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

by Samuel R. Delany

  In the shadowy second-floor living room, I sat on the edge of the bed, palms and bare feet tingling, between writing and sleep, while outside, on one October day or another, someone threw away an old appointment calendar in the alley. For weeks the broken paving stones were scaled with white rectangles, blowing here and there, a few of them getting as far as the Fourth Street gutter, all of them marked with black numbers signifying a day of the waning year—till a rainy weekend in November rendered them gray mulch.

  7.851. Near that time, Marilyn wrote:

  Eternal pressures shrink the finite earth.

  The waxing body swells with seeds of death.

  The mind demands a measure to its breath

  and in its convolutions comprehends

  the endlessness in which it is contained,

  the change that is its necessary end.

  Change is neither merciful nor just.

  They say Leonard of Vinci put his trust

  in faulty paints: Christ’s Supper turned to dust.

  Winter dries the grass, freezes the dew. …9

  7.86. My own response to the loss of potential fatherhood was a kind of numbness. Now and again I wondered what I ought to feel. The numbness was a tense equilibrium between three emotions. I was angry because the whole situation seemed one that just shouldn’t have been mine to deal with: it had come about through my doing things that, had anyone asked me, I could have said I honestly hadn’t wanted to do anyway. But I also felt an equally real compassion for what Marilyn had been through. Also, a very basic loss ran somewhere through it all, having to do with the moments when, however anxiously, I’d tried to imagine myself a father, if not a husband. The conflict between the three didn’t encourage talking about any of them.

  One chilly day when I’d been cleaning, I suddenly stopped, took my army jacket off the back of the red chair, and walked into the kitchen. “I’m going out for a while,” I called in to where Marilyn lay on the daybed.

  She looked up, then frowned. “You don’t even have your shoes on …!”

  “I know.” I stepped out the kitchen door and pulled it to behind me.

  Barefoot on the hall’s tile, I slid one arm and the other down the jacket sleeves. My jeans were ones I’d gotten from my cousin and slightly too long. Going down the stairs, when I stopped on the marble landing, I got the backs under the foot, between my heels and the grey-white stone—in one of whose worn depressions, under the reticulated glass in the hall window, a foot-wide amoeba of yellow water glimmered, with three butts afloat.

  My plaid shirt (with no sleeve buttons and a large hole in the elbow) was open. I didn’t button it up now but just zipped frayed drab halfway up in front of it. Coming out through the vestibule, I walked down the cold stoop.

  The air was still.

  The sky was gray.

  Between two cars, I stepped over a broken beer bottle onto the street’s smoother macadam, and crossed to the alley. On the far sidewalk, I glanced back at our second floor window behind the fire escape, to see if Marilyn had gone to look after me.

  But she hadn’t.

  With the mechanical glances at the pavement for glass of the barefoot New Yorker, I went out through the alley and walked toward Avenue B. I hadn’t even taken my notebook with me, which was unusual. Past the drugstore, I strolled on for another block. At the corner, I lifted some change from my pocket. Coins slipped by my fingers. Two nickles lay on my palm.

  Though subways had just gone up, the Staten Island Ferry was still a nickel each way.

  Among the other coins, there’d be the subway fare to and from the boat. I began to zig-zag up toward the Astor Place stop.

  Inside the turnstile, while I stood next to the worn red counter of the news kiosk, I started looking at the headlines of the various papers stacked there. I went from one to the other, my hands in my pockets, reading whatever text was on the page. After a minute, the man who’d been stacking papers beside me went in, sucked his teeth, and put his fists down behind the green and yellow boxes of chewing gum. “You wanna buy somethin’?”

  I glanced at him.

  “I asked you, you wanna buy somethin’?”

  I looked back at the papers.

  “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you! You wanna buy somethin’? You don’t wanna buy somethin’, get away from the fuckin’ papers, huh?”

  I looked at him again.

  “Hey, I’m talkin’ to you! You wanna buy somethin’? Just tell me: Yes or No?”

