on my own! And here I am, sentenced to Bedlam for it.
LEONARD When you have seen the squalor that I have, you will realize that Dalingridge Hall is no punishment, Virginia.
VIRGINIA It’s a punishment for me. Think of its owners, in their smug pride, rulers of the universe. How can you of all people, abide them? But they seduce even you with their privilege, luxury and glamor. What is the use of the finest education in the world if it teaches people not to hate force but to use it? Why can’t we learn the arts of understanding people’s lives and minds? All that the professions preach is worship of the sacred tree of property.
LEONARD The doctors say you pushed yourself too hard.
VIRGINIA Is that what you really think, that diving deep is dangerous? Go away, Leonard. I can’t bear to hear you lie to me.
DR HYSLOP Here you go, Virginia. This will make you more comfortable.
VIRGINIA I don’t want a hypo! Your drugs are making me ill. Help! Help! Get away from me! Life has destroyed me, I am silenced. I have no stings left.
DR HYSLOP Virginia, you must rest. You’ve had a tiring journey but everything’s fine now. After a good sleep and a fine dinner, you’ll be right as rain.
VIRGINIA When I close my eyes I’m attacked and assaulted!
(She tries to thrash but he injects her. He pulls up a chair as she begins to subside. LEONARD sits uneasily)
DR HYSLOP Your wife’s constitution’s very strong. It’s all that exercise, I’m afraid. Young women of the present day indulge in gymnastic exercises that sadly retard their mammary development. It only makes it worse for her. Now what’s the cause of this current fuss? I could hear her screaming all the way upstairs. The staff was alarmed, I assure you. It’s very bad for them. Loosening the bonds of self-control always results in sexual license among the lower orders.
LEONARD Hostile fantasies about Sir George.
DR HYSLOP Don’t encourage her by listening. You can never argue a madman out of his madness, and you will succumb to madness if you try. This degradation is so common among artists, I assure you, especially the moderns. “Imagist” authors use disjointed gibberish the way madmen rave and think themselves quite clever.
LEONARD Virginia’s mind is free and remarkably fearless. I treasure that. She thinks the chloral is causing her hallucinations.
DR HYSLOP Sadly, it’s the lack of good blood, I fear, responsible for these behaviors.
LEONARD Sir, do you refer to my Jewish ancestry?
DR HYSLOP Not at all, though I think you will admit mixed marriages constitute a special danger. It is the sad mental history of the Stephens family to which I refer – uncle and sister institutionalized with cerebral exaltation and morbid excitement, agnosticism, heresy and even self-murder. Now you find yourself married to a young girl who is comfortable speaking obscenities! It’s all dung and semen among the avant garde. Britain has become a dumping ground of late for the terminally unfit. You were wise to come to me. Did you visit Colby Court as I suggested?
LEONARD It’s … awful. I can’t imagine Virginia there.
DR HYSLOP Do you know, once they have settled down they are happy in their own way. Virginia is testing you. I assure you Colby Court is the finest of its kind. It can be uncomfortable to view our loved ones in extremis, and once mental disease takes hold many family members cease to pay calls. It is better thus. I understand Virginia’s sister, for example, is never visited by any family member.
LEONARD What a tragedy! I couldn’t bear it. You should have seen the beautiful Miss Stephen who agreed to marry me, scintillating with charm and wit.
DR HYSLOP (comforting him)
Fruit of the poisonous tree.
LEONARD But isn’t Sir George, her brother, then also poisoned fruit?
DR HYSLOP Half-brother, my good sir. Not at all. The Duckworths are quite a different line. Obviously, no effort was made to acquaint you with the family lineage before your marriage. It is my belief that the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act and the failure to reform the marriage laws has caused much needless harm. I’m relieved you came to me for advice about propagation. In my view it would be most unwise.
LEONARD Dr. Savage says childbirth would be the best thing for her.
DR HYSLOP He was her attending physician and look at the state she’s in. Dr. Savage’s methods are sadly outdated, I regret to say.
LEONARD I don’t want children but Virginia think she does.
DR HYSLOP She’ll get over it. The question really is whether she should be certified. You do realize that your wife’s attempt at suicide mandates her certification for the protection of landlords, staff – anyone she encounters is at peril.
LEONARD We can’t do that. Once she is certified divorce is impossible. Roger Fry is chained to his mad wife forever.
DR HYSLOP You needn’t divorce, you have grounds for a nullity. Do you contemplate divorce?
LEONARD Not yet at any rate. But the honeymoon – it was ghastly.
DR HYSLOP Coitus was completed, I assume? Or not?
LEONARD Hard to say. On our wedding night Virginia became so excited, dashing about the room I admit I became quite angry shouting at her to lie down. I’m afraid she wet the bed. We’ve tried a few times since but under the circumstances my manhood is severely impaired.
DR HYSLOP I assume you had all the usual experiences of a man of the world?
LEONARD Oh, yes. In Ceylon it was all concubines and courtesans. I was very lucky not to contract the syph.
DR HYSLOP Yes, these hazards are much more common abroad. Your general health is quite good? Apart from the tremor, I mean.
LEONARD Jews are a hardy race. We can survive anything.
DR HYSLOP It might be that this young woman is simply too effete for coitus and must remain a natural spinster.
LEONARD I threw over my career for this marriage. It was a big step.
DR HYSLOP Civil service, I believe?
LEONARD I was administrator of Hambantota.
DR HYSLOP Bully for you! Britain’s colonizing, civilizing impulse is the glory of the world.
LEONARD Well, I found it a difficult, dangerous and dirty job.
DR HYSLOP So is caring for the terminally insane. My advice is that once Virginia is calmer you attempt to explain to her that if Dalingridge Hall were not open to her there is nowhere she can go without certification. Convince her that absolute fidelity to our dictates is her only hope of healing her poor brain. Keep your chin up, young fellow. Best not to think about yourself so much. Spend as much time as you can manage in the open air.
LEONARD I need a job. I must establish a writing career.
DR HYSLOP Return to the Civil Service, is my advice.
LEONARD The climate in Ceylon would kill Virginia.
DR HYSLOP You should discuss certification, annulment and divorce with a specialist solicitor. I can recommend a few names. All this brooding gets one into a funk, don’t you see? Cultivate a sense of proportion.
Following her honeymoon Virginia Woolf attempted suicide and was sent to recover at her half-brother’s estate, Dalingridge Hall.
CHARACTERS
Virginia Woolf: a sensitive young artist having a breakdown
Leonard Woolf: her new husband, nervous, forceful, an “outsider”
Dr. Craig: bluff, elderly, genial, doctor to the wealthy
Dr. Hyslop: a fashionable eugenicist
Two orderlies: rough & tumble Cockneys ALF & BOB (orderlies & doctors played by the same actors)
(Scene 1: Dalingridge Hall, An ostentatious faux British castle with all the updated luxurious mod-cons. A pair of white-coated orderlies maneuver a stretcher into a sickroom.)
ALF Hold up a mo, let’s have a fag.
BOB Buckle her in, and then we’ll have a fag.
ALF Now that’s right stupid, that is. Tie her up, the job is done. No time for a fag then.
BOB Oh, right. I get you. Where can we stow her? She’s heavy.
ALF Tall as a man and strong like one, so they say. Prop her up over here. Careful, now, you got me shin!
(They lean the stretcher against the wall facing the audience. Fumble with cigarette packs. ALF sits on the bed.)
BOB I don’t like her looking at us.
ALF Oh, she’s well out of it. Off to dreamland. Took the mickey out of her, they did.
BOB So what’s up with this one? Trying on hats and ordering jewelry too much for her?
ALF I heard it was her honeymoon what sank her!
BOB Oh, Lord!
