E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

BY THIS TIME I had achieved an affection for little Lissy. Whenever she disappeared for a day or two I found myself waiting for her return. Of all of them she was the most talkative, the most fetching certainly, and the fact that I was sightless intrigued her, whereas the others merely deferred to me. One morning she found me in the kitchen by bumping into me, because she had decided to keep her eyes closed from the moment she woke up. It’s not so bad, is it, she said. Oh I know I can open my eyes at any time where you can’t, but right now you can see better than me, can’t you? I said I could because my other faculties were a kind of recompense. And while we had this conversation I put a glass of orange juice in her hand, and she gasped.

Lissy’s experiments in sightlessness brought us closer. She would feel my features, touching my forehead, nose, my mouth with her small hands, at the same time I ran my fingers over her face. She was so charming, her eyes closed, and her head averted in the manner of someone thinking of the image her hands created. Supposing this is what people did instead of kissing, I said to her. Like we were some isolated island people apart from the rest of the world. And at that I felt her lips on mine. She was standing on tiptoe to reach me and I held her waist and ran my hands down her back and felt her flesh under the thin shift she wore.

I won’t pretend I was instantly and passionately in love with young Lissy. Yes, it was as if my age fell from me, but there was always in my mind an awareness of transgression — as if I was taking advantage not of this girl’s generosity, but of the culture she had come out of, because she was not at all virginal, she was clearly experienced and quite comfortable climbing all over me, like some cat looking for a place to nestle down.

It doesn’t make any sense at this point to gloss over things. I quote from one of our poets: “Why not say what happened?” If anyone ever reads this and thinks poorly of me — Jacqueline, if you read this you will understand, I know — but if anyone else is put out, what is that to me? I am headed in any event to a superseding namelessness.

THE ONLY SUSPENSE for me was in how much of Lissy’s prattle I had to listen to on the way to the inevitable. She believed that trees were sentient. She thought people could find the answers to their problems or even know their fate by consulting a Chinese book of wisdom that she carried in her rucksack. You threw some sticks down and their arrangement told you what page to turn to. But it’s just the same for you, Homer, if you open the book to any page and point your finger, she said. So I did that and she read the passage I had pointed to: Jesus, she said, I’m sorry Homer, there’s “trouble ahead.” Nothing I didn’t know, I told her. And then she read to me from a novel in which a Buddha-inflamed German wandered about seeking enlightenment. I didn’t tell her how funny I thought that was. Lissy was herself a Buddhist only insofar as she had a romantic wistful admiration for anyone who was. It was more a generalized susceptibility she had to anything Eastern. I was entranced by her sweetly cracked voice. You could almost see the little packets of sound trooping along her vocal cords one after another, some of the squeaking kind, others tumbling into the alto range.

She took it upon herself to wash my feet before I retired, saying it was an ancient custom of the desert peoples of the Near East — Jews, Christians, or Whoever. She wanted to do this and so I let her, though it was embarrassing to me. I knew my feet were far from my best feature, and having always found it difficult to trim my toenails, an arduous process, and sometimes painful, I had done that less frequently than I should have. But this Lissy didn’t seem to care, she had found one of Grandmamma Robileaux’s steel mixing bowls and filled it with warm water, and lay a hand towel in the water and then over my feet, and then under, lifting each foot by the heel, and washing the soles, and I had to admit it was not unpleasant. It was clearly a ceremonial washing rather than anything of practical use. These youngsters had various ceremonies of their eclectic taste, the ceremony of smoking, of drinking, of listening to music, of having sex. Their lives were one ceremony after another, and to a person who had drifted through time lacking any capacity to step out of its stream, I was prepared to learn this art with which they seemed to have been born.

One evening after washing my feet she stayed in the room with me. Her suggestion that we meditate together is what led us to lovemaking. There was really no right place to sit in the lotus position in this house. No alcove that wasn’t piled high with things. My bedroom — really not even my bedroom in which the inevitable stacks of newspapers and piles of books and bric-a-brac lay about, leaving the narrowest of aisles, but my bed, a double bed which I had managed to keep sacrosanct, was the only proper platform for thinking about nothing. For that was what we were supposed to do, according to Lissy. I can’t think about nothing, I said to her. The best I can do is think about myself thinking. Shhh, Homer, she said. Shhh. And when she whispered my name, God help me, the love broke over me like the hot tears of a soul that has found salvation.

Holding her arms straight up so I could lift her dress away, she emerged from her chrysalis, this tremulant wisp of a girl. Her narrow shoulders, nipples like seeds on her thin chest. And the long waist, and a pear-shaped little backside in my palms. Giving her small gift to the world, Lissy, with her childlike faith in ideas mysterious to her. Leading me through it.

Afterward, I held her in my arms and then there was a moment of mental confusion, some weird misstep of time itself, because I was briefly under the illusion that it was Sister Mary Elizabeth Riordan I was holding.

I DON’T KNOW WHY I couldn’t simply enjoy the blessing of this charmingly loopy creature, the experience of her, so unsummoned, and let it go at that. Instead, I decided to torture myself by thinking about that momentary illusion while in her arms of having had my piano student. I needed to talk to Langley about it. I thought I had purged myself of any lingering feelings for Mary Elizabeth Riordan — after all she was transmogrified, a certified fifty-year-old sister. So I had debased two dear souls simultaneously, violating one in spirit and using the other for the purpose. It was no consolation to me that Lissy didn’t seem to feel that anything of consequence had occurred between us. She was, at her age, in the exploratory mode characteristic of her culture. But I was deep in the doldrums now, for of course I had mostly debased myself. I knew Langley too had at that long ago time fallen in love with our piano student. I wanted to know his thinking. We had never talked about things of this sort. I was in a confessional mood. Did anybody know what love was? Could unconsummated love exist without carnal fantasy, could it survive as love without recompense, without reward? No question that I had enjoyed Lissy’s giving of her body. So what did anybody love other than the genus, where one adorable creature could stand in for another?

But there didn’t seem to be a right time to have this conversation with my brother. Too much was going on. As I’ve said, besides the original group we’d met in the park, friends of theirs, fellow squatters, had been in and out, and there were instances when I tripped over someone of whose presence I had not been aware. Or I’d hear laughter or chattering in another room and feel myself to be a guest in somebody else’s house. Langley had surprised me by welcoming these people and acting toward them with uncharacteristic generosity. And they responded, taking up his daily way of life, acolytes in his Ministry. Even the thick-lensed cartoonist, Connor, liked to bring back from the street something he thought Langley would want. They all seemed to understand his acquisitiveness as an ethos. I was fairly sure that he wasn’t involved with any of the girls — running these people seemed to be how he was relating to them, they could have been kid pickpockets in London and he Fagin. The only audience he’d had in all these years was me. Now he was an adopted guru. How they cheered when he kicked the water-meter reader out of the basement!