(based on There Will Be No Divorce by The Mountain Goats)
JENNY is angry.
JEFF knows why.
[This play takes places over one night and into morning. At lights up, we’re in the middle of the time period; JENNY is sleeping on blankets on the floor, while JEFF is lying on a bed. HE is looking at HER. The look is mostly fear; HE envisions the space without HER, which is unbearable to him. HE doesn’t sleep. SHE breathes free and even.
The action will start by moving swiftly backwards, like rewinding a tape. JENNY will put the blankets back in the room near JEFF, and THEY’LL move backwards to a particular point in their conversation. When they get to the beginning of the time period, i.e., the evening, they start. Note that they’ll at some point reach the moment at which the action started, and continue beyond it.]
JENNY
That’s not why I’m angry.
JEFF
Why are you angry, exactly?
JENNY
Because you’re making me justify my anger when the reasons should be obvious.
JEFF
You think they’re obvious?
JENNY
Yes! Because you say things like that. You’re infuriating.
JEFF
Am I?
JENNY
Stop it. When I express my actual feelings, it’s not an opportunity to show how clever you are.
JEFF
Funny you should say that.
JENNY
Why am I still even here? [SHE starts to gather her things]
JEFF
Would you like to go somewhere?
JENNY
What is wrong with you? You sound like you’re trying to pass the Turing test.
JEFF
I’m just reflecting back what you’re giving me.
JENNY
That’s exactly how you’d pass the Turing test! Jesus.
JEFF
No. A computer is a rational operating system – it would’ve given up on you by now.
JENNY
Well lucky for me, you don’t have an ounce of rationality in you.
JEFF
Do you want me to be rational?
JENNY
When the electricity gets cut off? Yes, yes I do. When we’re headed north west on 84 trying to catch the sun and the engine’s roaring? No. I don’t.
JEFF
That’s why I made the payment on the bike instead of paying the electric bill!
JENNY
I don’t know what I’d do without you –
JEFF
I don’t know what I’d do without you either //
JENNY
// But it probably would not involve wondering when the electricity was going to be cut off again.
JEFF
It probably wouldn’t involve chasing the sun, either.
JENNY
I’d probably have found it by now.
JEFF
You have, my love, and you know it.
JENNY
Don’t say nice things to me right now – wait, that’s not even nice! It’s just you being arrogant.
JEFF
It’s the truth.
JENNY
Sometimes I think the brightest light is behind whatever door takes me away from you. [pause] G-d I’ve even started to talk like you.
JEFF
I know. And it is endearing and wonderful and terrifying.
JENNY
What are you so afraid of?
JEFF
Stop trying to trick me into being vulnerable. I’m already completely vulnerable, all the time. You know that. It’s my natural state.
JENNY
Yes, this is your natural state: pretending that you can actually access your own emotions. I’m going to sleep.
JEFF
I’ll sleep on the floor.
JENNY
No. I’m tired of you being a martyr.
JEFF
I could go to Derek’s –
JENNY
No, you made your bed, now you have to sleep in it. [long pause]
JEFF
That’s sort of funny.
JENNY
I know. [pause] It’d be even funnier if you ever made the fucking bed.
JEFF
We’re not in this for our shared love of housekeeping.
JENNY
But we are in it for our shared love of how language and reality intersect.
JEFF
I love when your mouth says things like that.
JENNY
Stop it. We’re not living in some platonic ideal of a relationship. We’re not ideas. We’re living in a place where dishes in the sink mean fruit flies no matter how much you say you love me.
JEFF
So why don’t you punch out the windows again so the flies can escape? Besides, I was thinking about your mouth as an object in the world that says things and kisses me. It’s so beautiful. But if I think about how it’s attached to you right now that would ruin it.
JENNY
You understand that I’m a person, right? An actual person with actual feelings? Not just a series of body parts or constructs you’ve strung together with some bullshit pseudo-scientific explanation?
JEFF
Nothing could be more real to me than your feelings. They’ve seeped into my skin and slithered into my brain.
JENNY
Then you’ll have a constant reminder of what you threw away.
