"Seasons Clear, and Awe" - Chapter 13 [fin]
by Matthew Gasda
Today we conclude our serialization of Matthew Gasda’s Seasons Clear, and Awe. It’s been quite a ride having all of you along as we try to bring back the serial novel as a force in American letters. We hope you’ll stick around for the next cycle, and please share what we’re doing here at PILCROW.
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“Seasons Clear, and Awe” chronicles three decades in the life of the Gazda family, whose children inherit not wealth but something more dangerous: their parents’ unlived ambitions and their mother’s gift for psychological dissection. As Stephen and Elizabeth grow from precocious children into neurotic artists in their thirties, Matthew Gasda reveals how post-industrial, late 20th century America created a generation too intelligent for ordinary happiness, too self-aware for decisive action: suspended between the working-class pragmatism of their fathers and the creative and spiritual aspirations of their mothers, capable of everything except building lives.
Matthew Gasda is the founder of the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research and the author of many books, including the recent novel The Sleepers and Writer’s Diary.
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2019
Elizabeth arrived at Charles de Gaulle with gin and Xanax in her blood system. The recording session had gone terribly. She had fought with Louis for three days.
After spending the first week that they were supposed to be recording, taking her to parties and going to the countryside and drinking in bars, not really thinking about music, and then suddenly pushing her to sing until her voice started to crack. It was ridiculous.
—You’re a genius, Louis had said in New York. We need to make an album together.
And she’d been so excited, she’d really thought that this was it.
The unconscious was life and life was turning against her, dominating her, and had forced her to buy a bottle of gin before she left. She was already starting to forget the songs she wrote. She didn’t really write anything down.
She spent six weeks in her apartment in Bedstuy, writing them, preparing the album, gave up her apartment, went to Europe, worked on the farm in Switzerland, went to Genoa, went to Paris, started recording the songs and just broke down. The manic energy started to falter; Louis started to push her; she broke down; and the natural luminosity, what she felt when she sang, when her fingers plucked at the guitar, almost as if it were a harp, started to fade.
The reality around her started to explode. The lights in Charles de Gaulle were so bright, she almost felt like she was dead and had gone to the moon, had become a moon person or like she was in a space station.
Only a few generations back in this experience, there would have been unimaginable fluorescent light, glass and steel, plastic, sealed off from nature, giant steel birds taxiing around the glass, taking off into the sky, to her great-grandmother from Verona, who she’d been learning about lately.
This would have been a terrible nightmare, and it was a terrible nightmare.
Adele opened her iPhone with a four digit code, the year of her birth (1955), and called her son, who had just turned 30 at precisely 12:12 that afternoon, and though it was around one (Stephen hadn’t picked up and might have been asleep at 12:12), she still felt how special this moment was; it had been thirty years since this newborn had been carved out of her belly by the surgeons, balled up and blue. Her husband was beside her; she put the phone on speaker:
—Hi son.
—Hi mom.
—I’m here with your father; I’m just calling to wish you happy birthday.
—Aw, that’s very sweet, I’m touched.
—I’m sure you’re busy but we wanted to hear your voice.
—It’s nice to hear yours too.
—Hi son, happy birthday, Michael piped in, in a voice that had grown lower, and lost brightness, over the years.
—What are you up to Stephen with your big day? Adele asked.
—Well I had a party last night at my apartment; it was really fun; I mean we probably had about 30 or 40 people.
—Oh yeah that’s great.
—Who was there? Michael asked.
Adele glared; Michael always wanted the factual details about his children’ s lives, in a rote way, even if the names wouldn’t mean anything to him.
—I mean not a ton of people you know; Weintraub, Gates, some people from my theater company.
—Madison was there?
—Yeah of course.
—I never know with you two.
—I mean.
—I don’t get this whole open relationship thing.
—What is there not to get?
—I just don’t know how you do it.
—Can we not talk about this Michael groaned.
—Yeah it’s my birthday!
—I’m not judging you my sweet love. I’m just asking.
—Okay but I’m with Dad; let’s change the subject.
—Okay, well, you don’t even have to stay on the call with us for too much longer if you don’t want to; we just wanted to say happy birthday.
—How’s Elizabeth?
—She called from the airport, seems like she’s having a tough time; your dad is going to pick her up in an hour.
—Sorry to hear that.
—She says she wants to stop drinking.
—I think drinking is a good thing, Stephen said.
—Well not everyone is able to set limits with themselves the way you can, Adele said.
—Fair.
