The Traveling Companion & Other Plays Read online

  NANCE: The phone is on the table, right beside you, behind the jar of peppermint stick candy.

  JOSIE: Aw. Hmm. [She dials a number on the phone.] —What’re you doing, Pat? —Ice-Hockey fight on the tube? Hmm. How many beers you had? Look, watch it tonight. I want you to pick me up so I can keep my cab-fare. I’m sitting here with a loony. A grown young woman dressed up like a kid in party clothes, this is a real bummer. She’s got her eyes on a naked male statue in the hall and her hand is in her lap with the fingers movin’. Get the pitcher? If she starts being indecent I’ll call you back so stay by the phone, this job is a weirdie. Don’t git drunk now, Pat!

  SCENE DIMS OUT

  SCENE TWO

  A while later. Josie is sewing, but looking up repeatedly at Nance.

  NANCE: —It rained last night. The dead come down with the rain.

  JOSIE: I don’t know about this. [A slight pause.] What’s that book you got there? [She crosses to Nance and seizes the book.] Photographs of a boy dancer in tights. Give it here.

  NANCE: NO! He isn’t yours!

  JOSIE: He ain’t yours neither. You got indecent thoughts, it makes me sick.

  [Nance hold the books tight to her breasts.]

  NANCE: Please return to your chair, he won’t come in till you do. [She looks back at the shadowy life-size stature in the hall, and speaks in a cultivated adult fashion.] I recognize you from your photographs. Never mind the old woman, she’s employed to sit with me while Mother is out. I know if I were alone, you’d come in and sit here with me and we’d have an intimate—conversation . . .

  [Chimes ring.]

  NANCE: That’s just the clock, don’t mind it . Being a dancer, perhaps you’d like some music to make an entrance? There’s a music-box. I’ll turn it on. Do come in! You’re beautiful as the chauffeur.

  JOSIE: That does it! I’m going to call my husband again to pick me up, crazies I won’t sit with! [She dials phone.] —Pat, you come right over and pick me up here, I can’t take no more of this creature I’m sitting with. She’s still acting indecent with her hands in her lap and staring at that naked man’s statue and you come here, this is no place for a clean-living woman. Know how long I sit here? Till midnight, probably later, while the Mother and her friend are out with pick-ups. Now you come right over. Or I’m going to walk out without pay. I left you the address, Fifty-fifth and Park, come quick, before I—You heard me! [She hangs up.]

  [The statue becomes the apparition of Vaslav Nijinsky. He advances to the parlor door.]

  NANCE: Oh, how do you do!

  JOSIE: How’s who do?

  [Vaslav assumes a dancer’s first position with grave concentration.]

  JOSIE: Answer me, you disgusting idiot!

  [Josie shakes Nance. Nance pushes her away rather violently.]

  NANCE: You are not allowed to touch me!

  VASLAV: You have an unpleasant companion. I understand what that’s like. To be stupid is worse than to be mad, but probably more comfortable to be.

  NANCE: Pay no attention to her, she’s employed to sit with me.

  VASLAV: I can’t perform if she creates a disturbance.

  JOSIE: Here’s your pill.

  NANCE: I’ve had one already.

  JOSIE: Then go up to bed.

  NANCE: Not till midnight. Please return to your chair and go on sewing.

  JOSIE: If I was your mum I’d lock you up and throw the key away. [She returns to the chair and her sewing.]

  VASLAV: You would like me to dance.

  NANCE: Yes, please.

  VASLAV: It’s been so long and there isn’t much space.

  NANCE: But you can leap, I’ve read you spring like a bird.

  VASLAV: I had great levitation.

  [He leaps over a small table. Nance gasps and applauds.]

  VASLAV: Don’t applaud ’till I bow.

  JOSIE: This makes me sick, I’m going to the bathroom. [She exits.]

  VASLAV: The harpie’s out. [He dances for a few minutes.] —The music’s stopped.

  NANCE: Shall I start it again or will you? I wish you’d sit by me here and talk.

  VASLAV: I went mad, you know, and when I talk it’s madness.

  NANCE: Just sit beside me a while.

  VASLAV [on sofa]: Are you a lunatic too?

  NANCE: Mother says I’m a child.

  VASLAV: But you’re not.

  NANCE: No. I’m very different, though.

