Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,48
us if we didn’t pay the ever increasing past-due bills. Langley thanked them, saying we were already disconnected but eventually we had to deal with a collection agency, the first of several representing creditors with whom Langley’s battles were to achieve a kind of notoriety.
My brother and I conferred. He had understood my uneasiness with the perpetual darkness in the house. You would think that wouldn’t matter to me, but I had found myself gravitating to the back rooms, whose windows still looked out. I could tell daylight from darkness by the varying temperatures or even by scent, darkness smelling one way and light another. So I had not been entirely happy with our self-reliance. My Aeolian didn’t like the darkness either, its tonal quality seemed to have changed, it was more muted, less declarative, as if it had found itself muffled in the gloom.
And so, what with one thing and another, we threw open the shutters and, for a while, we would again be windowed on the world.
LANGLEY GOT ME in his sights and decided I looked flabby. You’re getting soft, Homer, and that does not bode well for good health. He dug out the Hoshiyamas’ tandem bicycle with its flat tire and bolted it to frames that lifted the wheels off the ground so that I could pedal away and not go anywhere at the same time. And every morning we took a brisk walk down Fifth Avenue and back on Madison Avenue and once around the block for good measure. Of course that was just the beginning of his campaign. He had brought home a nudist magazine that was fervent in its advocacy of radical health regimens. Not that we were to go about without clothes, but that, for instance, heavy doses of vitamins A through E reinforced with herbs and certain ground nuts found only in Mongolia might not only ensure long life but even reverse pathological conditions such as cancer and blindness. So now I found at the breakfast table, beside the usual bowl of viscous oatmeal, handfuls of capsules and nuts and powdered leaves of one kind or another, which I dutifully swallowed to no appreciable affect as far as I could determine.
I should say that there was nothing wrong with me—I felt fine, never better in fact, and I didn’t mind the exercise at all—but not wanting to hurt my brother’s feelings I went along with this dietary nonsense. Besides which I was moved by his concern for my welfare. That I was become one of his projects pleased me in some way.
Among his collectibles that I had come across in the parlor was a bas-relief of a woman’s head that he’d hung from a nail on the wall. It was like a large cameo. I felt her features, the nose, the forehead, the chin, the waves in her hair, and it gave me tactile pleasure to run my fingers over this raised half face even as I knew the piece was of no great value, a reproduction perhaps of something hanging in a museum somewhere. But Langley had seen me, and it must have been on this occasion that he was inspired to do something about my woeful deprivation as a person to whom the fine arts were inaccessible.
At first he brought in from his wanderings some miniature bone ivory netsuke carvings of Oriental couples making love. They were of the same proportions as the miniature ivories that the Hoshiyamas had left behind but we couldn’t have found those even if we had looked. I was invited to feel these small depictions of sexual bliss and figure out just what intricate positions the pairs of tiny heedless lovers had gotten themselves into. There were also masks of smooth-faced plaster of Paris creatures, and fearsome African deities carved from wood, that he had picked up at some flea market or auction. So in this manner what I called Langley’s Museum of Fine Arts began to distinguish itself from everything else of the inanimate world that, over the years, we had come to live with. And I was now engaged in a course of tactile art appreciation. But this wasn’t art for art’s sake: Langley had read up on the anatomy and pathology of the eye in our father’s medical library. Rods and cones are what make the eye see, he told me. They’re the basis of everything. And if a damn lizard can grow a new tail why can’t a human being grow