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

by Samuel R. Delany

  It seemed feasible, Risa explained, given the people who’d come, that we begin with the International Poetry Project, which would involve readings of poems in both the original languages and in translation from different nations. Were any of us, she wanted to know, familiar with the vast and wondrous tradition of native poetry written by the Maori of New Zealand …?

  More blank stares, as Risa reached into a large, red-leather reticule and pulled out a dog-eared copy of The Penguin Book of Maori Verse. “What,” someone wanted to know, “would the International Poetry Project consist of?”

  Well, it would begin with readings of poetry from different countries—like New Zealand—which would be arranged with the actors we had present.

  Where?

  Well, right here. In this coffee shop? Oh, no. Not now. But she knew the owner, and he’d said he would be willing to have some evening programs of poetry readings. So if we’d just all go out and acquire this book …? Then we could begin rehearsals—did anyone have a place where we could rehearse?—next week. Future programs would include German Poetry, Italian Poetry, Spanish Poetry, South American Poetry, and French Poetry. Penguin, she assured us, did anthologies of each.

  But for now, Maori came first.

  I’d told Marilyn about the meeting, and, as I recall, she hadn’t been particularly interested. But she’d agreed to drop over after her classes at NYU and meet me at the coffee shop an hour after the meeting was scheduled. Certainly by that time it would be over. Well, an hour later, when she came in, it was still going on. Within minutes of her arrival, Risa had her trying some Maori ritual chant out loud at the table, and was smothering her with praise over her reading voice. Risa would not even entertain the thought that Marilyn was not, now, part of the Chamber Theater Company.

  Though I guess I had an inkling of the preposterousness of it all, I was also curious. Willie, who volunteered his Village apartment for the first rehearsal a few days later, was at least twenty-four or twenty-five and was clearly tickled by the wackiness of the whole thing. Seven-thirty the next Tuesday night, we met at Willie’s small, neat apartment, in a Village walkup with its johns in the hall. A couple of the people didn’t show up, but all the ones I’ve described did—including Marilyn. A couple of us had actually gone out and bought the book, so that with reading over each other’s shoulders, there were enough copies to go around. Risa began to assign (and endlessly reassign) poems for various of us to read aloud (and assign lines of poems, for those works she felt should be read by several actors in several voices) and, sitting around on cushions or the sagging couch, we began to rehearse. In this setting, Willie’s speech defect became terribly apparent. Everyone wondered how, and if, anyone would say anything about it. At one point, quite professionally, Risa finally said to him, “You know, you really have a serious problem with your s’s and z’s.”

  To which, equally professionally, Willie replied, “Yes, I know, I’m working on those.” (As I’ve said, it verged on a lisp, but rendering his s’s as “th” would mock it, not convey it.)

  Slowly, over a series of tries, Willie’s role was reduced to the male voice in a single poem that was a ritual marriage dialogue between a man and a woman—with a minimum of s’s in the man’s lines. I must say, he took it very well. And, speech impediment aside, he was a wonderful actor.

  Risa taught us at least one terribly useful thing in that first rehearsal that I’ve gotten much mileage out of ever since. Even today, when most people read a line of poetry—and if it’s common now, it was rampant in the fifties—they will, on reaching the line’s end, close with a rising inflection. For most people this is a way to signal what they’re reading is poetry, rather than prose. (Listen to a record of Sylvia Plath reading her own poems. That’s the way everybody read poems in the fifties. Where did we learn it? Probably from those recordings of Dylan Thomas that every bright fourteen-year-old with literary ambitions owned. Even if you didn’t like the poems, you loved the voice.) Risa stopped Marilyn in the middle of one of the poems to explain: “Even if it’s poetry, dear, you’ve got to read it as though it were a sentence someone was saying. Drop your tone at the end of the line, the way you do at the end of an ordinary sentence.” After that, things went much better.

