by David Ives
JACK: Yeah, and—?
RUTH: And that’s what love makes you feel.
JACK: Safe?
RUTH: More than safe. Invulnerable. Like nothing could touch you. Like you’re protected against death and sickness and unhappiness and the ravages of time and the dog at the door.
JACK: I thought love was supposed to make you feel vulnerable.
RUTH: No, getting dumped makes you feel vulnerable. Not falling in love.
JACK: Well I’ll go for intense like. And intense alikeness. Gleich mit gleich gesellt sich gem.
RUTH: Translate, please!
JACK: Like with like goes gladly.
RUTH: Into English, I mean.
JACK: Similar things and people go together naturally.
RUTH: Sounds like something the Germans would say.
JACK: Oops.
RUTH: A nation of potato people. Nazi potato people. And very, very unfunny.
JACK: My great-grandmother was German.
RUTH: Was she funny?
JACK: Not really.
RUTH: I rest my case.
JACK: She did leave me a very beautiful brass bed.
RUTH: Melted down from brass knuckles, no doubt.
JACK: No, no—I loved that bed.
RUTH: Uh—loved it?
JACK: Intensely liked it.
RUTH: Thank you.
(Lights begin to wash out.)
JACK: God I had some wonderful nights in my youth, jingling the brass on that bed. Après le déluge Joan got it, of course.
RUTH: Hell isn’t other people.…
JACK: Now she’s off somewhere jingling other men, on my brass bed.
RUTH: Hell is remembering other people.…
JACK: And such are the thoughts that keep me awake a-nights.
(Small pause, as the lights return to where they were before that section.)
RUTH: Did you know that there’s a slight touch of green in your complexion?
JACK: Yeah. I used to go out with a Chinese girl and when we stood close together we looked blue. That’s color theory.
RUTH: Oh what a clever child it is.
JACK: I am a clever little boy.
RUTH: Pinky—what do you say we do this forever. Don’t you think we could? I mean—
JACK: Do this forever?
RUTH: Yeah. I mean, doesn’t this make you think—
JACK: What.
RUTH: Nothing.
JACK: Doesn’t it make me think I could reconsider my usual dark and nasty ideas about the abominable institution of marriage?
RUTH: Something like that.
JACK: Doesn’t this make me think I could find marriage less than asphyxiating?
RUTH: Something like that.
JACK: And terminally dull.
RUTH: Something along those lines.
JACK: And that children are not the ultimate horror, designed by some maleficent deity to scream in your ear, shit in your hand, and bankrupt you?
RUTH: You’re bankrupt already.
JACK: That’s because I was married once.
RUTH: No, that’s because you think you can live on six thousand dollars a year.
JACK: So call me an idealist.
RUTH: Freeloader.
JACK: Capitalist.
RUTH: Not all marriages have to be as bad as yours was, you know.
JACK: It’s all I have to go on.
RUTH: Joan wasn’t every wife.
JACK: Right.
RUTH: We’ve just started off so well, Jack!
JACK: But we have scarcely begun to taste our joys! Six months?
RUTH: Six months is a lot of time to get to know a person.
JACK: Hardly the “t” in “tick” on eternity’s clock.
RUTH: I’m not saying tomorrow. I’m not saying we have to run off and hire the first J.P. we come to.
JACK: Jewish J.P.
RUTH: Well that goes without saying.
JACK: We’re still young anyway. Who needs a J.P., Jewish or otherwise?
RUTH: We’re not twenty-five anymore, Jack.
JACK: What? We’re not?
JACK AND RUTH: Uh-oh!
RUTH: Not only that, but we won’t get to play moony-eyed lovers in bed forever.
JACK: If we got married we wouldn’t get to do anything in bed together.
RUTH: Now watch yourself.
JACK: I speak from personal experience.
RUTH: But that was in another century. And besides, the bitch was bored by sex.
