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

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Where’s Marilyn?” she said.

  Uncle Abe hung back in the hall.

  “She’s not here,” I said. “Come on in. I was just mopping—”

  “I don’t want to come in!” she said. “I want Marilyn!”

  “She’s not here, now,” I said. “Are you sure you don’t want to—”

  “I think we better go inside,” Abe said, behind his sister.

  Somewhat flustered, Hilda stepped in. “Where’s Marilyn?” she repeated. Abe stepped in, too.

  “She’s out,” I said. “She’s with some friends. She’ll be back in an hour or so, I’d imagine. Would you like to sit—?”

  “I wouldn’t sit on anything in this dirty house!”

  “Hilda,” Abe said.

  “Are you keeping Marilyn from me?”

  “Come on, Hilda. He said she’s out.”

  “You’re welcome to wait for her, if you like,” I said. I was only beginning to pick up on Hilda’s shaky despair. And I was also beginning to feel invaded and somewhat put out.

  “I don’t want to wait,” she said. “I don’t want to wait here.”

  “Hilda,” Abe said, as though he might have said it before, “you know the kids are married. You said they’ve both got jobs—”

  “Oh, I don’t believe he’s got a job,” Hilda snapped, turning in her cloth coat on the wet kitchen floor.

  Since I’d been working all day at Barnes & Noble, I laughed.

  “Well, at least he’s mopping the floor,” Abe said.

  “Why isn’t Marilyn here?” Hilda demanded once more. “I want to get Marilyn. And I want to go home!” She was close to tears.

  It went on like this another ten minutes. They came inside.

  But after Hilda rebuffed two or three more of my attempts at civility (one that stays is her refusal to sit in the red chair that, just days before, she’d sent down to us. “It’s too filthy! I won’t sit on it! Everything here is too filthy!” In the living room, with her hands in her pockets, she held the coat tight about herself. Abe’s London Fog hung widely open over his tie and checkered jacket), I let Abe handle it. Then, as precipitously as they’d come, they left. “Good night,” I said. “I’ll tell Marilyn you were here.” Shaking my head, I closed the door and went back to mopping.

  I learned later that Abe was rather impressed that I was cleaning the house and became something of an advocate, if not of me, then at least of sanity in dealing with what had to be dealt with. A family who’d come to this country as immigrants, they knew what it was to be poor and live in a slum.

  And I was a polite kid.

  But as Hilda made her slow, always more or less unhappy adjustments to having a married daughter, I was often more discommoded by the relation between Marilyn and her mother (in which, out of only that politeness, I became more and more a middleman) than I was with any strains between Marilyn and me.

  And Friday night dinners in the Bronx continued as though nothing had happened.

  7.01. To return to Fifth Street, at least from the west, you walked east on Fourth Street a third of the way along the block beyond Avenue B, then turned up an alleyway between the back of the schoolyard’s handball court and the red brick wall of the window-frame factory. “D.T.K.L.A.M.F.” was the only graffito scrawled in black paint over the handball court’s wall in those days. An extraordinarily handsome fifteen-year-old Puerto Rican boy named Rusty, whose mother ran the aforementioned shooting gallery, explained to us that the “D.L.A.M.F.” part meant “down like a mother-fucker.” The T and the K, however, remained a mystery.7

  Perhaps they were angel letters.

  7.1. The most disturbing incident in those early days of marriage—for me—happened in my first days of work at Barnes & Noble. I don’t remember where I learned that B & N was hiring for the September textbook rush, or why I even considered working there. I think I wanted to get any job I could. I remember going in to fill out a preliminary application, being told to return the next day at ten; and when I did, with a dozen other applicants I was ushered upstairs into an office floored with black-and-white tile, with a few full-to-overflowing aluminum-stand ashtrays of the sort you used to see sometimes in doctors’ waiting rooms, where we filled out the more complicated bonding application. If none of us turned out to have criminal records or proved otherwise unacceptable to the bonding company, we would start work on Wednesday at nine—and eight-thirty every day thereafter.

