The following monologue was presented at The Neighborhood Playhouse on Sept. 11th, 2002, curated by Harold and Mary Baldrige on the one-year anniversary of the Tower's collapse.
TIFFANY:
Sixty years. Or thereabouts. Not the brittle kind of calm. no, mine’s the slow-baked calm, the marrow-deep calm, the one you buy with rent checks written in your own hand and paid in full with the ache of your own back.
And LONELINESS. Not the lap-cat kind. Mine is the kind with iron breath and a spine made of wind. The kind that hums at the edge of a room when the lights are off. The kind that tastes like freedom, and absence.
It is one day after September 11th, 2001. The year after the fire fell.
At first!
shock. That’s what the papers called it. A word printed in the same font they use for “Sale” or “Weather.” A box you check at the doctor’s office. Shock.
I was not there. No. Thank God. I was uptown, East 72nd. Far enough to pretend the sky was still whole. Not so far that the pretense could survive the air if I stepped outside. I did not step outside.
I watched television. So much television the air in the apartment began to smell like static. Usually, I watch PEOPLE. That’s why you live alone in New YORK. SO, you can belong to the congregation of solitary souls, each lit up in their own little streetlamp of purpose. Sidewalks as scripture. Parks as theater. Delis as living poems.
But in those days, the people looked peeled. Skinless. Their eyes were full of unsent letters. And it felt indecent to read them.
Shock is like an ice-cream headache. First the blade, then the frost, then the slow thaw of disbelief. I told myself it was War of the Worlds, a trick of the airwaves, but the television was too loud to lie.
And still they said: “It looked like a movie.” And I wondered: When the real looks like the pretend, and the pretend hurts like the real, where will we find the difference? And when they make the movie of the day the towers fell, will it look too real to bear, or not real enough to mourn?
Sometimes. And forgive the longing-- I wish I lived in a fictional New York. The New York where rain is charming, not ruin. Where love waits on fire escapes. Where Audrey sings to the moon and George types: “There was once a very lovely, very frightened girl…”
(Sings, low) “Moon river, wider than a mile, I'm crossing you in style some day. Old dream maker, You heart breaker,
Wherever you're going, I'm going your way. ”
And then They say to each other:
She: Hi. He: What you doing? She: Writing. HE: Good.
Then they look at one another. Searching for the, the... The small, ridiculous CERTAINTY OF... It’s going to be fine.
I have never had a fire escape worth mentioning. No one has ever leaned from above to look down at me. I have never sung on a windowsill.
But I watched those towers fall. And they fell like they’d been PRACTICING, straight down, into absence, into the hollow where sound refuses to go.
(Sings, softer) “Two drifters, off to see the world. There's such a lot of world to see. We're after the same rainbow's end, Waiting round the bend, My Huckleberry Friend, Moon River and ME.”