  I frowned, questioningly.

  He looked uncomfortable. Finally he said, “Jesus Christ, get away from the fuckin’ papers, will you?”

  I blinked.

  “Get away!”

  I stepped back, turned aside. I hadn’t shaved that morning. Maybe, I thought, I should grow my beard back.

  From where she stood at the edge of the platform by one of the columns, a young woman with low heels, short hair, and a black coat glanced at me, very seriously.

  On the subway, I sat with my heels in the aisle, hands in pockets, and toes up, looking at the people pointedly not looking at me. It was about three and not very crowded. Somewhere before South Ferry, I remembered my dream of §6.611. I think I laughed. I walked up the stairs, came out of the station, and continued on up into the ferry terminal—to slide my nickel between the steel lips of the green stile; and pushed through.

  I’d thought to linger in the waiting room, looking at the concessions along the walls (postcards, magazines, candy bars …), watching the passengers; but at the far wall the long metal doors were already rolling back on the small wheels on their high rails. And the lights above the door said the boat was in. The dozen people standing there began to walk forward. I walked between the wooden benches to follow them.

  Moments later, by wheels and chains and pulleys, as I came down the ramp onto the upper deck, the engine thrum rose. I walked through the cabin by the hotdog and hamburger concession and out to the back deck. After another minute, the boat lugged out from the dock, beginning its hugely attenuated, slow motion sway. Above the top of the cabin, I saw the city slip to the side. We floated out between, then banged once into, the sagging wall of pilings.

  Cold air pried like a shoe horn under my collar. What I hoped—realized, indeed, I’d been hoping it for several days—was that someone, maybe not too different from me, might simply start speaking to me, warmly, understandingly.

  I wouldn’t speak in reply.

  But I wouldn’t have to.

  If there was something sexual in the meeting, it would be silent and known. But as I glanced at the elderly woman to my left at the waist-high gate before the chain, then at the two businessmen—one holding his gray hat and, with napping coat, turning now to go back into the cabin—I knew I wouldn’t find it here. Back inside, I walked down the gritty steps, looking out the scarred and stained windows over gray water without feature, to wander the oily plates between the parked cars on the boat’s lower level.

  Before we pulled into the far slip, I went up on the passenger deck again.

  You had to go out, around, pay another nickel, then come in again. In the Staten Island terminal’s waiting room, I sat on the benches a while. Then I walked around a bit.

  Among the concessions, in one corner was a florist booth. It was made of green wood—like a shoeshine parlor. Inside was a refrigeration unit with glass doors. Outside, on a green wooden step, stood some cardboard vases, like the ones in which my father had occasionally received particularly cheap floral presentations for funerals. One was full of some scraggly orange flowers. Along a ledge at the booth’s top were clamped some small spotlights. Shafts of yellow beamed down, one falling on some roses leaning over the rim of an earthen pot. In the terminal’s high hall, the dark and dusty hue of paint flaked from an old barn, their lapped petals were menacingly beautiful.

  Puttering busily at the counter inside, the guy running the place was fifty, squat, balding, and probably Irish. Out at the elbows, his maroon cardigan showed a
dirty striped shirt beneath. A two-inch pencil was stuck behind one ear, and he looked like he should have been chewing a cigar stub—but he wasn’t. He wore gray workman slacks and new high-topped basketball sneakers, striated rubber around the toes and rubber circles over the ankle’s black cloth, suggesting the sorest of feet or an even worse orthopedic infirmity—

  Because sneakers on an adult (in that time when construction workers rode to their jobs on the subway wearing jackets and ties—however beat up—perhaps with their workshoes on, perhaps wearing a knitted cap, only to change into overalls at the site) were almost as rare then as my lack of shoes.

