One on One

by Rebecca Dunn Jaroff

  I don’t want to be ashamed of either anymore.

  I watch my father die nightly. He takes so many pills and he’s strong for his age but his skin is like parchment in some library somewhere. Flaking. You know it’s just a matter of time. And it just makes me realize—looking at him, it makes me realize that these secrets of mine—they shouldn’t be. I should be so much more visible than I’ve ever allowed myself.

  That’s the spin I put on it, anyway.

  Maybe I’ll tell him. Let him see what it’s good for.

  You wanna see it, don’t you? (He nods.) All right. Take my hand.

  One. Two. No more secrets.

  (HE raises his arm. The lights go out.)

  Three.

  STORYTELLERS

  BY THOMAS MCCORMACK

  BREN is a fit, even athletic, Irish-American without a brogue; HE wouldn’t look out of place on an oil rig or a construction site. HE has quite a brilliant academic career, and HE’s now secluded HIMSELF to try to become a writer. HE seems insulated, distanced, by courtesy and a guarded poise devoid of jiggles and sawing the air. His modest clothes are from L.L. Bean. Here, HE’s speaking to Elga, a smart, sympathetic book editor who has also been his landlady. She’s been trying to understand this extraordinary young man. HE has just told her HE is going away.

  SCENE

  A one-room studio apartment on the beach side of a large home on the shore of the Long Island Sound in Stamford, Connecticut, thirty-five miles from New York City

  TIME

  Now

  BREN: (HE holds a can of soda water. HE gazes at it, unopened, pondering. HE will from time to time seem to contemplate the can, revolve it slowly in the reflecting light, read it as though seeing a message there. HE does all this with a sober maturity; HE is not a child playing with a toy. Only near the end, when HE announces his decision, does HE finally pop the can open.)

  You do ask lots of questions: why I quit, why I’m going home, why I say I’m a disappointer, why I want . . . remoteness. I’ll try to give honest answers, but I won’t trust them. You shouldn’t either: never trust autobio. A writer will self-justify, self-compliment, lie.

  One writer I know explained why his sister despises him.

  (“Sympathetically.”)

  “I only asked her what her hopes were for her short story.”

  What he really asked was,

  (Sneering.)

  “What’s a tone-deaf, semi-illiterate like you think you can possibly do with shit like this?”

  Don’t let anything I’m about to say convince you I’m a fountain of compassion. I’m not. For example, at the first sign of needy in someone, I want to run like hell. If I let someone come to depend on me, I’ll feel hooked. It’s a defect, but it’s not unique to me. Very few primary caregivers do it with unsullied wholeheartedness. We wish . . .

  Also: You ever run low on disdain, apply to me. It used to yellow up in me like combustible sulfur whenever I met self-confident fools—and I felt they came on in battalions—at grad school and then when I taught seminars at Oxford. Lots of remoteness justified right there.

  You look at my academic record, and my reputation in philosophy, and the so-called ultra-high IQ scores, and you say, “C’mon Bren! Why all the self-deprecation! It’s silly!” I was part of a forty-year study of ultras at Princeton. We learned a high score entails only that you’re pretty good at a range of different things. It doesn’t imply you’re world-class at anything.

  So it’s not self-deprecating for me to believe there are things I can’t do! In particular, things I can’t do for people. Some people. Most people. One way or another I disappoint. It’d be senseless not to admit it! Above all, don’t try to cast me as a super-modest guy mewing, “Poor me, I disappoint because I’m just not good enough—” That’s not me.

  At Princeton, there were classes graded on a curve. I saw guys come to the door on day one, see I was in the class and say, “The hell with this,” and go register for something else where they figured their chances were better. Somehow, it did not make me giggle.

  But those guys I don’t bleed for. The awful thing is disappointing kind people, good people, and I do that: women, benefactors, philosophers. At Oxford a generous, decent man on the faculty took me under his wing, became a comrade. We used to have dinner together, smoke cigars together. He wrote an important scholarly paper about “truth-conditions,” everyone was high on it, it was about to be published. One night, over a glass of port, I made a mistake: I showed him a mistake in his theory, a basic flaw. His most ambitious paper . . . was wrong. I didn’t mention it to anyone else, but he withdrew the paper, and it was never the same after that, with him. Disappointment hung in the air like the smell of urine. Our dinners soon stopped.

  You wonder if I don’t regret leaving philosophy, and why I won’t say I was good at it. Okay: I was wickedly good. A famous man once said vanity is a necessity in a philosopher. I had it—and I grew to hate it. But hating your bad traits doesn’t kill them—they seem to thrive on the attention.

  No—I don’t regret leaving philosophy. I left for the same reason some people quit Wall Street, or defending criminals they know are guilty, or even selling insurance. They quit because they despise themselves for doing it! They know the awful feeling of seeing yourself be gorgeously, hideously clever.

