Dinner With Friends
By Donald MarguliesGabe and Karen are a couple in their forties. They are best friends with another couple, Tom and Beth. Tom has recently left Beth after having an affair. Gabe and Tom meet for a drink, and a confrontation ensues.
GABE
Wait a minute. You were faking it?! You mean to tell me that all those years - all those years, Tom! - the four of us together, raising our kids together, the dinners, the vacations, the hours of videotape, you were just being a good sport? I don't get it. I was there, as well as you. This misery you describe, the agony. Gee, I thought we were all just living our lives, you know? Sharing our humdrum little existences. I thought you were there, wholeheartedly there. And now you're saying you had an eye on the clock and a foot out the door?! You say you were wasting your life, that's what you've said.
We were there. Karen and Danny and Isaac and I, we were all there, we were all a big part of that terrible life you had to get the hell away from. Isaac's totally freaked-out by this, by the way. So when you repudiate your entire adult life... And I can understand how you might find it necessary to do that; it must be strangely exhilarating blowing everything to bits.
I mean it. You build something that's precarious in even the best of circumstances and you succeed, or at least you make it look like you've succeeded, your friends think you have, you had us fooled, and then, one day, you blow it all up! It's like, I watch Danny and Isaac sometimes, dump all their toys on the floor, Legos and blocks and train tracks, and build these elaborate cities together. They'll spend hours at it, they'll plan and collaborate and squabble and negotiate, but they'll do it. And then what do they do? They wreck it! No pause to revel in what they accomplished, no sigh of satisfaction, they just launch into a full-throttle attack, bombs bursting, and tear the whole thing apart.
Sure, we all complain. That's what married friends do: we joke about sex and bellyache about our wives and kids, but that doesn't mean we're about to leave them. Marriages all go through a kind of baseline wretchedness from time to time, but we do what we can to ride those patches out. You don't get it: I cling to Karen; I cling to her. Imagining a life without her doesn't excite me, it just makes me anxious.
It all goes by so fast, Tom, I know. The hair goes, and the waist. And the stamina; the capacity for staying up late, to read or watch a movie, never mind sex. We spend our youth unconscious, feeling immortal, then we marry and have kids and awaken with a shock to mortality, theirs, ours, that's all we see. We worry about them, their safety, own own, air bags, plane crashes, pederasts, and spend our middle years wanting back the dreamy, carefree part, the part we fucked and pissed away; now we want that back, 'cause now we know how fleeting it all is, now we know, and it just doesn't seem fair that so much is gone when there's really so little left. So, some of us, try to regain unconsciousness. Some of us blow up our homes... and others of us... take up piano. I'm taking up piano.
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