Imaginary Friends Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the bathroom and slams the door. A beat
.
    MARY : We were incredibly happy.
[She goes to the bureau and takes out a fox stole and wraps it around her neck. Re: the stole.]
My grandmother’s.
[Beat.]
One day Philip had a lunch for the great critic Edmund Wilson and took me to it. I wore my best black dress and a silver fox stole. He—Edmund—was short and stout and pink and pop-eyed, and he huffed and he puffed all the way through lunch. A few weeks later he took me to dinner. Here’s what I had for dinner: three daiquiris, two double Manhattans, a bottle of red wine, and several tumblers of B&B. Two weeks later a similar dinner, and then to his house in Connecticut. I was shown to a guest bedroom. I decided to come down to the study where I knew he would be. It was late. There was a couch. He misunderstood why I had come, and took me in his arms, and I gave up the battle.
    BARTENDERS :
    A COUCH, A KISS, AND YOU
THE RAPTUROUS FORCE
OF A FUTURE DIVORCE
FOR TWO
BEFORE IT BEGAN
IT WAS THROUGH
    LILLIAN : You slept with him because you were drunk.
    MARY : That wasn’t the reason—
    LILLIAN : Why are you making this into the turning point of the twentieth century?
    MARY : But I didn’t come down to the study to sleep with him. And I tried to explain that to him later. Not that he cared—the only thing he cared about was that it had happened. I’d slept with him, that was the fact, case closed. But I hadn’t gone there to sleep with him. I’d gone there to talk to him, I swear, I’d gone there only to talk to him.
    LILLIAN : Listen to this, you wrote this: “She married him as a punishment for the sin of having slept with him when she did not love him, when she loved … someone else.”
    MARY : I also wrote, “It made no sense for me to sleep with him, so I married him so it would make sense.”
    LILLIAN : Bullshit. What about ambition? What about vanity? What about how pleased you had to have been that this brilliant man had chosen you? Or did you think it was only because you were “a princess among the trolls”?
    MARY : I didn’t write that about
myself
. I wrote it about a character in a short story.
    LILLIAN :
[Dismissively.]
It was fiction. Hmmph.
    MARY : Yes. It was.
    LILLIAN : You wrote fact and called it fiction—
    MARY : And you wrote fiction and called it fact.
    LILLIAN : Ooh ooh ooh, that is so painful.
    MARY : Was there ever a moment we could have been friends?
    LILLIAN : Hard to imagine.
    They both think about it for a moment
.
    When would it have been?
    MARY : Hard to imagine.
[Beat.]
But isn’t it odd? The two of us might never have become real writers if it weren’t for these two older men who came into our lives at almost the same moment. After we were married, Edmund led me to a small guest bedroom on the ground floor of his house. There was a desk and a typewriter. He put me in that room and closed the door, and I became a writer. I wrote short stories, and they were published, and one of them was called “The Man in the Brooks Brothers Shirt.” It was about a young woman who meets a traveling salesman on a train, and they get drunk, and she wakes up naked in his sleeping berth. It was very shocking, it was, it was shocking, and because of it, I was a sensation, and I was twenty-nine.
    LILLIAN :
[Mae West again.]
“Hey, boys, come on over and I’ll show you my underpants.”
    MARY : Literally. In the story was a pair of underpants.
    LILLIAN : With a safety pin in them.
    MARY : You read it?
    LILLIAN : Of course I read it. Everyone read it.
    MARY : Did you like it?
    LILLIAN : Did I like it? After all those horrible things you said about me and my work?
    MARY : I was just wondering what you thought of it.
    LILLIAN : I liked it. I liked
Memories of a Catholic Girlhood
, too.
    MARY : Thank you. I liked
The Children’s Hour
.
    LILLIAN
looks at her, surprised
.
    Your plays were so well made. Too well made, really—there was way too much of the gun over the mantel in the first act being