E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

At times things got noisy as something clanging would be brought in through the front door. Langley himself had discovered the neighborhood down at the Bowery where secondhand restaurant supplies were out on the sidewalk, and so to end our indebtedness to the gas company he bought a portable, two-burner kerosene stove, thus retiring the massive old eight-burner gas stove on which Grandmamma Robileaux had done her cooking. Langley would risk death by asphyxiation to defeat the gas company. Also sets of crockery and dishes, bowls, and implements like spatulas — this was to give our guests whatever they needed to prepare our community meals. And that electric guitar of JoJo’s had inspired further acquisitions — speakers, microphones, and recording consoles, Langley saying to me, knowing I was not the biggest fan of the electronic sound, that these were things we could rent out, the number of aspiring musicians who wanted to play electric guitars increasing exponentially day by day, as he could tell by reading the entertainment sections of the newspapers. It’s no more Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, he told me. No more Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. It’s electrified musicians who give themselves existential names and command huge audiences of slightly younger people who want themselves to go out and pump their pelvis and scream and twang their earsplitting music to stadiums full of idiots.

So as I say, somehow I could never find the opportunity to sit Langley down and have him consider my despondent contribution to his Theory of Replacements. He assumed the passage of generations, you see, but my idea was lateral. If what mattered was the universal form of Dear Girl, and if each dear girl was only a particular expression of the universal, any one of them might serve equally well, and could replace another as our morally insufficient nature demanded. And if that were the case how could I ever be educated to love anyone for a lifetime?

Lissy, I reiterate, did in no way suffer my duplicity. She asked no questions, was quite incurious about my past life except for the novelty of my sightlessness. We did make love another time or two and then it became apparent to me that my bed, one of the more desirable accommodations in our house, was of more interest to her as a place to sleep. For a while we continued to meditate or, as I understood it, to sit quietly together, and she one day brought in from her wanderings some homeopathic remedies in anticipation of the coming flu season, she said, and pressed these vials into my hands and kissed me on the cheek. We were friends and if she had slept with me, well, that’s what friends did.

—

AND IT WAS GETTING colder now, was it November by this time? I don’t recall. But none of these people could accept winter. For one thing they hadn’t the stamina for it, their marginal existence demanded a beneficent climate, some steady changeless warmth in which they could survive with the least effort. They availed themselves of some of the army issue still lying around — Lissy’s found field jacket coming to her knees — so I knew they would soon, like any other flock of migratory birds, lift their wings and be off.

I assumed it was in anticipation of their departure that they prepared a big dinner for us all to have at the same time. For some reason the front hall was less filled with things than any of the rooms, and so our hippies dug up our candelabra, and candlesticks, and availed themselves of our supply of candles, of which we had many and of different kinds, including candle wax in glass tumblers that Langley had found in a shop down on the Lower East Side, and these were put on the floor in a manner to suggest a dining table, and cushions gathered from all over the house were placed about for our bottoms, and so Langley and I were invited to seat ourselves, which we did laboriously in the cross-legged position, like pashas, while our boarders trooped in with the food and wine. Apparently all of them had worked at this, each contributing a specialty, sautéed mushrooms, bowls of salad and vegetable soup, fondue with toasted points of bread, and steamed artichokes, and oysters, and clams boiled in beer — I assumed that was JoJo’s contribution — and hard cheese and red table wine, and pastries and marijuana cigarettes for dessert. They had paid for everything and it was all by way of thanks, and it was very moving. Langley and I for the first and last time in our lives smoked joints, and my memory of the rest of the evening is a little blurry, except that both Dawn and Sundown seemed to have discovered me at this late date, and they came over and sat beside me and gave me hugs and we all laughed together, finding it funny for some reason as I pressed their ample bosoms to my chest and nuzzled their necks. Toasts were given, and if I’m not mistaken a solemn moment of remembrance for the three great men who’d been assassinated in the course of a decade. I like to think, too, that Lissy may have moved to repossess me for herself during the course of the evening for it was she who led me up to my room afterward, navigating the stairs for me — I was thoroughly stoned, they had moved on from the marijuana to hash, a somewhat more potent drug — and she lay down beside me on my bed, where I had a vision: it was of sailing ships and they were as if etched on a salver of pewter. I said, Lissy, do you see the ships? And she touched her temple to mine and at that moment the ships were as if hammered on a sheet of gold, and she said, Oh wow, they’re so beautiful, oh wow.

