A Small Play: “All Woes and All Joys”

☛Dusky stage. Dusty and in flames. People come and go. They seem uncomfortable, very intensely so, yet hopeful, or at least waiting for something. The effect is like a station, or an onsen, but the heat is dry and the cleanliness being instantiated is not visible to the eye.

S: That’s what I was afraid of. There was something unnatural in my flesh or, at any rate, in my words and I was afraid of it and afraid of being found out, having people see it there.

F: People like you are always asking if something is “natural” when really our nature comes down into us from on high and has next to no interest in the sex question to begin with.

S: Spoken like someone who never had sex.

F: Yes.

S: Never had children.

F: I had lupus half my life.

S: You gave birth to it four times?

F: More, if you count each time I was up with the chills.

S: I just can’t see my soul burning through my body like that, if there is a soul. It matters more to me what did go in, what did come out of my body.

F: It’s a hell of a way to think about the marriage bed if it’s just a matter of things going in and coming out. Like the most awful guests at a college party. “Please, may I take your coat, Annie Lou?”

S: “I assure you there aren’t too many people smoking reefer in the coat room.”

F: What a time that was. Lord, I don’t miss it.

S: I never really got out of it. I mean, my husband…

F: Yes, hence the four children you gave birth to while I was giving birth to the lupus. I wrote a story about pregnancy. Unwanted, as they say. Called it “A Stroke of Good Fortune.” I don’t know looking back that I’d find it to be that, exactly, but it sure would be better fortune than the lupus, at any rate.

S: I’m sure it would. I read that story.

F: Before you got here, or afterwards?

S: I don’t recall. Do you recall when you read “The Possibility of Evil”?

F: I can’t say I do.

☛Stage lights change color. Elsewhere:

A: I would say my ecological conversion as the Pope puts it, came when I saw a sign on the road driving through freezing rain to get home right before Christmas. This would have been 2021 or 2022. It said “It’s a wonderful life. Drive safe.”

G: By implication, “so you don’t lose your wonderful life,” then?

A: Yes.

G: It was a film, wasn’t it? A rather popular one, as I understand it.

A: Oh, perennially so. A good joke too, for the kinds of jokes MassDOT would make. And it’s the funniest thing: I didn’t even like winter, or cold weather, and I would have been happy to live in a Boston with the same climate as Florida if that was really what the world had in store for us, but I decided that I could not abide a future where that joke wouldn’t make sense.

G: Snow on the roads?

A: As I said, freezing rain. Or sleet. A great deal of it.

G: There was sleet in Tunbridge Wells, also, the evening I went to the New Year’s Eve party at which my conversion began. I remember looking out into that sleety night and humming one of the old parlor songs to myself while trying to scrub claret out of the bodice I had on. I wasn’t used to the neckline, you see; it was more modest than what I had usually gone in for until then; I was growing older, you know, and I felt ill-at-ease. The drops of wine would have fallen on my collar-bone; they fell on my bodice instead, and so I went up to the washroom and stood there singing parlor songs and looking out the window until someone bellowed out, “Happy New Year! Happy 1897!”

A: Is that when you died?

G: No; it was simply when my conversion was complete. I looked in the glass, then—in the mirror, that is, you understand—and I realized that if 1897 was to be any different then I had absolutely better stop feeling so bloody sorry for myself.—Pardon my language.

A: I died right after my conversion. I did not drive safely; I caromed off Interstate 91 and broke my neck on a tree.

G: Oh, what a pity.

A: As a matter of fact I don’t think it was a pity at all. My conversion might not have lasted otherwise.

G: Itself a pity.

A: True enough, I guess.

☛And elsewhere:

C: Portinari? So you are Dante’s Beatrice?

B: I am my own Beatrice.

C: But the one he wrote about?

B: I barely know who Dante is.

C: So you were misidentified? By Boccaccio?

B: I suppose I must have been. I don’t think it’s obvious that that woman was any one particular person, any one real person, at all. Would you want her to be? Forget the Commedia for a moment and think about how La Vita Nuova writes about her.

C: You were saying you barely knew who Dante was.

B: I barely know who Dante the dead man is; I know who Dante the figure of world literature is, because I am being asked about this all the time.

C: I’m sorry.

B: Oh, no need to be. It’s only that it confuses me to this day, that this would be of such overwhelming, almost exclusive, interest to everybody. What kind of name is “Dante,” anyway?

C: It was short for Durante.

B: Fascinating. I do think I may have met a boy with that name, once or twice.

☛The proscenium arch explodes into roses. The roses distend, extend, their petals growing longer and much, much thinner, until they are those of Lycoris radiata, the red spider lily. The flowers fill everyone’s field of vision—everyone’s, onstage and off—and then they are gone, and the people on the stage with them.