My second Muse for that year was another senior, named Peter. In many ways he was a more compact, more muscular Chuck. Sophomores and seniors took gym together. Peter and I were in the same gym class. In the first session, when the gym teacher was testing us, Peter (in his black chinos, white T-shirt, and sneakers) and I were the only two students in our section who could do a flying split. Later, in the locker room, joking about it with him after class, I realized this muscular, ivory and gold student, two years ahead of me, had a severe speech defect. He’d been born with a paralyzed uvula (at first, I thought it was a cleft palate; the distortion it lent his speech was much the same). Though he didn’t bite his nails, the fascination was similar to that I’d felt toward Joey, toward Gus—and just as sexual. Though we didn’t become particular friends, I began to watch him all around the school, following him pretty much unobserved, making notes about him, writing down my impressions of him. Though the results were not another novel, eventually Peter (unnamed) became the object of an informal essay, which took a second prize in the next year’s National Scholastic Contest.
6.561. One thing that has slipped between these enumerations is the Jack and Jill of America. The Jack and Jill was a black social club which middle-class black parents joined to provide monthly programs for their younger children and seasonal affairs for the older ones: horseback riding afternoons, outings at Bear Mountain, days at the beach, parties at Halloween, Christmas, and Easter—and dances all through the spring and summer. I’ve since known black parents who would have done anything short of kill to get their children into the Jack and Jill. (One of the members was the handsome, aggressive, adopted son of the first black cabinet member, Robert Weaver. The boy flirted mercilessly with my sister at one of these summer parties, danced the “fish” with her, and was as spectacular a nail-biter as Gus or Joey—and, half a dozen years later, killed himself.) And I have met others who would have died before letting their kids join, hating all it spoke of dusky country clubs, of an Old Darkies’ network, loathing the whole web of middle-class social connections and middle-class social pretensions it stood for.
What has kept it out of these pages, however, was a value that still lingers with me from my adolescence, a value I was taking to eagerly at Science: a value that said that dances, that dating (and dating the right children of the right parents), indeed, that the whole conservative social machinery through which the Jack and Jill both existed and managed to wield its considerable social power, were, in themselves, beneath contempt for intellectuals. Yet despite any contempt I felt for it, Jack and Jill functions had still filled up my childhood, and continued to, up through the first high school years. It was at one of their spring dances, in the crepe paper-festooned basement of a midtown social center, the room hot as only a summer’s dance could be before the days of universal air conditioning, the red and amber gels turning over the ceiling spotlights, two or three mothers with arms folded and smiling from beside the punch bowl, and the rhythm-and-blues records moaning over the slow couples for a higher order of love, that I sat down on the banquette to talk to Mary.
Mary was my age and had been in my class at Dalton. Her father was my parents’ lawyer. And she’d been my date at the eighth-grade prom. We hadn’t seen each other for a while. “What have you been doing?” she asked.
“Actually,” I said, “I’ve written a novel.”
I was not referring to Lost Stars, though—at least in my own mind.
“Really?” she asked. “What’s it called?”
“The title’s Scavengers.”
“That’s interesting,” she said. “What’s it about?”
“Well,” I said, crossing my legs in my dark blue suit—and began to outline-cum-invent the plot of a book that, mistily, had been in the back of my mind to write. The justification for what I took to be a simple social lie was that, after all, I had written one novel (even if it really didn’t have an ending)—so it didn’t seem too much of an exaggeration to say I’d written another that, really, I was considering. The surprise came, however, when, at the end of my synopsis, Mary said, with what I immediately recognized as more than polite interest, “That sounds fascinating! I’d like to read it. Why don’t you let me see it?”
“Well,” I said, “actually, I’ve got a couple of weeks’ more work to do on the end. But I’ll give it to you soon. …” Then, while the record ended and Jack-and-Jillers drifted by us to the refreshment table, I added, “I’ll be sure to get it to you as soon as it’s done!”
Next day at home, in a paroxysm of guilt, I sat down at my typewriter, put in a page, and typed:
SCAVENGERS
by Samuel R. Delany
Beginning in June of ’57,1 worked on the book three weeks, six weeks, two months, three months. I outlined it. I re-outlined it. The first part (it was divided into five sections) bore an unsettling resemblance to Lost Stars—that is, the hero (nameless this time) spent the first forty pages wandering around and observing the city: perhaps it was my theme.
(And a novel was always conceived to occupy the center of my notebook, to fill it up unto both covers; and, in the writing, always slipped now to the front, now to the back, the intricacies of compositional order destroying, as notes accrued in an order all their own, all organizing schemas.)
