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

by Samuel R. Delany

We left it at that and talked about other things.

  When I got back to the house, I mentioned it to Marilyn and Bob.

  Marilyn’s comment: “Dave?” Are you kidding?”

  Bob just shrugged: “Well, if he wants to, let’s put him out to work.”

  I still didn’t think it was a terribly feasible idea.

  But a night later, when Dave stopped by again, another call happened to come, this time from one of Bob’s Johns. In the middle of it, Bob said: “… just a second, Matt.” Bob put his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Dave: “You wanna make some money tonight?”

  Dave frowned. “Me?” He put his hand on his chest. “Doing what?”

  “Getting your dick sucked,” Bob said. “That’s what. For twenty bucks.”

  “You mean me?” Dave said again. “What else do I have to do?”

  “Yeah, I mean you,” Bob said. “Just that—that’s all Matt’s into. Yes or no?”

  “Well, who is he?” Dave asked. Marilyn was beginning to find this funny. I guess I was, too.

  “I just told you; his name is Matt.” Bob looked a little frustrated. “He’s a nice guy—he’s about thirty-five. He lives over on Greenwich Avenue. I’ve seen him three or four times—but, you know, that last two times he was talkin’ about wantin’ some new stuff. I was thinkin’ about getting Chip to take ’im for me. He’s a cool guy—he gives you a drink when you come in. He don’t take all night. An’ he ain’t gonna hassle you about the dough when you leave. He’s okay.”

  “Well, what about you?” Dave asked.

  Bob sighed and looked at the phone. “Make up your mind, will you? Look, I been workin’ all day up at that goddamned tool-and-die shop. I don’t wanna go out tonight, anyway. I’m tired. I stink. I ain’t had my dinner. And I wanna stay home and take care of business.”

  Dave looked from Marilyn to me. “I guess you have a lot of business to take care of, huh?”

  “Dave, I can’t keep the guy hangin’ on the fuckin’ phone.”

  “Okay.” Suddenly Dave stood up. “I’ll do it.”

  Marilyn raised an eyebrow at me.

  Bob put the phone back to his mouth. “Matt, I got another guy here, I can send him over. You said you wanted to try something new … No, not the two of us. Just him. … Yeah, he’s cool. … Twenty-two, dark hair, about six foot, real good looking—Hey?” He called over to Dave. “You gotta big dick …?”

  Which made Dave look a little surprised. “Naw—” Bob said into the phone. “I’m just kiddin’ you both. …” And then to Dave: “He says as long as you’re a nice guy, that’s what counts. I told you, Matt’s pretty cool. …” He went back to the phone. “Uh-huh. Same deal like with me. … Okay, just a second.” Bob put down the phone again, only this time he didn’t cover the mouthpiece. “You goin’ over there now?”

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “I guess so.”

  “Okay,” Bob said into the phone once more, “he’s on his way.”

  “He’s on Greenwich Avenue?” Dave said. “Tell him to expect a real good lookin’ guy on his bicycle in about twenty minutes.”

  Bob went back to the phone. “Huh …?” Then he laughed and looked up at Dave. “He heard you.” As Bob hung up, Dave lifted his bicycle over his shoulder and started out the door. Bob went after him to call down the address. “I wonder what that’s gonna be like?” Bob said when he came back.

  We went to bed before ten. Then, a little after midnight, I found myself wide awake with something to write in mind. I pulled my arm out from under Marilyn, climbed over Bob’s naked back, got my underwear out of the tangle on the floor, slipped it on (it was chilly in the apartment) and went into the kitchen. I closed the bedroom door, turned on the light, took out my notebook and sat at the round table, writing, thinking. Just before one the buzzer sounded. Frowning, I answered it. The footsteps outside on the stairs a minute later had a familiar heaviness. I looked out the door to see Dave, bicycle on his shoulder, coming up in his shorts and T-shirt. “Hi,” he said. “I figured if you were asleep, you wouldn’t answer.”

  “I’m up,” I said. “Where are you coming from?”

  “Matt’s.”

  “You been there all this time?” I asked, as he came in. “How did it go?”