I do remember these moments so clearly, my mind as out of control as it was. I have never since taken, or done, any such drugs, not wanting to tamper with what consciousness I have. But it’s undeniable that those moments had their uncanny clarity. I must have dozed off but came awake to find Lissy holding me, and my shirt wet from her tears. I asked her why she was crying but she wouldn’t answer, only shaking her head. Was it because I was an old man and she was overwhelmed with pity? Had she realized, finally, the ruinous state of this house? I didn’t know what it was about — and concluded it was nothing more than the emotional overload of a stoned mind. I held her and we fell asleep that way.

BUT A FEW MORE DAYS were to pass before the exodus. I was at my piano — this was in the evening, I believe I was doing the elegiac slow movement of Mozart’s Twentieth — when other sounds began to intrude and these gradually defined themselves as shouts, and they were coming from all over the house. Apparently the lights had gone out. I at first thought Langley had blown something — one of his most sacred long-term missions being to defeat the Consolidated Edison Company — but in fact it was the whole city’s power failure, and it was as if a time of pre-civilization had come around again to deliver the meaning of night. Oddly enough, once people looked out the window and understood the extent of the blackout, everyone wanted to see it — all our squatters clamoring to get out there and be amazed by the moonlit city. I considered the possibility that this municipal blown fuse was, after all, something for which Langley’s tinkering was responsible, and it made me laugh. Langley! I called to him. What have you done!

He was upstairs in his room and was having as much trouble as the rest of them trying to get to the front door. It was the blind brother who got everyone organized, telling them not to move, but to stay where they were until I came and got them. Nobody could have found a candle — where any candles or candle glasses were nobody knew by now, the chances of finding even one in the blackness of the house was nil, the candles had consigned themselves to our kingdom of rubble as had everything else.

The house by this time of our lives was a labyrinth of hazardous pathways, full of obstructions and many dead ends. With enough light someone could make his way through the zigzagging corridors of newspaper bales, or find passage by slipping sideways between piles of equipment of one kind or another — the guts of pianos, motors wrapped in their power cords, boxes of tools, paintings, car body parts, tires, stacked chairs, tables on tables, headboards, barrels, collapsed stacks of books, antique lamps, dislodged pieces of our parents’ furniture, rolled-up carpet, piles of clothing, bicycles — but it needed the native gifts of a blind man who sensed where things were by the air they displaced to get from one room to another without killing himself in the process. As it was, I tripped several times, and fell down once and hurt my elbow, in the meantime finding people from the top of the house down, as I asked them to call out, one by one, and telling them to attach themselves to me, like boxcars to an engine. And it turned out to be a good time I was having actually as the deviser of this human train that wound its way through the Collyer residence, everyone laughing or yelping in pain as they banged their knees or tripped. And the train got heavier to pull along with each new person who hooked on — clearly there were more of our hippie friends in residence than I had known about. Of course Lissy was the first one I had managed to find and I felt her hands on my waist as she giggled. This is so cool! she said. Then she decided we all had the makings of a conga line — how she had known about a dance that went out of fashion before she was ever born, I don’t know. But there she was, trying to instruct me and everyone behind her in that hip-shifting one-two-three followed by the leg-out BAM! which of course created even more chaos as the others tried to do it. I heard Langley at the very end of the line, and he was having a good time too, it was remarkable hearing my brother’s wheezing laugh, truly remarkable. And it was the darkness that made all of this possible — their darkness, not mine — and when I reached the front hall and lifted off the two-by-four dead bolt and opened the door, they all flew past me like birds from the cage, and I think it was Lissy’s kiss I felt on my cheek, though it may have been Dawn or Sundown’s, and I felt the brisk night air and stood at the top of the stoop and inhaled the earthy fragrance of the park, edged with the metallic taste of moonlight, and I heard their laughter as they fled across the street and into the park, all of them, including my brother, though he would come back, but the others, never, their laughter diminishing through the trees, for that was the last of them, they were gone.