The Traveling Companion & Other Plays Read online

  WOMAN: Mr. Kuniyoshi, will you please call downstairs and have an ambulance sent here to remove this madman.

  MAN: Red paint on purple sequins! Marrrrr—velous! [He throws back his head and laughs so hard that he staggers.]

  WOMAN: At this point you know it’s no use to continue. It’s time to stop, to rest. You could go to Kyoto with a doctor and nurse or to the Izu peninsula where they have pacifying hot springs and little Japanese girls to bathe you like a baby till your nerves are calmed by their tender ministrations.

  [Smiling in sweet triumph, she is suddenly quite beautiful: her skin is flawlessly smooth and deep olive, her figure superbly lithe and perfectly molded under the purple-sequined silk sheath splashed with crimson.]

  WOMAN [removing a little bottle from her evening purse]: Put this little round white bit of dynamite under your tongue. [She advances fiercely toward him.] —Before you drop dead. I can see your heart through your ribs. Open, open, mouth open!

  [He complies.]

  WOMAN: Pop! In it goes! Mr. Kuniyoshi, have you called downstairs?

  ORIENTAL [as law student]: I think it is better if you—

  MAN [to the woman]: You go to Kyoto or the hot springs till I—

  WOMAN: I’m not an artist in a state of collapse. I am just your whore.

  MAN: Mine? Only? With a Jap in your bedroom?

  WOMAN: A bilingual young Japanese who has studied—

  MAN: Christ!

  WOMAN: Law at the Imperial—

  MAN: You used to—

  WOMAN: University and spent years in the States, his—

  MAN: Pay me the compliment of—

  WOMAN: Father’s a consul.

  MAN: Not bringing them home under my—

  WOMAN: He’s made a comparative study of—

  MAN: Nose!

  WOMAN: Eastern and Western law. I told him what you told me, that I am a woman without any legal position in your life, lived with you eleven years without one!

  MAN: I reminded you you were free, that I had no chains or claims on you.

  WOMAN: This young man is of the opinion that I have a claim on you that American courts would uphold.

  [They stare at each other in silence for a few moments.]

  WOMAN: So! I didn’t know you were painting with spray-guns now!

  MAN: You see now that I am.

  WOMAN: Yes, now I see, and I see why the gallery has refused to exhibit this new work.

  MAN: What makes you—?

  WOMAN: Think so? This! [She produces an opened cablegram from her purse.] Since I was aware that something extraordinary was happening in here, I took the liberty of opening this cablegram to you from Frelich’s Gallery. [She reads.] “What in hell’s going on, you must be sick or kidding? We value your reputation too much to consider the exhibition of these canvasses photographed for us. Come home, baby. We love you, want to help you, could only harm you by exhibiting work done in obvious state of confusion. All our love, Sarah.”

  MAN: Cable her back: “You know what to do with your love, all of it. Put my new work in storage while I make arrangements with another gallery for the exhibition of my most important new work.”

  WOMAN: You don’t believe that, do you?

  MAN: I’m working with absolute freedom for the first time.

  WOMAN: So’s a child making mud-pies.

  MAN: Get out. I’m going back to work now.

  WOMAN: Nobody can help you, you have gone beyond human help.

  MAN: I’ve never been given any, I’ve never been offered any and have never asked for any. Now will you please get out? You’ve got somebody in your bedroom, go in and go to bed with him.

  WOMAN: What’s my bottle of Lysol doing here, are you painting with Lysol now, too?

  [She goes into adjoining room which is lighted. The Oriental rises.]

  WOMAN: It’s horrible.

  ORIENTAL [as law student]: What?

  WOMAN: Lock that door, he’ll come in here.

  ORIENTAL [rising]: I think perhaps I should go now.

  WOMAN: No. Why should you? This is a serious business appointment. Sit back down. Would you like some whiskey?

  ORIENTAL: Thank you.

  WOMAN: I’ll have to get it from him. [She enters the other room.]

  MAN: What the fuck do you want now? Besides that man in there with you?

