Drinks Before Dinner Read online

  CLAUDETTE Grace is a painter herself.

  (EDGAR makes an incoherent sound)

  GRACE I beg your pardon?

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

  GRACE I am not sure why you are telling me this but I think you are wise not to be inconsolable.

  (In the ensuing laughter EDGAR distractedly takes a handgun from his breast pocket)

  EDGAR Very wise. Very brave.

  JOAN What is that?

  CLAUDETTE Is that a gun?

  JOAN Where does that come from?

  CLAUDETTE Joel—

  JOEL It isn’t loaded, I’m sure. Is it, Edgar? What is it, some sort of objet?

  EDGAR I don’t know.

  MICHAEL You’ll go to great lengths to win an argument.

  EDGAR On the contrary. I didn’t know I was inconsolable until it was said. It is exactly true.

  JOAN Where did you get that thing?

  EDGAR I bought it. Very cheap. I didn’t know why, it just appealed to me.

  (A moment of silence. The others exchange glances)

  EDGAR (Ruminatively) I am inconsolable! Yet I don’t claim not to take pleasure where I can. I don’t claim pleasures are not possible or desirable because everything is so painful. For instance, on a beautiful day in the city people buy sandwiches and take them to the parks to eat, or they sit in one of the plazas off the streets, one of the raised plazas or parks of the banks and corporations. And they watch each other go by. That is a simple, undeniable pleasure available to everyone. It is a precise pleasure to eat one’s lunch in contentment and stare at the girls and think about them as they go by. It is nice to see the sun shine through the thin skirt of a lovely girl. When the weather is warm she may wear such a flimsy dress that you can see the sun shining through it, so that it lights her thighs. And if the sun is really strong, you can through your half-closed eyes see it shining through her dress, so that you can see her entire body, and through the flesh of her so that you can see her bones, and even through her bones so that you can see the most opaque intimate part of her, her intrauterine device.

  JOAN What are you trying to do? Put it away, please. What is it you want? What is it you hope for? When will you relent?

  (Pause)

  ANDREA But you remind me of a story of the street and it happened today. I was on Fifth Avenue and I saw a young man standing on a corner. Edgar, he was a poet selling his poems that he had written and printed himself on broadsheets. He was a poet standing on the corner along with the peddlars of leather belts and strings of beads and watercolors of lions and tigers, but he had no luck selling his wares because the people walking somehow walked too quickly to be able to read a poem and like it and make a decision to buy it as they might buy a belt or beads or a watercolor. Perhaps he could see, of the lightly dressed girls passing him and ignoring him, their intrauterine devices. But he noticed not only that the girls ignoring him but that everyone ignoring him, walking and strolling and carrying their lunch in paper bags to the park or the slightly raised plazas of banks and corporations, was moving faster than the automobile traffic in the street. In fact, the traffic wasn’t moving at all. So this enterprising young man turned his back to the people walking on the sidewalk, and took his poems out into the street into the traffic jam, and he began to sell them to the people sitting behind their steering wheels not going anywhere. And, you know, he did quite well!

  (EDGAR smiles. At this moment the children are heard, giggling, just out of sight)

  EDGAR (Playfully) Do I hear those naughty children?

  (Everyone looks toward the sound of the laughter)

  Curtain

  SCENE 2

  (As before. But the two children, in their bathrobes, are onstage as well. EDGAR, holding the gun, is totally absorbed in his thoughts)

