A handsome middle-aged woman, DIANA, sits center-stage in a formidable chair.

Beside it, a table and chair. Books, papers, a phone, a stereo remote control lie on
the table, chair, and floor in fairly neat order. DIANA reads, looks over some
papers.
JACK, 35–40, enters. Throughout, JACK sits, stands, circles, paces, kneels,
lies down, curls up, touches DIANA, approaches her, etc.

Jack
You wanted to see me?
Diana
Jack, therapy is on its way out. I know you’ve seen at least four or five therapists.
None of them seems to have done you much good. You’re still a bad influence on
yourself, and you haven’t managed to be a very good influence on anyone else.
Jack
My younger brother admired me.
Diana
That may be, but he’s been dead since 1984. It’s the second millennium now.
You’ve had twenty years to get someone else to admire you.
Jack
I taught for ten of those years. I had a few students who liked me, even if they
thought I was boring.
Diana
They only meant that you spoke in complete sentences. But that’s not the point.
Everybody seems to like you. My daughters, for example. I heard one of them say
last night, in your bed, “Jack, oh Jack, I don’t know what it is about you.” I have
many daughters. My daughters are legion. How many have you bedded?
Jack
I don’t count that way.
Diana
Oh yes you do. All men count, though not many count. You’ve made your lists.
Jack
I think I’ve made two.
Diana
You’ve made ten if you’ve made one. Do the math.
Jack
Over a hundred, I guess. I don’t know.
Diana
“I don’t know.” You know very well, if not perfectly well. It’s false modesty to say
“I don’t know” as a tag-end to your sentences. It’s worse than that. It’s British.
Jack
I don’t have the list with me is what I mean, and I don’t remember the figure.
Diana
Then say so. You should be slapped for not speaking accurately. The trouble with
therapists is they don’t slap you. Didn’t you ever get slapped by your mother?
Jack
No. The three therapists I had before the last one never challenged a word I said. I
fell asleep in the sessions.
Diana
Your stories didn’t interest you anymore.
 Jack
That’s what they said.
Diana
Of course they did. They had nothing better to say. There’s too much emphasis put
on stories. What is story? The final attraction you have is that you can’t answer this
question. You don’t buy it.
Jack
I dreamed I could breathe underwater again. This time I was dressed in ski clothes,
light blue. A whole suit with a high collar. Only my hat was wool. And I was
jumping into rivers in the dark, diving. I came on myself. I was thinking, how does
he know where to dive? How deep is that river? But I wasn’t cold. And puddles.
All kinds of bodies of water. In and out. It was gray, too, sundown. The woman the
night before mentioned “sundowners” with dementia. Old women . . . . You don’t
seem to have come through your operation very well.
Diana
What did you expect? You can drink hard until you’re thirty. You can smoke until
you’re forty. You can have sex until you’re fifty. You can travel until you’re sixty.
You can support an infirm man until you’re seventy. But you can’t get your hip
replaced after that and expect to look like you’re fifty-five.
Jack
It’s your hair-line. It’s receding.
Diana
Everything’s receding, even for you. What have I always told you? There is no
such thing as a condition that doesn’t pre-exist. All conditions, as those pathetic
students you teach say, “happen for a reason.” We were born to recede, and what
goes for us goes for our hair of course. What I’m trying to get at with you is your
interest in me, your attraction to me, your admiration of me. So I ask again: how
many of my daughters have you slept with?
Jack
I gave you a ball-park figure.
Diana
That​ is an ugly figure—“ball-park.” What do you know of ball-parks? I’d expect
that language out of your father’s mouth.
Jack
All right. A round number. I gave you an estimate, an approximation, a guess.
Diana
Then maybe we need to switch from numbers to names. I want names.
Jack
Billie in Aspen. Susan Cuseo. Judy Moffatt. Stephanie Ryan. Brenda Brock.
Brenda Stolbach. Carrie Davis. The Russian woman in Aspen, the CEO looking for
investors for her medical company. Rhonda Hess.