—I’m still reeling from the Eagles loss, Stephen, referring to the Divisional round playoff loss to the Saints (when folk hero Nick Foles’ pass to Alshon Jeffrey bounced off the receiver’s hands into the hands of Saints cornerback Marshawn Lattimore) announced (both changing the subject and reaching out through the phone to his father).
—Pretty terrible Michael said stoically.
—Do you think Foles is going to be back?
—I’d like it if he were, Michael said, with the stoicism of a lifelong Eagles fan, —but Wentz has that contract, so.
—Fuck Wentz, Stephen said. —I can’t think of a single Eagles fan who doesn’t want Foles starting at this point.
—I guess we’ll see.
—Okay Stephen, we’re going to go for a walk.
—It must be strange without Calvin around, Stephen said, referring to the dog, who had died over the summer, at age 13.
—It’s very strange, but your father and I are trying to take walks both in his honor and to keep ourselves in shape. We really enjoy them. Don’t we Mike?
Michael grunted in assent from across the dining room table.
Elizabeth’s flight from Paris arrived at six, and by 6:57, Michael was able to locate his daughter at level two of the Terminal B arrivals. She carried a book bag, a larger duffel, and a guitar. She had her hands as she got in the car. “Eczema,” she said. —I’m fucking exhausted.
—Long flight, Michael said, afraid to pry.
—Well, I haven’t slept for two and a half days, she said, as if under a spell of dark enchantment.
—That’s a long time,” Michael said.
—Well, I fought with Louis about the recordings, and he kept telling me to keep singing, and I said my voice was tired. I got drunker and drunker and ended up in the airport with gin and Xanax in my system, wanting to never have a drop of alcohol again.”
—That might be a good thing, Michael agreed, cautiously.
—I want to get a sobriety drink tomorrow. Can you take me somewhere like a vintage?
—Yeah, that’s fine, Michael said. —Of course.
It was one in the morning. There was a bottle of organic red wine open on the floor. Stephen felt a deep bodily contentment. It was January 22nd, his birthday, and he planned to take the Transbridge bus from Port Authority to Bethlehem the next day, or the day after that, so he could be back in time for his birthday dinner at his Aunt Rosemary’s. His apartment was big. The bedroom was big, and there was a second, smaller bedroom that he used as an office, which had a cot in it that his sister had left in New York ostensibly to travel or crash at when she passed through. The office had a standing desk made of a marble tabletop that his father had made using steel stilts, which he was quite proud of, which had Stephen’s books and his typewriter. Between the cot and the long standing desk stood an IKEA bookshelf.
In the living room: a small table in the corner where Stephen ate dinner. More bookshelves. A metal entertainment center with the record player and records. A shitty couch with blue painter’s tape on the walls where there were pages of books and notebooks. A few prints: an Egon Schiele, a Picasso, a Giotto that Stephen had ordered.
Stephen’s lover (and very much not his girlfriend) Albina, two-thirds his age, 20 to his 30, stretched out on the blue floral patterned rug on the floor of his living room, all 5’ 10’’ of her in her underwear and his flannel. They were listening to a Brahms quintet in B minor, Op. 115, for clarinet and strings (on the record player that was the property of Madison, Stephen’s girlfriend of three-and-a-half years). Albina struggled to rationalize the arrangement (even though she had her own girlfriend at NYU, and in theory looked at the polyamorous and, in her case, queer lifestyle as rational, if not entirely functional or preferable). Monogamy, the social category of ‘the monogamous’ as Stephen explained, was a mystery to him. He didn’t understand why people did it, how they could do it, but the point was when the soul, the body was always reconstructing and regrouping around other attractions, other sources of energy, more or less unconsciously and sometimes consciously.
Desire moved in measure like a dancer and that he had to obey where it went.
—The day I broke my violin was the worst day of my life, Albina said when the record ended (they hadn’t spoken for the last movement).
—How’d you do that?
—Oh I mean I did it on purpose because I was struggling with a piece and then my mother freaked the fuck out.
—The worst thing you can do as the child of a Soviet is fail at music, huh.
—There are worse things.
—But did you fail or just feel like a failure?
—There is no difference, Albina said in her blunt, rational voice that Stepehen knew masked a more suspicious, irrational, and emotional self (but maybe this was also just being Russian or ‘Soviet’).
—My last piano lesson was the last week of high school; I basically kept taking lessons because I knew my teacher would be hurt if I stopped, but I really stopped practicing whatsoever the last two years; I mean I was playing in bands so it sort of helped to keep the scheduled time, but.
