Leaving Rhode Island: Dallas

                (FRANK and GARY at an airport bar.)

GARY:  --They won’t even hire exiles at Patterson Groff.

FRANK:  They think we’re aliens.

GARY:  What?

FRANK:  Patterson.  He thinks we were exiled because the Rhode Island government has secret knowledge or whatever that we’re aliens.

GARY:  You’re joking, right?

FRANK:  You didn’t know people think that?

GARY:  I knew crazy people thought that.  Conspirators and, like, right-wing nutjob websites, but not one of the two partners at a major firm.

FRANK:  Oh, Groff believes in the alien stuff too.

GARY:  Jesus.

FRANK:  Even more than Patterson does.

GARY:  It’s discrimination.  Time magazine did a whole thing on it.  Did you see that?

FRANK:  I don’t read.

GARY:  Time?

FRANK:  What?

GARY:  You don’t read Time?

FRANK:  No, I just don’t read.

GARY:  Who says that?  Who says ‘I don’t read?’

FRANK:  People who don’t read?

GARY:  But who doesn’t read?

FRANK:  People who don’t read.

GARY:  Well, you should look at it.  You don’t have to read it, but just look at it.  It’s right on the cover.  We’re being discriminated against.  We’re the new minority.

FRANK:  There are only—what?—a hundred of us?  That’s not enough to be a minority.

GARY:  Are you listening to yourself?  You just said ‘not enough to be a minority.’  As if more people would make you more of a minority.

FRANK:  Well, it would, wouldn’t it?

GARY:  No!  You keep adding more people, eventually you’re a majority.

FRANK:  But you have to have so many people just to be a minority, otherwise you’re something else.

GARY:  All right, so if you’re less than a minority, what are you?

FRANK:  Nothing.  You’re nothing.  That’s what we are:  Nothing.  We’re not being discriminated against.  People just think it’s creepy.  The exile thing.

GARY:  And that’s not right.

FRANK:  Well, it is kind of creepy.

GARY:  That’s not our fault.

FRANK:  I didn’t say it was.

GARY:  I should sue.  I should sue Patterson and Groff.

FRANK:  You’d have to prove that they think you’re aliens.

GARY:  Well how do you know that they think that?  How did you find that out?

FRANK:  I used to sleep with Patterson’s wife.

GARY:  Really?

FRANK:  Yeah.  She said he’d go to these secret cult meetings with a bunch of other millionaires and they’d all talk about how the exiles are beings from another planet and that if we’re not destroyed, we’re going to summon the rest of our alien army to take over the world.

GARY:  Geez, if they think we’re that dangerous, you’d think they’d hire us.  Try to keep us happy.

FRANK:  You hear about that exile guy they found dead in his apartment?  Apparent suicide?  Ha.  Suicide my ass.

GARY:  You think this cult had something to do with it?

FRANK:  I’m saying we have a target on our backs, whether we want it there or not.

GARY:  Well now you got me freaking out.

FRANK:  Good.  You should freak out.  You sure as hell shouldn’t be heading back to Rhode Island.

GARY:  I got kids, Frank.  I got a wife.  I already sent them ahead of me.  As soon as the letter came in saying we could go back.

FRANK:  When you get home—pack up the kids.  Pack up the wife.  And get the hell out of Dodge.  Head to Europe or something.

GARY:  I can’t.  They’re too excited.  They’ve been living in Dallas for the past five years.  They want to go home.

FRANK:  I wouldn’t be surprised if there are guards waiting for you at the gate.

GARY:  You think?

FRANK:  Have you called home since your family got back?

GARY:  Stop it, Frank.

FRANK:  You’re the one talking about us being a minority.  What do you think they do to minorities?  When nobody gives a shit what happens to them?

GARY:  They’re not just going to exterminate us like that.  This isn’t World War II.

FRANK:  No, it’s a new kind of war.  We’re the rats and they’re the cats.  And nobody’s going to miss the rats when they’re gone.

GARY:  That guy was a suicide.

FRANK:  If you say so.

GARY:  And no way could you get Patteron’s wife.  She’s a former Miss USA.

