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

by Samuel R. Delany

  In the very first hours, there were notes of tension between Joanne and Bob: a sudden harsh word, from one, from the other, now an angry look from Bob, now a pout from Joanne.

  Twenty-two-year-old cousin Lonny was a corn-silk blond, full-bellied, small-shouldered, and far too pale for anyone to believe he was really from rural Florida. One afternoon he climbed tiredly up our four flights to sit a while in our kitchen. In his gray suit and red tie, he let me pour him a cup of coffee, while he asked: “Do you mind if I take these shoes off? I just ain’t used to the kind of walkin’ you folks do up here in New York City.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Go on.”

  And, under the table, he toed a new, too-tight, black loafer off a very white sock.

  I commented that Bob and Joanne seemed to be having some trouble already.

  Lonny picked up the pink plastic prototype automatic spring-operated toothpaste dispenser—his basement-inventor father had sent him up here to see if he could sell it to any of these northern supermarket chains—turned it over, looked at it, and set it on the table again. “Well, that’s the way they been goin’ on at one another ever since the two of ’em got together. I don’t expect it’s ever gon’ change. I like the son of a bitch—I really do. But when he run off, me and everybody else told her she was better shut of him.”

  Marilyn stood at the kitchen window, looking through plants, across clotheslines, at fire escapes. She hadn’t really moved or said anything in two or three minutes.

  “Lonny—” I set the coffee pot down, folded my arms and leaned back against the stove—”what do you think the real problem is with those two?”

  “They only got but one,” Lonny said. “They’re just too damned country—the both of ’em. That’s all.”

  And a day later, after a big breakfast of bacon, toast, fried potatoes, pastry, eggs, and pancakes at our place, with Joanne and me dividing the cooking, Louanne and Lonny went off to catch a cab to the airport and the plane back to Florida, leaving their country cousins to deal with New York.

  Both Marilyn and I tried to be as friendly as we could. Marilyn gave Joanne a red felt winter coat. And when Bob and Marilyn were off at work, I took her on a tour, from the roof of Radio City to the Staten Island Ferry.

  As we stood at the deserted rail and Joanne looked over the glass-green water at the New York skyline, I realized, while her black hair lifted and fell against the red collar, that, with only a push. … I didn’t do it of course. But it was odd suddenly to know I was capable of seriously considering murder. She turned to me then. “You treatin’ me nicer than Bob,” she told me. “He done asked me up here, and now he don’t pay me no min’ at all since I come.”

  The next day, when she came over to sit for a while in my kitchen (again Bob and Marilyn had gone to work) and, at her urging, I’d gone to type up a section of my novel in the front room by the window looking into the airshaft, she suddenly set a cup of coffee down on the wing of the typing stand.

  “Oh, thank you …!”

  She gave me a dark smile and moved quickly away. But I was struck with the strange and awkward fact that, at no time during my life, through five novels now, had anyone else ever thought to bring me, unbidden, a cup of coffee while I worked.

  52.1. Broadway theater is, of course, central to the experience of New York—though Broadway tickets were beyond what Marilyn and I could afford. But that season a new young playwright, Terrence McNally, had premiered his first Broadway play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night, starring the wonderful Eileen Hackett. The title had certainly come from the old prayer that, years ago, Chuck and I had listened to WOR’s Jean Shepherd recite, meditate on, and extemporize over, on his midnight-to-three radio program: “From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggety beasties and things that go bump in the night, Dear Lord, deliver us.” The play had received good reviews, but it was not doing well commercially. Then The Village Voice, convinced of the work’s import, had mounted a campaign to keep it running—and the theater had actually decided to sell tickets for only three dollars each!

  Yes, I was interested in seeing it. But mainly I thought it would be nice for Joanne to see at least one professional theater piece in the course of her two-week visit. With not much idea what I was getting into, then, I took the subway up to the box office and purchased four tickets—for Marilyn and me, for Bob and Joanne.

  That night we went.

