Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,3

and through the window saw a shocking thing, what in later time would be called a blue movie. Its licentious demonstration was taking place on a portable screen something like a large window shade. In the reflected light we could see in silhouette an audience of attentive adults leaning forward in their chairs and sofas. I remember the sound of the projector not that far from the open window, the whirring sound it made, like a field of cicadas. The woman on the screen, naked but for a pair of high-heeled shoes, lay on her back on a table and the man, also naked, stood holding her legs under the knees so that she was proffered to receive his organ, of which he made sure first to exhibit its enormity to his audience. He was an ugly bald skinny man with just that one disproportionate feature to distinguish him. As he shoved himself again and again into the woman she was given to pulling her hair while her legs kicked up convulsively, each shoe tip jabbing the air in rapid succession, as if she’d been jolted with an electric current. I was rapt—horrified, but also thrilled to a level of unnatural feeling that was akin to nausea. I do not wonder now that with the invention of moving pictures, their pornographic possibilities were immediately understood.

Did my friend gasp, did she tug at my hand to pull me away? If she did I would not have noticed. But when I was sufficiently recovered in my senses I turned and she was nowhere to be seen. I ran back the way we had come, and on this moonlit night, a night as black and white as the film, I could see no one on the road ahead of me. The summer had some weeks to go but my friend Eleanor never spoke to me again, or even looked my way, a decision I accepted as an accomplice, by gender, of the male performer. She was right to run from me, for on that night romance was unseated in my mind and in its place was enthroned the idea that sex was something you did to them, to all of them including poor shy tall Eleanor. It is a puerile illusion, hardly worthy of a fourteen-year-old mind, yet it persists among grown men even as they meet women more avidly copulative than they.

Of course part of me watching that tawdry little film felt no less betrayed by the adult world than did my Eleanor. I don’t mean to imply that my mother and father were among that audience—they weren’t. In fact when I confided in Langley, we agreed that our father and mother were exempt from the race of the carnally afflicted. We were not so childish as to think our parents indulged in sex merely the two times it took to conceive us. But it was a propriety of their generation that love was practiced in the dark and never mentioned or acknowledged at any other time. Life was made tolerable by its formalities. Even the most intimate relationships were addressed in formal terms. Our father was never without his fresh collar and tie and vested suit, I simply don’t remember him dressed any other way. His steel gray hair was cut short, and he wore a brush mustache and pince-nez quite unaware that he was aping the look of the then president. And our mother, with her ample figure girdled in the style of that day, with her abundant hair swept up and pinned cornucopically, was a figure of matronly abundance. The women of her generation wore their skirts to the ankles. They did not have the vote, a fact that my mother found not at all disturbing, though some of her friends were suffragettes. Langley said about our parents that their marriage was made in Heaven. He meant by this not a great romance, but that our mother and father in their youth had conformed their lives dutifully to biblical specifications.

People my age are supposed to remember times long past though they can’t recall what happened yesterday. My memories of our long-dead parents are considerably dimmed, as if having fallen further and further back in time has made them smaller, with less visible detail as if time has become space, become distance, and figures from the past, even your father and mother, are too far away to be recognized. They are fixed in their own time, which has rolled down