The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [28]
He found out he liked it.
“… have to admit he attempts more than any other American playwright. The man tries.”
“He tries my patience.”
“He’s ambitious, Warren.”
“Don’t you think you might be confusing ambition with pretense? God knows he selects the loftiest themes imaginable, but to praise him for that is like giving a man a medal for climbing fifty feet up Mount Everest. What’s so ambitious about coming out against witchhunts? And the analogy doesn’t even hold, you know. Those girls in Salem were witches. Damn silly reason to hang them, but facts are facts.
“As far as ambition goes, the most ambitious thing the man ever did was marry Marilyn Monroe, and I don’t think he handled that so triumphantly. He did not do well by the lady, but then nobody did.”
“You one of her fans, Warren?”
“How could I be otherwise? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. What self-respecting faggot can fail to respond to that? Garland, Monroe—”
“Why is that, Warren?” This from Hugh.
“Why the attraction? Lord, I don’t know. The usual argument is identification. Another one is that we hate women and want to see them fail, so we treasure the failures. Or that they embody (a) all the qualities the typical faggot’s mother lacked or (b) all the qualities she had. You pays your money and you takes your choice. None of it makes much sense to me. But we like the losers, the fey doomed ones. The Ophelias.”
“What do you think of Miller, Hugh?”
“I haven’t seen that many of his plays, and none of them recently. I remember enjoying A View from the Bridge.”
“Better than most,” Warren conceded.
“But I can’t really judge him, I’m afraid.”
“You can judge him as a craftsman, can’t you?”
“Oh, definitely not. Playwriting is a completely different discipline and one I know nothing about.”
“You’ve never written a play?”
“Wouldn’t know where to start.”
“But your dialogue—”
“Dialogue is a completely different matter on the stage and between book covers. It has an entirely different task to perform. In a book… .”
Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe and Gretchen Vann.
Was that how he had chosen her? A sexy waif and a born loser who always knew it. That was Gretch well enough. She was a loser, fey, doomed, and it was there in her haunted eyes in the best of times. Was that the aspect of her that had appealed to him?
He wondered. In a way he had not chosen her at all. She had chosen him, warming to him that afternoon when he had stopped at her shop on the Towpath, keeping him there in bubbling conversation all afternoon, then taking him back to her apartment in the Shithouse and leading him promptly to bed.
He’d never expected it would end in bed; when it did, he never thought it would lead to more than a quick tumble, of little good to either of them. He had not thought of her that way while they talked, probably because of the difference in their ages. He had been with girls before, perhaps half a dozen of them (although she was the first he ever lived with), but all his female sexual partners had been in his own age group.
Perhaps that had made it easier for him to relax in her presence. They got to know each other through conversation uncomplicated by sexual overtones; the undertones were there but he wasn’t listening to them. He talked to her, more at ease with her than with any other man or woman, and he listened to her and was struck by her wit and warmth and verve.
If she surprised him by taking him to bed, once there he surprised himself. Her body was exciting, soft skin over firm flesh, the curves of her hips, the sweet plain of her belly, but while recognizing this he felt no great desire for her. His detachment was cerebral; his loins had other ideas and wanted her with an urgent and yet confident potency he had never enjoyed before. He lay upon her and moved in and out of her warmth with long, deep, tantalizingly slow strokes, each movement heightening his passion but bringing him no closer to fulfillment. Her first orgasm thrilled him with a sense of heady masculine power; he had experienced nothing like it before.