  Back home, I told Marilyn I had a job. She seemed pleased. And I suppose I’d vacillated between wondering why she hadn’t also applied at B & N herself to deciding it was just as well we weren’t working at the same place. Both opinions, I’m sure, I had been very vocal with. But now, Marilyn commented sensibly enough, since one of us was working she could take a few days to look through the Times want ads for something a bit more substantial. It sounded sensible to me. We probably took a walk that night over to the Village, where we looked into the Fat Black Pussycat, or stopped in the Cafe Feenjon for a mug of overpriced espresso, and finally walked back to the Lower East Side.

  On Wednesday morning, I got up, made coffee, asked a sleepy Marilyn if she wanted breakfast—“Okay,” she said—and I fried some bacon and scrambled some eggs. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Marilyn in an orange robe, me in my slacks and a T-shirt, we ate together. I wondered aloud if, to be a book clerk, you should wear a tie on your first day.

  “I don’t think so,” Marilyn said.

  We ate more eggs.

  “Do you think you could clean up the house while I’m at work?” I asked, as we were finishing. “There’s not very much to do. You know—spread up the bed, wash the breakfast dishes, pull some of the things out from the wall, and get behind them when you sweep the floor? I don’t think it could take you two hours at the outside.” Looking around the living room, I figured it was more like forty minutes’ work. “I’ll pick up something for dinner on the way home. We’ll have something nice.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  I got into my shoes, my shirt. The night before, Marilyn had started the first chapter of Middlemarch. When I left, she had picked up the chunky Modern Library volume and moved to the easy chair. “I’ll see you later,” I said at the door.

  Marilyn turned another page and glanced up. “Bye.”

  I walked up to Eighteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. In the textbook area at the rear of the old, then rather dismal store, we were shown the hive of the textbook stacks; how to fill out various receipts; how to help customers fill out call slips; we were told things we should never say, were shown who we should go to for help, and what to do about checks, etc. Some of the clerks asked stupid questions, others intelligent ones. It was a young, friendly group, and in the long run, it was more interesting that not.

  That evening, when I shouldered through the kitchen door, I noticed the breakfast dishes were still in the sink where I’d put them before I’d left. Well, I thought, I wasn’t in love with dishwashing either. Maybe Marilyn hadn’t gotten to it. It would just mean—though I found myself frowning as I set the groceries down on the counter—it would take another ten or fifteen minutes to get started on dinner.

  When I looked into the living room, I saw that the bed was in the same rumpled state, to the wrinkle, as when I’d left. “Hello,” I called.

  “Hello,” Marilyn’s voice came, cheerily.

  I stepped inside.

  Still in her robe, Marilyn was still in the easy chair. Middlemarch was open in her lap. It looked as though she had about thirty pages to go. The room gave the overwhelming impression that not an object had been moved since I’d left this morning.

  I was a bit perturbed. But I also thought it was a kind of silly thing to make a fuss over. I mentioned what I’d brought for dinner.

  “That sounds good,” Marilyn said.

  “How’s Middlemarch?” I asked.

  Whereupon Marilyn, getting up from her chair, launched into an astonishingly detailed account of the doings of Doroth
ea Brooke, Mr. Casaubon, Will Ladislaw, and Dr. Lydgate. She followed me into the kitchen, telling me about the story while I washed the dishes and fixed dinner. I was wondering, of course, when she would say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t get to the housework. I got too involved in the novel,” but that was as absent from whatever she spoke about as were any questions on what had happened to me in my first day at work.

  The next morning, I made breakfast again. While we were again eating on the bed, I said, “You didn’t get to the housework yesterday. Do you think you could get to it today?”

  “Oh,” she said. “Sure.” Although she had a rather confused expression.

  I took another bite of bacon. Then I looked at her and grinned. “Have you ever cleaned a house before?”

  I think she laughed. “No,” she said. “I don’t think I have.”

  “Really,” I said, “it’s not that hard. Come on. When we finish eating, I’ll show you.”