  VASLAV: —Yes, very—different, though.

  NANCE: I wish that you would embrace me.

  VASLAV: Impossible. You wouldn’t feel it at all, it would be nothing.

  NANCE: Well, may I touch you?

  VASLAV: Physical touches—dissolve me.

  NANCE: They make you—

  VASLAV: Disappear, go away.

  NANCE: No, no, don’t!

  VASLAV: Then no touches between us, just—

  NANCE: It’s—unbearable—to just sit here beside you without any contact.

  VASLAV: But you know, I’m an apparition.

  NANCE: A fantasy?

  VASLAV: Something—similar, yes, it’s like a vision, or a shadow or a figure in a dream.

  NANCE: —I—don’t dream.

  VASLAV [with a sad smile]: You mean you don’t distinguish between waking and sleeping.

  NANCE: Just that the room is darker when I sleep.

  VASLAV: Otherwise, no difference?

  [Nance shakes her head. Pause.]

  NANCE: I don’t understand apparitions.

  VASLAV: They’re contradictory, paradoxical things: maybe only possible on a stage, in a play written by a madman.

  NANCE: I want to touch and be touched.

  VASLAV [touching her hand]: This is my touch. Do you feel it?

  NANCE: If you say so.

  VASLAV: You’ll believe so?

  [Nance smiles.]

  VASLAV: The licenses of madness are almost unlimited. I know, since I’ve explored them too.

  NANCE: You’re—beautiful.

  VASLAV: Well, I created the illusion. Et ça va. Actually, I was short. Slant-eyed, my hair receded early. My legs were so muscular that my upper torso, while hairless and well-formed, seemed inadequate to them. However, costumes and light and the creations of Bakst and my passion for my art, and, I must admit it, the possessive care that Diaghelev gave me ’till I defected to matrimony and madness, made me appear to have beauty. And I had an arrogant way. Well. The apparition of a dancer leaps without effort, nothing to make him breathless. —You seemed to be dressed for a little girls’ party.

  NANCE: Mother prefers me to. [Pause.]

  VASLAV: Little frosted cakes: petit fours.

  NANCE: Won’t you have one?

  VASLAV: Oh, I don’t eat, apparitions can’t, no digestive tract.

  NANCE: Well, sit down with me on the sofa again, and—

  VASLAV: Embrace you? I thought I’d shown you that apparitions can be seen but not touched and not touch. I understand erotic impulses, was taught them early in life and was a good pupil. But, finally, found them inadequate as my torso to my abnormally muscular legs. To be disembodied is a release from passions. But music haunts me still.

  NANCE: Music. Arensky’s “Vals a Deux Pianos”? [She returns to the music box.]

  VASLAV: You want me to dance again?

  NANCE: Please.

  [He dances. She stands ecstatic. He stops and bows.]

  VASLAV: Applaud, applaud, shout Bravo and I will take bows.

  NANCE [applauding]: Bravo, bravo!

  [He takes repeated bows.]

  NANCE: Isn’t that enough?

  VASLAV: I would take fifteen, twenty, in a storm of flowers.

  NANCE: Do you still care about that, I mean does your—apparition?


  VASLAV [imperiously]: Hand me those roses! [He indicates flowers in a vase on incidental table.]

  NANCE: Oh, but—that mean old woman will notice!

  VASLAV: Vite, vite, do as I say, the house is thundering with applause!

  [She rushes to hand him the roses; they fall from his hands to the carpet. Josie enters from the hall.]

  JOSIE: Oh, throwin’ things about, are you! [She kicks viciously at the roses.]

  NANCE: I can’t imagine a person kicking roses! Can you imagine anyone kicking roses?

  VASLAV [ecstatic]: I don’t imagine, I bow with Karsavina! Now with Pavlova! Now with the corps de ballet and the ovation continues, now Stravinsky joins us, and now— [His face darkens.] That demon Diaghelev. [He swears in Russian and spits.] Chort s nem1 —Now Bakst . . . [He takes a final bow.] —Nothing afterward ever really existed! —Madness and death are unbearably lonely . . . [He averts his head in torment.]

  NANCE: So are madness and life.

  JOSIE [frightened]: Too goddam much! I’ll wait outside for my husband!

  [Josie exits through the hall. Vaslav returns to the sofa.]

