Drinks Before Dinner Read online

  JOAN I cannot believe you would have come to this. But quite clearly, you have. Therefore there is something wrong with me. I am to blame. I thought there were limits to his dissatisfaction. I thought there were limits to his capacity for unhappiness. There are no limits.

  EDGAR So what have I commandeered here? I think I might have chosen a room less trendy. White upholstered modules, lots of chrome and Lucite. A spot of color on the walls, a modest Léger, a dubious Mondrian. A view of the park. All very standard. All what they’re doing this year.

  GRACE I feel I must speak. It’s bad enough to walk into a fine Fifth Avenue building with excellent security only to meet a gunman in the very apartment of my dear friends Joel and Claudette. But that he also feels free to malign their taste is inexcusable.

  CLAUDETTE Grace dear—

  EDGAR No, no, it’s all right. Grace feels that a gunman should know his place. But I live in an apartment like this. We all have apartments with beautiful things and we all have summer homes at the seashore. We all have cars like each other’s cars, we all have safe deposit boxes and we all have lives indistinguishable from each other’s lives. So what shall we do? We none of us know our place.

  CLAUDETTE Then what is it you want from us? If we are so hopeless, what do you expect from us? If we are so lost, why do you stay among us? Why do you come here and terrorize us?

  (One of the children comforts CLAUDETTE. JOEL, in turn, calms her)

  JOEL Edgar, you claim to want us cooperatively to decide what is happening here. But the opinions of the person who holds the gun have, somehow, more amplification than the opinions of the rest of us. What shall we do about that? I would not want to call you a hypocrite. I would not want to suggest that it is an act of fraud for you to encourage us to determine altogether what is to happen.

  CLAUDETTE Yes, you didn’t ask our permission to bring a gun here. We didn’t share that decision. We didn’t know you had it and we didn’t agree that you should have it or agree that you should bring it into this house. Yet you came here with it. And you knew you were going to pull it.

  EDGAR No, I had no idea! In fact, I had almost forgotten I was carrying it until Joel perceived I was inconsolable. I am grateful to him for that. Perhaps it is wrong to expect you to share the feeling of inconsolability. Perhaps it exists because it cannot be shared!

  (Silence)

  ANDREA I have a confession. I did not tell in my story of the poet selling his poems in the street that I bought several of them. That is because they were mostly very bad poems. Only one was good and that was a plagiarism of Walt Whitman. I think it is important to clear that up. That is part of the story too. It is important that we all know all of the story that any of us tells. I edited my story for the sake of romance. I wanted Edgar to find someone from the crowd who distinguished himself in his enterprise. But of course the truth is that in our country, where the practice of poetry pays so little, there are enormous numbers of poets. In our country, where the practice of poetry is thought to be impractical and eccentric, there are astronomical numbers of poets! And they are all standing on street corners selling their poems or standing in country roads and writing their poems. They are all standing looking at the ground under their feet or at the sky over their head and making up poems about what is on the ground and what is in the sky. We may be unaware of their great numbers because they are forced to live among us as we live among ourselves, as workers and people without work, as patients in hospitals, as betrayed lovers and born and dying persons, but not as poets. And that’s the way they live too. There may be almost as many poets in our country as there are cars. They are manufactured somewhere, perhaps in the English departments of universities. And so they are everywhere. Every town in the United States has its poet, just as you always find a Chinese restaurant wherever you happen to be. I think if every Chinese restaurant in the country had a poet inside, you would see how many poets there are. In fact, most of the restaurants would have to have several poets inside. Some of the poets would have to cook and some of them would have to dine. Some of them would stand behind the glass case containing the lichee nuts. And as time went on, there would be more poets than the Chinese restaurants would know what to do with, and poets would be waiting on lines outside the doors and down the streets.

  (In the last few moments of this speech ANDREA begins to laugh. But it is the kind of laughter that turns almost immediately to tears)

  EDGAR But why are you crying?