Diana
She wanted you in seventh grade, and the meaner you were, the more she wanted
you.
Jack
We had each other in 1994, more than twenty years later.
Diana
And more than once. How was it?
Jack
It? She said it was dreamlike, very sweet.
 Diana
Like swimming?
Jack
No—because she squeezed me down there, inside. There’s no pressure in
swimming.
Diana
It was an affair, then. You were with someone else at the time? A sister of hers, a
daughter of mine.
RHONDA enters. JACK’s age. She speaks to the audience.
Rhonda
We flirted. We talked about Joni Mitchell and sat outside on the balcony. We were
talking in code and it didn’t serve us, so I made it clear: our respective
relationships had little bearing on what happened between us. I told him: I want to
make love with you again.
Jack
It’s a recurring dream. I swim underwater and I breathe, like a fish. I’m a man, but
I’m amphibious. I can stay under as long as I don’t tell anyone. As soon as I tell
someone, I wake up. It’s always disappointing.
Diana
I’m sure it is. Another.
Jack
This could take forever.
Diana
Don’t flatter yourself. There would be no point in naming every name. We’ll just
get what the statisticians call a representative sample for now, and then we’ll see.
 Jack
Julie.
Diana
One of my eldest. Always going around in a leopard-print nightie with a drink in
her hand.
Jack
Her skin was so nice. I could see through that nightie. She was pathetic. Her son
was my friend, and he snorted up her house, her car, her inheritance. All she had
was that terrible little dog. I went there one day and she was in the living room,
smoking a cigarette, drinking, listening to talk radio. I sat with her for a while. She
was in a good mood. She got up and walked past me to the kitchen. By the time she
came back with some cheese and crackers I had an erection.
Diana
And a plan, I’m sure.
Jack
I thought if I could get a look up inside—
Diana
What then?
Jack
I didn’t know. But that’s when she asked if I could get something down out of the
closet for her. I forget what it was, but I remember thinking as we walked over to
the closet that it wouldn’t do me any good to reach up. I had to get her to reach,
and I had to get down there on the floor by the shoes.
Diana
What? And lift her up to do the reaching?
 Jack
I guess. In any case, I did get down underneath her and I did look up under her
nightie, and I did see her, her . . .
Diana
That’s good, Jack. And then I suppose you excused yourself and masturbated in
her powder room?
Jack
Gwen.
Diana
You did nothing with Gwen.
Jack
She was my student. I taught her.
Diana
You taught her nothing and did nothing with her. Poor Gwen. It’s no world to be
ugly, old, or poor in. Beauty is the thing, and youth, and money—all the
misfortunes. Between the two of us, we have only one of those things, and the least
thing-like among them.
Jack
I never said all the names on my list were people I slept with.
Diana
True. But I asked how many of my daughters you bedded. That means I’m not
interested in the men you bedded or the women you wished you’d bedded but
didn’t. And by bedded I mean had carnal knowledge of, had intercourse with;
fucked.
Jack
But the sample wouldn’t be representative without them. There’ve been at least a
dozen Gwens, which is over ten percent. That’s not negligible.
Diana
What would you know about it? Your math skills failed you in eighth grade. Your
literary skills are failing you now. But I think we’re both old enough to know that
margins of error and control groups are negotiable. Fungible. Still, I’ll allow
Gwen—on the grounds that you generalize her.
Jack
She would write me letters and notes on the papers she’d turn in. She was very
frank about liking sex, and she was always fighting with her boyfriend. She was
quiet in class, never raised her hand, and then these five-page letters would come.
She’d write them over several days, and mention sex in every entry. The more she
wrote, the more I wanted to fuck her.
Diana
Is that what you want to do to me?
Jack
It is.
Diana
Go on.
Jack
Before I do, I want to say—
Diana
—you are saying.
Jack
I got in bed with one man. He was my father’s age and he looked like Peter
O’Toole.
Diana
Not interested. I told you. Now go on.
Jack
But it was through Frank that I slept with Deborah and Sylvia and Cynthia.
