BLUE AND DARKER BLUE by Steven Schutzman
A Play in One Act
CHARACTERS
MAN, 50s
WOMAN, a bit younger
The setting is a comfortable room. The MAN is sitting near a window. The WOMAN is editing a journal from a stack of identical journals. She reads and marks the journal with a highlighter.
MAN: A woman was suing her landlord for negligence, lead paint dust in the window wells, because she’d seen an ad on TV and hired an attorney who knew a jury would award such and such for brain damage to her boy child and that his percentage would be such and such, a nice – from his point of view – redistribution of the wealth all around. I was surprised this had reached my courtroom. Such cases are usually settled out in the hallway since juries are known to be generous whether negligence is proved or not, especially with the poor child sitting there stunned the whole time, and the landlord, well, he was a rough-speaking, barrel-chested man without much hair. No contest. We were in the expert phase hearing from a doctor I’ve heard testify many times before, a professional witness, no longer practicing actual medicine, a real smooth and likable sleaze-ball, and I was thinking idly about the general nature of man, which a judge isn’t supposed to do, because a judge is involved with the law and the law takes for granted the general nature of man, the law is designed to curb and direct the given crummy general nature of man, when I slammed my gavel and said very loudly, much too loudly, “What do you want?” An action which surprised everyone but no one more than me since I hadn’t planned it, since it just burst out and since it had nothing to do with the proceedings or the general nature of man. Now counsel for the plaintiff, short, energetic red-haired guy, very good, saved me by saying, “Just recompense for my client’s injuries, Your Honor.” And I said, “Ten-minute recess. Counsel, approach the bench.”
[Pause. MAN touches windowpane.]
Nobody’s fault. Nobody’s negligence. Sealing the child in a lifetime of mental fog. Glazed look, halting speech, odd stillness for a ten-year-old. Though all that can be coached.
WOMAN: Let me do this.
[Pause. MAN touches windowpane again.]
MAM: Not even eight and I’m dead tired.
WOMAN: So go to bed.
MAN: Right. I will.
[MAN looks out window.]
MAN: Have you noticed anything strange about our new neighbor?
WOMAN: No.
MAN: Nothing?
WOMAN: Just that he seems nice.
MAN: Everyone around here seems nice until you park in the space they’ve come to think of as theirs.
WOMAN: So?
MAN: So that he’s nice isn’t strange, darling.
WOMAN: Go to bed.
MAN: I’m sure he’s nice but the three times we’ve talked he’s looked into my eyes with a kind of mute appeal, pleading and sad, and I feel like he’s going to tell me something personal I don’t want to hear, that he’s going to spill. What, is he recently divorced or something?
WOMAN: We’ve only just nodded in passing, from our cars.
MAN: Is there a woman over there?
WOMAN: Not that I’ve seen.
MAN: He’s going to spill, I tell you. Talking to him is like watching the river rise in the spring. I used to be interested in people. I used to like to talk to them and to listen. Talking was one of the things I really enjoyed, but it feels creepy these days, like they should go to a doctor to do it.
WOMAN: They have names for doctors like that, darling.
MAN: Keep him away from me. He’s smart, good-looking and well-spoken. Don’t you know someone you can introduce him to?
WOMAN: Look, I’m really into this now.
MAN: Talk about spilling. Publishing those things.
WOMAN: Uh huh.
MAN: You have some nerve, you know, becoming famous? Some nerve. Me, I wouldn’t have the stomach for it. Not driven. Not tough-minded like you.
[Pause. MAN touches windowpane.]
The parking spot’s not theirs but they’ve come to think of it as theirs because it’s in front of their house. Like you, they’re confused about what’s private and what’s public? Is it me?
WOMAN: Did you take your pill this morning?
MAN: No.
WOMAN: Well, then, there you go.
MAN: I’ve been taking yours the last couple of weeks. For the heck of it. I’ve hit a plateau with mine so I figured what the heck. And it’s been getting interesting since I don’t so much see you or hear you or feel you anymore as I do feel you feeling me, like I’m a ghost. You’re so alive compared to me, it’s scary. That’s why I’ve been bumping into things, have you noticed?, because part of me thinks I can pass through the furniture. And why I have all these mysterious cuts on my hands, self-inflicted I do believe.
WOMAN: The pills aren’t interchangeable. They all work by different mechanisms and chemicals.
MAN: You’re not draining me, dear, are you? Like a succubus? Or is it incubus? The one that sits on your chest in the middle of the night and whispers nightmares into your ear while it gnaws on your hands?
[Pause. MAN touches windowpane again.]
I don’t have enough life force in me to get up and go to bed.
[WOMAN closes journal.]
WOMAN: Let me see your hands.
MAN: No.
[She goes back to journal.]
Here’s the answer: You start taking my pills so we can be ghosts for each other. I’ll be a street and you’ll be dead leaves blowing down me. You’ll be a house and I’ll be a face in your window. Together we’ll be, I don’t know . . . a ghost town. Nice?
[Pause. Windowpane.]
