Play With a Tiger and Other Plays - Doris Lessing

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of Western man …

      DAVE [turning on her]: You have also, since I saw you last, been engaged to marry Tom Lattimer.

      ANNA: Don’t tell me you suddenly care?

      DAVE: I’m curious.

      ANNA [mocking]: I was in lurve. Like you were.

      DAVE: You were going to settle down?

      ANNA: That’s right, I decided it was time to settle down.

      DAVE: If you’re going to get married you might at least get married on some sort of a level.

      ANNA: But Dave, the phrase is, settle down. [she bends over, holds her hand a few inches from the floor] It is no accident, surely, that the phrase is settle down. [DAVE stands watching her, banging the side of his fist against the wall.] I’m thinking of writing a short, pithy, but nevertheless profoundly profound article on the unconscious attitude to marriage revealed in our culture by the phrase settle down.

      [DAVE lets his fist drop. Leans casually against the wall, watches her ironically.]

      DAVE: Anna, I know you too well.

      ANNA: An article summing up – how shall I put it – the contemporary reality.

      DAVE: I know you too well.

      ANNA: But it seems, not well enough … We’re through Dave Miller. We’re washed up. We’re broken off. We’re finished.

      DAVE [with simplicity]: But Anna, you love me.

      ANNA: It would seem there are more important things than love.

      DAVE [angry]: Lust?

      ANNA: Lust? What’s that? Why is it I can say anything complicated to you but never anything simple? I can’t say – you made me unhappy. I can’t say – are you sure you’re not making someone else unhappy. So how shall I put it? Well, it has just occurred to me in the last five minutes that when Prometheus was in his cradle it was probably rocked by the well-manicured hand of some stupid little goose whose highest thought was that the thatch on her hut should be better plaited than the thatch on her neighbour’s hut. Well? Is that indirect enough? After all, it is the essence of the myth that the miraculous baby should not be recognized. And so we are both playing our parts nicely. You because you’re convinced it can’t happen to you. Me because I can’t bear to think about it.

      DAVE: Anna, you haven’t let that oaf Tom Lattimer make you pregnant.

      ANNA: Oh my God. No. I haven’t. No dear Dave, I’m not pregnant. But perhaps I should be?

      DAVE: OK Anna, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I made you unhappy. But – well, here I am Anna.

      ANNA: Yes, here you are. [in pain] Dave, you have no right, you have no right … you’re a very careless person, Dave … [She gets off the bed and goes to the window.] What’s the use of talking of rights and wrongs? Or of right or wrong? OK, it’s a jungle. Anything goes. I should have let myself get pregnant. One catches a man by getting pregnant. People like you and me make life too complicated. Back to reality. [looking down] My God, that poor fool is still down there.

      DAVE: Anna, don’t freeze up on me.

      ANNA: You want to know what I’ve been doing? Well I’ve been standing here at night looking into the street and trying not to think about what you’ve been doing. I’ve been standing here. At about eleven at night the law and the order dissolve. The girls stand at their window there, kissing or quarrelling as the case might be, in between customers. The wolves prowl along the street. Gangs of kids rush by, living in some frightened lonely violent world that they think we don’t understand – ha! So they think we don’t understand what’s driving them crazy? Old people living alone go creeping home, alone. The women who live alone, after an hour of talking to strangers in a pub, go home, alone. And sometimes a married couple or lovers – and they can’t wait to get inside, behind the walls, they can’t wait to lock the doors against this terrible city. And they’re right.

      DAVE: They’re not right.

      ANNA: Put your arms around one other human being, and let the rest of the world go hang – the world is terrifying, so shut it out. That’s what people are doing everywhere, and perhaps they are right.

      DAVE: Anna, say it!

      ANNA: All right. You’re an egotist, and egotists can never bear the thought of a new generation. That’s all. And I’m an egotist and what I call my self-respect is more important to me than anything else. And that’s all. There’s nothing new in it. There’s nothing new anywhere. I shall die of boredom. Sometimes at night I look out into the street and I imagine that somewhere is a quiet room, and in the room is a man or a woman, thinking. And quite soon there will be a small new book – a book of one page perhaps, and on the page one small new thought. And we’ll all read it and shout: Yes, yes, that’s it.

      DAVE: Such as?

      ANNA [mocking]: We must love one another or die, something new like that.

      DAVE: Something new like that.

      ANNA: But of course it wouldn’t be that at all. It would probably turn out to be a new manifesto headed: Six new rules for egotists, or How to eat your cake and have it.

      DAVE: Anna, stop beating us up.

      ANNA: Ah hell.

      [DAVE puts out a hand to her, drops it on her look.]

      DAVE: OK, Anna, have it your way … You’re not even interested in what I’ve been doing since I saw you? You haven’t even asked.

      ANNA: The subject, I thought, had been touched on.

      DAVE: No, honey, I was being serious. Work, I mean work. I’ve been working. [mocking himself] I’ve been writing a sociological-type article about Britain.

      ANNA: So that is what you’ve been doing for the last week. We were wondering.

      DAVE [acknowledging the ‘we’]: OK Anna, OK, OK.

      ANNA: What am I going to be without you? I get so lonely without you.

      DAVE: But baby, I’m here. [at her look] OK Anna. OK.

      ANNA: All right, Dave. But all the same … I sometimes think if my skin were taken off I’d be just one enormous bruise. Yes, that’s all I am, just a bruise.

      DAVE: Uh-huh.

      ANNA: However, comforting myself with my usual sociological-type thought, I don’t see how there can be such pain everywhere without something new growing out of it.

      DAVE: Uh-huh.

      ANNA [fierce]: Yes!

      DAVE: All the same, you’re tough. At a conservative estimate, a hundred times tougher than I am. Why?

      ANNA [mocking]: Obviously, I’m a woman, everyone knows we are tough.

      DAVE: Uh-huh … I was thinking, when I was away from you, every time I take a beating it gets harder to stand up after-wards. You take punishment and up you get smiling.

      ANNA: Oh quite so. Lucky, isn’t it?

      DAVE: Tell me, when your husband was killed, did it knock you down?

      ANNA: Oh of course not, why should it?

      DAVE: OK Anna.

      ANNA: Everyone knows that when a marriage ends because the husband is killed fighting heroically for his country the marriage is by definition romantic and beautiful. [at his look] All right, I don’t choose to remember. [at his look] OK, it was a long time ago.

      DAVE: Well then, is it because you’ve got that kid?

      ANNA [irritated]: Is what because I’ve got that kid. That kid, that kid … You talk about him as if he were a plant in a pot on the windowsill,

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