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

by Samuel R. Delany

  “Chip?” the man called from outside. “Marilyn—?”

  I opened the door as I realized it was an angry Mike, who was stepping from one foot to another. “Where’s Gail?” he demanded. “Is she in there?”

  “No,” I told him, surprised. “Why should—?”

  “’Cause if you’re hiding her from me—”

  “Mike?” Marilyn said, stepping up behind me.

  “Where’s Gail?” he demanded over my shoulder.

  “She’s not here,” Marilyn said.

  “Come on in,” I said. “Why don’t you come in and sit down for a—”

  “Well, if she’s not here,” Mike said, “you tell her when you see her I’m gonna—” He made a fist, lifted it in front of me, but, as if another idea took him, turned abruptly from our doorway and galloped down the stairs.

  I closed the door, turned back to Marilyn, who was frowning again, and shook my head.

  “What do you think that was all about?” she asked.

  “God only knows,” I said. We went back into the living room to speculate on Mike’s and Gail’s vagaries while from the street now and again a shout echoed in the cul-de-sac that, the third time it came, Marilyn realized was probably Mike, howling imprecations at, or about, his temporarily vanished spouse.

  Five minutes later—certainly no more than ten—there was another knock. Again very loud.

  I sighed, got up, and went back to the door, assuming Mike had returned.

  When I opened it, though, two policemen stood there, Mike between them, hands cuffed before him, demeanor wholly changed from the irate husband of minutes ago.

  His blue work shirt was darkly sweat-blotched. Between the open buttons, his chest and its hair gleamed with perspiration. His stubbly face was covered with bright drops. He sagged against one of the cops—at first I wondered if, with the billy club one had obviously just knocked against my door, he’d been beaten. Mike’s eyes were wide.

  The policeman on the right hefted up his stick and said to me, “Do you know this guy?”

  The seconds I stood there watching the policemen while Mike panted under the hall light, remain lucid as an image. What went on in my mind, in that same time, will be forever opaque. I must have been thinking of how many cops-and-robbers movies. I must have been thinking of Mike’s often bragged-about criminal career. I know I wondered what he’d want me to say. Finally, I made a choice and said, with a kind of questioning look, “No, I don’t …?”

  Mike sagged back even farther, clasped his hands in prayer, and lunged forward. “Aw, Jesus Christ, Chip! Come on …!”

  Flagrantly, I’d said the wrong thing. “Yes,” I said, now. “I know him.” I told them Mike’s name. “He was just here to see us a few minutes ago.” I was frightened at that point; but I probably sounded ridiculously blasé.

  “Okay,” the cop said.

  They turned away from the door—taking Mike. When I went inside, back to Marilyn, I knew that, for the most naïve reasons, I’d come close to getting Mike into even more serious trouble than he already was. And for all my much self-vaunted nineteen-year-old sophistication in the ways of the marginal world, I hadn’t even known what to do when faced with an ordinary identification check.

  7.4. Then there was another party, this one a wedding celebration for my tall cousin Nanny who, a scant month after us, married an intense musician/karate instructor/black radical with a gentle smile and a sense of humor that could smart like finest emery cloth. It was a quiet Buddhist ceremony at a small midtown temple. My elderly maiden aunts, whom everyone feared would be shocked, sat primly on the floor with everyone else. Those two slim black ladies, the older, Sadie, a domestic science teacher (I remember a photograph of her as a girl in a college schoolroom at a blackboard, while Professor Boyer with his pointer indicated the declension of λελυχα, λελυχας, λελυχε…), the younger, Dr. Bessie, a dentist (who, as she got older and older, became more and more like Sadie’s fiestier twin), who, together, thirty-five years before, at the rerelease of Birth of a Nation, when the pickets and protests outside seemed to be accomplishing little, bought tickets on line (they were light enough to be mistaken for white), went into the theater, to run down the aisle, leap onto the stage, tear down the screen, and start a riot. Many years later, both would take up the serious study of yoga.