  Half a dozen years later, indeed, bare feet on urban kids would flower as commonly as poodles on Park Avenue in spring. But as I stood, watching the man, the stall, the flowers, I realized I’d only seen people barefoot in New York streets twice before in my life. Once, when I’d been leaving the 135th Street subway station, I’d watched a very tall black man in black suit and clerical collar coming down the steps, followed by two equally tall black women in nun’s outfits. The man’s immense feet were naked. As they passed me, at each step long toes sliding from beneath the habits’ hems, I realized the smiling women were barefoot too. The one nearest me, on her dark foot had a bunion on her little toe the size and color of an unpeeled almond. Chatting together in a foreign language (were they some kind of reverse African missionaries?), the three had walked by as I turned to stare. The next time was at night in the Village, perhaps a couple of years later, when some seventeen-year-old kid with lots of curly red hair, a blue plaid shirt, and one hand and arm shortened and deformed by a birth defect, ran down the steps of a coffee shop on the east side of MacDougal Street to sprint past Marilyn and me, and—as I turned, surprised, to watch—vanished around the corner of Bleecker, so that the last I saw of him was the street light on one, then his other, naked heel, with just the lozenge of pavement dirt at their center. Such unshod incidents were rare enough so that, wondering what people might make of me, I remembered both now.

  When I looked up from the flowers, the man—still working with wire and blue tissue paper inside—was watching me. I looked at him—and he went back to working, glancing up now and again. After about three minutes, he suddenly came to the door, stepped out, looked around the empty terminal, then at me. His eyes went from my feet, to my face, and back—a couple of times.

  I stepped away from the flowers, wondering if I should leave.

  “You lookin’ at the flowers?” He shook his head. “I don’t think you’re gonna buy none of those, are you? But you can come inside and look—what’s your name?” He stepped back into the small, wooden stall. Curious, I stepped in after him. “What’s your name?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “What’s your name?” he asked a third time.

  Suddenly I reached up and took the pencil beside his ear. He frowned. On the edge of a piece of wrapping paper on the counter, I wrote:

  Snake.

  Now he frowned at me, then at what I’d written. “Solly …?” he said. “Sammy …?” Then: “I can’t read that!” (Because I’d been surprised how close he’d come just by accident to my actual name, only later did I realize he was saying he didn’t really know how to read at all.) My handwriting was very clear, and I’d printed it. “What’sa matter, you stupid?” He said the word the way someone else might say “retarded.” Or “deaf.”

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “You one of them stupid kids, huh? Here, come on and look at these. These are nice flowers, ain’t they?” He put his hand on my shoulder and led me farther along the short counter to show me a pot in which were just some florist’s greens. Then, after he glanced out the door again, he reached under the counter, put his hand between my legs, and rubbed me, hard. “That feel good, huh?”

  I was surprised to realize his interest was sexual. I looked at him, and I don’t think I smiled or frowned. I was more curious than anything. And numb.

  “You like that,” he said. “Good. Come on. That feels good, don’t it?”

  There was an eighteen-inch storage space behind the refrigeration unit, which he pushed me rather roughly into. “Get your pants down!” he whispered, hoarsely. He began to pull at my belt, pushing me farther back among the brooms and planks of wood stuck in there, wedging himself in after. He opened his fly and pulled himself free. He wasn’t very big and kind of stubby. “Come on, get ’em down.” He shoved my jeans down to my thighs. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Come on. Hurry up. Turn around!”

  I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to do that. But he managed to get me with my back to him in the small space, and pushed forward. Even though he didn’t get it in, he shoved hard enough to hurt. I wasn’t sure what I should do. But in less than a minute, wedged in the crease between my buttocks, he grew wet. He took a big breath and backed out of the place, already zipping up his gray pants. “Come on—come on! Get your pants up and get out of here, now. Before anybody sees you.”

  I pulled up my jeans and stepped out of the narrow space.

  “No, close ’em. Close ’em up. Jesus Christ, a stupid kid!” The inflection was sort of wrong, with more accent on stupid than kid. “Come on, now. Hurry up.” I got the top button in its hole and zipped my fly. He had his hand on my shoulder again. “Come on, now. Get out of here. Before my boss gets back—I’m just helpin’ out, see?” Almost shoving me, he got me out the door. “Before somebody sees you. G’on, now.”