  ANDREA Because it is enough to make me cry but not enough to make me hold a gun.

  EDGAR Oh, Andrea, don’t ask me to put down this gun. I find my hand wants to hold it. Is it possible the body makes the decision and the mind only understands it subsequently? That’s how reflexes work, after all. The body does something and the mind recognizes what it has done. Perhaps the mind is only the body announcing what it has already done. When it’s born it cries to announce it was born. When it’s older it kills and announces it was angry. Do you think, do any of you think I would hurt you, that I wouldn’t destroy myself a thousand times before bringing harm to you or the children? But something has begun that has to be allowed to happen. So Andrea, if you must cry, I must hold the gun. I’ll hold it for all of us.

  (Pause)

  MICHAEL I remember years ago a man running on the beach, a middle-aged man running alone at low tide. He was the first one I ever noticed. The runners those days ran alone. They ran on the beaches, or they ran on the tracks behind the universities. Today there are so many runners that they go in packs. And they are dressed to run. They’re dressed in shoes that have been manufactured for them and sweatsuits and shorts and headbands manufactured for them. They run in the city along the river and they run in the streets of the suburbs. They run along the edges of highways past the gas stations and fast-food places. They run along the highways to enlarge their lungs and breathing capacities, to make their hearts strong and muscles firm, but I don’t know why, because the cars get the air first, they can’t run past the cars, and what is making their lungs large and hearts strong is pure lead and carbon monoxide. Still, they run and there are more of them than ever. Not only white middle-aged men, but boys and girls and older people and black people and most of all women. A lot of the runners are women. They do not appear as women, they appear as runners. Even when they’re attractive, they’re attractive as runners rather than as women But as I say, they are all running. And I wonder, What is it their bodies have decided that their minds have yet to announce? Perhaps it is their secret acceptance of the need to train for what is going to happen. Perhaps the runners training along all the roads of the country, training on the trails of our national parks and down the main streets of small towns and in parks in our cities and in traffic packs on the highways are the unconscious training of the nation for the terrible thing to come. When this terrible thing comes, our runners hope to outrun it. I see no other reason to run along the highways and breathe car exhaust. They are learning not only to have strong hearts and limbs and large lungs, they are learning the directions in which to run, they are learning the routes, it is very interesting. But of course, if you talk to runners, they all tell you how much better they feel since they began to run. They’ll not admit to be training for the time that will come when it is time to get away from whatever it is that is coming. They will not admit it, perhaps because their minds do not yet know it. And each day their number increases because more and more people want to be ready for the time when there is nothing left but to run, when nothing else will avail but to run, and they do not want to be among those who cannot run or who falter and stumble and collapse from the attempt to run. They do not want that. They intend to be able to run. Their bodies are in training but their minds haven’t made the announcement. When will they make the announcement? I have no idea why they haven’t already made the announcement.

  (The sound of the doorbell)

  JOEL There is our guest of honor.

  (The little GIRL cries out.
EDGAR drops down on his knees before her)

  EDGAR What? What is the matter? What do you think is going to happen?

  GIRL The end of the world!

  Curtain

  Act Two

  (A few minutes later. Everyone onstage, as in Act One. But the guest of honor, ALAN, sits tied to a straight-back chair. EDGAR holds the gun.)

  EDGAR Speaking for all of us, Mr. Secretary, I can’t tell you how thrilled we are to meet you, to have you here among us, in this very room, and to have experienced the almost mystical moment of your arrival just as the idea came over us that the world is coming to an end. You can imagine how we look forward to the views on this subject of our greatest statesman.

  ANDREA The idea of the end of the world seems logical to me. It is a perfectly reasonable possibility that the world will soon end. I think I am more frightened of the thought of my own death in the ordinary way while everyone else goes on living than that I will die because the world ends. I find I am even curious to know how it will happen.