  Here’s how I sounded. I was on an Internet philosophy forum, and there was an anti-American bigot in Paris who was such a constant fool I finally wrote him this, online: “People say either you plagiarize your thinking from an utter fool, or you’re stone-stupid all on your own. In your defense, I tell everyone it’s wrong and unkind to say you plagiarize.”

  In other subjects you triumph by adding something new. In philosophy, triumph requires slaying someone old, proving them wrong. At my worst, I’d feel a gladiator’s glee. There are many decent philosophers. I wasn’t one.

  (Pops the can open; his tone changes, as though moving on to another subject.)

  So that’s why I’m going back to Galway. I’ll be living in the house where my grandfather, my mother, and I were all born, and where I lived for my first two years, before my mother took me to America. I’m told I’ll inherit it one day—the house, the beach, and the echoes.

  Over there, the best Irish dancers are treated like prima ballerinas, and my mother . . . could have been the best in the world. She lost it all because of me. Now, in that old, memory-wracked house, I have a job to do. My mother had a somber fear she’d be forgotten, but that’s one disappointment I’ll spare her. I don’t know how well, but I will write her story: She will be remembered, at least for a time, at least by a few of us.

  Whatever happens, given my wondrous aptitudes I figure I can still make it as a high-school teacher in some rural village on the Irish coast. . . .

  TALES OF AN URBAN INDIAN

  BY DARRELL DENNIS

  At 22, SIMON, a Canadian Indian, recalls attending an integrated junior high in Vancouver, dealing with racism, and his inevitable attraction to the “Forbidden Fruit,” a.k.a. white girls.

  SCENE

  Wolves Lake Reservation, British Columbia. The words “Forbidden Fruit” appear on the projection screen.

  TIME

  The play begins in 1972 and spans twenty-two years. In this monologue, SIMON is talking about events that occurred in 1985 when HE was 13.

  SIMON: By the start of the eighth grade I was catching the bus to attend junior high. It would get to the reserve at 7:30 AM, and for about an hour there was fun for Natives of all ages. Then the bus would arrive in town and we would pull into the golf course where the rich white kids lived. All the Natives would fall silent and move to the back of the bus. If you listened closely, you could hear Rosa Parks cussing us out. Then, a sea of blonde hair, designer clothes, and an overpowering smell of perfume would flood the bus. The master race. Any brown person trapped in a seat beside a white person was the focus of the tribe.

  [NICK: Tommy’s in a window seat beside a wh
ite one!

  SIMON, AGE 13: You stay here. I’m going in to get him.

  NICK: For the love of God, man. No sudden movements. They can smell fear.

  SIMON, AGE 13: Dammit! We got Math together. I’m not leaving him behind.]

  SIMON: It was us against them, even though none of them knew we existed. Except when they had to sit beside one of us. They would turn up their noses and roll their eyes. When we finally got to school it was just more of the same. Indians against whites. Rich against poor. Everybody against the East Indians. You could walk from one end of the hall to the next and hear all the nations of the world slammed between periods. “Honky,” “Wagon-burner,” “Chink,” “Paki,” “Wop,” “Kike,” “Spade.” Everyone stayed with their own, the status quo was maintained, and everybody was expected to be content. That’s when I started to crave the forbidden fruit. The white girls at my school seemed so pure. They didn’t walk down the hall, they floated, and little cartoon animals would flock around them. They had it all. They were living the life we saw on TV. Where every problem was solved in twenty-two minutes. The apple of my eye was Kimberly Thompson. She had big, pouty lips, she wore an adult-sized bra, and she came from Viking stock. I found her name in the phonebook and with my best pal Nick beside me, I was about to break on through to the other side. . . . I dialled the number. My heart was pounding through my chest. My face was burning. Nick was standing in front of me, breathing his beef-jerky breath in my face. One ring. “Oh God, please don’t be home.” Two rings. “Please God, don’t let her be home.” Three rings. “Thank you, God.” Click.

  THEY’RE JUST LIKE US

  BY BOO KILLEBREW

  Once the lover of a young actress who is now famous, RICHARD has moved on. HE gives a “pretend” interview to Barbara Walters, perhaps looking in a mirror.

  SCENE

  Indoors

  TIME

  The present

  RICHARD: No, I don’t really like to do interviews. I figure, you’re Barbara Walters, so if I ever am going to do an interview, this would be the one to do. (Listens.) Yes, people do still ask me about her. A lot, actually—photographers everywhere, calling my mother, following me into the public bathroom—all that stuff. (Listens.) I’m great actually. I teach drama to high school students and I’m married to a wonderful woman and I have a backyard and a dog and lots of wide open space. (Listens.) Yes, I hear she’s doing that. I’m sure it will be absolutely wonderful, she’s really a very talented character actress. (Listens.) I called it off, yes. I just couldn’t really stand that kind of lifestyle any longer. It’s not me. (Listens.) We don’t really talk anymore, no. (Listens.) I do miss her, Barbara. We used to have a really good time together. I miss her feet, she had great feet. (Loses focus.) I miss sitting in the audience, watching her onstage, and knowing that she would go home with me that night. I miss the way she would smile with her lips closed. I miss how quiet she would get every time it would rain. I miss her trying to hide pictures of herself in my sock drawer. I miss her blinking. (Snaps out of it.) Yes, I would say that there are times when I wonder if I made the right decision, but then I remember how she was one of those women that you just can’t keep. I was always looking at her and she was always looking out. (Stops the interview.) This is stupid. I am so stupid.

