Read Imaginary Friends for Free Online Page B

real life, I mean.
    STEPHEN SPENDER : If I could just throw something in here that is only going to confuse things, I’m afraid. A few months earlier, before any of this happened, I had dinner with John Dos Passos. He had been in England, which had just elected a socialist government, and he announced that he no longer believed in socialism because he’d gone to a restaurant in London and found a bug in his chicken.
    A beat
.
    LILLIAN : A bad moment for your team.
    MARY : Thank you, Stephen. Thank you for that.
    STEPHEN SPENDER : It doesn’t mean your version isn’t accurate—
    MARY : It’s not “my version.” It’s what happened.
    LILLIAN : It’s not what happened.
    STEPHEN SPENDER : What do
you
think happened?
    LILLIAN : What do I think happened? I thought you’d never ask.
[She stands and moves some of the furniture around.]
I was here.
[She sits down.]
Harold—you’re next to me.
    And the sunlight was coming into the room, like so—
[A light hits her.]
Even more sunlight.
[The light gets a little brighter.]
Lovely. And the students were sitting on the floor, because so many of them had turned up to see me that there weren’t enough chairs—
    The
STUDENTS
sit on the floor
.
    They sat cross-legged, looking up at me like little fish—no, like baby birds in a nest, waiting to be fed—
[She motions to the
STUDENTS
to tilt their chins upward slightly.]
When I suddenly noticed—over there—
    She motions to
MARY
to move to the other side of the room
. MARY
crosses and the
STUDENTS
turn to watch her
.
    The students never took their eyes off me—
    The
STUDENTS
turn back to
LILLIAN .
    —a quivering dark cylinder of rage.
[To the lighting person.]
Even darker.
[The light on
MARY
dims.]
She was holding a teacup and saucer—
    MARY
is handed a teacup and saucer, or perhaps a teacup and saucer are lowered from the ceiling on a hook
.
    I was talking. I’d been asked a question—
    A
STUDENT
raises her hand
.
    STUDENT : Did you ever meet Ernest Hemingway?
    LILLIAN : “Did I ever meet Ernest Hemingway?” And I was answering. I was saying …
[To the
STUDENTS
.]
I would have starved to death in Spain but for Ernest. Because when I told him I was going there, during the war, he said to me, “Bring food, there’s none.” And when he and I had dinner in Madrid, in someone’s apartment, I brought sardines and pâté. And Ernest said thank God I had, because Dos Passos had just been there and hadn’t brought any food at all and ended up eating everyone else’s. That’s what I said, it was completely harmless, and Madam over there began shaking—you could hear her teacup rattling against the saucer.
[To
MARY
.]
Go ahead. I did your version. Do mine.
    MARY
starts shaking her teacup against her saucer
.
    And she said—
    MARY : How can you say that about Dos?
    LILLIAN :
Dos
. So she would be sure I would know she knew him. “How can you say that about Dos?” What had I said? And perhaps I said something like “Well, Dos loved his food,” and she reacted quite bizarrely. She said—
    MARY :
[Shaking her cup and saucer.]
You’re just saying that because you can’t stand that he went over to the other side—
    LILLIAN : Good. Keep shaking the cup.
    MARY : You’re just saying that because you’ve never admitted what the Stalinists did in Spain—
[
MARY
continues, overlapping with
LILLIAN
.]
    LILLIAN : I had no idea what was going on. I turned to the president of the school and said—
[Turning to one of the people in the room.]
“Who is that girl?” And he said—
    PRESIDENT : Mary McCarthy.
    LILLIAN : And I said “Oh.” I said, “Oh, the one who married Edmund Wilson for his looks.” And some of the students laughed—the ones who knew what Edmund Wilson looked like—
    Many of the students laugh. So does
LILLIAN .
    And she dropped her cup and saucer on the floor—
    MARY : What?
    LILLIAN : And they shattered into a million tiny pieces.
    MARY : Never happened—
    LILLIAN : Go ahead, do