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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Usually when we finally went to sleep, Bob would have made his way to one side or the other, so that he could hang one arm off the edge.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It was always just the way I was most comfortable sleepin’.”

  Which was fine with me.

  I liked being in the middle.

  51.2. One weekend afternoon, when Bob had gone up to see Bernie about something and Marilyn was off seeing her mother, I went out intending to go to the supermarket, but a kind of excess energy that March day started me wandering north, occasionally angling west, till I came to Stuyvesant Park. As I was walking along the outer ring of benches, I noticed a guy in his early thirties or so watching me. When I came back around, he was still looking. He wore paint-stained work-pants under a zippered jacket. I passed, then looked back. He nodded. I turned and went to sit beside him.

  “You want to come to my place?” he asked.

  The guy’s hair was very fine and brown and he had a bald spot, though he wasn’t thirty-five.

  I thought for a moment. “Sure.” The way he smiled when I said it decided me he was pretty pleasant. In the same way my relation with Marilyn had never been a closed one, I didn’t feel my relation with Bob and Marilyn was exclusive either—though this was the first chance I’d had to see what sex outside it would be like. Frankly, I was curious.

  We got up and walked out the iron gates at Sixteenth Street, eventually arriving at a building full of small furnished rooms with a stale smell in the halls. In a low-ceilinged corridor, he unlocked the several locks on his door, and I followed him in. The paint was cracked and blue. A window looked out at a brick wall eighteen inches away. There was a bureau and a three-quarter bed. A hot plate sat back under a white table with cigarette burns on the top. A wash-up sink was attached to the wall. “If you want to take a piss,” he said, “use that.”

  The sex was all right; but I found myself thinking, in the midst of it—almost predictably—that while it was fine for having fallen into, it wouldn’t have been worth looking for, considering what I had at home.

  Afterwards, he asked me if I wanted a cup of tea. I said no thanks. He set up the hot plate and began to boil water for himself in a white-speckled enameled pan anyway. Was I sure I wouldn’t change my mind? So I said okay. Sitting cross-legged in my undershirt on the foot of his bed, looking at the bureau no farther away than the brick was from his window, I asked who the couple were with their arms around each other’s shoulders in the seven-inch frame sitting on the spread-out dish towel.

  The woman was small, plump, and white-blonde. The man with her was darker haired and—in this photo—looked both muscular and a little goofy.

  “My wife.” The man adjusted the temperature on the hot plate.

  “And the guy?”

  “My lover.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, joking. “At the same time?”

  “Yep.” He sat back down on the bed.

  I was intrigued. “Did you ever make it all three at once?”

  “Sure,” he said. “That’s the way we did it. All the time.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Sounds like fun. I could get into that myself. Where are they now?”

  “Dead.”

  That surprised me. “What happened?” I turned on the bed.

  “They got killed—in a car wreck.”

  “That’s terrible!” I said. “What about you? Where were you when it happened?”

  “In jail.” He handed me a cup of tea with a tea bag whose grey paper was just going dark and transparent under steam. “She wrote a lot of bad checks—really, she forged them. Once we knew she was probably going to get caught, the three of us sat down and talked about it. We decided that I would be the one to take the rap.” He shrugged. “We all spent the money, anyway. Then I went to jail for five years.”

  “How long were you together?” I asked. “I mean the three of you? Before you went in.”

  “About six years. Louise—my wife—and I got married when we were eighteen. Sammy came along maybe a year later.”

  “His name was Sam?”

  “Sammy. That’s what everybody called him.”

  “What about kids?” I asked. “Did you all have any?”

  “Two,” he said. “One by me. One by him. Boy and girl.” When I looked at him curiously, he said: “They were killed too—they were in the car.”

  “That’s awful!” But at this point it just didn’t seem politic to tell him about my own situation. The correspondences were great enough so that he probably wouldn’t believe me, and would just think I was putting him on—or crazy.

  “How long have you been out?” I asked.