—I would literally kill to hear your high school band.
—Yeah you literally never will.
—I bet I could internet stalk you.
—It’s not on the Internet; some stuff I recorded with my sister in our early 20’s is online, but even that I think you’d have trouble finding.
—What kind of music did you and your sister make?
—Like dream pop stuff; I dunno.
—Dream pop. Highly dubious.
—What do you want to listen to next?
—I am not against good old Bach, Albina said, sitting up to receive a kiss from Stephen.
—We can take a chunk out of the Mass in B Minor.
—My friends think I’m crazy for trekking out to Flatbush every weekend.
—It’s not so bad on the B express.
—There’s no express on weekends.
—Right.
—I wonder if I’m crazy.
—We have nice times together.
—We do.
They let the music settle over them; Stephen poured more wine out into both of their cups.
—Your friends are only scolding you because they’re trying to mask their boredom.
—Sure. But you hide me from your friends.
—Not entirely.
—No but you introduce me as your ‘friend.’
—Well.
—Yeah you’re not gonna say the hot twenty year old you’re fucking.
—No I’m not gonna say that.
—It’s fine; I don’t need acceptance on the Millennial dinner party circuit.
—It sounds like you do Bina.
—I just... Albina clutched the glass which contained her wine, and Stephen watched her frantic, unknowable, inner-process manifest itself in front of him; it reminded him of his mother; it reminded him of his sister. —I want um... I don’t know... I don’t know...
—Use your words.
—Shut up Stephen... insufferable...
—Sorry.
Having returned home from her son’s play, a family drama called Model Citizens, in New York, which was staged in a small townhouse in Chelsea, Adele, after Michael (who hated driving into the city) went to bed, went rummaging through the metal filing cabinet in the basement where she kept the family’s most important documents (a file for Stephen, Elizabeth, Michael, herself). It took her about ten minutes to find a small, yellowing newspaper clipping:
A Bethlehem woman, Adele A. Rossi, will make her professional stage debut at the J.I. Rodale Theatre, Allentown, May 11.
She will appear as Millie, one of four sisters in “Scenes and Revelations,” a new work by playwright Elan Garonzik, a native of Lancaster.
Prior to the Rodale appearance, Ms. Rossi had a brief part in a Pennsylvania Playhouse production, “Play It Again, Sam.” Before that, her theater experience had been in high school plays.
She attended Freedom High School before entering Moravian College where she was awarded a bachelor of arts degree.
Ms. Rossi lives with her parents, Arturo and Maria Rossi, who reside at 814 W. Union Blvd.
“Scenes and Revelations” will run through May 21. Performance and ticket information is available at the theater box office, 837 Linden St., Allentown, or by telephone at 433-3394.
The next morning, having not slept, she called her son, who, to her surprise, picked up at 10:35 a.m. (he was a late riser and usually started tutoring work late afternoon).
—My son!
—Hi mom.
—I couldn’t sleep last night after I got home from your play.
—I’m sorry to hear that.
—It’s very good; and you know I don’t always think so.
—Well gee thanks.
—I mean that sincerely, it was very moving; even the mother character.
—Okay I believe you.
—I think you’ve really matured as a writer, Stephen.
—Is there a non-back-handed...?
—I’m your mother after all.
—I know.
—So you have to let me...
—You should try to go back to bed or something or take a nap this afternoon I mean; if you haven’t slept.
—Oh I can’t do that; you know that.
—Mom... I worry...
—You’re turning into your mother: a worrywort.
—Can’t be helped I guess.
—How’s New York? How’s your apartment?
—It’s fine.
—How’s Madison?
—It’s fine; we’re seeing other people now; but we’re still seeing each other, so.
—How does that work? Do you get jealous?
—I dunno Mom; no; not really; I’m not a jealous person.
—Does she?
—Probably a little.
—I guess I’m not hip to these things.
—How’s home? How’s Dad?
—Pretty grumpy. I think he misses Calvin.
—You guys should get another dog.
—We’re old.
—You’re not that old Mom.
—It’s a lot to take care of a pet.
—You always say that; you said that after Hobbes died.
—I think your father was very attached to Calvin; I don’t think he’s ready for another dog.
—Well, eventually.