  THIRD PERSON

  BY PETER S. PETRALIA

  This play follows the strange love affair of two ordinary men whose brushes with loneliness, death, and madness frame their attraction to one another. CHARACTER A narrates a story HE once read about a man who had no sensory feelings of heat or cold or pain. A became obsessed with finding the man and kissing him.

  SCENE

  A stage with two microphones placed opposite each other

  TIME

  The present

  CHARACTER A: I read a news story once about a man who couldn’t feel heat or cold or pain. He grew up getting cut and not crying, walking in the snow and not freezing, stepping in fire and not even noticing. His body was a riddle of scars from the burns, lacerations and frostbite he never felt. It was like a road map to a sensation that doesn’t exist. In the story, he claimed he felt emotions. He claimed he knew joy, love, sorrow, grief, loneliness. He was sure of it because of that last one. He was constantly lonely. No one wanted him around because he frightened people. At 34 years old, he had never had sex and had only kissed one person in his life. He remembers the way his lips felt that one time and how inside he felt something that seemed like fire. In that kiss, he could imagine what it might feel like to be burnt. What it might feel like to be warm. Or cold. It was as if this kiss had the power to awaken in him something he didn’t even know existed. But it was just one kiss. And that was years ago. There was a picture of him with the story and looking at him I could see that he was waiting to be kissed again. When I read that story I wanted so badly to find him and kiss him. I wanted to open him up to the sharp edges of life. To something warm and dangerous. I called the newspaper and tracked down the writer. I made up a convincing story about being a long-lost relative and the writer gave me the man’s phone number. I called. But the phone just rang and rang. I called for weeks until it seemed like he would never re-emerge. I eventually just gave up.

  A few weeks later I saw another little blurb in the paper that I immediately understood. On the lower left corner of page A9 a headline read, “Man Who Doesn’t Feel Pain Ends Life in Hotel Room.” The article gave the pieced-together details of a night he spent with a prostitute. He was found dead, smiling, with lipstick on his face.

  (A drinks from his glass.)

  I hope I’m so lucky when it’s my turn.

  THIS IS HOW IT GOES

  BY NEIL LABUTE

  A threesome, who knew each other in high school, meet again after twelve years. Belinda has married Cody, an African-American former track star. The MAN describes HIMSELF as being an “ex-lawyer, an ex-husband, and ex-military.” HE has just left the couple to get a drink, but speaks to the audience.

  SCENE

  A restaurant in a smallish town in the Midwest

  TIME

  Yesterday

  MAN: Is it me, or does he seem a little pissed off? I totally get that vibe from him. Pissed right off about something. (Beat.) He didn’t always used to be that way, not when I knew him, anyhow. Not that we were, like, tight or anything. Best buds. But I knew him enough . . . enough to say that much about him, and he never seemed so keyed up like this. I mean, maybe after his mom left, for a while there he was kinda . . . you know. How you get when that sort of thing happens. You’re just cruising along and then, wham! Life gets, like, all shitty. Matter of minutes. . . . I think that’s what happened to him. And, thing is, she’d do it about every other month. Plus, there’s the whole race thing . . . not that he made a huge deal about it at school, but yeah, he pulled that card out a few times back then. Just once or twice a day! Nobody really called him on it, but it was completely obvious when he’d do it. School lunch line, picking teams for gym, when some girl or other wouldn’t go out with him . . . like, whenever he needed some excuse, basically. We used to call it the ol‘ “Ace a Spades.” I mean, not to his face, God no, you kidding? Cody was, well, you know . . . kinda fierce. Pretty serious when he wanted to be, so no. We’d say it when we were alone, just a few of the guys. Say, like, “Hey, Cody just whipped out the Ace’a Spades.” And that’s when somebody’d say, one of my friends would . . . “Just gotta call a spade a spade.” (Smiles.) We were only just joking, but it was pretty funny. At the time . . .

  THREE DAYS OF RAIN

  BY RICHARD GREENBERG

  PIP, the son of a famous architect who died when HE was very young, describes how his parents met.

  SCENE

  New York City

  TIME

  Middle of the night

  PIP: (Solo.) Hi. Hello. Okay: now me.

  My name is Phillip O’Malley Wexler—well, Pip to those who’ve known me a little too long. My father, the architect Theodore Wexler, died
of lung cancer at the age of 38, even though he was the only one of his generation who never smoked. I was 3 when it happened, so, of course, I forgot him instantly. My mother tried to make up for this by obsessively telling me stories about him, this kind of rolling epic that trailed me through life, but they, or it, ended up being mostly about her. Which was probably for the best.