Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes: Revised and Complete Edition (23 page)

Hannah, in a bathrobe, enters the Brooklyn living room, carrying a dress over her arm and a pair of shoes. She puts the shoes down in front of Harper
.

HANNAH
: Good you’re out of that nightdress, it was starting to smell.

HARPER
: You’re telling me.

HANNAH
: Now let’s slip this on.

(They put the dress on Harper.)

HANNAH
: Good.

HARPER
: I hate it.

HANNAH
: It’s pretty.

     
Shoes?

(Harper steps into them.)

HANNAH
: Now let’s see about the hair.

(Harper bends over; Hannah combs Harper
’
s hair.)

HANNAH
: It can be very hard to accept how disappointing life is, Harper, because that’s what it is, and you have to accept it. With faith and time and hard work you reach a point where . . . where the disappointment doesn’t hurt as much, and then it gets easy to live with. Quite easy. Which . . . is in its own way a disappointment. But.

     
There.

HARPER
: In my old life, my previous life, I never used to get up at five
A.M.

     
(To Joe)
This is a nightmare.

HANNAH
: I said I’d open up.

HARPER
(Fake admiration)
: You volunteered.

HANNAH
: I can’t sit around, idle.

HARPER
: You just got here, you could . . . sightsee, you could—

HANNAH
: I didn’t come for fun.

HARPER
: You came to the right place.

HANNAH
: I leave messages for him at work. They say he’s not in but I know he is, but he won’t take my calls. He’s ashamed.

JOE
: She’s right.

HANNAH
: I’ll fix myself.

JOE
: I am.

HANNAH
: And we can go.

(Hannah exits.)

HARPER
: You’re in love with him.

(She crosses into Louis’s bedroom. Joe shrinks from her, afraid, but he’s careful not to wake Louis.)

JOE
: I am?

HARPER
: Don’t ask
me
. Are you?

JOE
: How’re you doing?

HARPER
: Huh. Maybe you’re not in love with him. If you were, you wouldn’t ask me that. You wouldn’t be brave enough. You’d know.

LOUIS
(Still asleep, starting to wake)
: Joe . . .?

(Louis is asleep again.)

HARPER
: I have terrible powers. Maybe I’m a witch.

JOE
: You’re not a—

HARPER
: I see more than I want to see. You can’t do that. I could be a witch. Why not? I married a fairy. Anything’s possible, any awful thing.

JOE
: Leave, Harper.

HARPER
: I knew you’d be with someone. You think of yourself as so lonely all the time, but you’ve never been alone.

JOE
: Oh that isn’t . . . You don’t know. I have felt very alone.

HARPER
: Till now.

(Harper puts her hand under Louis’s head, and pushes up; Louis startles awake.)

LOUIS
: Who are you . . .?

JOE
(To Louis)
: I—It’s nothing, just . . .

     
(To Harper)
Go.

(She vanishes.)

JOE
(To Louis)
: Morning.

     
Sleep well?

LOUIS
: No.

     
Did you?

JOE
: Soundly.

LOUIS
: How do you manage that? These fucking dreams, every . . .

     
Don’t you have—

JOE
: I don’t dream.

LOUIS
: Everybody dreams.

JOE
: I don’t.

LOUIS
:
Ever?

JOE
: Not that I can remember.

     
Not since I started, um, being here, with you.

LOUIS
(A beat, then)
: You’re a conundrum.

JOE
: Solve me.

     
(Embarrassed)
Sorry, that was really—

LOUIS
: But you can’t—

JOE
: Weird, that was really—

LOUIS
: You can’t
solve
conundrums, they’re . . . bafflements, you can only, um . . .

JOE
: Conjecture.

(Louis nods.)

JOE
: So ask me something.

LOUIS
: Like . . .?

JOE
: Something you’ve never asked me before.

     
It should be easy, you haven’t asked much.

(Louis looks around the room, as if not recognizing any of it, then he stares hard at Joe. A beat, then:)

LOUIS
: Who
are
you?

Scene 2

Same day. Roy in his hospital room; near his bed, there’s a mini-fridge with a locked door. He looks worse than before, gaunt, gray. The pain in his gut is now constant and it’s getting worse. He’s on the phone, a more elaborate model than the one in the previous scene; this phone has buttons
.

ROY
: No records no records what are you deaf I said I have no records for their shitty little committee, it’s not how I work I—

(He has a severe abdominal spasm. He holds the phone away, grimaces terribly, curls up into a ball and then uncurls, making no sound, determined that the party on the line won’t hear how much pain he’s in
.