JACK: Everybody’s bored by sex in marriage. Except adulterers. It’s a rule of nature. Even I was bored by sex in marriage. The moment you say “I do,” your sex glands pack up and head into retirement, and the perfumes that the body gives off for mutual attraction turn to vinegar. That person you used to spend whole weekends with, linked at the groin—? You start staying up a little later so they’ll go to bed before you and you won’t have to endure having sex with them. Your husband’s cock starts to look about as attractive as an old carrot, and your wife’s nipples start to look about as kiss-able as ink erasers. Suddenly you notice little hairs sprouting from your partner’s ears.…
RUTH: Don’t you ever stop?
JACK: No. Wake up alongside the same body every morning? Yech!
RUTH: Thank you!
JACK: Anyway, you’d have to get your parents to talk to me first.
RUTH: All right, all right…
JACK: Rather a major undertaking.
RUTH: Can we—?
JACK: Just because my name doesn’t end in -berg, -stein, or -erkowitz, they won’t enter a room with me without hanging garlic around their necks first. I can’t believe they actually agreed to come over tonight.
RUTH: My parents aren’t the question.
JACK: What, even though they think I’m polluting their daughter with my goyish sperm? Even though your mother boiled her hand after the last time I shook it? Even though they threatened to write you out of their goddamn will if you marry someone who isn’t Jewish?
RUTH: All right.
JACK: Christ. Religion.
RUTH: I know—
JACK AND RUTH: Superstition and slavery.
JACK: Well that’s all religion is. Superstition and slavery.
RUTH: Yes I think I’ve heard this speech someplace before.
JACK: What century are we in, anyway?
RUTH: Can we stop? Please?
(Small pause.)
JACK: Was somebody just curmudging in here—?
RUTH: Yes, dear. You.
JACK: Oh Christ, I’m sorry, sheriff. I don’t know what came over me.
RUTH: Just the usual.
JACK: But you know that it isn’t anything personal, against any one religion.
RUTH: I know.
JACK: I mean, you know that my secret ambition is to assassinate the Pope. First I’ll anesthetize him with a lot of cannoli, then BLAM!—the water pistol. “I’m melting! All my beautiful evil!” However you say that in Latin.
RUTH: Oh you Catholics, boy. You are really something.
JACK: Excuse me, but I am not a Catholic.
RUTH: Okay, lapsed Catholic.
JACK: Ex-lapsed. I just happened to be born into a Catholic family.
RUTH: It’s the same thing.
JACK: Everybody who isn’t Catholic thinks that. Especially Jews, who can’t be lapsed even if they want to be.
RUTH: You might think you shake it, but you never really shake it.
JACK: I always shake it. Otherwise you get pee all over your shorts.
RUTH: How come everybody I know who was brought up Catholic acts like all religions are an insult to their integrity?
JACK: An insult to my integrity! A perfect description, thank you.
RUTH: Like they got jilted by God, or something.…
JACK: Haven’t your parents caught on that none of your boyfriends for the last fifteen years have been Jewish? Haven’t they cottoned to the fact that Semitic Ups have not touched yours since that guy at c
ollege who later had a sex-change operation?
RUTH: They caught on, all right. That’s what they’re worried about.
JACK: My parents don’t mind that you’re Jewish.
RUTH: Yes they do.
JACK: No they don’t.
RUTH: I give your parents a first-class case of the Hebrew-jebrews.
JACK: They’ve never said a single thing about you being Jewish!
RUTH: Maybe they don’t say anything outwardly. But inwardly they mind very much that I’m Jewish. That Dolby silence at the table when any reference to my being Jewish came up?
JACK: There are a lot of silences at my parents’ table about a lot of things. That’s what goyish means. “Silent at table.”
RUTH: That killing politeness?
JACK: Oh, it’s their politeness that persecuted you. Isn’t that better than your parents—who inwardly mind that I’m not Jewish and outwardly say it all the time?
RUTH: At least they don’t hide their convictions behind a slittyeyed grin.
JACK: Ah. Convictions. Another fine word for bigotry.
RUTH: What, your parents don’t have “convictions”?
JACK: My parents’ convictions at least leave room for different “convictions” at the table.
RUTH: I thought that you despised your parents’ convictions.
JACK: Well I do, mostly, but I’m making a convenient exception.
RUTH: Everybody does.
JACK: Maybe if your parents wore glasses with little dark wigs and big noses painted on the lenses they could look at me and see me as one of their own kind.