But when he decided to run away to the country, plot took over, and he joined with a number of other disaffected youngsters, who now tried to live by themselves in the woods near a small country town. What plot there was, was simply Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human, stripped of its science-fictional trappings and with the cast of characters expanded. A lot of the kids in it were portraits of my several new Puerto Rican friends who lived across LaSalle Street in the General Grant Houses. Some of its intense climaxes were over purely metaphysical conflicts so rarefied even I, a month after writing them, could not be sure what they were about. I never did show it to Mary. (At one point I saw her walking hand in hand through Morningside Gardens with Wally, a rambunctious white boy with whom, back at Dalton, I’d had a yearlong, after-swim-session, locker-room affair, and decided—on what justification I couldn’t tell you now—that she was probably no longer interested. But I was now writing other stories, too, with titles like “Payday at Coal Creek Don’t Come No More,” “Passacaglia with Death in the Higher Voices,” “Animal in the City,” and “The Pigeons.” In this second novel, though, nobody dreamed.) I did, however, show it to Marilyn.
In the Horn and Hardart Automat at the southeast corner of Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, we drank cup after cup of watery coffee while Marilyn criticized my manuscript.
Some of her comments were withering—especially toward my handling of the female lead, who, when she was by herself, was a rather overweight, plain, fifteen-year-old girl (based on one of my school friends), but who, whenever the plot demanded she do something romantic, like kiss the hero, would conveniently disappear for a couple of weeks, lose forty pounds, and return to the scene of the action ravishing and svelte, whereupon she would “slip beneath him,” for some sort of sex.
But whatever her criticism, I think she was impressed, as, in fact, was I, that I’d managed to type more than two hundred consecutive pages about more or less the same characters who stayed more or less in the same place and more or less took part in the same story.
Together that year, again and again after school, we would ride from her subway stop at 175th Street to mine at 125th Street and back, till as late as ten o’clock at night; then, at home, we’d continue the conversation another hour on the phone.
6.562. Once—in ’57? ’58?—I told Marilyn about a memory connected with our old house on Seventh Avenue, of lying in bed at night there, in my third-floor room, watching the traffic lights from Seventh Avenue sweep across my ceiling. And Marilyn wrote:
The child of wonder looks in bed
at naked ceilings overhead.
Infinity eats up the skies
as burning teardrops cauterize
&n
bsp; his wet, white eyes. …
The child of wonder cannot pass
the curved rococo looking glass.
Suspended in between the pair,
body and image frozen there,
he whirls to stare. …4
6.563. Also Marilyn wrote:
The searing curve of beauty is a thought too bright to tell of
in fire and desire. Every meaning is a shell of
polynomial perfection, never factored, not equated,
in fluctuating fancy for perfection uncreated.
Its crystalizing concept, agonizing extrospection,
in perfect affirmation has denied its own perfection.
Its perfectness imperfectly fulfills its own condition.
Reality as realized refuses recognition.5
6.57. My basic vocational leaning, since my childhood, had been, as I’ve said, toward the sciences. In my second year at Science, the experimental math course I’d signed up for, instead of the usual twin terms of geometry and trigonometry, covered group theory, field theory, the theory of functions as ordered pairs, and elementary mathematical logic. Geometry and trigonometry would be compressed into a few weeks at the end—and we would be required to take the State Regents’ Examination in both, even though we were doing them in days.
The course was wonderful.
Our soft-spoken teacher, with his crew-cut white hair, Mr. Kaplan, was as excited about it all as we students were. During the final days, when we were trying to crush a term into two weeks, his patience was endless. My marks for both the class and the Regents’ were in the mid-to high nineties. I resumed my friendship with Ben, visiting his house, having him over to mine. I attended the math club after school regularly (where I watched a very blond boy named Mark almost lose a finger in a blood-dripping accident involving the six-foot wooden slide rule hung up over the blackboard for demonstration purposes, when his red-headed partner, Mike, shoved the oversized slide through its runner at the wrong moment) and the Science Fiction Club desultorily—with Marilyn. I stopped going to the latter when a story of mine, read to the group and based on what I thought was an infinitely clever variation on a notion lifted from Wyman Guin’s classic Beyond Bedlam, met with general incomprehension. In the Science Fair I received an honorable mention for a homemade computer (actually constructed in Danny’s basement with his father’s impressive set of power tools), and, even more important, became friends with the girl who had the exhibit next to mine, an intensely bright, somewhat heavy, Puerto Rican girl, Ana, whose project on the electrophoresis of proteins took a well-deserved second prize—the model for the heroine of that second novel.
In that same term, yes, I wrote stories and a violin concerto for a young violinist named Peter Solaff, whom I’d met at a party of some old Woodland friends up at Croton, Barbara and Greg Finger; and I composed and recorded a chamber symphony and put together electronic music and (again, with Danny’s astonishing amount of hi-fi and Ampex recording equipment) made more electronic compositions and took photographs and worked on Dynamo, the school literary magazine that had seemed so distant from me two years before. But it was all, I fancied, secondary to my scientific interests—the way, Life magazine assured us all, Einstein, down at the Princeton Center for Advanced Studies, played his violin to relax. I read Scientific American each month and memorized the names of each new meson and antimeson, each lepton, hyperon (my favorites), and boson as it was discovered (there were fifty-six elementary particles, as I recall, back then), along with each one’s charge, spin, and decay products.