(they both guffaw)
BOB Wonder it doesn’t happen routine-like, what with the shock and all. I mean, she’s not used to seeing the farm animals getting frisky in the spring. She’s not walking to church with the village lads. She’s not sharing a bed with the brothers and sisters. So everything seems right and proper until the big night and then –
ALF All hell breaks loose!
(they laugh uproariously)
BOB So, you seen the husband?
ALF Oh yes, he was hanging about. Wringing his hands.
BOB So what’s he look like, then? One of them muscle-bound rowing blues?
ALF No, no, no. Nervy bloke. Just back from the East where he’d been sorting out the blacks.
BOB Oh, Lord! Used to carrying a big stick is he?
(they gasp, cough, laugh and fall about)
VIRGINIA
(groggily)
What is this place? What vast forces of good and evil dropped me here? I burn, I shiver. I turn, I tumble, I am stretched. I am nailed like a stoat to the stable door.
ALF Oh my jugs and jiggers, she’s coming out of it. Look here, you take that end.
BOB Hold her up, hold her up!
ALF She’s heavy, I’m telling you. They feed them women up like Strasbourg geese. Look sharp now.
BOB There’s hell to pay if she’s not buckled in.
(They get her on the bed. Much buckling and strapping.)
VIRGINIA Who are you? Where am I? I have been diving through seas of horror to come up rotting in dirty ditchwater. Don’t touch me!
(She starts struggling when it’s too late. She’s already buckled in. The men rest, gratified but exhausted.)
ALF Nothing to fear, my lady. You’re all right now. You’re safe here at Dalingridge Hall.
(His last words reverential)
VIRGINIA Dalingridge Hall! Now the agony begins, horror has seized me with its fangs! I am turned, I am tumbled, I am stretched and everyone pursuing!
(She starts screaming)
ALF Hypo! We need a hypo!
(ALF and BOB rush about panicked. Enter LEONARD. Exit orderlies.)
LEONARD What is it? What’s happened?
VIRGINIA Dalingridge Hall! They’ve taken me to Dalingridge Hall!
LEONARD Virginia, your brother Sir George and his wife Lady Margaret have kindly lent us this splendid mansion. They’re staying up in London and have left it all to us. Up to date comfort. Plenty of servants – French chef – the food is magnificent. Eleven bathrooms! Spotless, hygienic, – the nurses are impressed I can tell you.
VIRGINIA Now this monstrous ugliness is explained. I hear the crack of antlers as if the beasts of the forest are rearing, plunging among the thorns. One has pierced me. One has driven deep within me. You have left me to undergo this squalid humiliation served out like soup by greedy, casual scullions, coarse, ogling, brushing, destroying everything, smearing even our love with impure fingers. “What is this secret sin, this untold tale, that art cannot extract nor penance cleanse?” Don’t you understand? ALL DEATHS ARE ONE DEATH.
LEONARD
Would you like to see Sir George?
VIRGINIA
George! That obese alligator who used to roll me round my bed of an evening as if I were a minnow shut up in a tank with a frenzied whale. I would rather touch a decaying dogfish than that man’s body.
LEONARD Hush, Virginia. George is an Adonis, a true man of the world, adored by great ladies and parliamentarians alike.
VIRGINIA George has the eyes of a sow! Or is it an elephant? Sows look so much like elephants on the Duckworth side of the family. He used to fondle me so I couldn’t read my Greek. The very locusts deform the trees with their lusts.
LEONARD George claims chastity until hi marriage. That’s more than I managed.
VIRGINIA What liars men are! George was a pig, snuffling, rolling, grabbing, calling me Beloved. How he tortured both of us, me and Vanessa alike, Greek slaves in the harem promised him by Eton. He smothered us with caresses until Nessa told Dr. Savage and Dr. Savage made him stop. George told Dr. Savage he was only comforting us for the illness of our father.
LEONARD Virginia, you’re romancing. Dr. Head says longing for adult attention creates a wish-fulfillment leading to ideas like these. He says the only way out is the talking cure.
VIRGINIA So it’s wish fulfillment that has trapped me in George’s house? Dr. Head is another booby, Leonard. We were right to dismiss him. He knows nothing.
(she grabs him)
Don’t you understand that we are poured to the very edge of the abyss, Leonard, where we shall be broken together into nothingness and flames? Help, help! Get me out of this thing!
LEONARD Dearest, you threatened to harm yourself, remember? You attempted suicide.
VIRGINIA You left the veronal unlocked. I thought it was an invitation. My father praised the Duke of Bedford for having the courage to shoot himself. Surely you longed to be rid of me. I’m a bad bargain all around.
LEONARD
No Virginia, no. I love you. I moved heaven and earth to save you.
VIRGINIA But I’m already dead, Leonard. I am certainly in hell. Fallen in a duck pond and strangling in duckweed! Quack, quack!
LEONARD Virginia, why do you reduce me to madness too? If you could only comprehend how insane you sound.
VIRGINIA You can’t think what a raging furnace it is to me, madness and doctors and being forced. I am bent like a tree under a remorseless gale. The crass blindness that poisons childhood still threatens bitter storms. Children will be trodden under. Speech is false. The demand to submit must always be returned with cries of pain, hate and rage because that’s all they understand.
LEONARD You were violent, Virginia. You attacked your nurses. Don’t you remember?
VIRGINIA I was defending myself. They attacked me! Forcing food down my throat. I will go down with my colors flying. Father used to say, “Face the inevitable with eyes wide open.”
LEONARD You vomited on Lily and you struck Susan with a platter of cold meat. You must eat to gain weight, Virginia. Then the voices will subside, the doctors say. That’s why they’ve ordered a rest cure.
VIRGINIA Those doctors! My life is a constant fight against doctors’ follies. That cretin, Savage? He’s not fit to be about. Borrowed from another century.
LEONARD Four doctors and all of them in agreement. You know this, Virginia. You chose Head yourself – because Roger Fry recommended him – Vanessa suggested Craig and I found Hyslop.
VIRGINIA Really, a doctor is worse than a husband. I’ve given up expecting doctors to listen to reason. If only those pigheaded sawbones could see I speak the sober truth without excuse! Alienists know absolutely nothing. Their vanity is as profound as their ignorance. What does their “treatment” amount to? It is all eating and drinking and being shut up in the dark, sequestered with lunatics.
LEONARD The food here is delicious. May I bring you some?
VIRGINIA Once when we travelled by train to St. Ives the lemonade spilled on the sandwiches and turned them into mush but Nurse still made us eat them and I was sick and then I was punished. Leonard, don’t you see that when I am weighted with food I can no longer make the moments flow together. I become an excreter, an excretion. No, of course you don’t see. You’re in a conspiracy, plotting against me. I see your grinning, I know your subterfuge, I hear you sneering behind my back.
LEONARD Virginia, the people who love you are trying to decide what’s best for you. I’m trying to make the best decisions I can.
VIRGINIA You’re punishing me for disappointing you. For being a bad wife.
LEONARD When you’re well, you admit you’ve been mad.
VIRGINIA My sister wanted to be rid of me. While she threw away our father’s possessions I lay in bed and heard the birds singing Greek.
“What bird so sings, so yet does wail? Tis the ravished nightingale Jug, jug, jug, tereu she cries And still her woes at midnight rise.”
LEONARD You’re hurting yourself with all this wild talk. No one can understand anything you say.
VIRGINIA People know very well enough but it’s a secret. King Edward spewed the foulest possible language amongst the azaleas and yet they crowned him. “Swallow, my sister, O Sister Swallow,” I sing. If I become king of the lunatics shall I escape molestation? God, I wish I were dead. I will soon have to jump out of a window.
LEONARD These violent oscillations, Virginia! If I could only get you to see! A whirlwind brings madness in its wake!
