BELLA

And some of the more absurd stories of Kurt Vonnegut.

CHRISTOPHER

Kurt. Fucking. Vonnegut.

BELLA

The New York Times Book Review, however, wasn’t so kind. In a heavily qualified review, a peer novelist tepidly praised the overall vision of the book and Bella Lee Baird’s undeniably evocative sentences, but ultimately dismissed its two-hundred-and-fifty-six pages as—quote—“a slightly hokey pastiche of dreamy, anecdotal Middle-American folklore”—unquote.

CHRISTOPHER

But fuck the New York Times, right?

BELLA

Sure.

CHRISTOPHER

(To the audience) And then I talk about how she successfully traversed the fine line between absurdity and sincerity; how in lesser hands the novel might’ve come off as antic; how emotionally invested I was in Billy Baird’s simple, Herculean goal.

(To Bella) It functions brilliantly as a fable for our capitalistic, celebrity-obsessed society failing its younger generation.

And our hunger for faith and miracles in a godless universe.

I also like that you gave Billy your surname.

BELLA

I’ve always regretted that. I consider it to be one of the more sophomoric choices I’ve made in my career; one that begs the reader to somehow interpret Billy as a stand-in for his author.

CHRISTOPHER

Yeah, Billy Baird. Bella Baird. But I enjoyed considering the possible autobiographical tension between the two of you.

Cool author photo, by the way. You sort of look exactly the same.

BELLA

I had a better ass back then.

CHRISTOPHER

Really?

BELLA

I had a hot ass.

(Beat.)

CHRISTOPHER

So where’s the new one?

BELLA

The new ass?

CHRISTOPHER

No, the new book. It’s been a long time. Like almost twenty years.

BELLA

Sometimes things have to gestate.

CHRISTOPHER

Gestation, sure.

BELLA

And it’s been seventeen years, not twenty. Seventeen years is problematic but twenty years would be tragic. I still have three years.

CHRISTOPHER

Sorry.

BELLA

Ask me something else.

(Awkward pause.)

CHRISTOPHER

Why aren’t you with anybody?

BELLA

I guess I’ve always held on to this very simple idea that someday I would find a partner who I could read with. Someone I could lie beside in bed on Sunday mornings, our limbs intertwined. We’re both lost in a great novel. Something by James Baldwin or Denis Johnson. Lynda Barry. We laugh secretly to ourselves. And we’re comfortable enough with our life that we allow this secrecy. Because loving a book is kind of like having an affair, after all.

CHRISTOPHER

That sounds like writing.

BELLA

Okay. At some point I guess I just stopped liking people.

(Christopher rises and exits to the bathroom.)

(To the audience) Christopher gets up to go to the bathroom. As he walks away I find that his youth is, well, jarring. Our age difference is like an enormous cast-iron pot hanging from the ceiling.

I’m suddenly struck by the notion of how one becomes remote in one’s own life. Like a forgotten object on a shelf. I am a lamp. I am a letter opener.

A piece of minor archaeology.

How the years suddenly tumble on you.

(Christopher returns from the bathroom.)