  This was more or less Dave’s report:

  “Well, when he buzzed me in, I had to carry my bike to his place on the second floor—you know, I never leave it out on the street. He came to the head of the stairs, so I called up: ‘Yeah, this really is your guy for the evening coming upstairs carrying a bicycle on his shoulder. But that’s because I don’t want to leave it outside—is it okay?’ He said sure, and invited me in. He really was a nice guy. Not like I thought he was going to be at all. He asked me in, and we got started talking—Jesus, we must have been there six hours. Well, I kept asking him questions. After all, I’d never done this before. And he would answer them. At length. Then he’d ask me something, and I’d answer it—as best I could. I figured there wasn’t any point in not being up front with him. I told him it was my first time. He said sure it was. I said, in this case, it wasn’t a line. It went on an awfully long time before we got down to anything. And when we did, I’ll tell you, it wasn’t much. I don’t think I even really got a hard-on. But he said it was okay. And I got my twenty dollars. He really was pretty nice. He said he might even ask me to come over again. He said he liked talking to me. I sure talked a lot, though.”

  The next day Marilyn answered the phone. “It’s Matt …” she said, with the mouthpiece covered. Bob looked up. But Marilyn had gone back to talking. Bob and I kind of waited for her to hand Bob the receiver. But, somehow, she’d gotten into some kind of conversation with him. So after about three minutes, we went back to whatever it was we’d been talking about. After fifteen minutes, Marilyn hung up.

  “Didn’t he wanna talk to me?” Bob asked.

  “No,” she said. “I think he’s got some new numbers from Artie.”

  “Oh,” Bob said.

  “He was telling me all about Dave.”

  Bob’s expression got brighter. “Yeah? How’d he say that worked out?” I’d already given them Dave’s late night report.

  Marilyn laughed. “Well—he said Dave was very nice. But he’s not somebody to have over if you’re in any kind of hurry—he really thinks he should be saved for special occasions.”

  Which set Bob off laughing.

  When I saw Dave again, I asked him: “Are you interested in doing that again?”

  Dave tossed his handball up and caught it. Behind him the other players ran, halted, and swerved back across the Tompkins Square court. “I don’t think I’d go looking for it. But if somebody asked me to again—maybe to help you guys out, sometime when you didn’t feel like going.” He tossed the ball once more.

  When I conveyed this to Bob, though, sitting in the window beside the plants, he took another swig from his beer bottle and said: “Well, I just don’t think we better ask him again.”

  51.8. Of all the incidents and anecdotes that remain with me from the time the three of us spent together, this is the hardest to write.

  An account such as mine of Bob, Marilyn, and me begins as various notes, now reordered with an attempt at chronological sequence, now written out in fuller form, now another, new memory taking the writer back to an incident already written to append something insistent or characteristic or—it would be disingenuous not to admit it—wholly invented as far as memory is concerned; yet necessary, because logic insists that it must have been like that. In the course of it, the various incidents achieve certain affects: this one was a pleasure to draft, while another was pure work—or worse, painful. …

  Lydia was smart, fat, and shy. I don’t believe she and Dave had come for dinner that night—perhaps they’d dropped over later in the evening, and I’d offered them some of whatever cobbler or pudding—along with coffee—we were having for dessert. Dave’s attitude toward our three-way relationship was an odd combination of tolerance
and—sometimes—importunate curiosity. Since we were all three pretty verbal people—Marilyn and I in a literary and analytical way, Bob in a gregarious and anecdotal one—we were all open to discussing things, if anyone wanted to ask. So, from time to time, Dave asked. The only preface to the evening I’d gotten, however, was when, a few days before, he’d told me: “I was talking about you guys’ threesome to Lydia. And she says there’s a lot about it she doesn’t understand. I think she’d like to discuss it.” When they’d come in, I’d wondered if this visit would yield some informal interrogation. But by the time coffee was poured, I’d decided it wouldn’t. Yet, soon, we were answering one or another of Dave’s questions. And Lydia said: “But the three of you don’t get jealous of each other, do you …?”

  I said: “So far we haven’t. I don’t think we will, though.”

  “I mean, say,” Lydia said, “we all went to bed with one another. You wouldn’t mind that?”