VIRGINIA How long can any man love a woman without driving her mad? How long can I protect my clean visions from the odious masculine point of view – from the egotism of men? You crack my brain like a thrush cracks a snail – hammer, hammer, hammer.
LEONARD I am not your enemy, Virginia.
VIRGINIA Then who else is? Why shouldn’t I be frightened? I wanted to spend my life innocently indifferent among the trees and rivers but instead men expose themselves whenever I step out doors. I saw a woman pinned beneath a car and horses falling in the street. Outside our scullery a man cut his own throat. His jowls were whitened as codfish. The human face is hideous. What are you doing? Don’t touch me!
LEONARD Trying to loosen your straps. You’re getting excited. Doctor!
(Lights up on Hamptons cottage, as before. WHITNEY assaults the door.)
WHITNEY Charmayne!! Charmayne!!
(Her stepmother opens the door. Slower, less confident; accusatory)
CHARMAYNE You’ve been avoiding me, Whitney. Why haven’t you returned my calls? I thought we were besties.
WHITNEY I wanted to bring you something.
CHARMAYNE (Haughty, but momentarily excited in spite of herself)
And what could you possibly give the woman who has everything?
WHITNEY Just this.
(Tenders a bullet)
CHARMAYNE Ooooo, scary! And what’s this supposed to represent?
WHITNEY It’s a bullet, Charmayne. It matches the bullets in your gun, the bullets all over this beach and the bullets in your stepfather.
CHARMAYNE My stepfather!
WHITNEY Yup. I’ve been to visit his grave.
CHARMAYNE Well, thank you for this –
(Mockingly, as she throws it out to sea)
I was never was two-faced as you, Whitney. My stepfather – who’s in hell, as you very well know from the personal, confidential disclosures that I made to you during a Girls Night Out – doesn’t have a grave. Anyway, nobody cares about that old stuff anymore.
WHITNEY There’s no statute of limitations on murder.
CHARMAYNE (Tries to grab her)
Statute! Limitations! Whit, do you need cash to go to law school?
WHITNEY (Evading her neatly)
It’s time to answer for what you’ve done.
(CHARMAYNE walks past her towards the ocean – crossed arms, thinking)
CHARMAYNE Your father wouldn’t want this.
WHITNEY I’m not doing it for him. I’m doing it for me.
CHARMAYNE This feels so odd. It’s not what I expected, at all. You never fail to surprise me, Whitney. Your enmity is so flattering. I feel… courted.
(Turns around to face WHITNEY, back in control)
So you think you know everything about me now?
WHITNEY I know all I need to know. For example, that you’re wondering right now whether it’s worth your while to get rid of me. Whether I have a partner in my researches who knows everything I’m doing. And the answer is yes.
CHARMAYNE I was not wondering how to get rid of you, Whitney! As if! I couldn’t get rid of you if I tried. You’re one of the Immortals.
WHITNEY Am I supposed to know what that is?
CHARMAYNE We Immortals have been here since time immemorial. We recognize each other. We are transformable, but essentially indestructible.
WHITNEY Wow, that’s so comforting. Lucky for us! And now it’s time for my second gift. I’m going to tell your fortune.
(Sits at the patio set table and starts shuffling cards)
CHARMAYNE (Approaching nervously, interested in spite of herself)
You can’t tell my fortune.
WHITNEY I’m the only one who can.
CHARMAYNE But that’s not my deck. So you can’t use it.
WHITNEY No. It’s my deck. You have to play the cards the goddess deals, right? Sit down. First, I’ll tell you your past.
(Produces a card – Hermit leaps up on the screen. Cards seemingly tremble, shimmer in the air) Recognize him?
(CHARMAYNE sits down)
CHARMAYNE It’s the Hermit.
WHITNEY There he is, with his broom and his light. Don’t you recognize him?
CHARMAYNE That’s a staff.
WHITNEY It’s a broom. It’s holding him up more than he’s holding it up. I saw him. I spoke to him. Mr. Butterbatch.
CHARMAYNE (Sounds delighted)
Old Butterbatch! Is HE still ticking! I can scarcely believe it – he was a hundred when I knew him. How is the old geezer?
WHITNEY Fine and dandy. I must say he remembers you very well, Destiny. He told me all about how the police have been longing to find the source of the female DNA all over the frog gigger they found sticking out of Burt’s throat. You must have cut yourself! Imagine that! Probably just a little nick. How would you even have noticed it, when there was so much blood?
CHARMAYNE Burt was vile, Whitney. Vile. Anyone would have done it. He needed to be put down.
WHITNEY Maybe, Charmayne. Who can judge? O, right, this guy! Justice!
(Tarot card leaps up to screen and trembles in the air)
CHARMAYNE Justice is female, Whitney. But I have faith in you. You’ll figure it out.
WHITNEY Must be where the phrase “stings like a bitch” comes from. And see that box she’s sitting on? That’s the box they’re going to put you in.
CHARMAYNE No one’s putting me in a box. Never.
WHITNEY Oh, they’re going to put you in a box, Charmayne. They’re going to put you in a series of boxes, like some kind of dangerous Matrushka doll. That’s three separate states you’ve unleashed mayhem in and they’re all going to want a crack at you. And who’s this? The Lovers!
(Tarot card onscreen)
There’s your girlfriend, Charmayne Carr. You must have known the cards would turn on you someday, Charmayne. Why don’t you just tell her family where you stashed that body? The prosecutor’s going to get it out of you, one way or another. After a few weeks of instant mashed potato mix, egg substitute, baloney and wonderbread you’ll tell them anything they want to know.
CHARMAYNE (Mocking) Shows what you know! I wonder if your much-vaunted “classical education” isn’t a pair of distortion goggles after all. Dr Carr’s family rejected her and she never gave a damn for any of them! She was free of all that. And for your information, the Lovers was never was her card. She was the Empress.
WHITNEY You said you weren’t two-faced like me, Charmayne. But you were careful, weren’t you? Did you give her the honor of confronting her the way I’m confronting you now or did wait until her back was turned?
CHARMAYNE She gave me her life! She was longing for me to absorb her! It was her free choice, one I wouldn’t expect you to understand. I was an Immortal! She recognized it and she yielded.
WHITNEY Sure, sure. That’s what always happens. The fish throws himself into the boat to save you from spearing it. Tell yourself anything that lets you sleep at night. Oh, wait, you can’t sleep, can you? It’s starting to show on your face.
(CHARMAYNE stands up and turns away, touching her face)
CHARMAYNE That was just mean, Whitney. That was uncalled for.
(WHITNEY produces another Tarot card – it leaps to the screen and shimmers in the air) Who’s this? An Emperor with the long white beard! Who can that be, I wonder!
CHARMAYNE (Turned away from the card, forces herself to sit down, put her feet up and make a show of relaxing)
Let me guess. A certain cardiac surgeon of our acquaintance?
WHITNEY Thoracic.
CHARMAYNE Thoracic surgeon. Now we get within sight of your real problem, Whitney, the real fountain of your rage. Your father was such a charming man, even in extreme old age. The Lady of Life met the Lord of Death: it was just the way he wanted it, it had to happen. He was so touchingly eager to enrich me, to pass along his acquisitions. You’re just jealous because he found a new pupil.
WHITNEY You thanked him by killing him!
CHARMAYNE I did reward him, Whitney. Your father was suffering. He begged me to put him out of his misery. Would you like me to summon him from the grave so you can ask him? You’ll see I’m right! I think from the first moment our eyes met in the job interview he knew I was the only one who could get the job done exactly the way he wanted. He begged me for that extra dose of morphine. Having a body became a torment to him. He could no longer enjoy anything.