After getting off the phone with Stephen, Adele made coffee in the Mr. Coffee in the kitchen, which they’d recently done over, so now it marked the blue marble countertops. She added a little raw milk, the kind the kids insisted they buy and drink, claiming it was better for you, and which she had grown to like. With her coffee, she walked through the dining room and the living room, onto the porch, and then down into the stone patio that Michael had built by hand in the summer of 2010. She sat down on the green Adirondack chairs that looked out onto the fenced backyard, which had been fenced after they got Hobbes.
And then everything was so quiet without children or without a dog. The neighborhood had been largely emptied of children over the years. In the ‘90s, the summer evenings were filled with the sounds of playing children, and the cries of their voices would continue long after dark as they darted between houses, playing hide-and-seek and manhunt, racing their bikes up and down the alley, the sounds of teenagers listening to music in their cars.
Now it was just old folks, boomers, living in the empty coral reefs. A human being could only be oriented, she thought, toward past, present, or future at one time. When she was a teenager, and even into her 20s, she had looked toward the future. When she was raising kids, she had looked toward the present. And now that her kids were in their 30s, or approaching their 30s, she had started to look toward the past.
Her parents were dead. Michael’s parents were dead. Michael had survived cancer. Neighbors had started to die, the folks a little older than them. Gary next door had died suddenly of a brain aneurysm. Art Wallander had pancreatic cancer and didn’t seem to have long to live. Irene was going blind on Henderson Street. It wasn’t easy aging.
In addition to insomnia, Adele had osteoporosis. She was still thin, but she’d gotten a little stout around the waist, not like some of her friends, like Mariana or Susan, but she’d never been less physically active. She wanted to retire. She didn’t enjoy driving into Allentown for work at the law office, especially since the merger with the New Jersey firm.
She still missed her father almost 20 years later. Actually, the more time passed, the more the awareness of the loss and its ever-present possibility increased. In fact, an awareness of time and its forward directionality was its own function. There was nothing really now to deflect or divert that awareness of the flying arrow.
And she almost welcomed one of her children having a crisis, because it would give her a task to displace her melancholy and terror.
It was January, and a very cold day outside. Stephen was hanging out with his sister, who was staying in his guestroom/office, a small room with a standing desk that his father had built, and a sofabed (taken from Elizabeth’s old apartment).
His sister had just returned from Europe, where she had been itinerant: working on a farm in the Swiss alps, renting a flat in Genoa, and finally, Paris, where she was supposed to record an album, but had, instead, fought with the producer, Louis, a friend from New York, the details of which she had just recounted to her brother. Now she was floating between Bethlehem and her parents and Brooklyn and her brother’s. She had no plan as far as Stephen could tell.
—God, it’s warm in here; I need to open a window.
They were in Stephen’s living room: a recliner-couch, a record player, small dining table in the corner, pages of books, movie stills, taped with blue tape over all the walls.
—Yeah, Elizabeth said, moving to the window.
—Actually, it is hot in here, but I kind of like it.
—I think you’re right.
—I already have coffee anyway, Stephen said.
—Dad seems... Elizabeth started.
—Hmm?
—Dad seems bad.
—Yeah?
—He’s on antivirals. He’s on SSRIs. He’s on statins. He’s on everything. He’s on too many drugs.
—Yeah.
—I know. Mom was saying she’s been so dizzy and everything. I was like, well, what drugs are you on?
—She’s like, oh, well, my doctor increased the dose of my statin.
—Mom’s on statins?
—Something. Whatever. Her blood pressure medication, Elizabeth said.
Stephen went to the kitchenette and started opening cabinets, looking for something...
—Yeah, and I was like, maybe you should think about that instead of just saying, I’m getting old. It’s like, no, you’re on drugs. Those can cause side effects like dizziness.
—Yeah, Mom criticized Dad, but then she also...
—Yeah.
—You want some royal jelly? Stephen asked, holding a yellow jar.
—What?
—Royal jelly.
—Yeah. Sure. Just a spoonful.
Stephen grabbed another bottle from the cabinet.
—You want some sheep thymus?
—What?
—Sheep thymus?
—No.
—You want zinc?
—I’ll take some niacin.
—Okay, I’ll give you a zinc and a picolinate and a niacin.
—Yeah. I did a niacin flush last night, Elizabeth said. It was nice by the fire. Oh, and your closet’s so well-organized now.
—How are you and Gideon? Stephen asked.
—So, I think I’m going to end it, Elizabeth said.
—When?
—I don’t know. I just... There’s just no emotional involvement. After three months, it’s like, what are we doing? This is not going anywhere.
—Does he know that? Sense it?
—I don’t know. The last 48 hours, it seemed like he’s been a little distant, and I thought, I don’t know. I think the clock’s run out on it. Which is okay.
