A VOICE (It is an incredibly beautiful voice): Look up!
PRIOR (Looking up, not seeing anyone): Hello?
A VOICE: Look up!
PRIOR: Who is that?
A VOICE: Prepare the way!
PRIOR: I don’t see any—
(There is a dramatic change in lighting, from above.)
A VOICE: Look up, look up,
prepare the way
the infinite descent
A breath in air
floating down
Glory to . . .
(Silence.)
PRIOR: Hello? Is that it? Helloooo!
(Very frightened) What the fuck? . . . (He holds himself)
Poor me. Poor poor me. Why me? Why poor poor me?
Oh I don’t feel good right now. I really don’t.
Scene 8
That night. Split scene: Prior and Louis in their bed. Louis reading, Prior cuddled next to him. Harper in Brooklyn, alone. Joe enters.
HARPER: Where were you?
JOE: Out.
HARPER: Where?
JOE: Just out. Thinking.
HARPER: It’s late.
JOE: I had a lot to think about.
HARPER: I burned dinner.
JOE: Sorry.
HARPER: Not my dinner. My dinner was fine. Your dinner. I put it back in the oven and turned everything up as high as it could go and I watched till it burned black. It’s still hot. Very hot. Want it?
JOE: You didn’t have to do that.
HARPER: I know. It just seemed like the kind of thing a mentally deranged sex-starved pill-popping housewife would do.
JOE: Uh-huh.
HARPER: So I did it. Who knows anymore what I have to do?
JOE: How many pills?
HARPER: A bunch. Don’t change the subject.
JOE: I won’t talk to you when you—
HARPER: No. No. Don’t do that! I’m . . . I’m fine, pills are not the problem, not our problem. I WANT TO KNOW WHERE YOU’VE BEEN! I WANT TO KNOW WHAT’S GOING ON!
JOE: Going on with what? The job?
HARPER: Not the job.
JOE: I said I need more time.
HARPER: Not the job!
JOE: Mr. Cohn, I talked to him on the phone, he said I had to hurry—
HARPER: Not the—
JOE: But I can’t get you to talk sensibly about anything so—
HARPER: SHUT UP!
JOE: Then what?
HARPER: Stick to the subject.
JOE: I don’t know what that is. You have something you want to ask me? Ask me. Go.
HARPER: I . . . can’t. I’m scared of you.
JOE: I’m tired, I’m going to bed.
HARPER: Tell me without making me ask. Please.
JOE: This is crazy, I’m not—
HARPER: When you come through the door at night your face is never exactly the way I remembered it. I get surprised by something . . . mean and hard about the way you look. Even the weight of you in the bed at night, the way you breathe in your sleep seems unfamiliar.
You terrify me.
JOE: I know who you are.
HARPER: Yes. I’m the enemy. That’s easy. That doesn’t change.
You think you’re the only one who hates sex; I do; I hate it with you; I do. I dream that you batter away at me till all my joints come apart, like wax, and I fall into pieces. It’s like a punishment. It was wrong of me to marry you. I knew you—
(She stops herself)
It’s a sin, and it’s killing us both.
JOE: I can always tell when you’ve taken pills because it makes you red-faced and sweaty and frankly that’s very often why I don’t want to . . .
HARPER: Because . . .
JOE: Well you aren’t pretty. Not like this.
HARPER: I have something to ask you.
JOE: Then ASK! ASK! What in hell are you—
HARPER: Are you a homo?
(Pause)
Are you?
If you try to walk out right now I’ll put your dinner back in the oven and turn it up so high the whole building will fill with smoke and everyone in it will asphyxiate. So help me God I will.
Now answer the question.
JOE: What if I . . .
(Small pause.)
HARPER: Then tell me, please. And we’ll see.
JOE: No. I’m not.
I don’t see what difference it makes.
(Louis and Prior are lying on the bed, Prior’s head resting on Louis’s chest.)
LOUIS: Jews don’t have any clear textual guide to the afterlife; even that it exists. I don’t think much about it. I see it as a perpetual rainy Thursday afternoon in March. Dead leaves.
PRIOR: Eeeugh. Very Greco-Roman.
LOUIS: Well for us it’s not the verdict that counts, it’s the act of judgment. That’s why I could never be a lawyer. In court all that matters is the verdict.
PRIOR: You could never be a lawyer because you are oversexed. You’re too distracted.
LOUIS: Not distracted; abstracted. I’m trying to make a point:
PRIOR: Namely:
LOUIS: It’s the judge in his or her chambers, weighing, books open, pondering the evidence, ranging freely over categories: good, evil, innocent, guilty; the judge in the chamber of circumspection, not the judge on the bench with the gavel. The shaping of the law, not its execution.
PRIOR: The point, dear, the point . . .
LOUIS: That it should be the questions and shape of a life, its total complexity gathered, arranged and considered, which matters in the end, not some stamp of salvation or damnation which disperses all the complexity in some unsatisfying little decision—the balancing of the scales . . .
PRIOR: I like this; very zen; it’s . . . reassuringly incomprehensible and useless. We who are about to die thank you.
LOUIS: You are not about to die.
PRIOR: It’s not going well, really . . . Two new lesions. My leg hurts. There’s protein in my urine, the doctor says, but who knows what the fuck that portends. Anyway it shouldn’t be there, the protein. My butt is chapped from diarrhea and yesterday I shat blood.
LOUIS: I really hate this. You don’t tell me—
PRIOR: You get too upset, I wind up comforting you. It’s easier—