QUITT
The long and short of it: you are still here for me?
HANS
Because I am compelled to be as free as you are. You have everything, live only for yourself, don’t have to make any comparisons any more. Your life is poetic, Mr. Quitt, and poetry, as we know, produces a sense of power that oppresses no one — but rather dances the dance of freedom for us, the oppressed. At one time I felt caught in the act even when someone watched me licking stamps. Now I don’t bat an eyelash when someone calls me a lackey; carry the garbage can out onto the sidewalk in my tails absolutely unfazed; walk self-confidently arm in arm with the ugliest woman; do work, willy-nilly, which isn’t mine to do — that is my freedom, which I have learned from you. In the past I used to be envious of what you could afford to do. I didn’t feel treated like a man but like a mannequin — notice my new freedom, I’m already playing with words! — cursed you under my breath as a bloodsucker, did not see the human being in you, but only the corporation mogul. That’s how unfree I was. Now, as soon as I imagine you, I see the self-assured curve that your watch chain describes over your belly and already I am moved.
QUITT
This sounds familiar. (HANS laughs.) So you’re just making fun of me. I should have known that someone with your history would never change. But you’re not the one who matters. It’s the others that count.
HANS
Do you actually despise yourself, Mr. Quitt? — Now that you’ve screwed them all?
QUITT
Myself? No. But I might despise someone like me. (Long pause.) Why don’t you react? Just now when you weren’t answering me, what I said began to crawl back into me and wanted to make itself unsaid, and me too, by shriveling me deep inside. (Pause.) You’re making fun of my language. I would much prefer to express myself inarticulately like the little people in the play recently, do you remember? Then you would finally pity me. This way I suffer my articulateness as part of my suffering. The only ones that you and your kind pity are those who can’t speak about their suffering.
HANS
How do you want to be pitied? Even if you became speechless with suffering your money would speak for you, and the money is a fact and you — you’re nothing but a consciousness.
QUITT
(Derisively) Pity only occurred to me because the characters in the play moved me so — not that they were speechless, but that despite their seemingly dehumanized demeanor they wanted really to be as kind to each other as we spectators who all live in more human surroundings are already with each other. They, too, wanted tenderness, a life together, et cetera — they just can’t express it, and that is why they rape and murder each other. Those who live in inhuman conditions represent the last humans on stage. I like that paradox. I like to see human beings on the stage, not monsters. Human beings, gnarled with suffering, unsche-matic, drenched with pain and joy. The animalistic attracts me, the defenseless, the abused and insulted. Simple people, do you understand? Real people whom I can feel and taste, living people. Do you know what I mean? People! Simply … people! Do you know what I mean? Not fakes but … (He thinks for quite a while.) people. You understand: people. I hope you know what I mean.
HANS
I can’t take your jokes so soon after waking up. But let’s suppose you’re being serious. There must be another possibility which makes your dichotomy — here fakes, there human beings — look ridiculous.
QUITT
Which?
HANS
I don’t know.
QUITT
Why not?
HANS
That I don’t know is the very thing that lends me hope. Besides, as one of those whom you have in mind: I can say it: every time when the curtain rises I become discouraged at the prospect that things will be human again up there any moment now. Let’s further assume that you mean what you say: perhaps the people on stage moved you — not because they were people, but because everything was shown as it is. For example, if you recognize a portrait as true to life, you frequently develop a peculiar sympathy for the person in the portrait without necessarily having any feeling for the real person. Couldn’t the same thing have happened to you when you saw the play? That you empathized with the inarticulate people represented there on the stage and think, therefore, that you have done with the real ones? And why do you want to see real characters on stage at all, who belong in the past and are alien to you?
QUITT
Because I like to think back to the days when I was poor too, and couldn’t express myself, and primarily because the painted grimaces from my own class sit in the audience anyway. On stage I want to see the other class, as crude and as unadorned as possible. After all, I go to the theater to relax.
HANS
(Laughs.) So, you are being derisive.
QUITT
I meant that seriously. (He laughs. Both of them laugh.)
(WIFE enters.)
HANS
Here comes one of your real people.
WIFE
Are you laughing at me?
QUITT
Who else?
WIFE
And what were you saying about me?
HANS
Nothing. We were only laughing about you.
(WIFE laughs too; she slaps QUITT on the shoulder, nudges him in the ribs.)
QUITT
We’re all merry for once, right?
HANS
Since business is so good, Mr. Quitt — why don’t you cross my palm with silver?
QUITT
You’re welcome.
(He wants to put the coin into HANS’s outstretched hand but HANS pulls back the hand and stretches out the other. Now QUITT wants to put the coin into that hand, but HANS, so as to adjust to QUITT, has already stretched out his first hand again. When he notices that QUITT … he stretches out his second hand again. But QUITT tries to put the coin into HANS’s first hand again and in the meantime, etc. Until QUITT puts the coin away again, walks to the piano, and plays a boogie. WIFE takes HANS and dances with him … Then QUITT suddenly plays a slow, sad blues and sings along with it.)
QUITT
Sometimes I wake up at night
and everything I want to do next day
suddenly seems silly,
how silly to button your shirt,
how silly to look in your eyes,
how silly the foam on the glass of beer,
how silly to be loved by you.
Sometimes I lie awake
and everything I imagine
makes everything that much more inconceivable—