A psychological convention, however, similar to the narrative one by which the paraliterary detective story developed, says: Because you cannot remember it, it must contain a mystery, a meaning, an explanation, an epiphany highly significant, waiting to be untangled. Your lack of memory is precisely a sign of a unique and terrific repression of that import, intaglioed on the event’s surface, if we could only recover it.
Another narrative convention, however, declares: Because you do not remember it, the event must have been exactly one with the baseline norm toward which all such situations sediment. Your lack of memory is precisely a sign of the wholly general, the totally unexceptional, the purely ordinary and thus thoroughly historical of which all that is socially (as opposed to individually) meaningful in life is constituted. Most of life in its specificity is ordinary: that is why we forget it. There was nothing of interest on the event’s surface. Its only meaning lies at a historical depth, which can always be, somehow, reconstructed around it.
Still another, that rises almost wholly from contemporary feminist theory, declares: What you have forgotten, repressed, obliterated in the terror of its specificity, is the ideological. What you cannot remember is specifically an encounter with a woman. Your reconstruction, whatever it contains, is only ceded you by the history of other such encounters—since you admit your memory does not hold the event itself. Depths and surfaces are not eventual.
Whatever text you can peel from it—remembered, reconstructed, even invented—start by rereading:
Why did you ask her not to meet you? Call up those anxieties, those arguments. Interrogate those sulks. Articulate those silences. Who was paying for this back and forth flying—not to mention the flights to come? (Not you!) Give money, the domestic, and psychology voices equal to, and as intricately operationalized as, the totality of your homoerotic forage on the road. You will then at least begin (To write this immediately calls up two incidents that, till now, have escaped the “totality” of the account above: Ron and me pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of the supermarket after Elmer, buying a dozen steaks to stock the galley for the next trip out, as Elmer didn’t like fish, though Ron and I both could have lived off fish happily and easily—and we were both mildly unhappy about it because food money was deducted from our salaries. And, out on the water, I cooked a heaping platter of fresh-caught shrimp, hoping to persuade Elmer to reduce the beef—and the cost to us all—on the next trip out; but Ron and I ate them alone, sitting on the deck in the evening, because Elmer couldn’t abide the things) to be able to read the political unconscious of your text.
This convention tells us:
An unknown event is not a personal mystery to be solved, telling yet something else—your weakness, your power, your guilt over the discrepancies between them—about “the man” (i.e., the subject) in you. It is rather a historical text to be written about the woman you have forgotten, repressed, or never, really, known. Whoever we, today, men and women, substitute for “the man” in the previous sentences, that is what—today—ideology has become and remains.
(History arrives only when we don’t know what has happened. Only when we forget. Only when people disagree on what has happened. That is why a theory of history must always come into being at the same moment as history itself.)
58.6. The night I left Texas, back in Aransas Pass, Bob got drunk, into a fight, and disorderly. Arrested, he was sentenced to thirty days—all of which he explained to me in a call the next morning, while, in just my undershirt, standing by the kitchen window, I nodded sleepily into the phone.
Marilyn was out when he called.
Later, when she got back, she phoned down to Texas—and actually got to speak to him in the small-town hoosegow.
Over his protests, Marilyn wired him down two hundred dollars for bail—I borrowed a hundred of it, wired from my cousin in Los Angeles, and Marilyn made another through a couple of hours’ work from a connection left over from Artie.
A day later a plane ticket was waiting for Bob at the Houston airport under the name “Alfred Douglas.”
58.7. On a drizzly night, sometime during the depths of the A.M., Marilyn met Bob at the airport and, instead of bringing him back to our Sixth Street apartment, took him up to the Ansonia Hotel, on Seventy-third Street and Broadway, where I met them on the corner, just outside the doors of the Seventy-second Street subway kiosk. But by this time, even Bob was willing to admit that seeing Joanne again here was just not the best thing for either of them.
Marilyn wrote:
When you told me that he was in jail
again, I scrounged two hundred dollars for his bail
in two hours, wired it down, came home, threw up,
cried while you brewed me coffee, and threw up,
and threw up every thirty minutes flat
for two days, till the airline ended that
and flew him back. Pale, tired, clean,
I took the Carey bus at two-fifteen and waited at the terminal for him.
He had new checked, pegged slacks. They’d cropped his hair.
He said he was surprised that I was there
and had I dieted to get so thin.
He asked why you weren’t there, and I said, well,
you were engaging in diplomacy, which meant you had to wait around and see
his wife. We took the bus back. It was dark
inside, but floodlit girders looped the park.
Grained, heavy cones of light spilled on the sky
as planes dropped to their runways through the mist.
There was a groan of engines as we kissed.
And searchlights limned my hand over his thigh.24
A foggy summer sprinkle fell on and off throughout that whole night. It had just stopped again and the streets were still wet, when Bob, with his arm around Marilyn, came out the subway kiosk doors at Seventy-second Street and, seeing me standing across on the corner, grinned and waved. I kissed Marilyn while my hand rested on his shoulder. She looked totally exhausted and very happy. The three of us walked up dark Broadway together to the Ansonia.
Seventy-second Street; so tired it hurt.
