Leaving Rhode Island: Houseboat

                (VINCENT and NAOMI stand  a few feet apart from each other facing the audience.  They hold their letters in their hands.)

NAOMI:  Dear Vincent.

VINCENT:  Dear Naomi.

NAOMI:  This is just like ‘Love Letters.’

VINCENT:  This is nothing like ‘Love Letters.’  ‘Love Letters’ means dinner theater.  This is life.  Life is nothing like dinner theater.  Except sometimes there’s dinner.

NAOMI:  I put on a blue dress tonight and went to a party.

VINCENT:  What are the parties like in Newport?

NAOMI:  They’re like parties anywhere else except you’re always looking around trying not to look at anyone.

VINCENT:  Looking around trying not to look at anyone?  How does that work?

NAOMI:  It doesn’t.  So you get drunk instead.

VINCENT:  I met you thirty-two years ago.

NAOMI:  Remember how good my breasts looked thirty-two years ago?

VINCENT:  I like your breasts—now, I mean.

NAOMI:  Everything was better thirty-two years ago.  When you get older, you can’t help but think that.  That’s how politicians get older people to vote Republican.  They go to them and say ‘Weren’t things better before?’ and we go ‘Yeah, they were!’ because we honestly want to believe that.

VINCENT:  I voted for Romney.

NAOMI:  You did not.

VINCENT:  Not because I wanted to, but because I knew he was going to lose and I felt bad.  I always feel bad for the loser.  Doesn’t matter who they are.

NAOMI:  That’s sort of—

VINCENT:  It’s why I can’t watch sports movies.  I feel no satisfaction when the protagonists win.  Even if they were the underdog.  No matter how mean the other team is to them, I still feel bad when they lose.

NAOMI:  How odd.

VINCENT:  Have you given any thought to what we discussed?

NAOMI:  What we—oh.

VINCENT:  You coming to live with me in Sri Lanka?

NAOMI:  On the houseboat, right?

VINCENT:  Yes, the houseboat.

NAOMI:  How does a houseboat work exactly?

VINCENT:  Well…it’s a boat.  That you…live in.

NAOMI:  For some reason, I thought there’d be more to it than that.

VINCENT:  No.

NAOMI:  Oh…Could there be more to it than that?

VINCENT:  We’ve been talking about this for years, Naomi.

NAOMI:  Vincent, when I met you, we were young and passionate and the idea of living on a pond-trailer—

VINCENT:  Houseboat.

NAOMI:  --Whatever.  It seemed charming.  But now—

VINCENT:  You’re in love with someone else?  Is that what you’re saying?

NAOMI:  No, I’m just not in love with you.

VINCENT:  Somehow that seems worse.

NAOMI:  People change.  They evolve.  They devolve.  They revolve.

VINCENT:  You’re not making any sense.

NAOMI:  I was hoping you wouldn’t notice that.

VINCENT:  Dear Naomi, I’m begging you to reconsider.  You’d love Sri Lanka.  It’s so much nicer than Rhode Island.  Remember the time I took you out on my boat, and I said I couldn’t bear to leave you and you said I’d never really leave you because I’d always be locked away in a part of your heart that nobody could get to but me?

                (A beat.)

NAOMI:  Was I drunk?

VINCENT:  No!

NAOMI:  I think I was drunk.

VINCENT:  Our love has lasted past time and distance.

NAOMI:  It may have survived time, Vincent, but it definitely didn’t survive distance.

VINCENT:  Every night I look at a picture of you and fall asleep thinking about the day when you’d finally be next to me.

NAOMI:  I have Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man next to my bed.  That book is impossible to get through.

VINCENT:  You said once your husband died—

NAOMI:  Oh, he died five years ago.

VINCENT:  What?

NAOMI:  And also, there was no husband.

VINCENT:  WHAT?

NAOMI:  I just couldn’t bear to hurt your feelings.

VINCENT:  So why are you hurting them now?

NAOMI:  Because I just don’t care anymore.

VINCENT:  Again, somehow worse.

NAOMI:  And I always sort of liked this back-and-forth we had going on, but now I’ve grown tired of it.  We can still tweet each other if you want.

VINCENT:  I don’t get wi-fi on the houseboat.

NAOMI:  And you expect me to move there?  I may as well strand myself on an island somewhere.

VINCENT:  Sri Lanka is an island.

NAOMI:  You’re not helping your case, Vincent.

VINCENT:  Dear Naomi, come here and I can show you things you’ve never dreamed of seeing.

NAOMI:  Dear Vincent, today on the Discovery channel, I watched a giraffe give birth.  I now believe that some things are better left unseen.

VINCENT:  You were never going to leave Rhode Island.

NAOMI:  Perhaps.  There’s something about the nighttime here.  It doesn’t feel like it feels everywhere else.  It’s active and still at the same time.  I’d miss it too much.

VINCENT:  Do you want to keep exchanging letters?

NAOMI:  To be honest, this is the first one of yours I’ve read in a few months.

VINCENT:  But I write you every day!

NAOMI:  I know, and honestly, Vincent, who has the time?

VINCENT:  I’ll miss you.

NAOMI:  What can you miss?  You haven’t seen me since I was a girl.

VINCENT:  I’ll miss the possibility of you.

NAOMI:  Oh Vincent, that’s an awful lot to miss.

                (Lights.)