William Gaddis - A Folic Of His Own

— 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…'

— That's enough! Giant bird plumes, my God.

— The confusion of tongues was the way Harry put it, simply another language, art theory referring only to itself 'stripping the forms of art to the bone, shaking off the emotional excesses of abstract expressionism' reducing art itself to theory with no more substance than that swarm of flies the Judge stepped on in his Szyrk opinion while Szyrk himself is out there somewhere right now hearing it exalted in terms of death and transfiguration, of the sacred seizing the profane in an embrace seething with sexual ferment saying it all 'makes him puke' with these 'hints of Christian sacrifice and suffering, its suggestions of journeys without end as the sculptor seems to turn away, smitten to the point where its beams buckle in shyness yet remain as firm and vigilant as a dog who has cornered his prey' —to coin a phrase, as Christina broke off with the front page picture of the thing itself, towering over the new dining area at Mel's Kandy Kitchen like the one at Babel rising toward heaven till the Old Testament Sculptor up there was smitten to the point of sending down a confusion of tongues so that nobody knew what anyone else was talking about where the judge below explicated the Village defense resting on an act of God in his charge to the jury while assorted Baptists sang Amazing Grace and the high school band played America the Beautiful and Tubby the Tuba on the courthouse steps as policemen ticketed cars with out of state plates and one of them smashed the camera of a newsman from the liberal northern press out to make trouble playing up the race angle on the piebald jury's black and a few poor white faces from the Possum Hollow end of town where long smouldering resentment over lacking streetlights, neglected garbage collection, road repair and ruptured sewer lines threatened to surface in a verdict against the Village already crippled by its foreign foulmouthed red atheist cross-claimant under the local headline STRANGE BEDFELLOWS IN CYCLONE SEVEN CASE and a vexatious God strangling in the bedclothes, the pied jury as finders of fact decided parti pris for plaintiff little James B with a judgment for damages, — talk about stepping on a swarm of flies said Harry, here was Judge Crease himself reported as saying some of these jurors had lied during jury selection when they declared they could hear the case objectively, reading what they told the newspapers after the trial their minds were made up before they walked into the courtroom, — all God fearing men and look, that reminds me. Your friend Trish.