The florid Slav bursting his dirty shirt
could see from the cash window what we were:
a trio of unluggaged travelers,
wanting cheap beds and anonymity.
You signed for two, although he could see three.
Two bulldykes teased an acrid teenaged whore
pinioned with dexies to the lobby door
and wondered if distinction could be made
among us who was trick and who was trade.25
I’d decided I’d leave Bob and Marilyn alone together for what was left of his first night back. There were things I knew she wanted to talk to him about, to ask him about. She’d been away from him much longer than I had. And she’d been very upset by the last turn of events.
We took the elevator up to our room.
And Marilyn wrote:
The walls were hotel green. Someone had drawn
blue crayon mountains facing the iron bed.
We shelved our change of underwear. I yawned.
A swish of cars, a whiff of the dried dead
came through the blinded courtyard to the halls.
You went away that night …26
Back down to Sixth Street was where I went.
And went to bed alone. And rose the next day, made coffee for myself, and sat at the round oak table, thinking. I’d already seen Joanne a couple of times. Once I’d gone up to the Bickford’s on Twenty-third Street where, in her yellow smock with the white handkerchief pinned to her shoulder, she worked behind the counter at night. Over the free cup of coffee she’d given me, I’d told her of Bob’s doings up till the time I left. I suspect I saw her that day as well—and marveled at how easy it was to keep up the ordinary conversation that we did, now about her job, now about how bored she was here in the city with nothing except her job to do, without my mentioning tha
t Bob had been in jail and was now out, that he was back in New York, that he was in a hotel room up on Seventy-second Street. I went out and walked around a bit. And, later, I went back up to the Ansonia.
Marilyn had taken the day off to be with Bob. But when I got there, they were taking a nap together. In the dim room with its obligatory torn shade, I talked to Bob, who sat now, naked, cross-legged on the bed up near the pillow, while Marilyn sat on the edge in her slip.
What, I wanted to know, was he going to do about Joanne?
“What am I supposed to do about her?”
“Are you going to see her?”
“Nope,” Bob said. “I don’t even want her to know I’m in the city.”
“When you brought her up here,” I told him, “you said there were some things you wanted to work out together. You got anything more to work out?”
“Shit,” he said. “That was the dumbest thing I ever done. There ain’t nothin’ more between us.”
“You have anything more you want to say to her?” I asked again.
“Nope.”
I took a breath. “All right, then. Why don’t you let me send her on back to Florida. She doesn’t like it up here. She misses the kids—”
“You think she’d go?”
“I think in about a week I could convince her. We’ll buy the ticket for her. And that’ll be it.”
“It’s fine by me,” Bob said. “If you think you can do it.”
“You mind paying for another airline ticket?” I asked Marilyn.
She took a breath, too; and shook her head.
It didn’t take a week—only three days. I didn’t tell her Bob was back. And when I offered to buy her ticket, I brushed aside her protestations of the expense: it was some extra money that had just come in to me from one of my books. She could pay me back whenever it was easy for her. If she couldn’t, she didn’t have to. … But to reconstruct those persuasive conversations with the woman who still thought her husband was in Texas would be as difficult for me as recreating my meeting back from Texas with Marilyn. All memory holds to are those moments when her dark eyes would brighten at the thought of her kids: “Oh, God, Chip, I do miss those children. You just don’t know how much. …”
And I’d say, “Then why don’t you go home to them?”
But that’s all.
Conveniently.
One morning around ten-thirty, three days later, I took Joanne (on the Carey bus) to Kennedy—and ran with her luggage, out the door and across the tarmac to the baggage cart, when, for a moment, it looked as if she might be too late. Then I stood in the sunlight, waving and watching as she climbed into the plane, blinking as the plane rolled away and, minutes later, runways away, rose. …
In the glare I narrowed my eyes and wondered how all this had happened.
Now Bob returned to Sixth Street.
The three of us had begun to sleep together again. There were even moments, in bed, when one or all of us, perhaps, were convinced that things were back to normal.
One story Bob now told from his brief stay in the Aransas Pass jail remains with me—probably because it was the only indication of homosexuality anywhere in that small town (the story of Red notwithstanding) I ever had. My own weeks there, possibly through my own blindness (but I doubt it), had presented a landscape that, for most of the unattached men on those docks, was, despite their endless stories, as sexually bleak along heterosexual as it was along homosexual lines.
Sitting in the clutter of the front room, where there was an old couch, Bob explained (while I typed): “When I got me arrested and thrown in the drunk tank—” Marilyn stood in the door, listening—“there was this little queen in there—good-lookin’ guy, too. Maybe twenty, twenty-two. I don’t know what they’d picked her up for. But man, she wanted to get fucked in the worst way. She was still drunk, and she was goin’ around to every guy in that tank, just beggin’ him to fuck her. An’, of course, we was all sittin’ around laughin’ at her an talkin’ about how, later, maybe we just would. And how she would probably be a pretty good piece of tail. An’ after all, there weren’t nothin’ better around. Well, later, I went over to her, an’ told her, sure, I’ll do it. So I got her pants down there in the corner, and just climbed into that nice little asshole. An’ you know, after I’d finished, none of the other guys in there would speak to me no more? Like I done somethin’ funny an’ there was something wrong with me! Can you believe that?” he ended, with the disingenuous belligerence I can honestly say he never turned on either Marilyn or me, but which, by now I knew, was his response to any situation that did not go exactly as he might have wished, no matter if it was Tony’s outrage, Joanne’s sulks, Artie’s prices, or a night’s ostracism by three or four Gulf coast alcoholics.
