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

by Samuel R. Delany

  At the first evening’s gathering that November, on the third floor of the building on Thirteenth Street, Professor Lewis led a truly exciting discussion of Coriolanus—that play of a son with a strong, strong mother, in which the ghosts of the grain riots that perturbed fifteenth-century England are manifested among the lines of Shakespeare’s ancient Romans.

  Two weeks later, our first class on Lear began with Professor Lewis sitting on the corner of his desk, reading the opening scene to us, paraphrasing as he went.

  In his explication of the scene-one altercation between Lear and Kent, just as Lear is preparing to curse Cordelia, I realized, as Professor Lewis stopped to give an explanation now of this line, now of that one, that he’d interpreted Lear’s interruption of Kent’s petition with line 144 (“The bow is bent and drawn. Make from the shaft”) as “You’ve spoken too long. Get to your point,” i.e., “Your bow is bent and drawn, Kent. Let your arrow fly,” as if, indeed, the line were another version of Gertrude’s exhortation to Polonius in Hamlet, “More matter, with less art.”

  In the discussion that followed, I took what I thought was the mildest exception and suggested the line was better interpreted as: “My anger is ready to become action. If you do not move away from it, it will strike you too,” i.e., “My bow is bent and drawn, Kent. Move away from the arrow.” I pointed out that he’d conflated the meanings of “bow” and “shaft” (i.e., “bow” and “arrow”).

  I thought I was pointing out the most obvious of mistakes and expected Professor Lewis to say something like, “Oh, of course,” and was quite surprised when he declared that here “shaft” meant “any piece of wood” (I’m sure he was thinking of “staff”) and that the word here, in fact, meant “bow”! My reading was, he explained, obviously and patently wrong. The argument became heated, with Marilyn and me as the chief spokespersons for my reading and the rest of the class on Lewis’s side.

  At one point, he actually took a vote—as if the question could be decided in such a manner!

  At that point, I decided it was time to get up off it. And did—so as not to interrupt the class further. But poor Rose, a few seats away from us and intuiting that we were correct and that Lewis was wrong (“I know the difference between ‘shaft’ and ‘staff’ perfectly well. And ‘shaft’ means ‘bow’!” he had declared. “I don’t care what it says in your dictionary!”), was the most upset person in the class.

  7.92. On two or three evenings, with Marilyn, I searched up an old building on James Street—one of those nineteenth-century wooden tenements with a high stone stoop you could still find occupied back then, here and there in Manhattan. In the back apartment with its metal sink and scratched walls, another Barnes & Noble stock clerk, Billy (“Now don’t get that confused with Saint James Street,” he’d explained carefully. “They run right off each other.”) had invited us for dinner. Not that this was a particularly egalitarian era—still, both Marilyn and I were a bit surprised at the young, dark-haired woman (“This is my girlfriend, Bobbi.”) busily making spaghetti and salad in Billy’s bachelor digs. Other times I remember Billy and Bobbi coming to our apartment on Fifth Street—where I would make spaghetti one night, or chili another.

  7.93. One winter’s afternoon, when the enamel sink top was covered with what was to become dinner, I picked up an oddly shaped green pepper, about twice as long as most and rather thinner, with a gently phallic curve—it looked more like a cucumber—Marilyn came up to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “Green pepper,” I said. Then I nodded to the stove, where, on the bottom of the Dutch oven, in a slather of bacon grease, bits of onion were sautéing like a scatter of translucent rectangular pearls. “Beef stew.”

  She nodded at the pepper. “Looks like yours,” she said.

  I frowned at it. “So it does,” I said. “Well”—I raised the kitchen knife—“let’s castrate the fucker,” and whacked off the end of the pepper on the small cutting board. Then I whacked off two more pieces—

  And glanced at Marilyn, who’d said, “Oh …!”

  I saw she’d started to cry. “Oh, hey—!” I said and put my arm around her. “I was only kidding! I’m sorry—”

  “I know,” she said, laughing a little herself, while the tears kept on. “But it was so sweet—”

  By the time the rest of the stew was on to simmer, I think we ended up in bed, her thin arms holding hard around my neck, both of our breaths smelling faintly of green pepper.