  Beyond her Chamber Theater dream, Risa was also a fine raconteur. How much of my sense of the Village comes from Risa’s tales and stories. She had come to the Village some time in the forties. (Her father lived in Brooklyn—as I recall, she didn’t get along with him too well.) But she had endless and wonderful stories of the Waldorf Cafeteria, on the southeast corner of Sixth Avenue and Eighth Street, with its potted plants, tiled floors, cloths on the tables, and baskets of rolls set out with the salt and pepper shakers (Horn & Hardart Automats—themselves once as much a symbol of New York as the Empire State Building, but now all but vanished from the city—were a deco vulgarization of these older establishments), and tales of E. E. Cummings, Brother Theodore, and Dylan Thomas.

  Let’s go back to the rehearsals for our first evening of Maori poetry.

  I’ve mentioned Peter. For western films, Hollywood has always liked tall actors: easily Peter could have been the sulky, mildly good-looking-in-a-seedy-sort-of-way, fourth-in-line member of the Gang. About twenty-five, he had immense hands—which, though the nails were of ordinary length, still practically hypnotized me. He wanted to be an actor. But he talked in a breathy near whisper. I recall at least once Risa telling him, “I’m sure your interpretation of those lines is truly marvelous—full of feeling, deeply sincere, and rich with insight. But you’re sitting on the couch. I’m sitting over here on the cushion. The room isn’t that large. And I can’t hear a word you’re saying!”

  In that year when I was first experimenting with sex, the information I had to base those experiments on was not very sophisticated. From somewhere I’d learned that male actors were supposed to be gay. But I wasn’t sure about Peter.

  When our second or third rehearsal broke up (I don’t think Marilyn made that one, but perhaps she did), as we left I just started walking with Peter down the street. After a few blocks, he suggested we have some hot chocolate together. We stepped into a shop, probably somewhere on Seventh Avenue. As soon as we sat down, he began to pour out all his doubts about Risa and the Chamber Theater project—it seemed silly to him, pointless, impossible. I said he was probably right, but if you had nothing better to do, it certainly couldn’t hurt. (This must have sounded very different to a twenty-five-year-old living on his own in New York and trying to be an actor from the way it did to a nineteen-year-old living at home with his mother and looking for something to do over a long dull summer. Several times Peter mentioned how intelligent I seemed for my age. People often did, so I was kind of smugly used to it.) When we finished, I paid for my own chocolate over his protests and—uninvited—went on walking along with him.

  Soon we came to a small sunken yard, of the sort that fronts many brownstones, and Peter said, “Well, this is where I live.”

  I actually said: “Can I come in for a little while?”

  Peter looked surprised, then said, “Well, yeah. Sure.”

  We went in.

  Something in his tiny, ground-floor, two-room apartment was nonfunctional. The gas? The electricity? I don’t remember. There were some books on the floor by the gray wall. A box spring on the floor with a print thrown over it was his bed. We sat on it because there weren’t any chairs and began to talk.

  I really wanted to go to bed with him. Since Lorenzo, my experiences had mounted from five or six to thirty or forty, but they were formal “cruising” situations at Forty-second Street movies or along Central Park. I hadn’t the vaguest idea how to turn a social situation into a sexual one—and the situation with Lorenzo certainly didn’t provide much of a model.

  I said we talked.

  Outside the window, the gray afternoon darkened and colored itself deep blue. I remember I was surprised to learn how upset he’d been over Risa’s criticisms of hi
s soft-spokenness—though it had certainly seemed a reasonable point to me. The logic of his complaint, however, went something like this. If Risa was right, and he couldn’t project or be heard, that was tantamount to saying to him he couldn’t be an actor. And who was she to say that to him? The whole thing was stupid. And reading Maori chants in a coffee shop for an evening wasn’t his idea of acting, anyway.

  I was determined I was going to stay there until he asked me to go. But he seemed happy enough to have me. I knew the best way to maintain someone’s interest was to get them to talk about themselves, and so I spent a lot of time drawing him out. He must have told me most of his life story—and I recall none of it, even to the midwestern town he’d come from.

