— If that's all you can…
— That was the first scene of my, did you see it! And here was the blonde again, seated knob knee to knee with a black man of imposing dimensions and sartorial splendour introduced as 'our guest today' by a name she was sure their wonderful audience out there would want to know if it was his real one? — Yes it's that friend of look it's, listen!
— No I'm going! I'm going right now Oscar, if you think I came over just to sit and watch television I can't believe how much you've changed, maybe I can't still expect you to feel like I do about you but I hoped at least you could be kind, are you listening to me? She'd lurched up only to come down closer as they were being told it was a long story, how he'd taken this name, because his old name was way behind him, far enough behind him that now he could talk about it, because he'd done time under his old name, — can't you see what I'm going through? she came on, — that you're looking at somebody that's practically coming to pieces? You're not even looking at me, can't you even hold my hand if you can't bear to look at me? It was back in Illinois, he'd been sent up for three years for something a dumb kid would do stealing a car and he didn't even realize he'd driven across the state line that made it a Federal crime and a Federal prison and he felt like his life was over before it hardly began but maybe you wouldn't believe it, that 'was the best thing that ever happened to him. — Don't you believe me? and she had his hand again, tight — if I told you it really didn't mean anything? that I was all upset about your accident seeing you in pain and then Bobbie when tragedy struck down there and I hardly knew what I was doing when I let him do it? The best thing that ever happened because they had a program there, kind of play acting therapy for the prisoners to help them understand their anger by venting their hostility in these plays they chose, The Emperor Jones, he'd done The Emperor Jones — when I was really crying out for help Oscar and you weren't there on account of your accident, nobody was, can't you understand? He'd always been pretty vain about his looks, had to admit it now with the studio lights gleaming on the strong lineaments of his brow arching in a deprecating sort of way but they'd never brought him anything but trouble and now suddenly here was a place for them, a place for all his anger and strength and talent if you'd call it that and he'd never have made it without the others, the other prisoners when he heard their applause he knew he had something, one buddy in the program in particular kind of a jailhouse lawyer in there for something that would curl your hair tried to help him out on his appeal, told him if you're black in America you're always playing a part, no way around it just got to find the right part to play where you aren't going to take your bows in a cell block and that did it, — Oscar?
— Just listen will you!
— Can't you just listen to me for a second? please? her voice broke in what might have been a sob, and that was when he swore he knew what he'd be, who he'd be when he got out of there, when he took that name from one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence because this was his own declaration of independence from who he'd been, who they'd told him he was when they took one look at him, who they'd tried to make him, besides he'd had a little brother once they called Button, died from meningitis they'd thought was just a bad cold, didn't have any doctor, couldn't afford one — because I need you to help me Oscar, won't you just listen?
— How! I've got my own doctors' bills to pay haven't I? He'd snapped off the sound as the screen abruptly confronted them with a lively fellow fleeing the torments of diarrhea at what appeared to be an international airport, — after the mess you and that lawyer you brought me made of things? He ought to be shot.
— That's why I came, Oscar.
— You've done enough haven't you? Will you just come right out with it? without all this, all these maudlin theatrics, just come right out and tell me what you want?
— Revenge.
— For what, against who, what…
— Him.
— A little late for that isn't it? He's already got me into this mess, and then he sends a bill for seven…
— Not for you, for me, what he's done to me.
— We know what he's done to you don't we? in the front seat, the back seat and every bed from here to Disney World, that's all he's good for isn't it?
— With my girlfriend.
— What girlfriend, what…
— He's been screwing my girlfriend! That's what. My girlfriend from the phone company where we worked together on long lines, she needed this divorce so I sent her to him and they did it the second time she went there, right on his desk, she said he just pushed all these papers away and fucked her right up there on his desk and they're doing it now someplace, I bet they're doing it someplace right now.
— She told you this?
— After I got my hair cut and shaped like this because he wanted me to that makes me look like some scarecrow?
— Take him before a grievance committee, that's what I…
— Are you crazy? because it's just all these other lawyers, didn't he tell us that himself? when we wanted to do that with that sleazeball woman lawyer he took my divorce away from that we had to pay off and now she's this judge? Because they're all these other lawyers that are screwing their clients so they're scared if they give him a hard time they're going to be next, no. I mean revenge. I mean like in the movies, you're always writing these plays where you have to think up these characters and plots and everything and here's this real sleazeball character you have to start right off with, it would make some movie. You ought to see my girlfriend, she's really built and she's got all this red hair you ought to see her. Are you hungry? We could watch television while we eat and maybe you'll think of something.
And so over Pinot Grigio and cold salmon with mayonnaise and a boiled potato they watched Errol Flynn in The Charge of the Light Brigade. — Do you have to go? over that sodden icecream cake.
— I have to get this car back where I borrowed it.
— Where, from who.
— My girlfriend at long lines.
When the telephone rang later that night he let it ring, drawn up tight with one knee clenched against him as though cringing from some featureless dread there under the cover where he had a terrible dream which he could not remember, transfixed over coffee and the morning's headlines, or even on the mornings after that, vaguely following the course of jury selection and the trial in U.S. District Court, Southern District of Virginia, kept alive in the press pandering to Senator Bilk's electioneering appetite for attacks by the liberal northern media on his perennial states' rights stance against Federal interference in general and his vow to his constituents to employ every measure at his command to prevent the elevation of Judge Crease to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in particular; by the homespun support of his veteran colleague from Iowa's Twenty Fourth Congressional District sponsoring a bill to restore the arts to their pristine decorative function; and finally by fleeting interviews with the artist himself, just now busied elsewhere defending a suit alleging wrongful death in the collapse of another of his creations in securing the delicate balance of its three ton steel appendages, denying any intention of meaning to be construed in his sculptural works beyond the raw arrangement of their actual materials in which any meaning, if there were such, resided in this very meaninglessness hence the vacuous site specificity of Cyclone Seven being embraced, even then, in testimony before the jury by expert witnesses called at appropriate expense on his behalf and in the farflung vapourings of art critics in the press confronting 'the challenge to decipher its iconography in its forceful maneuverings of space by steel beams bending, leaning, reclining and thrusting themselves forward, light as plumes of a gigantic bird curving around us with gentle solicitude in the sculptor's wish to appeal to all people in sympathy with their lives and needs in the energizing myth of participatory democracy characteristic of American postwar art to fit in everywhere yet stand defiantly alone in its solitary monumentality, restless and dominating, even menacing in its threat of instability finding few echoes in the surrounding architecture, dwarfing the people with an intimidating authority but also a sense of informality and fun, toying with our anxieties of inclusion and exclusion in experiencing the full immensity and vertigo of space, tapping the explosive feelings trapped within its sense of emotional and physical accessibility, its suggestions of Christian sacrifices and suffering…'