  7.94. Billy didn’t like many foods. When I invited him over the first time, I’d been going on about one or another of my culinary extravaganzas, but the tall, sunken-chested, Jewish young man, with his square face, frizzy hair, and glasses, said: “Now you just fix something simple for me. If I’m going to come, I just want something simple.”

  7.95. Minor infidelities? One newly chill October night, cruising the Williamsburg Bridge walkway ended me up with a tall Midwesterner in jeans and a navy-blue wool shirt. As we walked down Delancey to his studio loft, he told me his name was Jack Smith. I realized he was an experimental filmmaker, whose work I’d read Susan Sontag praise in the Village Voice.

  Inside, a low-wattage bulb over the corner cot lit only half the messy bedding and a circle of dark floor boards. We stripped down, and, after a night of crowded sleep, I woke—alone—to gray light falling through the tall windows, left from when the place had been an industrial storeroom.

  I pushed up from under the army blankets, looking around. It was six times the size it had seemed when, in the dark, we’d entered.

  Still sleepy, but up and dressed, Smith was walking about, pretty much ignoring me.

  In another corner, among sets and props and beamed racks leaning against the walls or forming makeshift dividers, an orange and red tasseled print partly curtained an alcove. From behind the skew hanging stepped a quizzical Puerto Rican transvestite in a coral blouse, a worn tan sweater, and wearing a blue and pink head kerchief. While sitting on the cot’s edge, I got my drawers and socks up from the floor, and we began to talk. “Hello, I’m René.” Holding my underpants, I stood up to shake his extended, olive, manicured hand. “René Rivera. Jack’s letting me stay here, between parts. I’m a star.” He showed me his “dressing room,” with brass-steaded bed, vanity, and brightly light-ringed mirror, crowded against a rack of “costumes,” behind the hanging shawl. “Just like in It Happened One Night.” He’d been working under the name Mario Montez: “And I’m thinking of going with it.” Years before I’d seen The Cobra Woman, with his female namesake, on Channel Five afternoon television and grinned at the cleverness. Obviously he was pleased I’d recognized the reference. “I’m the lead in Jack’s next film. Maybe you’ve seen me in the movies already, darling …?” He’d acted in a number of Smith projects. “I’m surprised how many people coming through here have.” René/Montez was affable, chatty, and as considerate of a nineteen-year-old, somewhat befuddled by the morning after, as was possible. On the corner hotplate, he boiled up water for white crock mugs of instant coffee, tinkling semi-clean spoons within their rims, while I got my clothes on. He offered me canned condensed Pet Milk, sugar (“Though that condensed stuff is so sweet, you don’t really need it”), and kept up a pleasant run of early morning small talk, generally evincing a human level of concern—while Smith, on whom I’d laid three loads by dawn and from whom I’d pulled out two, ambled between leaning flats and papier maché scenery, occupied by what creative problem I would never know. Eventually, he rolled a morning joint and, from the studio’s far side, absently asked if I wanted a hit. Once I said no thank you, Smith pretended I wasn’t there.

  So, leaving a half cup of coffee on the white enameled tabletop, I said thank you and good-bye to Mario, and left.

  When I got back to the Fifth Street apartment and told Marilyn, she seemed quite pleased with what I think she may have taken as more of a conquest than it was. “Why don’t you go back and volunteer to give him a hand
with his next film project?” It sounded interesting. But I never did.

  7.96. Dick and Alice, with whom we had dinner that night, mentioned that the previous weekend they’d made love a dozen times. Back on Fifth Street we talked about it. Then, between Saturday morning and Sunday night, we made love thirteen times. It was fun.

  7.971. I’ve said my cousin Nanny and Walter were married only weeks after Marilyn and me.

  For the first year or so, they lived in a sprawling loft above the narrow sidewalk at 20 Spruce Street, well below Houston. Walter was a diminutive black trumpet player with a generous heart, precise diction, and a cutting sense of humor. The first time Marilyn and I met him, with Nanny, a week or so before their wedding, he’d launched into a twenty-minute monologue about Jackie Kennedy’s freckles that would have done proud any Mort Sahl or Shelley Berman. Just before various public appearances, freckles kept breaking out on Mrs. Kennedy’s face, which put the White House staff in a tizzy: they were afraid that if enough showed up, people would begin to believe the First Lady was secretly “colored.” (This was two years before the assassination.) There were press conferences denying the little brown spots’ significance; there were Joint Chief of Staff and Cabinet meetings. (“Gentlemen, there’s been another … how do I put this tactfully … freckle.”) It laid us out on the floor that afternoon.