  It seemed to have taken no time.

  I stepped from the door, then turned to look at him again. He went back to the counter, started to do something, then, from inside, looked up at me. After a moment, he said: “What do ya’ want?”

  I just stood there.

  Suddenly he took a breath and started forward. I flinched a little, wondering if he were angry. But he turned to the ledge beside the door, reached down, and took one of the roses. “Here—no. … Those are expensive.” He put it back and took some of the orange flowers instead. “You take these.” He thrust the small bunch at me. “You stupid kids, you’re supposed to like this stuff—flowers and things, right? Now come on.” He sounded imploring. “Get out of here now, will you?”

  With the flowers, I walked across the waiting room to the benches.

  It wasn’t long till the ferry got in, and the light came on over the big door. As I walked onto the boat again, I wondered if this was what happened to the mute or simple-minded wandering New York.

  The flowers were pretty old and the stems were kind of limp. As I stood on the upper deck and we plowed back to the Battery, a blossom fell off to slant down past a gull taking off from the lower deckrail, then blew for moments over water like black glass.

  When I came in, I put the remaining bunch in a jelly jar to the back of the kitchen counter.

  “Where did you get those?” Marilyn asked, stepping from the bathroom.

  “When I was out,” I said. “Somebody gave them to me.”

  7.9. If anything, the miscarriage rather galvanized Marilyn—I guess that’s the word. Shortly afterward, with the help of a friend of my mother’s in the department store’s personnel division, Marilyn took a job at B. Altman’s to train for the Christmas rush. Once she was working, she was much happier about sharing housework. She’d always been willing to cook—and now did it better and better so that in the sharing of practical household duties we were soon approaching fifty-fifty—not that it eased much tension.

  Cooking, for example, was a problem. Marilyn did it well and liked to do it—was, indeed, quite willing to do it. We were both learning more and more things in the kitchen. But I enjoyed doing it too. My logic ran something like this: since I did the sweeping and much of the bed making, I should at least get to do the household chore I enjoyed. So I cooked whenever I could and edged her away from the stove whenever I could manage it. Whenever she needed help, opening a stuck oven door or getting the lid off a jar, if I could possibly use it as an excuse to take over, I would.r />
  And whether I could or not, I went around thinking of myself as the one who did it all. Also I wanted the privilege of feeding whom I wanted to:

  One of the Barnes & Noble stock clerks and I had become good friends. The shy, handsome son of a Chicago minister, he lived in a furnished room over in the Village on Waverly Place. Since he had no place to cook, why didn’t he come over and eat with us? After a week of it, Marilyn objected. She didn’t feel like … cooking for three every night—fine, I said, I’ll do all the cooking. And did, whenever he came over. It still left Marilyn miffed, since that wasn’t the point. The point was, I was quite in love with him—though I didn’t think there was the slightest chance of the feeling’s being reciprocated. Why didn’t she bring home some friends of her own? She did: a young black woman with whom she worked at the store. With great—if not somewhat forced—graciousness, I cooked dinner and tried to be a perfect host. It didn’t really improve things.

  7.91. Another clerk at Barnes & Noble was a young woman a few years older than Marilyn and I. Her name was Rose. She had bright red hair and was given to diaphanous blue dresses. She lived a block to the northeast in a building in better condition than ours by several degrees. After I invited her over for dinner one evening, she took on a motherly attitude toward us.

  Rose had been taking a Shakespeare class that met evenings at the New School for Social Research. Nothing would do but that we attend the next six-week session. The instructor, a Professor Lewis, was a theatrical and enthusiastic gentleman with a reputation for making “dead topics” come to life. Not that Shakespeare was particularly dead for either Marilyn or me. But this session, the plays to be read were As You Like It, Coriolanus, The Tempest, and King Lear. And I had read the two comedies but not the tragedies.