  EDGAR Your poet knew something, Andrea. We have our life in cars. We eat our meals in cars, we pay our bills from cars, we hear the news of the world—so why not take our poetry sitting behind the wheels of our cars. In cars we have conversation not otherwise possible—conversation more intimate than what is permissible when, as now, people face each other. There is an intimacy of conversation in cars produced by the fact that we sit together but face in the same direction. We watch the road and see the state of mind of what we say imposed upon the road. We drive our cars down the interstate while our lives go on inside them. But this is not to say we cannot see things from cars. We become aware of other drivers in their most acute moments of personal expression. In our cars on the roads and in the streets we are made aware of the endless numbers of wills like our own, the infinite number of equally powered antagonistic wills, and apparently I am the kind of driver who habitually creates in others acute moments of personal expression. These moments are quite interesting. You look in the rear-view mirror, although if you think about it, all mirrors are rear-view mirrors, but as I say, you see there on this small field of vision an acute expression of character on the part of the stranger in his car behind you. And what he does as you slow for a turn without giving signal is throw his arms up in a gesture of despair, lifting his head and opening his mouth in what looks to be some sort of howl. In a car we gather impressions of another person’s character from minimal information, but we make our judgments nonetheless. I love the sleek and souped-up car filled with boys and girls that tears by recklessly and cuts you off with unerring scornful precision. That is character. I have seen old men drive with great dignity in old cars, wavering at slow speeds as the memory of their lives wavers. And in city traffic in hot weather you may see from your stalled lane the drivers sitting there without moving in the opposite direction. In this situation there is some
embarrassment, considerable close examination is possible, moments of communion or recognition for the idiocy or pretense or unimportance of our lives. A sense of our mutual victimization in the system of cars. We look frankly into each other’s windows. I notice a high proportion of women doing city driving of this kind. Older women tend to sit at the wheel in a kind of hunch that suggests permanent deformation. Young women with sunglasses lying as fashionpieces in the crown of their hair may appear to ignore you but examine your fender, your trim, your aerial. Women who drive tend to lose their attractiveness as women to the driver’s expressions. They are not primarily women but primarily drivers. As for those cars with families, they appear to me as genetic traps. Cars with families are particular contraptions for the entrapment of certain similar beings with similar facial structures. That is what they seem to me. The members of the genetically trapped family look out of the car with identical eyes and at the same instant, and all the miseries of biological relationship are arranged on their faces. If they are laughing and one of them has a brutish face they all have brutish faces. Different sizes of the same brutish face are laughing. So cars suggest to me the dreariness of biology, the predictability of the plan of mindless excess by which we reproduce ourselves. Sometimes the children you see in cars seem to understand this, they understand communication between cars is possible, they don’t pretend it doesn’t exist as adults do, they welcome it, they want it, and they wave at you from the backs of station wagons or the rear seats of sedans. At such moments you see the children calling for freedom of themselves from genetic entrapment. They wave and could as easily be your own children. You wave back. I always wave back at the freedom of small creatures who understand for a moment how we all long to be released from our genetic traps, who understand how arbitrary is our relationship to others with the same features, how we all know each other by waving from our windows, how by just as easy a set of arbitrary genetic circumstances we could all be each other.

  (During this speech everyone else has drifted away from EDGAR, and regrouped so that he is left isolated on one side of the room)

  CLAUDETTE I wonder, with your sensitive feeling for children, if we shouldn’t allow these children to return to bed. They are tired and should be asleep by now.

  EDGAR They don’t look tired. They look rather interested. You always wave, don’t you?

  BOY Yes.

  GIRL What kind of car do you have?

  EDGAR A good question. I drive an obscure, not-quite-working foreign car to express alienation. There are only tens of thousands on the road.

  JOEL It’s true that we extend our persons in our cars. I fail to see why that is terrible. In any event, it is inevitable. Everything we make is modeled on ourselves. The common valve is a mechanization of the sphincter, household plumbing mimics the bowels, and cameras are mechanical eyes. Our computers take our minds for the model and produce thought outside of our bodies. Every technical human achievement redesigns the self, recreates it, and projects it. How could it be otherwise?

  EDGAR (Laughing) As the arm hurling a stone becomes—a gun.

  (He swings his arm and points the gun toward the doorway. At the same moment the MAID enters, stops in her tracks)

  JOAN Edgar, please, I find that frightening.

  (Pause)

  MICHAEL You said you bought that gun. Why?

  EDGAR Well, that’s the point, I don’t know why. I bought it without planning to, I bought it with no thought for guns or weapons of any kind until the moment the opportunity was given to me to buy it. Children, where do you think I was when this gun was offered to me?

  BOY In your car?

  GIRL (Simultaneously) Your car!

  EDGAR Exactly so. You are very fine children. I was sitting in my car. It was late at night, I was alone, I was waiting for the light to change at the intersection of Third Avenue and a Hundred and Twentieth Street. The street was quite empty and a wind was blowing sheets of newspaper across the avenue. The intersection was brightly lit by our modern anticrime amber streetlights. Every tenement and boarded-up store was lit in ghastly amber light. So that this whole ruined avenue was lit as for easier inspection and could be seen without shadow, without darkness, like the inside of an always lit prison cell. And then, standing at the driver’s window of my car, without my having seen him arrive, was a boy not much older than you, a boy with his palm out and this gun resting on his palm with handle toward me. He asked me if I wanted to buy it. I said “Yes!” He said, “Lay down twenty.” I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and he dropped the gun in my hand and he was gone. And I had the gun.

  JOEL That is a most interesting story.