  Set in a world that has just gone through an atomic war, the play centered on a macabre family—a mother, a late adolescent son, and a slightly younger daughter. The family suffered from some disease, or possibly a mutation, as a result of which they had to lure someone in from the outside and murder him or her every night. If they did not, the mother explained, they would turn on and kill each other. To that end, the son goes out and returns with a young man he’s picked up for the night, presumably to have sex with. As the young man talks to the son about his attempts to have a meaningful life, the boy records his conversation. When the two boys go off to make love, the daughter photographs them through a keyhole.

  “It’s interesting,” Joanne said during the intermission in the crowded lobby. “I sure never seen anything like it before. But I don’t quite know what’s suppose to be goin’ on.”

  “It’s strange, is what it is!” Bob said, standing next to his wife, five years older than he. “It’s weird, that’s what!”

  The bell rang for the second act.

  I took Marilyn’s hand. “We better go back in. …”

  When the young stranger came out of the room, the children played back an edited version of his comments. At the same time, they projected slides of the two boys having sex over the whole stage. The result was grossly distorted and mortally embarrassing, and the young man is finally destroyed. The klaxon-voiced Hackett, in the role of the mother, now turned to harangue the audience in the play’s closing movement: Yes, we are monsters. And you are the people we are destroying. But how much better for the world that we do—for while we only murder one person a night, you have murdered thousands with your bland ideas, your naïve optimism, and your good intentions wholly out of touch with the world’s real situation. However impure, we are the only good that is left. It is you who have brought this devastation in the first place—that is why monsters, such as we are, must kill you.

  The effect was stunning—and disturbing, at least for me.

  I can’t speak for Marilyn or Bob. But I felt it was truly moot whether I was monster, victim, or naïve optimist.

  “I don’t think I understood it,” Joanne said as we left the theater. “It was interesting, though.”

  Marilyn and Bob were pretty pensive too.

  52.2. By the end of the week, however, she had announced—to my shock, to Marilyn’s, and I believe to Bob’s—that, kids be damned, she liked it up here and intended to stay.

  Three days more, and she had a job as a waitress in a short-order chain on Twenty-third Street. “And I’m a real good waitress,” she told us.

  She was, too.

  52.3. After several false starts and a few weeks where I just felt too down to write, one afternoon when Marilyn was at work and I’d finally gotten back to my book, I heard Bob push into the apartment—the door was open—but kept on typing. Then I realized he was standing behind me. Maybe his breathing was different. When I glanced back, he looked absolutely wild-eyed. He said, slowly, hoarsely, “Come on, cocksucker, get the fuck in bed with me!”

  I overturned the chair, standing up; then—though, before, I got to the door and locked it—we were in the bedroom. In the intense, desperate sex, neither one of us ever got fully out of our clothes. But when we were finished, Bob turned over, snuggled back into the arc of my body, and, holding my arm around his chest and both of us breathing heavily, we went to sleep on the crumpled blankets.

  I was still dozing when the key turned in the lock. Of course it was just Marilyn … but seconds later, I realized it wasn’t.

  Bob had a key to our ap
artment. But he must have left it back in his own place when he’d come over. I’d always told Joanne that if she needed anything, she could come over and just get it—use the key if I wasn’t in. And that’s what she’d done.

  I opened my eyes.

  With her black hair and dark features, Joanne stood in the bedroom doorway, looking upset.

  My arm was around Bob.

  I had the presence to realize that the only thing to do was to act as if nothing were wrong, nothing could be wrong, and nothing could have been wrong. “Hello,” I said sleepily, taking my arm from Bob’s chest. Getting up from the bed, I pulled my belt closed. “Did you need something …? Go ahead, just get it. I’m getting up anyway.”

  “Bob’s here …!” she said.

  “Yeah. We were taking a nap.”

  Bob woke at his wife’s voice. “Hi,” he said. Fortunately—and independently—he’d decided much as I had.

