The Dinner Party Read Online Free PDF Page B

look like that, you’re not supposed to be smart. And the two of us—you know, I don’t think we ever had a fight, you know, the way brothers and sisters scrap all the time and cat each other. We made a closed thing, and she was like a romantic love to me as far back as I can remember, and we did all our sexual exploring of each other with such innocence, like two loving animals, like you might think about two puppies, and sometimes I’d have daydreams of just Liz and me on an island, like those two kids in that movie—what was it, do you know?”
    â€œ The Blue Lagoon ,” Clarence said gently.
    â€œSo she has to know I’m gay—it’s just putting two and two together, and there are other things between us that she knows and I know and we never talk about them.”
    â€œAnd your mother and father—they never put two and two together?”
    â€œBite your tongue, Jones. My father would have to pause, resign from the Senate and the presidency for at least five minutes, have a good long look at me, convince himself that I am his son, memorize what I look like—and then he’d remember that he never looked at me before, so how in hell could he put two and two together when the other two never was there? Does that make sense?”
    â€œNo, and you’re shouting and Liz will hear you. Anyway, I don’t believe you. The senator’s a good man.”
    â€œShe wouldn’t hear a bomb explode, the way she’s going. And don’t tell me about the senator.” He glanced at his watch. “Twelve minutes. Eighteen minutes to go.”
    â€œThat’s determination.”
    â€œThat’s a stainless-steel ramrod instead of a spine.” Looking at his watch, he felt his pulse, counting the beats against the second hand of the watch.
    â€œDo you feel all right?”
    â€œI think so. I can go an hour, sometimes two hours without remembering, and then it comes home and my heart stops—it actually does, I mean I miss a beat or two or three—and my chest is filled with ice. Fear. My God, Jonesy, the fear is so fucken terrible, but I’m all right now. I’m all right. Daytime isn’t so bad. The nights are awful.”
    â€œYou have to tell someone, Lenny. You have to. You can’t do this alone.”
    â€œI told you.”
    â€œThat’s what I mean. What about your mother? You never talk about your mother.”
    â€œAh, my mother, dear, sweet Dolly. I love Dolly. I don’t know about right now, right this minute. Right this minute I don’t know whether I’m capable of loving anyone, even you. But Dolly has been all that a mother should be. She dedicated herself to being a mother, just as she dedicated herself to National Cancer, or to the End Poverty thing or Save the Children or Amnesty International or public television. She has a conscience large enough for every good cause this country produces, but whether there’s any real ordinary compassion under that conscience I simply don’t know.”
    â€œYou’re being pretty hard on her. She struck me as a lovely woman.”
    â€œShe is a lovely lady. She’s beautiful, and when I do tell her, or when somebody else tells her, it will be like cutting her heart out, because she adores me. But what is she and where is she? She goes on living year after year with a man she despises. She does this Jewish pretend. Her full name is Dorothy Shippan Constanza Levi. Somewhere the Shippans came into the family, and Constanza was the name of her first woman ancestor here in America who married Gideon Levi in New York. Somewhere in the sixteen hundreds.”
    â€œJust about when my folks came,” Clarence said.
    â€œRight on. Oh, hell, why am I doing this? Dolly is Dolly. She’s a dear, and so she wants to be Jewish. But it’s like when I told her I was a vegetarian. She didn’t ask me why. She immediately fell into a game of menus.