  EDGAR Perhaps it’s already begun. Perhaps that is what I feel, the already-begun ending. Perhaps I can feel it with some trace in my being of the instinct that allows animals in a forest to anticipate a storm or sense a fire before it can be sensed. Is something wrong with me, Mr. Secretary, or is something happening that I am only responding to with some awakened perception? There may be nothing the matter with me except that I feel this. We have lived past what we used to be and still think we are, and anticipate with the laid-back ears of an animal some terrible holocaust of the world. Perhaps we are running in perception, perhaps we are becoming new beings in this perception.

  ALAN There is nothing new about pistols. People have been running around and firing them for a long time.

  EDGAR That’s true. But if the world were really coming to an end, I mean if that is truly the situation we are in, then surely the carrying of this pistol is as unprecedented as that. The world has never ended before. Whatever we do, then, becomes as new as the ending of the world. The power, the terrible might or power released by the ending of the world, releases in us first a perception of its end, an anticipation of its end first in the most sensitive of us, the children, and then, in disguised ways, in the rest of us, who run or who find themselves with pistols in their hands. It is up to us to understand through the actions of our bodies the announcements that are being made. Just as we attempt to understand the disguised announcements of our dreams.

  ALAN How peculiar to hear that idea expressed. I will tell you of a dream of mine. I have this dream on a regular basis. There is some state of war. There is some sort of revolution and I hear the drumming of feet. It is night—the sky is lit by fire. Shadows of men run among the trees. Wrecked helicopters lie like giant insects on suburban lawns. I don’t know if I’m with the state or with the revolution. A priest comes to my home and gives me for safekeeping a parcel wrapped in newspaper and tied with twine. He is on the run. I take him through the backyards, through the woods, to a bluff overlooking the highway leading to the city. The highway is filled with tanks and military trucks with their headlights on. They are not moving. Their engines make the ground tremble. I point the way for the priest and we say farewell. I race back home. And when I open the parcel I find he has given me for safekeeping Adolf Hitler’s dinner jacket.

  MICHAEL Why, that could be an end of the world, all right.

  CLAUDETTE Michael, have you gone mad? Alan, this man has forced us to tie you to a chair and you tell him your dreams? The world is not ending! Nothing is happening except that he is holding a gun and terrifying us all and threatening our lives. Nothing is happening except that he has frightened my children to such a degree that they are in fear of the end of the world. How do you condone this? How do you speak to him; why do you listen to him? Why are we allowing ourselves to be humiliated this way? It is the utmost form of humiliation to begin thinking like him.

  ALAN Please, Claudette. I am not unaware of the position I’m in. Think of this as a negotiation.

  EDGAR But what is it we’re negotiating? The end of the world? How can that be negotiated? What single human is so stupidly arrogant to put himself in that role?

  ALAN All revolutionaries want to end the world as they know it.

  EDGAR You think I’m a revolutionary?

  ALAN If you are not a revolutionary, then you are a criminal psychopath. One can be both, of course, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt.

  EDGAR Things happen so fast. Determinations are made so fast. In the back of my mind I have not ruled out the possibility that we may yet sit down to dinner.

  ALAN I would give up that idea if I were you. You are holding a roomful of people at gunpoint. Including several women and two children. They are not likely to agree happily to sit down to dinner with you. You are not only holding a gun but constructing a dangerous rationale for holding it. You are saying that if the world is coming to an end, then the carrying of a pistol is somehow appropriate, although you do not yet know in what way. Do I represent your position correctly?

  EDGAR It is unprecedented for me to be carrying this gun. My buying it was a mysterious act. A child sold it to me. Another child perceives the ending of the world. We must learn what it is the children know.

  ALAN The danger in your thinking, of course, is that any action can be justified, no matter how mad or destructive it is, if the world is presumed to be ending. Even if, granting for a moment, the world is ending, there is no guarantee that each and every person’s anticipation or perception is worthy or appropriate. If you and I act differently or in opposite ways, who is to say which of our actions is appropriate. The true response to the anticipated end of the world might be to get down on our knees together and pray. Besides which, the world may not be ending. And I may be doing more for the world and all its revolutionary possibilities in deciding it is not going to end than you are in deciding that it is.