  We didn’t leave the house again. If we ate, it was something like bread-and-butter sandwiches. At ten or ten-thirty that night, he said something about being tired and that he was going to go to sleep. I said I was tired too; would he mind if I stretched out next to him? No, sure, go right ahead. Lying down on the low bed beside him, both of us in our underwear, I drifted off to sleep. About an hour later, I woke. After five minutes in the still dark, one or the other of us turned over—and suddenly we were hugging each other, kissing. Wholly without words, over the next forty minutes, we went through pretty much everything sexual two men can together.

  Both of us, first me and three minutes later Peter, came.

  I went back to sleep. An hour or so later, I woke again and, after counting to ten (six or seven times), reached to touch him. He was hard. But now he moved my hand away, whispering, “No, not now. …” Disappointed as only a horny teenager can be, I went—uneasily—back to sleep.

  In the morning we got up. We talked of everything else that morning. But all mention of the sex that had occurred—occurred furiously, passionately, ravenously—was wholly outside our conversation. By mutual agreement? Not exactly. I figured Peter was the adult. It was his house. I was the guest. I was trying to take my cue from him.

  But I was also still trying to figure out—silently, furiously—for the whole day, how I could get him to have sex again. Having crested the barrier of number one with this quiet giant, number two seemed far more difficult. Again, he made no sign that he wanted me to go. Indeed he seemed to enjoy having me there. Not once did he ask me if parents or roommates might be expecting me. There were none of those annoyed and put-upon signals that let you know you’re not wanted. No, he had nothing to do that day. Sure, it would be fine if I wanted to hang around. Now we went out together for a cup of coffee; now we went back to his apartment to read our separate books, stretched out on the bed together; now we talked easily of this and that, quite as comfortably as I would have been spending a day with any of my cousins. (Was this, I wondered, simply the despair of lovers who could think of nothing else to do?) At some point in the afternoon, I decided that the only way to have sex with him again was to wait until we went to bed and then do exactly what we’d done before. And so, with a mustering of patience, I resolved to do so.

  Slowly, slowly, the day completed itself.

  Still, he gave no sign I could read that he wanted me to go. He had candles in the apartment for the evening, but I don’t recall if they were for atmosphere or lack of current. Eventually he stretched out on the bed and said he was going to sleep. I lay down beside him. He blew out the two stubby, and the single tall, wax staffs. After what seemed an appropriate time, I reached for him. This time he immediately took my hand and moved it away. “No. We better not. …” So I turned over and, thinking that there was something very dumb and wrong and unhappy about this whole thing, went to sleep.

  The next morning, very early—four-thirty or five—I got out of bed, told him I was leaving. (Obviously wide awake, he looked at me and said, “That’s all right.”) Outside I climbed the steps to the street level and started down the block, with sunlight in my eyes from the east prying under the trees that edged the narrow Village street. My overriding thought was: What an incredible waste of time that was!

  Certainly formal cruising grounds were preferable to this silent and impossible nonsense. They were definitely faster.

  Thinking about it, four years later, alone in the hospital, it occurred to me that I had been under twenty-one: that might have worried Peter. Also, heaven alone knows what sickness or crime or sin he’d learned, at home in whatever small town, such acts were; or what vow he’d taken never to do them again. Perhaps, in his refusal, he simply thought he was doing the best thing for us both. But if he was, I was absolutely resentful of the sheer time it had cost.

  More to the point, however, those years saw, throughout the middle classes of our country, a deep, widespread fear and mistrust of sex—a fear of speaking of sex (for there was a whole lexicon of words that in those days could not be printed in even the most serious fiction, could not be heard on the stage or the screen in even the most mature play or film; there was a whole gallery of texts that could not be printed, sold, read in this country). And black Lorenzo and white Peter presented the behavioral poles between which that fear manifested itself—behavior that ran from (near) rape to (almost) rejection—behaviors with easy analogues among heterosexuals for anyone who wants to seek them, behaviors shared by white and black, behaviors that the adolescents of the sixties were soon to declare rebellion against, often unaware that what facilitated those rebellions were a set of institutions—homosexual, heterosexual—that equally disgruntled men and women in the fifties, forties, and before had established (however silently, however exploitatively) to similar ends.