FRANK:  I saw her sitting in the lobby when I went for my interview at the firm.  She was waiting for Patterson to finish with me so they could go to lunch.  We started talking and within five minutes she was cancelling the lunch and booking us a room at the W.

GARY:  Bullshit.

FRANK:  I kept her bra if you want to see it.

GARY:  Well I don’t know if Patterson’s going to try and kill me, but he’s definitely coming after you.

FRANK:  You know, people like you crack me up.  The government kicks a hundred innocent people out of their homes, out of their state, and nobody does a damn thing about it.  Five years later, they’re letting us back in, and you pack up your stuff and say ‘thank you sir, may I have another?’  Like a beat-up wife going back to her white trash husband.  We should be telling that whole state where they can shove it.

GARY:  Not everyone’s going back.

FRANK:  But you are.

GARY:  I told you, my kids—

FRANK:  Do your kids even remember Rhode Island?  How old were they when they left?

GARY:  My wife’s family is there.  My family—

FRANK:  They been holding a vigil for you all this time?  Or did they light a few candles and then go right with their lives like nothing happened?

GARY:  I have to go back.

FRANK:  Maybe you do, but I’m not.

GARY:  Yeah, that’s because you…

                (A moment.)

FRANK:  Go ahead, Gary.  Say it.

GARY:  I…

FRANK:  You think this is about Carol?

GARY:  I think you’re angry about a lot of things, and I don’t blame you.  But you can’t lash out at people for wanting to go home.

FRANK:  Home is just an idea, Gary.  It’s a milk spill.  You go chasing after it, and you find it goes in all these different directions until pretty soon it doesn’t look anything like what it did when it was sitting nice in a glass on the kitchen counter.  And you can cry about it, but you’re still going to be sitting in a mess with a wet floor underneath you.

GARY:  I think you’ve been living in Texas too long, Frank.  You’re starting to sound like a Larry McMurtry novel.

FRANK:  I told Carol I’d never go back.  That was my promise to her.  That if I couldn’t go back with her, I’d never go back at all.

GARY:  And that’s what you think she’d want?

FRANK:  I think all she’d want is to still be alive.  What I think is that she probably didn’t want to die hundreds of miles from where she grew up, from her sister, from her dad—

GARY:  I offered to let you use our beach house on the Cape—

FRANK:  She was too proud.  You know that.  She wouldn’t even let the nurses give her pain meds.  I think she thought she was a martyr or something.

GARY:  Nah, she was just tough.  That’s why I liked her.  If anybody could have led an alien army, it would have been her.

FRANK:  You know, we still own the house in East Providence.  I rent it to a nice couple—two kids, a dog—nice people, from what I can tell.  When they heard about the exile being lifted, they called me and offered to find a new place to live if I wanted to come home, but…it just doesn’t seem right.

GARY:  Kicking a family out?

FRANK:  That.  And pretending the past five years didn’t happen.  Pretending Carol just left and never came back.  That’s what it would feel like.  Like she left me.  That’s what it felt like at first anyway, but then, it sort of felt like…I woke up one day and I knew how to make her tomato sauce.  She tried teaching me a thousand times when she was alive, and she couldn’t do it.  Then two weeks after she dies, I turn on the stove, and the next thing I know, I got it.  Funny stuff like that happens when you lose somebody.  But see, it’s here.  It happened here.  She died here.  I feel like—like if I go, I can’t take her with me, you know?

GARY:  Home’s just an idea, Frank.  A lot of things are just ideas.

FRANK:  I still think I’m better off where I am.

GARY:  Maybe one day the spaceship will come around and pick you up.

FRANK:  Wouldn’t that be nice?  The ship touches down, the little platform or whatever pops out, and here comes Carol walking towards me, in a nice white robe, with a little antennae coming out of her head, saying she’s sorry it took so long to get back, but am I ready to go?

GARY:  Just don’t tell her about you and Patterson’s wife.

FRANK:  Or Groff’s sister.

GARY:  What?  How—

FRANK:  Don’t ask, Gary.  There are some things you just don’t need to know.

                (They laugh a little.)