Homer & Langley

NOR WAS THERE any true consolation to be had in the whores that none other than Vincent, the gangster with the squeaky voice, sent over one night as a present to me, his best blind friend. Jacqueline, you will have to forgive this: but you did tell me to be fearless and write what comes to mind. There they were at the door as our clocks struck midnight, two girls whose broad smiles I could hear, and with a big cake on a rolling table that the same driver who had brought us home a month before rattled into the hall, and a half dozen bottles of champagne packed in ice.It takes some drinking to dissolve the wariness that comes over one who is the recipient of a gift from a gangster. It wasn’t my birthday, first of all, and second of all, because some time had passed since the night we had met Vincent, what other inference was possible than that (a) we were now a pin on his map, and (b) without any choice in the matter we could be incurring some mysterious obligation.These ladies for their part seemed wary of us, or perhaps of our residence, Fifth Avenue on the outside and something of an aspiring warehouse on the inside. Langley and I sat them down in the music room and excused ourselves for a conference. Fortunately both Siobhan and Mrs. Robileaux were long since retired, so that was not the problem. The problem was that these professionals could not be turned away without offending a man of great and possibly murderous sensitivity. As we discussed this dilemma in the butler’s pantry I heard Langley putting champagne glasses on a tray and so it wasn’t to be that much of a conference after all.I will say in our defense that at this time we were still young men, relatively speaking, and deprived for some time of the male’s basic means of expression. And if this gesture by a man we hardly knew seemed menacingly excessive, there was such a thing as potlatch among indigenous tribes, a means of self-aggrandizement through the distribution of wealth, and who was this Vincent but a sort of tribal sachem determined to elevate himself in the opinions of others. And so we drank the champagne, which had the effect of erasing all thoughts not of the present moment. For this one night we were to arise from our gloom, recklessly relaxed and taken with the philosophical conviction that licentious life had something to say for it.And I’ll say this about the girl who came to my bed: she did not find it humiliating to be accompaniment to a three-layer cake and a bottle of champagne. And I knew the name she gave me was fictive. So I had some sense, once the giggling was over and the serious engagement began, that some achieved wisdom governed her life and that she lived apart from what she did for a living. She had grace, she was not vulgar. And the other thing was that she was very kind, and that the professional she was tended to disappear in the simple facts of a small female body. When afterward she kissed my eyes I almost wept with gratitude. After she was gone, when they both had gone and I heard their car driving off, I was fairly sure that Vincent, their employer, could not have known these whores as Langley and I did. It was as if they waxed or waned in their being according to who it was, of what quality of mind, who touched them.Langley said only about his encounter that it was finally meaningless, two strangers copulating, and one of them for money. He was not prepared to acknowledge our champagne-induced excitements. He was convinced that one way or another we would end up paying for my gangster friend’s generosity, and that we had not heard the last of him. I agreed, though with every passing year and no further word from Vincent the Gangster we would quite forget him. But at this time Langley’s presentiment seemed all too valid. So that by noon of the next day the tender emotions of my drunken self were unseated and my gloomy spirit had returned to its throne.