Landscape of the Body

by John Guare

  They sit on the daybed and light up. Rosalie appears and sings one of those rousing uplifting songs of a musical comedy.

  ROSALIE It’s amazing how a little tomorrow

  Can make up for a whole lot of yesterday

  It’s amazing how a little tomorrow

  Can make up for a whole lot of yesterday

  Yesterday was dreary

  Clocks kept on crawling

  Now the future’s cheery

  How thrilling, how enthralling

  It’s amazing how a little tomorrow

  Can recompense an awful lot of sorrow

  So get yourself a little tomorrow

  And wake up from those awful yesterdays.

  It’s amazing how a little tomorrow

  Can recompense an awful lot of sorrow

  So get yourself a little tomorrow

  And wake up from those awful yesterdays.

  Shake up all those bore-filled yester-

  Make up those unlawful yesterdays.

  She inhales the smoke from the joint, bows, and goes into the darkness. Bert and Betty sit on the daybed.

  BETTY The first time I ever smoked pot, I was in a bar in Rhode Island with my girlfriend.

  BERT (Bombed by the joint) The summer you met Durwood?

  BETTY No, after. This guy asked us if we wanted to smoke reefers and my girlfriend said, “Only if you promise we’ll turn into sex-crazed nymphomaniacs who won’t be held responsible for any of their activities.”

  A man appears upstage, dressed like a beatnik.

  BETTY And the man said …

  DOPE KING (Striking a match) Results guaranteed.

  BETTY And off we went. He had a car.

  DOPE KING (Lighting a cigarette) Get in.

  The Dope King takes out a black rag.

  BETTY What’s that black rag?

  DOPE KING (Blindfolding her) I’m going to have to blindfold you girls seeing as how I am the Dope King of Providence, Rhode Island.

  BETTY Ooooo, I love an expert. Shut up, Betty. Just shut up.

  DOPE KING Lookit, you little twats, if you ever got caught, you couldn’t reveal where I’d taken you. You couldn’t betray me, but then I couldn’t have you betray yourselves with the knowledge you knew where the dope headquarters of Providence, Rhode Island, was. I’m doing this for you, you little twats.

  BETTY We drove, the three of us, my girlfriend, him, me. We giggled suicidally because maybe this man steering his car right then left then left then right would murder us and if he did we should remember where he took us. I had heard that directions given before death stay embroidered on your brain and the police can use that for a clue. I didn’t care if we were murdered. My life was beginning. There was a hit song that summer. We drove singing it. (She sings in a clear strong voice.)

  Hey stay a while

  In the crook of my arms

  All you got to do is

  Look in my arms

  And you’ll see Home Sweet …

  Mavis, because that was my girlfriend’s name, Mavis Brennan is squeezing my hand and I’m squeezing hers. Where are we? I smell bread. That Portuguese bakery. I think I know where we are.

  DOPE KING We’re here.

  BETTY He led us out of the car. We held hands like mountain climbers. Doors open, stairs climb.

  DOPE KING Okay.

  BETTY Three steps. One. Two. Three. Doors shut.

  DOPE KING Open your eyes.

  Betty takes off the blindfold.

  BETTY It was the room I had lived in the year before when I was working in the shoe factory for the summer. I saw traces on the wall where I had written “Fuck You” in peanut butter the year before one night because I was seventeen and my life still hadn’t begun and I’m out supporting myself. I said, “Is Miss Carter still the landlady here? Is that the shoe factory over there?” I said, “Boy, some dope king. Living in a seventeen-dollar-a-week rooming house with breakfast thrown in on Saturday.”

  DOPE KING Some breakfast.

  The Dope King goes.

  BETTY We laughed and laughed.

  BERT That’s nice. You go to a strange place and they take off your blindfolders and it’s a place where you lived.

  BETTY That is precisely what I did not, underline the not, did not like. I remember Miss Carter had said, “What’s that word in peanut butter on the wall?” I said, “Oh, you think that says Fuck? You dirty lady. That’s a message in speed writing: If You See Kay. Kay was my girlfriend,” I said. “If you see Kay, remind us both to rd ths msj and gt a bttr jb.” Memories within memories. I’m remembering what I remembered in my memory …

  BERT Where’s Mavis?

  BETTY She died or something.

  BERT Mavis Brennan.

  BETTY Don’t be such a busybody.