  We laughed about it for a week.

  One of Nanny and Walter’s plans was to open their loft a night a month for a jazz party. Walter’s musician friends would drop by to jam. Nanny would cook a huge pot of black-eyed peas and rice. Admission was a dollar at the door. Musicians who played got in free—so did, I have a feeling, just about anyone short a buck.

  7.972. They must have kept this up a good while. (They stopped and started it again a couple of times.) Marilyn and I went down on half a dozen nights. But somehow it never quite worked out the way it was supposed to. Sometimes there just wasn’t the right combination of musicians—three drummers, two double bass players, and Walter. Sometimes there were too many people and not enough peas. One night, when they’d reopened after not holding it a while, their publicity must have been particularly good. Instead of thirty or forty people, they got a hundred, who couldn’t get in—so never came back. At another, only fifteen or twenty people showed up—and if you didn’t get a solid thirty-five or forty, making food just wasn’t worth it.

  7.973. They were nevertheless great fun.

  From somewhere Billy knew Walter—I never found out just how. But one evening, when Marilyn and I came into the loft, there was Billy, from Barnes & Noble, in the largely black crowd. Billy had a kind of bumptiousness that at first tickled Nanny—but finally rather got on her nerves. Eventually she started referring to him as “your friend Billy,” with a raising of her eyebrows on the “your.” She told me once he dropped in when they were not having one of their monthly parties, hung around (in Nanny’s words) “an awfully long time,” and did not seem to pick up on the fact that this was also their home and that they had things to do. But all this—jazz parties and black friends and the Lower East Side and writers and poets—was what Billy had left his Long Island parents and come to the city to find. He seemed very happy in it all.

  7.98. In November I got involved in my first major infidelity. You remember the stock clerk whom I’d been bringing home to dinner every night? One evening as I was walking him back home, he paused on the chill corner of Avenue B. He had something to confess to me that he knew would wreck our friendship; but he could hold it no longer. He was homosexual. He wanted to go to bed with me. …

  In the course of the whole thing, on the night of Marilyn’s birthday, he burst into our apartment, and actually declared to us both, “We can’t go on like this!”

  The unhappiness all around us for the ten days or so of it finally established, however, what became a kind of house rule regarding outside sex: “I don’t care what you do when you’re not here,” Marilyn finally told me. “It’s just how it makes you act when you are here I object to!”

  It seemed reasonable to me. But over the years it was easier for me to adhere to the parameters of behavior that suggested than it was for Marilyn.

  7.981. My affair brought my own writing to a halt (for a week) and produced a sudden creative spurt in Marilyn’s: most of the fragments that became her poem “Prism and Lens.”

  7. Familiar with the street culture of those years and encountering the above passage in the first edition of this book, a contemporary reader, John Del Gaizo, informs me that the “T. K” stood for the words “to kill”—so that the entire acronym expands to “Down to kill like a mother-fucker.”

  8. Hacker, “Prism and Lens,” in Separations, p. 67.

  9. Hacker, “Catherine Pregnant,” in Separations, p. 23.

  8. On a chill, immobile evening, during a midnight November walk, through a window in an alley adjacent to the Village View construction Marilyn glimpsed two or four or six naked people—multiplied or confused, in a moment of astonished attention, by some mirror on the back wall, as the window itself added a prismatic effect to the bodies inside, gilded by candlelight or some mustard bulb—before they moved behind a jamb, or she walked beyond the line of sight, the image suggesting proliferations of possibilities, of tales about those possibilities, of images in harmony, antiphon, or wondrous complementarity. Once, when I was gone for the night, she went walking—and was stopped by two cops in a patrol car, curious what a woman would be doing out in that largely homosexual haunt—on the Williamsburg Bridge. It was a time of strained discussions in our tenement living room, in the midst of which a bit of plaster from the newly painted ceiling would fall to shatter over the mahogany arm of the red chair.

