What should I tell Sammy Ronstein if I can’t finish? What about Nancilla Aronie? I have a setup for success, serious success, that could catapult me into the realm of playwrights who matter, but I’m never going to matter because I still can’t figure out my ending. I know if I don’t finish this play, my career will be over. I guess that’s fine. I was never going to be a serious playwright anyway. Who was I kidding? Just myself.
Self-delusion is the sweetest nectar.
Maybe I should have been a poet. Most writers are driven by deadlines. But apparently not me because yesterday was wasted researching sandwiches.
I miss the straightforward, no-nonsense sandwiches, the ones I ate when I was a kid. Peanut butter and jelly, tuna fish, bologna, grilled cheese—all on white bread. Did these utilitarian sandwiches reflect a simpler time? Absolutely not. The ’70s were soaked in strife. Vietnam, Nixon, women’s lib, civil rights. The sandwiches of the ’70s had an ungarnished raw authenticity. Since then, sandwiches have evolved into fussy, pretentious, vainglorious affairs. A sandwich is no longer just a sandwich, it’s an art project.
The 4th Earl of Sandwich was a big man with big appetites. Did I really just write that? How dreadfully cliché. Would you ever describe someone as a small man with small appetites? How would I describe Marsden? Maybe as a lanky lad with still undiscovered appetites. But that’s not our portly Earl of Sandwich. He ate, drank, womanized, and gambled profligately. He was a big man with big appetites.
As the story goes, the 4th Earl of Sandwich refused to break for food during a marathon game of cards and ordered his minions to bring him a meal of salted beef stuffed between two slabs of bread, paving the way for the fast-food revolution and eating lunch at your computer. I was saddened to learn that this perfectly packaged meal was named for a rakish asshole with a gambling addiction. Not only did he get the world’s most convenient lunch food named after him, he managed to get a set of islands. And if that’s not enough to give someone indigestion, Lord Sandwich had a talented and beautiful mistress, an opera singer, who was killed by another one of her lovers after leaving the opera one evening.
The year after her murder, a book came out about the entire affair with the brilliant title: Love and Madness: A Story too True: in a Series of Letters between Parties Whose Names Would Perhaps be Mentioned Were They Less Known or Lamented. I wish books still had titles like this. I love the title so much I made myself memorize it. I downloaded the book and couldn’t believe how full of passionate purple missives it was. When will tomorrow come? What torturing dreams must I bear tonight? Every time a soft s is written, it is printed as an f, so the book reads like you’re listening to a small child with a slight lisp who says paffion for passion and confeffion for confession. Shall I have your foul, and shall he have your hand, your eyes, your bofom, your lips, your…
Yesterday, I also found out that for a brief period during World War II, selling sliced bread was illegal, due to a shortage of steel, wheat, and wax paper, which bread was packaged in. The earliest bread slicers were manufactured in the 1860s, but pre-sliced bread, a tenet of a true sandwich, wasn’t widely sold until Wonder Bread came along in the 1930s and turned sliced bread into the greatest invention since sliced bread. Then, during World War II, a decade after prohibition ended, the prohibition of sliced bread began. Public outcry was fierce, savings were minimal; the ban was lifted after three months.
I hadn’t realized that the term Sandwich Generation has been around for 30 years already. I salute the other sandwiches out there, the women feeling the squeeze from two generations. We are in this together. I think I may abandon playwriting and open a sandwich shop called Sandwich Generation Sandwiches, which will only sell peanut butter and jelly, grilled cheese, and tuna fish sandwiches. My sandwich generation intuition tells me it could be big.
(GRACE and LARRY are in Laurie’s living room, which is now filled with large cardboard boxes. Grace gestures at the boxes and the furniture, then she points at Larry.)
GRACE
Is this necessary?
LARRY
I needed to get my things out of the house before Nicolette got rid of everything.
GRACE
So you bring it here? I thought you didn’t have any money. How’d you pay the movers?
