Dinner with Friends (TCG Edition)

by Donald Margulies

KAREN: I think what Beth was telling us . . . I think it was very hard for you.

You can’t control everything, Karen, even though you’d like to think you can.

BETH: It was out of your control. That we came together was as much out of your control as our falling apart. You can’t control everything, Karen, even though you’d like to think you can. (Silence.)

BETH: Why is that so hard to believe? I fell in love with Tom that first weekend at the Vineyard.

So much of my marriage to Tom was this dark little tango, this adagio dance.

BETH: I’m gonna marry him. (A tense pause) David is not Tom. He’s not. They’re very different men. There’s no hidden agenda with him. What you see is what you get. You know? He talks to me; he tells me what he’s thinking. He lets me in. (A beat.) So much of my marriage to Tom was this dark little tango, this adagio dance. I don’t want that anymore. I want another shot at it. With David. And David wants me.

BETH: As long as I’m artsy and incompetent, everything is fine. The minute I show any signs of being on an equal footing with you, forget it, you can’t deal with it, you have to knock me over!

BETH: We can’t all be like you, Karen. God knows I’ve tried. No matter how much I stir, my soup still sticks to the pot.

KAREN: I spent my first twenty years doing whatever the hell I could do to get away from my family and my second twenty years doing everything I could to cobble together a family of my own. I thought if I could choose my family this time, if I could make my friends my family . . . BETH: Congratulations. The family you’ve chosen is just as fucked-up and fallible as the one you were born into.

KAREN: I spent my first twenty years doing whatever the hell I could do to get away from my family and my second twenty years doing everything I could to cobble together a family of my own. I thought if I could choose my family this time, if I could make my friends my family . . . BETH: Congratulations. The family you’ve chosen is just as fucked-up and fallible as the one you were born into. (They eat in silence.)

Marriages all go through a kind of baseline wretchedness from time to time, but we do what we can to ride those patches out.

GABE: Well, sure, we all complain. That’s what married friends do: we joke about sex and bellyache about our wives and kids, but that doesn’t mean we’re about to leave them. Marriages all go through a kind of baseline wretchedness from time to time, but we do what we can to ride those patches out.

KAREN: What does this say about our friendship? What were all those years about?

KAREN: Like a whole chunk of our history’s been erased and there’s no present tense.