Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,55
the society would eventually do to them by way of vengeance. Langley and I could have told them. They had seen our house as a Temple of Dissidence, and made it their own, so even if we had said, Look at us, look at what you might become, it wouldn’t have meant anything.
In fact we were too charmed and flattered by these people to have said anything to discourage them. You would think Langley would go crazy the way they made themselves at home. They took over the kitchen at mealtimes—Dawn and Sundown would cook up great batches of vegetable stews, for of course none of them ate meat—and they slept wherever there was some space. They could at one time occupy all the bathrooms in the house, but they interested us, we attended to their diction like parents of children who were just learning to speak, and would make sure to report to each other when a word or phrase popped up that we hadn’t heard before. A put-down was a remark to chasten or humiliate. Not to be confused with what one does to a terminally sick animal. A turn-on was a state of arousal—an odd electronic locution, I thought, for this vegetarian earth-loving crowd.
Fat JoJo had one day come in from his wanderings with an electric guitar and a speaker. All at once the house reverberated with awful earsplitting sounds. Fortunately I was upstairs at the time. JoJo twanged some thunderous chord and as it died out he’d sing a line from a song, and laugh, and twang another wavery chord and sing another line, and laugh. After a while I got used to JoJo’s guitar—he knew he was no musician, it was a game he played, a fancy that he made fun of even as he gave himself to it. He handed it to me one day, this guitar. The strings were more like cables and they were stretched of a solid piece of wood shaped like a car with fins. I would not have thought to call it a musical instrument. Its sound made me think of those old-time vaudevillians who played a saw by bending it this way and that and running a violin bow across it.
One of JoJo’s badly sung songs intrigued me. It began “Good morning, teaspoon.” Langley and I discussed this. He thought that it spoke of the loneliness of the speaker ironically addressing his breakfast tableware. I disagreed. I said it was simply the speaker addressing a presumably diminutive lover waking with him in the morning, teaspoon being a term of endearment.
BY THIS TIME I had achieved an affection for little Lissy. Whenever she disappeared for a day or two I found myself waiting for her return. Of all of them she was the most talkative, the most fetching certainly, and the fact that I was sightless intrigued her, whereas the others merely deferred to me. One morning she found me in the kitchen by bumping into me, because she had decided to keep her eyes closed from the moment she woke up. It’s not so bad, is it, she said. Oh I know I can open my eyes at any time where you can’t, but right now you can see better than me, can’t you? I said I could because my other faculties were a kind of recompense. And while we had this conversation I put a glass of orange juice in her hand, and she gasped.
Lissy’s experiments in sightlessness brought us closer. She would feel my features, touching my forehead, nose, my mouth with her small hands, at the same time I ran my fingers over her face. She was so charming, her eyes closed, and her head averted in the manner of someone thinking of the image her hands created. Supposing this is what people did instead of kissing, I said to her. Like we were some isolated island people apart from the rest of the world. And at that I felt her lips on mine. She was standing on tiptoe to reach me and I held her waist and ran my hands down her back and felt her flesh under the thin shift she wore.
I won’t pretend I was instantly and passionately in love with young Lissy. Yes, it was as if my age fell from me, but there was always in my mind an awareness of transgression—as if I was taking advantage not of this girl’s generosity, but of the culture she had come out