But I was working hard again on my book.
58.8. I finished Babel-17 in July of ’65. Bob read a first draft of the manuscript sitting on the bench at the round table, sometime after Marilyn. “That’s not bad,” was his comment.
“Well, I’ve got to put it through the typewriter again,” I told him.
There were pleasant moments, certainly, when we sat around the kitchen and I taught Bob half a dozen chords on my guitar; or when, leaning back against the wall and shuffling the cards at the table, Bob taught Marilyn one or another brand of jailhouse poker—and discovered, to his surprise, that the poet was a natural pokerface with fewer tells than he.
But the pieces of our triple just didn’t fit together the way they once had. Depressed, Bob really wanted to return to Florida. Marilyn worried about him; and I found myself pulling away from both his doldrums and her glum feelings of powerlessness. There was a week of long, serious talks—between Bob and me, between Marilyn and Bob, between me and Marilyn, now in the hot apartment (which Bob left less and less, much as he’d done before in the apartment at the other end of the hall with Joanne), now in the city’s summer streets. Finally, though, there was nothing to do but send him home.
It’s what he said he wanted.
The night he left, Marilyn said: “Suppose he doesn’t come back?”
“Don’t be surprised,” I said, “if he doesn’t.”
Marilyn wrote:
Bailed out too soon, back in our den of exiles,
he dreams of ships and speaks to us in code.
He hides his golden back from the June sun,
learns music from you, teaches me prisoners’ games,
reads novels about glorious escapes.
Freedom is fugue and love is a disease
the way they teach blond boys in Gulf port towns …
Then, where he was, an empty space and dreams:
the clean sea and his naked body, gold
in a spray of sun, round hard arms sweat-oiled
reaching to fold me in. Between his hands
I wake. We, loving him, new strangers, wake27
Shortly, in Florida, Bob was arrested for a series of bad checks, some of which dated from before he’d come to New York—but some of which had been written after he’d left. These, he told us (in another call), had been written by Joanne. But there didn’t seem to be any need for both of them to go to jail, especially since she had the kids. It wouldn’t make that much difference in the sentence—which, he told us in his next call, was twenty years.
By now we’d talked to his parents a few times.
Bernie received a couple of letters from Bob in jail, in the telltale envelope bearing a return address but no name for the institution. In one, which Bernie showed us, he went on at great length about how much he loved us, how sorry he was he hadn’t stayed with us, but how—more than likely—for us, if not for him, this was the best.
Marilyn was drained.
Bob had been the lynchpin holding us together; now we were very much apart.
24. Ibid., p. 24.
25. Ibid, p. 25.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid, p. 26.
59. A day or so later, I received a letter from Ron, still wor
king on the boats. In it, he brought up the idea of going to Europe in the fall, though he felt it would be too expensive. I had been toying with the idea myself since … well, since 1961. Ron and I had worked well together, living easily in close quarters. In my answering letter, I volunteered to pay for a roundtrip Icelandic Air Lines ticket for him if he wanted to go with me. Ron returned a letter full of enthusiastic agreement, if I was serious.
I wrote back that I definitely was.
59.1. I began a short book (really a long story) called Empire Star soon after I received Ron’s second letter. There were at least three motivations behind it, and at this distance I can’t honestly say which was the strongest. More money for the trip was one of them. Also, the final strain of the affair with Bob had left Marilyn and myself both exhausted with, and distanced from, one another. In an emotionally drained state myself, I felt I had to take on some new project that I could complete and feel some satisfaction in, if only to bolster my own shaky sense of well-being. Never a fast writer nor, by my own estimation, a very disciplined one, I wanted to do a thoroughly planned-out work.
More important, I wanted to write to a rigorous schedule, just to see if I could. The long story (which I’d initially thought would appear on the back of Babel-17 in an Ace Double format) was written as a kind of endurance test, writing in the morning, rewriting in the afternoon. The third reason was that there was still much from Marilyn’s and my time with Bob (including the trip to Texas) that would not settle until at least some of it had become art.
It had been true of Babel-17.
It was true of Empire Star.
And it was true of “The Star Pit,” the story whose first two thirds I completed right afterwards.
Empire Star’s thirty thousand words were finished in eleven days.
59.2. About the time I was finishing the last retyping, Ron arrived at his parents’ home in New Jersey, gave me a call, and we met a couple of times to discuss our coming trip. Ron was a pretty insightful guy. Not only had he realized (without being told) that I was black, but he’d put together the outlines of the relation between Bob, Marilyn, and myself. From Bob he’d learned that I was a published writer. Oddly, the whole confusing story, instead of making him move away, seemed to make him like me more. We’d actually become pretty good friends.
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 56
