Patter for the Floating Lady
By Steve MartinAngie has ended a long, romantic relationship with The Magician. He has hypnotized her, and asked her, "Was there anything you loved about me?"
ANGIE:
Oh, yes. I loved you. So many things. The safety. The words exchanged. Letters. I would cough and the phone would ring and it would be you asking me if I was all right. You could imitate me and make me laugh. You would buy me a little thing. When I made spaghetti for you, you were so grateful. We were at a restaurant, and a woman came up to you, flirting, and right there in front of her, you laced your fingers between mine, showing her who you loved. But the most powerful was the tennis shoe. My God, I cried. After our week in the tropics, where we collapsed, ended - a month later, not having spoken, you sent me a tennis shoe. I looked at it for days, not knowing why you sent it. Then one morning, barefoot, not knowing why, I slipped my foot into it. Sand. Grains of sand still in it from seven thousand miles away; each one the size of a memory. I will love you forever for that second. I cried. I cried for us. But when we fell apart, you didn't understand that I would be back. That if you let me have my life, I would be with you forever. Now, I see other people.
Angie describes the reasons she had to leave.
ANGIE:
Dream. There is a dream inside me and a corona surrounding me. The dream is of a bright star in eclipse, and its corona shimmers magnetically. You saw it. I loved you for seeing it. It drew you to me, into the dream. But I needed time, and you didn't have time. Everything you said and did, every touch at night in bed, every act of kindness, every generosity, every loving comment had this sentence attached: Maybe now she'll love me. And it made you weak. And if I'm not going to love someone strong, why love at all?
You should have seen that to let you in hurt me, because you wanted the part of me you cannot have; you wanted the part that no one should have of another person. And I will have my dreams remain inside me, for me, and if you had let them be, they would have been for you, too. So now I wait for a man who will stand before me at arms length, and I will hand him unimaginable joy, and he will not move forward, or move back. Then I will hand him unimaginable pain. And he will stand, moving neither forward nor moving back. Then and only then, I will slit myself from here to here (she indicates a vertical line from her neck to her abdomen), open my skin, and close him into me. I'm gone.
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