The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village

by Samuel R. Delany

  6.6. When I was sixteen, I got my father to take me to see Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where it had recently opened at the then comparatively new New Yorker Theater. We both went expecting some sort of medieval costume fantasy—after all, the Sunday Times had printed a picture of a knight playing chess with death on a desolate beach. And a clip of the same sequence had been shown on a TV program. But the film’s patina of intellectuality troubled, perhaps even offended, and, probably, excluded my father.

  I’d found it fascinating.

  Dad said he didn’t understand it. Nor could he understand why I’d liked it. He rather pooh-poohed and even laughed at my so clearly having been moved at the film.

  We didn’t get in a really big argument over it. But it meant that another cord of communication between us (and there were very few) had broken—as now it seemed that I liked one kind of film and he liked another.

  6.61. Both Marilyn and I now wanted to be writers, at least as part of whatever else we might do. And I was now sixteen and had launched into a third novel. It was called Those Spared by Fire, and it was the first time I had tried to tackle directly characters and institutions around me—my school, the community center where I went in the evenings, the kids who were my friends over in the General Grant Houses.

  It also essayed a good deal of nonlinear storytelling. I’d begun to read in Faulkner and Joyce, and had been as influenced—in all the predictable and awkward ways—as one could be.

  Our downstairs neighbor, Jesse, the children’s book writer, read it over and wrote me a note in which he declared, “If you keep on like this, you will probably be in print before you reach voting age.” A friend I’d made through Marilyn, the poet Marie Ponsot, found a typist for me in Queens (and gave me a hardcover copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood). After several deep and intense conversations with Jesse, my father decided he would pay the sixty-eight dollars to the Queens housewife who worked out of her kitchen (thirty-five cents a page) with an old Remington on the formica table, to retype the book for me.

  This parental support was so out of keeping with his usual disparaging attitude toward all my extracurricular projects that, after my initial gratitude, I really had no idea how to respond.

  On a warm Saturday morning toward the end of summer, Dad drove me out to Queens to deliver the finished manuscript. I sat beside him in the car’s beige interior, my blue typing-paper box held in my moist hands and resting on my lap. In the white-haired housewife’s yellow kitchen, Dad even paid her in advance—with a check. And two or three weeks later, with my friend Ian, a diminutive kid from my creative writing class, who wore thick glasses and liked to wrestle, I went out by subway to pick up the finished job. The coppery sunlight had already taken on an autumnal slant; the first leaves scattered the Queens sidewalk. We rode home on the E train, carrying the box—with two manila envelopes, now—containing the original, the retyping, and two carbons. And I began to submit my third novel here and there—and receive my first rejections. It intrigues me that I do not remember to which publishers those early submissions went. But they were rather mechanical, and I was already involved with more writing projects.

  6.611. … and I seemed to recede down a hall, so that everything fell into the distance, as if I were observing it through the hollow cardboard tube from a paper towel roll. Only, as I recognized what, again, was happening, I emerged from the tube’s other end. Blinking, I looked around me, at the grass, at the blanket I sat on. It was wonderfully sunny, with the light itself like a fog or haze. A boy sat on the other side of the blanket from me, cross legged, in jeans. He was barefoot. His plaid shirt was too big. One rolled-up sleeve hung midway down his arm. And the buttons were open over his dark chest. He was a year older than I—we were of the same racial makeup.

  “Hello,” I said.

  His mouth moved a little, but there were no words.

  “You can’t talk …?” I said, only a little surprised.

  He touched his throat and smiled at me with the pleasure of not having to explain.

  “That’s okay. I can understand you.” I moved nearer; he moved nearer. He took one of my hands in both of his, and came even closer. We leaned our heads together and his toes now pressed the top of my sneaker. His cheek beside mine was warm. I felt his breath against my neck. Without words, he told me his name was Snake. Bad people had cut his tongue out, and he’d been afraid no one would ever understand what he was saying again. He’d tried to learn some sign language, but not many people knew it. He moved his fingers on my palm to let me feel the shapes they made, as if we were both blind in that luminous mist. … Finding someone who could understand him made him want to cry with relief and release. So we held each other—and sometimes cried.