  WOMAN [seizing bottle]: The whiskey. The man has come here to discuss my legal position, he’s a young Japanese law student at the Imperial University, and a graduate of Harvard: brilliant. We’ll have a drink in there till you pull yourself together, then come in. And we’ll all have a quiet, plain discussion of my legal position.

  [She returns to adjoining room with whiskey bottle. A Second Stage Assistant rushes on with small table and glasses. The woman and the Oriental drink together as she talks.]

  WOMAN: I found a bottle of Lysol in his room.

  ORIENTAL: What is Lysol?

  WOMAN: A powerful disinfectant: American women use it, diluted, as a douche, but undiluted, it’s poison; I mean if you drink it.

  ORIENTAL: —Did he drink it?

  WOMAN: No, of course he didn’t. He just put it in there to scare me. He’s ridiculously childish, infantile, and—perverse!

  [The man enters.]

  MAN: What’s this Jap doing here, I didn’t think you liked them, I thought you considered them sexually inadequate.

  WOMAN: He understands and speaks perfect English.

  ORIENTAL: Excuse me, shall I go now? Yes, I think I’ll go now.

  WOMAN: No. Wait. I want you to tell him what you told me about my legal position.

  MAN: What does this Jap know about your legal position, and what do you mean by your legal position I’d like to know anyhow?

  WOMAN: My legal position with you after eleven years of unlicensed co-habitation with a dangerous psychopath, continually proposing a double suicide pact.

  ORIENTAL: Please, I think I should go now.

  MAN: No, don’t go now. Tell me what you told her about her legal position? [To the woman.] How in hell could a young Jap know about what you call your goddamn legal position in the States when you have none and even a Jap would know it.

  ORIENTAL: Excuse me, I’m going to go now.

  MAN [restraining him forcibly]: NO, YOU ARE GOING TO STAY, NOW.

  ORIENTAL: I will come back later after the—

  MAN: —After the what?

  ORIENTAL: Discussion between you and the lady. It’s after midnight, I will come back tomorrow.

  MAN: Hell, tomorrow begins at midnight, this is already tomorrow. Stay here and tell me right now about her legal position after her years with a madman she’s driven mad and now she wants to get rid of.

  WOMAN [lifting a phone brought to her by the Second Stage Assistant]: —I have the phone. I’m going to call for help downstairs if you don’t let this young man alone. He is a graduate of Harvard, and now a post-graduate student at the Imperial University here in Tokyo. He says that I have a very strong legal position.

  ORIENTAL: I said a very strong moral position.

  WOMAN: A very strong moral position that would—

  MAN: Moral position, you’ve brutalized my nature, you’ve driven me out of my mind and brutalized me completely, systematically, for eleven years, what moral position does that give you? You’ve destroyed me as a man and destroyed me as an artist, both, equally, both! How does that give you a moral or legal position? HEY!

  [The “HEY!” is shouted at the Oriental, who has picked up his briefcase and gone out.]

  WOMAN: How about my nature? Being your whore for eleven years hasn’t brutalized my nature in your opinion, or don’t I count in your opinion? Artist you, whore me! Artist is a dirty word to me, now, a dirtier word than whore is! Artist, artist, a disgusting
word to me now. Get out your spray-gun, you painter, spray, spray paint on the canvas, you artist, you spray-gun painter, you SHIT, you MOTHER GRABBER! I LOVED YOUUUU! Otherwise would I have lived as your whore, without a legal position except a whore’s in your rotten life all these years if I didn’t love you, damn you!?

  [He stares at her for a moment. Then lifts the spray-gun still in his hand and sprays paint in her face. She screams. The Second Stage Assistant enters with a can and a towel.]

  SECOND STAGE ASSISTANT: Turpentine, please.

  WOMAN [sobbing]: Ahhh.

  SECOND STAGE ASSISTANT: Permit please. [He removes the paint with the turpentine and towel.]

  MAN [in doorway]: I can’t work anymore, finished! An artist has got to have the support of some decent, dignified relationship with somebody in his life. [He is painting, jerking his head violently at the audience.]

  [The Second Stage Assistant bows slightly as if to efface himself more completely.]

