Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,57

a moment of mental confusion, some weird misstep of time itself, because I was briefly under the illusion that it was Sister Mary Elizabeth Riordan I was holding.

I DON’T KNOW WHY I couldn’t simply enjoy the blessing of this charmingly loopy creature, the experience of her, so unsummoned, and let it go at that. Instead, I decided to torture myself by thinking about that momentary illusion while in her arms of having had my piano student. I needed to talk to Langley about it. I thought I had purged myself of any lingering feelings for Mary Elizabeth Riordan—after all she was transmogrified, a certified fifty-year-old sister. So I had debased two dear souls simultaneously, violating one in spirit and using the other for the purpose. It was no consolation to me that Lissy didn’t seem to feel that anything of consequence had occurred between us. She was, at her age, in the exploratory mode characteristic of her culture. But I was deep in the doldrums now, for of course I had mostly debased myself. I knew Langley too had at that long ago time fallen in love with our piano student. I wanted to know his thinking. We had never talked about things of this sort. I was in a confessional mood. Did anybody know what love was? Could unconsummated love exist without carnal fantasy, could it survive as love without recompense, without reward? No question that I had enjoyed Lissy’s giving of her body. So what did anybody love other than the genus, where one adorable creature could stand in for another?

But there didn’t seem to be a right time to have this conversation with my brother. Too much was going on. As I’ve said, besides the original group we’d met in the park, friends of theirs, fellow squatters, had been in and out, and there were instances when I tripped over someone of whose presence I had not been aware. Or I’d hear laughter or chattering in another room and feel myself to be a guest in somebody else’s house. Langley had surprised me by welcoming these people and acting toward them with uncharacteristic generosity. And they responded, taking up his daily way of life, acolytes in his Ministry. Even the thick-lensed cartoonist, Connor, liked to bring back from the street something he thought Langley would want. They all seemed to understand his acquisitiveness as an ethos. I was fairly sure that he wasn’t involved with any of the girls—running these people seemed to be how he was relating to them, they could have been kid pickpockets in London and he Fagin. The only audience he’d had in all these years was me. Now he was an adopted guru. How they cheered when he kicked the water-meter reader out of the basement!

At times things got noisy as something clanging would be brought in through the front door. Langley himself had discovered the neighborhood down at the Bowery where secondhand restaurant supplies were out on the sidewalk, and so to end our indebtedness to the gas company he bought a portable, two-burner kerosene stove, thus retiring the massive old eight-burner gas stove on which Grandmamma Robileaux had done her cooking. Langley would risk death by asphyxiation to defeat the gas company. Also sets of crockery and dishes, bowls, and implements like spatulas—this was to give our guests whatever they needed to prepare our community meals. And that electric guitar of JoJo’s had inspired further acquisitions—speakers, microphones, and recording consoles, Langley saying to me, knowing I was not the biggest fan of the electronic sound, that these were things we could rent out, the number of aspiring musicians who wanted to play electric guitars increasing exponentially day by day, as he could tell by reading the entertainment sections of the newspapers. It’s no more Swing and Sway with Sammy Kaye, he told me. No more Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights. It’s electrified musicians who give themselves existential names and command huge audiences of slightly younger people who want themselves to go out and pump their pelvis and scream and twang their earsplitting music to stadiums full of idiots.

So as I say, somehow I could never find the opportunity to sit Langley down and have him consider my despondent contribution to his Theory of Replacements. He assumed the passage of generations, you see, but my idea was lateral. If what mattered was the universal form of Dear Girl, and if each dear girl was only a particular expression of the