WHITNEY As your body will torment you, while you rot away in jail. But at least somebody will get to enjoy it – whatever bullies or “Immortals” you’re lucky – or unlucky enough to run into. They’ll pass you around like a pizza.
CHARMAYNE (Snatches her feet off the table) I’m not going to jail, silly Whitney! Not ever! I served my time!
WHITNEY (Pulling herself forcibly together she produces another card – Judgment on screen – hugely vibrating )
Sorry, Pearleen – or whoever you are this week – childhood doesn’t count. Now here’s a lady you’ve never met. She showed me your stepfather’s grave.
CHARMAYNE (Labored change of tactics)
I like this new you, Whitney. So forceful, so ablaze.
(Pretends to shiver)
It’s so sexy. Pity it’s all wasted, that you’ve been so misled. Judgment is not the card you’ve been looking for all your life.
(Picks it up and sends it spinning – onscreen card – which she avoids looking at – seems to swell)
WHITNEY But this is the one card we have in common. The lady who tends your stepfather’s grave – saving it for the investigators – she brandished a trumpet and everything. Looks like the goddess has given up on you, Charmayne.
CHARMAYNE Nice try, but my stepfather doesn’t have a grave. He didn’t deserve one.
WHITNEY Yeah, he does, and I took a picture of it. See?
(Shows her phone)
The Hidden Glade developers found him when they paved over Dead Lake and they treated him to a nice box of his very own. There he is, just waiting for someone to find a match to those bullets.
(She pulls a bullet from a chain around her neck)
This bullet, for example. I chose it from the many bullets you’ve sprayed around this beach. You’ll never find them all.
CHARMAYNE (Crossed arms) I never transitioned anyone that didn’t want it or deserve it.
WHITNEY Transition! Now there’s a word! But the law doesn’t respect your private language, you know. They have a language all their own. You killed Charmayne Carr to steal her identity. You killed my father to get rich. You killed the night manager to steal his stash. You killed your stepfather to steal his wheels and run away.
CHARMAYNE (Firing up immediately)
None of that is true and you of all people –
WHITNEY That’s what they’ll say. I’m just trying to prepare you. That’s what prosecutors always say, based on what they can prove. It’s worst case scenario right at the beginning, Pearleen, so prepare yourself. I’m sure your oh-so-expensive defense attorney will explain to them about your “Immortals” theory. That’ll sound good to the jury. Or maybe he’ll just give up and plead insanity. Possibly you should represent yourself in court – after you’ve had all that plastic surgery you’ve been thinking about.
CHARMAYNE I ‘m not bothering with the law, Whitney. Don’t you see that the law’s a charade? A puppet dance for marionettes? I was greedy for life, Whitney. For ecstasy, for joy. For experiences and possessions, so I took them. I’m not ashamed. I’ve had everything I ever wanted.
WHITNEY Then isn’t it time?
CHARMAYNE For what?
WHITNEY To give up.
CHARMAYNE I’ll never give up!
WHITNEY (Produces a final card)
Because here’s your future. The Hanged Man. He sees the world upside down. And it’s the last thing he sees.
(Card onscreen)
CHARMAYNE You’re young, Whitney. Nothing wrong with that! You know nothing about the real world, by which I mean the invisible world that pulses beneath the visible. Your father kept you from it with that “classical education”. You need to take your time figuring out who – and what you really are. I could help you. We could share all this.
WHITNEY No.
(Throws a card at her – Death appears onscreen)
Death, Charmayne. That’s your future. Your future is Death.
CHARMAYNE (Upends the table, scattering everything – rises from her chair)
I can’t die. It won’t happen. Didn’t I explain it to you? Listen, Whitney. We make our own reality. You’re my mirror.
WHITNEY I’m your parabolic mirror, sent to fry you to a crisp.
CHARMAYNE Don’t say it like that. What if I admit you’ve won? Here, take the dagger. Now you’re the new Queen of Swords.
WHITNEY Someone told me never to “settle”.
CHARMAYNE (Kneeling beside her)
It’s breaking my heart that I can’t explain this to you.
WHITNEY Don’t kid yourself, Destiny. A heart was one of the encumbrances you left behind.
CHARMAYNE Is this what love feels like? I’m not used to wanting things I can’t have.
WHITNEY You just tried to convince me you’re immortal, you’ll never talk me into thinking you’re human!
CHARMAYNE It’s so strange! You feel about me the way I thought about them. Murder kills feeling. And if you can’t feel, you can’t enjoy. If you can’t enjoy, you might as well be dead.
WHITNEY I guess there’s a limit to everything, and you’ve reached yours.
CHARMAYNE (Turns to face the audience)
Maybe it is my time to find out my next stage. I’ve always wondered who I really am. Your father called me a “living doll,” Burt said I was cold as ice, the Empress named me “the marble-hearted”. My step-dad said I wasn’t a little girl, I was a cockroach like him.
(Touches WHITNEY)
Help me.
WHITNEY I’m helping you to see that it’s the end. You’ve had a good run, but it’s over.
CHARMAYNE You don’t even know what you’re rejecting! Let me show you what you’re missing –
(Tries to embrace WHITNEY who pushes her away)
WHITNEY (Roughly)
You’re not my type.
CHARMAYNE Isn’t there anything I can give you to change your mind? Think, Whitney. Aren’t I the only person in the universe who really understands you? Sees you for what you are?
WHITNEY Actually, you aren’t. But there is something you can give me.
CHARMAYNE (Such relief)
What? Anything! Name it.
WHITNEY I want you to prove your immortality.
(Points out to the audience)
Swim out there. Keep swimming. And don’t come back.
CHARMAYNE Are you sure that’s what you really want?
WHITNEY (Gesturing)
Challenge your Goddess to a swimming match. Be my guest. Bye-bye.
CHARMAYNE A swim? That’s all you want? When I am willing to share everything? All the secrets?
WHITNEY A swim to eternity. That’s all that I want.
CHARMAYNE (Brittle laugh)
You can see me naked any time, Whitney. No need to go through all this.
WHITNEY Just swim. I don’t care how.
CHARMAYNE But it’s freezing!
WHITNEY You swim here every night.
CHARMAYNE But the weather’s changed. It’s gone dark and cold. Still, they say beyond the water lies a place where all waters part. I could re-invent myself.
(Looking out)
So once again I’m the initiate, am I? It’s funny how things come around.
(Comes closer peering way, way out beyond the audience’s eyes.)
I wonder what’s out there. A little tequila before I go? For old time’s sake?
WHITNEY You’ve had all the tequila. Go.
(WHITNEY’S implacable so CHARMAYNE starts undressing.)
CHARMAYNE Look at my beautiful body, Whit. Won’t it be a shame to waste it?
WHITNEY Stop begging and save your strength.
CHARMAYNE (Insulted)
Begging? Is that what you think I’m doing?
(To herself)
The Empress told me that to find your dominant was heaven. I see it now. You’re the goddess who can never be denied.
(Bows at her feet – WHITNEY steps away in agitation)
WHITNEY Stuff it. Soft soap won’t work on me. I’ve never had it and I don’t want it. Your goddess is out there. Go find her.
CHARMAYNE (Kicking her clothes away)
This is all so different from what I imagined. I’m so different. It’s the ultimate surprise.
WHITNEY You may have more surprises waiting just around the corner.
CHARMAYNE I can feel myself getting younger. Like a child, begging for that one last story before lights out! Who knew after all this time that sacrifice – that giving up my strength would prove to be the missing fountain of youth! Will the Goddess reveal herself to me unveiled? Whose face will she wear, I wonder?
(Shivers)
WHITNEY You knew this was coming! You had to know!
CHARMAYNE I thought if my past ever caught up to me I’d…be destroyed. Disemboweled like the Hanging Man. Poison. The asp. Who knew it would feel so sweet? Relief.
