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.