I wanted to fill the emptiness of my life. And so I thought more and more about them, that other family, wrapped up in their simple cares, free of my intellectual complications. And that’s why I used to watch that child coming out of school.

STEPDAUGHTER: Will you listen to him? He used to follow me down the street, smiling at me and waving his hand! I watched him, wide-eyed, puzzled. Who was he? I asked my mother about him. (going to Mother and putting head on her lap, a little child again) Mama? She knew. (Mother nods) She kept me out of school for a few days. When I went back (again a little girl), there he was again—a sad-looking figure, holding a brown paper bag. He came nearer and stroked me. In the bag (excited) … was a beautiful silk shawl with a fringe on it. All for me?

JEREMY: Sorry, this is all fascinating, but dramatically it’s irrelevant.

SON: (contemptuously) Yes, just literature.

FATHER: What do you mean, literature? This is life, my boy, real emotions.

JEREMY: That may be! But it won’t work in the theatre.

FATHER: I know it won’t. But this is only the background of the action. You don’t put this on stage. As you can see, she isn’t a little girl any more with long hair down to her waist.

STEPDAUGHTER: —or with frilly little underwear showing under her dress.

FATHER: The real drama begins now. And I can assure you, it’s new and innovative.

STEPDAUGHTER: (coming forward, fierce and brooding) When my father died …

FATHER: They came back here. Only I didn’t know it. I had lost touch with them over the years. The drama was about to break out, violent and unexpected. I hadn’t learned how to do without sex. I was lonely but revolted by casual affairs—not old enough to do without women, not young enough to have them without feeling disgust. Ashamed of myself but unable to suppress my desires. What good was my intelligence? And the women—what about them? You find one who looks at you warmly. You hold her in your arms. And the next thing she does is close her eyes. She’s telling the man: “Blind yourself, for I am blind.”

STEPDAUGHTER: And if she doesn’t close her eyes, what then? When she looks directly into the sweating face of a man who comes to her without love, what then? Oh what disgust she feels for this attempt to justify lust, excuse it…. I can’t listen to this shit any more. His intellectualizing is contemptible. He makes me sick.

CHUCK: (from under the earphones) Can we get to the point at last? I’d like to listen to the playoffs, (or “I can feel my hair falling out”)

FATHER: All right, then. But I’m just trying to provide you with some motivation. Isn’t that what you actors always want? Anyway, how was I to know that they had all come back here after that poor fellow died, that they were dreadfully poor, and that the mother had gone to work as a dressmaker, sewing costumes for Emilio Paz, of all people.

MOTHER: Believe me, I had no way of knowing that man gave me work because he had his eye on my daughter….

STEPDAUGHTER: Poor Mama. Do you know what that pimp would say when I brought back the stuff you’d been working on? That you didn’t know how to sew a sequin, that you were messing up the seams.