Excerpt J

[Immediately after Excerpt I]

Laura: You know what else bothers me?

Frank: [apparently still on the earlier point] There are differences.

Laura: The other important thing with the nature of what we were discussing, it would have been very different if it wasn't something that was so difficult and personal and ultimately which was so important to us and to our relationship. I mean, that's what really bothers me. We brought up things in that conversation, Lou, that we hadn't brought up before and that really needed to be worked out between us and I resent the fact that you needed an edge and some distance from that.

Frank: God, I'm sorry that it's all being erased now, that whole important conversation. [Plaintive, possibly mocking tone]

Dave: Well [consolingly], it's in your minds, your memories. As a matter of fact, though, the playing out of it, the erasing of it, the challenging of it is probably a metaphorical expression of the very conflict the two of you were discussing.

Frank: Absolutely.

Laura: Sure.

Frank [An aside, directly into the tape recorder] I've been trying to remember what the original taped conversation was about and I can't.

Dave: We make little synecdoche of our lives and offer them to each other very innocently.

Frank: Absolutely. Absolutely. We're spiders and any corner gets the same web. We just adapt to the shape of the corner, but we spin out the web and we receive our guests in our web regardless of what size they are. We wrap them up and give the same welcome. And we engulf them.

Laura: That's partially true.

Dave: [Laughs]

Laura: That's all I grant you.

Frank: We each spin our own webs.

Dave: We each spin the webs of the metaphor maker and the partially true agreer.

Laura: [Laughs] I really did walk into that trap. I got caught in your web.

Dave: You also made one.

Laura: Yes.

Frank: We are spiders who live in our own houses, our frameworks. That's as far as we can move: up, down, to the side....We're bound by it. That is the world we see and know.

Laura: Oh, but Frank, it's not that static. It's not a...

Dave: It's partly true, but it's not that static [Dave is parodying Laura here]

Frank: You just have a different web.

Jean: No, you just throw a line out to another web.

Frank: Yes, that's right, you can. Absolutely.

Jean: ...or to another world.

Frank: We don't live entirely bounded by those webs.

Jean: Hardly at all.

Frank: We throw them out and that's why we get entangled on such occasions as when we tape something.

Jean: Because you make the wrong step you see. You have to know where to walk on.

Frank: That's right. If you walk into someone else's web you get trapped.

Jean: You get stuck. You do.

[The conversation on the topic of the taping continues inconclusively for a few minutes longer and then shifts to less ego-involving topics. It ends at 2:45 am.]