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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Since I’d been published—and possibly because her downstairs neighbor Jesse’s prediction about my being in print before voting age (still twenty-one then, and not yet eighteen) had come true—she’d become as supportive of my writing as it was possible to be … though she still didn’t read it, for much the same reasons, I suspect, that Sue had found it so difficult.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  I gave her a kiss and left.

  I thought perhaps I might drop in to say hello at Bernie’s, phoned to see if he would mind, and, twenty minutes later, walked in under the long, green awning that ran to the curb of West End Avenue. I said hello to the West Indian doorman, who smiled, nodded, and ushered me into the dark lobby, and ignored the always-repeated surprise of my own image in the distant mirrors. In the front elevator, I rode up to the fourth floor.

  Inside, the lock gave its familiar ka-chunk. Bernie pulled the door back. “Hello, there! Come in.”

  “Hi.” I stepped past the large Florentine table that filled the foyer, its black wood and ivory inlay supporting an ornate clock that combined gilt and teak and didn’t work, the two, table and clock together, suggesting, not an amassing of incongruous antiques but rather an ease with time and history that, over five years now, had become part of the comfort of visiting here.

  I hung my winter coat in the front closet.

  Bernie led me into the living room.

  Relaxed in jeans, a denim jacket, and very scuffed cowboy boots, a young man got up from his seat on the couch.

  Bernie introduced us. “Chip, this is Bobby.”

  “Bob,” the young man corrected, as we shook.

  I said hello.

  Bob sat down again, forward on the brown brocade cushions and asked me how I was doing with a country twang out of the deepest south. He had blue-gray eyes, dark blond hair, and long, large hands that clearly had done manual labor. In conversation, Bernie explained that Bob was an old friend. He’d known him several years ago—though Bob looked only a year or so older than I. (He was a single year my senior.) Bob was up visiting New York for the Christmas season, Bernie explained.

  “I come with my brother-in-law,” Bob said, “from Florida. I was here a long time ago. That’s when I met Bernie. It’s nice to see the city again.”

  Bob and his brother-in-law were staying someplace called the Dixie Hotel, which I knew was in the Forty-second Street area. He sat with his knees wide and his elbows propped on them, while Bernie explained that, during his last time in the city, Bob had worked as an office boy for a woman friend of his who ran a design and printing company. “How old were you then—fifteen? Sixteen?”

  “I was fourteen.” Bob grinned. “At least when I started. I just didn’t tell nobody.”

  Always a great one for showing off his friends to one another, Bernie broke out his own copies of my books for Bob, and I told him I’d been up registering at City. Bob said, “Goin’ to school. That’s real good. I wish I’d a’ done that.”

  Bernie and Bob were just finishing their conversation. There was some talk of a man named “Artie.”

  “Well, if he’s still around, I guess I’ll just go see him and ask him what’s going on.”

  “If you want to,” Bernie said, “I guess you will. Be careful, though.”

  Though I’d never met him, I’d encountered Artie’s name several times in my adventures around the city. He ran a callboy service that supplied older men with young ones.

  Bob said good-bye, got up, and, with a rangy swagger, ambled alongside Bernie to the door.

  When Bob had gone, Bernie came back and sat down.

  “He seems like a pleasant guy,” I said.

  “Bob’s always been a very winning fellow. I gather he’s just run off from a wife and a pack of kids, somewhere in Florida, to come up north with his brother-in-law and some girl.”

  “How’d you meet him?” I asked. I pictured some southern working-class family that had spent some time in the city, for whatever reason, bringing their son—Bob—along.

  But Bernie explained that, when he’d done youth counseling work for the Big Brother organization, Bob had been referred to him. Bob had run away from Florida at thirteen and hitchhiked up here to the city, to live here pretty much on his own till he was fifteen. Then he’d gone back home. Bernie hadn’t seen him since.

  “What did he do all that time he was back?” I asked. “Well,” Bernie said, “I know he spent two of those years in jail.” We talked about other things. Then I left to return to the Lower East Side and tell Marilyn what the college guidance counselor had said about my readmission.