Diana
Deborah, Sylvia, Cynthia. We’ll get to the Old Testament and Greek mythology
soon enough.
Jack
When another man takes an interest in a woman, it piques your interest in that
woman. In the same way, a woman’s looks may get overlooked or looked down on
until her writing—or something else she does—piques your interest.
Diana
Stop talking like a professional athlete, or most of the citizens of the United States.
Use “I” when you mean “I,” and “you” when you mean the person you’re talking
to.
Jack
I was trying to generalize Gwen.
Diana
I didn’t mean it that way. I meant: have Gwen stand for the other women you
wanted to have sex with but didn’t. I didn’t mean: start talking about other men in
the second person. Besides, your analogy doesn’t quite work.
Jack
I meant that Gwen minus her writing didn’t interest me, but Gwen plus her writing
made me want to visit her some afternoon and fuck her brains out.
Diana
That’s the first time that phrase has made any sense to me. Most of the men
who’ve been with my daughters wanted to fuck their brains out. You seem to have
wanted to fuck their brains.
Jack
Brains are like intestines. Some are large and some are small.
Diana
Gray, tuberous, tissue-y, capacious in a snug way. Yes. Like a colon. Like a
vagina. Gwen had a good brain.
Jack
But she was depressive and she rambled and she had a crush on David Duchovney.
Diana
Aren’t you depressive and rambling—and monotone, like David Duchovny?
GWEN enters, 28–30. (It could be the same actor who played RHONDA). To
the audience.
GWEN
What made me remember him that evening was I was reading this David
Duchovney interview—I truly love this man because I had a dream about him and I
generally don’t have memories, beyond vague feelings and sometimes who they
involved, about my dreams—but there were two things: one, I turned down sex
with him in order to remain friends, and two, he told me I was either “pleasantly
obliging” or “obligingly pleasant”—it’s so specific and I have no idea what it
means, but I woke up gaga over him . . . But what prompted me was he was a Lit
Ph.D. at Yale when he started acting and the interviewer asked him if there are
warning signs for Ph.D.s who “would be happier as actors” and one of the ones he
gave was “while teaching, all of your references are to television shows and
popular movies rather than literature,” and it reminded me of Jack—Professor
Stone—he used to quote Frasier in class, though I don’t know whether his thought
is valid, because it might be hard to find anyone who doesn’t make references. My
baby sister does. She somehow acquired what the rest of us missed: good looks and
ambition. Anyway, I had the dream, I thought of him, I wrote to him—hadn’t
written a thing in six months, just nothing interesting to commit to paper, no
interest in doing so, no need to. That was the first of May. “Hooray, hooray/The
first of May/Outdoor necking starts today.”
Jack
Gwen thought Duchovny had a Ph.D., but he never finished. He’s only got an
M.A., if that.
Diana
And money, lots of money.
Jack
My father said I’d never make money teaching. But that was when $30,000 seemed
like enough. Now I read about money—“steep discounts,” “fat margins,” “bottom
lines.” Weird language of money. I want more of it, but I don’t have an instinct for
making it.
Diana
Money is shit: that’s all you need to know. Now, how many of your students did
you sleep with?
Jack
None, three, two, none. But none of the five was my student when we were having
sex.
Diana
Not a fact worth gloating over. You were still employed by the college when you
fucked them, and they were still enrolled. Right? I thought so. Tell me about Beth.
Jack
Another one who didn’t attract me at first, but then did. I think it was something
she wrote. Strange writer. Very uneven. Yes—she wrote about this poem. She saw
it as a masturbation fantasy, a woman’s fantasy. It was striking, and I told her so in
the margins. Of course, after that I had a fantasy of her masturbating. I wasn’t sure
the poem was an image of masturbation, but I was sure that she wrote about it with
authority. And it was unique. The rest of the class said nothing interesting about it.
Diana
So you took a second look.