  BERT Mavis Brennan.

  BETTY What am I telling you stories about dope for? I should be telling you stories about how I didn’t take dope. I should be a father influence to you.

  BERT How did you die?

  BETTY Who died?

  BERT Mavis Brennan.

  BETTY Don’t be so morbid. I didn’t say she died.

  BERT You said she died.

  BETTY Or something.

  BERT What’s the something?

  BETTY You lose touch. Touch gets lost.

  BERT Will I lose touch with you?

  BETTY You’re my kid. You’re me. You’re the fruit of my loins or the fruit of my loom. Some jokes Mavis and I used to make about phrases in the Bible. Jesus came riding into town on his ass. We’d laugh. I wish sometimes you were a girl. I wish sometimes I had a friend. Mavis Brennan.

  BERT You can call me Mavis.

  BETTY Mavis, I’m in love with a boy named Bert.

  BERT Do you love him a lot?

  BETTY More than life itself.

  BERT Do you love life?

  BETTY More than Bert himself.

  BERT Do you love me?

  BETTY But Mavis, you’re my best friend.

  BERT Can I rub your hair?

  BETTY Oh, yes, Mavis.

  BERT (Rubs her hair) When I rub your hair, I can feel the oil from it under my fingernails. I sit in class and the teacher says, “Get your fingers out of your nose.” He says, “You can always tell the Catholic kids from the Protestant kids.” He says, “The Catholic kids are always picking their nose and the Protestant kids are always biting their nails.” He’s bald and he says, “Grass doesn’t grow on busy streets.”

  BETTY You tell him grass doesn’t grow on rocks either. This feels so good … don’t stop … Bert … Mavis …

  BERT (Goes to sink, gets a tray containing basin, pitcher, water, and shampoo) I’m getting the basin.

  BETTY I washed my hair last night.

  BERT Let me wash it tonight? Please? Momma, we have a thousand dollar bills in consecutive numbers. You are loved. You have decisions to make. Momma, let me clear your head. You always think better when I wash your hair.

  He pours water over her hair. She leans back. Her hair is undone. Bert soaps it.

  BETTY Make it lather up. Push all the thoughts, the bad thoughts, push them out of my head.

  BERT Push ’em out. Push ’em out.

  BETTY (Loving the shampoo) Wasn’t he disgusting?

  BERT That man?

  BETTY (Looking at the flowers he brought) Durwood Peach.

  BERT If you married him, you’d be Betty Peach.

  BETTY I’ll give him back his money tomorrow.

  BERT Here comes the hot water!

  BETTY I’ll keep half the money. A consideration fee. For considering his proposal.

  BERT Keep all of it. I don’t want him around.

  BETTY No, I’ll keep half the money in payment for a tormented night’s sleep. For tossing and turning and wondering whether or not I should run away with an insane Good Humor Man. Ex—Good Humor Man.

  BERT Our flavor of the week: Betty Peach! Betty Peach on a stick! Here comes the shampoo. Make the bubbles come up. Work out all the
bad thoughts.

  BETTY I went to visit Mavis in Memorial Hospital. She was dying of everything. They had cut off her breasts and she had lots of radiation treatment and her hair had gone. And I came to visit her. She was down to about sixty pounds and she wouldn’t die. And I said, “Mavis, is there anything I can do for you?” And she said, “Yes, there is this new book, The Sensuous Woman. Bring it. Read it to me.” And I went all that summer in Boston. Every day for visiting hours and read her from this dirty book on how to be sensuous and how to be attractive and how to have orgasms and how to … All summer she wouldn’t die. All summer I read to her. I finished the book. Mavis said, “Begin it again.” And I’d have to get very close to her to read because it was on the ward and the other patients did not want to hear this dirty stuff. And her gums were black and her breath smelled like sulfur and her hair was gone and I’m reading to her how to attract a man and she’s smiling and hanging on. I never went back after one day. I couldn’t go back. Fall was coming. I hated life. I hated Mavis. I hated. Rub the hair. Wash it out. More hot water. More bubbles. More soap. Get it all out of my head all the bad into a bubble and fly it away and pop it. Get it out.

  Betty has torn all the petals off Durwood’s flowers.

