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April 18, 2005

It was a weekend of heartbreak and regret.

On Friday night at keno I couldn't win one hand. Time after time I was one chip away from victory, only to lose to another member of the Catholic Mafia. They were good company and there was a lot of rich, probably-bad-for-you food and some good Reisling, but still. Being an egalitarian group, they make sure everybody gets a prize even if they don't win and so I got a prize but. But I didn't win. Which for some reason reminds me of a conversation I had with W. a couple of months ago. Me: "I've always felt kind of lucky, you know?" W.: "Really? Because you're not."

On Saturday night I saw a play called The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia? It was written by Edward Albee, who also wrote Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, so I guessed that marital discord was on the menu and I wasn't disappointed. The Goat is about a man who falls in love with and has an affair with, yes, a goat. An actual love affair with everything a love affair entails, including ... well, sex. He loves the goat and he loves his wife as well, and she is understandably, and hilariously at first (she gets most of the best lines), distraught. But the play turned out to be less about how odd it is for a man to have fallen in love with a barnyard animal and more about how we love each other and what love means, what it does to us, how it can lift us up while it destroys the people around us, and destroy us as well.

On Sunday I met D. and D. and had lunch and a margarita and a movie. Talk at lunch inevitably turned to men and the lack thereof and, or at least the lack of any "good men--whatever those are--and D. (or was it D.?) said
"Well, it doesn't matter if I'm not dating because I haven't got anything to offer anybody anyway."
... What do you mean, nothing to offer? Nothing?
"Nothing."
Nothing at all? You have nothing to offer anybody, anywhere.
"That's right."
Well, shit, that's frightening.

After this revelation we went to see The Upside of Anger, which is a movie about a woman whose husband runs off with his secretary, leaving her and their four daughters to try to cope. The woman (played by Joan Allen), immediately turns to vodka and wearing nightgowns all day long and letting things (i.e., the house) generally go to hell. I thought, now that's how I should have done it, and how does she still look so great while she's drinking all that Gray Goose day after day? Anyway, she gets a boyfriend despite being drunk and angry, even though he's drunk and angry, too, and they help each other.

And at the end of the movie one of the daughters, in a voice-over, talks about how empowering anger is because once you aren't angry any more you are ... I don't know, better. Along the lines of "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" and all.

On the way home I thought about poor Stevie, Martin's wife, whose rival was a goat, and Stevie's anger, and what she did with it. After she washed the blood from her hands, her hair, her clothes, what happened to her anger and her love?

And then I was pulling into the driveway and there was the husband, installing speakers in his car. After you wash the blood from your hands and put the vodka away, what happens to your anger? What happens to your love? "Stay out here and talk to me," he said. And I did.

Posted by JudyLa at 09:10 PM | Comments (0)