WHITNEY (Somewhat shaken)
More cons.
CHARMAYNE What relief to concentrate on the physical challenge ahead. Oh, the blessing of the physical!
(Steps into the “water”, clutching her arms.)
There was always another freedom, right around the corner. What new thing comes next? Freedom’s the lover I pursued all my life, and still she evades me. There’s always a greater freedom… somewhere.
(Steps down into the audience. Swimming)
Suddenly I feel so shy. It’s like being thirteen again. If my stepfather had never existed, who would I have become?
WHITNEY (Coming down to the water to watch)
Maybe you’ll find out.
CHARMAYNE The Empress recommended surrender. She said it felt so good! They all told me…or tried to tell me. Who could predict that Death would come to me as a beautiful young woman?
(Breaststroke)
Is this right? Am I doing it right?
(WHITNEY gestures “farther out”. CHARMAYNE blows her a kiss.)
Goodbye, my nemesis.
(Faces outwards.)
Hello, Virginity!
(Swims away through the audience. Exit.)
(WHITNEY drops her “Judgment” pose, leaps to her feet, paces up and down the beach, peering out to sea. Increasingly anxious. Enter EIGHT to stand behind her and put his arms around her. She shakes him loose. Pacing.)
EIGHT Is she gone?
WHITNEY
I’ll never know! I thought it was all an act! I never thought it would work! She can’t be gone if I don’t feel she’s gone, can she? I’m so scared she injected herself inside me, like a brainworm! Am I a murderer now, too?
(Calls loudly)
Wait, wait! I’ve changed my mind! Come back! Let’s talk!
(EIGHT tries to calm her, she collapses into bitter weeping.)
EIGHT You’re acting like you lost your best friend. Don’t forget she was your bitterest enemy. She was the world’s enemy.
WHITNEY You confused her with your demon, but she was my demon.
(Shaking her head)
No, no. It was over too fast. What did I say? I blurted out a bunch of lies, just like she did. I had to turn myself into her in order to catch her! What if I can’t change back? I did everything wrong.
EIGHT (Hugs her)
Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re decompressing. You were in an impossible situation. It worked! You did everything right.
WHITNEY But I miss her. Now I have nothing. No offense, but now I have nobody.
EIGHT No offense taken. You’re just feeling the emptiness where the anger used to be. Let it melt away. Of course it’s going to hurt. There’s a whole wide world out there and it needs you. The universe is full of treasure.
WHITNEY Didn’t I tell you I hate it when you talk about treasure?
EIGHT No. Sorry. Maybe I need a new expression.
WHITNEY I need a lot of new expressions. New words. I need a whole new language.
EIGHT It’s out there, Whitney. When you can’t manage forgiveness, just let go.
WHITNEY That’s what she said! It’s myself I can’t forgive.
EIGHT It takes awhile. You’ll figure it out. It’s like being born all over again. I have faith in you.
WHITNEY She said that too!
EIGHT She doesn’t own ideas, Whitney. She doesn’t own emotions, or the past, or even the future. She used those things as camouflage for her greed. For her appetites. Come. Walk with me.
WHITNEY No. No. I can’t leave. She might come back. You’re just trying to re-make me in your image.
EIGHT Absolutely not. The thing I like most about you is, you’re not me. Take your time, Whitney. This is your chance to be you. You’re telling your own fortune, now.
WHITNEY (Looking out over the ocean)
If I’m telling my own fortune I might as well give myself a really good one. Do you think she’s really gone?
EIGHT She’s less than nothing now. Hold my hand.
(Touching her)
You’re cold. Don’t you want to go inside?
WHITNEY No. I have to stay right here. For awhile.
(Sits down.)
In case she comes back. She might come back. Will you wait with me? At least till dark? Or till I get used to missing her? There were so many things I forgot to say.
EIGHT Rehearse them. Tell them all to me. I’m here.
(Sits beside her, they clutch hands, staring out into the audience. Lights out)
(Lights up on – Graveyard with sign, DEAD LAKE CEMETERY. WHITNEY approaches to read a stone aloud)
WHITNEY “John Doe – a friendless stranger. The Lord will recognize His own”.
(Enter a grave-tending woman, MRS DAVISH with basket of gardening tools and wheeled cart of plants.)
MRS. DAVISH Did you know that poor lost soul?
WHITNEY Looks like nobody knew him.
MRS. DAVISH (Pulls an ear trumpet off her cart and holds it to her head) What’s that you say? Speak up.
WHITNEY A trumpet!
MRS. DAVISH Just funning with you! My hearing’s perfect.
(Tosses the trumpet back on the cart.)
You wouldn’t believe the things people leave on graves around here. And the signs say, Plants Only. Trust me, Great Grampster hears fine in heaven. Care to purchase a remembrance for this grave? It would be very thoughtful of you.
WHITNEY I’m not sure he’s the right one. Is he the only John Doe you’ve got?
MRS. DAVISH He’s the only one. Usually people no one can identify go straight to paupers’ field. But the Hidden Glade developers paid for this poor gentleman.
WHITNEY Why would they?
MRS. DAVISH Maybe ‘cause they’re the ones that disturbed his peace by digging him up. But they didn’t bother to buy the perpetual care — that is rarer than hen’s teeth… They do say nothing is perpetual but my fond fancy… Look, I could just give you some flowers if you’re not too particular.
(Rummages in her cart)
WHITNEY Nothing for me, thank you. Doesn’t he ever get … remembrances?
MRS. DAVISH Never. Poor lost soul. Anything that’s ever been on that grave, I’ve put there myself.
WHITNEY Well, that’s peculiar, don’t you think?
MRS. DAVISH Not in the least. It’s the rule, really. You’d be surprised. No one speaks for the dead.
WHITNEY But when you want to speak up for them, it seems like they object.
MRS. DAVISH (Smiles at her)
Some of them can get a little noisy.
WHITNEY So how long have you been working here?
MRS. DAVISH Oh! Thirty years. Thirty-five years, off and on. My grandmother brought me every Sunday. You could call it a ritual. You’re welcome to try breaking out of long-established rituals – but it can’t be done.
WHITNEY Glad I found you. Seems lately I owe everything to people living in the past. So this man was buried by the Dead Lake developers, eh?
MRS. DAVISH Sssh. They don’t like the connection to anything “dead”. Hidden Glade, it’s called these days. Yup, a backhoe tossed this man up and out like a ragdoll!
WHITNEY But where’d they find him?
MRS. DAVISH Heavens, I don’t know! You never saw such a frenzy of obfuscation! One of those houses around the lake they bulldozed is all I know. There’s no fact-getting at this late date.
(WHITNEY looks depressed – MRS DAVISH leans to stage whisper)
But they did have to call the cops!
(Sage nodding. WHITNEY perks up)
WHITNEY And why’s that?
MRS. DAVISH (Leans forward to whisper)
He was as full of lead as a shad full of roe! They took some out and left the other ones inside!
(Pats tombstone lovingly)
Died of “heavy metal” poisoning, poor old thing.
WHITNEY Wow! Not a popular guy.
MRS. DAVISH Either that, or he was far too popular to suit somebody.
(They laugh)
WHITNEY But couldn’t they tell what house he came from?
MRS. DAVISH I’m telling you they didn’t want to know! Tenants had been pushed out and disappeared long before.
(Pulls down an eyelid)
There’s none so blind as those who will not see.
WHITNEY I guess ancient corpses full of bullets are pretty blind, too.
MRS. DAVISH True, true. Who wants to buy a property that had a murder on it? Who signs up for a haunting? Said they owed it to the shareholders to hush things up. But truth is the daughter of time, not of authority, says the poet.