  “Not quite two years. I’m still on parole.”

  “It must have been a lot of checks,” I said.

  “A lot of checks. And some other stuff, too.” He put the cup on the table, reached down and pulled up his paint-streaked trousers, without putting on any underpants. Fly unzipped and top button still open, he sat on the bed again and took up his teacup again. “When I learned they’d all been killed, I really went to pieces.”

  “I bet you did!”

  “It was pretty much—” he considered, in his soft, precise voice—“the worst thing that ever happened to me.” He sipped again. “I was in the prison infirmary about three or four weeks. I wouldn’t eat anything. I was throwing up everything—they thought I had hepatitis or something at first. But I was just sick over them, you know what I mean? Only there wasn’t anything I could do.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess there wasn’t.” Somehow I felt that I had to say something. “My name’s Sam,” I said. “Samuel. But nobody calls me Sammy—at least not any more. My nickname’s Chip.”

  He sipped his tea. “Sam?” He smiled. “Now that’s a coincidence, isn’t it?” He sipped again. “You don’t look like him at all, though.”

  “You like to have sex with a man and a woman at the same time?”

  He glanced at me, with a grin. “I loved it.

  “Are you—sort of over it, now?”

  He shrugged. “Sort of.”

  “That’s really terrible.”

  Somehow, I’d managed to listen to all this without considering it any kind of omen. Rather, it was an unsettling coincidence to test my own even-mindedness. Pretty calm and collected, I left the Eighteenth Street rooming house.

  Yet as I walked home, I thought: again I’d encountered this strange doubling—a doubling that had taken what I’d never thought to be other than my personal situation and changed it into a socially shared one, even if it was only by an adult society of six; even if two of that society had already died in a car crash. At the same time this doubling had placed between this man and me a boundary, a silence, which, while saliva, semen, and perspiration had crossed it back and forth, I’d been barely able to penetrate with a sympathetic cliché and my name.

  Already I’d decided there was little point in telling Bob and Marilyn about him. It wasn’t something current; it was something that had been and was over. (Perhaps a week later I changed my mind; their response was merely interest.) Now the boundary seemed primarily to halt a certain order of language.

  At the same time I was the boundary, the place where language stalled.

  As I walked home, I thought about the hospital again. It was so easy to tell your story and not mention you were homosexual. It was so simple to write about yourself and just not to say you were black. You could put together a whole book full of anecdotes about yourself without ever revealing you were dyslexic. And how many people whom I’d just met and who’d asked me, “What do you do?” did I answer disingenuously, “Oh, I type manuscripts for people”? For by now I knew that such an answer troubled the easy, flickering social waters far less than the accurate, “I’m a writer,” or the more troubling, “I’m a writer, I’ve published five novels,” or the most disturbing, “I’m a writer, I’ve published five novels. They’re science fiction,” which, when you said it to men, mostly produced
a low, bewildered grunt, as if you had unexpectedly slugged them somewhere below the navel, and which, when you said it to women, mostly produced a sudden smile and the ejaculation, “Oh, isn’t that wonderful!” which response, formal, phatic, many women in our society have been conditioned to give in the face of unexpected and inexplicable violation (sudden sexist art, insulting jokes)—before, with both the men and the women, the silence crystallized, across which nothing meaningful really can be said, the silence for which it would be so easy to use the slippery, cold, static, cloudy, and crackshot metaphor, ice.

  Those silences, those boundaries, were the gaps between the columns.

  Yet even to conceive of them, to articulate them, to tell the story of their creation, constitution, or persistence, even to yourself—wasn’t that to begin to displace them? To speak, to write—wasn’t that to break the boundary of the self and let your hearer, your reader become the boundary instead of you (hence the grunt, and phatic blurt), but a boundary so much easier to cross now because she or he had been written to, spoken to?

  What would it be like, I wondered, to talk or write freely of such a situation, not to those who’d never conceived before what such a situation might be, but rather to talk or write to someone—like him, or even a thousand strangers—who already knew? I walked back to Sixth Street by way of the supermarket. When I got home I started dinner.