Jack
She had a nervous body, uncomfortable. Abrupt. That turned me off at first. But
her breasts were beautiful and her figure. Like a Renaissance model. Rubicund,
fleshy. And then her face came clear: Annette Benning. The body of Brenda, the
face of Annette Benning.
Diana
Brenda. I was wondering when you’d get to her. My vodka daughter, my Texas
whirlwind. Built like a brick shithouse. Like a roll of toilet paper in a public toilet.
Just when she’d start to unwind, she’d break off. An actress, in other words. In her
bones. Never knew when she was on-stage, off-stage, back-stage, or in the wings.
More unemployed than not. Like a non-tenure-track professor. Like you.
Jack
I was so in love with her.
Diana
She’s lucky. Her father reads Hegel and her mother’s decisive. The others you
were simply fond of? Kay, Wendy, Lisa, Sara, Cheryl, Caroline, Ann, Tammy,
Libby, Catherine, Abby, Leslie, Dana—
Jack
I thought I was in love with all of them, but love became other things as time went
on. Jennifer and I went to a wedding the other day. I’ve been to lots of weddings.
The vows always move me. I started crying. I was struck with how faithless I’d
been—not one relationship—
Diana
I despise that word. It ought to be confined to business and mathematics. So many
words need to be retired. Expunged. Gazetted. On that note, why do you think it is
that my daughters find your language so appealing at first, and then, after a month
or a year, find you so inexpressive, so unrevealing?
Jack
I wish I knew. Most people tend to equate intelligence with expressiveness. Some
of your daughters praise my intelligence, and then resent it when I use it on them.
Diana
I would too, if you used it on me.
Jack
I’d rather use my mouth than my intelligence.
Diana
That mouth of yours. I’ve heard some shallow reports. Show me what you do with
it.
 JACK goes to her, kneels in front of her, and begins to kiss her legs. He
moves up into her lap.
Diana
That’s one way of avoiding eye-contact. Hillary and Becky told me you were a
rascal, trying to fall asleep in their laps when they babysat you.
DIANA takes his head in her hands and lifts his face to look at it.
Diana
It’s your silence they resent. It’s what you think but don’t say. Just as one can feel
stared at from behind, so can one feel spoken to from within.
Jack
But if your daughters knew what I had to say, if they knew how I felt.
Diana
But they do. When a dog comes up and sniffs between your legs, you know how
the dog feels. The dog is saying something—and you push it away.
Jack
Well, I’ve rarely been pushed away when I put my mouth down there.
Diana
You’re not the only people-pleaser in the world. My daughters are also capable of
doing something—not because it pleases them, but because they think it will please
you. If it ends up pleasing them in the event, why not?
Jack
Marge was an exception.
Diana
Marge was exceptional, but she still proves the rule. And once you go down that
road, sex becomes a deal without dickering.
 Jack
I don’t like to dicker.
Diana
You don’t like to dicker out loud. You strike me as a man who’s always
negotiating in his head. All my daughters have been items in your silent auction.
You think your boundaries are set in permasoft, but it’s tungsten steel.
Jack
Katie. We never had an affair, but we had a date one night. She’d been with two
friends of mine for years, first Bill, then Tim; or was it Tim first, then Bill? Katie
never said much. It seemed a real effort for her to speak. She talked inside herself,
too. She held back.
Diana
We all do.
Jack
Tim didn’t say much, either, and Bill had trouble talking. None of us was
articulate.
Diana
Your entire generation is either speechless or inaccurate. And that goes for most of
my daughters, too. Some of them can’t talk, but they can write beautifully, as you
know.
Jack
Joanne. But you told Joanne I was trying to come onto her with the comments I
made in her margins. She told me that, two years after she was in my class.
Between her high school teacher telling her she couldn’t write and you telling her
that, because she could, I was coming onto her, no wonder she hated English. Lots
of women must be driven into a kind of aphasia by mixed messages like that.
Diana
So you weren’t coming onto her? I gave it a fifty-fifty chance, and I was wrong.