  Apparently Bob had been supposed to go out to the store to get some milk for coffee. He hadn’t come back. He’d come here instead. After an hour, Joanne had taken the key and come over to see if I had any in the icebox that she could borrow. I sent them, with half a quart, back to their apartment. Then I sat down at the typewriter—and closed my eyes.

  There was no way she could have missed my arm around her husband. She’d been nervous the whole time, slightly confused, and I knew what that was. How, I wondered, would Bob get out of this one?

  Later that evening, when I was returning to the house, I met Bob alone in the hall, as he was leaving. “What in the world,” I asked, “did Joanne say about walking in on us like that?”

  A quarter of a smile away from deadpan, he said: “She wanted to know why you was sleepin’ with your arm around me.”

  “What did you say to her?”

  “You was asleep and maybe thought I was Marilyn—you probably didn’t even know your arm was there.”

  “And she believed you?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “She ain’t said anything about it since.”

  A day later I got home to hear sounds from the bathroom. When I stepped into the bedroom, through the bathroom door I saw, with a moment’s familiarity in the fluorescent light, Bob and Marilyn embracing, naked, against the sink, his shoulder faintly freckled, hers indented where bone inside pulled down the skin—because her arm was raised. A shank of her long hair was caught between them. Some of his, slightly long now, in bronze blades, mingled with it. They made standing love, hip to hip, against the white porcelain.

  52.4. Over the next nights, at three or four in the morning, Bob would come into our apartment—with his key—and crawl into bed with us. We would make love. Then we’d hold him while he cried. “Love” was not a word we used much. I never doubted that Bob liked us. But at these times, when he seemed wholly vulnerable and a victim of his own miscalculations and mistaken judgments about what Joanne would want, what he could effect with her, I believe he loved us both, as well as what there was between us, as much as he loved anything.

  When he’d first wanted to bring Joanne up, I’d wondered if we were being used, or deceived in his feelings. But I don’t think we were now. As deceptions go, it just would have been too complicated.

  After staying with us half an hour in the dark, he would leave.

  Then Marilyn would cry; and I’d hold her.

  52.41. Somewhere in the Seventies along Central Park West, a tall, black guy in a denim workshirt sat on the back of a bench one chill afternoon in early spring. I was wandering downtown—probably after a visit to Bernie’s. We looked at each other. It was cool, sunny, somewhere in March of ’65. I smiled at him; he smiled back, motioned me over. I walked up. Immediately, with a trace of a Caribbean accent, he explained he wanted to ball. His name was Tony—oh, and one other thing: had I ever heard of a famous German philosopher named Oswald Spengler?

  No, I said. I hadn’t.

  Well, he was surprised. I’d seemed like an intelligent guy. He’d thought I must have.

  Tony took me home to his basement flat, just off the park. The sex was downright athletic. In his single, subterranean room, he had a very high bed. And I think there was a fireplace that didn’t work. But afterwards, what was even more memorable, was that he broke out his two-volume edition—from the public library—of The Decline of the West. According to Tony, the author (Spengler) had solved all the problems of the world, and we only needed to pay attention to what he had to say in order to put civilization back on track. At one point, when Tony had to go to the store, he left me alone reading it for about twenty minutes.

  The famous “Introduction,” where the young are exhorted to abandon the arts and the humanities and take up science and engineering instead, I’m afraid just didn’t register—or, at any rate, seemed a kind of crackpot metaphor for something else I wasn’t quite clear on. But the opening section of the argument proper, on Greek history, I found fascinating. Tony was staying with a diminutive black friend, a cornet player in the Sun Ra jazz band, who came in later.

  “Do you live with anybody?” Tony wanted to know.

  “My wife,” I explained. “And my lover.”

  “Both at the same time?” his friend asked.

  “Yep. We all sleep in the one big bed.”

  Tony raised an eyebrow.

  It wasn’t true, of course. But now, prompted by whatever desire, it was easier to say that than it was to describe the situation that had come to replace it.