  When I woke the next morning, in my bed, I thought back on the astonishingly satisfying dream—had it only been the night before? Or had it been going on over several nights? Had, in other dreams, Snake and I talked—silently—of other things?

  But even before I pushed back the spread, I knew this strange, gentle youngster, castrated of language and rephallicized by his name, was some version of myself, who both doubled me and split something off from me, as though my self (itself) had itself been split by an astonishing gap. Outside my windows, birds were chirruping, and the sun dazzled in the trees of Morningside Gardens.

  6.62. And on Saturday mornings, with redheaded, full-breasted Ellen and tall Hispanic Ruben, I went down to the Hunter College Dramatic Workshop for Young People, and took drama lessons and wrote plays for them (which, somehow, I never got around to showing them, but some of which, after the fact, became still more “dreams” in Lost Stars), and talked to Marilyn’s friend Judy for hours from the drugstore phone booth out on Amsterdam Avenue or walked barefoot down by St. Marks Church in the Bowery and across Ninth Street to visit her friend Gail, and took my first job, as a page in the library at the St. Agnes branch on Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-first Street, and on Thursday afternoons attended ballet class at Ballet Theater (suggested by Judy), and even auditioned for the Donald McKyle Dance Company, only to be told, kindly but firmly, to take a few more years of lessons, and joined a little group called Chamber Theater and the New York Repertory Company on St. Marks Place, and spent two weeks on Martha’s Vineyard with my family, reading Atlas Shrugged in the car up to New England and on the ferry across from Woods Hole. When I came back, I plunged into a cycle of short stories about the sea, called Cycle for Toby, then another novel about bohemian life in Greenwich Village, called Afterlon.

  Most of my energy toward friendship at the time was taken up by Ana—of the electrophoresis experiment and the heroine of Scavengers.

  She had dropped out of Science and was now a patient at Hillside Hospital, whose adolescent pavilions housed a number of personable youngsters with more or less serious emotional disturbances. Ana had a clear and lovely singing voice. I reconvened the folksinging group, this time with Ana, Dave, and a young black woman who’d lived next door to me when we’d lived over the funeral parlor, Laura. We even got so far as to make a demonstration record of The House of the Rising Sun (found in the pages of some Lomax anthology) after about three months of rehearsal in the early summer of ’60. Ana’s and my friendship was indeed fraught enough to fill novels. At that time I tended to form close friendships with any number of young women (Frances, a fine pianist sharing her time between Science and the Julliard School of Music; Ana; and Judy, one of Marilyn’s closest friends at college), friendships in which there was sometimes sexual interest on the part of the girls, which I generally tried to discourage.

  6.63. Somewhere in her first two years at NYU, Marilyn wrote her verse play, Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices, which changed our relationship mightily. When, at fifteen, Marilyn had entered NYU, a young man named Bartolomé had been in her calculus class. Then, in her second term, he’d disappeared. Sometime in her third, she encountered him again in the school hallway. “What happened to you?” she asked.

  Bartolomé a
nswered coolly, “I had a nervous breakdown. I spent seven months looking at the wall in a mental hospital.”

  The incident struck her (“… Why did he look at the wall? Why did he look at the wall so long …?”), and over the next weeks she began to write her play:

  Bartolomé

  for one month on the whitened plaster saw

  the grave configuration of the law. …

  She would phone to read me sections (“… the second month he waited in a guise / of stone with strange words chipped into his eyes …”), or we would meet on various subway platforms between Morningside Heights and the Village and she would show me another section:

  The fifth month, with the wind behind him,

  he was sickened by the chill of liberty …6

  6.64. When I was seventeen, Uncle Myles and Aunt Dorothy came over one winter evening. My uncle’s laughter and enthusiasm dwarfed everything and everybody in our house. “You’ve got to see this, Margaret! You’re not going to believe it. Sam—” he meant my father—“it’s right over there, at the Apollo! They’re female impersonators! But really, it’s the cleverest thing you’ll ever see!”

