Dearly Beloved — Excerpt

from Act I

A gothic parlor adorned in flowers; Roderick speaks with his servants, Osfero and Countisia, as the doorbell rings the arriving guests:

RODERICK
The hell gate maws the masquerade: th’ accompaniment arrives.

Countisia exits.

OSFERO
Master, this must come before the guests: Ariat is missing.

Countisia shows in Silvus Bartletome, Evie Collette and Banberry.

RODERICK
Too close, Osfero, too close; there’ll be time for—

COUNTISIA
—Professor Silvus Bartletome, Evie Collette, and . . . Banberry.

BANBERRY
Limey floodlights upon you Roderick! Haha! you’ve made a shaded guard of your vamp’ric husk—the hall’s nice, too.

Osfero and Belios exit.

RODERICK
The lady-to-be trends to nurse what’s needed pruning.

BANBERRY
Your nurse?

SILVUS
This is untamed, and untethered beyond the day; bend her stalk now lest the Green Man supplant.

BANBERRY
Which is why you should never marry a flower. I knew an Ivey once.

EVIE
Has she kissed her prime?

BANBERRY
Will you kiss her after?

EVIE
Is after already here?

BANBERRY
Explains the funeral feeling. What a marvelous occasion! Nuptials embowered by vaulted death. Will the bride wear black? Shall we drape her dressed in downy lilies? Do we speed the former and the first? You’ve embraced the lavish the more macabre you’ve become, each comorbidly tainting the other til only you are distinguishable.

SILVUS
Let us not eclipse th’ occasion with mention of the former lady; weddings are best blessed in the sun. We supported you then, Roderick, and we support you now.

EVIE
Speaks the male concert.

BANBERRY
More crusted fife.

EVIE
Says the sad oboe.

RODERICK
Cymbals in the chamber piece.

BANBERRY
Let me be a purpled wine cloud of electric song, my bouncing body my jig and my jug, my ventures my vineyards, my cellar my stories, to cheer me a beer fountain of a dirndl lass, or an icy lady of a vodka lake, or a beautiful fool of a pool of absinthe—

EVIE
May you drown in a barrel.

BANBERRY
The cheek! Now I shall turn mauve. Where is this wine? There’s nothing worse than a desiccated nimbus; a cloded wad shouldn’t float but to the bin, our common end—we could make a race of it, and canonize the winner.

Osfero enters with wine and serves the guests.

Count Osfero! yet to press yourself into a page?—Cheers to the multi-married! You still have yards of flesh to catch me, taking years to finish a dish while I sit at the buffet.

SILVUS
Enough of your jaunts and gibs. You prance like a pompous filly in chaffing heat. The jauntiest whiskey mellows with age, but you’re more incessant than your schoolroom days: as retrograde as a tardigrade, yet wanton for their wit.

BANBERRY
Will you swaddle me in my old age, in your cantankerous youth?

SILVUS
Energy is youthfulness.

BANBERRY
Outrage isn’t energy—

SILVUS
—But  energy tainted.

BANBERRY
The proof speaks.

SILVUS
When wine become a man blithers; you’ve had enough to replace blood if scent is sense.

BANBERRY
And so water becomes wine: you see me messianic.

RODERICK
If every drunkard is a king.

EVIE
Don’t give him ideas.

BANBERRY
If imagination is the thing, or my blood is wine.

SILVUS
As centuries explained, the sacrament is metaphor, not sign.

EVIE
And metaphors reveal the subconscious true, or did you think we couldn’t see you through?

RODERICK
The literal’s excused?

BANBERRY
Laughed at.

EVIE
Is that why nothing’s serious?

BANBERRY
Very few, as the juggler to his spheres, the dog his thrown toy, or the child his stick fight: to play as I do, so seriously with life.

EVIE
With us your pawns?

RODERICK
I insist on a bishopric. This religious fume inspires.

BANBERRY
I sanctify thee. You always did move horizontal. I give Evie a rookery to be with her own kind, and because she can only barrel in simple directions, and Master Brittlebone, you are the king, because you’re ineffectual and believe everything revolves around you.

