By Brad Gooch
Date: 17 March 2000
Todd & Lucy, the Ultimate Literary Duo
Half an hour into the show, or two glasses later, Todd
meanders to the wall phone to call Lucy again.
Lucy: Lo.
Todd: (his heart a puddle) Where have you been?
Lucy: Out. Where you?
Todd hangs up. His insides are turning around like taffy.
He feels so bad. So he leaves and crosses the street with
all its contradictory beams of light and yells up. This
time his voice cracks, like Stanley Kowalski yelling
"Stella" in "Streetcar." He leans against a big old
hearse that some joker in the neighborhood has converted
into his personal station wagon.
Lucy runs down to let him in. She looks great in the
doorway, letting her hair down, like an aria singer
in an opera. But she looks sad, too. Has on a yellow
t-shirt (inside out), white jeans, red beat-up pumps.
When something is wrong Lucy doesn't wear black.
Todd: I feel sick.
Lucy: I smell a dragon. Come upstairs.
Todd: I think I have to throw up.
Lucy: Go ahead. But wait till we get to the bathroom,
okay?
Todd is in the narrow bathroom with a toilet flushed by
pulling down on a hanging chain. He starts to heave
into the porcelain bowl. Purple, orange, brown, white
flecks in one whoosh. Then again. Fireworks of upchuck.
Settling into a green swamp below.
Todd: (loud) It's disgusting. It's disgusting.
Lucy: (standing up in the bathroom doorway) I can't believe
you're taking it so hard. Even I know it's not so bad.
Todd: It is bad. It is bad. I'm a bad person.
Lucy: Why?
Todd: Because I'm leaving you.
Lucy: (walking back across the long room, lighting a
Benson & Hedges) I have to keep moving around the room.
Walking around. Do you care?
Todd: (rushing out of the lav while a torrent of toilet-bowl
water roars) Who in the world talks like I'm talking now?
Or acts this way? What's wrong with me? I'm under some heavy
curse.
Lucy: (angry) You're not.
Lucy sits Todd down on their mattress. She takes his two
hands in hers, stroking their tops the way you stroke
the tops of a dog's paws.
Todd: Hands are private parts, too.
Then she leans sideways and lights the kerosene lamp next
to the mattress. It gives off an amber glow.
Lucy: You're just getting used to it. The life we see
around us is as pretty as a postcard. But felt life is a
monster movie.
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