  “That sounds kind of fun,” Bob said. “You want to?”

  Dave laughed. “You really want to?”

  “We could all play strip poker,” Bob declared, obviously warming to the idea. “The winner gets to do whatever he wants with the losers. …” And he was clearly a man set on winning.

  Marilyn had a kind of strange look, part smile and part something else.

  “No, here, I’ll show you.” There was a deck of cards on top of the refrigerator. Bob was up and back at the table with them in a minute. And so Bob, Marilyn, Dave, Lydia, and I found ourselves in a game of cards. Clearly Bob was set for this to turn into a five-way orgy.

  But just as clearly, as we sat around our kitchen table and one piece of clothing came off after another, neither Marilyn nor Dave was particularly enthusiastic.

  Neither Bob nor I wore underwear; we were soon both sitting with bare buttocks on the board bench. Out of some sense of compensation, Dave had taken off his pants and underpants first, leaving his shirt and T-shirt on. I have a memory of Marilyn, looking a bit sour, in her slip, and another, of Lydia removing her white, shiny bra and, as one cup fell from her broad breast, my surprise that the nipple centered on the pink saucer of its aureole was so small.

  “You know,” I said, “I don’t think anybody’s into this, really.” It acted like a kind of signal, and Marilyn and Dave began to reach for their clothing again.

  “Shit,” Bob said. “I was!”

  “Well, nobody else is,” Marilyn said.

  Lydia re-dressed silently.

  “You know,” Dave said, pulling up his jeans, bare feet wide apart on our kitchen’s gray linoleum, “what we’d kind of been wondering—Lydia was talking to me about it, and she thought … well, I guess we were both curious, you see, just what a threesome would be like. In bed. But I mean, how do you find something like that out—”

  Lydia buttoned her blouse, and added demurely: “—unless you’ve got three people.”

  Now it came out that Lydia had been interested in a threesome and, basically, had hoped to borrow me for the evening. No, not an orgy. Just me.

  Though I’d always been rather fond of her, I was a bit surprised. “Just me?” I asked.

  Shyly, Lydia confirmed it.

  Bob’s response was big and somewhat—even I felt—overgenerous: “Well, Jesus, why didn’t you justly so? You wanna take him off for the night? It’s okay by me as long as you get him back here by morning.” He turned to Marilyn. “You mind if they take your old man off for the night?” He put his arm around her.

  Marilyn looked surprised, then shrugged. “I guess not.” Her look at me was questioning.

  But I wasn’t too sure how I felt about it myself—perhaps more curious than anything else.

  “What about you?” Lydia asked.

  “Yeah,” Dave said. “How do you feel about it?”

  “Well,” I said. “I guess it’s okay. I mean, if you really want to. …”

  So Lydia and Dave took me back to their apartment on Tenth Street. We all went to bed. In its way, it was pleasant enough. As I said, I’d always liked Lydia. And Dave was my best friend. But in spite of the odd hard-on with Dave, though I did reasonable oral duty with Lydia, I couldn’t get really physically excited—though both of them did. And for someone not really into the male side of the sex, Dave was as generous as anyone could have been. “Well, it’s easier with someone like you,” he said. “That’s all.” My memories from that warm, full bed are of Dave, bucking above a panting Lydia, one arm caught around me, hard enough to hurt my shoulder; another of gazing over Lydia’s pale bulk, while she laughed about something Dave had said. During some other sexual maneuver, I remember a brief surprise when I saw Dave’s circumcised penis—though of course I knew he was Jewish; and I was circumcised myself. Still, after Bob’s heavily foreskinned cock, it looked momentarily odd. We talked, we joked, we drank Coca-Cola. We lay around in bed. For me, I don’t think of it as sexually very successful: I was the only one who hadn’t come. But its purpose had been to assuage their curiosity—and mine. And it had.

  I walked back home, my jacket shrugged up around my ears, about three in the morning, climbed upstairs, went into the apartment, and got into bed with a sleepy Marilyn and Bob. We talked about it briefly the next day. Bob was mostly put out by the time it had taken for them to get around to saying what they’d wanted. “I thought we were all gonna fuck. If they didn’t wanna, they should have said so right off!” Marilyn just seemed content that things were back to usual.

