Triptych and Iphigenia (4 page)

DAUGHTER
   You've got to give him up.

MISTRESS
   Why?

DAUGHTER
   It's harming his work.

MISTRESS
   Does he know you're here?

DAUGHTER
   Maybe. Maybe not.

MISTRESS
   Does your mother know?

DAUGHTER
   I tell her nothing.

MISTRESS
   We have tried giving each other up, but it's no use … we are (
pause
) inseparable.

DAUGHTER
   Bullshit.

MISTRESS
   It may be bullshit to you but not to me.

DAUGHTER
   And what about us … You haven't even given us a thought.

MISTRESS
   I have given you a thought … in fact I often walk past your building and I wonder what's going on up there, on the tenth floor.

DAUGHTER
   (
hitting her
) Mayhem. All for a fuck.

MISTRESS
   (
fends her off
) Young lady, there are things you have yet to learn … manners for one thing and propriety for another.

DAUGHTER
   You should hear my mother sobbing … it's like Niagara Falls.

MISTRESS
   Please don't.

DAUGHTER
   There are times when he has to pick her up and hold her and rock her in his arms like a baby … then he's in his office, on the phone to you, cooing.

MISTRESS
   Yes. Lovebirds.

DAUGHTER
   When she can't sleep she goes downstairs, wakens Jesse to play with a ball … back and forth, back and forth … all Jesse wants is to sleep. She's my dog, she followed me home from the subway last Christmas. She's the one I talk to, not them.

MISTRESS
   Surely that's not true.

DAUGHTER
   They're too wrapped up in themselves, they've no time for me … well, not enough time.

MISTRESS
   What do you want to be …?

DAUGHTER
   A drummer.

MISTRESS
   Do you have a beau?

DAUGHTER
   Yeah … lots … but they're all geeks. Morons. I can talk to my father about movies or rock or hip-hop, or clothes, or my grades, or anything.

Pause.

MISTRESS
   I would give him up, but I can't. He's part of my life now.

DAUGHTER
   (
angry again
) Do you do it on the floor? Or on the stairs?

MISTRESS
   Both.

DAUGHTER
   We have suppers alone, together. He asks my advice. I tell him that it would be better if he went away … but really away … far away from the two of you … not upstate … not out west … but to another country altogether, and he says, “You're right … I should go far away because I haven't made anyone happy and I haven't done what I want to do.”

Pause.

DAUGHTER
   I love him.

MISTRESS
   We each love him.

DAUGHTER
   But I am his princess.

MISTRESS
   So why be so jealous?

DAUGHTER
   (
with relish
) I hate you. I stick pins all over your face every time I see a photograph of you … that simper, that Mona Lisa smile … I cut it out and paint a horrible black mustache on you and pin it up on my board. He's seen it. I read in the gossip column that you drink green tea all day and then champagne in the evening … champagne made from the white grape only.

MISTRESS
   Bullshit.

DAUGHTER
   (
shouting
) Go back to where you came from. … Leave … us … alone.

MISTRESS
   I'm afraid I have to ask you to go.

Daughter leaves.

MISTRESS
   (
turning
) Little did she know that she was to have a brother or a sister or a half brother or a half sister before long.

STAGE MANAGER
   (
offstage
) Ladies and Gentleman of the As You Like It Company, this is your fifteen-minute call. Fifteen minutes, please.

S
CENE
T
HIRTEEN

Daughter watches as Wife starts to dress herself, preparing to go out. Mistress starts to dress herself for her part as Rosalind.

MISTRESS
   I was out and about doing errands and a taxi stopped at the light and he opened the door and I got in and he said, “Where shall we go?” “North,” I said and he tapped on the glass and told the driver to keep going north. Should I tell him or should I not. No one knew, certainly not Rosalind, she would scold me. (
clasps her waist
) He'll know soon enough … so will Rosalind in her doublet and hose.

DAUGHTER
   We looked at places for Daddy to rent, so he could get down to his writing … one on the East River was quite something. I said “It will give you inspiration” and he gave me that gorgeous grin of his.

WIFE
   What is this nonsense about renting an office … Complete waste of money.

MISTRESS
   We came to a small town with dinky little houses and a pond; pairs of swans gliding by. After we'd checked in
at the inn, we sat in the bar and had champagne cocktails … I'd never known him so open, so tender … said he'd been dreaming a lot of his early life and how I came into it … I was there in that place where I've never set foot.

WIFE
   I have a good idea—darling, we can turn the music room into an office … it's never used. I'll put a minifridge in, (
half scolding
) so you can mix your martinis.

DAUGHTER
   I begged him to take it … I could go after school with my friends and sit around talking to Daddy … listening to Daddy … telling stories.

MISTRESS
   His mother … his beautiful, high-strung mother adoring him, everybody adoring him … he felt he didn't have enough love to give back … what he preferred was the fishing trips with his father in the mountains … two men barely speaking a word and cooking supper on an open fire at night.

