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

by Samuel R. Delany

  When, at irregular intervals, a policeman stopped by to check the place out, a light would come on over the jukebox, the dancing couples—mostly male and male—would part, drift back to the walls, and take up their drinks. (Remember, it was six years to Stonewall.) The cop would joke with the bartender, maybe flirt with one of the queens, cast a contemptuous look toward another, then leave. The light would go off. The jukebox would come on. And the dancing would begin—for which Pat, or her backers, paid an outrageous protection fee.

  25. While she was working as an editor of a company in-house organ, Marilyn took a postal worker as a lover that summer, an older, easygoing guy, somewhat in awe of her talent and intelligence. The relationship gave me a sense of relief—and Marilyn some pleasure. I was to meet them one evening at his Fourth Street apartment, where the two of them would be waiting, and the three of us would go out—possibly over to the waterfront bar.

  I climbed the narrow marble steps to the fourth floor. It was an ancient house, whose leases still stipulated in fine print that horses could not be stabled inside the apartments. Outside the door, I realized I could hear Marilyn and her friend talking together in the kitchen as they waited for me.

  Marilyn had always been a person who spoke easily and eloquently in public. When she had to speak in groups, she expressed herself with intelligence and insight. But in personal conversations, when caught up in the grip of excitement or anxiety, she often developed a slight and persistent stutter. Indeed, it had come about just at the point we’d first decided to go off and get married. As I stood there that evening, I realized Marilyn was not stuttering at all.

  As they talked, now of her class at the League, now of work conditions at the post office, I realized I was listening to a voice I hadn’t heard for more than two years—and that I had very much missed.

  It was a warm, easy, and personable voice.

  I stood listening for five minutes or more, just enjoying it, before I knocked.

  Her friend answered the door. “Hi!” he said. “Come on in.”

  “Hello.” I stepped inside.

  At the kitchen table, Marilyn turned and smiled. “Oh, hi!” she said. “Hello. You got here!”—both the o’s and the h’s catching faintly on her tongue to make the small stutter that was the only voice she could now speak to me with.

  26. It had been a lucrative Saturday night at the Elysée—surprising, because, thanks to some scheduling mix-up on Billy’s part, five singers were working there that evening, rather than the usual three. But the tourists had responded. When Terry pulled the blind down over the glass door at three in the morning, we’d each ended up with sixteen or eighteen dollars.

  Marilyn did not like staying in the Fifth Street apartment alone. But sitting for hours in a coffee shop, night after night, from seven till three, while a handful of singers sang the same dozen songs over and over left her bored and irritable. That night, however, because there’d been more performers, because the audience had been so lively, because friends had dropped by, she’d enjoyed herself. A group of stalwarts, Marilyn and I among them, had walked down to Chinatown for a three-thirty supper in an all-night basement restaurant. Now, as dawn rose—rose bright and still—in the empty streets, we walked back to Fifth.

  The hard guitar case had grown heavy on my arm, lugging it to and from Canal Street. We were talking about how few people trusted each other—indeed, had just pulled out the old saw about how people step over other people in the street. We were passing the schoolyard; behind the wire fence, on one of the benches, I saw a young man, sleeping. His back was to us. He wore sneakers, black jeans, and a black shirt. Clearly it was someone in his late teens or early twenties.

  It had been a fine night. We were both feeling magnanimous.

  Marilyn looked up at me; I looked at her, and we turned back to the gate to wake whoever it was and ask him if he needed a place to stay.

  I reached down and shook his shoulder.

  The young man started, turned over, and … became a young woman. “Chip …?” she said, blinking sleepily.

  Surprised, I realized I was looking down at Carol—former manager of the Elysée, late denizen of Dirty Dick’s.

  “Carol!” Marilyn said. “What are you doing out here?”

  Sleepy Carol’s story was sordid and confusing, and came out in bits and pieces over the next day or so. As best I could make out, another woman had hired two men to break into her apartment and sexually molest the woman who was now either Carol’s roommate or lover, in an act of jealous revenge. (Sonny had first introduced me to the notion that there were “rape artists” for hire and, at a Clancy’s Bar on Twenty-third Street, even introduced me to a pale, gangling, thirty-nine-year-old Irishman who pursued this unwholesome specialty. “Naw,” he explained to me over a mug of Piel’s, “most of the people that hires me is women. Men gonna do something like that, I guess, they do it themselves.”) Where the other woman had gone, I was not clear. But afraid lest the assailants return, Carol had felt safer out on the street.

  We took her back to our apartment, where we all—Carol in the living room and Marilyn and I in the bedroom—slept late into the day. Carol stayed with us two or three days. That evening, when she was in the bathroom, she recognized some drawings Marilyn had taped to the wall of one of the models she’d drawn regularly at the League—a woman who was rumored to be the daughter of a judge. It was a friend of Carol’s.

  In the poem I’ve already quoted in §20, Marilyn wrote:

  … The night she spotted her

  sometimes girlfriend naked in my red chalk

  drawings taped to the john wall, we had a talk

  about how she bridged night’s work and day’s work,

  a dude till dawn, a nine-to-five file clerk

  in heels and hose. Some grass: she demonstrated

  her butch walk, girl walk, paced like a five-gaited

  horse the splintered floor, miming her cross-

  over from flunkey to 3 A.M. yard boss.

