You Must Meet My Wife

[FREDRIK]
She lightens my sadness
She livens my days
She bursts with a kind of madness
My well-ordered ways
My happiest mistake
The ache of my life—
You must meet my wife

She bubbles with pleasure
She glows with surprise
Disrupts my accustomed leisure
And ruffles my ties
I don't know even now
Quite how it began
You must meet my wife, my Anne

One thousand whims to which I give in
Since her smallest tear turns me ashen
I never dreamed that I could live in
So completely demented
Contented
A fashion

So sunlike, so winning
So unlike a wife
I do think that I'm beginning
To show signs of life
Don't ask me how at my age
One still can grow—
If you met my wife
You'd know

[DESIREE, spoken]
Dear Fredrik. I'm just longing to meet her. Sometime.

[FREDRIK]
She sparkles

[DESIREE]
How pleasant

[FREDRIK]
She twinkles

[DESIREE]
How nice

[FREDRIK]
Her youth is a sort of present—

[DESIREE]
Whatever the price

[FREDRIK]
The incandescent—what? The—

[DESIREE, holding up her cigarette]
Light?

[FREDRIK]
—Of my life!
You must meet my wife

[DESIREE, spoken]
Yes, I must. I really must. Now—

[FREDRIK]
She flutters

[DESIREE]
How charming

[FREDRIK]
She twitters

[DESIREE]
My word!

[FREDRIK]
She floats

[DESIREE]
Isn't that alarming?
What is she, a bird?

[FREDRIK]
She makes me feel I'm—what?

[DESIREE]
A very old man?

[FREDRIK]
Yes—no!

[DESIREE]
No?

[FREDRIK]
But—

[DESIREE]
I must meet your Gertrude

[FREDRIK]
My Anne

[DESIREE]
Sorry—Anne

[FREDRIK]
She loves my voice, my walk, my mustache
The cigar, in fact, that I'm smoking
She'll watch me puff until it's just ash
Then she'll save the cigar butt

[DESIREE]
Bizarre, but
You're joking

[FREDRIK]
She dotes on—

[DESIREE]
Your dimple

[FREDRIK]
My snoring

[DESIREE]
How dear

[FREDRIK]
The point is, she's really simple

[DESIREE]
Yes, that much seems clear

[FREDRIK]
She gives me funny names

[DESIREE]
Like—?

[FREDRIK]
"Old Dry-as-Dust."

[DESIREE]
Wouldn't she just?

[FREDRIK]
You must meet my wife

[DESIREE]
If I must—yes, I must

[FREDRIK]
A sea of whims that I submerge in
Yet so lovable in repentance
Unfortunately, still a virgin
But you can't force a flower—

[DESIREE]
Don't finish that sentence!
She's monstrous!

[FREDRIK]
She's frightened

[DESIREE]
Unfeeling!

[FREDRIK]
Unversed
She'd strike you as unenlightened

[DESIREE]
No, I'd strike her first

[FREDRIK]
Her reticence, her apprehension—

[DESIREE]
Her crust!

[FREDRIK]
No!

[DESIREE]
Yes!

[FREDRIK]
No!

[DESIREE]
Fredrik...

[FREDRIK]
You must meet my wife

[DESIREE]
Let me get my hat
And my knife

[FREDRIK]
What was that?

[DESIREE]
I must meet your wife

[FREDRIK & DESIREE]
Yes, you must Yes, I must