  All we brought to it was language.

  Which creates very little.

  But it stabilizes.

  I never saw Peter again.

  He didn’t come to the next Maori poetry rehearsal, nor to the coffee shop performance the following Wednesday. (Somehow, that summer, there was only one performance.) But Risa relieved me of whatever guilt I felt by saying, “No, I didn’t think he’d show up. He never really struck me as Chamber Theater caliber.”

  Chamber Theater may well have been what inspired us, a week or so later, to restage Marilyn’s Perseus on Tenth Street for the Coffee Gallery, later that same month.

  43.7. Once more, I simply do not know when this next incident occurred. I had started cruising. But I was not yet married. It was cold. But it just as easily could have been in early March, as it could have been in early November. The possibilities for it lie anywhere in the colder months between the winter of my eighteenth year and the spring of my nineteenth. …

  I went walking up Central Park West. But the chill had kept most people in, and either I was not satisfied by the few people I saw, or they were not satisfied with me. Near midnight, I ended up sitting on a bench beside the park, somewhere near Seventy-eighth Street. I was wearing my army jacket, jeans, and probably a pair of much-worn tennis sneakers. While I was sitting there, I saw a ragged, but good-looking black guy, about six-foot-three, maybe twenty-seven or twenty-eight years old, coming across the street from the south. He saw me and came walking directly up to me, with a big, friendly smile. “Hi, there,” he said stopping right in front of me. “What you out lookin’ for tonight?”

  Whatever my experience was, it still had not prepared me for too much besides the cat-and-mouse of looking, looking back, strolling back, passing, and repassing three or four times, before an actual pickup—pretty standard fare for cruising in the fifties, even in so notorious a spot as this.

  “I don’t know!” I blurted. “What do you … have?” It was probably a slip of the tongue more than anything else.

  But the man moved his hand to the crotch of his worn and soiled black slacks and narrowed his eyes. “Oh … ’bout eleven inches.”

  I could have been no more terrified if I’d suddenly realized I’d stepped off a cliff. My head pounded. My heart thudded.

  “You want it?” he said. “It’s yours.” Then he sat next to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “You got some place to go?”

  “N
o …”I managed to get out.

  “You live with your family, huh?” he said, letting me know, even in my fear, that this magic formula, which had already been said to me at least three times by others and which I’d said as many times myself, was, indeed, the socially accepted code for “you can’t come home with me.” He went on, “You wanna come with me, then?”

  “I … don’t know,” I said again. And then, “Okay.”

  “I have a room up in the Endicott. You know where that is?”

  I didn’t.

  “Yes, you do,” he said, flatly. “It’s that big ol’ hotel. You just come on.”

  We walked over to Columbus Avenue and Eighty-first Street. The Endicott, at the time a cheap giant of a residence hotel that had seen far better days, took up the entire block. But I don’t think I’d ever actually been past it before. Outside the dilapidated, institutional-green lobby, in which I could see a double elevator door, a Coke machine, and an ancient check-in desk, he told me that he would go on up—I should wait five minutes, then just go on in, to the elevator in the back—“Not that one there …!”—and come up to room four-oh-something or other.

  Then he sprinted off up the steps, into the hotel’s lobby door (open wide in autumn), and disappeared. I knew he wanted the time so that if any hotel clerks saw me come in, I’d be in no way associated with him. But that also meant that he, in no way, could be associated with me. I waited the requisite five minutes, then walked inside. The desk clerk didn’t even look up from his mystery magazine.

  As I stood by the back elevator, waiting for the door to open, staring at the peeling blue wallpaper and the floor indicator that didn’t work, did I think, “This man may be a crazed, psychotic killer who wants to torture me, cut my body up into little pieces, then dispose of it in small paper bags all over the city?” You bet! Did the small of my back sweat, and the muscles in my thighs shake, and my throat feel like sandpaper? Yes, they did. Did I realize I didn’t know his name and that he didn’t know mine, so that if anything terrifying happened between us, there would be no way to attribute any other motive to the horrors he might inflict except crazed sexuality? Right.