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: the accompaniment arrives.

Countisia exits.

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

RODERICK
Too close, too close. There’ll be time for that hereafter. To the step and line: we leave the middling here: let your purpose threshold what’s come.

Osfero and Belios exit. Countisia shows in Banberry, Siluvs Bartletome, and
Evie Collette.

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

BANBERRY
Limey floodlights ‘pon you, Roderick! Haha! You made a shaded Gard of your vamp'ric husk, not one hedgey finger of nature tendrilled to a misplaced curl, like an unseelie overgrowth in gothic fairyland, jeweled by flowers dyed in dawnlight.

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

SILVUS
This is untamed, and any remaining untethered beyond this day. But I’ve never doubted the puissance of your will; ever since your schoolboy demonstrations force met aptitude, and so I congratulate you in all, for every flower bends in time.

BANBERRY
Which is why you should never marry a flower. I knew a tulip 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 the 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
He’s no orchestra!

EVIE
You volumize a section.

BANBERRY
I must be brass.

EVIE
I always saw you as a sad oboe.

BANBERRY
Thoughtful, surely.

RODERICK
Cymbals in the chamber piece.

BANBERRY
What is arching quiet to echoing thunder? Let me be a purpled wine cloud of electric song, my bouncing body my jig and my jug, my ventures my vineyard, my cellar my stories. Perhaps I’ll find a hopping beer fountain of a man, or an icy lady of a vodka lake, or a glowing fool of a pool of absinthe, and we can compare our spirits.

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 wadded clod 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! Pattering with our common purpose. You’ve yet to press yourself into a volume? Cheers to the multi-married! You still have yards of flesh to catch me. You take your obsessions like courses, Roderick, while I’m emulous of a harem.

SILVUS
Enough of your jaunts and gibs. You prance like a pompous filly in chaffing heat. The jauntiest whiskey mellows with age, buy 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
As so water becomes wine: you see me messianic.

RODERICK
As the Eucharist wizens: you are what you eat.

EVIE
The only sense of the lot.

BANBERRY
Man, filled with pain. . .

SILVUS
As was explained centuries ago, heathens, the sacrament is metaphor.

BANBERRY
But metaphors reveal subconscious truths; which do you believe, and what shall they say about you?

RODERICK
The literal is excused?

BANBERRY
Laughed at.

EVIE
Is that why you don’t take anything seriously?

BANBERRY
Does the juggler take his spheres seriously, or the dog his thrown toy, or the child the outcome of a stick fight? Of course, and yet they play, and so do I 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 Bartletome, you are the king, for you are ineffectual and believe everything revolves around you.

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

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

RODERICK
Is that why you’re here, Banberry?

SILVUS
To queenly flounce and pigeon-strut and dance the board and flirt the 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? shall it be a dimple that craters the face? a 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! Haha! Not enough iron in that one—you pepper me!

EVIE
To offset your salt-lick.

BANBERRY
Says the dried fish.

RODERICK
She’s whetted by cutting.

BANBERRY
Innuendo?

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 recognize he eats his.

BANBERRY
All this talk 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 made one you may eat for two.

BANBERRY
Well, I’m turning viking on your kitchen til. I shall pillage, I shall plunder, I shall rape the food not a little, so beware of your melons for 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)
—Yet the hallway stares, audienced with opera flowers, posing at attention, collar’d to choking, primmed to pinching, vibrating the rafters and cringing every glass.

COUNTISIA
(In the hallway)
It’s not the flowers.

Cleya and Countisia enter.

CLEYA
Oh, Countisia! A nature that’s never been is reclaimed by your touch! More natural than natural, you could gloss dross 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 Clearmonts: Gendarme, Madrigola, Audalade, and Cedgwick, with Vera Theodora as Ariadne Baskerville.

OSFERO
The Family Clearmont: Monsieur Glendarme, of the Clearmont 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 like an infection of light to these spaces, as he may impregnate starshine in your’s, that you may share those rooms, make memories and mornings in them, and in conversations between inspire the other in a shared and mutual glory. You wed the future to make together, and I bring with my arrival my doubly approved and honored consent.

RODERICK
Twice given is doubly sweet to our now doubled family. Welcome, law-father: I am remade 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, Sedgwick, 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 that she deserves.

AUDALADE
All that she deserves.

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

AUDALADE
You’ll only hear your dreams shatter.

CLEYA
Don’t add foul breath to the fragrant 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
We’d never have fun if 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 vigor and the bolt, the fire and the brim, the question and the answer, 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
A thousand contusions body him a blouted purple! I would have him wear scar tissue for a body suit and choke on the molten gold he craves til his digestive track is worth more than his life!

VERA
His desires, be they for your father’s money or something stranger, are more interesting than your pornographic torture carnival; but your lack of impulse control is impressive: I’ve known breathing volcanoes that are safer to stand next to.

CEDGWICK
He boils me to a heat, then a purge, then to venting, then to steaming, then to condense again to flaming water and begin the cycle anew.

VERA
There’s nothing new about any of that: humanity’s still trying to escape that pot. Well, I’m off to pry: I have a secret laboratory to find.

CEDGWICK
Remember: we need the accountant ledger to prove his fraud and intentions, 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 Clearmont meeting Lord Pater’s wand was certain to count and unwell new annals, but I shower you both in every kind of coin that adversity is lost to sight. I give not my daughter away today but buy of you my love, dear Roderick, that lends lineage to our economy and funds your projects that will change the world. To the prosperity that prospers for all, I raise 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.