Homer & Langley: A Novel - By E. L. Doctorow Page 0,71

So now you are interviewing me? She laughed.

She would be back in New York in a few weeks. We will have a coffee, she said.

I have no phone, I said. If I’m not in the park please knock on the door. I’m usually home. If I don’t hear from you I’ll try to get run over and there you will be.

I felt her looking at me. I hoped she was smiling.

Okay, Mr. Homer, she said, shaking my hand. Until we meet again.

WHEN LANGLEY RETURNED I told him about Jacqueline Roux. Another damn reporter, he said.

Not exactly a reporter, I said. A writer. A French lady writer.

I didn’t know it had got as far as the European papers. What were you, her man-in-the-street interview?

It wasn’t like that. We had some serious conversation. I invited her in and she refused. What reporter would do that?

It was hard trying to explain to Langley: this was another mind—not his, not mine.

She is a woman out in the world, I said. I was very impressed.

Apparently so.

She is divorced. Doesn’t believe in marriage. A son in school.

Homer, you have always been susceptible to the ladies, do you know that?

I want to get a haircut. And maybe a new suit in one of those discount places. And I need to eat more. I don’t like being this thin, I said.

HOURS LATER LANGLEY found me at the piano. She helped you across the street? he said.

Yes, and a lucky thing, I said.

Are you all right? It’s not like you to misread traffic.

Ever since they made Fifth Avenue one-way is the problem, I said. It’s a heavier, more congested sound with fewer gaps and I just have to get used to it.

Not like you at all, my brother said and left the room.

NATURALLY I WAS NOT able to hide my hearing problem from Langley—he had picked up on it almost immediately. I didn’t say anything about it, I did not complain or even mention it, nor did he. It just became an unspoken understanding, an issue too fraught with anguish to speak about. If Langley had any instinct to attend to this matter it was not going to be as one of his cockamamie medical inspirations. I had been blind so long that his orange regimen and his theory of replenished cones and rods from vitamins and tactile training—well it was all in the nature of his self-expression and I wonder now if he ever meant it as anything more than a what-have-we-got-to-lose sort of impulse, or if it was more a manifestation of love for his brother than any conviction that some good would come of it. But maybe I misjudge him. With my hearing beginning to go, he of course didn’t suggest that we see a doctor and I for myself knew that it would do no good, no more than a visit to the ophthalmologist had done years before. I had my own medical theories, perhaps this was a disposition given to the progeny of a doctor, but I believed my eyes and ears were in some intimate nervous association, they were analogous parts of a sensory system in which everything connected with everything else, and so I knew what had been the fate of my vision would be the same for my hearing. With no sense of self-contradiction I also persuaded myself that the hearing loss would stabilize long before it was gone completely. I resolved to be hopeful and of good cheer and in this frame of mind waited for the return of Jacqueline Roux. I practiced some of my best pieces with the vague idea that I would somehow get to play for her. Langley quietly studied the books in our father’s medical library—books probably outmoded in many ways given their age—but he did one day hold a small piece of metal against my head just behind the ear to see my reaction when he asked if there was any difference—pressing it to the bone behind the ear and then releasing it, and then holding it there again. I said no and that was the end of that modest experiment.

WHEN MONTHS WENT by and I did not hear from Jacqueline Roux, I began to think of her as an exotic accident, in the same sense that bird-watchers whom in past years I’ve chatted with in the park have informed me that birds discovered out of their normal range—a tropical specie for instance ending up, say, on a beach in North America—are called “accidentals.”