Homer & Langley

BUT ONE NIGHT SOMETHING Langley had said came back to me as I tried to sleep. He said everything alive was at war. I wondered if the diminution of my senses, even as I was terrified of an enlarging consciousness slowly displacing the world outside my mind — if it was possible that I was becoming progressively unaware of the truth of our situation, the magnitude of it, protected in my insensitivity from the worst of its sights and sounds. As I reflected, the stoning of our house by children, rather than being an episode incidental to our major concerns — our increasing isolation, losing by our own doing or the doing of others the ordinary services of an urban civilization, no running water, I mean, no gas, no electricity — and finding ourselves in a circle of animosity rippling outward from our neighbors to creditors, to the press, to the municipality, and, finally, to the future — for that was what these children were — rather than being of minor significance, well, that was the most devastating blow of all. For what could be more terrible than being turned into a mythic joke? How could we cope, once dead and gone, with no one available to reclaim our history? My brother and I were going down and he, lung-shot and half insane, knew that better than I. Our every act of opposition and assertion of our self-reliance, every instance of our creativity and resolute expression of our principles was in service of our ruination. And he, apart from all that, had as his burden the care of an increasingly disabled brother. I will not criticize him then for the paranoia of that winter when he began to devise from the hoarded materials of our life in this house — as if everything here had been amassed in response to a prophetic intelligence — the means of our last stand.

In the old days there was another poet he liked to quote: “I’m me, and what the hell can I do about it! … I, the solemn investigator of useless things.”

MY OWN RESPONSE has been to press on with my daily writing. I am Homer Collyer and Jacqueline Roux is my muse. Though in my weakened state I am not sure if she ever returned as she said she would, or if I only needed the thought of her to begin this writing, a project comparable in its overreaching to Langley’s newspaper. At this point I can’t be sure of anything — what I imagine, what I recall — but she did come back, I’m almost sure of that, or let us say she did, and that I met her at the front door, having been groomed and turned out in some reasonable state by my understanding brother. Sitting in the chill of this house, I feel the warmth of a hotel lounge. Jacqueline and I have had dinner. There is a fireplace, arrangements of upholstered armchairs, small low tables for drinks, and a pianist playing standards. I remember this one from the time of our tea dances: “Strangers in the Night.” I can tell from the stiffness of the playing that this is a classically trained pianist trying to make a living. Jacqueline and I laugh at the chosen song — the lyrics describing strangers exchanging glances, which is not possible between us, and ending up as lovers for life. That too is funny though in a way to stifle the laughter in my throat.

Then, on my second glass of the best wine I have ever tasted, I am impelled to sit at the piano after the hired help has withdrawn. I play Chopin, the Prelude in C-sharp Minor, because it is a slow chord-heavy piece that I can be reasonably sure of, not being able to hear it very well. Then I make the mistake of going into “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” which requires a digitally meandering right hand: a mistake, because I understand from the touch on my shoulder — this is the lounge pianist stopping me — that I’m doing the sequence as Bach wrote it but I have started off on the wrong piano key. It is like a mockery of Bach. I am corrected and finish capably enough, but am led back to Jacqueline in total humiliation that I try to dissemble by laughing. What wine will do!

In her room I confess to my misery, a blind man going deaf.

A generous conversation ensues — practical, as if this is a problem to be solved. Why not write, then, she says. There is music in words, and it can be heard you know, by thinking.

I am not persuaded.

You understand, Mr. Homer? You think a word and you can hear its sound. I am telling you what I know — words have music and if you are a musician you will write to hear them.

The thought of life without my music is intolerable to me. I stand and pace. I blunder about and something goes over, a standing lamp. A bulb bursts. Jacqueline has my arm and sits me down on the bed. She sits beside me and takes my hand.

I say to her, Perhaps your French has music and so you think all language is musical. I do not hear music in my speech.

No, you are wrong.

And I have nothing to say. Given who I am what is there to write about?