  48. Phil was now working as a picture librarian for a daily paper. That year, for Christmas cards, he sent out eight-by-ten glossies of a recent Vietnam photo: three shirtless grunts, in helmets and fatigues, stood atop a tank. One was smoking a cigar, with a midwestern farm boy grin; a second was giving the photographer (and the viewer) the finger. Turned away from the camera, was a third urinating off the side. Some ropes ran from the tank to the ground, tied to the legs of half a dozen Vietnamese corpses, shoulders and thighs twisted in odd ways. Some limbs were missing. In one Asian face the eyes were still open … leaving the suspicion, as the tank dragged the bodies along, that a few might still have been alive. The photographer had taken the picture from very low down, so that the corpses in the foreground seemed to tumble from the picture’s bottom. Over this, with a rubber stamp, Phil had printed in streaky red:

  PEACE ON EARTH!

  GOOD WILL TO MEN!

  It was quite something to take from your mailbox a day or two before Christmas. Later Phil told me that he’d not only sent them to his friends, but that he’d used the newspaper’s bulk mailing facilities to send copies to some hundred government officials.

  48.1. One day when I dropped in to visit Phil for a pre-Christmas visit and to tell him I’d gotten the picture, I finally coerced him into showing me the volume of his sex journal in which our initial meeting had been recorded. “Well,” Phil said, to my joking about the terrible things he must have written, “why not?” Minutes later, sitting in the brown living room chair, I paged through the typescript held in the spring binder. (In the bedroom on the rather full shelf, there were two or three more volumes after it by now.) Finally I reached the four-line entry, dated sometime in November of the year before:

  Met a kid on the docks last night, twenty or twenty-one. He sucked me. I sucked him. Went for a beer afterwards. Name was Chip. He’s Negro—maybe Spanish. Exchanged numbers. Then went home.

  I looked at the three- and five-page entries either side of it. Well, many of the entries were brief. But others were written out in detail as rich and complete as anything I’ve recounted here, with vivid evocations of the smell and the light, full of sociological speculation and psychological analysis, nuanced in a prose at once crisp, sculpted, and notably better than mine. I read again: “… He sucked me. I sucked him. …” Then I looked a few pages on, hoping to find an account of our second assignation—but Phil had said he never wrote about repeats or about people he actually brought home. That might be too intimidating should his journal get into the wrong hands.

  I closed the binder, took it back into the bedroom and slipped it into its place on the shelf—Phil had just gone into the kitchen for a beer.

  Anonymous sex can be hell.

  49. On the second day of classes the Promethean staff sought me out and asked me to rejoin. I did. And enjoyed the work mightily.

  The meetings for the journal were also a kind of workshop, where stories and poems by the local school writers were criticized. To decide if she wanted to continue with graduate school, Marilyn had enrolled that term in a graduate linguistics course at NYU. On an evening when her course didn’t meet, while the light outside the windows behind their diamond-wire grills was still tinged with gray, Marilyn came up to the City College campus and sat in on a workshop. Her criticisms were incisive. When the meeting broke up two and a half hours late
r, the present editor-in-chief—another ex-Scienceite—invited her to come back to the meetings regularly; the windows were now black.

  In the freezing January dark, muffled in scarves and winter coats, as a bunch of us crossed the snowy campus among the new and traditional buildings, all with yellow window lights, someone’s portable radio played the Supremes: “Baby Love”—and we turned out of the gate to make our way down the hill to the subway.

  50. In the first days of February, likely on a Thursday afternoon (neither Marilyn nor I had classes Friday), I dropped in again to say hello to Bernie. “Bob—you met him here a few weeks ago—just called and said he might be stopping by, too,” Bernie told me, as I hung up my coat.

  He’d just gone in the kitchen to make some tea when the bell rang. “Would you get that?” he called.

  I went to the door and opened it. “Hello.”

  Bob looked a little surprised, but recovered with a broad smile. “Well, howdy, stranger!” He stepped in. “Is Bernie in?”