SILVUS
I would have given you the crown for similar reasons, you embodied pretension, until I remembered that even in your games you don’t matter.

BANBERRY
I am crowned but am no king, and play jester to my empty court.

RODERICK
Is that why you’re here, Banberry?

SILVUS
To queenly flounce and pigeon-strut and dance the board and flirt th’ air?

RODERICK
I’m surprised you showed up at all, though shame has shouldered greater burdens, if not greater egos.

BANBERRY
To see through time in both directions, knowing the ending as it begins because we’ve been here before: what shall it be this time? A scar? heterochromia? a slightly longer finger? a laugh? will you tune her vocal chords if you don’t like her giggle? cover a dimple that dares a crater? a staring strand of silver hair? Or will it be another birthmark, you cankered heartbreaker?

RODERICK
An unforeseeable failure does not judge the motive, as your latest book shows.

BANBERRY
Satire corrodes when there’s more pepper than iron.

EVIE
To offset your salt-lick.

BANBERRY
Says the dried fish.

RODERICK
She’s whetted by cutting.

BANBERRY
Inuendo?

RODERICK
Warning.

BANBERRY
If anyone’s going to cut me it’s old Bartletome bound in bone: he’s wanted to slice me ever since I was a child.

SILVUS
You’re still a child, and that was a grotesque attempt at a rhyme.

BANBERRY
I wrote a song for you and you say that? Do you remember it, Roderick?
Silvus the stone
Sits all alone
With all the tomes he bartered,
But he doesn’t move
With every reprove
He’d swear you’d think him martyred.

SILVUS
Like you, the ending trips.

BANBERRY
While stabbing!—

EVIE
—Yourself in the end.

BANBERRY
The serpent finds his tail a delicacy.

EVIE
And a worm doesn’t realize he eats his.

BANBERRY
All this talking of eating oneself is poking me famished. Is dinner now, and if not, why can’t it be? This is outrageous!

RODERICK
After the ceremony: when two are one you may eat for two.

BANBERRY
Well, I’m turning viking on your kitchen til (avoiding Tisia’s nails, of course): I shall pillage, I shall plunder, gluttony and lust, so beware your melons the next week or so.

Banberry exits.
EVIE
The air clears, purity from toxin, and I can breathe again.

RODERICK
A little red in your eye? They shocked feral.

EVIE
His absence manners decorum. Sad clowns do that to me.

RODERICK
And your other teachers?

CLEYA
[in the hallway]
—No, Tisia, no! I want it fixed now! now or I’ll know they’re there—I will, that they’re still there, still suffocating—feel how the hallway follows, I can feel it: staring opera flowers—

COUNTISIA
[in the hallway]
It’s not the flowers.

Cleya and Countisia enter.

CLEYA
Oh, Tisia! A nature that’s never been is reclaimed by your touch! More natural than natural, you could reclaim Death and verdure fields of glass; may as many courtier-flowers attend my lowering as raise me here. Roderick must be proud of nature so re-figured.

COUNTISIA
The window’s brightening paints my collage. Tonight a thousand candles light us like attendant souls at a sacral reckoning.

CLEYA
Lighter than any dream that touches memory, vaulted in an impossible spring that stirs ambrosial: will you be my satyr, Roderick, in our new Arcadia?

RODERICK
Darling, you make a satire of me and try fate to preclude the knot and bell.

A knock at the front door. Countisia exits.

CLEYA
A knock extempores well enough, and here: [Cleya kisses Roderick] a knot of lips, the balm of nature’s blushing. Now we’re as sanctified as this room, as pollinated as your buds. Gentlemen, Mademoiselle Collette.

SILVUS
Madame, there were no pollinating kisses here; even the bees are castratos.

CLEYA
And yet honey comes. They sing their queen pregnant.

SILVUS
Madame—

EVIE
—No madame yet, professor; corrections til the hour lest the hor correct us.