  Then the younger guests repaired to our apartment on East Fifth, where Marilyn and I had cooked pounds and pounds of yellow rice and paella (toward which my mother had contributed thirty dollars), me vaguely perturbed as to whether anyone would think to ask if the lobster tails had been imported from South Africa, as indeed they had—a fact I’d only discovered on the bottom of one label after I’d gotten the two dozen of them home from the supermarket and out of the red, white, and clear plastic wrappers.

  7.5. There was no lock on the front door of our building. The door itself was usually left standing open. Day and night, especially in cold weather, from the hall we would hear the claws of two, three—some times half a dozen—ownerless dogs, running on our stairs. Daily we found their turds on the tile landings.

  Across from us was a factory where they made aluminum window frames. In the first three weeks we lived there, the owner’s sister once called Marilyn up and asked her not to change clothes in front of the window, “… because the men all run over to watch you. They put down their hammers and they won’t work!”

  For years Marilyn laughed about this. It became one of her standard anecdotes about her life on the Lower East Side. She always seemed rather proud of it.

  But we got shades.

  A doctor’s office was on the ground floor of the building directly opposite. Along the block were various bodegas (where you could get credit for a week or so; and from time to time we did), botanicas de fe, garages, other apartment houses—most of them tenements as squalid as our own. One, next door, called the Mildred, was in miraculously decent condition at the head of the row of slums.

  7.6. One Saturday afternoon when Marilyn was out, it began to rain cats and dogs. Suddenly the kitchen door burst open, and Marilyn came in, her arms full of soggy brown-paper grocery parcels. I took the bags from her arms and put them on the counter, while she stood in the middle of the floor, hair in streaks across her forehead, looking disheveled and unhappy.

  I handed her a paper towel to dry her glasses—“Wait a second”—and dodged out of the room, to return in a moment. “Here.” I handed her a pair of my jeans.

  At that time, we both wore size 28/28 pants.

  “Thanks.” In the middle of a growing puddle on the kitchen floor, Marilyn undressed, toweled herself off with a green towel I got her from the bathroom, and slipped into my pants. She zipped them up, turned around, and slid her hands into the pockets.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  She’d gotten the strangest expression. “The pockets …” she exclaimed. “They’re so big!”

  Then she showed me the pockets in the pair of girls’ jeans she’d bought a few weeks ago. And the pockets in her overcoat. And in her skirts. None of them was large enough to accommodate a pack of cigarettes without its sticking out the top. (Remember: this was pre-Beatles; pre-wrap around skirts. And phrases such as “women’s liberation” or even “women’s rights” were never uttered.) The idea that pockets in men’s clothes were functional had never occurred to her. The idea that pockets in women’s clothing were basically decorative had never occurred to me.

  We talked about this, and soon I realized that, though we’d gone to the same high school, had seen each other almost daily for four years, had shared thousands of intimate conversations, somehow, without even knowing that the other existed, we had been raised in two totally different cultures—though it was part of a dialogue Marilyn had been conscious of at least as far back as our talks in the Forty-second Street Automat.

  7.7. In the first weeks we lived on Fifth Street, I went with some neighborhood acquaintances to clear out (read: loot) an apartme
nt a block or so away that had belonged to a twenty-five-year-old male dancer who’d died of hepatitis in a city hospital. The only thing I could bring myself to take away was a bathtub stopper. I recall looking at an immense pair of tennis sneakers lying on the invaded bathroom’s paint-splotched floor, wondering just how tall the dead dancer had been.

  At home now and again the apartment rat would jump up on the back of the kitchen sink, while one or the other of us was brushing our teeth—shocked paralysis holding a moment between human and rodent, before one of us shrieked and the other fled; or it skittered out from under the tub to dash toward the toilet and leap to the rim for a drink—halting only because I was sitting there!

  The next day, when Marilyn was leaving the apartment, in the hall she met the middle-aged Polish woman from the apartment next door. “I hear you have rats,” the woman said.

  Marilyn was surprised. “Eh … yes,” she answered. “But how did you know?”

  The woman laughed. “I heard your husband shout last night!”

  We named him Gregor, after Kafka’s giant waterbug.