  When we got finished, I took the dishes in to the sink. “I know you can wash dishes,” I said. “I don’t have to show you how to do that.” I got the broom and the dustpan from beside the sink. Marilyn followed me back into the living room. “You move the furniture out from the wall,” I said, pulling out the bed, a bookshelf, the phone table, the chair. “Sweep behind them,” I explained; and in a minute, I brought a small pile of dust to the middle of the floor. “You just get that up with your dustpan and push the furniture back. Not difficult, huh?”

  She shook her head.

  I leaned the broom against the living room wall and set the dustpan down beside it. “Have you ever made hospital corners?”

  “No,” she said.

  I went to the bed, pulled loose the sheets from the foot, and went through the summer-camp operation. “Tuck in the foot. Lift in a forty-five-degree angle. Tuck again. You try it on this corner.”

  With pursed-lipped concentration, on the other side of the bed’s foot, Marilyn made her first hospital corner. “You don’t have to do that with the top sheet up at the head. Just the bottom. The rest is just spreading it up.”

  My model for all this was my mother or one of her sisters showing a new cleaning woman How Things are Done in This House. As such, I’m sure it was shot through with an intolerable arrogance. Still, years before, Mom had spent a fair amount of time instructing me on how to clean. “You’ll probably have to teach your wife how to do all this,” she’d said back then. “You might as well learn it now.” And here it was, happening just as predicted. It all seemed great fun and terribly amusing.

  “Okay,” I said. “If it takes you half an hour, I’ll be surprised. I said two hours yesterday just because I figured you’d be pleasantly surprised how much faster it was.” I kissed her on the nose. “Well, I gotta go. We had steak last night,” I opened the door to leave. “What do you want this evening? Chicken or chops?”

  “Oh,” she said, standing in the middle of the living room in her robe. “Chicken. Unless you want chops.”

  “Chicken it’ll be,” I said. “See you this evening.”

  That evening, after work, I got back to the apartment with a cutup broiling chicken, some spaghetti, and frozen beans in a brown paper bag. As I pushed into the apartment, I glanced at the living room.

  The broom was leaning against the wall, where I’d left it that morning, the dustpan on the floor beside it. When I took a step toward the living room, I saw that the dust I’d swept up that morning was still in the middle of the floor. The bed, with two hospital corners at its foot, was untouched.

  I said, “Hello …?”

  From the living room, Marilyn answered, again cheerily, “Hello.”

  I turned back to the sink to put the groceries down on the enameled counter—where the dishes were still in the sink. I went into the living room. Marilyn, in her robe, was sitting in the chair. She was most of the way through another thick book—the night before, I remembered now, she mentioned thinking about rereading Daniel Deronda. She was pretty much finished with it, by now.

  I scratched my head. “I guess you got caught up in your novel,” I said, “and didn’t get to the housework.”

  She looked up, with a small frown. “Hm?”

  “Did you just decide you didn’t want to do it?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, with a kind of bewildered look, as if I’d just asked her a very silly question.

  “Then why didn’t you do it?” My belligerence, I’m sure, was starting to come out.

  “I don’t know,” she answered with annoyance, as if somehow I’d mistaken her for Ben and had just asked her some impossible mathematical problem.

  (Ten years later, when, by chance, we were discussing this again, Marilyn broke my heart describing how, eighteen, pregnant, and very frightened, she would sit through the first days when I would go out to B & N, sure someone was about to break in and do what, she could not even imagine, afraid to move, flinching at every sound outside on the stairs, not eating, trying very hard to pay attention to the book in her hand, wondering how long it would be till I would be back, her heart pounding when she’d hear, finally, someone push in the door—with a wash of relief moments later, on realizing it was only me. But in the thirty years I’ve known her, I have never heard Marilyn say, as an immediate response to any situation, “I’m frightened,” or “I’m scared.” Taking refuge in her own fears has never been her style. This means, as it often does with incomprehensible actions, there was a certain bravery in what she was doing, even if I missed it at the time.

  (That night, however, this was nothing that I knew anything of. And it became an argument:)

  “If you didn’t want to do it,” I said, “couldn’t you just say so? ‘I don’t feel like it. I’d rather read a book.’”