  MAN: That is the spring of his talent. You’ve poisoned the spring: deliberately, systematically, out of God knows what twisted feelings. That’s what I can’t forgive. You have muddied, dirtied, poisoned the spring of my talent! My God how I’ve fallen since you! All dignity gone from my life, all pride gone out of my life! The will to live gone out of my life, completely. And brutalized life and work both, both! Yeah, yeah, equally, both life and work, you, you—horrible! Merciless! Bitch!

  [He makes a sobbing sound and rushes back into his room. She follows as far as the threshold. She is superbly in command of herself as she always is when he flips. She is beautiful, cool: a queen.]

  WOMAN: Blame me for your dead talent if that makes you feel better.

  MAN: Oh. “Dead talent”?

  WOMAN: You said it was and I’m afraid I agree. Yes, it’s dead, and stinking. When you start putting your canvasses on the floor and painting with a spray-gun instead of a brush and then mess it around with your fingers like a kid making mud-pies. —Who wouldn’t know it was dead? And yet you refuse to go into a clinic. And get psychiatric treatment, which is the only hope for you.

  MAN: OUT, GET OUT, OUT, OUT, OUT, GET OUT!

  [This cry is accompanied by action: he thrusts her violently out the door. She offers no resistance. He snatches the whiskey bottle.]

  MAN: You know where to stick the knife in! —You’re an artist at that. [He retreats from the door. He picks his canvas up from the floor and puts it on the easel. He looks at it with a sick sound in his throat.] You never knew what it meant to me. I never valued myself or my life in my life, my work was all I valued, just my work that used to, to—purify me! It rose above me and gave my life some meaning. [He picks up the bottle from the floor and drinks.]

  WOMAN: I can see you in there: drinking out of the bottle—already drunk—and wallowing in self-pity.

  [The man sets the bottle down as noiselessly as possible on the stool before the easel.]

  WOMAN: I heard you putting the bottle down in there.

  MAN: Here’s something else you can hear! [He hurls the bottle against the door locked between them.] You can hear that too!

  WOMAN: That means you’ll come in here to get another bottle out of the case. But I’m locking the door on my side now. Artist! —Creep! —Phoney!

  MAN: You’re showing your hand plainly now. It’s my work that you hate me for most.

  WOMAN: Yes! Because it’s sick, sensational crap!

  MAN: And you? And you?

  WOMAN: Me WHAT? Go on and say it.

  MAN: —You make me attack you. I don’t want to attack anybody—nobody. I just wanted some little decency in my life and some little bit of tranquility in my life so I could—

  WOMAN: So you could what?

  MAN: Try to be what I was. I used to have decent feelings. I had many friends before I latched on to you. I was liked, I was loved and respected.

  WOMAN: For what! You were always the same as you are now. People like you never change, they just develop like cancers. Just grow in their sickness like a malignant growth grows. Oh, if I ever told you what you have done to me!

  MAN: Tell me, tell me: —What have I done to you besides providing you with the means to be utterly idle?

  WOMAN: How cheap you are! What a cheap idea you have of human relations.

  MAN [slamming door open again]: What is your idea about human relations? After eleven years, I don’t know!

  WOMAN: You may have noticed that I have friends and you don’t!

  MAN: I don’t have any because I took you! —In place of all friends, took you!

  WOMAN: You had no friends, just leeches!

  MAN: You are the big blood-sucker! [He slams door and locks it again.]

  WOMAN: I won’t forget you said that.

  MAN: I hope you don’t forget it: Remember it! —Not that you give a shit . . .

  WOMAN: You are the leech, not me: You’ve sucked my blood, sucked my arteries dry, dry, dry, till I feel like the shell of a—locust! —And now you pity yourself and tell me that I have “brutalized your nature.” You artist! You—pretender!

  MAN: Let’s cut this out, this is hell.

  WOMAN: Yes, it’s hell!

  MAN: Well, then let’s cut it out, it’s the same old fight that we’ve been fighting eleven years, the longest war that’s ever gone on!

  WOMAN: How do you think it’s been for me for eleven years, having no hold on you but the sexual act and knowing that that was the only hold I had on you?

  MAN: How do you think it’s been for me, wanting to be loved and just offered sex now and then?

