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not and never have been. Follow me, please. I must become a sexual creature of the kind that you have yourself never dreamed of being. In order to preserve what we have remarkably sustained by forthrightly pursuing together our sexual desires—are you with me?—
my
sexual desires must be deformed, since it is unarguable that, like you—you until today, that is—I am not by nature, inclination, practice, or belief a monogamous being. Period. You wish to impose a condition that either deforms me or turns me into a dishonest man with you. But like all other living creatures I suffer when I am deformed. And it shocks me, I might add, to think that the forthrightness that has sustained and excited us both, that provides such a healthy contrast to the routine deceitfulness that is the hallmark of a hundred million marriages, including yours and mine, is now less to your taste than the solace of conventional lies and repressive puritanism. As a self-imposed challenge, repressive puritanism is fine with me, but it is Titoism, Drenka,
inhuman Titoism
, when it seeks to impose its norms on others by self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex.”
    “You
sound
like stupid Tito when you lecture me like this! Please stop it!”
    They hadn’t spread their tarpaulin or removed a single item of their clothing but had remained in their sweatshirts and jeans, and Sabbath in his knitted seaman’s cap, sitting backed against a rock. Drenka meanwhile paced in rapid circles the high ring of elephantine boulders, her hands fluttering anxiously through her hair or reaching out to feel against her fingertips the cool familiar surface of their hideaway’s rough walls—and could not but remind him of Nikki in the last act of
The Cherry Orchard
. Nikki, his first wife, the fragile, volatile Greek American girl whose pervasivesense of crisis he’d mistaken for a deep spirit and whom he had Chekhovianly nicknamed “A-Crisis-a-Day” until a day came when the crisis of being herself simply swept Nikki away.
    The Cherry Orchard
was one of the first plays he’d directed in New York after the two years of puppet school on the GI Bill in Rome. Nikki had played Madame Ranyevskaya as a ruined flapper, for someone so absurdly young in that role, counterbalancing delicately the satire and the pathos. In the last act, when everything has been packed and the distraught family is preparing to abandon forever the ancestral home, Sabbath had asked Nikki to go silently around the empty room brushing all the walls with the tips of her fingers. No tears, please. Just circle the room touching the bare walls and then leave—that’ll do it. And everything she was asked to do, Nikki did exquisitely . . . and it was for him rendered not quite satisfactory by the fact that whatever she played, however well, she was still also Nikki. This “also” in actors drove him eventually back to puppets, who had never to pretend, who never acted. That he generated their movement and gave each a voice never compromised their reality for Sabbath in the way that Nikki, fresh and eager and with all that talent, seemed always less than convincing to him because of being a real person. With puppets you never had to banish the actor from the role. There was nothing false or artificial about puppets, nor were they “metaphors” for human beings. They were what they were, and no one had to worry that a puppet would disappear, as Nikki had, right off the face of the earth.
    “Why,” Drenka cried, “are you making fun of me? Of
course
you outsmart me, you outsmart everyone,
outtalk
every—”
    “Yes, yes,” he replied. “Luxurious unseriousness was what the outsmarter often felt the greater the seriousness with which he conversed. Detailed, scrupulous, loquacious rationality was generally to be suspected when Morris Sabbath was the speaker. Though not even he could always be certain whether the nonsense so articulated was wholly nonsensical. No, there was nothing