  “That’s not the point,” she insisted. “Why is housework all that important? You said yourself it was only half an hour of work.”

  “Was I unpleasant when I asked you to do it? I mean, after I left, did you say, ‘Fuck him, I’m damned if I’m going to do it’? Really, I’d understand that. It would make more sense!”

  “Of course I didn’t,” she said. “I didn’t think about it at all. Why is sweeping the floor such a big deal?”

  But the result was that from then on—at least for the next few months—I did the housework. What was frightening, at least to me, was that I now knew (whether it was because of Marilyn’s refusal to articulate her own fears, or her inability to acknowledge mine) there were going to be vast areas to our relationship that were just “not thought about,” that were not going to be spoken of. And any attempt to articulate them would be met with blank incomprehension that, if pressed, would only lead to anger, hurt, and resentment.

  7.2. 1961’s was a hot September. Outside, among the domino games on the sagging bridge tables at the sidewalk’s edge, grubby kids without shirts, in shorts and sneakers, opened both ends of empty beer cans (this was pre-poptop; this was when some women carried a “church key” [a pocket can opener] to rip the necks of muggers or sexual assailants) and used them to deflect arcs from the spuming hydrants up through the harsh purple light of the newly installed vapor street lamps, high enough to spatter our second-story windows with bright drops, while I crouched on the daybed in the living room, working in my notebook in red ball point on a one-act play, The Night Alone, inspired by James Ramsey Ullman’s novel, The Day on Fire, which, though it contained the best, if fragmentary, translations of Rimbaud’s prose poems yet to appear in English, seemed (to me) to have no understanding of the young poet’s psychology.

  Marilyn sat in the easy chair, reading a novel by Disraeli.

  Every once in a while I would get up to wander into the kitchen to stir the skillet full of spaghetti sauce I’d done up from a recipe on the back of the small white-and-green cardboard box of oregano leaves, the counter still flaked with bits of onion and three fugitive pieces of tomato. Or I’d wander into the front bedroom—just as another arc from the hydrant below broke between the black fire
escape slats to sing across the glass, and five hundred purple crescents would gem and drool the pane, while I stood watching the motion of light in water.

  “Marilyn, come in and take a look at this. …”

  Then we’d go back into the living room—and I’d kneel down on the bed and write some more.

  7.21. My play dealt with the shooting of Rimbaud by a Verlaine, egged on—in my version—by his wife, Mathilde, from her frustration over having been kept a Victorian prisoner, first by her parents, then by her twenty-eight-year-old husband, when Mathilde herself was only a few months older than the eighteen-year-old vagabond poet.

  7.3. Of that tight trio of friends—Gail, Judy, and Marilyn—Marilyn had not been the first to marry. Nearly six months before we’d eloped to Detroit, Gail had married a thirty-five-year-old Italian native of the Village, named Mike. Mike was an affable, if excitable, character, something of a ne’er-do-well, and whose involvement with drugs went well beyond the acceptable bounds of marijuana into heroin and speed. He was rather dazzled, I suspect, when his somewhat joking marriage proposal got him an enthusiastic yes from the attractive, lively, and intelligent twenty-year-old New Jersey-born undergraduate.

  Their relationship developed some fairly serious problems fairly quickly, however. I remember a pleasant dinner with them, which Marilyn invited me along to, at their downtown flat a few weeks before we went to Detroit. But other friends were soon reporting arguments and a generally uneasy atmosphere around the two of them.

  Between my sexual adventures and my writing pursuits, I’d always considered myself a pretty sophisticated young man. But before the warm weather turned, an incident happened that brought home to me just how naïve about the real world I was.

  One evening, minutes after Marilyn and I had finished eating, there was a loud knock on the door. The key in the bell was twisted hard, three times. Then the knock came again.

  Marilyn and I frowned at each other; then I got up and went to the door.

  “Yes?” I said, looking through the peephole. The unshaven face of a man in his mid-thirties at first I didn’t recognize. “Who is it?”