— What's the difference… She hadn't moved, her back to him rigid as the table between them — he was dead, wasn't he?
— Going over a trestle? off the roof of the train? Because I remember it, I remember that scene. I saw the same movie.
— That wasn't kind, was it… and her shoulders fell a little, — because when people tell a lie…
— No I didn't mean, I didn't say that you'd…
— I'll tell you why yes, because why people lie is, because when people stop lying you know they've stopped caring.
— Wait… but she'd made a sudden move for the door, pulled it open and was through it out to the terrace where, before he could follow, she'd come down sitting alone on the edge of an upturned chair and he stopped, looking out at her, at her hair smouldering red in the sun and the yellow green of something she was wearing, a sweater? he hadn't noticed, even the pale arch of her face protesting the drab of the leaves dead around her and he coughed again, cleared his throat as though about to speak, to arrest a shudder turning away to pace the kitchen floor looking out there each time he passed, finally reaching the phone, dialing it, speaking in blurred tones of — en désordre, la maison oui… demain? tôt le matin, oui? certainement… before hanging it up and stepping out to the sun's pale warmth.
She'd looked up, not at him but right past him at the house, at the roof peaked in this outward symmetry over twinned windows so close up there they must open from one room but in fact looked out from the near ends of two neither of them really furnished, an empty bookcase and sagging daybed in one and in the other a gutted chaise longue voluted in French pretension trailing gold velvet in the dust undisturbed on the floor since she'd stood there, maybe three or four times since she'd lived in the house, looking down on the greens of the lower lawn and the leaves before they'd cried out their colours, before they'd seized separate identities here in vermilion haste gone withering red as old sores, there bittersweet paling yellow toward stunted heights glowing orange in that last spectral rapture and to fall, reduced again to indistinction in this stained monotony of lifelessness at her feet where a dove carped among last testimonies blown down from somewhere out of reach, out of sight up the hill in its claim as a mountain, leaves of scarlet oak here and there in the blackened red of blood long clotted and dried. — Here… he'd come down to right an overturned chair, — sit here… brushing the leaves from it — I, I've thought about what you said and, I hope you don't think I…
She hadn't moved. — I've never really looked at it.
— At what… looking where she was looking.
— At the house. From outside I mean.
— Oh the house yes, the house. It was built that way yes, it was built to be seen from outside it was, that was the style, he came on, abruptly rescued from uncertainty, raised to the surface — yes, they had style books, these country architects and the carpenters it was all derivative wasn't it, those grand Victorian mansions with their rooms and rooms and towering heights and cupolas and the marvelous intricate ironwork. That whole inspiration of medieval Gothic but these poor fellows didn't have it, the stonework and the wrought iron. All they had were the simple dependable old materials, the wood and their hammers and saws and their own clumsy ingenuity bringing those grandiose visions the masters had left behind down to a human scale with their own little inventions, those vertical darts coming down from the eaves? and that row of bull's eyes underneath? He was up kicking leaves aside, gesturing, both arms raised embracing — a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions, the inside's a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale, because it's stood here, hasn't it, foolish inventions and all it's stood here for ninety years… breaking off, staring up where her gaze had fled back with those towering heights and cupolas, as though for some echo: It's like the inside of your head McCandless, if that was what brought him to add — why when somebody breaks in, it's like being assaulted, it's the…
— Listen! The phone had rung inside and she started up at the second ring, sank back with the third. — All I meant was, it's a hard house to hide in… Raising her eyes up to the twinned windows again, — seeing it from outside, looking up there and seeing myself looking out when everything was green, it all looked so much bigger. Like Bedford. The last time my mother came out to Bedford she just sat in the car with the chauffeur. She sat there for two hours and when we left, all she said was I never realized there were so many shades of green.
— What was Bedford.
— A big country house we had. It burned.
— When you were a child? was that…
— Last week… She thrust a foot into the leaves bringing the dove nearest up in a flutter, and down again, bleating. — That was the last thing she said that made any sense… looking down off the terrace — and now it's, look at it, it's just a horrid little back yard.
— Well it's, yes of course that's what happens isn't it, he said as though again called on to explain, pursuing it as he had the house itself, welcoming facts proof against fine phrases that didn't mean anything with — all those glorious colours the leaves turn when the chlorophyll breaks down in the fall, when the proteins that are tied to the chlorophyll molecules break down into their amino acids that go down into the stems and the roots. That may be what happens to people when they get old too, these proteins breaking down faster than they can be replaced and then, yes well and then of course, since proteins are the essential elements in all living cells the whole system begins to disinteg…
— Why did you ask me that.
— Did I, about what I don't…
— About my father.
— I don't know, I… He'd settled on the bare rungs of the chair, rubbing a thumb over the back of his hand as though to rub away the spots there, — I don't know.
— Then why did you. Because you knew the whole thing anyway, you knew what really happened Billy'd already told you every…
— Can't you, please. Just listen to me please. I didn't need to hear it from him. I didn't have to read it in the damned papers I was out there when it happened, good God. You know the name Vorakers out there like you know the name De Beers, you know Vorakers Consolidated Reserve like the name of a country and it's bigger than most of them, buy and sell half of them out of its back pocket and that's all he was doing, that's what your father was doing it wasn't a secret, it wasn't even a scandal till these big bribe cases like Lockheed came up and the politicians and papers over here turned it into one and what happened then, I didn't need Billy to tell me what happened then did I? Took him out drinking half the night no, no I told you he took me I hardly got a word in, you think you have to teach the young outrage? Not just Paul not just your father no, he was outraged at everything, everybody who came before him you think he left me out? that he had some kind of romantic picture like the, like you did? finding gold out there when I was his age do you know what he said? Just one more four fucking thousand foot hole in the ground they'll pack with black skins to dig it out for them oldest damned story there is, the new generation blames the old one for the mess it inherits and they lump us all together because all they see is what we've become, lying in wait for you out there one misstep and they pounce, grab one straw of expediency and they're on to you for betraying yourself, betraying them, selling out like the ones writing bad books and bad everything who are doing the best they can? when we thought we could count on civilization? Two hundred years building this great bastion of middle class values, fair play, pay your debts, fair pay for honest work, two hundred years that's about all it is, progress, improvement everywhere, what's worth doing is worth doing well and they find out that's the most dangerous thing of all, all our grand solutions turn into their nightmares. Nuclear energy to bring cheap power everywhere and all they hear is radiation threats and what in hell to do with the waste. Food for the millions and they're back eating organic sprouts and stone ground flour because everything else is poisonous additives, pesticides poisoning the earth, poisoning the rivers the oceans and the conquest of space turns into military satellites and high technology where the only metaphor we've given them is the neutron bomb and the only news is today's front page… He'd been up kicking paths through the leaves until one of them led him to the edge of the terrace where he stood looking down toward the river. — Have you ever seen the sunrise here? and as though she'd answered she hadn't, as though she'd answered at all — especially in winter. You'll see it in winter, it's moved south where the river's its widest and it comes up so fast, it's as if it just wanted to prove the day, get it established so it can loiter through the rest of it, spend the first damned half of your life complicating things in that eagerness to take on everything and straighten all of it out and the second half cleaning up the mess you've made of the first, that's what they won't understand. Finally realize you can't leave things better than you found them the best you can do is try not to leave them any worse but they won't forgive you, get toward the end of the day like the sun going down in Key West if you've ever seen that? They're all down there for the sunset, watching it drop like a bucket of blood and clapping and cheering the instant it disappears, cheer you out the door and damned glad to see the last of you.