  7.8. One October morning, I woke before sunrise and, after lying in bed for some minutes, realized I was wide awake. I got up. Three months pregnant, Marilyn looked up sharply to ask: “What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m just awake.”

  I padded out to our kitchen and to the bathroom, padded back, decided to put on my clothes.

  I think Marilyn may have asked again, “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” I repeated. “I’m all right.”

  I’d thought to play my guitar for a while. I’d decided to take it up to the roof. Still uncurtained since we’d moved in, the back window onto the airshaft showed the first deep blue. I got my shoes on and picked up my guitar case. “I’m going up to the roof for a little while. I’ll be down soon.”

  Marilyn raised up on one elbow. “Oh, please! Don’t. …”

  I opened the kitchen door, went out, and closed it softly behind me—took a deep breath and sucked my teeth.

  7.801. I’ve since known many people whose automatic response to anxiety was to immobilize the other: “Don’t go!” “Don’t move!” “Don’t speak!” But Marilyn was the first such I’d ever been involved with. My own, equally automatic response to anxiety was to immobilize myself.

  When anxieties are high and shared, this is a very unhappy combination. If I had to present a single reason why we stayed married, together and apart, for nineteen years, this is probably it.

  Still, after only a month of claustrophobic marriage, I’d found a strategy to survive in such a situation. When you’re not anxious, more or less ignore the other person and do what you want. And I was feeling pretty good that morning.

  As strategies go, it’s a very cruel one.

  7.81. I carried my guitar case up the stairs past the fifth floor, turned up the last flight to the roof, opened the iron hook, shoved back the old metal door—ineffectually painted pale blue, like the rest of the hall (its creak and roar, as the weighted chain clambered through the eyebolt, shocked the morning)—and stepped over the sill to mica-flecked tar paper.

  The sky was already lighter than I’d expected. I leaned the case against the wall of the entranceway, opened the snaps, and took out my Martin with its new Granger machines, carried it over to a skylight by a TV antenna, sat down on the skylight’s edge, stared at the roofs around me a while—and played.

  After minutes of augmented and diminished arpeggios, falling through to sevenths and ninths, sixths and thirteenths, I looked up.

  Fifteen feet from me stood a young man in his mid-twenties, with short red hair. His hands were in his jeans pockets. His feet were bare. His shirt hung open over a bony chest. His sleeves were rolled up on freckled forearms. I wasn’t sure if he’d just come up (probably not, because the roof door was pretty loud, and I would have heard it open), or if he’d been there all along behind one of the abutments.

  I nodded to him, went on playing.

  He nodded back.

  Later, I stopped and said, “Hello.”

  He wandered over. “Hi.”

  “You live in the building?”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Where you from, then?”

  “I just got back,” he said, “from Greece. Yesterday. I’m staying here with a friend. Downstairs.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Greece. Did you like it?”

  “Yeah,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It was wonderful.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “Two years.”

  The conversation went on, much like this, infected with the October morning’s calm, while the sun came up to smear salmon and copper over the indigo. His name was Tony. Most of his time abroad had been spent on Crete, where, as with all the Greek islands, he told me, it was incredibly cheap to live.

  How cheap, I wanted to know.

  Well, he and some friends had rented a house for six dollars a month—only after the first month his landlord had never collected any more rent. From time to time the villagers, knowing some impoverished foreigners were in the dilapidated shack, had left baskets of food in front of their door. No hot water. But cooking was done with something called “Petrogaz.” He wasn’t sure what it was, though. At any rate, they had survived for most of the time, in his estimation, on no money at all.

  “It sounds like a good place to go to write.”

  “I guess so,” he said. “Of course, you can’t just walk down to the store and buy things like typewriter ribbons. Or typing paper. Or ballpoint pens. Oh, I suppose in Athens you could. But not on the islands. …”

  Soon I went back downstairs.

  I never saw Tony again—or even found out the friend with whom he’d been staying. His time in the building must have terminated very shortly after that. But now, sunk again in the tenements and shadowy streets, I retained, mixed with memories of Graves’s White Goddess and The Greek Myths, of Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, a yearning now luminously associated with music and morning.