RUTH: No racial stereotypes, please.
JACK: Oh right. This from the girl who planned the How-to-Be-Jewish kit.
RUTH: Okay …
JACK: The ads at the back of the New Yorker? “You too can say ‘Nu’ in five languages”—?
RUTH: That was in a moment of drunken abandon.
JACK: Oh that excuses it.
RUTH: Anyway did I say that or did you say that?
JACK: You said that.
RUTH: Well I can say those things. You can’t.
(Lights suddenly change to glaringly bright.)
JACK (sudden furious heat): Yeah? What makes it all right in your mouth and sacrilege in mine? How come you can insult the Germans and the French, but your own tribe is sacred?
(The phone rings. The lights change back. Calmer rhythm again.)
RUTH: Parents, parents, everything’s parents. Who invented parents, anyway?
JACK: J. Robert Oppenheimer. I just never think about them.
RUTH: I know.
JACK: Parents? Feh! World’s biggest waste of time. I mean, what century are we in, anyway? (He notices that she’s looking at him intently.) What. What’s this gimlet-eyed look?
RUTH: Nothing. Just tell me I’m beautiful.
JACK: You’re extremely beautiful. For your age.
RUTH: You dog!
JACK: You’re very well preserved.
RUTH: You hound! You beast!
JACK: A little crow’s-foot here and there …
RUTH: You cad! (Sudden swoon.) Oh Nicky …
JACK: Oh Nora … (They swoon into bed together and embrace, just as the alarm clock goes off.)
RUTH: Christ, it’s six o’clock! We have to get dressed! (She turns off the alarm and runs into the bathroom, JACK stares at the place on the bed where she had been, as if she’s just disappeared.)
JACK: Nora? Nora … ? OH GOD, NORA!!!
RUTH (from the bathroom): Six o’clock, pal!
JACK: Plenty of time, plenty of time … Everybody’s going to be fashionably late anyway, (RUTH appears in the bathroom door-way with a toothbrush.)
RUTH: Rise ‘n’ shine, lover.
JACK: ’Tis true ’tis day—what though it be?
Oh wilt thou therefore rise from me?
Why should we rise because ’tis light?
Did we lie down because ’twas night?
RUTH (completes the poem): Burma Shave. Do you want to wash up in here? Scrape off some of the funk?
JACK (starts to dress): No, I want to reek of sex. I want everybody exchanging furtive glances across the room and wondering why the place smells like an aquarium.
RUTH (in bathroom): Like a what?
JACK: An aquarium.
RUTH (puts her head into the room): If you tell that joke tonight, I’ll kill you.
JACK: Who, me?
RUTH: Yeah, you.
JACK: Would it be all over?
RUTH: It would definitely be all over.
JACK: Seems to take so little these days. Where are the fifty-year attachments of yesteryear? The golden anniversaries. The silver-haired couples taking their third honeymoon in the Poconos. Lost to the weekend liaison and the one-night stand.
RUTH: Lost to the search for the liaison d’être.
JACK: Ouch, ouch, ouch.
RUTH: Sorry. Couldn’t help it.
JACK: One more of those and you’re out, kid.
RUTH: You don’t know how long I’ve been saving that one up.
JACK: Hey what’ve you got playing on your inner radio?
RUTH: Bizet. Pearl Fishers.
JACK: Ah! Les Pêcheurs de perles! I’ve had Joan Armatrading going for about three days, and she is driving me crazy. Right … here. (Taps the center of his forehead. Sings from “Takin’ My Baby Uptown.”)
What we’ve got is the past
What we’ve got is the past
What we’ve got is the past—
RUTH: The best.
JACK: Huh?
RUTH: That line is, “What we’ve got is the best.”
JACK: “What we’ve got is the past.”
RUTH: Best.
JACK: Past.
RUTH: Best.
JACK: Oh good. Let’s have a fight.
RUTH: We never fight. Do you realize that?
JACK: We disagree. We disagree all the time.
RUTH: But we’ve never had a real knock-down-drag-out brawl.
JACK: We can practice up for when we need it. Anyway, give me a few bars of Bizet and drive the bitch off my inner radio, will you?
