own speechless sermons, isn’t it? And if God is there after all, we should thank Him for reminding us of His hideous creation and dispelling any residual hope we might have had for an afterlife of fatuitous happiness in His presence.
Langley was always able to lift my dark moods from me.
ALL RIGHT, I SAID, then this is just something else to deal with. Let’s get to it.
We were tied to the ladder-back Shaker chairs with rush seats that were my mother’s choice to go with the big farm table that Vincent had used as a bed, itself an outrage as I thought about it. It was no use struggling against the clothesline webbed and knotted round our arms and in and out of the back slats. But I had noticed that the legs of my chair wobbled a bit as I moved from side to side. These chairs are older than we are, I said.
Right, Langley said. When I say three, throw yourself to the left. We’ll go down. Watch your head.
And so that’s what we did—heaved ourselves over and when we crashed to the floor the back of my chair broke apart and suddenly the clothesline was loose enough for me to twist around and slip out of the loops and untie Langley.
There was great satisfaction in accomplishing this maneuver. We staggered to our feet, brushed ourselves off, and shook hands.
THIS WAS IN THE early autumn of the year. It was still quite warm, and so by way of enjoying our liberation we went out and sat on the bench directly across the street under the old tree whose branches reached out over the park wall. It felt good to be outside. Even the fumes of a passing Fifth Avenue bus smelled good. I heard some birdsong, then someone walking a dog, a big dog by the clicking sound of its paws on the pavement. I sat back on the bench and tilted my face toward the sky. Never had normal ordinary life in the out-of-doors been so delicious.
Langley appraised the condition of our house. The lintels over the second-floor windows, he said. Chipped away here and there. And the cornice, chunks of it missing. I don’t know when that happened. And there’s some sort of filthy bird’s nest tucked in one of the gaps. Well why not birds, he said. Home to the world. Thieving servants, government agents, crime families, wives …
Only one wife, I said.
One’s enough.
We discussed going to the police but of course we would never do that. Self-reliance, Langley said, quoting the great American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. We don’t need help from anyone. We will keep our own counsel. And defend ourselves. We’ve got to stand up to the world—we’re not free if it’s at someone else’s sufferance.
And so we sat there for some time in philosophical reflection and let the shock of the experience wear away in the warm autumn afternoon with Central Park at our backs and the image of its composed natural green world filling my mind.
WHEN WE WERE tied up in those chairs Vincent had crumpled up a couple of hundred-dollar bills and thrown them down at Langley’s feet, like to a beggar. I thought we used the money well by ordering in from a lumber supply house heavy louvered shutters custom fitted to the front windows. Langley had them painted black. We also had the front door bolted with steel brackets and a two-by-four cross brace. This would encourage us to ask who was there before we opened the door.
But the shutters seemed to be a signal of some significance to the real estate profession. Brokers were drawn to our house as birds to a feeder. Their knockings on the door and presumptuously cheerful hellos became a daily occurrence. Most of the time they were women. And when we stopped answering they took to dropping their cards and brochures through the mail slot. And then someone, probably one of those same real estate agents, had tried to phone us and, receiving a perpetually busy number, reported that to the phone company. And so telephone repairmen appeared, and there were further poundings on the door and shouts from us that we didn’t want any. Since the day Langley had ripped the phone out, neither of us had felt the need to be reconnected. And even as the phone company should have known from their repair department that the phone was already out of service, they sent letters threatening to disconnect