Homer & Langley Read Online Free PDF

Langley, human identity is a mysterious thing. Can we even be sure there is something called the Self?
Miss Perdita Spence’s peroration, addressed only to Langley, the one person in the room high enough in her estimation to have her opinion, was actually quite interesting. There was not the umbrage you would expect from someone of her class finding herself at table with a servant. She said—and I can only paraphraseafter these many years—that given brother Homer’s deficient state she could understand his availing himself of whatever poor creature came to hand. But to sit this same creature at the dinner table was the boorish act of a pasha for whom it was not enough to exercise his power, he must also put it on display. Here was this immigrant woman, who had to bend to his will lest she lose her job, sat down to her obvious discomfort in order to advertise her total servitude. A woman is not a pet monkey, said Miss Spence, and if she is to be used to her shame at least let it be in the dark, where no one can hear her weeping but her abuser.
I’ll take you home, said Langley.
And so the dinner was left to my inamorata and me. Julia filled my plate and sat herself beside me. Not a word was spoken, we knew what we had to do. With Mrs. Robileaux coming out of the kitchen periodically to stand at the doorway and glare at us, we proceeded to eat for four.
I had no idea what Julia was thinking. Surely she had gotten the gist of Miss Spence’s critique, but I sensed her indifference as if she, Julia, couldn’t have cared less what this stranger had to say. She went about dinner with the same gusto with which she cleaned house or made love, refilling my wine glass, and then her own, serving me another cut of the roast before replenishing her own plate.
And now here is the sequence of thoughts I had, for I remember them quite clearly. I recalled that Julia had appeared unsummoned in my bedroom the evening of the day I had asked to touch her face. I had not meant anything by that, Imerely wanted information, I like to know what the people around me look like. I had felt her jaw, which was large, and her wide full mouth and her small ears and slightly splayed nose and her forehead which was broad, with a high hairline. And that same night she had slipped into my bed and waited.
Was Perdita Spence right—that this immigrant girl in order to keep her job was merely responding to what she thought was a summons? Langley hadn’t believed that—he had seen the assertiveness of the maid, who in a relatively short time had taken charge of the household and bedded his brother.
But now here is what happened: In the process of leaving a clean plate, I was working on the last of the pea pods, crunching them in my teeth and savoring their sweet green bitter-edged juices, and all at once I found myself thinking of the truck farm at the corner of Madison Avenue and Ninety-fourth Street, where as a sighted child I would go along the rows with my mother in the early autumn to pick the vegetables for our table. I’d pull the carrot bunches out of the soft ground, pluck the tomatoes from their vines, uncover the yellow summer squash hiding beneath their leaves, scoop up the heads of lettuce with both hands. And we so enjoyed ourselves at these times, my mother and I, as she held her basket out for me to deposit what I had chosen. Some of the plants rose above my head and the sun-warmed leaves would brush my cheeks. I chewed the tiny leaves of herbs, I was made giddy by the profusion of vivid colors and the humid smell of leaf and root and moist soil on a sunny day. Of course, along with my sight, that farm had long since gone, an armory in its place, and I suppose it was thewine that was allowing me to dredge from the depths of my unforgiving mind the image of my gracious mother when she was in such uncharacteristically loving companionship with her small son.
Taking hold of Julia’s capable hand in this emotional moment of recall, I found my