— Did you see? He skidded back into the rut he'd swerved from avoiding the old car cutting a swathe through bull vine and bittersweet down the driveway behind them.
— No, what. Who.
— Lily.
And see what she'd brought him, — Oscar? banging the outside doors, clattering down the hall — are you okay? It was a chocolate icecream cake and look, he already had a fire going in the fireplace, it was like old times, everything was so cozy, it was like he expected her, when she'd called and he hung up in her face she just came right over, to tell the truth she wasn't too sure what kind of welcome she'd get, coming down beside him, didn't he even have a kiss for her? sitting here all alone like old Mister Grouch with the silent television already aglow where a mouse flattened a cat with a sledgehammer, — you're not watching that are you? Look at me. Aren't you even going to ask how I am? But all he wanted to know was what she'd done to her hair. — I had it cut and shaped, do you like it? Me neither. Is that why you're so standoffish? You're not mad are you? But he seemed suddenly absorbed in the predicament of the cat, who was being stamped into smaller editions with a cookiecutter. — Oscar? Is everything okay?
— Is everything okay! Of all the stupid, you show up here like this out of nowhere just to ask me if everything's okay?
— I only meant, I thought maybe by now you're up walking around again and that, that everything…
— That everything was okay. That I'd forgotten all about the way you walked out of here with that, that, that all these medical bills were paid and I'd won my suit against the movie sitting here with seventy five million dollars in my pocket? Will you just tell me why you came? without making a big scene about it, just a plain honest answer?
— Oscar you can't! seizing both his hands — no, I've thought about you every day, how kind and gentle you are I forgot, I forgot how cold you can be, how you can look at me like you're looking right through me like I'm not even there. Do you know how that cuts right through somebody that cares about you like I do like this big knife cutting right through them? I never said anything about your seventy five million dollars, is that why you think I came? That's why you think I came isn't it, I don't see how you can be so cruel to me, how you can be so suspicious the minute I walk in the door that you won't even look at me because you're afraid I might ask you for money, even just a little because all this time you thought well I won't have to go through that again didn't you. You thought I'll never have to go through that with her again because I told you with Bobbie gone maybe I'll have this reconciliation with Daddy over this old misunderstanding where now I'm all they've got so maybe he'll help me out where there's all this money he put in Bobbie's name in this joint account where the government wouldn't get it when he died in these death taxes only now it's Bobbie that died instead so he has to pay all these death taxes on Bobbie's estate for his own money coming back to him which was really his all along, are you even listening to me?
— Now you listen to me. This miserable ambulance chaser you got to help everybody out, do you know how he helped me out? Sending me a bill for seventy five hundred dollars for filing some court papers someplace in my accident case and he won't hand anything over to the new lawyers I've got looking into it till I pay him, you remember right back at the start? When I asked you about paying him and you told me he said don't worry about it? The same trick that miserable woman lawyer played on us when he took your divorce case away from her after she made some feeble excuse and pulled out? Now he does the same thing.
— You know why Oscar? Because now she's this judge. Because he told me how they made her this judge and he got scared if he crossed her that some time he might have to appear before her in court where she'd wipe up the floor with him for revenge like she ought to do anyway just because he's such a real sleazeball.
— Then why did you let him get your, get you in the back seat of his BMW and every motel bed from Disney World to…
— I told you!
— You did not tell me!
— Because I was mad at you, because…
— Why! You didn't tell me why, you just…
— Because you hurt my feelings, I told you.
— You've told me that a hundred times, how. How did I…
— Because you just did again, you said I was stupid right when I came in, just because you're smarter than I am with all these books that doesn't mean you're better than me does it?
— Listen, just tell me what I did that made you get into bed with that, that real…
— The way you treated me laying there on your back with this big erection sticking up right in front of somebody as if you never saw me before you didn't even…
— No wait, wait. In front of who…
— I don't know who! Because he didn't have any clothes on either like you were just laying there showing off and there were these cans of shoe polish on the bed, there were these three kinds of shoe polish and you…
— No wait stop it, stop! You mean this was some dream you had? some stupid dream that made you so mad when you woke up that you…
— It was real! It was as real as anything, it was just as real as that little man in the black suit you dreamed came to see you in the hospital to take these messages to the other side and…
— No that happened! That really happened, it was as real as we're sitting here now with your…
— That's what I just said! It was just as real as right now with your hand on my, I still get mad when I remember you laying there with it sticking up like I never saw you have one like that before and you looked at me like you never saw me before when I reached over and…
— Of all the, the shoe polish? three kinds of shoe polish? Of all the, dreams like that all of them, they're the junkyard of the mind all of them of all the crazy, and you want me to believe that? that that's why you did it?
— Oscar why are you doing this to me! When you're all I've thought about day after day crying myself to sleep sometimes at night remembering all the nice things I did for you when it was just you and me? Like that time that we, I can't even talk about it, that sweet sad kind of smile you'd always have when I came in the room I thought about it all the way coming over here but you just look at me like you wish I'd go away, I can feel it, you don't even want to look at me but I can feel it, don't you even think I have feelings? And finally letting go his moist hands to look up where his gaze lay fixed — at her? a full bosomed blonde crossing a knobbed knee on the screen, — you'd like to be feeling hers wouldn't you, did you think that's what I meant? This lump I've got, I think it got worse since I saw you, can you feel it? No don't then, you didn't even ask, it's too late please don't try, can't I say anything to make you listen to me?
— No wait, look! he startled upright, — where's the, here! The room shook with the sound of cannon fire, the screen with a tumult of plunging horses, flaring rockets and the Stars and Bars and men, men — look!
— How can you do this! I can't believe you're actually doing this just to drive me away when I came here to…
— Please! as the smoke cleared, and now the room echoed with the clop clop of a horse and carriage seen approaching up a drive adroop with Spanish moss from the pillared veranda of an antebellum mansion by an imposing liveried black, the sun gleaming on the strong lineaments of his brow arching disdainfully as a decrepit horse and buggy bearing an aging woman and a handsome intense young man standing to snap his whip imperiously came close for an exchange of unheard words to be pointed scornfully on their way, glimpsed from behind a curtain by a ravishingly beautiful young woman in negligee in their retreat back down the drive. — Good God! he barely whispered.