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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Most of my extracurricular work for the past three years had been with the school literary magazine, yes, Dynamo. But Miss Baskind was the faculty advisor for both that and the school newspaper, The Science Observer. A fair amount of activity went back and forth between the two publications. That year, as well as a college calculus course, I was taking both a Senior Journalism elective and a College English course. I decided to write an article on the general student dissatisfaction with these attempts to orient the school so blatantly toward display at the expense of learning. At a newspaper meeting, it was informally decided I would take over Scott’s monthly “From the Gallery” column for one winter issue. (“After all,” Scott commented, “we don’t have a gallery anymore.”) My friend Jeff brought in his Polaroid camera; I came to school wearing a jacket and tie, and, in the first floor hallway so we could get as much light as possible, he snapped my photograph.

  “Does that really look like me?” I asked, peering over his shoulder, as the black and white picture cleared.

  “We’re just using the head. And it gets reduced to an inch by an inch,” Jeff reminded me. “I don’t think it really matters—but I’m going to take a couple more anyway.”

  I was very proud of the article I wrote, though Miss Baskind suggested—firmly—I drop a sentence that seemed, in her words, “unwisely critical” of the school. Even thus edited, it was pretty strong. It came out in the February 1960 issue of The Science Observer, just after the winter break.

  For some reason—possibly because that issue had been printed over the holidays—the printer delivered substantially fewer copies than usual. The bundles of papers left outside the attendance office for students to take had peeled away, sheet by sheet, particularly fast. People were actually talking about what I’d written, so I felt very good.

  At that week’s Dynamo meeting, Miss Baskind mentioned she’d been speaking with the principal.

  I asked: “Did he say anything about my article?”

  “Well—” She glanced at me; Miss Baskind was a short-haired woman, young and rather energetic—“I don’t think he was exactly happy about it. But.…” She shrugged.

  A week or so after the paper came out, usually one or two unopened bundles still sat in the corner of the newspaper office. But after reading and rereading two or three copies of my own to a frazzle, when I went to Miss Baskind to ask for two or three more pristine issues to take home and preserve, she told me: “We’re all out. I don’t know what happened to them. We thought the printer was going to deliver another bundle, but they never did. We don’t even have any file copies of that issue!”

  Graduation from Science that year passed as a happening parenthetical to the rest of my life. I was to receive the school creative writing award, and, with half a dozen other award winners, I refused to be at the graduation assembly to be called up on the stage—and be displayed—accepting my plaque.

  For the same reason, my picture was not in the school yearbook. Though I still took my learning seriously, a year of this attitude from the school’s administration made it hard to take seriously anything the school officially said or did about that learning.

  I came to school on graduation day, but once the proceedings started, I and a few other school friends who felt much the same—among them my musician friend Dave, and Ian—went off and sat on one of the grassy banks of the playing field across from the school to talk through the afternoon.

  Eventually some boys came by, drinking beer. They were from De Witt Clinton High School on the other side of the huge field that was too overgrown for anyone ever to play on it. They too were cutting graduation.

  They asked where we were from.

  When we said Science, they poured the beer over our heads and half-heartedly tried to start a fight—not with any sense of malicious fun, but with only the tentative boredom of people carrying out a ritual whose purpose had been forgotten, whose origins are obscure. Actually I think it had something to do with the fact that Science’s swimming team, who averaged eighteen months younger and half a head shorter than theirs, still beat theirs consistently. And now they had to endure an added ignominy: since the opening of our new, ten-million-dollar building, our team had to practice over in De Witt Clinton’s pool.

  We yelled at them and got shoved and shoved them back and told them to cut it out.

  They did—and went away.

  The fallout of the day was that I learned beer is sticky when it dries in your hair.

  6.66. One of the first things I did during my second term at City College was to stage Perseus with some of our friends: Dave, Esther, and myself in January or February. It had two afternoon performances in the Grand Ballroom of the Student Union.

  For the rest of the afternoon, after the first day’s show, I discussed Sappho’s meter with one of the older students from my Greek class, and we rolled Catullus’s onomatopoetic evocation of the sea about in our mouths (… litus ut longe resonante eoa / tunditur unda …), declaiming it loudly in the all-but-empty ballroom beneath its ancient chandeliers, comparing it with Homer’s.

  6.67. Before his death my father had already been ill for nearly a year and had spent great blocks of time at home. Since all we seemed to do was argue, through most of my senior year in high school I’d felt the best thing I could do was stay away from the apartment as much as possible. Much of that time I’d spent at the apartment of some older friends of Marilyn’s—Victor (a young man from England, with whom Marilyn had initiated her own adult sexual exploration pleasantly enough a year or so before), Lloyd, Steve, Stewy, and Paul—on Seventy-fourth Street. Later, after he died and I was struggling with college, I hung out with my friend Bob, a year my senior, in his apartment on 113th Street, with all his ham radio equipment. He’d lived in Morningside Gardens and we’d been friends since my family moved there in ’55. Bob had been anxious for me to move in with him as a roommate for some time. Alas, none of this did much to put my mother at ease.