Enter Osfero followed by the Glendarme, Madrigola, Audalade, Cedgwick, and Vera Theodora, as Ariadne Baskerville.

OSFERO
The Family Clarvallo: Monsieur Glendarme, of the Clarvallo Arms, Madame Madrigola and Ms. Audalade, and Monsieur Cedgwick, escorting Mademoiselle Ariadne Baskerville.

Osfero exits.

CLEYA
Welcome, father. I hope you find the wedding house as welcoming as partied arms: as garlanded, as open, as filled with light—

CEDGWICK
—As supported. You are this glowing room amidst a current of black arteries and hidden chambers.

GLENDARME
One that may spread to these spaces an infection of light, as his lighted thoughts may inspire you, betterment following love, shared memories and mornings, too, led to whose door I bring my doubly approved and honored consent.

RODERICK
Twice given is doubly sweet to our now doubled family. Welcome, law-father: I am reminded in your strictures.

GLENDARME
Then a familial introduction: my mother, Madrigola,—

MADRIGOLA
Are these lamps perfuming?

RODERICK
Well, it seems.

GLENDARME
And her sister, my aunt Audalade. I believe you’ve met my son—

CEDGWICK
We’ve crashed a verbal cross.

GLENDARME
Bellowing blows?

MADRIGOLA
Who won?

CEDGWICK
I smote him into the landscape, of course, a mangled masterpiece graveled in slate.

MADRIGOLA
This gas will contend another.

SILVUS
I shall martial these batteries.

GLENDARME
Arrest your thoughts and give them a laborious time, for the only coupling here shall be betrothed. You o’er-rev him, Cedgwick, and he may not have engine enough for the thrust.

CEDGWICK
It’s the landing I fear.

MADRIGOLA
So should she.

GLENDARME
To pilot paradise and claim all she deserves.

AUDALADE
All she deserves.

MADRIGOLA
You can only pose that as a challenge. Listen to your heart and you’ll only hear your dreams shatter.

AUDALADE
Here your dreams shatter.

CLEYA
Don’t add foul breath to the room, Aunt Audalade; this is where prophecies are fulfilled, not made.

MADRIGOLA
Darling, you know she never means what we think she does; we’d never have fun if she did.

AUDALADE
She did.

GLENDARME
Is dinner post? Preempt our schedule.

SILVUS
I shall not eat: the daintiest morsel paralyzes me comatose for a dream of an age. Air, the breath of being, the biting and relief, the whisper and the clue, the sourcing and the spell, sustains for other nourishments enough that I may dabble myself with water a time and feel blessed from life’s own fountain.

EVIE
How have you lived this long?

CLEYA
I should eat myself first before fading, and die happy of a fine last meal.

RODERICK
Save your feasting for after the wedding march.

Cedgwick and Vera Theodora speak aside.

CEDGWICK
Cover ‘im in scar tissue, blout purple in a thousand contusions, drinking his gold to get drunk off his greed, laughing and fattening, blood-sucking—

VERA
Dribbling magma when not spewing, you swing the sadist’s carousel, a ride humanity’s still trying to grow out of, dizzy and ego-soused on delusion, but this doctor’s more—

CEDGWICK
Remember: we need the accountant ledger for any proof of any fraud, and we need it now: the wedding is an extended conversation away.

VERA
I never forget anything.

Vera exits.

GLENDARME
My boy! Temperance in a cup! The gunsword Clavallo meeting Lord Pater’s wand was certain to count and enwall new annals, but I shower you both in every kind of coin that adversity is lost to sight. I gift not my daughter away today but trade with you my light for yours: a little lineage for an endless economy to build for more our better world; to the prosperity that prospers for all, I raise to you this toast.

MADRIGOLA
Don’t forget your receipt.

CLEYA
Why would I return my heart’s desire, grandmama?

MADRIGOLA
The heart’s more changeable than the seasons, far uglier about it, and equally predictable.

CLEYA
Then we defy nature in making the most of ours. Love is as simple as the world is not, and we shall not let it infect our clarity.

MADRIGOLA
Says the unmarried.