  51.21. Rereading the above two or three weeks later, I wonder, under the prompting such concretization of the past too often provides, if I haven’t wholly misremembered a goodly part? It seems to me now that I must have told the guy about Bob and Marilyn; and that we discussed the similarities of our situations with an easy complicity it is now almost impossible for me to reconstruct (“Who’s that in the picture?” “My wife.” “And the guy?” “My lover.” “Yeah? At the same time?” “Yes.” “Hey, you’re not going to believe this, but I’m married. My wife and I are living with a guy right now we both sleep with.” “Sure, I’d believe it. …”), while the real barrier discussed is the one relegated to mere parenthetical mention—the one that prevented me from telling Bob and Marilyn for the next two weeks.

  Certainly this displaces meanings and meditations in time and space, translating them to new locations in the field of desire; but does this change the meaning of the discussion of boundaries above?

  Only a little, I think.

  Does it change the meaning of the meaning?

  I’m afraid almost wholly.

  51.22. To write a science fiction novel about some people who loved each other and shared their bodies, all three, was something I wasn’t prepared to do—yet. But the book I’d started involved a poet who’d just emerged from such a relationship and who occasionally advised some of the other characters—the three Navigators—currently within one.

  And many of the problems and insights concerning language I’ve discussed here were becoming part of it.

  Certainly this new relationship rewrote over Marilyn’s and mine its stunning integral—another way of saying that, for several months, we were happy.

  The novel used as its starting point the language Marilyn and I had tried to invent on our way to Detroit to get married.

  51.3. With his first paycheck from the tool-and-die shop, Bob asked if he could send fifty dollars home to his parents. “You can do anything you want with it,” I said. “It’s your money.”

  “The hell it is,” he said. “It’s ours. So I’m askin’.”

  “Of course you can,” Marilyn said.

  “Cause I’ve pulled some real shit with them, and sometimes I don’t think they think too much of me.” So Bob got a fifty-dollar money order from the post office, and spent the afternoon writing a long letter to his father and stepmother.

  By this time, we knew a fair amount about Bob’s life. For one thing his given name was not Robert or Bob but “Bobby,” and he hated it as much as I’d ever hated “Sam.” He’d lived with his real mother till age twelve. Most of that time she’d supported herself by prostitution. A repeated childhood memory was of lingering around one or another fly-specked motel screen door, waiting for her to finish with someone inside. “She really liked a good time. Somethin’ like we’re doin’ here, she’d a’ thought that was just great. She would of thought it was crazy—but it would of tickled her. She was into niggers, too.” He would settle himself against me. “Only she liked real black ones.” She died either from drink, drugs, a stroke, or some unclear combination. The state sent Bob to live with his father and stepmother. “That worked about three minutes.” After a few trouble-filled months, he ran away to New York, and supported himself by his mother’s profession. Eventually he supplemented that with a job as an office boy in the design firm. A pretty ingenious kid, among other things, he had invented a kind of tape, with stickum on both sides and a double plastic coating that could be stripped away. It’s common today but was unknown in ’56. When he first told me about it, I thought it sounded pretty improbable that he was the one who’d first come up with it, especially at fourteen, but when I met the woman who’d employed him ten years before (who was still quite fond of him), she confirmed it. A trip to Florida to see his father brought disaster down on his head. Gun mad like so many poor southern boys, he’d bought a pair of pistols with another kid about his own age. There was an argument about who was the guns’ real owner. The guns were stolen from Bob’s house. Bob broke into the trailer where the other boy lived to repossess his property. There was a fight over the weapons. Nobody was hurt and the police broke it up. “What were you tryin’ to do?” the judge asked.

  “Kill the motherfucker!” Bob declared.

