Three Days of Rain
By Richard Greenberg"Torpid" Pip has a chance to tell the story of his parents' meeting. He is Theo's son.
PIP
Hi. Hello. Okay: now me.
My name is Phillip O'Malley Wexler - well, Pip to those who've known me a little too long. My father, the architect Theodore Wexler, died of lung cancer at the age of thirty-eight, even though he was the only one of his generation who never smoked. I was three when it happened, so, of course, I forgot him instantly. My mother tried to make up for this by obsessively telling me stories about him, this kind of rolling epic that trailed me through life, but they, or it, ended up being mostly about her. Which was probably for the best.
Anyway, it went like this:
My mother, Maureen O'Malley back then, came to New York in the spring of '59. She was twenty, her parents staked her to a year, and she arrived with a carefull-thought-out plan to be amazing at something. Well, the year went by without much happening and she was miserable because she was afraid she was going to have to leave New York and return, in disgrace, to Brooklyn.
Early one morning, after a night when she couldn't sleep at all, she started wandering around the city. It was raining, she had her umbrella, she sat in the rain under her umbrella on a bench in Washington Square Park, and felt sorry for herself. Then she saw my father for the first time."There he was," she told me, "this devastatingly handsome man" - that was an exaggeration, he looked like me - and he was obviously, miraculously, even more unhappy than she was. He was just thrashing through the rain, pacing and thrashing, until, all at once, he stopped and sank onto the bench beside her. But not because of her. He didn't realize she was there. He didn't have an umbrella so my mother shifted hers over to him.
"Despair," my mother told me, "can be very attractive in a young person. Despair in a young person can be seductive."
Well, eventually she got tired of him not noticing the wonderful thing she was doing for him, so she said, a little too loudly:"Can I help you?"
Because he'd been crying.
And he jumped. He shrieked.
But he stayed anyway, and they talked, and I was born. The end.
Okay. So, my mother had been telling me that story for about ten years before it occured to me to ask, "Why was he crying? What was my father so upset the first time he met you?" "I never knew," she said. He just told her he was fine, and she took him to breakfast, they talked about nothing, and I guess she kind of gawked at him. And the more she gawked, I guess the happier he felt, because by the end of breakfast it was as if nothing had happened and they were laughing and my mother was in love and the worst day of her life had become the best day of her life.
My mother is hardly ever home anymore. She travels from city to city.
I think she's looking for another park bench, and another wet guy.
That's okay. I hope she finds him.
Ned has left his most prized building to Pip, the son of his partner Theo, instead of to his own son. Walker attacks Pip at the lawyer's office, then sits, sulking, in the rain. Pip rants to Nan.
PIP:
It's the same thing all over again - it's the same thing. I mean, when Walker was gone, all I could remember was all the great things about him. Which when you think about it is a pretty meager amount of material to spread out over a year. Well, I mean, no, not really, but this stuff, this stuff! I mean, you'd think returning from the dead would be character-improving, but I mean: Look at him. He chooses to sit there in the pretty cold evening, and, somehow, I feel guilty about it! As if I were the weather! Or something. I mean, what he said to me, Jesus, at the lawyer's! He's my lawyer, too, you know. Can you imagine how chagrined I'll be next time I have to - okay, not that I ever really need to use him, so it's not that bad, I guess - but still to be the victim of this - Shakespearean tirade - or at least Maxwell Anderson - as if I'd done something - which I haven't - but still I feel guilty about it because he's in so much pain. You know? And I remember when we were ten, not doing things because he was in so much pain. I connected everything to it: "I better not eat that baloney sandwich, Walker is in so much pain." I mean, a ten-year-old boy shouldn't be so emotionally, whatever, fastidious about another ten-year-old boy's feelings, but with him...
There comes a time, Nan, there comes a time where you have to say: Enough, I don't care that you're in so much pain, you cannot behave like this any longer.
But you can't, because he's in so much pain.
Pip reluctantly explains why Oedipus "doesn't make sense."
PIP:
Oh, no, I, that was, I don't want to get into it. (But they're staring at him.) No, I mean, just from a practical point of view, not in any deep-structural way or... anything.
No, I mean, it's just, like... if some oracle told you you were going to kill your father and marry your mother, wouldn't you just never kill anybody and stay single? ...And then, if you did inadvertently kill somebody, in the heat of the moment or something, and later started dating? Wouldn't you be smart enough to, like, avoid older women? I mean, to me the moral of the story is not your destiny awaits you. To me it's... you know... Do the Fucking Math.
Pip explodes at Walker as a result of the conflict described above.
PIP:
Why do you get to be the one who judges things when you're having the stupidest life of anybody? I'm sick of it. You're the one who's done the bad thing here, you're the one who ran off like a maniac and left us to go bonkers worrying about you. I've been good, Nan's been good, you've been bad. Okay, that's the morality of the situation. So you don't get to make the laws; that's the upshot.
Be quiet, I'm talking now, and it's a very weird sensation. Look, it's just - you can't be the only personality in the room anymore. You cannot just change the temperature of every circumstance by this kind of tyrannical psychological, you know, fiat - oh, look, I know you think I'm an idiot - but the fact is, it isn't true - being in a good mood is not the same thing as being a moron. It just isn't. And, you know, for years, I wondered. I strove to sustain some level of unhappiness because I felt so left out, but I couldn't manage it.
I don't know - I feel bad - I go to the gym - I feel better. Maybe that means I lack gravitas or something, but the hell with it, I'm having a good time.
Except I am no longer willing to bear the brunt of your meanness!
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