Women of Manhattan
By John Patrick ShanleySetting - Manhattan, Rhonda's apartment.
Three women meet for a dinner celebrating their friendship. Rhonda Louise, the hostess, is "twenty-eight, hails from the Deep South, speaks and moves in a very deliberate way, and is slender and slow to react. Rhonda Louise has just kicked out her boyfriend, Jerry. Jerry's red sneakers are sitting in the middle of the floor, and one of the guests asks Rhonda Louise why she doesn't get rid of them.
RHONDA:
I know what you think this is, but it's not. I don't keep the sneakers because I still love him...
I guess my big mistake was I revealed myself to him. That's where I really went wrong. You know, that thing that most people can't do? That thing that's supposed to be like the hardest thing to get to with another person? It took me time, but I struggled and strove and succeeded at last in revealing my innermost, my most personal soul to him.
He just sat there with a coke in his hand like he was watching television, waiting for the next thing. Like that was a nice stop on the way to WHAT I CAN'T IMAGINE! The whole thing with him was such a let-down. But why am I surprised? You know? I mean, here I was congratulating myself on being able to show myself, show my naked self to a man. But what's the achievement? I chose to show myself to a wall. Right? That's why I was able to do it. He was a wall and I was really alone, showing myself to nobody at all. How much courage does that take? Even when I got it together to throw him out, and I made this speech at him and got all pink in the face and noble as shit. He just said alright and left. What did I delude myself into thinking was going on between us if that's how he could take it ending? "Alright. Just lemme get my tools together, Rhonda Louise, and I'll get on to the next thing."
You know how in that one school a thought you're the only thing real in the world, and everything else is just a dream? All these people and things, the stars in the sky, are just sparks and smoke from your own lonely fire ina big, big night. I always thought that was a lotta intellectual nonsense until I met Jerry. I mean, to tell you the naked truth, I'm not even sure there was a Jerry. It seems impossible to me that there was. Sometimes I think I just got overheated, worked myself into a passion and fell in love with that wall right there. It must've been! It must've been that wall and me, crazy, loving it cause I needed to love. And not a human man. I couldn't have poured everything out to a really truly human man, and him just stand there, and take it, and give nothing back. It's not possible.
But when I get too far gone in that direction of thinking - and alone here some nights I do - at those times it does me good to look and see these sneakers there sitting on the floor. His sneakers. He was here. It happened.
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