  Fox-faced in burnt sienna, the judge’s daughter

  ignored us. Was it Carol who had bought her

  the watch she left on, posing, to keep time?

  I learned the lesson as a paradigm

  of living day-life, night-life, Janus-faced.

  Why didn’t Carol, older, have her own place?

  Where did she sleep the nights she didn’t crash

  on our spare mattress at East Fifth Street? Cash

  she stored in the front pocket of her drip-

  dry Chinos, which she slept on, laid out under

  the mattress for their knife-edge. Who, I wondered,

  did she sleep with, now? She’d told things to

  Chip she wouldn’t tell me, who’d only (she’d guess) botched

  stoned fumblings while somebody’s boyfriend watched.

  I knew the boys’ bars—did she go to one

  for girls? I dawdled nights on the question.

  Two weeks later: what did they make of me

  on a barstool at the Sea Colony

  in a paint-spattered Black Watch shirt, old khaki-

  work pants, one long braid straight down my back,

  chain smoking Camels, making my second Bud

  last? I sipped it as slowly as I could,

  looking around me surreptitiously.

  Boys’ bars had dance floors. Puerto Rican queens

  in mohair sweaters, who worked up routines

  in kitchens, line danced to “No Milk Today,”

  “From a Jack to a Queen,” “Walk Like a Man,”

  too cool to giggle at the double enten-

  dres, cruising without seeming to cruise.

  No one was dancing, here. Women in twos,

  each suit-and-tie paired with a plunge-necked sheath,

  held hands at tiny tables, closed. Bad teeth

  and Brooklyn accents, nineteen-year-old snob

  thought, in the wrong outfit for either job

  —and how invade
with chat hermetically

  sealed couples? Somebody romantically

  forty-plus, foreign, solitary, face

  defined by facing danger, in the place

  for R. & R., who’d like my mind, whose bed,

  dovetailed by bookshelves, was four blocks away …

  Seduction by the French Department head

  to whom I owed a paper on Genet

  was what I had in mind, and I assumed

  she’d know how to proceed beyond the full-

  face closeup kiss on which my mind’s lens zoomed

  in, blanked out. I should have followed Carol

  on her night off. She knew the regulars,

  I guessed. I couldn’t sit on a barstool

  reading, till closing. Chip had adventures;

  I, it seemed, had trepidations. Full

  of them, I got down the rest of my beer

  and turned tail, out the door into the night

  streets, which aroused just reasonable fear …20

  20. Ibid.

  27. Ana, now a young folksinger, just twenty or so, working the coffee shops as I did in the Village, had developed a kind of passion first for me, then for Marilyn.

  Ana was dark-haired, full-bodied, very smart, very talented, and she lived with an older man (thirty-five or so … ahem) named Fred, who used to come to the coffee shops where she performed and, gazing through his wire-framed glasses, waited for her sets to be finished with, then would walk with her, carrying her guitar case, back to the Second Avenue apartment (hers) they shared.

  For a while, both Marilyn and I alternated between being flattered and being a bit annoyed by her attentions. I guess one evening when she was over visiting us to sing for us a song or three she had just written, we both decided to be flattered at the same time. The three of us ended up in bed together.

  For me it was an abundance of breasts, a thicket of thighs, an arbor of arms. There was a lot of laughing, a lot of quiet affection, and mouths moved everywhere over the various hills of various bodies. I was fascinated to see that a certain politics of attention applied here, prone, with two women I knew as friends just as much as it did, over at the trucks, upright, with four men who were complete strangers.

  Because feelings, emotional and physical, are so foregrounded in sexual encounters, the orgy is the most social of human interchanges, where awareness and communication, whether verbal or no, hold all together or sunder it.

  28.1. One night when Marilyn was out—narrative closure urges me to make it her visit to the Sea Colony she details in the poem in §26 (a notorious, if staid, lesbian bar in the fifties and sixties) described above, but Mnemosyne (though at her most untrustworthy) tells me that visit was on a cooler evening, perhaps in November—Ana dropped over for a return engagement.

  It was a sweltering night.

  I’d been somewhat surprised that I’d been able to get an erection before, as two women at once as a fantasy simply bore no erotic charge for me.

  And yet—like how many heterosexual men confronted with a homosexual encounter—I’d discovered that the reality of human bodies, despite the intricate psychic web that binds it, is often, and especially in the young, more agile than our expectations. I liked her. And I was still interested in exploring the limits of my own sexual map.

  Ana bit her nails as badly as any boy I’d ever mooned after. I’d always felt the habit, hugely erotic for me in men, would become a damper to sex when exhibited by women. But, while in our last encounter it had not added anything the way it would have with a man, it had not halted me either. With Marilyn, of course, I was sexually familiar and at ease. What would it be like without her?

  We went to bed.

  My memory is that it was hot, sweaty work—made pleasant enough by the moments of conversation and joking that, now and again, punctuated it. In the middle of some particularly sweat-drenched and robust bout, there was an insistent knock at the door.

