Bill Orcutt Character Analysis

Almost immediately after the reconstitution of her face to its former pert, heart-shaped pre-explosion perfection, she decided to build a small contemporary house on a ten-acre lot the other side of Rimrock ridge and to sell the big old house, the outbuildings, and their hundred-odd acres. […] When he overheard her telling the architect, their neighbor Bill Orcutt, that she had always hated their house, the Swede was as stunned as if she were telling Orcutt she had always hated her husband.

“She looks like a million bucks,” his father said. “That girl looks like herself again. Getting rid of those cows was the smartest thing you ever did. I never liked ’em. I never saw why she needed them. Thank God for that face-lift. I was against it but I was wrong. Dead wrong. I got to admit it. That guy did a wonderful job. Thank God our Dawn doesn’t look anymore like all that she went through.”

“But degrading things should not be taken in their stride! I say lock them in their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like this. This is the morality of a country that we’re talking about. Well, isn’t it? Am I nuts? It is an affront to decency and to decent people.”

“And what,” Marcia asked him, “is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?”

The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this woman.

It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the family. Bill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov’s aid. “And what is wrong with decency?” Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia.

But whether he was or wasn’t running the show no longer mattered, because if Merry and Rita Cohen were connected, in any way, if Merry had lied to him about not knowing Rita Cohen, then she might as easily have been lying about being taken in by Sheila after the bombing. If that was so, when Dawn and Orcutt ran off to live in this cardboard house, he and Sheila could run off to Puerto Rico after all. And if, as a result, his father dropped dead, well, they’d just have to bury him. That’s what they’d do: bury him deep in the ground.

Almost immediately after the reconstitution of her face to its former pert, heart-shaped pre-explosion perfection, she decided to build a small contemporary house on a ten-acre lot the other side of Rimrock ridge and to sell the big old house, the outbuildings, and their hundred-odd acres. […] When he overheard her telling the architect, their neighbor Bill Orcutt, that she had always hated their house, the Swede was as stunned as if she were telling Orcutt she had always hated her husband.

“She looks like a million bucks,” his father said. “That girl looks like herself again. Getting rid of those cows was the smartest thing you ever did. I never liked ’em. I never saw why she needed them. Thank God for that face-lift. I was against it but I was wrong. Dead wrong. I got to admit it. That guy did a wonderful job. Thank God our Dawn doesn’t look anymore like all that she went through.”

“But degrading things should not be taken in their stride! I say lock them in their rooms if they take this in their stride! I remember when kids used to be at home doing their homework and not out seeing movies like this. This is the morality of a country that we’re talking about. Well, isn’t it? Am I nuts? It is an affront to decency and to decent people.”

“And what,” Marcia asked him, “is so inexhaustibly interesting about decency?”

The question so surprised him that it left him looking a little frantically around the table for somebody with an opinion learned enough to subdue this woman.

It turned out to be Orcutt, that great friend of the family. Bill Orcutt was coming to Lou Levov’s aid. “And what is wrong with decency?” Orcutt asked, smiling broadly at Marcia.

But whether he was or wasn’t running the show no longer mattered, because if Merry and Rita Cohen were connected, in any way, if Merry had lied to him about not knowing Rita Cohen, then she might as easily have been lying about being taken in by Sheila after the bombing. If that was so, when Dawn and Orcutt ran off to live in this cardboard house, he and Sheila could run off to Puerto Rico after all. And if, as a result, his father dropped dead, well, they’d just have to bury him. That’s what they’d do: bury him deep in the ground.