  My mother’s brother-in-law Myles, another judge, was just not usually so boisterous about such things—at least not when I’d seen him before.

  “That’s the Jewel Box Review,” my mother said. “Yes, I read about it.”

  “Men dressed up like women?” one or another of my cousins commented. “I think it sounds nasty. They’re probably all fairies, anyway!”

  My aunt was saying, her voice undercutting her loud husband’s: “You know, Margaret, the show in the first ten rows of the theater was even stranger than what was going on on stage.”

  “I can believe it,” Mother said to her older sister.

  “Well—” Uncle Myles shrugged—“I don’t know about that. But it’s certainly entertaining. Everybody sings and dances in it. At the beginning, the master of ceremonies, this nice-looking young fellow named Stormy—he’s colored too, I think; and with a real, fine tenor voice—tells you that the company is made up of twenty-five men and one real woman. Then the impersonators come out and sing and dance and do their numbers—some of them are good, too! Not just because they look like women, either—though some, I swear, nobody could tell. Then you’re supposed to see if you can figure out which one is real. Oh, I thought it was the cleverest thing!” He turned again to my father. “And then of course, at the end, it turns out—”

  “Now don’t tell,” Aunt Dorothy said. “They might go see it.”

  “Oh!” Uncle Myles laughed. “Sam and Margaret aren’t going to see anything like that! But at the end, Stormy, the master of ceremonies, comes out and asks the audience which of the performers do you think is the real girl. And while people are calling up this name or that—” he laughed again—“and everybody thinks they know it’s this one or that one, Stormy pulls this thing that’s been holding his hair back and shakes it out—and you realize that he’s been the … I mean, she’s been the real woman all along! And it’s right over there at the Apollo.”

  “Now that’s not the usual sort of thing they have there, is it?” my father asked. “Is that what they’re doing there now?”

  “I don’t like to go there,” Aunt Dorothy said. “The jokes the comedians tell are always so dirty!”

  “The company travels around, I guess,” Uncle Myles said. “That’s just where they’re playing while they’re in New York.”

  My father said: “Now why would they bring something like that there?”

  “No!” my uncle protested, again laughing. “It’s really good!”

  I stood in the living room, like someone grown invisible, listening, wondering, puzzling that Uncle Myles, usually so staid, could grant his approval, even his enthusiastic approbation, to something so anarchic. At the same time I yearned to see this transvestial extravaganza with a desire approaching the electric. Perhaps I would notice something, meet someone, recognize something in one of those strange people who’d clearly been marked as foreign and alien to everything I knew, that would, in some way, enlighten me about my own sexuality.

  I committed myself to seeing the show with the same desperation with which I had sought out Gide’s Corydon and The Immoralist (coming across me reading it behind a book at my desk back in my freshman English class, Mr. Kotter had begun to thunder, “And what is it that’s so important that you’re reading it in here. … Oh—” and, on recognizing the title and the Nobel Prize-winning author, returned to his normal conversational tone—“well, that probably is more important than anything I’m saying right now. You go on.”), Tellier’s The Twilight Men, Vidal’s The City and the Pillar, Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room.

  The next Saturday, I strolled over to 125th Street and the fabled Harlem theater, where regular movies alternated through the day and evening with live entertainment. This month’s show, proclaimed the marquee, was, indeed, the Jewel Box Review. I paid the five dollars for my ticket (half my month’s allowance), went in, and sat as close to the front of the orchestra as I dared, watching the last half hour of an unremarkable western. The audience was mostly black—but a few white people had come, as though somehow this particular show transcended parochial racial interests.

  At the film’s end, the lights came up on the stage, the first curtain swept back, and, in purple sequins, a middle-aged black woman comic came out to regale the audience with a barrage of jokes far more sexually suggestive than I would have thought—in those days—it was legal to tell from a public stage.

