Triptych and Iphigenia Read Online Free PDF

have the male energy lines, a helluva hip guy, I’ll give him credit for that. … One night he brought a porno, people doing it nonstop, like a zoo … We couldn’t stop guzzling the booze and giggling … Nathan gave himself a body scrub in the shower.
    Mistress is sitting on the last step of the staircase.
    MISTRESS    (
low with emotion
) When I told him, he froze. He said, “You’ve got to get rid of it.” And I said, “No, it’s mine, mine … I’ll rear it alone.” I’ve never seen a man so thrown, so flabbergasted, he went ashen. I said, “Is it your wife … is it your daughter?” and he said a most cutting thing. He said, “It’s not my wife, it’s not my daughter, it’s you and it’s me … A man thinks he has found a new woman, a great woman, but it always turns out to be the same bloody woman in different costume.” He walked out of the restaurant; “You rat, you fucking rat!” I shouted and I was certain that he had merely gone down the street to think things over, men are wont to go down the street to think things over, but I was wrong. Not long after, I rang my friend Rachel to ask for her doctor’s number and I took two weeks off work and learnt that my understudy was a wow.
    Daughter lying on her futon, flicking through salacious magazines, whistles, etc.
    DAUGHTER    Wow, she’s curvy … You’ve got a very big bush, madam, you could sweep Amsterdam Avenue with that.
    S CENE S IXTEEN
    Wife in raincoat and red beret approaches the Mistress’s space pointing the ferule of the long black umbrella. She is smiling, almost laughing. She has had a few drinks, weaves a little.
    WIFE    (
singing
) Oh show me the way to the next whiskey bar
    Oh pretty boy
    Please don’t ask why,
    You know that you must die …
    Oh, pretty boy
    MISTRESS    Whenever I saw a mother and a baby on the street I just burst into tears.
    WIFE    (
quizzical
) Your hair … something different … Seems shorter … Not quite so tousled.
    MISTRESS    You’ve been on the town, I see.
    Wife, ignoring that, takes a photograph out of her wallet.
    WIFE    Souvenir. Thought you’d like to see what Henry looked like when we met twenty years ago … He’d seen a postcard of James Dean wearing a cap, standing by some fence so he got himself the same cap. From the moment I met him I decided that he was the one, my Orpheus, even if it meant going down into hell for half the year.
    MISTRESS    Look, I am not breaking up your marriage and I don’t intend to … I am his mistress and I know the rules.
    WIFE    You and your ilk are a pox on married households … up our husbands’ asses, licking our husbands’ asses … and we carry the can and smile and say, “Darling, shall we have Lourda O’Shaughnessy around for dinner?” She of the alabaster cleavage. And we smile and smile (
lower voice
) and get fat.
    MISTRESS    He spends time with you … Christmas, Thanksgiving, anniversaries … values your advice about his work.
    WIFE    He’s washed up. He has a block. He can’t deliver. It’s different with actors, you can fake it … you have your (
pause
) repertoire of masks … that you put on and off at will … but a writer dons a mask at his peril. When he goes into solitary, he doesn’t lie, Clarissa.
    MISTRESS    (
scornful
) What pearls of wisdom.
    Wife picks up a vodka bottle off the dressing table.
    WIFE    May I?
    MISTRESS    Help yourself.
    Wife drinks, savoring it.
    WIFE    You went to Washington with him.
    MISTRESS    Did I?
    WIFE    I telephoned him at his hotel and the girl on the switchboard said he was out, so I tried later. She said, “Ma’am … you’ve been phoning all evening.” I said: “No, that’s his