  JOEL Yes, and let me remind you that this man, our oldest dearest friend, whom you have so brutally abused, is a recipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

  EDGAR (To ALAN) Yes, your argument could have validity if not for that. I might seriously consider it if you were not someone apart from the rest of us. But you’re famous. Your hosts invited you here not only for their own honor but altruistically to give you a quiet evening away from your public life. You have a public life. You have received the Nobel Prize for peace and you dream of inheriting Hitler’s dinner jacket. You are one of those whom society appoints to embody its values for the rest of us. How, then, can you judge what is appropriate or inappropriate? You no longer know what it means to be human. You are disqualified.

  GRACE That is an outrage.

  EDGAR But I mean nothing personal. It is precisely the point that none of us any longer can mean anything personal. Let us assume we are all beginning to realize the world is coming to an end. Andrea, for instance, is quite ready to have the world end. She contemplates the oblivion of us all with a degree of curiosity. So do I. Is there some connection between that feeling and everything we know? Everything being done, all our institutions, all our customs, should be announcing something. And if not just Andrea and I but the masses of people have this crucial perception, and the children with the clearest, most crucial perception of all have this perception, then obviously the way we are living begins to make sense. For what other reason would we all permit ourselves to live and to feel as we live and feel except that we perceive our end? What other reason could we have for giving ourselves over to the industrialization of our being? Why else would we dispose of our community like an idiot smearing his own shit over cars and furniture and fashion clothing and art? I am no longer a person. I am no longer distinguishable from anyone else, nor is anyone distinguishable from me. My acquaintances are arbitrary. I can move as easily among strangers as among friends. I can just as easily know the people I don’t know as the people I do know. I can go anywhere in the country and call people I don’t know by their first n
ames. My most personal tastes and preferences are predicted in market studies that compute my age and color and education and income. I am a function of other things. This is what it means today to be human. And we know that. As we fade in the conviction that we exist and our lives are important, as personhood begins to be given up by men in anticipation of their own oblivion, human character, like a precious resource, is allocated to fewer and fewer individuals. These are political figures and wealthy beautiful people, film stars and TV talk personalities. They hold the proxies for our humanity. The people in the gossip columns and magazines are the appointed human beings for the rest of us. They are designated people with a capital P. Is that not preparing very well for the end? At the same time we relinquish our value to ourselves, we can believe everything is as it has been and everything we have believed is still worth believing. In this way we move painlessly to the end. Celebrities become our trusted kin. They live in our television sets. They are more familiar to us than our own families. We are industrialized, like our refrigerators and our cars. We are indistinguishable in our affections from those in the next house. And in this manner we are led painlessly on to the end.

  JOEL Only our friend Edgar could seriously suggest the world is coming to an end because we watch TV.

  EDGAR It is funny that a machine is everywhere transfixing people by the billions. Inside the machine, momentous events are played out, the drama proceeds inexorably to its end. To be followed by another momentous event, another drama. To be followed endlessly by mindlessly momentous events and endless drama. And where we are, outside the machine looking in, there is no drama. There is no drama in our lives because our lives no longer lead to anything. Our crises prove nothing. Our conflicts simply repeat themselves and lead to themselves repeating. Anger is simply anger. Conflict is simply conflict. We are not elevated by it, nor do we learn from it, nor can we avoid repeating it. If our relationships break down, we renew them with others. There are no momentous events. We don’t marry our true loves, we don’t know who they are. If a person dies, he dies. If he dies heroically, who can care? If he dies needlessly, we feel no less sorry. People die needlessly in the thousands and millions. Nothing is done about that. We don’t punish their killers. We don’t assign responsibility for their deaths. That would be drama. People commit great crimes and we have them to dinner. Everything goes on as before.