  “Sure. He’s out in the kitchen.”

  And from inside, beyond the glass doors to the dining room, Bernie called: “Hello, Bob! What do you take in your tea, milk or lemon?”

  “Anything,” Bob called back, “long as it’s hot!”

  It was cold out that day.

  Bob was wearing the same denim jacket he’d had on before. It wasn’t lined. As he walked, long-legged, into the living room, I decided his jeans hadn’t been washed since, either. His hair, three quarters of an inch longer, clutched down over the back of his collar in a way it hadn’t before. His hands were gray and rough. His nails were dirty.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked as he sat on the couch, far forward as before, elbows on knees.

  I sat in one of the armchairs across the room.

  “I could be doin’ better. But I could be doin’ worse, too.”

  “You’re still at the Dixie?”

  “Nope.”

  “Where’re you staying now?”

  “Well—” he grinned—“I spent last night on a bench in the Port Authority Bus Station.”

  Bernie brought in the tea tray. Bob put a lot of sugar in his and held the flowered china in both hands right up to his chin, taking little sips. We talked about an hour—about my classes, about various people Bob had seen. There was no more talk of Bob’s derelict status, but I learned that the brother-in-law, along with the car and the girl, were gone from the city. At some point, from Bob’s mention of “some guy she was with that night,” combined with what I knew of the Dixie, not to mention Bob’s relation with Artie, I realized that the brother-in-law, if not Bob, had been prostituting her and living off the proceeds. After a little Bernie said, “I wish I could invite you fellows to stay for dinner. But Iva’s coming home in a little while, and we hadn’t really planned on it—”

  We took it as a signal to leave. I got my coat from the closet and followed Bob, still in his denim jacket, out into the hall. “Thanks for dropping by,” Bernie said. “See you soon.” He closed the door.

  “You have any plans for this evening?” I asked Bob as we waited for the elevator.

  “Nope.”

  “You want to come down to my place and have dinner with me and my wife?”

  “You mean it?”

  “Sure.”

  Bob glanced over at me. “If you want me to get down on the ground and kiss your feet right now, I will …!”

  “I’ll give her a call and say you’re coming.” I laughed. “You don’t have to do that—but we do have to find a phone booth.”

  The elevator came.

  There was a booth on the corner.

  While I was digging out a dime for the call, I told Bob, “Maybe you can stay over on a blanket on the floor—but I can’t promise that. It’s up to Marilyn. We had a pretty long-term houseguest a while ago. Since then she hasn’t been too hot on overnight visitors. We don’t have much room. But at least you’ll get something to eat.” I frowned at Bob in his light denim jacket. The February wind laid its knife blade against my cheek beside the hood I’d shrugged up over my head when I’d come out of Bernie’s and cut my knuckles where I’d taken off my glove to dial the number. “Aren’t you cold in that?” I asked.

  Standing with his hands in his pants pockets, Bob was waiting for me to make my call. “Matter of fact,” he said, “I’m freezin’ my fuckin’ nuts off—since you asked.”

  “Hello?” Marilyn said on the other end.

  “Hi. I’m bringing somebody home for dinner—a guy I met at Bernie’s. His name’s Bob. Is that okay?”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Fine. If you just take the other pair of pork chops out of the freezer for me, I’ll cook those up with the ones I left out this morning.”

  “You want me to cook?” Marilyn asked.

  “There’s lettuce and celery and stuff in the bottom of the fridge,” I told her. “Make a salad?”

  “All right.”

  Minutes later, Bob and I were hurrying toward the 103rd Street subway stop, shoulder to shoulder in the darkening February afternoon. He didn’t have subway fare.

  “How did you get up here from Port Authority?” I asked as I bought two tokens at the scarred window behind its tarnished brass bars.

  “Walked.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said, “in this weather …?”

