by Tony Kushner
HENDRYK
But you did say that.
ESTHER
And how did—
HENDRYK
No if.
ESTHER
But how—
HENDRYK
No hypothetical.
ESTHER
But.
HENDRYK
You said it.
Sleep with me. At least.
ESTHER
(Laughs) You’re gay.
HENDRYK
Oh yeah, well, so what. Gay. What. Is. That. You’re a dyke, I’m gay, so—
ESTHER
Actually I never said I was a—
HENDRYK
Oh come on.
ESTHER
What?
HENDRYK
You wear . . . Harley Davidson boots and you have short hair.
ESTHER
Once I wore those boots.
HENDRYK
We saw each other for—
ESTHER
You were my patient.
HENDRYK
I . . . what?
ESTHER
We didn’t “see” each other.
HENDRYK
For five years.
ESTHER
You make it sound like we dated.
HENDRYK
You think this is all about my mother.
ESTHER
It’s not not about your mother. Of course I think it’s about—
HENDRYK
I think you’re a dyke.
ESTHER
Lesbian.
HENDRYK
Wasn’t hostile.
ESTHER
Felt like it.
DYMPHNA
(To Esther) Thought he was gone.
ESTHER
(To Dymphna) He’s supposed to be.
BILLYGOAT
(To Hendryk) So are you to my thoughts as food to life.
HENDRYK
(To Billygoat) Stop it.
(To Esther) I’ve gained twenty-four pounds.
BILLYGOAT
Or as sweet seasoned showers are to the ground.
HENDRYK
Last night on the subway I urinated. In my pants.
BILLYGOAT
And as for the peace of you I hold such strife—
HENDRYK
(To Billygoat) SHUT UP! I hate the sonnets. Boring boring boring.
BILLYGOAT
. . . As ’twixt a miser and his wealth is found.
HENDRYK
I’m BROKE! I know women who have slept with you. New York is a tiny village. Well, it isn’t but I do. I work with a woman who has. Slept with you.
ESTHER
No you don’t.
HENDRYK
Yes I do.
ESTHER
No you don’t.
HENDRYK
Yes I do. I know you’re a lesbian.
ESTHER
And how does it make you feel.
HENDRYK
Sleep with me.
ESTHER
I’m going to charge you for this visit.
HENDRYK
I’ll pay twice what I paid.
ESTHER
You’re broke.
HENDRYK
I’ll mug someone.
ESTHER
Ba-DUM-bump.
You keep saying “sleep” with me.
HENDRYK
Sex.
ESTHER
Sleep isn’t sex.
HENDRYK
Nitpicker.
ESTHER
It’s interesting.
HENDRYK
Kleinian nitpicker. I think you can sleep with me, uh, have sex with me because unlike the truly great analysts of the past who had unshakable faith in the stern tenets of their discipline, you and all modern practitioners of . . . well, of anything, of psychoanalysis in this instance, in our . . . um, pickle, conundrum, whatchamacallit, have, well, faith, but no unshakable faith, no one does in anything these days, we have . . . ambivalence, it’s why we tattoo ourselves.
ESTHER
What?
HENDRYK
So like those priests who wind up sleeping with children, it’s not their fault, I mean we should put them in prison of course, kill them probably, who knows. I know that’s bad to say but there are days when everyone, um, seems like everyone should be killed, you know? In a world in which no structure rests assuredly, with assurancy on a foundation, in which nothing comes with a metaphysical guarantee, because even, take even an old atheist like Freud, God was still watching, He was watching all the way up until so-on-and-so-forth but today, today . . . Well take me for instance.
Only you have ever been watching me. For five years.
And nothing lasts longer than five years. Used to be, used to be
. . . ten at least. And so abuse of your . . . of one’s . . . wards, patients, inferiors, subjects. Well it’s wrong but not absolutely so because there simply are no absolutes, and. The, uh.
ESTHER
I think the associative leap to tattoos is interesting.
HENDRYK
Tattoos last.
ESTHER
Your mother was tattooed.
HENDRYK
That again.
ESTHER
I am absolutely never going to sleep or have sex with you.
HENDRYK
Because I’m fat, urinate in my pants, and I’m broke. And frightening. I have a thought disorder.
ESTHER
I don’t think you do.