     
Ethel Rosenberg appears in her hat and coat. Roy sees her enter. He watches her walk to a chair and sit. He resumes his phone call, never taking his eyes off Ethel, who stares at him, silent, unreadable.)

ROY
: Those notes were lost. LOST. In a fire, water damage, I can’t do this any—

(Belize enters with a pill tray.)

ROY
(To Belize)
: I threw up fifteen times today! I
COUNTED
.

     
(To Ethel)
What are
you
looking at?

     
(To Belize)
Fifteen times.
(He goes back to the phone)
Yeah?

BELIZE
: Hang up the phone, I have to watch you take these—

ROY
: The LIMO thing? Oh for the love of Christ I was acquitted twice for that, they’re trying to kill me dead with this
harassment
, I have done things in my life but I never killed anyone.

     
(To Ethel)
Present company excepted. And you
deserved
it.

     
(To Belize)
Get the fuck outta here.

     
(Back to the phone)
Stall. It can’t start tomorrow if we don’t show, so don’t show, I’ll pay the old harridan back. I have to have a—

BELIZE
: Put down the phone.

ROY
: Suck my dick, Mother Teresa, this is life and death.

BELIZE
: Put down the—

(Roy grabs the pill cup off the tray and throws the pills on the floor. Belize reaches for the phone. Roy slams down the receiver and snatches the phone away, protecting it, cradling it.)

ROY
: You touch this phone and I’ll bite. And I got rabies.

     
And from now on, I supply my own pills. I already told ’em to push their jujubes to the losers down the hall.

BELIZE
: Your own pills.

ROY
: No double blind. A little bird warned me. The vultures are—

     
(Another severe spasm. This time he makes noise)

     
Jesus God these cramps, now I know why women go beserk once a—AH FUCK!

(He has another spasm. Ethel laughs.)

ROY
: Oh good I made her laugh.

     
(The pain is slightly less. He’s a little calmer)

     
I don’t trust this hospital. For all I know Lillian fucking
Hellman
is down in the basement switching the pills around. No, wait, she’s dead, isn’t she? Oh boy, memory, it’s—Hey, Ethel, didn’t Lillian die, did you see her up there, ugly, ugly broad, nose like a . . . like even a Jew should worry mit a punim like that. You seen somebody fitting that description up there in Red Heaven? Hah?

     
(To Belize)
She won’t talk to me. She thinks she’s some sort of a deathwatch or something.

BELIZE
: Who are you talking to?

(Roy looks at Ethel, realizing/remembering that Belize can’t see her.)

ROY
: I’m self-medicating.

BELIZE
: With what?

ROY
(Trying to remember)
: Acid something.

BELIZE
: Azidothymedine?

ROY
: Gesundheit.

(Roy retrieves a key on a ring from under his pillow and tosses it to Belize.)

BELIZE
: AZT? You got . . .?

(Belize unlocks the ice box; it’s full of bottles of pills.)

ROY
: One-hundred-proof elixir vitae.

     
Give me the key.

BELIZE
: You scored.

ROY
: Impressively.

BELIZE
: Lifetime supply.

     
There are maybe thirty people in the whole country who are getting this drug.

ROY
: Now there are thirty-one.

BELIZE
: There are a hundred thousand people who need it.

     
Look at you. The dragon atop the golden horde. It’s not fair, is it?

ROY
: No, but as Jimmy Carter said, neither is life. And then we shipped him back to his peanut plantation. Put your brown eyes back in your goddamn head, baby, it’s the history of the world, I didn’t write it, though I flatter myself I am a footnote. And you are a nurse, so minister and skedaddle.

BELIZE
: If you live fifty more years you won’t swallow all these pills.

     
(Pause)

     
I want some.

ROY
: That’s illegal.

BELIZE
: Ten bottles.

ROY
: I’m gonna report you.

BELIZE
: There’s a nursing shortage. I’m in a union. I’m real scared.

     
I have friends who need them. Bad.

ROY
: Loyalty I admire. But no.

BELIZE
(Amazed, off-guard): Why?

(Pause.)

ROY
: Because you repulse me.
“WHY?”
You’ll be begging for it next.
“WHY?
” Because I hate your guts, and your friends’ guts, that’s
why
. “Gimme!” So goddamned entitled. Such a shock when the bill comes due.