Homer & Langley

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!