  He served two years for breaking, entering, and assault with intent to kill. When he got out at eighteen, he married the first woman who was nice to him, a half Indian waitress at a local diner, named Joanne. She was five years his senior and on the rebound from a broken marriage, with three boys of her own. Over the next three years, they had two more children. It was a stormy marriage. Bob was sure that the first child—a son—was not his. The second, a little girl named after him, Bobbi-Dee, he loved as much as anything in his life. Bob and Joanne spent the winter months in Florida, living near his father, within the tangles of an extended southern country family, in which he was by no means the only one in and out of trouble. Summer, at first with Joanne, but later on his own, he’d move to Texas and work the shrimp boats that ran up and down the Gulf, from Port Arthur to Brownsville. Aransas Pass, a few miles seaward of Corpus Christi, was the place he usually started from. He was surprised I’d ever heard of the tiny tidewater town. But it had figured in a story by Theodore Sturgeon, “A Way of Thinking.” Thanks to the Sturgeon magic, I felt I already knew the place. Shrimp fishing, he explained, was a pretty wild life and attracted some pretty wild men. In Freeport, Texas, another Gulf town, he was sure he was still wanted for a night of barroom fights and drunken vandalism that had involved some robberies on the part of some of the other guys. Not him—but the law didn’t know that. For the last year, both in Texas and Florida, he’d been in so much minor trouble, now in jail for drunk and disorderly charges, now with the police called in to stop an argument between him and Joanne that had gotten to furniture throwing, he was sure she was happy to be shut of him. When a brother-in-law of his, another ex-convict, had decided to take off north with a young prostitute, Bob had decided to come along. Maybe he could start in at something new—and, to his disbelief and astonishment, he had.

  This was the history into which he was sending his letter. (And fifty dollars.) He asked us to read it. Addressed to his stepmother, simply and straightforwardly it said he loved them, that he knew from time to time he’d been a burden, but now he was settled in New York. He had a job in a tool-and-die shop. He’d made some good friends here—not the kind who would get him in trouble. He hoped to send more money soon. Later on in the summer, he might even come down and visit a few days. He’d be glad to see them. He hoped they’d be happy to see him.

>   A week later, I took out a letter from behind our tarnished brass mailbox door. It was addressed to “Bobby” in a childishly sloping hand and postmarked Florida. I took it upstairs. That evening, when he got home from work, I was cooking string beans and told him he’d had a letter from home.

  “Where?”

  “On the table.”

  He sat down and opened it. Marilyn came in while he was reading it. “Bob’s family wrote back,” I said, while she was hanging up her coat.

  “Oh,” she said, “what do they say?”

  A few minutes later, Bob threw the letter down on the floor and started for the back room. Marilyn frowned at me. Bob hesitated in the doorway. He didn’t look back. But he said, “You wanna read it? It’s from my stepmother. Go ahead.” Then he went into the bathroom.

  Dear Bobby,

  Things have been real hard since you left but not too hard and I guess we all feel better since you run off, Joanne’s boys are getting used to you not being here but Bobbi-Dee cried a lot at first, she don’t now. We got your letter and was good to hear things were settling down for you. Your dad said you should of written before and was very mad, you still part of the family, which is true, Bobby, thank you for the money, but that’s what he said. This is what we all feel, I guess, you said you could send us some more money maybe, if we wanted you to come visit, and you sure should send some more money, after what you done when you left, but not if you coming back. We don’t want you to come back and would like not to have the money if that’s what it means.

  That’s very hard, I know, but I hope you can write me again if you want, your letter got everybody here and daddy all upset. I hope you don’t come here,

  Sincerely,

  —Momma

  “And my stepmomma,” Bob said, coming back from the bathroom, “is the one in the family who likes me!”

  I don’t have the letter today. But I feel sure of my reconstruction: a few months later, when I was writing a story called “The Star-Pit,” to create a similar letter sent to one of my characters, I put Bob’s letter on the green metal wing of the typing stand and, sentence by sentence, translated it, as carefully as I could, into the text of my story. I worked on that section half a day; thus twenty-two years on, with the story text beside me, it is fairly easy to translate it back.