  NANCE: She’s gone now, we’re alone. [She touches his face and throat lingeringly.]

  VASLAV: I’m sorry I can’t respond. —What is your name?

  NANCE: My name is Nance.

  VASLAV: Enchanté. —Why haven’t you gone to the party?

  NANCE: I wasn’t invited to one.

  VASLAV: You’re dressed as a little girl for a bal masque, for a masquerade party.

  NANCE: No. This is how I dress when alone every night.

  VASLAV: Hmmm. —If I were still human, I would be—sympathique . . . Please remove your hand. —I suspect that you will have no love in your life outside of your fantasies, because when people go mad, they’re usually, almost always, kept under close custody, and intimacies are forbidden.

  NANCE: —There are diamonds of perspiration on your forehead and throat.

  VASLAV: You do—imagine—well . . .

  NANCE: I feel this blue vein pulsing in your throat and I feel—

  [He catches her hand.]

  VASLAV: No, no. No more, I’m sorry. I can’t go back that way, not even in your fantasy. It was too much: it burned me up, it interfered with my art and finally blasted my mind. I know how sad it is, to be deprived of gratification of strong natural longings, but there are other things, there’s a lifetime of dreaming before you in this elegant house, or at least till—you’re abandoned.

  [She continues to caress him.]

  VASLAV: No, no, I said no. —Well, of course if you have to. —I’ll—submit, I was—always passive permissive. —You do know where to touch to thrill the skin—if the skin of apparitions could be thrilled.

  [She continues her touches.]

  VASLAV: However —If you go on with this, I’ll dissolve. You’ll find your hands are empty, moving in air. —Of course I admit that’s probably not much different from the caresses of those that caressed me and whom I caressed when I lived but there is a difference and that difference is a great one. —You’ve defiled me! I’m not yet entirely free from the memories of my body and the disgust of being exploited as a body when I existed as a great dancer and wanted only that. I told them and wrote in my diary that I am spiritual food.

  NANCE: I know your diary. I have read that, too.

  VASLAV: Begun in St. Moritz, a place of retreat from war.

  NANCE: You devoted yourself to music and choreography and then your words to the world.

  VASLAV: I informed the world that I am spiritual food. People go to the church in order to pray and there they are made to drink wine and are told that it is the blood of Christ. The blood of Christ does not intoxicate—on the contrary, it makes people sober. Catholics do not drink wine, but make use of it in a symbolic way. They swallow white wafers, thinking that they swallow the blood and flesh of Our Lord. I am the spirit in the flesh and flesh in the spirit.

  NANCE: Yes, remember the flesh, it cries to be remembered.

  VASLAV: In becoming an apparition, I rise, I rise, above flesh!

  NANCE: Please, not completely! Not above my—desire!

  VASLAV: Don’t play Diaghelev with me. [He retreats.] He dyes his hair in order to look young. Diaghelev’s hair is white. He buys black dyes and rubs them in. I have seen this dye on Diaghelev’s cushions. His pillowcase is blackened by it. I hate dirty linen and therefore was disgusted by this sight.

  NANCE: Not with me, please not disgusted with me!

  VASLAV: Then control your hands, control your ravenous lips!

  NANCE: I know my age is disguised by inappropriate clothes. Please be tolerant of my hungry flesh, my—my ravenous lips, they’re human!

  VASLAV: Accept me as I am.

  NANCE: You are?

  VASLAV: I am the Lord. I am Man. I am Christ.

  NANCE: I know, I read, I remember, but for tonight—for me? Be man?

  VASLAV: Woman disguised as child, false child, lonely woman.

  NANCE: Loneliest woman, prisoner of child’s clothes!

  VASLAV: I consent no longer to the service of lechery, at the height of my ascent into purity as an artist. You know my words by heart but you don’t understand me. No. You’re a lunatic in their eyes, so was I. Led about, watched over, treated like a pet monkey on a chain!

  NANCE: But there was Romala. You had flesh for her, were man, not apparition!

  VASLAW: In her I bred Kyra, direct descendant of Christ. A difference, no?

  NANCE: Let me be Romala for you; breed for you a descendant of Christ!

  VASLAV: Watch what your hands reach for! I don’t live there except in your madness and fever. Stop it! —I am Spirit! [He retreats from her hands.] Or I will leave you and not come back. You can stare your eyes out at my photographs in a book and I’ll not enter the room . . .