JEFF
If only it were as simple as tossing them in the trash.
JENNY
Is that the problem? That we’re tied together too tightly for you to throw me away? Do you have any idea what that sounds like?
JEFF
Don’t worry, you’re still winning so far, if we’re keeping score by how bad I feel.
JENNY
That’s not an apology.
JEFF
No, it’s not.
[THEY hold each other’s gaze for a bit. Then, JENNY gets blankets from the “bedroom” and arranges them on the floor. JEFF gets into bed. THEY recreate the scene from the beginning of the play. Night turns to morning. Time passes, lights shift. JEFF gets out of bed, goes to an old radio, turns it on. It’s mostly static. HE fiddles with it. A few measures of ______ comes on, then mostly static again. HE leaves it on, goes to a blackboard. HE draws a normal distribution as such:
HE labels the left side “bad” and the right side “good”, and labels the y-axis “likelihood”. Then, he draws another one over it, but with the tails further out. Eventually, SHE wakes up, fiddles with the radio to no avail, pours herself some coffee from a pot that was made last night at the earliest, and stares at JEFF.]
JEFF
I was thinking about this all night, I was trying to understand what we were doing. What we do. And it’s like this: with any given person, for every single interaction, here are the possible outcomes: The majority are in here [points to the middle of the distribution] but there’s a small chance of – listen to this! – something really good [points to the “good” end]. And there’s a small chance of something really bad [points to the “bad” end]. But with us, the good is more extreme. And the bad is more extreme. And it’s – no! I have it wrong. There’s nothing in the middle at all. [JEFF erases the distributions (but not the axes or labels). HE draws a bi-modal distribution, as such:
. THEY go into fast forward mode. JEFF maybe makes more coffee. JENNY maybe makes the bed, picks up the blankets. THEY might look at each other, but THEY don’t talk. During this, JENNY erases what JEFF has drawn and replaces it with a scatterplot, as such:
SHE labels the X axis “good” and the Y axis “bad”
JENNY
You know, when I first moved here, people used to be surprised when you did anything right, anything interesting. They’d say “Jeff, of all people” about anything good you did. Jeff, of all people, aced the chem test. Jeff, of all people, told a funny joke. I thought your name was ‘Jeff of all people’ for a while. I mean, people were surprised when you found ten bucks in the cafeteria. And then I started listening to you, like I heard what you were saying through the noise and through the static. And when we first started sneaking out… people were still surprised, I mean I was…. “She’s with Jeff, of all people!” And I didn’t care. It was you and me up against all of it, laughing with them laughing at us. I remember looking down my nose at the first bottle of scotch… what was it, fucking Dewars?… and seeing it crawl up the side of the bottle and thinking well this isn’t so bad and then it burning my tongue, my throat, and coughing, spitting it all over you, and laughing and laughing and drinking it again and again until we could keep it down. And it’s still that way: it’s laughing at pain, laughing despite you, because of you, spitting on you and getting spit on, and not wanting to be anywhere else. It’s completely flipped around: Jeff, of all people; of all people, I want to be with you. I hear people talk about their lives, wondering if they should break up with their boyfriends, if they should go out with some guy, and I think those poor people, those poor fucking people, trying to detect faint signals through the noise. With you, for me, the signal is clear. It’s almost never either good or bad, but the signal is clear: we’re up here. We’re the best and the worst all at the same time. [SHE adds a data point on the top right corner of the plot.]
[The static on the radio clears. The music comes through.]
Sometimes I have to rearrange things in my brain to make room for the emptiness I feel when we fight. And sometimes I have to rearrange things to make room for the light you bring me.
JEFF
I don’t know where you put everything I give you, either.
JENNY
What was it you said to me the other day, about measuring joy?
JEFF
That you are the difference between an amount of joy in my life that I can measure, and an amount that overwhelms me completely.
JENNY
That’s it. Sometimes I have so much love and so much anger that I have to store some inside of you.
JEFF
And I’ll take it all.
[pause]
JENNY
[nods] I’ll go warm up the bike.
[lights face to BLACKOUT]
Art and Music in Our Souls 