— Oscar?
— Tell her to hurry!
— Oscar?
— And don't talk to me when I'm on the phone! Here, hang it up.
— I just wanted to say do you want to eat?
— To eat what!
— Eggs? you want me to make eggs?
— You can't make eggs.
— I can so. I can make them boiled, or scrambled, or…
— Listen Lily you can't make eggs. Chickens make eggs, ducks make eggs, those swans on the pond out there make eggs but you don't make eggs. You cook eggs, you prepare eggs. You don't make eggs.
— Oh Oscar. You always make everything so complicated, all I meant was…
— Isn't that what language is for? to say what you mean? That's why man invented language, isn't it? so we can say what we mean?
— What man. Anyway I'm not talking about language I'm talking about eggs, you knew what I meant. Do you want me to prepare you some eggs?
— No.
— I thought that's why you wanted me to come over because you were alone, to help you out. Who was that old man.
— Who was what old man.
— This old man walking around the room when I drove in before.
— There was no old man walking around the…
— I saw him through the windows Oscar, just for a second when I looked up, he was sort of stooped and slow right here walking across the room, by the time I got out of the car and came in he was gone.
— Oh. Oh. That, oh yes I forgot I, must have been old Mister, Mister Boatwright yes he's the, he's our plumber he's quite old yes, been with the house as long as I can remember.
— You better get a new one pretty soon, he didn't look like he could hardly make it across the room.
— Well he's, an old house like this he knows every pipe in the house he's replaced most of them, get some new young plumber in here it would take him a year to figure things out and have to start all over again.
— I think you better start all over again pretty soon before the whole place falls down like that porch out there.
— They'll be after it next, a wealthy recluse living on a family estate on Long Island when they see that! He had the torn page of newsprint he'd held crushed in his hand up trying to smooth it against a quivering knee, — Oswald! His son Oswald who wrote the original script for the spectacularly successful no wonder he's furious, that fool law clerk of his takes him to see this vulgar misleading twisted deformed perverted distortion of my, exploiting my grandfather, exploiting his father exploiting the family exploiting the whole Civil War and he thinks I wrote what he's seeing up there on the screen where is it, this madness in the, here, as an article of impeachment the possibility of a strain of madness running in the Judge's family which has gained credence with the, credence! No wonder he's furious, just the word, impeachment just the word. Impeachment! Madness, all right but a man whose whole life is the law, who's lived and breathed the law for his whole, for almost a century a century! It would kill him they, look at them look at it! He spread up the flaming effigy IMPEACH frozen there in print before the flames caught it — as an article of impeachment the strain of…
— You just read me that, you've read me all of it ten times Oscar it's all just…
— What! all just what!
— Just, Oswald? You want me to call you Oswald?
— If I, Lily if I could reach you to hit you I'd…
— It's the same thing! but she stepped away nonetheless, — this wealthy excuse living on this big fancy estate they got everything wrong didn't they? this Oswald that wrote this big movie is that you? where he just lost this big lawsuit that's not you is it? so they pretend they know everything because nobody knows anything?
— Basic knows, this lawyer Mister Basic he must know but there's something wrong somewhere. I can't get him on the phone they don't call me back I know it, I know there's something terribly wrong I've known it since the, you remember that black actor? the one we saw on television who was in the movie when he talked about being in prison? that he learned to act when he was in prison and…
— The telephone, you…
— Well answer it! If it's this collection agency tell them…
— Hello? It's who?
— Say I went to California.
— It's The People Magazine.
— No. Tell them…
— Hello? He went to California… No he didn't leave a num…
— Just hang up! Listen, if it rings again if it's Basic let me have it, or these other lawyers the ones with my accident case I…
— They called already Oscar.
— When! Why didn't you…
— Just now, when you were in the bathroom. I forgot.
— They're supposed to stop this collection agency from calling me in the middle of the night, that bill for seventy five hundred dollars for suing myself he ought to be shot.
— That's what Daddy said too but Reverend Bobby Joe said that could get him in real trouble, because Daddy already gave him this money to sue the insurance company and make them pay up on Bobbie's car where Reverend Bobby Joe said it was all this grand design of the Lord where Daddy could take this big insurance settlement and cleanse it by putting it in the Lord's service? Only now they won't pay it because they said Daddy's responsible because he gave Bobbie the money for the car where they found this empty sixpack in the wreck when tragedy struck so Daddy has to sue this dealer who sold Bobbie the car because he already failed his learner's permit three times so he didn't even have a driving license and they never should have sold him the car in the first place. So now Daddy and Reverend Bobby Joe they're both of them mad at me because it's my fault I brought down this lawyer that took money from Daddy to help him out when the only reason he did it with me in the first place in his car and at Disney World and these water beds all over the place he thought he was going to get in on all this money I'd have from Daddy now that Bobbie was gone when we reconciliated and he's up there right now spreading my girlfriend from long lines on his desk unzipping his big…
— Wait, no wait he was, that was before, you did it with him in his car before Bobbie's accident because of that stupid dream you…
— I don't care! I said I want to get revenge and don't call me stupid either, you said you'd help me didn't you? If we could do something to his car that would be funny, so he could have an accident like Bobbie wouldn't that be funny? Did you see that old movie where she thinks Gary Grant did something to the brakes so she'll go over the cliff? Only this time…
— Funny? getting run over by a car do you think I…
— Or I read someplace where they put this rattlesnake in this man's mailbox so that when he reached in…
— No! No this is all…
— Then you think of something! You just sit around here all day reading and watching the television where all everybody does is kill each other and you still didn't think of something?
— Wait what time is it. My nature program, what time is it.
— I don't know! I didn't come over here to watch some smelly animals and funny looking fish Oscar, can't you even talk to me?
— I, I can't no, I can't talk to anyone I can't think I can't even, everything's just spinning around I just want to get my mind off the whole, off all of it for a minute.
— Do you want me to…
— No, no don't. Later.
— I'm hungry she said, straightening up as the screen came dispiritedly to life on a visit to a lackluster member of the Cistaceae or rockrose family, Helianthemum dumosum, more familiarly known in its long suffering neighborhood as bushy frostweed for its talent at surviving the trampling by various hoofed eventoed closecropping stock of the suborder Ruminantia, to silently spread and widen its habitat at its neighbors' expense like some herbal version of Gresham's law in Darwinian dress demonstrating no more, as his head nodded and his breath fell and the crush of newsprint dropped to the floor, the tug at his lips in the troubled wince of a smile might have signaled no more than or, better perhaps the very heart of some drowned ceremony of innocence now the worst were filled with passionate intensity where — we share something then don't we, no small thing either — That's good to know, demonstrating simply the survival of the fittest embracing here in bushy frostweed no more than those fittest to survive not necessarily, not by any means, by any manner of speaking, the best, so that when at last the outer doors clattered open, clattered closed and down the hall with — My God, he's sound asleep! it was upon some lowlife in the bogs from the sundew family, Droseraceae to their betters, busy here supplementing their nitrogen spare diets in this gloomy habitat with insects captured on their leaves so purposefully endowed with sticky glands or hairs.