  WOMAN: Is that how you think I have “brutalized your nature?”

  MAN: Yes, that’s how, exactly!

  WOMAN: Did you hear my question? I asked you how do you think it’s been for me just being your whore, God damn you!?

  MAN: That’s all you wanted to be. You could have been—everything else, everything, anything else, you could have, you could have—at least deceived me, fooled me, made me believe that there was some love between us, not just the sexual thing and the eleven year power-struggle, battle of—

  WOMAN: You got what you wanted! —I gave you all my young life and now I’m fading, I’m faded.

  MAN: Oh, you still manage. You still make pick-ups in bars, continually, with no effort.

  WOMAN: That’s just one of your paranoiac delusions.

  MAN: I’m going to pack up and check out.

  WOMAN: You can’t pack.

  MAN: Oh, yes, I can. I packed plenty of suitcases in my time.

  WOMAN: Before you turned into the feeble mess you are now.

  [Pause. He throws his hands to his face and cries into them for a moment.]

  MAN: Christ, what a monster you are: The cruelest, hardest person I’ve ever known in my life! —I’ve been castrated by you! —I knew it eight years ago but wouldn’t face it, kept kidding myself that the act you put on in bed was true, sincere. I told my analyst that: I said you were so sweet in bed. You want to know what he said? He said, isn’t that the business of a whore, to be sweet in bed?

  WOMAN: You told him that, you said that to him about me?

  MAN: Yes, I did, and that’s what he said to me! About you!

  WOMAN: You were paying him fifty dollars a day for telling you just what you wanted to hear about me. Now I’m going to tell you something about yourself and it won’t cost you fifty dollars or fifty cents! —You are the meanest, lowest, and cheapest mother-grabber there ever was: no lie!

  MAN: —Well, I’m packing up, now, and checking out of this hell. [He moves forward and calls for the maid like a drowning man shouting for help.]

  MAN: Otetsudai2

  [A little Japanese maid rushes in, bowing and uttering breathless little exclamations.]

  MAN: Will you please help me pack? I am leaving, going! [He has to repeat
this several times before the maid understands.]

  WOMAN: How is she going to pack for you in there? Your luggage is in here and all your clothes. Send her in here. I’ll give her your things and your luggage. Just write me out a check for my plane fare back to the States and stick in under the door. I don’t want you back in this room, I don’t want to see you ever again in my life.

  MAN [to the maid]: Go next door for my things.

  [She doesn’t understand: keeps ducking her head with frightened little gestures.]

  WOMAN: Let her in here, I’ll explain, I’ll give her your rotten things and your luggage.

  [The man unlocks the door and motions to the maid to enter.]

  WOMAN: Here! Here! Here! [She is hurling his clothes from a closet to the floor, then kicks his suitcases toward them.] —Now take all this stuff in there. IN THERE!

  [The frightened maid gathers up clothes and suitcases. The man has slammed the door. The maid raps timidly. He lets her in. She keeps murmuring little apologies. She starts folding and packing garments into luggage, crouching on the floor.]

  WOMAN [through the door]: That’s what you need: a servant to live with, a slave! —A little crouching, whimpering, ducking and bowing little slave! —At your feet.

  MAN: I needed love, understanding: the tenderness of a woman, not the tricks of a whore.

  WOMAN: Why are you leaving? These women are perfect for you! —They’ll kiss your feet when you kick them.

  MAN: Because—

  WOMAN: —Because of what?

  MAN: —You were beautiful to me and I loved you. With all my heart I loved you.

  WOMAN: You mean you enjoyed me in bed. That’s all you mean.

  MAN: I loved you. That much you know, you can’t deny that you know it. That I did love you until you made me choose between you and—my last bit of self-respect, that much you must know, you can’t deny that you know it . . .

  WOMAN: You’re in there drinking, getting slobbery drunk.

  MAN: What are you doing in there?

  WOMAN: Under the circumstances, I don’t see how that concerns you!

  [On her side of the unlocked door, the woman is making up at a mirror with calmness and care. He is drinking. The little Japanese maid is bustling and murmuring as she packs with a tenderness and precision like a mother caring for a sick child.]