  BERT (Very moved, very tender) The next time my biology teacher rubs his bald head and says “grass doesn’t grow on busy streets,” I’ll say, “Yeah, and it doesn’t grow on rocks either.” I’ll say that. I kiss your hair, Momma.

  BETTY And I kiss Mavis and you and Raulito and your father and the Dope King of Providence, Rhode Island, and my sister Rosalie and life for bringing us a thousand dollars through the door and I kiss life and I kiss all the people I ever loved …

  BERT Me! Me! Most of all me!

  Bert pours water over her hair. The soap is washed out. Durwood appears in the room. He is breathless and excited.

  DURWOOD Is something wrong with me? I have you here and say good night like some goon. What am I being so polite about? I’m no goon. Good manners make you a goon. I’m trying to learn to listen to myself. Listen to what I want. Not what people tell me I should want. You must think I’m a goon. Only a goon would drive thousands of miles to find the only woman he ever loved, find her, then leave her and go back alone to a room in the Dixie Hotel by himself.

  BETTY What did I do to make you feel all this?

  DURWOOD I remember riding by your house looking up at the porch, ringing the bells extra loud so you’d come down and buy ice cream from me. Your mother was sitting there rocking and your father reading a paper and you and your sister crouching on the green steps holding your skirts down around your ankles talking so hard to each other.

  BETTY They’re all gone mostly.

  BERT You’re gonna catch a cold. You got to dry the hair or the wet picks up dirt. Ma?

  DURWOOD You and your sister walked down the steps still talking so hard you didn’t even pay any attention to me and you bought vanilla and walked back up the stairs and sat down and kept on talking.

  BETTY What in God’s name could we have been talking about?

  DURWOOD I said I want in. One day I’m going to be on that porch with that girl.

  BETTY Her leaving home? Some Ava Gardner movie?

  DURWOOD I realize now I wanted the girl and not the porch. (He takes out snapshots.) You got to come back with me. This house will be yours. All this land.

  BERT Look at all the fences. Everything is outlined.

  DURWOOD (Tearing up the photos) But if I had to choose between where I live and you, I’d rip up everything I own because the only landscape worth looking at is the landscape of the human body. I kiss your Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I kiss your Missouri and Monongahela and Susquehanna and Shenandoah and Rio Grande. I kiss the confluence of all those rivers. I kiss your amber waves of grain. I kiss your spacious skies, your rocket’s red glare, your land I love, your purple mountain’d majesty. But most of all I kiss your head. I kiss the place where we make our decisions. I kiss the place where we keep our resolves. The place where we do our dreams. I kiss the place behind the eyes where we store up secrets and knowledge to save us if we’re caught in a corridor on a dark, wintry evening. And you, with your mouth, kiss my head because that’s the place where I kept the pictures of you all these years. Come home with me to the hotel.

  BETTY I will come with you.

  DURWOOD (Takes her aside) But you can’t take the kid.

  BERT What is he saying?

  DURWOOD I don’t want you having any children except what comes out of us.

  BERT What are you talking?

  DURWOOD A family is like a body. A perfect body. The man’s the head. The woman’s the heart. The children are the limbs. I don’t want any limbs from any other bodies. No transplants allowed. You hear me? Only out of us.

  BERT What are you saying?

  BETTY (Taking Bert aside) Let me go down there and check out the landscape. I’ll send for you in a few days. I swear.

  Rosalie appears.

  ROSALIE So they went to South Carolina. The two of them. They left the boy home.

  Holahan appears.

  HOLAHAN So she claims. So she claims. The fact remains the kid is dead.

  Betty holds out the money. Bert takes it. Betty and Durwood leave.

  Bert comes downstage and sings.

  BERT I used to believe

  When I was young

  I understood

  Every note that was sung.

  Voices of sparrows

  Voices of blue jays

  Voices of robins

  Voices of eagles.

  When I was young

  I used to pretend

  Through all of my life

  I’d have a friend

  We’d climb the mountains

  We’d cross the deserts

  We’d sail the oceans

  We’d solve the mysteries.

  When I was young

  I used to believe

  In some other life

  I was an Inca

  Maybe a druid

  More like Egyptian

  Pyramid builder

  Leader of millions.

  I used to believe

  When I was young

  I understood

  Every note that was sung …

  Voices of eagles

  CURTAIN

  ACT TWO

  The interrogation room at the police station.

  HOLAHAN We had trouble tracking you down. You left town. Everybody thought you had taken the boy with you.