  EDGAR Yes, I think so. I don’t know if it works, although it smells as if it does. There is a faint acrid odor at the muzzle. I have been wondering for days why I felt compelled to say yes when it was offered to me. I’ve been carrying it around ever since. Perhaps you can help me understand this.

  JOEL What? But how can you expect us to help you understand anything. If you were holding a porcelain or a picture or a rare book, we might be disposed to be helpful. We would all sit around and wonder why you bought it and what it could possibly mean, and some of us would like it and others would not care for it, and we would give you all the attention you thought you needed but not more than we wanted to give. We could even do that with the gun if you put it down somewhere out of the way. But look at you: you have it in your hand. That hardly encourages us to be understanding and helpful.

  EDGAR But I now realize, as I hadn’t since the night I bought it, that it is meant to be held in the hand.

  JOEL All right, then let me hold it. I have a hand. I’ll hold it.

  EDGAR We should consider that. But isn’t it the nature of a gun to be held in a hand that is inconsolable? Guns belong to the inconsolable Therefore you are not really trustworthy. It would not be true to the occasion for you to hold this gun. If there is any truth or meaning to be derived from the occasion, we would not find it by having you hold the gun. The occasion would be defeated.

  (Long silence)

  JOAN I think it is important for everyone in this room to remain quite calm while Edgar explains to us what he is trying to say. It may be a joke in poor taste for him to hold a gun and say things in this way, and perhaps later we may make him understand this. But everything seems to be fine as we sit here with our drinks. This is a dinner party, after all; we all know each other and respect each other and there may be a constructive lesson for all of us in this, so let us hear what he has to say.

  EDGAR Yes, do let us hear. But you may disagree with me as vehemently as you wish. Disagree, argue, object—nothing, I assure you, will enrage me as much as a patronizing, officious remark of my wife’s.

  MICHAEL What do you mean by not defeating the occasion? How do we go about ensuring that? The final form of the occasion is not yet realized. Is that what you mean? That the guest of honor is still to arrive?

  EDGAR We’ve been talking of matters of consequence and this is what has evolved. So my little arms deal wasn’t a separate event. Surely that is clear. It was not a separate inexplicable event. It was the beginning of something. I can tell you I have never owned a gun before and it generates in me a kind of nervous pleasure. It interests me to be holding this gun and I find myself interested in my ideas as I hold it. I am not bored holding it. And peculiarly enough, I look at you all and wonder why you don’t have guns, why we are not all holding guns. Isn’t that weird—it seems to me so much more natural a picture if we were all holding guns. This apartment should be filled with them. They should be stuffed in drawers and falling out of the medicine cabinets in the bathrooms, they should be in the children’s toy chests. If that is the feeling I have, perhaps we are meant to share what it is that is to happen from this gun. Only this evening did I feel moved to take it out of my pocket, so perhaps we are meant to share the occasion in some way. But if you isolate me because I am holding this gun, if you decide I am on the brink of madness, for exa
mple, or over the brink, that could be ruinous.

  CLAUDETTE But what else can we think? What else are we to think as you brandish that thing and insist that the children and the staff be brought in here, and you wave that thing around until they are!

  EDGAR That is your construction of what I did. I waved nothing. Your housekeeper came, I suppose, to consult with you and she has been too paralyzed to move since. Your children wanted to join us again. They are in the house and already implicated in whatever happens here. Shouldn’t they have some say in the matter?

  CLAUDETTE Very well, will you permit them to leave? If they have a say, I have a say, and if I want them to leave and their father wants them to leave, if I should take them in hand and leave this apartment, will you stop us?

  (Pause)

  EDGAR I have not heard them say they want to leave. But if that is your instinct, you should follow it, if it feels correct, and I will see then what is correct for me.

  (CLAUDETTE struggles with the idea of attempting to leave with the children. She cannot do it)

  EDGAR Oh, what a shame. After all, Claudette, you invited me to dinner, you thought I was acceptable in your house, perhaps you thought I was amusing, perhaps you even had some affection for me. And now you have judged me to be not recognizably human. We must be careful. It is Joan’s nature to interpret her husband to the world in the worst possible light. Do you really see this as something hostile or mentally unstable? Does everyone else agree? Do you, Andrea? Michael, you could not agree with that.

  MICHAEL Well, without question you’re committing a hostile act. But since you’re generally sensitive to the state of our culture and the way we live, I might make an argument for an ironically hostile act, one in which you are less personally involved than you appear to be, with some off-hand, distant, almost political cruelty about it. You appear to have hijacked a living room.

  EDGAR Well, that’s better! After all, what would my destiny be, what could any of us hope for if it turned out that I had only gone crazy.