  On the subway down, we talked about a dozen things. For a while we got into swapping jokes. “You know the one about the cocksucker who’s workin’ on the guy in the bushes, and after he’s finished, the guy looks down at him and says, ‘Okay, you sucked my dick, faggot. Now I’m gonna beat the shit out of you.’ And the cocksucker looks up at him and says, ‘There’s two things I always liked. One’s suckin’ cock. And the other is a good, fuckin’ fight!’” Bob chuckled, nudged me with his elbow; and I wondered what Bernie had told him about me. “I always kind of liked that one—or did you ever do anything for Artie?”

  “No,” I said. “But I know who he is.”

  “Oh,” Bob said. “Well, I figured you would.”

  We swapped more jokes. In a pause, I told him: “Bernie said you’d spent some time in jail.”

  “Two years.”

  “When was that?”

  “Sixteen to eighteen.”

  “I’m surprised they didn’t put you in reform school.”

  Bob chuckled as the train pulled away from Fourteenth Street. “I lied about my age.”

  That evening, in the thin, shortsleeved summer shirt he wore under the denim, Bob sat at the round oak table in our kitchen and ate pork chops and spaghetti and garlic bread and salad. Then, with his back against the wall, during the hours afterwards, he was as charming and entertaining as a twenty-three-year-old southern country boy might be. The night was a gallery of anecdotes, now about working shrimp boats, now about his family in Florida, now about an array of semi-legal adventures from running moonshine to stealing lumber. He was a natural raconteur, and Marilyn and I were both fascinated. Once he broached the subject of his time in jail tentatively—with a glance at me.

  But Marilyn began to question. Soon he was into a whole new series of stories, about how guys would take potatoes, stick them with four or five razor blades, and hurl them at each other. “I never threw one. But I got hit with one, and it hurts!” He showed us a broken tooth and told us that, after he’d gotten in a fight, he’d been restrained by being taken off into another room and tied to a set of bedsprings with no mattress. When it was time to eat, a guard who had it in for him brought him a bowl of soup and an iron spoon. “He’d been assigned to feed me. They weren’t gonna let me up. So he sat down on my bed—they called him Bigfoot, because every time he sat down, he’d kick his shoes off his big dirty feet. Then he starts in to ‘feedin’’ me—he broke my tooth, cut up my mouth. … I had to have three stitches in my tongue! It’s a wonder I can still talk!”

  Marilyn took to Bob as much as I did. Once, when she’d gone in the back room for something, I follow
ed her in and told her, “He doesn’t have a place to stay tonight. Do you mind if he sleeps here?”

  A minute later, when Marilyn was out in the kitchen again, she told him, “It’s awfully cold out. Do you want to stay over with us? We can give you a blanket. You’ll have to sleep on the floor, though—”

  “Well, your floor can’t be any harder than the Port Authority benches. Thanks a lot, I really appreciate it.”

  The apartment only had three rooms. Even with a wall we’d torn out (largely with Sonny’s help, after we moved) to join the front room with a small hallway to the kitchen, it was nowhere near as spacious as our Fifth Street place. The front room was still mostly storage. My typewriter and the filing cabinet were there. The middle room was the kitchen. In the back, I’d taken two beds my mother had given us, wired them together, and made them into a double sleeping surface.

  The heat had gone off for the night, but some warmth still lingered in the back room.

  “You want me to sleep in the kitchen?” Bob asked.

  “You’ll probably be warmer if you sleep in the bedroom with us,” Marilyn said. “You can put your blanket just down beside the beds.”

  At one point I stepped into the bathroom while Marilyn was brushing her teeth. “He’s awfully cute,” she whispered to me.

  “I think so too,” I whispered back.

  “I figured you did.” She laughed and went back to brushing.

  Marilyn and I got into bed, while Bob rolled around on the floor beside us with a pillow and a blanket. “You guys are real nice to put me up like this.” He turned first one way, then the other, in the dark.

  Exactly what followed I don’t think I’ll ever be able to reconstruct entirely. There’d been no pot. Not even beer. After we’d all been quiet an hour or so, Marilyn whispered to me, “Do you want him to get in with us?”