Taken all together, these were what made the life of a scientist interesting, no?
At the end of the first term, we were told of another experimental course to start in the fall, this one in physics, with a syllabus some educators at MIT had set up for high schools. They wanted to try it out at Science. Many of us from the math course signed up for the experimental physics course, looking forward to an equally broadening and exciting experience as the math course had just provided.
After the Christmas break, the school moved three subway stops to the north, just west of the great gouge for the railway tracks beneath the deco overpass, with the waterworks at the end of the street, into a new, ten-million-dollar building—to a cascade of corruption scandals: while the old building’s auditorium had been able to hold all the students and their parents, the new auditorium could contain only a fraction of the entire student body. Vast amounts of expensive equipment had been bought that did not function. The stairwells, half the width of those in the old dilapidated building we’d just left, could not accommodate the student flow between classes. A huge, ugly, and expensive mosaic mural had been placed so no one could see it. There was no swimming pool. (There’d been a nice, if rundown, one in the old building.) And our prizewinning swimming team was faced with dissolution. On rainy days the cafeteria (down below the wide-paved walkway that led into the building) leaked torrentially. Dr. Meister had retired. Our new principal wanted to impose a jacket-and-tie dress code for the first time in the school’s history. Fortunately he failed.
The physics course was a disaster.
It was as badly planned as it was possible for such a course to be. Vast numbers of mimeographed pages would detail, in wooden, un-grammatical prose, brainlessly simple general concepts—followed by formulas presumably derived from them but whose variables and constants were often left wholly undefined. Following these were problems that frequently required entirely unrelated information (as well as other formulas) to solve. Revisions arrived weekly from MIT, usually to fill in absolutely necessary gaps the course designers had discovered in material we’d presumably finished with, three weeks or three months before. The teacher was as unfamiliar with the topics (mostly wave mechanics) as we were, and often two and three periods would pass in which most of the time was simply filled with head-scratching and bewildered silences.
An “experimental” physics course?
It had never occurred to me that an experiment could go so disastrously awry.
Yes, we had to take the regular physics Regents’ exam, anyway. But unlike the math course, no time had been set aside to study the traditional material.
I got a seventy-five.
But far more important, I came away with the feeling that I had been robbed of a term of science learning. I felt wholly cheated and unprepared to continue with the study of the sciences. Physics was all I had come to high school to learn. Over the same period, to retreat from this bewildering fiasco, I had buried myself more and more in the writing of fiction (I had been taking a creative writing course as well), more into my journal (which I was never now without), into notes and stories and plays and, on occasion, poems.
Often now I walked home from the 125th Street subway station with a girl named Judy, who also lived in Morningside Gardens, who also went to Science, who played the viola and sang in a folksong quartet with me and Ana and Dave (when Chuck met her on his occasional visits north to see his mother, he was perfectly friendly to her in person, but, as soon as she was out of earshot, appalled me by saying, most unfairly, “She looks like a CPA in training!” But then Chuck was incapable of resisting what he felt to be a good line), and who pointed out to me on the angled brick wall across from the firehouse and the gas station a sloping, mysterious graffito painting in foot-high letters aslant the brick:
ANGELLETTER
Later she wrote a story about it that appeared in Dynamo. And at the end of our junior year she received an early admission to Radcliffe.
But every time I returned to my mother’s or left through General Grant, the mysterious glyphic hung there, unreadable on almost any level save that of euphony (joined ten years later by a misty KNIGHTS), till I was thirty, till the firehouse was shut up, till the gas station was only a triangular bit of raised paving in the middle of the street, till Sydenham Hospital on the corner had been shut down, abandoned, and opened again—and somebody, with gray-blue paint, finally sprayed it out.
Throughout my own junior year of high school and Marilyn’s first year of college, however, we became better and better friends.
Marilyn’s father, Albert, had been an inventor and engineer without a degree. He had died from cancer of the pancreas at the end of her first year at Science, three months after her fourteenth birthday, some months after we’d met on the school roof. Her mother, Hilda, was a small, nervous woman who taught elementary school and later became an assistant principal, coming in first in the city on the assistant principal social service exam. Many years before, she’d gotten a Ph.D. in psychology that she’d never used professionally. The opinion of most of her colleagues for the many, many years she’d taught second grade (she didn’t begin to study for the assistant principal’s position till two or three years after Marilyn and I were married) was that she was working far below her intellectual capacity. Marilyn’s relation with her mother was—the only word I can use—disastrous. Her mother was diabetic and prone to go into insulin shock with near-suicidal frequency.
Now Marilyn and I took long walks in the Village, where we made endless jokes to each other about fourteen-year-old poets—which we had been when we’d started joking. Was that only a few months ago?
The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village Page 10