RUTH (sings): “Au fond du temple saint.”
RUTH AND JACK: “Paré de fleurs et d’or.”
RUTH: “Une femme apparait.”
JACK: “Une femme apparait.”
RUTH AND JACK: (“Je crois la voir encore!” (RUTH stops singing, but JACK goes on, standing on the bed to vocalize dramatically.)
JACK: “C’est elle! C’est la desse! Plus charmante et plus belle!” (Stops.) What’s the matter? I’m pearl-fishing all by myself here suddenly.
RUTH: I had a thought the other day.
JACK: Think it for me.
RUTH: Do you remember how somebody once said that hell is other people?
JACK: Yeah. Sartre the Fartre.
RUTH: Hell isn’t other people. Hell is remembering other people.
JACK: I don’t think I quite follow you, Senator.
RUTH: I mean getting them stuck in your memory. Having to remember certain conversations over and over again. The scenes that keep coming back. Running them over and over again like some broken record …
JACK: There’s always the bright side of that. The “Ode on a Grecian Urn” side.
RUTH: Which is—?
JACK: That frozen moment in time. “Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.… Forever wilt thou love and she be fair.… Forever … Forever … Forever …”
(The phone rings, and the lights change again to sudden glaring brightness. Immediate change of tone.)
RUTH: All right, then, leave!
JACK: Fuck you!
RUTH: Leave!
JACK: Fuck you!
RUTH: Then leave!
JACK: Fucking Jap!
RUTH: Will you leave?
JACK: Fucking Princess! Look how you turned out!
RUTH: How did I turn out?
JACK: Did you ever think that this isn’t even the real issue?
RUTH: It doesn’t have anything to do with believing.
JACK: Then what does it have to do with?
RUTH: It doesn’t have anything to do with believing.
JACK: So what does it have to do with?
RUTH: And what’s the real issue? Do you want to tell me that?
(The phone rings, and they go completely still. Lights change back to where they were before. Calm tone again.)
RUTH: Hell isn’t other people. Hell is remembering other people.…
JACK: I had a thought the other day. About parents.
RUTH: A plan to exterminate them?
JACK: Something like that.
RUTH: How did I ever guess.
JACK: You see in my Utopia—
RUTH: Yes in your Utopia—
JACK: In my utopia when you turned sixteen you’d get to exchange your parents.
RUTH: Not for other parents.
JACK: Of course not! Who’d want more parents?
RUTH: It’s a given. (Realizes.) Oops! Joan-phrase! (Claps a hand over her mouth.)
JACK: “It’s a given?”
RUTH: I’m sorry.
JACK: Boy, did my heart drop out of me!
RUTH: I’m sorry.
JACK: Phew! For a second there I thought I was still married!
RUTH: Relax. Breathe. You’re here. You’re still single. Still adrift in the world.
JACK: Did you say “adrift”? I’m not adrift.
RUTH: Oh. Sorry. Afloat?
JACK: I’m not afloat either. Maybe ajar. Anyway—parents.
RUTH: Oh good. Back to that.
JACK: In my Utopia, you’d get to exchange your parents.
RUTH: For—?
JACK: I don’t know. What’s the exchange rate on parents these days? A coupla glass beads and a chicken pot pie? A ticket to a bingo tournament?
RUTH: Classic Jack …
JACK: Anyway they’d be gone. Cashed in. And you wouldn’t have to hang out with them—and you wouldn’t have to invite them to your birthday parties. They wouldn’t even be allowed to come to your birthday parties. It’d be illegal. They’d be ticketed and towed away.
RUTH: Mmm. Great plan.
JACK: I seem to sense some reservations on your part.
RUTH: Aren’t you going to get dressed?
JACK: I am dressed. Pants. Shirt. Even socks.
RUTH: I mean dressed.
JACK: Your friends wouldn’t recognize me if I wore anything fancier than this. They’d think you dumped me for some worthy capitalist and they’d all come up to me and say, “Did you get a load of that loser she was going out with? Jack something-or-other-that-didn’t-end-in-bergstein? Thank God she dumped that one, boy.”