  Toward the end of her routine—which, vulgar as it was, was very funny—the orchestra players filed into the small pit. Then the music crashed up and out. Another curtain swung back. And an amplified voice announced to the multiple balconies in the dark: “And now, Ladies and Gentlemen, what you’ve all been waiting for: the fabulous Jewel Box Review!”

  Why double my uncle’s description with accounts of the glitter and feathers and sweeping trains in which the female impersonators danced with their “male” partners—a maleness suddenly thrust into quotation marks by the fake breasts, cinched waists, and wigs around it, for here all masculinity seemed as questionable as any femininity on show. Be-tuxed and black-tied, Stormy introduced “Mr. Alberto Pavlova,” who, in tutu, toe shoes, and silver wig, began to dance the Dying Swan—only to break into something hot and kicky, with a sudden lurch of the music toward jazz. Now, from the other side of the stage, Stormy introduced “Mr. Georgie Brown,” a hefty black transvestite, who, in wig and high heels, with inch-long crimson nails, clutched a bit of sequined gauze to his padded bosom and sang “Day In, Day Out” in a volcanic contralto that laid chills all down my shoulder blades. Once or twice someone in the first row ran to the footlights to hand a bouquet of roses up to one or another of the stately queens. And, at the end, Stormy pulled loose her hair to let it fall over the tux’s satin collar, as the whole company came out to sing, “We’re Twenty-Five Men and a Girl …!”

  Yet as the curtain finally swept across the tinsel, plumes, and lamé, and the house lights came up (briefly, before the movie began again), there seemed no way for me to break through the doubled and redoubled artificiality of this entertainment that had just made me laugh and thrill and madly applaud its falsifications, this one artful, that one pathetic, yet all insisting on the entire range of artifice that was art.

  It was dark in the street when, hands in my army jacket pockets, I strolled from under the bright marquee to walk back home. I never even mentioned to anyone in my family that I’d gone.

  It was some years later, when the Jewel Box had again made its annual swing through the Northeast, coming to light at the Apollo, that I overheard my mom and a downstairs neighbor talking in our kitchen.

  “Certainly I was curious, but … well, I couldn’t have gone to see it,” Mom said, putting down her coffee cup. “You know how her mother feels about it. Really, she never would have spoken to me again, if she’d found out.”


  “Now, that’s the one I read about who plays the master of ceremonies. …” The neighbor’s voice both repeated and confirmed at once. “The one they call ‘Stormy’ …?”

  “Yes—that’s Mary.”

  “Who used to be a counselor up with Sam and Peggy, at camp, about six or seven years ago?”

  My mother nodded. “That’s right.”

  And for a moment (and only a moment), it was as if a gap between two absolute and unquestionably separated columns or encampments of the world had suddenly revealed itself as illusory; that what I had assumed two was really one; and that the glacial solidity of the boundary I’d been sure existed between them was as permeable as shimmering water, as shifting light.

  6.641. On my eighteenth birthday, while we were walking through Washington Square Park and looking up at the Washington Arch, Marilyn said, “Next year, let’s meet on your birthday under the Arch of Triumph in Paris.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not?”

  6.65. “Bronx Science is a very important school,” our new principal, Mr. Taffle, had told the student body from the podium on the stage of the old building—in an attempt to establish a dress code for the first time in the school. From the balcony’s great and curving gallery, sitting among the other students, not far from the film projection booth (while two or three more students stood behind it, chatting), I listened with the rest. “At this point you have to understand that what you look like is even more important than what you learn.” Unanimously we all began to boo, loudly and angrily. But that perfectly intelligent educators might make such statements, convinced that in them a radical truth was joined to common sense, was perhaps the greatest condemnation of that security-mad decade—the fifties—now drawing to its close.

  In the new building auditorium, there was no balcony. Nor could the groundfloor space hold more than a fraction of the student population. The general feeling of demoralization was intense, and with various new policies, new inefficiencies, and a few more inopportune—or possibly misinterpreted—statements from the administration, it only grew worse.