  Now, where within this account do I locate its difficulty? What makes it, if not the last tale told, certainly the last tale written? (Is it that difficulty which makes me place it here? Or did this all occur much earlier in the relationship? The fact is, I don’t know.) Is it the embarrassment of impotence in a work that might otherwise be mistaken for an elaboration of endless and unmitigated prowess? Perhaps. Is it that, after all this time, I still feel protective toward Bob in some way this anecdote necessarily violates, with its picture of a coarser side to his sexual enthusiasm than the rest of us perhaps possessed? It’s conceivable. Is it because my failure to enjoy Dave and Lydia sexually suggests that what happened between Bob, Marilyn, and me was not some fetishized “perversion” sought as a replicable object, but rather three people relating (personally, sexually, socially) within the margins of their own sexual possibilities—and thus betrays an area of privacy, still untouched, more comfortably elided than articulated? Certainly that’s possible. But whatever those reasons on the margins of desire, they are inextricably mixed in with the more writerly fact that Lydia exists for me only in this one incident. If I ask, “What was her feeling toward Marilyn?” logic alone tells me the two must have liked each other, since Lydia was as voracious a reader as Marilyn or Sue, even if her natural reticence kept her from giving her opinion on what she read quite as freely. “What was her reaction to Bob?” I suspect she found him interesting and baffling—and perhaps somewhat off-putting, at least that night, through simple cultural estrangement: again, a logical speculation. And to Dave? Over these months her affair with him, before they broke up, developed the problems that seemed to me characteristic, in retrospect, of the time, the place. But, again, this is logic. (Did, at some point in the night, she laugh and say: “I think it’s very nice of you to do this.” Did Dave say: “Well, Chip is just a nice guy.” Having written it, I seem to remember it. But is it memory? Or logic? Or only the pressure of narrative, yearning after its own truth?) However much any of these speculations satisfy (or subvert) a narrative sense, specific memories do not come with them to suggest, to confirm, to create, to invest these structural judgments with images, with textures, with lingering sensory detriti. Thus the writer attacks this moment—in its way, more like a story than any other in the book—with a feeling of an immense impoverishment of all the extra-narrational material that impels diegesis into possibility, into narrative, into language.

  21. Hacker, “The Navigators,” in Presentation Piece, p. 17.

  52. Permane
ncy does not seem to be, as yet, an aspect of the relations we explore from our dissatisfaction with the options codified social levels make available.

  Bob decided to bring his wife, Joanne, to New York for two weeks, during which he moved out of our apartment and into one that had just become vacant down the hall from us. Today, I think he was convinced she would return home at the appointed time.

  “Are you going to tell her about us?” Marilyn asked. She looked very worried. But I think she also felt that, if he did, it might at least bring things between Bob and his wife to some kind of conclusion, either way.

  But Bob said. “Are you crazy? If I did that, she’d kill you, Chip, and me. Naw, I just don’t think she could even take that. That’s not what I’m bringing her up here for.”

  “Suppose after she gets here,” I said, “she wants to stay?”

  Bob humphed. “What’s she gonna stay for? She feels about me just about like my parents do. I just thought maybe we could get a few things worked out between us, and quit like friends. My folks’ll take the kids for two weeks. But how’s she gonna leave five of them behind any longer than that? After we get our thing all done, we can really be together, the three of us. …”

  Joanne arrived three days later, to be followed by a couple of relatives, who looked around the city, somewhat dazedly, for four more. Cousin Louanne (dark as half-Seminole Joanne—though she swore there was no Indian at all in her branch of the family) and Joanne—both, indeed, darker than I—had sung hymns and country songs together as girls. Once, when Marilyn and I were showing them around the city, we stopped up to see Bernie at a small Broadway recording studio, where he was working with a teenage singing group and there was an extra hour of paid-for studio time. He let the two women put down a track of their full, brassy harmonies on “Yes, Jesus Loves Me”—only now one and now the other would crack up laughing, with hands over her mouth, turning away from the hanging mike in a torrent of giggles, before they ever reached the end of a chorus. “Oh, come now—!” the other would say. “Now, come on, you!”