Love-Lies-Bleeding

A Play

Don DeLillo

• Publisher: Scribner
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9780743273060
• eBook ISBN: 9780743281805
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Classics
• Index: Literature

Love-Lies-Bleeding, Don DeLillo's third play, is a daring, profoundly compassionate story about life, death, art and human connection. Three people gather to determine the fate of the man who sits in a straight-backed chair saying nothing. He is Alex Macklin, who gave up easel painting to do land art in the southwestern desert, and he is seventy now, helpless in the wake of a second stroke. The people around him are the bearers of a complicated love, his son, his young wife, the older woman -- his wife of years past -- who feels the emotional tenacity of a love long-ended. It is their question to answer. When does life end, and when should it end? In this remote setting, without seeking medical or legal guidance, they move unsteadily toward last things. Luminous, spare, unnervingly comic and always deeply moving, Love-Lies-Bleeding explores a number of perilous questions about the value of life and how we measure it.

Act One

Scene 1

Alex and Lia, one year before the main action of the play.

He is haggard, after a stroke, seated in a wheelchair, stage right, isolated from the room set, which is in near darkness. His speech is labored. Lia sits in close proximity, a food bowl within reach.

Across the stage, in scant light, barely visible, there is the sitting figure of a man.

Alex

I saw a dead man on the subway once. I was ten or eleven, riding with my father. The man was in a corner seat, across the aisle. Only a few people in the car. A dead man sits there. This is the subway. You don’t know about this. Nobody looks at anybody else. He sits there, and I’m the only one that sees him. I see him so clearly now I could almost tell you things about his life. My father was reading the newspaper. He liked to follow the horses. He analyzed the charts. He studied the race results. There weren’t too many things he followed, my father. Horse races and prizefights. There was a column he always read. If I thought about it long enough, I could tell you the columnist’s name.

Lia

And the man. Across the aisle.

Alex

Nobody paid him the slightest mind. Another sleeping rider, by their dim lights. I watched him steadily. I examined him. I was fixated. When the train rocked. (Pause.) I’m thinking how he sat. He sat against the bulkhead, partly, at the end of the car. When the train rocked, he got bounced around a little and I thought he might topple to the floor. His mouth was open. His face, I swear, it was gray. There wasn’t any question in my mind. Dead. All life drained out of him. But in a way I can’t explain, it didn’t seem strange or forbidding. It seemed forbidding but not in a way that threatened me personally. I accepted what I saw. A rider on the train, going breakneck through the tunnel. It scared me to think he might topple to the floor. That was forbidding. He could have been riding all day. Gray like an animal. He belonged to a different order of nature. The first dead man I’d ever seen and there’s never been anyone since who has looked more finally and absolutely dead.

Lia

And your father. What did he do? Did he alert someone when the train reached the next station?

Alex

I don’t know. I don’t know if I told him. The memory ends here. I draw a total blank. This is the subway. He’s reading the sports pages. The column he’s reading is part boldface, part regular type, and I can see the face of the columnist in the little photo set into the type. He has a slick mustache. A racetrack mustache.

Lia

Can you tell me his name?

Alex

His name will come to me in a minute.

Scene 2

Present time. Lights up on the sitting figure. This is Alex, after a massive second stroke. The rest of the room remains dark.

Alex is motionless in a straight-backed chair with arms. It is now possible to see that he is attached to hydration and feeding tubes that extend from a metal stand next to the chair. His eyes are open, mouth open slightly. His hair is cropped. He is clean shaven and neatly dressed—casual pants and shirt, new pair of running shoes.

Lights up on entire room. Toinette and Sean are situated some distance from the sitting figure.

Toinette

I don’t like sharing a toilet.

Sean

Maybe I can use the shed.

Toinette

Nothing personal.

Sean

Or dig a hole somewhere.

Toinette

What will she say?

Sean

You know what she’ll say.

Toinette

I don’t know her. I know her for half a day.

Sean

I don’t know her much longer.

Toinette

You’ve been here before.

Sean

Once. After the first stroke. He was home from the hospital. She was looking after him, very capably, without help. That’s what she wanted then and that’s what she wants now.

Toinette

Do you think she has any idea?

Sean

Tell her.

Toinette

You tell her.

Sean

You must have shared a toilet with Alex. Somewhere along the way.

Toinette

We shared many things. We exhausted each other. We shared our exhaustion.

Sean

She does everything one person can do for another. A male fantasy of the caring woman. But not really. She’s not a little house sparrow. She’s smart and tough. Stubborn too.

Toinette

Finally what we shared was silence. The entire last year. Everything became internal. Shapeless and motionless. Vaguely sinister. Each of us wishing the other dead in a car crash. I’d sit and study that look of his. Angry and dangerous. Always a question in it. He’s puzzled by something.

Sean (IN ALEX’S VOICE)

I’m probing, I’m searching. Trying to figure out exactly what it is that makes me want to tear ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Praise
• Also by Don DeLillo
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Act One
• Act Two
• Act Three
• About the Author