  By the time I left, Tony and his friend had invited me to a concert at the Museum of Modern Art, which, sadly, I missed. But somehow the friendship kept up. Months later, finally letting me know for the first time that they were lovers, they moved into Bob’s and Joanne’s abandoned apartment at the end of the hall, just before I took off for Europe.

  And more than a decade later, when, in England, I purchased a copy of The Decline of the West for myself and read it through (much of it, alas, of the same crackpot stripe as the exhortation; though the erudition was often awesome), it was very much with the memory of that March afternoon under the blowing branches above the wall by Central Park.

  52.5. Three weeks after she arrived, Joanne announced she was pregnant. “I don’t know how she could be,” Bob said. “I ain’t fucked her since she got here. Once, in the mornin’, I woke up with her riding me with a piss-on, and told her to get the hell off. I don’t know. She says maybe I leaked.”

  53. Now Bob ceased entirely to go to work. After a week his job called our place to say he’d been fired. We passed the news along. It didn’t seem to mean much to him. What went on in the apartment at the other end of the hall, I didn’t know. Bob had stopped shaving, stopped washing—and in two more weeks, he looked about as strange and preoccupied as I had just before I’d gone into the hospital.

  Joanne was worried, too—now she told him that the pregnancy had been a false alarm, or, as Bob put it, “A fuckin’ lie.” Late one night, only a little later, dirty and distracted, he came knocking on our door, upset, to explain that Joanne had just slit her wrists. We rushed in. Bloody as it was, the cuts were not deep. It was a childish suicide attempt. But she was still in hysterics. Bob was in no condition to do anything. He wanted me to stay with him. So Marilyn took Joanne in a cab up to Bellevue.

  In the emergency room, while they waited, Marilyn wrote:

  Trackless and lost between piss-colored walls,

  she huddles on the bench arm, hides her face,

  shakes with sobs or dry retching. The intern calls

  in a bored voice. People shift in place.

  Clocks sweep toward morning and she hides her face.

  Between the red felt collar and her hair,

  her neck is cracked with white beneath the brown.

  I draw an old man. Three boys turn to stare

  over the bench to see what I have down;

  One has a bloody gash beneath his hair.

  I am a stranger whom she cannot trust …

  my hand is on h
er shoulder, we are here.22

  The next day, Bob was together enough to get Joanne and bring her home. New York welfare hospitals are grim places, and I think he was shocked at just how grim it was—and even at Marilyn and me for bringing Joanne there.

  But we had done the best we could.

  53.1. On April 15, 1965, the first page of Part Two of Babel-17 was in my typewriter.

  I had just typed the phrase “Semiotic, Semantic, and Syntactic Ambiguities …”

  22. Ibid., p. 21.

  54. … when Bob and Joanne, together, knocked on our door. They came inside and explained they’d had a long, serious talk. Bob had decided he was going to take off hitchhiking to Texas to work on the boats, out of Aransas Pass, as he had done every spring for four years since he was eighteen.

  It was presented as a decision that would solve their growing problems. It was clear that Bob basically wanted to get away from everything.

  “I sure wish you’d come along with me,” he told me. “You could work there too.”

  Marilyn and I, at this point, had already talked of separating.

  Leaving Marilyn and Joanne in apartments at opposite ends of the hall was probably not the best idea. But I think all of us—at least Marilyn, Bob, and I—hoped Joanne would tire of waiting through the summer and eventually would return to Florida and her children, who were still with her in-laws, going on six weeks now.

  55. I decided to take my notebook and my guitar.

  “You really gonna take that?” Joanne was dubious about my carrying a guitar case on a cross-country hitchhiking trip. But Bob said: “Oh, you see guys out on the road with stranger stuff than that. He might lose it. But some of them must make it.”

  Marilyn was just distant. I was preoccupied—and curious where her preoccupations had placed her. As I moved around the apartment, putting things away—while Marilyn looked in drawers and examined bookshelves—our eyes would catch. One of us would give a quizzical look that asked: “Did you have something you wanted to say …?” that the other, after a moment, would ignore.