  Then the bell rang, equally insistently.

  I raised my head, frowning.

  I thought it was Sonny—when he dropped by, he always knocked and rang both—so I didn’t bother to put on any clothes. All the lights were off in the apartment. I intended just to open the door, tell him it was the wrong time to come by, and go back to what I was doing.

  Streaming sweat in the dark kitchen, I turned the brass lock and pulled the door back.

  And looked out and up on a tall man in glasses.

  Under the sweat, I was almost immediately overcome with goose-flesh, the way one is at the sound of nails on slate or, sometimes, on learning that someone near to you has just died.

  “Excuse me,” he said, “Chip.…”

  It was Fred. He wanted to know if I’d seen his young girlfriend. She’d been talking about possibly coming to see me and Marilyn, and, as she hadn’t returned, he was worried about her …

  It was impossible not to recall the moment, from months back, when Mike had come pounding on the door looking for Gail. However much milder Fred’s demeanor was, certainly it was compensated for by the reality enfolded in the damp sheets inside.

  “Gosh, Fred,” I said, “no, Ana hasn’t been by here.” Then I added, “I’m sorry, but I have a friend of mine inside—” (It was pretty well known in the Village folksinging circles I moved in that I was gay; and I knew people frequently speculated on what sort of “arrangement” Marilyn and I had. And I was standing at the cracked doorway, obviously buck-naked) “—and he doesn’t have much time. Do you mind if I get back to him?”

  “Oh,” Fred said. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “If I see her,” I said, “I’ll tell her you’re looking for her.”

  “Okay,” Fred said. “Thanks.”

  “Good night.” I closed the door, turned the lock, and started back through the dark kitchen, thinking about a lot of things.

  Understand: Marilyn had been the first woman I’d been to bed with—and the act had precipitated me almost immediately into an uncomfortable marriage. Ana, inside, was the second; and here I was, already lying my way out of a situation from some Feydeau farce. In hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of homosexual encounters, casual or committed, nothing like this had ever happened to me. Was it, I wondered, something in the institution of heterosexuality that was, itself, just … off? Occasionally I’d told myself that if women were as easily available as men, I might pursue more of them sexually. And as often I told myself that that was a rationalization. Little or nothing in my fantasy life pushed me to such pursuit. But now I found myself thinking that, perhaps, if I had a choice, heterosexuality was something better avoided and just much too much trouble for someone who was not particularly disposed in that direction anyway.

  I sat down on the damp mattress, where the sheet had pulled loose. “That was Fred,” I said, “looking for you.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought it might be. I’m awfully glad you didn’t tell him I was here.”

  We stayed in bed together another hour.

  Then she showered and went home.

  When Marilyn got back, we sat together on the living room bed, made up neatly now, and I aired some of these thoughts.

  She almost laughed herself silly. And she and Ana were planning to take a five-day hitchhiking trip together up to Provincetown soon, anyway.

  28.2. To those among my straight friends with whom it came up, I usually characterized myself as homosexual. But among my gay friends, out of a kind of niggling guilt—since whatever my fantasy life, my relationship with Marilyn, once we were married, was one of easy and regular sex—I’d call myself bisexual.

  The minister’s son who had been the object of that catastrophic ten-day affair the previous November now dropped by to say hello. He had developed a permanent lover, a redheaded church organist, half a dozen years older than he, Marilyn, and I—a young man who, it turned out, was another, former Science graduate.

  Sitting and talking with him, that afternoon he came over, at one point, when he’d asked
me what I thought of myself as, and I’d answered, with a shrug, “… bisexual,” he took a drag of his cigarette and said: “Maybe there isn’t any such thing, really, as bisexuality.”

  28.3. It was the first time, though not the last, I heard the suggestion. The behaviorist approach to psychology (“You are what you do”) that dominated the forties and fifties, only to be seriously challenged in the sixties—and that I was still upholding, however tentatively, by my declaration of bisexuality—was not a sui generis invention of Dr. B. F. Skinner. It was rather an academic operationalization of the modernist aesthetic that was just as clearly expressed in the conclusion of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1921), “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent,” as it was in the precepts of the Imagist poets, or in the prose of the academic favorite, Ernest Hemingway, or the popular favorite, Raymond Chandler. Those—later in the sixties—who saw a strain of fascism running through behaviorism were responding to just this element, as it is the political operationalization of an aesthetic (as Susan Sontag has pointed out) that is the fascist hallmark: “It doesn’t matter what it feels like as long as it looks good.”

  The messy and marginal, which is how fascism has always conceived its enemy (“It doesn’t matter what it looks like—so long as it feels good”), besides always appropriating fascist emblems for their own look, always use a code of appearances to determine precisely how things feel—or are supposed to feel.

  Twenty-five years later, I would simply have answered that there is definitely such a thing as bisexuality. And though, indeed, I am not it, I have met too many who are for it not to exist. In terms of subject, how things feel has got to be part of specifically behavioral categories—certainly in matters of desire.

  28.4. But the reason the minister’s son had come by was to invite Marilyn and me to dinner at the apartment of his lover, Guy. He himself did not have many friends his own age—and his lover had made the suggestion that he invite us in the first place.