Cost of Living

In the prologue, Eddie explains that he is using his phone as an ineffectual means of connection: He sends texts to his dead wife’s number. While she was alive, Eddie would go on cross-country trips as a truck driver, and Ani would text him. Although the texts were mostly mundane, they made him feel less isolated and alone on the road. Eddie doesn’t describe whether he responded to her texts in kind, or even what lead to the demise of their marriage, although their separation suggests that the connection between them deteriorated. Eddie sees these text messages from Ani, whether he is romanticizing them after the fact or not, as the lifeline that kept his loneliness at bay. In reality, the occasional one-line text is fairly paltry in terms of nurturing an entire marriage from the other side of the country. When Eddie is helping Ani bathe, she curses at him for not taking care of her when it counted, when they were still together.

Eddie’s texts after Ani’s death are even more futile, an expression of affection that is simply too late. The communication devices used in the play are dead ends. Ani tells Eddie multiple times that she has an emergency button that will summon help to remove Eddie from her apartment. She sees the button as a safety net that allows her to preserve a measure of autonomy in her own space. After Eddie severed the line of communication between them for six months, Ani wants to feel as if she has control. Eddie, however, reveals that the button only calls him as her emergency contact. Ani doesn’t want to see Eddie, but she has no one else to call. Eddie uses his phone to try to rebuild their connection; he plays music for Ani, but he only manages to highlight how far apart they have grown.

Jess reaches a similar dead end when she calls her mother after running out of John’s apartment. She leaves a message to tell her how much she loves and misses her, and says that she wishes her mother were still herself. This suggests that Jess’s mother, or at least the mother who raised her, is nearly as unreachable as Ani is for Eddie. When Eddie suddenly receives texts from Ani’s number, he tries desperately to turn the texter into his wife. Eddie goes to the bar and says that there isn’t anyone who resembles Ani. He looks for a sign that the texts are meaningful by trying to connect Jess to the phone number. In the end, technology is a poor substitute for personal connection. When Eddie’s phone buzzes after Jess runs out, he feels fear and sadness, as a legitimate human connection has just slipped away. But Jess returns, and Eddie ignores his phone. Their connection is tentative, and much more complicated than the relationships that they’ve been having with their phones. It also has the potential to become something real, a friendship that they both badly need.