  7.82. There were hours, certainly, most of which had to do with intellectual pleasures, when Marilyn and I truly enjoyed each other. Given the insistently intellectual youngsters we could be, it would be false to slight them.

  Still, taken as a whole, the relation drifted from one aspect to another of low-key nightmare—even more so for her, I suspect, than for me. One particular facet of the torture was that as soon as we’d actually married, Marilyn, who through her adolescence had been extremely prolific, found herself less and less able to write.

  Watching her poems come, being her confidant and her critic, had, till then, been the aesthetic experience of my life. But both of us felt, though we did not often talk about it, a fear that if Marilyn stopped writing completely, there would be nothing to hold us together. And Marilyn, we both knew, would be the one most hurt by that. With its oscillating combination of guilt and dismay, that fear was equally real for us both, however unequal at any one time it was in its intensity.

  7.83. In the next days of October, it grew suddenly and surprisingly chill. Marilyn wrote of life in our second-floor slum:

  These nights old madwomen chant in the streets

  wailing their deaths to the October dusk.

  Precocious cold sullies our gelid sheets.

  Our hands turn yellow, and sticky crust

  devils our eyelids waking. …

  The rats wax bold without enough to eat.8

  7.84. A little while on, perhaps a few days, when, with a surge of Indian summer, the temperature had crept back up into the sixties, coming home through the alley, Marilyn realized she was hemorrhaging. She phoned her obstetrician, who advised her that, if she had to go into the hospital, she best go through the emergency room and not say she had a private doctor.

  Perhaps an hour later, holding on to the edge of our paint-stained tub, in our dirty, narrow bathroom, she miscarried.

  I came ho
me about an hour after that. Though she’d made an attempt to clean up, her lap was again sopped with blood. She opened the door for me and started to speak, only to begin sobbing.

  It was a day of fear, endless frustration, and finally futile rage: in emergency rooms at that time it was just assumed that any eighteen-year-old who miscarried, married or unmarried, must be in the aftermath of a then-illegal abortion, and she was treated by hospitals and their staff as a criminal. Finally, when it became necessary at the hospital to phone the doctor, he claimed he had never heard of her—thinking he was doing her a favor. And, with Marilyn still hemorrhaging and in great pain, we were just sent away.

  When, half a day later, Marilyn finally managed to obtain the necessary D & C procedure, both of us were emotionally drained and Marilyn was physically exhausted by a tragedy, by bureaucratic inhumanity, and by a general level of fiasco that assumed Kafkaesque complexities before things finally resolved.

  In the midst of things I finally phoned my own mother, who appeared twenty minutes later with great compassion and great efficiency. Mom moved Marilyn up to her own apartment for the next few days to recuperate in my sister’s old room. We discussed the advisability of telling Hilda, till Mom withdrew from the argument. “That’s got to be up to you two—and really a decision for Marilyn.”

  Marilyn decided not to. And I think it was the proper decision for the time.

  As soon as she was well, Marilyn consulted her doctor about birth control, again using a diaphragm and, later, the pill.

  7.85. Back on East Fifth, alone one afternoon in the apartment, I looked out the narrow back window of our living room, which opened onto the foul roof of a small outbuilding between the airshaft walls. The platform was thick with defenestrated refuse from the floors above. On it lay a rat’s corpse, which made me wonder—as I had seen still another dead rat in the gutter up the street only a day before—if, at least for the neighborhood, we weren’t due for an outbreak of plague. With such thoughts, I turned to lie down on the daybed in the shadowed living room, to sink, tingling with hyperawareness (once again), into the luminous evening waterfront of a primitive city, to climb, dripping, from the river into the ruined streets of an abandoned futuristic metropolis, to toil through glimmering jungles alive with violet sunsets and red bugs and ghouls, above which soared ivory and onyx vampires and in whose rivers dwelt a slimy aquatic race, jungles where I watched a man turn into a wolf while I tramped past mossy temples to the foot of a volcano abroil on the night, and where great violence was done to a four-armed child, which woke me (again), sharply and shockingly, in the dim tenement—