Jack
I like people who say just what they want to and no more. Tim was like that. You
couldn’t get him to carry on. I think Katie was attracted to that in Tim, and took it
for a strength; in Bill, she liked his incapacity to keep things straight, to say what
he meant. He’d bungle along until he made up a word that served. He couldn’t
remember names; he couldn’t look you in the eye; he couldn’t take part in a
conversation. But he was handsome, and Katie wasn’t the only one who fell for
him. He must’ve fucked his way through two-thirds of his life. I never fucked him,
and I wish I hadn’t fucked Katie. One night in the front seat of a car—this was
after high school, after college—she had a roughness I found exciting. This was a
Katie I hadn’t known. I turned the engine off, the lights, the radio. The last breath
of the heater was the only other presence. I was hard, she was moist; we were both
shy and a little desperate. We were throwing ourselves together for no reason apart
from a long friendship, a habit of coming home at Christmas—not to be at home,
but to go to a friend’s house.
Diana
What was good once is always good; what we used to love we still love. But this
wasn’t love, was it. It wasn’t even lust. It was grooming without distance. All my
daughters know how important that is. Baboons, monkeys, orangutans—they spend
much of their time grooming each other. There’s a professor—not in your
field—who thinks that human language originated in the grooming of apes. I
suppose he also thinks that language will expire in grooming. Nonetheless, this
man said, it’s physical contact that we count on. We declare our intention that way.
We say, “I would rather be here, rubbing you, than over there, rubbing her, rubbing
him, rubbing it. Or, I would rather be rubbing you than rubbing myself.”
Jack
That seems about right to me, but your daughters prefer pampering to rubbing.
Diana
Do they? Pampering is just another degree of rubbing. The pampering zone covers
a lot of territory. You touched me with your mouth a few minutes ago. You must
have made four or five declarations alone with those touches. Spoken language is
fading out—right along with therapy. We’re all giving each other the finger now.
You know what Frida Kahlo did, laid up in her invalid bed, when they asked her
about romance. She held up her finger, like this. In my experience, language began
to fade out when I was about forty. Language as anything more than a kind of
rugged efficiency. And the argument the professor makes is that language is more
efficient than touch. I can e-mail ten friends without touching one. I can stroke, as
the phrase is, their egos and mine by pressing the return button when I finish my
message. But I suppose if you took all the letters ever written before the advent of
e-mail, you’d find over half of them—and I’m being conservative here—were
fundamentally expressions of the desire to touch and be touched. Of course, touch
is liable to illusion, too. And touch can be misinterpreted. On the whole, though,
touch for most of us means warmth, and comfort, and pleasure.
Jack
But people touch themselves more than they touch others. My brother has allergies.
You know what his doctor told him? That people touch their faces between 200
and 500 times a day. I think I could touch your face 200 times a day. I think I
would sacrifice all the efficiency of language for that.
Diana
You think too much.
Jack
That’s what your daughters say.
Diana
Might makes right.
Jack
But they also say I’m a good lover.
Diana
Pam thought you were—but then you should have seen who you were being
compared to. You can’t rely on your reputation.
Jack
Pam and Stevie and Liz and Beth and Sharon and Katherine and Amy and—
Diana
Most men leave a lot to be desired. You certainly have, and it’s worked for you.
But you’re the one, finally, to say whether you’re a shit or a good lover.
Jack
Whether? Whether? How about when. I’m both.
Diana
That might explain why it’s all so heavy, why it all weighs on you so, Jack.
Where’s the fun, the joy, the juice? I haven’t felt any happiness coming from you.
Didn’t any of my daughters make you happy? Didn’t you have a good time with
any of them? Any fun?
Jack
I had a good time with each of them. But it’s very hard to say so—to use that
phrase. It seems to diminish everything, to cheapen it.
Diana
But how do you feel about it all?
Jack
I feel like a bad man. I feel wrong. I’ve been living against what I know, what I
was taught. The wedding vows express what I was taught. My body has done one
thing, my mind has done another—my soul, maybe. But I get along fine. Divided
against myself, or myself against what I take to be myself, the things I learned.