WIFE
   Didn't tell you I had lunch with your publisher … they're waiting with baited breath … he's a wine buff.

MISTRESS
   “Let the caged bird mate with the caged and the wild bird male with the wild …” It came into my head and I just spurted it out. “Which were we?” I asked him.

WIFE
   (
turning to Brandy
) You just stop calling real estate people …

DAUGHTER
   (
cutting in
) Who says I'm calling real estate people?

WIFE
   Three different firms called and I said we are not interested in leasing property at the moment.

DAUGHTER
   (
bridling
) Without speaking to Daddy or me.

WIFE
   You're getting too big for your britches … you need your butt kicked.

Mistress, swashing male attire as Rosalind, is by her mirror.

MISTRESS
   He said we were swans, because swans mate for life. (
her hands on her waist
) When I tell him … will I lose him … Will it send him running … It couldn't, it can't. (
pause
) One word he said that keeps haunting me—
entrapment
. He dreaded entrapment.

STAGE MANAGER
   (v.o.) As You Like It company: Please take your places for the top of the show. Places, please, for the top of the show.

Mistress goes toward stairs.

Wife walks past Daughter with scorn.

DAUGHTER
   Off to get sloshed again?

WIFE
   (
oversweet smile
) Noo.

Wife goes out.

Daughter looks after her, wrinkles her nose in mockery, then looks puzzled, goes out.

S
CENE
F
OURTEEN

Mistress is onstage as Rosalind, relishing her role.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind, playful
) And in this manner … He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me.

Wife comes down the auditorium aisle, shouting.

WIFE
   Whore … English whore.

Mistress continues as if she has not heard it.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind
) At which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve.

WIFE
   Grieve and give him up … He's mine, mine.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind, her voice getting rapider
) … Be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking, proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles.

WIFE
   … full of treachery and deceit (
to audience
). Be not misled by these dulcet tones … she strews in her path desolation.

VOICES
   Sssh … sssh. … sssh … sssh.

WIFE
   We were a happy close-knit family until this well-bred whore entered our lives, broke us up … ruined us.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind
) For every passion something … something.

WIFE
   (
cutting in
) Yes lady, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, every second of happiness you have stolen from me.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind, misses a line
) … would now like him, now loathe him, then entertain him, their forswear him, now weep for him, then spit at him.

Wife has climbed onto the stage.

Mistress endeavors to keep within her role.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind, faltering
) That I drave my suitor from his, from his mad humor of …

Daughter comes on stage and drags her Mother off.

DAUGHTER
   You're so goddam dumb … so fucking stupid.

MISTRESS
   (
as Rosalind
) … his mad humor of love to a living humor of madness … that I, that I drove my suitor from his mad humor of love to a living humor of that I, that I … that I …

She stops suddenly.

Her face freezes.

Lights go dark.

Lights come up on, wife in living room.

S
CENE
F
IFTEEN

The next day.

Light up on Daughter reading a newspaper.

DAUGHTER
   “Disturbance in theater brings giggles.”

Wife takes the paper and tears it methodically and violently.

Conversation over her action.

DAUGHTER
   He'll know.

WIFE
   You can't tell him.

DAUGHTER
   She'll tell him.

WIFE
   She won't.

DAUGHTER
   Why did you do it? Why did you make such an ass of yourself?

WIFE
   I'll do anything.

Daughter goes to her own area, pulls up her skirt, tries on saucy garters, singing “It's a Man's World.”

DAUGHTER
   I slept over at Judy's house and we would all lie on her big bed and watch TV—Nancy, Venus, Betsy, and Kim, and me. That's how I met Nathan … He was really cute, except for his armpits. Judy's parents were so rich that they were never in any one place for more than twenty-four hours. Nathan would take turns sitting between the girls in his boxer shorts, said it was good for us to have the male energy lines, a helluva hip guy, I'll give him credit for that. … One night he brought a porno, people doing it nonstop, like a zoo … We couldn't stop guzzling the booze and giggling … Nathan gave himself a body scrub in the shower.

Mistress is sitting on the last step of the staircase.

MISTRESS
   (
low with emotion
) When I told him, he froze. He said, “You've got to get rid of it.” And I said, “No, it's mine, mine … I'll rear it alone.” I've never seen a man so thrown, so flabbergasted, he went ashen. I said, “Is it your wife … is it your daughter?” and he said a most cutting thing. He said, “It's not my wife, it's not my daughter, it's you and it's me … A man thinks he has found a new woman, a great woman, but it always turns out to be the same bloody woman in different costume.” He walked out of the restaurant; “You rat, you fucking rat!” I shouted and I was certain that he had merely gone down the street to think things over, men are wont to go down the street to think things over, but I was wrong. Not long after, I rang my friend Rachel to ask for her doctor's number and I took two weeks off work and learnt that my understudy was a wow.