LARRY
That’s none of your business, Grace.
GRACE
None of my business. Nothing is ever my business. Laurie is going to be upset when she sees all this. And she’ll probably take it out on me. You’ll get a pass. You always get a pass.
LARRY
I’m looking into getting a storage bin.
(Grace walks around the boxes, sighing and shaking her head.)
GRACE
I’ve been wondering about something lately, Larry. Why did you marry me?
LARRY
What kind of question is that?
GRACE
I’m curious. Why did you marry me?
LARRY
Grace, that was a long time ago. You want me to remember why I did something forty-five years ago?
GRACE
Forty-two years ago. Larry, I’m not asking why you didn’t want to go to Laura and Charlie’s New Year’s Eve party in 1973 and insisted I go alone. Or why you wouldn’t wear a suit to your sister’s wedding. I’m asking you why you married the first of the five women you married? I get it. I understand that it must be hard to keep us straight in your head, along with all your business dealings and man-about-town philanthropy and philandering. But now, after another one of your wives saw through you, you’re retired and alone and have time on your hands to reflect. And I’d like it if you could think back and try to remember why you married me.
GRACE
I told Laurie you never loved me. That I was just a conquest.
LARRY
Why the hell would you tell her that? What the hell is wrong with you, Grace? Are you trying to poison her against me again?
GRACE
Again? I never tried to poison her against you. You were the one who played up the fun dad role and left me with having to discipline her. Of course she loved you more. You did everything in your power to sabotage me.
LARRY
Laurie never needed to be disciplined. She was the best-behaved kid I ever met. If you believe you had to take on the role of disciplinarian, you’re fooling yourself. Your failings with our daughter were your failings alone.
GRACE
It made my blood boil. The more I hated you the more she loved you, and after a while I started to hate her for loving you. And you have no idea how much I hated you for making me hate my daughter. Larry, you have no idea.
LARRY
Grace, I did what I needed to do.
GRACE
Abandon your family?
LARRY
Save myself.
GRACE
You act like I was trying to kill you.
LARRY
Weren’t you?
GRACE
Go fuck yourself, Larry.
LARRY
Come on Grace. Why are you bringing this up?
GRACE
I want to know. Did you ever love me? I mean it, Larry. Did you ever love me?
LARRY
Of course I loved you.
GRACE
I don’t believe you. You want to hurt me.
LARRY
By saying I loved you?
GRACE
You should have told her you were going to do this. Have you seen how Laurie keeps this place? She’s impeccably neat, and you’ve turned it into a junk yard. Larry, you’re still as selfish as you always were. I can’t talk to you anymore. We promised Laurie we wouldn’t fight.
(Grace walks around the room looking for a place to sit and finally positions herself on a somewhat precarious stack of two boxes. The doorbell rings, followed by knocking. Neither of them moves.)
Aren’t you going to get it?
LARRY
I’m not expecting anyone. Are you expecting someone?
GRACE
No, Larry, I’m not. But when somebody is at the front door, convention dictates that the person closest to the door gets up and answers it. Since I have found a seat on this side of the room, and since you are standing not four feet from the door, I would think you might take it upon yourself to see who it is.
(She sighs. Larry walks to the front door without saying anything. He opens the door and NICOLETTE, who looks like a younger version of Grace, bursts in.)
LARRY
Laurie’s not here. She went away for a few days.
(Nicolette pushes past Larry and walks into the house. She scans the room and sees the piles of boxes. Then she notices Grace.)
NICOLETTE
Oh, hello, sorry, I didn’t see you there. I’m Nicolette, Larry’s wife.
GRACE
I’m Grace. Also Larry’s wife. The first one.
(Nicolette walks over to Grace and the two women stare at each other.)
Take whatever you want. And make sure that includes Larry.
NICOLETTE
He’s all yours now. My lawyer will be in touch about the boxes Larry.
(Nicolette leaves and Larry, seemingly unfazed, walks into the kitchen.)
BLACKOUT