Diana
Not very convincing.
Jack
I’m tired of being told that I’m very attractive but not very convincing. So I’m not
convincing? So I’m attractive? What does that have to do with me?
Diana
I meant that you don’t sound convinced yourself.
Jack
I seem to be convinced by the last thing someone says. If my supervisor thinks I’m
unhappy and need therapy, I think she’s right. Same with love. Just the other night
Sally was telling me that I used to burn to tell her I loved her. I used to write her
poems. I used to want to be with her. Then she rolled away from me and went to
sleep.
Diana
What did you do?
Jack
I lay there thinking, “It takes two. It takes two.” She didn’t write poems, but she
used to feel more strongly about me than she does now. She liked to talk about our
“chemistry.”
Diana
You think you’re a lover, and you probably are, but you’re not one according to
my daughters—and they have a hundred definitions, depending on their needs
when some problem comes up. I can’t stand Sally right now myself. She’s in love
with energy, movement for its own sake. She won’t admit it to you; she might
admit to herself; she doesn’t have to admit it to me. And she’ll probably be like
that until she has children. She’s still very childish, as you know.
Jack
Except in bed.
Diana
All my daughters are women in bed. I taught them about the bed. Like Brick’s
mother in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, I put my hand on the bed and I told them: here’s
where the problems begin and end. But what I didn’t know then is that some of my
daughters—more than I care to think—don’t really like sex.
Jack
Everybody doesn’t like sex sometimes.
Diana
Not so. Some never like it. The feelings, the physiology of it—they just don’t want
it. Jennifer, for example. Slap-happy, active. She’ll put her arm around a man,
she’ll nudge a man, but she doesn’t like sexual feeling. She likes fear. She likes
what that feels like coursing through her veins. Sally likes speed. Caroline likes the
feeling of organizing things, of order. Susan likes the feeling of expectation. None
of them likes sex. They have it, but I imagine it’s a discipline for them, a workout.
Jack
I don’t know. My friend Dean says it’s a payment, says women feel they owe it to
men.
Diana
Trust me.
Jack
Aren’t you just talking about moods?
Diana
I might be talking about chemistry, about genetic predispositions. It’s something
determined, something you can fight, but nothing you can hide from.
Jack
Jennifer, Caroline, Sally, Susan. The thing about all of them is, they can’t sleep. I
don’t trust anyone who can’t sleep. I think that’s the main reason I didn’t stay for
long with Caroline. She was uncomfortable in bed.
Diana
Yes. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t want you to stroke her hair. Had to keep things
moving. No lights. Not even moonlight. Wouldn’t touch herself. Kept peeking to
see if you’d finished yet. Went to the bathroom as soon as she could.
Jack
But we were only twenty-something, and we were in your bed.
Diana
Unimportant circumstances. The fact is, you never sought her out again to sleep
with, and she married a joke-cracker. Come over here. (He goes to her.) What
about your future, your career?
 Jack
I’ve never held a job, but I’ve always had a career. I don’t talk about it that way,
because it makes nothing clear. I knew I had potential when I was about fourteen.
It was sad.
Diana
You’re too old to be innocent. Cut the crap.
Jack
What wears me down is this continual effort, this plotting, to know in advance
what the payoff is, the bottom line, the point, the message, the answer, the goal, the
reason. Maybe it’s been my deepest desire—to know what I’m here for, how to do
it, and why. No: I wanted to be an investigator, to set things right, to save, to do
justice. But I don’t want to undergo the operation; I just want to have the feeling.
Diana
History makes us the last hearer and the next teller at the same time. We all have a
great future behind us—and we use it to put the best interpretation on all we’ve
lived through. We turn our afterthoughts into forethoughts and hope for the best.
You read Shakespeare. Macbeth is a perfect example. He wants to succeed by
arriving ahead of himself, getting there before anyone knows how he did
it—himself most of all. He doesn’t want to have done what he would do, but it’s
too late: he’s done it when he’s said it.