WHITNEY Surely somebody checked for missing people!
MRS. DAVISH Oh naturally. Naturally. But nobody was missing! Everyone accounted for. He was some poor stranger.
WHITNEY So maybe it was a “good riddance” situation.
MRS. DAVISH Most likely.
WHITNEY (Jubilant) Under the circumstances, then, I’d like to buy some flowers.
MRS. DAVISH The pinks are magnificent this time of year. Or acacia. Means “Secret love” in the language of flowers, not that anyone tries speaking that no more. But for those of us in the know, it lends a little added pleasure. Got some beautiful violets just coming into bloom.
WHITNEY The language of flowers, eh? So what do violets mean?
MRS. DAVISH Faithful love.
(Quoting)
“The faithful shall be rewarded,” that’s what the violets say.
(On the beach. Door in the house opens and CHARMAYNE, wearing only a filmy cover-up over her bikini, steps out exultantly to spread her arms to the moon)
CHARMAYNE Moon, Mother-Sister-Goddess, whose tears fertilize the world, I seek permission to penetrate your veil.
WHITNEY (Awkwardly standing) Er – Char –
CHARMAYNE Oh, my God, Whitney! You scared the life out of me. What are you doing here?
WHITNEY Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you.
CHARMAYNE (Insulted)
I’m surprised, that’s all. You’re never here this late. Should I be flattered? What have you got there?
(WHITNEY proffers the bottle.)
WHITNEY I was trying to get up the nerve to speak to you.
CHARMAYNE Tequila?
(Laughs.)
WHITNEY It’s my drink. Want some?
CHARMAYNE Why couldn’t you just come to the door?
WHITNEY You were…with someone.
CHARMAYNE (Burbling laughter)
Ramon’s gone, you must have heard the television! Don’t be jealous of the television. You’re adorable! Give me some of that.
(Seats herself comfortably and takes the bottle)
WHITNEY Sorry I don’t have any cups.
CHARMAYNE Oh. Whitney, I’m the Queen of Cups, didn’t you know?
(Laughs and drinks)
Queen of bottles, too. So what did you want to talk to me about?
WHITNEY I wanted to ask your advice on something.
(Making it up on the spur of the moment)
I’ve got a problem at college, and you know all about men. My advisor is…handsy.
CHARMAYNE Handsy! There’s an expression I haven’t heard for awhile.
WHITNEY (Inspired) He’s a real – Casper the Grasper. He always pretends it’s a joke or a mistake. I don’t know what to do. He’s the head of the department. If I complain –
CHARMAYNE Never complain, Whit. Never settle. We’re better than that. You need to get even. Trust me, that’s where all the real satisfaction is.
(Takes another swig – offers it to WHITNEY who pretends to drink)
This is so much fun! I was yearning for a Girls Night Out!
(Puts her arm through WHITNEY’S)
This may amaze you, but I get lonely too. It’s a well-kept secret life can be lonely at the top. Finding my equal just gets harder and harder.
WHITNEY There’s Ramon –
CHARMAYNE Oh, please! Ramon’s just an employee and he knows it. Men! Even well-trained men are…a limited indulgence. And there’s one thing they can’t ever get right.
(Smacks WHITNEY’S thigh as she cuddles up to her)
This part.
(EIGHT looks over the boulder. WHITNEY seems emboldened by his presence)
WHITNEY So have you ever done it? Gotten even?
CHARMAYNE (Bragging)
I always get even. Nobody messes with me twice.
(Swig. She’s not even sharing the bottle anymore)
WHITNEY (Settling down for a story)
Tell me about it.
CHARMAYNE You’ll have to take off your clothes first.
(Uncomfortable moment. WHITNEY pulls away.)
Did you think offering me a drink would be enough to get me to unburden?
WHITNEY What are you talking about?
CHARMAYNE I need to know you’re not recording me, silly girl. I’ve been blackmailed by pros. What happens on Girls Night Out stays on Girls Night Out. Hos before bros. Come on. Hurry it up. Look at me, I’m not wearing anything.
WHITNEY (Peels down to her underwear)
Believe me, I’m not “recording” anything.
CHARMAYNE That’s what they all say. Knowledge backfires in the hands of the novice. Turn around. Let me look. Phone turned off?
(She runs her hand thru bra & panties)
You know what? I believe you. You couldn’t lie to save your soul. And you’re the most awful blusher, has anybody ever told you that? You blush with your whole body!
WHITNEY (Blushing)
I’m aware.
CHARMAYNE Lucky for you. People automatically trust blushers because blushing’s involuntary.
WHITNEY People trust me because they know I care about the truth.
CHARMAYNE Oh, bullshit! The truth! The Sacred Truth! There’s no such thing! There’s what happened and there’s what we think happened – who can tell the difference? OK, sit down. Take a load off. Have a drink to loosen you up.
(WHITNEY pretends to drink)
You’ve got a good body, you know that? Nice and hard. Lovely tone. You’re lacking a waist, that’s all. You inherited your father’s physique as well as his brains. It’s all about pluses and minuses. You have to work against the minuses. Men are prejudiced against waistless girls because their hard wiring makes them suckers for a certain waist to hip proportion. Did you know that? But we don’t care about them, do we? Who needs them? Prisoners of their reflexes! Born to mate! Man proposes, the goddess disposes!
WHITNEY Charmayne, you turn every conversation into a Whitney – critiqueathon. Why’s that?
CHARMAYNE Because you interest me, little Whit. You interest me extremely. You’re smart. The way your father was … at first.
WHITNEY (Refusing to be drawn. Grits her teeth to get through this.)
Please don’t talk about him. And don’t tell me to make myself gorgeous for Casper the Grasper.
CHARMAYNE Listen, if you were gorgeous he wouldn’t have the nerve to touch you.
WHITNEY I think the beautiful get harassed, too.
CHARMAYNE But they have more options. They can –
WHITNEY I want to hear about you. Tell me about that time that you got even.
CHARMAYNE (Very expansive)
There are so many! But let’s start at the beginning. Here’s something you didn’t know about me. I had a stepfather. You may complain about me, but the problem with you, Whit, is that you always take your good luck for granted. I never take anything for granted. I’m a day at the beach compared to that guy. Talk about “handsy”!
WHITNEY (Pretending to drink, then surrendering the bottle)
So what was he like?
CHARMAYNE What was he like? He was a monster, that’s what he was like. He was Death, the Hanged Man, the Tower. He thought he was the God of Wrath, that asshole. He was only a king of Destruction.
(Swigs from the bottle)
Destruction is easy. It’s creation that’s hard. It’s creating that takes it out of you. Every time I look in the mirror and recreate myself, I am spitting on his grave. He acted so convinced that I’d end up nothing, just like him. All he ever gave me was a spiral fracture of the arm.
WHITNEY (Shocked and appalled)
Why’d your Mom marry him?
CHARMAYNE She couldn’t believe he wanted to marry her! She’d never been married – God knows who my real father was. She thought if any vaguely presentable guy – even some unemployed wastrel on disability – proposes to you, you HAVE to say yes. She met him at the diner where she cooked. Oh, yeah, my Mom worked. And worked and worked. Two shifts a day. My step-dad was supposed to take care of me. She thought she’d hit the lottery to win some guy with a disability check and nothing but time on his hands to look after me for free. He used every second ratcheting up my misery. I couldn’t stay at school every minute, but you better believe I wanted to. I knew I had to go home to him eventually. But the joke was on him. He thought he was so smart but he sure underestimated me.
(She’s lost, now, talking to the audience)
What a scrawny, worthless loser! He knew the entire universe despised him so he thought he’d get himself a slave. Someone he could push around. I was eleven when he told me it was his duty to teach me about sex. He said that was what stepfathers were for.
