Turning around, Sammy was just in time to see the door to the room open. "My grandfather was a garbage-man," the white-coated attendant waas saying over his shoulder. "And his father and my father, too. So it was sort of like letting the whole family down when I flunked out."
"I see." Hannah's voice floated over his shoulder. "That's really very fascinating, George."
Sammy silently slid the window shut to cover their means of exiting. It also shut out the voices in the room behind them. The balcony was very small. There was only one window off it besides the one by which they'd come out. There was no choice. With Sammy leading the way, they climbed over the sill and into the room.
There was a night light on beside the bed, and there was only one bed in the room. A rather pretty woman in her mid-thirties was propped up on the pillows, reading. She had silver-blonde hair, worn in the Marienbad style which had been so popular two or three years back. She didn't notice Sammy and Llona as they hovered undecidedly in the shadows alongside the windows. She was too intent on her book.
Sammy motioned to Llona to crouch. Then he started waddling across the floor, ducklike, toward the door leading from the room. He hoped they'd be passing beneath both the perimeter of the light splash from the nightstand lamp and the range of vision of the woman in the bed. Llona waddled along behind him. They were almost at the door when the woman stretched, turned over on her side, and changed the angle of the lamp to suit her new position. It worked like a spotlight catching the two of them full in the face.
The woman stared a moment before she reacted. Then-"Quack-quack," she said.
"Quack-quack." Not knowing what else to say, Sammy responded in kind-albeit feebly-and reached for the doorknob. He had a dim hope that perhaps this patient's delusion was such that she really had mistaken him for a duck. The hope was only slightly misplaced, at that.
"You are the fattest duck I've ever seen," the woman remarked.
"Quack-quack," Sammy replied, an edge of annoyance to his quacking.
"Quack-quack," Llona echoed.
"Truth and illusion, George," the woman said. "Illusion and truth. If you want to don the fagade of a duck, who am I to say no?"
"His name isn't George," Llona corrected her.
"And I suppose your name isn't Martha, either?" Her tone said she didn't believe Llona.
"No, it isn't."
"Very well. I accept that. If my pretense is to lie here having a nervous breakdown, why should I doubt your pretense of not being George and Martha?" She paused to think about it and then nodded to herself. "Do you like being ducks?" she asked after a moment.
"Not particularly," Llona admitted.
"It must put quite a strain on your haunches."
"It does," Sammy grunted.
"Then why don't you change your reality? Stand up and be apes or something."
"Thank you." Llona got to her feet, and Sammy followed suit.
"Are you apes now?" the woman wanted to know.
"I don't think so," Llona replied.
"Oh? But your mate is scratching himself," she pointed out.
"That's only because I itch," Sammy said.
"Ah. But apes scratch themselves. How do you explain that?" She turned to Llona. "Your mate must be an ape," she decided. "And you must be an ape, too."
"I'm not an ape!" Llona insisted.
"Really? Then yours is a mixed marriage," she concluded. "That must be it. Tell me, does it give you many problems?"
"We're not married," Llona said firmly.
"Oh? Oh! I see. Then you just stay with him because he makes those colored lights spin for you. Woman always loses to the animal inside her. And she always responds to the beast in man. That's one thing I learned from Tennessee."
"Tennessee?" Llona was confused. "Is that where you're from?"
"Oh, no. I mean Tennessee Williams. The playwright. He's one of the reasons I'm here. He and Albee and Ionesco and Genet and all the rest. No one of them, you understand. All of them. Although you might say it started with Arthur Miller."
"Why Arthur Miller?"
"My husband was a shoe salesman, and his territory was Boston. I found out he was having an affair with some woman up there."
"I'm sorry," Llona said. "Did it break up your marriage?"
"No. I thought of that. I thought of divorcing him. But then I saw this Miller play and I realized he was only a victim of our false values. It wasn't his fault. Society imposed them on him. The play gave me insight. I never let my husband know I knew. I just kept mending stockings in front of him every chance I got. That was how it began."
"How what began?"
"My nervous breakdown. You see, to get my mind off his infidelity, I took up mah-jong. I used to play twice a week with these girls. It was a sort of club. And once a week we all went into New York together and took in a matinee. I never guessed what a dangerous course that was."
"Dangerous?"
"Yes. You see, certain things have always been true about myself, but it wasn't until I began getting the playwrights' messages that I knew they were true. Facts become very dangerous when they're exposed. I've always been a conformist, and yet I've always been alienated. Communication has always been a problem to me, but it's also true that when I chatter there's an undertone to the words that reaches people on a Freudian symbolic level that destroys their defenses. I'm both politically aware and aware that political action is fruitless. My femininity is aggressive but easily overpowered by masculinity at the same time that it's destroying masculinity. I have many masks to hide layer upon layer of reality, but when each of my fa?ades is stripped away, it reveals only another fa§ade. I've spent all of my life yearning for Godot, and I'm terrified that he might show up. All of this is true, but what's important is that I never realized it until the theatre brought it home to me. And so I blame Broadway, Off-Broadway and many a European playwright for my downfall. Do you understand?"
"No," Sammy admitted succinctly.
"Then let me try to explain," she continued. "O'Neill warned me, you see, but I was too dense to catch it. Iceman demonstrated the danger of stripping a person of his illusions. It makes the beer taste flat. Remember? Anyway, in my case, it went further. I began to identify. I identified with the slut in The Balcony. When my husband climbed into bed and pawed at me, I whinnied, leaped from the bed, and began trotting around the room like a horse. I identified with Jerry in The Zoo Story. I be gan waving knives at people-milkmen and salesgirls and insurance brokers and such-and demanding that they communicate with me. I identified with Marat in Marat-Sade, joined a militant peace movement, and spent all my spare time in the tub. In the end, I refused to be a rhinoceros, and the rest of the herd banded together and exiled me to this place. That's why I'm glad to see you two. You may be ducks or apes; I'm not sure. But at least you're not rhinoceroses."
"Rhinoceri." Llona corrected her.
"Really?" the woman sneered. "How semantical we are. Why don't you just shave your head and sing soprano, dearie? Poof!" She waved her hand. "You're vanished!"
"But we haven't," Llona pointed out. "The reality is that we're still here."
"The reality is shades that come in the night and insist on their existence. Shades that waddle like ducks and scratch like apes. One man's reality is another man's delusion. The politician's reality leads to the absurd. The playwright's absurdity may lead to reality, but who can bear it? Who in their right mind would want to be right-minded? Who wants the crystal clarity of absurd reality? Believe me, existentialism made me what I am today. If I can recapture my fantasies, I may get out of here yet. So the hell with reality. I say you're not here. You don't exist. Poof! You're vanished!" v
Llona and Sammy took the hint and went out the door. They were indeed vanished. But they reappeared in the hallway beyond, re-created themselves so to speak, and cautiously headed back toward the stairway. They were almost there when the sound of a door opening behind them made them both turn around. It was the door to the room of the two old men, and Hannah was standing outside it waving frantically to them to get out of sight. Just as the attendant emerged behind Hannah, Sammy and Llona ducked into yet another room.