  The friendship between Marilyn and me had gone on to include some necking and petting, usually commenced by her. My own feelings about it were uncertain. I knew this was not where, by inclination, my urges went. But I was complimented by her interest. I was also curious if I could function heterosexually.

  After my return from Breadloaf, after school began, after my father died, and a month later, I’d finally moved in with Bob, Marilyn came over one afternoon while I was there and Bob was out, and made it clear that we were to go to bed.

  What about birth control, I wanted to know. I didn’t have any condoms.

  I’ve got a diaphragm, she explained. For the last year or so, she had been involved in a number of affairs with “older men” (twenty-three, twenty-one, twenty-eight), which made her, to me, quite sophisticated.

  All right, I said, I’ll give it a try. But I’m not promising anything.

  In Bob’s back room I discovered (and was, I confess, pleased about it) I could perform heterosexually—but, while I enjoyed the laughing and the play, as well as the orgasms and the affection, I knew this just wasn’t what I was interested in, save intellectually. There was nothing particularly unpleasant about it. But there was a whole positive aspect, somewhere in the hard-to-define area between the emotions and the physical that I knew from my experiences with other men was missing. (I certainly had no feeling that the experience “cured” me in any way.) As I explained to Marilyn, a man could physically excite me from a distance. I seemed to need actual contact with a woman in order to become excited—and I had to think about men in order to reach a climax.

  She seemed to find this interesting.

  But I was pleased we emerged from it still friends. And I put it pretty much out of my mind, aware from time to time that Marilyn still wanted physical contact, and not particularly resentful—from time to time—of giving it. But her main sexual interests seemed to lie with other people anyway. I was someone to talk about them with—though sometimes her interest in what I was doing seemed almost oppressive. We s
till necked and petted. From time to time I wondered if I would ever be able to strike up a friendship with a male as interesting as my friendship with Marilyn, and which would also include sex.

  6.671. On my nineteenth birthday, Marilyn gave me a sonnet entitled “Sous l’Arc de Triomphe, 1 April 1961,” about two people who did not manage to meet in Paris that year.

  6.68. In spring I restaged Perseus for a second-floor combination coffee shop and art gallery on Tenth Street just east of Third Avenue—called, of course, the Coffee Gallery. Dave’s part was taken by a young actor, Danny (another Science graduate, he). The evening performance was filled out by Marilyn’s presentation of a Browningesque poetic portrait called “Helen” and by my reading a short story that had appeared in Dynamo back in my junior year, “Silent Monologue for Lefty.” Each weekend night (it ran for five weeks), we recited our lines among the small tables (most of which were empty), with their squat candles flickering in the half-dark, put on or removed our makeup in the gallery’s tiny back room (mostly under Danny’s supervision). And as we walked to or from the Tenth Street gallery, Marilyn and I talked of literature and poetry and art.

  6.7. One evening in June of ’61, Marilyn showed up with scratches on her face and bruises. She and her mother had gotten in another fight. She did not want to go home. So we spent the evening wandering around the city together, talking about her problems, her affairs (she was juggling a couple of older boyfriends at the time, with whom she’d been sexually involved; the fight may have been about one of them), her poems.

  By one, two, three o’clock in the morning, I’d made several attempts to bring the evening to an end, pointing out that she must go home eventually—that I really was out far beyond the time I was comfortable. But her face fell. Once she cried. She did not want to be alone. And she did not want to have to return to her mother’s. My arm around her shoulder, we strolled around Central Park, now inside on the grass-bordered paths, now outside along the stone wall by the benches under the trees, now along Central Park West, and, an hour later, along Fifth Avenue, till finally we reached the Conservatory Gardens, with their vined arcades across from the white, concaved facade of the old Fifth Avenue Hospital. We could go in the park, she suggested, and make love.

  We could also, I suggested, go home.

  She looked frightened and unhappy. We walked a while more. She made the suggestion again.

  “You don’t have any birth control,” I said.

  “I just finished my period yesterday,” she explained. She couldn’t possibly, she said, get pregnant now.

  I felt sorry for her. Her situation with her mother seemed to me at once awful and impossible. We turned into the park. The sun by now was coming up. In a thicket, she put her arms around me and we began to make out.

  While the sun broke fitfully through the summer overcast, we had sex.

  She was a great deal happier afterward.

  “You know,” I said, as we put our clothing back together, “you really have to go home.”

  She sighed and nodded.

  Eventually, though, we went to her friend Judy’s house, from which she phoned her mother. (“Hello, Mom …? I stayed over at Judy’s last night. I’m sorry I didn’t phone you. …”) Then I walked her to the subway and saw her onto the train. Fifteen minutes later I was back in the park, sitting on one of the benches, leaning forward with my elbows on the knees of my jeans. I was exhausted. I wondered if the friendship was not getting out of hand. It was the second time we’d actually been to bed in a year, but it was not where I wanted the friendship to be going.

  What was I doing?