WHITNEY But your Mom –
CHARMAYNE (Angrily)
Oh, my Mom knew perfectly well what was going on! It meant she didn’t have to cope with him!
(Returns attention to courting the audience, cultivating her reverie. WHITNEY muffles up to ease the flow)
Mom’s cooperation (I should say her silence, because she was way too fat to “cooperate”) could be bought with a carton of snack cakes.
My step-dad pretended I was ugly; that he could barely bring himself to touch me. He expected me to worship him. But he must have known that the moment I grew up I’d try to get away. Maybe he thought he could keep me forever, like a hostage. Once, when my girlfriends and I streaked our hair for a sleepover, he acted as if I had set the house on fire. Luckily it was the kind that washes out; otherwise I think he really would have shaved my head.
I remember exactly how scared I felt the first time I decided to ignore my stepfather’s dictates about how I should look and dress. My first day of high school I knew I couldn’t go in there looking like some Amish refugee. I had to step up my game. It was terror, rank terror, the kind that makes you wet yourself; but you know what enemies forget? That fear is the rocket fuel of rebellion. Remember that, Whitney. You’ll never experience an emotion like that; you’ve been too sheltered. My stepfather’s own possessive rage became the engine of his death.
I try not to think about him too often because my energy is the only thing that gives him life, but you know, I’m glad to share this with you. Open it up, get it out of my head. The memories are still there, perfect and crystal clear. Nothing that happened in all those years since packs that kind of punch. I was just beginning to realize that my stepfather couldn’t actually read my mind, had no eyes in the back of his head, could not see through walls, did not have spies everywhere, was not connected to the Mafia or the CIA. It was him or me. How could I destroy him?
That year Saturn and Mars were equally fiery, it was dry and there was a comet. Perfect for revolution. He was weakening and I was strengthening. Your father taught you that in chess queens rule: my step-dad was too stupid to know it. So our battles escalated. I was getting as tall as he was; he must have figured his fists and penis were no longer sufficient to control me. One day he produced a gun. His idea was that we would have a threesome, little me, paralyzed with fear, and Superman with his two dicks. My idea was different.
He knew I was afraid of the cellar. He used to lock me down there for punishment when I was little. As a child, I thought it was the mouth of hell; a dirt hole stinking like a sewer clawed out beneath the bowels of the house. When he pushed me down there I never even passed the top step but just clung to the doorknob, eye pressed to the light crack, wailing for release.
(A slug of fast-vanishing booze. Turns her attention back to WHITNEY)
Will is a muscle, Whit; you can train it just the way you train the body. I had transcended so many fears already; why couldn’t I outgrow this one? What is the fear of confrontation, really, but the fear of change? What is the fear of being caught but the fear of ultimate failure, of not being powerful enough? Poisoning him didn’t work – I tried that – hoping to make his death look accidental; so, what if he simply disappeared? Nobody except his bar buddies would even notice he was gone. And they were way too fuzzyheaded to stage any meaningful hunt. Mom could just keep cashing his checks. Who would know? And she owed me. He’d overstayed his welcome on this planet; neither of us needed a babysitter any more. If weapons are engines of confrontation, Whitney, both of us could use them.
That was when I fell in love with power, Whitney. I had to, and you can too, or you’ll never get anywhere. Let me be your teacher.
(Strokes WHITNEY’s hair, uses finger for a gun)
Pop, pop, pop, and “pop” is gone. I knew how to cock the pistol; I knew how to release the safety because I’d seen him do it countless times. If the cellar was dirty and stinky, and no one ever went down there, why couldn’t I bury him where nobody would ever look?
So, while he was out buying smokes I fired up my nerve and took a flashlight down to check it out. That wooden staircase rocked like it was going to collapse, but I told myself it had only to hold me two more times. There were bugs, just as I feared; centipedes and worms, but now I saw them as my friends. Let them eat the bastard up; if only they’d chew his bones as well. The walls were caving in; hunks of unhewn stone overpowered by tree roots. Then I saw my blessing. A wooden well cover. I knew the time was now.
I recalled the furor when the county forced us on to public water. My step-dad raged that fluoridation was a commie plot. And all that time the old well was down there. Water in the bottom reflected my flashlight as I leaned over. It was even set flush with the floor; what could be easier? I practiced moving the wooden cover; no problemo. The only difficulty now was to get him down here with the gun.
So I told him I heard rats; I knew he longed for targets; especially in front of me. When I said they were scratching at the door, he was ready to go.
But he liked being a man of surprises, fancying he was in control. He made me go down first, carrying the flashlight and a garbage bag. That meant I couldn’t tackle him from behind the way I’d planned. It cut down on my time for action, because as I think I said before, the place was just a tiny hole. He would see I was a liar.
But if he had surprises, I had ideas. The garbage bag gave me a good one. I had a friend who earnestly believed violence engenders hauntings, but she didn’t see her own death coming. But if what she said is true, that cellar’s haunted forever by me in a red sweater, red kilt and plaid tights; and my step-dad wearing a garbage bag over his head while we struggled for the gun. I had to drop the flashlight; it shot a crazy, useless stream of light across the floor; we were in darkness.
He was wiry and desperate and amazingly strong, but I had the gun two-handed and I would not have let it go if the world around me exploded into flames. I discovered in that moment the secret of power, Whit, if you want something with your whole being, if you have not one cell of doubt, you are invincible. I had to kick his crotch to loosen up his grip, but the gun came to me pre-cocked. What an idiot! I shot him right through the bag. That gun kicked like a rattlesnake. I shot him again and again and again, and one of the bullets somehow came back to graze me in the face. Doesn’t bother me. This chip along my cheekbone – see? I wear it as a badge of honor.
(Demonstrates to WHITNEY)
I still have that gun. I can show you if you want to see it.
(She’s slurring her words now. Shakes the empty bottle.)
There’s another one that fell before The Queen of Swords! Think we should put a message in this thing? What would we say?
(Pulls arm back to throw bottle into the audience, sits down hard)
WHITNEY So you’re telling me to shoot my way out?
(CHARMAYNE laughs. shakes & holds her head)
CHARMAYNE Oh, Whitney, you’re always so literal! Your father hoped you’d be a lawyer. Wow, am I drunk. Guess I should have eaten dinner, but who wants to eat alone? Don’t be so silly, Whit. You can’t dip your hand in the same river twice. Your guy’s got weaknesses is all I’m saying. Search – searching –
(Seems like she’s losing track of her thoughts)
You’ve got to search them out. I can’t do everything for you. Learn to defend yourself. No one helps anyone else and the sooner you find that out, the better off you’ll be.
(Throws herself on her back)
Look at those stars, Whit. So many stars. Every star’s a lost soul, struggling for a piece of sun. Did you know I can’t sleep, Whit? I haven’t slept in days. But, I think I can sleep now. There’s something so safe, so reassuring about you.
(Loud snoring. EIGHT and WHITNEY stand over her looking down)
WHITNEY Should we move her?
EIGHT Don’t disturb her. Jeez, when she goes down, she goes down hard.
(CHARMAYNE reaches up scrabbling at the air.)
CHARMAYNE I hear you! What did you say?
(Burps)
This has been so fun. Look out, there’s two of you!
(Rolls over, cuddles up in WHITNEY’s clothes. WHITNEY tries to cover herself – EIGHT lends her his Hawaiian shirt)
WHITNEY I don’t – thanks.
EIGHT Hey, it’s a beautiful night.
WHITNEY Well, they say confession is good for the soul. But you have to have a soul.
EIGHT I’m sure she’s got something left way down deep in there. But it’s probably a poor, stubby, underfed little thing. You take off, I’ll watch over her.