  NANCE [extending her hand again]: Please, it can’t be wrong to—

  VASLAV: Not just wrong but impossible. You must learn to accept. IT—WILL—NEVER—BE—REAL! You can only—dream!

  NANCE: How long can you stay if I—don’t touch.

  VASLAV: Till you go up to bed or till the moon-vines close.

  NANCE: But touches I just imagine, if they satisfy me, if they seem so real, why can’t I, why won’t you permit it?

  VASLAV: I can’t bear to be reminded of—being used for—don’t make me repeat all that.

  NANCE: But it’s agony for me.

  VASLAV: When Diaghelev took Massine and out of spite I married on that long Pacific voyage this woman who used me for ambition, to advance herself from the chorus to first ballerina, that was agony, too.

  NANCE: But yours is past. Mine’s now!

  [There is the sound of a door opening offstage.]

  VASLAV: Someone is coming in.

  NANCE: It’s Mummy and her friend.

  MOTHER [off]: Dynamite, he said, and offered me a popper.

  MRS. AID [off]: Mine, Bill, said “Wow!” He said, “Wow, Wow!”

  [Mother, Mrs. Aid, and Josie enter the room.]

  MOTHER: Aida, Bill was my date.

  MRS. AID: Which was mine?

  MOTHER: The Puerto Rican, Riccardo.

  MRS. AID: No, no, no, Riccardo was night before last.

  [The spotlight on Vaslav dims.]

  NANCE: You’re dimming out! You mustn’t!

  MOTHER [noticing Nance]: Mummy’s precious Angel! Mummy’s back!

  NANCE [closing her eyes]: I see! And he’s disappearing, oh, God, you’re disappearing! Don’t, please don’t dissolve.

  VASLAV: An apparition fades when your attention’s distracted from it.

  NANCE: I’ll get them out somehow!

  MRS. AID [suspiciously]: Who is “the child” talking to?

  MOTHER: The child al
ways has her imaginary companions.

  MRS. AID: Then why get her a sitter?

  MOTHER: Imaginary companions are no protection.

  MRS. AID: Protection from what? The sitter? This one does look like a menace out of the silent films, a villain in drag!

  MOTHER: Not even sitting, standing by the door.

  MRS. AID: She’s offering you her hand?

  JOSIE: I’m offering nothing and will touch nothing here but cab fare to and from Queens and double pay plus compensation for insult to decency while you “ladies” was out.

  MOTHER: What is she saying to me?

  JOSIE: Pay, pay!

  MRS. AID: Get her out of the house at any price. The “child’s” much better with an imaginary companion than with this wretched old creature.

  JOSIE: You’re old yourself, maybe older.

  MRS. AID: I am young as tomorrow! L’esprit de la jeunesse and Elizabeth Arden’s and—nightly adventures with youth and romance!

  MOTHER [airily]: “Romance, romance, may come with the Spring or the Fall!”

  JOSIE: Shit.

  MRS. AID: Did you hear that? The child could pick up vulgar expressions from this tenement drop out.

  MOTHER: The child ignores all language and behavior beneath the purity of the dream world she lives in.

  JOSIE: Shit.

  MOTHER: Out, you insufferable thing! Not another word from you in the child’s presence! [She tosses a bill to the floor.]

  JOSIE: Pick that up and hand it properly to me.

  MOTHER: Pick it up or leave it!

  MRS. AID [sprawling to the floor]: Here, take it and shove it and get the fuck out of here!

  MOTHER: Aida, your language, watch it in front of the child. [To Josie.] You are paid and dismissed, so be off with you at once!

  [Josie rushes out and slams the door.]

  MOTHER: Exit the Marchioness of Queensborough!

  [Pause. They admire themselves in the mirror.]

  MOTHER: Well, we had quite an evening of it, again. When an evening starts at the Plaza it usually goes well.

  MRS. AID: It might have gone better if you hadn’t insisted on a buggy ride that took us directly to the bushes at West Seventy-second.

  MOTHER: I found it very romantic.

  MRS. AID: With that old nag expelling gas in our faces every few steps?

  MOTHER: I noticed only the moon, spring foliage, and my escort’s importunate advances.