  The previous summer, just before Dad’s death, up at the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, I’d begun what I’d since planned out as a huge novel. Why wasn’t I working on it? Just who was I? Where was I going? Through my tiredness, questions glimmered.

  I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white. (Some figured I was Italian or possibly Spanish.) I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.

  And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of prizes, a few scholarships—prizes and scholarships, most of which Marilyn had already won for her own writing a year before I had.

  I spread my arms out on the back of the bench.

  So, I thought, you are neither black nor white.

  You are neither male nor female.

  And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.

  There was something at once very satisfying and very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revelation—a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction.

  A few weeks later, Marilyn told me she had missed her next period. “Should you get a pregnancy test?” I asked her, worried.

  “Oh, probably,” she said.

  6.8. She went for the test.

  A day later on the underground subway platform at 125th Street, she met me in the early afternoon. “Well,” she said. “I’m pregnant.” We talked for an hour, as one subway and another racketed past. (Sitting on the bench at the Forty-second Street subway platform a year before, she’d first read me the poem, two of whose ten-line stanzas I’ve used to head all this, when we’d emerged from some other adolescent adventure, chaste as far as each other was concerned, and firm in our friendship.) Abortions were illegal and generally presumed to be dangerous. I suggested one anyway, though neither of us knew where to go to get one or how to pay for one. For our different reasons she looked frightened and unhappy and I felt frightened and unhappy—convinced I must not let it show.

  More trains passed.

  I was living at Bob’s, then, and I knew Marilyn desperately wanted to get away from her own home. (She had left twice between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, once having gotten a Lower East Side apartment and a part-time clerical job at NYU. Her mother had had her brought back by the police, her bank account frozen, and her scholarship revoked. Girls could be made wards of the court until age twenty-one for such delinquent behavior in 1961.) We could get married, I suggested, and you could have the baby.

  She liked the idea.

  But look, I said. You know I am queer. That’s not going to change, I explained.

  I’d be very silly if I expected it to, she said.

  You’re really up to getting involved with someone like me?

  I’m pretty much involved with you already.

  You really wouldn’t mind that I’m going to be sleeping with men—probably a lot.

  I haven’t minded it up to now, she said.

  So we discussed that for another half hour.

  By the time we’d left each other that afternoon, we’d decided to get married. My image of the future was something like an apartment with separate bedrooms; a room for each of us to write, with shared housework; and the coming child …

  As a fantasy, it produced a worried smile. But the feeling was basically pleasant.

  Once we returned to New York after our Detroit wedding at City Hall, however, reality turned out to be that we slept together in a single bed, had sex twice a week or more; most of the housework and much of the cooking fell to me; and writing became more and more difficult for Marilyn and, as it became so, an area of greater and greater resentment.

  6.9. Marilyn had two very close young women friends, Judy and Gail. Judy had been a child actress on Broadway and had already danced with James Waring’s avant-garde troupe. Gail was Italian and from New Jersey, with endless enthusiasms for Camus, Kafka, and Hesse. They’d met in the first days of Marilyn’s French class at NYU. Smart and adventurous, they were at times as close, or closer, to Marilyn’s early writing than I was. The three clove together for the whole of her years in college and, now and again with protracted interruptions, throughout their young womanhood.

  Twenty years later, when I had run into Judy and was remi
niscing about some of those early days, she said, “Chip, when you were seventeen, eighteen, you were simply a dish. You were smart. And you were nice. We knew you were queer—you used to go on to me about it enough—but what did that mean back then? When we were seventeen, the three of us used to spend hours talking about how we were going to get you into bed. Marilyn just won.”

  1 Nanny Murrell, “Sleeping Beauty,” in Dynamo, the annual literary magazine of the Bronx High School of Science for 1955.

  2. This line is from an uncollected, unpublished poem by Marilyn Hacker, whose title I no longer recall.

  3. From “Soliloquy for a Sunset” by Marilyn Hacker. In four long stanzas, this poem is uncollected and unpublished. I quote these lines from memory.

  4. Hacker, “Chanson de l’enfant prodigue,” in Presentation Piece (New York: Viking, 1974), p. 8.

  5. Hacker, “Mathematical appeared in Dynamo, the annual literary magazine of the Bronx High School of Science for 1958.

  6. The lines in this section are from Perseus: An Exercise for Three Voices, by Marilyn Hacker. The poem is uncollected and unpublished.

  7. Three weeks after our marriage, Marilyn’s mother must have worked herself up to coming down to take her daughter back home. Marilyn’s living in some tenement on the Lower East Side was ridiculous. Hilda had to do something about it. So she enlisted her brother. The two of them came down to the Lower East Side.

  She must have been very upset, and though I have no way to know for sure, I suspect she may even have been perturbed enough to worry the stolid, older Abe, who, with his wife, Marion, owned a small factory that made sports clothes.

  Marilyn was out seeing some friends; I was at home that night, cleaning. With a pail in the middle of the kitchen, I was mopping the bare wood floor when the key in the doorbell was twisted loudly.

  Mop in hand, I opened the door. “Hilda,” I said. It was the first time my mother-in-law had come down. “Come on in.”