Drinks Before Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page B

cars. I fail to see why that is terrible. In any event, it is inevitable. Everything we make is modeled on ourselves. The common valve is a mechanization of the sphincter, household plumbing mimics the bowels, and cameras are mechanical eyes. Our computers take our minds for themodel and produce thought outside of our bodies. Every technical human achievement redesigns the self, recreates it, and projects it. How could it be otherwise?
EDGAR    ( Laughing ) As the arm hurling a stone becomes—a gun.
( He swings his arm and points the gun toward the doorway. At the same moment the MAID enters, stops in her tracks )
JOAN    Edgar, please, I find that frightening.
( Pause )
MICHAEL    You said you bought that gun. Why?
EDGAR    Well, that’s the point, I don’t know why. I bought it without planning to, I bought it with no thought for guns or weapons of any kind until the moment the opportunity was given to me to buy it. Children, where do you think I was when this gun was offered to me?
BOY    In your car?
GIRL    ( Simultaneously ) Your car!
EDGAR    Exactly so. You are very fine children. I was sitting in my car. It was late at night, I was alone, I was waiting for the light to change at the intersection of Third Avenue and a Hundred and Twentieth Street. The street was quite empty and a wind was blowing sheets of newspaper across the avenue. The intersection was brightly lit by our modern anticrime amber streetlights. Every tenement and boarded-up store was lit in ghastly amber light. So that this whole ruined avenue was lit as for easier inspection and could be seen without shadow, without darkness, like the inside of an always lit prison cell. And then, standing at the driver’s window of my car, without my having seen him arrive, was a boy not much older than you, a boy with his palm out and this gun resting on his palm with handle toward me. He asked me if I wanted to buy it. I said “Yes!” He said, “Lay down twenty.” I gave him a twenty-dollar bill and he droppedthe gun in my hand and he was gone. And I had the gun.
JOEL    That is a most interesting story.
EDGAR    Yes, I think so. I don’t know if it works, although it smells as if it does. There is a faint acrid odor at the muzzle. I have been wondering for days why I felt compelled to say yes when it was offered to me. I’ve been carrying it around ever since. Perhaps you can help me understand this.
JOEL    What? But how can you expect us to help you understand anything. If you were holding a porcelain or a picture or a rare book, we might be disposed to be helpful. We would all sit around and wonder why you bought it and what it could possibly mean, and some of us would like it and others would not care for it, and we would give you all the attention you thought you needed but not more than we wanted to give. We could even do that with the gun if you put it down somewhere out of the way. But look at you: you have it in your hand. That hardly encourages us to be understanding and helpful.
EDGAR    But I now realize, as I hadn’t since the night I bought it, that it is meant to be held in the hand.
JOEL    All right, then let me hold it. I have a hand. I’ll hold it.
EDGAR    We should consider that. But isn’t it the nature of a gun to be held in a hand that is inconsolable? Guns belong to the inconsolable Therefore you are not really trustworthy. It would not be true to the occasion for you to hold this gun. If there is any truth or meaning to be derived from the occasion, we would not find it by having you hold the gun. The occasion would be defeated.
( Long silence )
JOAN    I think it is important for everyone in this room to remain quite calm while Edgar explains to us what he is trying to say. It may be a joke in poor taste for him to hold a gun and say things in this way, and perhaps laterwe may make him understand this. But everything seems to be fine as we sit here with our drinks. This is a dinner