HENDRYK
I think I do, but perhaps my thinking I do is a result of a thought disorder. If you think you have a thought disorder and you do have one, you’re thinking a correct thought, in which case you don’t have a thought disorder. So if I don’t have a thought disorder, but think I do, that is a disorder, which means I do but then well you get the point. It’s a small point. I saw a man with tattoos all over his body yesterday covering almost all his flesh like an epidermatological crisis. Now that’s frightening. And I thought wow, the uh. Bet his skin will always smell like cheap ink. I thought, wow, the pain, he must’ve really enjoyed that suffering, bet he remembers every inky, little needle-stick. This is how he knows he’s been here. Because it hurt to be. He has inscribed proof of his, well, not existence but . . . OK, sure, existence, sure, existence in, inscribed on his own, on his, in the only arena available to the late twentieth century citizen seeking effectivity, historical agency: his or her skin. I cannot change any world except this small world which is bounded by my skin. I can change nothing, I can only hire a biker with a needle to bruise into my flesh, “Live Free or Die.”
I’m scared. I’m scared of the world.
I really want to come back to you. Maybe I’ll get a tattoo.
(Pause.)
HENDRYK
Ambivalence expands our options. It increases our freedom, to, to . . . tattoo. Our selves. If we wish to. To have a concept like “our selves” or “my self.” Which makes us more ambivalent and more free. Which drives us crazy, and makes us desperate to find nonambivalent things like tattoos which for all their permanence and pain serve mainly as markers of how ambivalent and impermanent we are. Or feel we are.
ESTHER
Actually tattoos are removable. Nowadays.
HENDRYK
I hate the way you introduce irrelevancies.
(Pause.)
HENDRYK
I have a boyfriend now.
ESTHER
That’s good.
HENDRYK
He’s beautiful and he has no soul. None. In nature there’s no deformity but the mind. None are called evil but the unkind. Beauty’s, um, good, a good thing, beauty is goodness, but the Beauteous Evil are empty trunks o’erflourished by the whatchamacallit. The Devil. As they say.
I don’t, I don’t by the way believe that you are right that my mother named me Hendryk because it sounds like Schmendrik. SHE WAS DUTCH. FOR CHRIST’S SAKE! It’s a DUTCH NAME! NOT . . . um, NOT. BECAUSE
. IT SOUNDS. LIKE SCHMENDRIK. I don’t think she meant that. I think that’s wrong. I think you could be, uh I could sue you for malpractice for suggesting that, for, for, implanting, inscribing whatchamacallit, for forging neural pathways in my brain. Maternal ambivalence is lethal. You ruined my life.
ESTHER
But she did call you Schmendrik, Hendryk.
HENDRYK
SO?
ESTHER
She called you that all the time. It’s Dutch but you were born in Massapequa. Schmendrik, Hendryk. The words are practically homonymic.
HENDRYK
Homophonous, actually, is what you—
ESTHER
Homonym and homophone are . . . homologues. They’re homologous.
HENDRYK
They’re homonyms, actually, not homologues, though homophony is the precise—
ESTHER
But if they’re homonymous then they’re precisely—
HENDRYK
Though there is a word more precisely connoting closeness but imprecision. But I can’t remember what it is. Homophones are, like—
ESTHER
Tattoo and taboo.
HENDRYK
No, those aren’t, they’re, oh, ha ha.
My mom’s favorite actor was Oskar Homolka. When she was angry she’d say, “What have you done, Oskar Homolka?” “Listen up, Oskar Homolka!” The subtext of the last minute is “homosexual.” There I beat you to it. Pissed?
All this coil is long of you.
I want back in.
Tattoos are taboo for Jews. Taboo. It’s . . . TABOOOOOO-OOOOOOOOOoooooooooo. Like anal sex. I’m not a homosexual. I can’t be. I have no talent to be. And anyway, the, uh. Anal sex disgusts me. Ugh. Anal sex. Ugh. I am filled with horror. Well that’s too strong. Disgust.
BILLYGOAT
Do you know why that is?
HENDRYK
I don’t know why it doesn’t disgust everyone.
BILLYGOAT
But it doesn’t.
HENDRYK
I don’t know why.
BILLYGOAT
All sex has fragrance, and is sometimes malodorous. Love like Attar of Rose overwhelms with its fierce volatility the mephitic pungency of elimination and waste. When two lovers are conjoining. When my cock is up your butt.