I was always attracted to the exuberant animal life in you but now, like everything else, even that has turned and will have its revenge. [Yawns.] Not even eight yet. It must be your pills.
WOMAN: So go to bed.
MAN: Sleep is a beautiful woman. She may want you, she may not.
[Pause. Windowpane.]
If I can find just the right angle, my hand will pass right through the glass without breaking it, that angle by which ghosts enter and leave. Still working on our first years?
WOMAN: More or less, give or take a few rampages, wild chase scenes, and the downstairs neighbor knocking on the door to see if I was all right.
MAN: We did have a time. Why did she wear a wig? The downstairs neighbor? We never learned why she wore a wig. She wasn’t sick. She wasn’t bald. She had this demonic energy like an imp in a dream. The whole thing’s like a dream, the downstairs neighbor wears a wig and you don’t know why. And her husband never seems to move. Doesn’t work. Sits in a chair in a cloud of cigar smoke, TV down low, and never moves. I think life is arranged around images like a dream is, clues to the mystery everywhere.
WOMAN: What mystery?
MAN: Or clues everywhere but no mystery at all, clues adding up to nothing. A busybody in a wig, a man sunk and smoking in a chair, a boy lost in a mental fog. I think I’ll eat a peach.
WOMAN: She was sick. You just don’t remember. We could smell the sickness in the airshaft.
MAN: Jesus. Really? I remember the smoke.
WOMAN: She died not long after we moved out.
MAN: Oh, really? Jesus. I wish you hadn’t told me that. I liked her, the way she protected her animal territory. I think she was fond of you.
WOMAN: It’s right here in the journal. She was a nice woman who took care of her husband until the very end.
MAN: Much was said, little was known, nothing was done.
WOMAN: Again.
MAN: People talked a lot. They didn’t say much. They lived in fear of the truth.
WOMAN: No, the first way.
MAN: I forget. Dead. It’s sad. And him alone down there.
WOMAN: Much was said, little was known. . . .
MAN: . . . nothing was done. They heard us through the airshaft. We smelled them through the airshaft. It’s like we were animals. People are animals, feeling each other like animals. The man next door about to burst into tears. What sad animals we are, like today in court.
[Pause. Windowpane.]
I wonder what happened to her husband, the poor bastard. How could a guy like that make it on his own? Read to me? Please?
WOMAN: No.
MAN: That’s my life, too, you’re holding in your hands.
WOMAN: It’s my experience..
MAN: Is our honeymoon in that one?
WOMAN: As a matter of fact, I’m just at the section where you took me from behind on the hilltop overlooking the lake, propped me on a boulder and just took me . . .
MAN: Now that’s something I’d like to hear.
woman: I don’t think so.
[Pause.]
MAN: I don’t remember any boulder.
WOMAN: You weren’t the one getting your face scraped by it.
MAN: I remember we were on the down slope and there was a space between the trees all the way down to the lake.
WOMAN: Uh huh.
MAN: And that the lake looked very blue from up there. Power boats carving white gouges in the water. The distant sound of the engines. Cloud shadows on the lake, blue and darker blue. Put that in, why don’t you?
WOMAN: That wasn’t my experience.
MAN: Should put it in. Round it out. Give the details you weren’t in any position to notice.
WOMAN: I know what position I was in.
MAN: Give the full perspective.
WOMAN: I don’t want the full perspective. Only my limited perspective can make my experience feel authentic to someone else.
MAN: Ah, the flawed narrator.
WOMAN: I didn’t say flawed. I said limited.
MAN: Let’s reenact that scene. Flawed narrator. Pawed narrator. Sawed narrator. Awed narrator.
WOMAN: You flatter yourself.
MAN: I don’t think so.
WOMAN: Not as a lover, your cleverness.
MAN: Tired of me?
WOMAN: If I decide to be.
MAN: Decide?
WOMAN: Yes. I made the decision to be pleased with you. I made the decision to marry you. I made the decision to let you have your way with me in a national park. So I can make the decision to be tired of you.
MAN: I would think that would be more of a reaction than a decision.
WOMAN: That’s not my experience. You’re often very tiring but I’ve learned not to get carried away by my reactions to you one way or the other.
MAN: You made a decision to be pleased with me?
WOMAN: Yes.
MAN: I don’t like the cold sound of that.
WOMAN: Believe me, it’s better that way.
MAN: You’re putting that in, too, I suppose. That you weren’t driven wild by passion for me.
WOMAN: It’s a major theme of the memoir. The decisions I was able to make consciously while still living through my passion, the still place I was able to achieve like a rock in the rapids.
MAN: Nice.
[Pause. Windowpane.]
MAN: How about quoting me, then. To let me have my two cents. Blue and darker blue. That’s nice too.
WOMAN: Nice, and true?
MAN: Sure. Why not?
WOMAN: You and what’s true go together hand and shoe.
MAN: I’m tired of the truth, so-called, that I have to listen to all day. The very act of speaking has been corrupted for me. And we always made things up before.
WOMAN: That’s why you’re not getting near my memoir. You’ll read it when it’s published, like everyone else.
