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.

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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.