Act 2 Scene 4 

A Work in Progress
90

Babette:  

Let me get this straight now.  Who is real and who is an avatar?

Catullus:

We’re real.  Highly animated actors.  Avatars with beating hearts.

Donal:

Why don’t we all sit down.  There’s wine.  There’s tea.

They sit except Glenn Hughes and Babette

Glenn Hughes: (aside to Babette)

Just like that Frankenstein character that was created, you can’t help feeling sorry for them.  

All so convincingly made 

So real so surreal too

Have we gone too far?

Suppose they turn on us

Those are real kitchen knives

Babette:

You must cross over into illusion

Women do it with men all the time

These are just replicants

Highly insured properties. 

Catullus has been patented

Briseis too.  Nobody’s found prior art.

Babette:

May we join you.  I’m gasping for a cuppa.

Is that what they say here?

We’re Americans.

Aldington:

So is my ex-wife.

Babette: 

Yes, I know and I read that you got married when you were only 19.  I was 18 coming on 19 when Glenn married me.

Donal serves her tea. Offers milk from a bottle carried in from the doorstep where it had been delivered that morning.

Aldington:

Yes.  That’s true.  We had our honeymoon before we were married in Capri.

H.D:

Ezra wanted to marry me when I was that age. May I have some tea.  No milk for me.

Babette:

People thought Glenn was a baby snatcher.  He’s nine years older than me.

H.D:

Ezra was a year older than I was Richard seven years younger

I like a virile man but not too virile

Ezra used to canoodle with me up in a tree

My father caught us snogging on the settee

He had his hands where his hands shouldn’t be

Briseis:

Your father didn’t kill him!

H.D:

Heavens no.  Mutual embarrassment that was all.

All very civilized.  If my father had killed him, it would have been murder, not like your day.

I understood Ezra was to be here too

Is this some sort of reunion?

He’s happily married to two wives now I understand

Babette: 

We met him in Paris and his mistress Olga

He has a wife Dot and a child with each

Bored with literary chit chat, Briseis gracefully exits through the window

Mary with Olga and Omar with Dorothy who is his real wife

Mary is some months older than Omar…

Catullus:

I saw Lesbia snogging with another.

She was just here.  Where has she gone?

Through that open window

Donal:

I’ll go and see.

Donal clumsily climbs out of the window.

Catullus

It’s quite remarkable how with just a wig change

Briseis was Lesbia just as I imagine her

But now she detests me she thinks I’m queer

Dick Russell © Richard M Russell

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