  BETTY I went away for a few days. He’s a big kid. He’s supposed to be able to take care of himself. Boy Scouts go off. Survivor camps where they go off, kids, for three months, four, in mountains. Kids go in forests for weeks and months and they come out men and parents are applauded.

  HOLAHAN Bleecker Street ain’t exactly survival camp.

  BETTY He was supposed to stay with people in the building, people were supposed to look after him.

  HOLAHAN A fourteen-year-old kid? Where’s your head, lady?

  BETTY Here. This whole area above the neck. I didn’t just desert him. I left him with money. I left him with a thousand dollars.

  HOLAHAN You left your kid with a thousand dollars?

  BETTY My friend that I traveled with gave it to him. To me. I gave it to Bert.

  HOLAHAN Even with inflation, a thousand’s a lot of money.

  BETTY What I’m saying to you is find the person stole the thousand dollars, you’ll find who murdered Bert. Said it. I said murdered Bert. I promised myself everything would be all right if I never mentioned the word murdered. If I just never said the word, I’d be all right. If I never said the word, the person who … did it—

  HOLAHAN The murderer—

  BETTY Would be found.

  HOLAHAN Stop running away from the fact!

  BETTY I am not running away from the fact—

  HOLAHAN Of the murder—

  BETTY I just promised myself I wouldn’t name
the fact. Not ever. You made me say the word.

  HOLAHAN Can I make you say another word you’re avoiding?

  BETTY Confess? Mister, I can say the word confess all that I want because saying the word confess is like saying the word desk. Chair. Necktie. Dirt. Room. You. I have nothing to confess.

  HOLAHAN Where is this millionaire now?

  BETTY It was only a thousand.

  HOLAHAN This thousand-aire. Where is he right now?

  BETTY South Carolina.

  HOLAHAN That’s where you went?

  BETTY Solomon Ferry. The Peach family. Durwood. His father’s name. He was a junior.

  Holahan dials the phone.

  Rosalie appears. She drags a chair and sits in it.

  ROSALIE Scene. In which Betty wishes her sister was still alive so she could tell her what happened.

  Betty sits against Rosalie’s knees.

  BETTY We got down to South Carolina two days after what a night at the Dixie Hotel. Durwood wasn’t kidding all right. We came down this alley of trees and he says, “Close your eyes and now turn ’em on.” He had this farm with white fences. I never saw so many white fences. I’m not even talking about what went on inside the white fences. I’m a country girl. No stranger to the green. The horses and cattle. I never saw such fences. And roads. White-painted rocks lining the roads pointing the way where you go up to the big house. I said, “Boy, old girl, you hit pay dirt this time. Boy, old girl,” I said, “you have been on adventures in your short lifetime, but this is the key adventure. They’re going to be doing TV spinoffs and shooting sequels to this part of your life. You are going to be a southern lady.” We stop in front of the white farmhouse and this youngish lady soon destined to be the ex-wife who wrote me the note struts out of the farmhouse followed by these two old people you just want to hug with a real nice parents’ look followed by golden dogs the color gold of cough drops that rescue you in the middle of the night. Durwood gets out of the car and I let him walk around the car to let me out. And these people instead lead him in the house instead of letting him open my side of the door. The woman who would soon be Durwood’s ex-wife came back out and said, “Are you the girl from Maine?” I said, “Yes, I am.” She said, “You’re very kind to bring Durwood back to us. Here’s money.” I got out of the car. I said, “I’m going to live here.” The old people said, “Thank you for bringing our boy back to us. Here’s money. He had to get you out of his system. We let him go to you. The doctors said let him go. It was the only way.” I said, “Hey, this is going to be my house.” “Well, one thing Durwood isn’t crazy about,” they said, “is you. You sure are a pretty girl. He’s been talking years about you. But it’s time he goes back in for a rest. There’s a bus leaving two-oh-five from Crossroads Corner going to Wheeling, West Virginia, direct and you can make connections there back to Maine.” I said, “New York. I live in New York now.” They said, “Isn’t that nice.” They gave me fifty dollars and showed me the hospital where Durwood would be which was very pretty too with a little pond in the front of it and the dog rode in the car with us and licked my face and I loved those old people and asked them to take me with them. And they said, “Here’s your bus,” and I got on it.