—Where are you going to go?
—I mean, my original plan was to spend another three months somewhere in Europe and travel more. That’s what I was going to be doing in February, March, April. I already miss it. I guess. But then I was seeing Gideon, and I just kind of put it off. But it’s a little tricky because he offered to buy me a hurdy-gurdy for $1,100, and called his friend in Poland about the one I wanted, and the guy called the luthier in Poland and he’s going to pick it up for me in Krakow, and bring it here with him, is the plan. I mean, I’ve offered so many times to just pay for it myself, you know? But he says no, no, I’ll get it for you. It’s a present. I want to do it.
—Do you ever see Anthony? Stephen asked.
—I saw him on Christmas Eve at his parents’ house.
—How was that?
—He’s still living at home. Still in his childhood bedroom, Elizabeth said. —At 30. But if it wasn’t for Gideon that would be me too.
—Jesus.
—Yeah, with all his film equipment. And he goes to Jungian analysis twice a week.
—Of course he does.
—He should have been a priest, Stephen said.
—That’s the right place to put your unwillingness to claim your sexuality. Take all of that libido and put it into something else.
—I mean, who knows? Maybe Dan Boettner will eventually end up in a monastic community or something. Upstate New York, I think there’s a bunch of them. I wouldn’t be surprised.
—But I’ve been saying that for years, like, I wouldn’t be surprised if he finally... Yeah. He’s in Bethlehem, too. He texted me in January when I was in Miami.
—Really? He just texted you out of the blue? Didn’t he come to the Into the Sea workshop in the spring?
—Yes, he was basically just rude. I was polite, but I tried to engage and it was pointless.
Stephen, still perusing the cabinets, took a mug down, and picking up a glass, half-full French press from the counter, poured his sister a cup of coffee.
He returned to the living room bearing the cup, which she, sitting on the couch which faced the table and record player, took into her hands.
Stephen, kneeling in front of the record player, selected Mahler’s 4th Symphony.
—I think a lot of these men, from our childhood, boys who’ve become men, with maybe the exception of Ben to some degree, although he didn’t make it either, have just retained their liberal worldview from 2009, Stephen said.
—How do they... What do they think?
—They all kind of phased me out once I didn’t do the super progressive ideology stuff and I haven’t heard from any of them since. With the exception of Drew, about sports, like, once in a while when he’s lonely.
—I got the same ‘I’m non-binary now’ text from him, Elizabeth said.
—Yeah, he texted me like, I’m just letting you know I’m non-binary now and then something about how he was terrified that Trump is gonna win a second term.
—I said something like, I have no idea who’s going to win and since then he’s texted me about the Eagles and Sixers a few times which is fine.
—I signaled that I had no interest. I’m sure he was testing to see what I would say.
—For all I know, Nick is non-binary too.
—I don’t actually think Nick was. He was always too innocent in a way to actually care that much about...
—No, but for Anthony, it’s just admitting that there was ever a worm in the apple of the ‘90s and 2000s, Stephen said.
—Yeah. I think there’s this strange phenomenon in our generation. Like, for a man so loyal to his family, his grandparents, his traditions, just ever questioning that loyalty actually requires some kind of aggressiveness, some kind of pride.
—Like, you know, part of being an Italian child is having testosterone. You can’t just passively worship the past, Elizabeth said. You have to have some muscular view of how to create a world in which you participate, Stephen agreed. It’s not enough to be a sensitive, liberal subject of the empire and expect your life to work out. First of all, the empire thinks you’re bad, and you’ve been sacrificed to it.
—Yeah. There’s this strange cohort, and I’m included within that cohort, although I think I’m always actively looking for a way out, at least. But this cohort of people, we’ve just ended up materially totally dependent on our parents, Stephen said. We never gained material independence and thus are unable to lead mature lives anywhere. Not in the hometown, not in the big city, not anywhere. And I think that’s, in a way... I’m interested in writing these quasi-political essays right now about this. I’m trying to answer that question for myself: what birthed this cohort of people? Why? It wasn’t a foregone conclusion that people like Nick or myself... there’s nothing so terribly wrong with us that we can’t make it in life. Or some of our cousins, you know? Someone who is alive, living her life, but where’s the capacity to build external structure for oneself? What happened?
—Well, that’s what I mean. Nick and Boettner, they were just men who needed to go to church, either become a priest or get married. They don’t have the capacity... I mean, maybe you fought your own capacity, but we have the capacity to create our own. Or, like, I especially have created something, but they show no... like, they’ve always been in some way hostile towards it or felt that there’s something nefarious about it, Elizabeth said.