(The Hamptons. Lights up on WHITNEY, sitting against the boulder, staring out at the ocean, drinking from a bottle of tequila. EIGHT approaches and sits beside her silently.)
EIGHT What? No door hammering? Your fists must be sore.
WHITNEY I’m waiting for her to come out and swim. She usually does – when the moon is full. Then I’m going to brain her with this bottle. Which will be empty at that point.
(EIGHT takes the bottle away)
EIGHT Save the tequila for her. You catch more flies with the tequila than by trying to smash them drunkenly with a bottle.
WHITNEY Hey, but at least I’d feel better.
EIGHT Let’s play a game. Role-play with me. What were you planning to say to her?
WHITNEY (Screwing up her face with struggle)
I guess… nothing. She scares me so badly I can’t think. You should hear the way she talks to me! I can’t break through this “I’m a great lady and you’re a poor little supplicant” routine. I was planning on getting drunk and then maybe having enough courage to wing it.
EIGHT This sounds like HER game plan. Deer in the headlights.
WHITNEY Well, it’s working.
(She tries to wrestle the bottle away – he keeps tight control)
Hey! It’s MY bottle!
EIGHT Wait for it to hit you before you pack on more. You probably need every bit of this for her – she strikes me as a hard drinker. Take my word for it, booze and ocean are a dangerous combination.
WHITNEY Is that so?
EIGHT I know from personal experience.
WHITNEY Is that how you died?
EIGHT (Points to his chest)
Me? Last time I checked I was a conscious, breathing human being.
WHITNEY I’ve been seeing too many ghosts lately. I guess some of them aren’t even dead yet.
EIGHT (Sits down beside her)
Lay off of that stuff if you want to know what’s real.
(Long lingering kiss)
That real enough for you?
WHITNEY (She stares at him a long time)
I’m not sure. I think I need another one.
(He obliges.)
EIGHT Ready to tell me what happened?
WHITNEY And here I was figuring you were all knowing!
EIGHT It’s easy to be all knowing about someone else’s business. It’s my own that has me stumped. Share what you discovered.
WHITNEY Well, you sent me spinning off to confront her and get my fortune read. She told me some people don’t have souls.
EIGHT She’s lying. I’m all-knowing enough about that.
WHITNEY She says people lose their souls.
EIGHT She’s messing with you. Don’t believe a word she says.
WHITNEY So after we find out she’s an identity thief whose prey has mysteriously disappeared you send me dancing off to see who else she’s murdered. Guess what! Turns out here WAS a guy, she probably did it but we’ll never prove it.
EIGHT What makes you so sure?
WHITNEY The police destroyed the evidence! On purpose!
(She leans toward him and whispers conspiratorially)
“GRASSY KNOLL”
. EIGHT You can still win this. Even with incompetent police, bedfellow prosecutors and bribable jailers you can win this.
WHITNEY Why’s that?
EIGHT Karma. Also known as, what comes around goes around.
WHITNEY We WISH.
EIGHT All you need’s more time. Cons simply can’t get away with it forever. Call it “hanging in there”. You have to let destiny know that you won’t let go.
WHITNEY Did you say “Destiny?” That was her stripper name!
EIGHT See? It started already! Be as wily as a serpent and as gentle as a dove.
WHITNEY I think I aced the “gentle” part.
EIGHT So all you need is wily. Ever asked yourself why she wastes time with you? Hasn’t she got everything she wants? What’s she hanging around here for?
WHITNEY She enjoys torturing people, and the better she knows them the more fun it is.
EIGHT Maybe. I think she needs something from you and you need to figure out what that is.
WHITNEY She did say I reminded her of herself. I was so horrified I almost upchucked.
EIGHT There you go! She’s looking for an heir! A protégée!
WHITNEY She actually used that word!
EIGHT See? You’re on your way!
WHITNEY But why me?
EIGHT
Maybe she’s lonely.
WHITNEY Why not somebody more malleable? Who LIKES her and is impressed by her?
EIGHT Maybe you represent a challenge. She’s probably in awe of you. Maybe she’s a little bit in love with you.
WHITNEY As if! She’s always talking about how terrible my body is and how I need to get it fixed.
EIGHT Talks about your body, does she? I think we’re onto something.
WHITNEY She doesn’t “fall in love”, she tries to seduce people. It isn’t the same thing.
EIGHT Maybe she thinks it is. Here, Whit. I’ve got something for you. I’ve got something for you.
(Reaches in his pocket and hands her small object.)
WHITNEY What’s this? A bullet?
EIGHT I’m a treasure hunter, right? There I was minding my own business sweeping this particular patch of beach and your stepmother came out of her house and took a shot at me. So I waited to find the bullet and then I dug it out.
WHITNEY She shot at you?
EIGHT More than once, using some very unladylike language.
(Puts her hand on his heart)
Yes, my heart’s still pumping, no thanks to your stepmother. She damn near killed me.
WHITNEY And here I was wondering if she conjured you up out of her medieval imagination!
EIGHT Not hardly.
WHITNEY So what are you proposing I do with this thing?
EIGHT Humans are pattern makers, Whit. Pattern makers and pattern finders. If her pattern gets big enough everyone’s gonna see it.
WHITNEY (Studying the bullet)
Patterns, eh?
EIGHT Right. Sometimes when we see them they aren’t even there. That’s why waiting for the come around to go around is so important.
WHITNEY I don’t like waiting. Tell me what you’ve figured out about my stepmother so far.
EIGHT Look at this place.
(Waves a hand expansively)
I think she’s a trophy-collector.
WHITNEY That’s for sure. Every day she puts on a necklace belonging to the woman who disappeared. Imagine what she’s thinking!
EIGHT Maybe other people aren’t even real to her. She goes shooting up and down this beach, like she’s the only person in the universe. That blindness makes her lonely I’m guessing. And sloppy for sure.
WHITNEY So the gun itself could be a trophy?
EIGHT Why not? And even if she destroyed that gun, she’d never find all those bullets.
WHITNEY You’re thinking she shot somebody?
EIGHT I’d call that most probable.
WHITNEY But how am I going to find out who’s got her bullet in them?
EIGHT Ask her.
WHITNEY Ask her! Are you out of your mind? I can’t do it!
EIGHT Sure you can. You don’t know your own strength. Bet she loves to brag.
WHITNEY You know, she does.
EIGHT She’s probably irritated that the world hasn’t yet caught on to how clever she’s been, how superior she is. She’s fooled everyone and they don’t even know it. You don’t need me. You can catalogue all your stepmother’s weaknesses for yourself by now.
WHITNEY Well, I know she loves hanging all over me pushing her disgusting “advice”.
EIGHT Maybe her prime weakness is you.
WHITNEY Me? Never! According to her there’s nothing “right” about me.
EIGHT I’d say that lady protests too much. Look at it. You’re the only person she hasn’t been able to fool. She needs to win you over.
WHITNEY I think her weakness is Time. It’s running out on her and she’s got to know it.
EIGHT I think you underestimate your powers of attraction. But let’s say I agree with you. Explain your last statement.
WHITNEY I think the only things she really covets are power, youth and beauty. In fact, she staked her life on them.
EIGHT Then she’s looking at trouble, isn’t she? Makes her whole future is a disaster area.
WHITNEY (Realizing it fully)
Sure looks like it.
EIGHT So maybe you should tell her fortune, for once.
WHITNEY That wouldn’t work! She’d never believe me.
EIGHT But Time, Power, Youth & Beauty – they’re are all on your side. Cave! Here she comes.
WHITNEY What makes you think so? I don’t see her. Time to admit it; you’re otherworldly.
EIGHT I’ve got a highly developed sense of smell for sulfur. Don’t you worry. I’m gonna be right here.
Alysse Aallyn 