[Pause. Windowpane.]
MAN: Blue and darker blue. As a matter of fact, I think it is true. It’s all coming back to me now.
WOMAN: I’m surprised you were able to notice so much detail.
MAN: Why?
WOMAN: I’d have thought you’d be concentrating on my ultimate submission to you in a national park of the United States of America.
MAN: I don’t think it was that ultimate.
WOMAN: The place was full of hikers.
MAN: Ah.
WOMAN: I submitted to your need to have me submit, the ultimate submission.
MAN: Ultimate?
WOMAN: It was your need to have me submit, not my preference. There were rangers around, too.
MAN: Rangers, too? I could’ve been disbarred.
WOMAN: Sometimes you have to submit to the other person’s need.
MAN: And other times?
WOMAN: They submit to yours.
MAN: Now we’re getting somewhere. Okay, okay. Keep the hikers in, if they were on your mind, and the rangers. Keep them all in there. I can’t see the harm in it. If it helps you think while you’re in the rapids.
WOMAN: There’s more, Darling. I submitted to your need to have me submit, yes, but truthfully I was more concerned with missing the trout they were serving for lunch up at the lodge.
MAN: Does it say that there?
WOMAN: Yes.
MAN: That you were actually thinking about lunch while I was . . . God. You wrote that down?
WOMAN: Digging my heels in, braced for your thrusts, my face scraped, worrying about getting arrested on my honeymoon in a national park, I was thinking about the trout they were serving for lunch. Mountain stream trout. Best fish I’ve ever had.
MAN: It’s in?
WOMAN: It’s true and it’s about food.
MAN: Not the food, the thinking about food.
WOMAN: In. People love reading about food.
MAN: Makes me look damn foolish.
WOMAN: Don’t ask, then.
MAN: Up until this moment the image of us on that mountain has helped me fall asleep when all else fails.
WOMAN: Blue and darker blue.
MAN: But now that the fish has been inserted, now that I know what was really on your mind . . .
WOMAN: Blue and darker blue was on your mind, maybe, and it’s not going in my memoir.
MAN: But the trout is.
WOMAN: Absolutely.
MAN: Ultimate submission always leads to ultimate revolt. Ultimate submission always leads to ultimate revolt.
[Pause. Windowpane.]
Today, after trying and failing to convince counsels to settle, I went to my chambers and wept for that dull child sitting there and for the innocent, rough-speaking landlord who was going to have to sell his own house to pay his attorney. I’ve had it. I just feel sorry for people, for the landlord, for the boy, for myself, for everyone. I’ve seen enough and heard enough truth.
WOMAN: So quit the bench.
MAN: And justify my existence how?
WOMAN: Sit with me while I’m working. I always liked that.
[MAN smashes his hand through windowpane and brings it back in bleeding. WOMAN leaves the room.]
MAN: Damn childish thing to do, damn childish.
[WOMAN returns with peroxide and bandages.]
[As she tends to his bleeding hand]: You know when you’re outside yourself, observing yourself like a judge, how the part that’s being observed never gets a say in the matter, that dull, injured child just sits there silent and stunned? If I must defend myself, I want that part to defend me, the silent part. I’ve made a lot of noise but that part has never said anything. And if you are going to judge me like my observing self, without love or sympathy, I will say nothing. So go ahead. Publish what you want. I will let my silence defend me.
WOMAN: Very eloquent.
MAN: Ultimate submission always leads to ultimate revolt. It’s a flawed perspective.
WOMAN: I didn’t say flawed, you did. I said limited. I don’t mind being limited. In fact, I like it. You can’t choose everything, you must choose something. You can’t choose everyone, you must choose someone like I chose you. Choosing everyone is like choosing among two-dimensional beings like mere photos of people; but, choosing someone, that once two-dimensional person suddenly takes on a third dimension, depth, tremendous depth. It’s like you’re falling, falling through the sudden, tremendous depth of another person, falling in love.
MAN: That’s nice. Is that in there?
WOMAN: That’s a quote from you, and you know it.
MAN: Is it in there?
WOMAN: Yes, it’s in here. Your words are all through here.
MAN: They are.
WOMAN [Reading]: “As a younger woman, I lived his words like a set of instructions.”
MAN: As a younger woman?
WOMAN: At first you were my rock in the rapids, darling.
MAN: At first?
WOMAN: Yes. Thanks for that. It’s why I’m dedicating the memoir to you.
[Pause.]
Your hand should heal nicely.
MAN: That’s what happens. It’ll heal and then get torn open again. Like a person.
WOMAN: Nice. Can I put that in?
MAN: Sure, put it in. Put it all in. I’m eating a peach and going to bed.
WOMAN: There are no more peaches. I had the last one this morning.
[Pause.]
And as I ate it, I didn’t think of you at all.
MAN: Good?
WOMAN: Sweet. Very sweet. ’Night now.
[MAN exits. WOMAN works. End of play.]
Steven Schutzman is the recipient of three Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Grants. His work has appeared in Poems & Plays and Rockford Review.