  9. Directly after Christmas Marilyn was let go from Airman’s. She was down over it. I’d been kept on at Barnes & Noble once the textbook rush had ended. She’d been hoping to stay on into the new year at the store.

  In a day or two, though, she began looking through the papers for another job. Very close to New Year’s she got an interview at Ace Books for a job as an editorial assistant.

  She told them she was twenty-one to get the position. When I spoke to her the evening after the interview, she said, somewhat pensively: “The editor-in-chief—his name is Wollheim—told me I’ll probably get the job … because I’m Jewish. He said Jews have a hard time getting into publishing, and so he always favors Jewish applicants.”

  9.1. We were both excited over the prospect. Ace published a good deal of the science fiction we both enjoyed reading. As well, they’d published a cleanly and elegantly written novel called Junkie by one “William Lee.” It was an open secret among those who spent time around the Village that “Lee” was a pseudonym for William Burroughs. We’d both been impressed by the fragments of Burrough’s Naked Lunch we’d read in Big Table. Though it was still unpublished in its entirety, the book had been referred to as one of genius any number of times in print.

  And a man named Carl Solomon also worked at Ace (he was the publisher’s nephew and his title was Idea Man), who had figured prominently in an energetic and passionate poem published a couple of years before in that small black-and-white pamphlet by Allen Ginsberg—Howl.

  It seemed like an exciting place.

  9.11. “There’s a guy who works there,” Marilyn told me after her first day, “—he’s twenty-five—who used to be a reader for Scribner’s. He told me this afternoon that he rejected Nabokov’s Lolita when he was there. He said he still doesn’t think it’s a good book.” She shook her head. “He’s still bragging about it. And he’s Jewish.”

  We both laughed.

  Well, one strike against them.

  9.2. The dreams (nightmares, I’ve called them since, though they clung to memory, lurid, fascinating, and as pleasurable as they were unsettling) returned for the sixth or seventh time in five or six weeks, and I resolved: yes, I’d try to catch their hypervividness in words. I’d weave some science fantasy novel through those light-shot locations,
one that might even appease Marilyn’s complaints about the books she was now editing.

  And with the first of the year, my own job dropped to part-time.

  9.3. Marilyn had been working for Ace perhaps two weeks when she learned that a young man named Ed (friendly, blond, and—incidentally—Protestant), hired as an editorial assistant at the same time as she had been, was making eighty-five dollars a week—twenty dollars a week more than Marilyn’s sixty-five. Out of curiosity, she asked the office manager why. It was Ed’s first publishing job as well. On the record, Marilyn and Ed were the same age: twenty-one. The office manager, a rather brassy older woman (incidentally Jewish) explained it was just customary to start men at a substantially higher salary.

  Shortly a phone was installed in the office Ed and Marilyn shared—on Ed’s desk. By this time Marilyn was doing rights and permissions work, which meant she was pretty constantly on the phone to other publishers. Ed was basically reading manuscripts, writing reader’s reports, and copy editing. So Marilyn had to get up from her desk and go use the phone on Ed’s whenever she had to call the rights department at another publisher. After a couple of weeks, she mentioned this to the office manager. “Oh,” the woman said, “we never give phones to women employees. They make too many personal calls.”

  In 1961 nobody even thought such a statement insulting—or might need to be dissembled just for the sake of manners.

  About a week after this, Marilyn came home upset by an encounter she’d had that afternoon with Ed. As I said, Marilyn needed the phone for her work. Most of the calls that came into their office, however, were (personal) calls for Ed. In the first week, simply because her work required she use the phone to call out so much, she’d taken to answering it—putting down the paperwork she was doing, getting up from her desk, going over to Ed’s. But now that it had become clear what the phone pattern was, she’d realized Ed still expected her to do the same thing. He was quite prepared to sit and read, while the phone rang seven or eight times at his elbow, till Marilyn got up, came over, answered it, and said, “Just a moment. I’ll get him … it’s for you, Ed.”