—Or even the idea of using charisma, sleeping with actresses, being charming, it’s like, well, in a way, that charisma and masculinity is part of it. Maybe that’s not liberal-coded, which it wasn’t, Stephen suggested. Like, Nick’s having an affair with a 22-year-old, I heard, apparently, like... but for him, he would never, in a sense, build something in the world. He would never have the idea of masculine erotic power being part of his artistry, his way through the world, that he would have to deal with malign people and institutions and fight. Like, he’s escaped totally into his unconscious rather than battled with New York reality or any place where if what he wanted to do was be a filmmaker or an artist. Someone in his position had two paths: he could have stayed at home, gone to church, got married, been an art teacher, which is a completely wonderful way to live. He absolutely could have done that.
—It’s just really the question of... I have to defend the childhood bedroom a little bit because I don’t have my own apartment right now. But no, I don’t have the same relationship to it that Nick does. It’s the question of: what happens to the family? In some ways, it literally drove me crazy, Elizabeth said.
—Well, he does go to his Jungian psychoanalysis. But it requires some kind of conscious engine. And I think it’s very... I’ve come to like Jung a lot, Stephen admitted as he laid down on the floor a few feet away from his sister on the couch.
—A lot of successful people are Jungian therapists because it’s a very passive orientation to the world. It’s not anything like Jung would have really recognized as normal. For people in the West, in modern Western society, it would have been considered completely abnormal, Stephen said. I think that’s the way we live, not that it’s by fault of our own; it’s just how things are made up. So when you look at the Boomer generation, they did the external ego-building. It was a lot easier for them. And you see all the rhetoric online about the Boomers stealing all the wealth and ruining it for us, and they all have five houses and everything. But it was easier for them, and so they were able to build their material lives out. But then the unconscious process never happened for their generation. It never happened. Which is the crazy part. That is as crazy as both inversions are crazy. And so they end up miserable, they end up divorcing, or on tons of meds, or what have you, without whatever is missing for them to engage with the fact of their existence. That is totally absent for their generation.
—So, I went to a concert, an album release. Do you know Katie Pink at all? Elizabeth asked.
—I feel like she came to something I did; you guys are acquainted?
—I think she’s actually quite intelligent. She had an album release party at The Sultan Room in Bushwick. It was a cool space, and it was packed. I actually ran into some friends there, and it was nice. And she put on a show. It wasn’t just mumbling into a microphone, she put effort into it. At the same time, the material she was singing about was very simplistic feeling. It wasn’t like smarmy love-song folk music, it was just... And I was sitting there, or standing there, and I was like, she’s singing to her mom. I was looking around the room, and I was like, all of these people are doing unconscious mommy worship. Or daddy worship, depending on who they are. And I realized at that moment that the room was filled with all of these people who had never, never emotionally matured. And I was like, that’s what’s always turned me off about Brooklyn. Not like fucking Manhattan, because Manhattan has ego. It has ego structure.
—It does, Stephen said. I feel like I’m a totally different person now that I’m living alone. This apartment has an ego structure.
—As Jung said, Elizabeth explained in her slow, strangely precise way of speaking, early adulthood is for building ego. That’s what people do here. That’s why it’s important to live here. They come from families that have money here, and they maintain the ego structure of the family through their individual lives, which is really the natural course for Western people. Whereas Brooklyn collects the inverted ego-unconscious structure. And that’s such as our young selves. And that’s why it turns you off so much when you live there. And it’s just such a shame because Katie is intelligent and talented, Elizabeth said.
—But yeah, I don’t know what I’m saying, Stephen paused.—Yeah, I think that’s why people don’t like my plays. The common criticism of my plays is, ‘That’s not how people talk.’ But that’s kind of the point.
—It’s how our family talks; that’s the thing; and we very distinctly grew up in a structure of extreme ego structure. Dad, and then total unconscious chaos Mom. That, in the end, turns out to be very dramatic when you put those tensions on stage.
—Totally.
—Do you mind if I crash here and read if you go out or whatever?
—Alright, I’m gonna take a shower and then head out, Stephen said, standing up.
—Yeah, sounds good.
—I love you.
—Love you too, Elizabeth said.
—Have you seen my new boots? she asked, showing them off.
—Nice. They’re really good.
—Yeah.
—Alright, see you. Bye.
—Bye.
