Drinks Before Dinner Read Online Free Page B

child—if you don’t stop, we’ll be asked to leave. In fact, I won’t wait to be asked.
( The new guest , GRACE , is led toward them and JOAN puts on a smiling face , CLAUDETTE ’s introductions are not here effusive. They are cursory first-name sort . GRACE sits down and receives a drink. Almost everyone sits. There is an awkward silence )
GRACE    Has anyone seen the Hopper retrospective at the Modern?
JOAN    Yes, isn’t it marvelous?
GRACE    I was disappointed. I used to like Hopper. Now I find I dislike him.
CLAUDETTE    Grace is a painter herself.
( EDGAR makes an incoherent sound )
GRACE    I beg your pardon?
JOEL    Perhaps you can help us, Grace. This evening Edgar is in great pain. We’re trying to console him, but he’s inconsolable. Today he went about his business as usual, and tomorrow he will go about his usual business, but this evening he finds himself inconsolable. Of course, by his own admission he doesn’t know anything the rest of us don’t know, nor perceive anything we can’t perceive. We all know and perceive the same things. As a physician I probably have more of a reason than anyone to be inconsolable. I know of more disgusting and degrading means of dying than anyone else in this room could possibly know. Every day of the week I perform five or six operations of the same kind. I get up early in the morning to do that. Every day in the week thousands of physicians all over the country get up very early in the morning to do the same operations for the people who have come to us for the same conditions for which other peoplehave come to us. The admissions officers of hospital emergency rooms can calculate by the week and month and year how many knifings they will get, how many shootings, how many cardiac arrests, how many ODs, how many car wrecks. They know in advance. Cars go up on sidewalks, through store windows, they skid into each other in the rain, they collide at intersections, they crash head-on on the highways. It is very farcical what cars do. The run into lampposts or hurtle off bridges. Trains derail, buckle, plow into the rear of other trains. Airplanes take off and crash, and they crash on landing. They hit other airplanes in the air, they turn on their wingtips on the runway, they skid off the runway, they miss the runway altogether. Everything disastrous that happens to people usually happens to many people at the same time. They even get sick in great numbers, as in epidemics. You would think that illness was a personal thing and a matter of individual character, but people are poisoned in great numbers by the food they eat at the same dinners, or they get cancer together from working in the same factories. There is very little that people can do disastrously by themselves. Neither crashing in airplanes nor burning to death in tenements. Most of the time, these things are done by groups of people. And of course, war is done by groups of people, and the dying in wars is comprised of enormous numbers of people. In fact, that is the meaning of dying in wars, that it be done by the greatest possible numbers of people. So it is all very painful. There’s very little dignity possible and I find that quite painful. Nevertheless, nevertheless, I choose not to be inconsolable.
GRACE    I am not sure why you are telling me this but I think you are wise not to be inconsolable.
( In the ensuing laughter EDGAR distractedly takes a handgun from his breast pocket )
EDGAR    Very wise. Very brave.
JOAN    What is that?
CLAUDETTE    Is that a gun?
JOAN    Where does that come from?
CLAUDETTE    Joel—
JOEL    It isn’t loaded, I’m sure. Is it, Edgar? What is it, some sort of objet?
EDGAR    I don’t know.
MICHAEL    You’ll go to great lengths to win an argument.
EDGAR    On the contrary. I didn’t know I was inconsolable until it was said. It is exactly true.
JOAN    Where did you get that thing?
EDGAR    I bought it. Very