E. Doctorow - Homer & Langley

I asked her what she hoped to find in the park. Parks are dull places, I said. Of course you can get murdered here at night, I said, but other than that it is very dull. Just the usual joggers, lovers, and nannies with baby carriages. In the winter everyone ice skates.

The nannies as well?

They are the best skaters.

So we had a rhythm going, making the kind of conversation that brings out one’s competitive intelligence — at least it did mine. Or was it simply flirtation? How refreshing this was. I had a certain class. As if I had been flipped to a different side of myself.

Jacqueline Roux could laugh without losing her train of thought. No, she said, despite what you say your Central Park is different from any other park I have walked through in my life. Why do I feel that? Because it is so organized, so planned? A geometrical construction with such rigid borders — a cathedral of nature. No, I’m not sure. Do you know there are places in the park where I have had an awful feeling? Just for a moment or two yesterday in the late afternoon with its shadows, and the tall buildings surrounding on every side — nearby, and in the distance — I had the illusion that the park was too low!

Too low?

Yes, right where I was standing and everywhere I looked! It had rained and the grass was wet after the rain, and I for a moment recognized what I had not before seen, that the Central Park was sunken at the bottom of the city. And with its ponds and pools and lakes as if, you know, it is slowly sinking? That was my awful feeling. As if this is a sunken park, a sunken cathedral of nature inside a risen city.

How she could go on! Yet I was enchanted by the intensity of her conversation — so poetic, so philosophical, so French, for all I knew. But at the same time it was all too fanciful for me. Good Lord — to look for the meaning of Central Park? It was always across the street when I opened my door — something there, something fixed and unchanging and requiring no interpretation. I told her that. But in reacting to her idea I was yoked into an opinion of my own that was certainly a degree up from my nonthinking life.

I am relieved you know you suffered an illusion, I said.

It is too crazy, I grant you. I go back to my first impression — the design, made by artisans with picks and shovels, and so my thought is everyone’s first thought — it is simply a work of art constructed from nature. Well that may have been only the intention of the designers.

Only the intention? I said. Is that not enough?

But to me it suggests what they may not have intended — a foretelling — this sequestered square of nature created for the time coming of the end of nature.

They built this park in the nineteenth century, I said. Before the city was there to surround it. Nature was everywhere, who would have thought about it coming to an end?

Nobody, she said. I have been shown the underground silos in South Dakota where the missiles wait and twenty-four hours a day the military sit at their consoles ready to turn the key in the box. The people who made this park didn’t think about that either.

AND SO WE CHATTED away at what I realized was a level normal to her. How remarkable to be sitting there, as if at a sidewalk café in Paris, in conversation with a Frenchwoman with an alluring smoky voice. It was no small matter to me that she deemed me worthy of her thoughts. I said: You are looking for the secret. I don’t think you have it yet.

Maybe not, she said.

I was glad she wasn’t trying out her ideas on Langley — he wouldn’t have had the patience, he might even have been rude. But I loved hearing her talk, never mind that she had bizarre theories — Central Park was sinking, shutters were un-American — her passionate engagement with her ideas was a revelation to me. Jacqueline Roux had been all over the world. She was a published writer. I imagined how thrilling it must be living such a life, going around the world and making up things about it.

AND THEN IT was time to go.

Are you walking back? she said. I will walk with you.

We left the park and crossed Fifth Avenue, her arm in mine. In front of the house, I felt emboldened. Would you like to see the inside? I said. It is an attraction greater even than the Empire State Building.

Ah no, merci , I have appointments. But sometime, yes.

I said, Just let me get an idea of you. May I?

She had thick wavy hair cut short. A broad forehead, rounded cheekbones, a straight nose. A slight fullness under the chin. She wore glasses with wire frames. She wore no makeup. I did not think I should touch the lips.

I asked her if she was married.

No more, she said. It made no sense.

Children?

I have a son in Paris. In secondary school. So now you are interviewing me? She laughed.

She would be back in New York in a few weeks. We will have a coffee, she said.

I have no phone, I said. If I’m not in the park please knock on the door. I’m usually home. If I don’t hear from you I’ll try to get run over and there you will be.

I felt her looking at me. I hoped she was smiling.

Okay, Mr. Homer, she said, shaking my hand. Until we meet again.

WHEN LANGLEY RETURNED I told him about Jacqueline Roux. Another damn reporter, he said.

Not exactly a reporter, I said. A writer. A French lady writer.

I didn’t know it had got as far as the European papers. What were you, her man-in-the-street interview?

It wasn’t like that. We had some serious conversation. I invited her in and she refused. What reporter would do that?

It was hard trying to explain to Langley: this was another mind — not his, not mine.

She is a woman out in the world, I said. I was very impressed.

Apparently so.

She is divorced. Doesn’t believe in marriage. A son in school.

Homer, you have always been susceptible to the ladies, do you know that?

I want to get a haircut. And maybe a new suit in one of those discount places. And I need to eat more. I don’t like being this thin, I said.

HOURS LATER LANGLEY found me at the piano. She helped you across the street? he said.

Yes, and a lucky thing, I said.

Are you all right? It’s not like you to misread traffic.

Ever since they made Fifth Avenue one-way is the problem, I said. It’s a heavier, more congested sound with fewer gaps and I just have to get used to it.

Not like you at all, my brother said and left the room.

NATURALLY I WAS NOT able to hide my hearing problem from Langley — he had picked up on it almost immediately. I didn’t say anything about it, I did not complain or even mention it, nor did he. It just became an unspoken understanding, an issue too fraught with anguish to speak about. If Langley had any instinct to attend to this matter it was not going to be as one of his cockamamie medical inspirations. I had been blind so long that his orange regimen and his theory of replenished cones and rods from vitamins and tactile training — well it was all in the nature of his self-expression and I wonder now if he ever meant it as anything more than a what-have-we-got-to-lose sort of impulse, or if it was more a manifestation of love for his brother than any conviction that some good would come of it. But maybe I misjudge him. With my hearing beginning to go, he of course didn’t suggest that we see a doctor and I for myself knew that it would do no good, no more than a visit to the ophthalmologist had done years before. I had my own medical theories, perhaps this was a disposition given to the progeny of a doctor, but I believed my eyes and ears were in some intimate nervous association, they were analogous parts of a sensory system in which everything connected with everything else, and so I knew what had been the fate of my vision would be the same for my hearing. With no sense of self-contradiction I also persuaded myself that the hearing loss would stabilize long before it was gone completely. I resolved to be hopeful and of good cheer and in this frame of mind waited for the return of Jacqueline Roux. I practiced some of my best pieces with the vague idea that I would somehow get to play for her. Langley quietly studied the books in our father’s medical library — books probably outmoded in many ways given their age — but he did one day hold a small piece of metal against my head just behind the ear to see my reaction when he asked if there was any difference — pressing it to the bone behind the ear and then releasing it, and then holding it there again. I said no and that was the end of that modest experiment.