HENDRYK
That is horribly horribly horribly embarrassing, what you just said, and I am going to vomit.
BILLYGOAT
Shit transforms.
HENDRYK
No it doesn’t. It’s irreducibly revolting. And germy. That is its essence. To revolt, and spread disease. You are very beautiful but you have no soul.
BILLYGOAT
Shit tranforms when you’re in love.
HENDRYK
Maybe I’ve never been in love.
BILLYGOAT
Maybe not.
(Pause.)
HENDRYK
How . . . sad.
ESTHER
Schmendrik. I mean Hendryk.
HENDRYK
(To Esther) Waitaminnit.
(To Billygoat) But you love me.
BILLYGOAT
I do.
HENDRYK
But how is that possible? I mean, look at me? And you have no soul. I, I’m reasonably sure about that. You’re a satyr. A Priapist. Nothing human is alien to you. It’s inhuman.
BILLYGOAT
Having no soul makes a person indiscriminate. Makes it possible to fall in love with unworthy object choices, like you.
HENDRYK
But if I don’t let you fuck me, you’ll leave me.
DYMPHNA
I thought he was gone, I thought he terminated.
ESTHER
He asked to see me.
DYMPHNA
What’s his real name?
(Pause.)
DYMPHNA
You shouldn’t let him back.
ESTHER
I won’t.
DYMPHNA
Ever. Promise.
ESTHER
Ever. Banished. Be gone.
HENDRYK
I don’t understand.
BILLYGOAT
I have to leave you.
HENDRYK
But that’s . . . that’s crazy. You love me so much my shit smells like Attar of Rose. I mean I can’t even say that without feeling nausea. But you say it does. But you’re going to leave me if we don’t fuck.
BILLYGOAT
Yes. Because your refusal means you don’t love me. I know that’s bad to say but we both know what the refusal means. You don’t love me, Hendryk. And that breaks my heart. It makes me want to die.
HENDRYK
So if you leave me, you’re going to die? Or are you just going to find a boyfriend who has no problems with the smell of Attar?
BILLYGOAT
Ummmm. The latter.
ESTHER
This morning I thought the bed was full of sand.
HENDRYK
I don’t understand.
DYMPHNA
Is it bad today?
ESTHER
Hi-ho hi-ho it’s off to work I go.
Yes, it’s very very bad.
I want to die. God has closed my womb and I want to die. As a lesbian and a feminist and a rational progressive person and everything I am, as lucky as I am, I know it’s bad to say this but I don’t give a fuck. I am so fucking depressed I want to die. Die die die die die die die die. I want to have a baby. If I can’t have a baby I want to die. I can’t take any more of those pills, I don’t want to get cancer; I don’t want to superovulate I just want to have a baby so bad I want to die but I don’t want cancer. But I really do want to die. I hate the baby that won’t be born. I hate the five failed sperm donors. Inexplicably, I hate you. Certainly I hate myself. I can’t describe the hatred I feel for the doctors who . . . I have projected the hatred I feel for those doctors and their superovulators onto my shrink and her antidepressants so I can’t remember to take my Zoloft, which I need to do but I hate her and her Zoloft for seeking to rob me of my death-desiring depression which is now the only thing left of my baby. I don’t believe in God, I never did, not even a little but my hate believes in God apparently and He has closed my womb so fuck you, God. While my patients are jabbering away on the couch I wish I had a big sand bucket like kids have at the beach and I imagine myself with a plastic shovel pouring sand in their jabbering mouths, slowly and deliberately and seriously the way kids do, filling their mouths with sand not just to
(To Hendryk) SHUT THEM UP (To Dymphna) but obviously to strangle them; I wish all the world was burnt to a cinder, I wish I lived on the island of Montserrat. I do live on the island of Montserrat. You know that island with the . . . whatchamacallit, um, volcano. I imagine you calling my patients and saying, “Esther is dead, Dr. Zauber is dead, she killed herself, sorry, here are referrals.” They would all be shocked and sad and so forth but also deeply gratified to have finally heard what you sound like, to have it confirmed that you exist, my lover. Parasites. Oy. Oy. Die. Die. Oy vey iz mir. Oh woe is me. Every morning’s . . . I’m sorry, but it’s only ever, “Oh no not this again.” And know what? My complete lack of hope is all that keeps me alive. I think that if for one moment I felt hope, I would have the courage to kill myself. For real.
