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

by Samuel R. Delany

  Now Bob pulled on his shirt and announced, “I don’t think I’m gonna eat tonight. I’m gonna go out and get me fuckin’ drunk!”

  Marilyn looked distressed. Bob saw her, frowned. Then he went to her and put his wrists on her shoulders. “Don’t worry. I didn’t say I was gonna kill myself!” He smiled. She didn’t. “I just said I’m gonna get drunk.”

  “But I don’t want you—”

  “But I do want to,” he said. “You all can come along with me, if you like. I’ll probably need somebody to get me home!”

  “I’ve got my linguistics class tonight …” Marilyn said, in a very small voice.

  “I’ll go out with you,” I said.

  “Then come on.”

  So most of dinner was put back in the icebox.

  Bob and I went out.

  We went to three small, dark, neighborhood bars, none of which I’d been in before. In the first two, we drank silent glasses of beer, Bob putting away two to my one. At the third place, Bob finally began to talk, very much as he usually did, about his adventures hitchhiking in the south, about hustling in the north, or working along the Gulf Coast. Near midnight, he seemed pretty much back to normal. It was only when we got up to leave that I realized, as he almost overturned his barstool, that he really was unsteady. Once, on the corner, he nearly fell. But by the time we were going upstairs together, we were laughing about something.

  He hadn’t drunk anything else but beer.

  When we came in the door, Marilyn, reading at the table, looked up with delighted relief. I started to explain the joke to her. But suddenly Bob lurched into the back. A moment later, a retching came from the bathroom.

  “Oh, Jesus …” Marilyn said. We both went in after him, where he’d thrown up, half on the bathroom floor and half in the toilet. We got him (and the floor) cleaned up, then into bed.

  That night he slept in the middle, holding on to both of us. About dawn, I woke to hear him crying. A couple of hugs, and we were all back to sleep.

  The next morning, when he came out while I was putting up the coffee, I asked him: “Are you going to work today?”

  “Sure,” he said. “I feel like shit. But ain’t that the point of gettin’ drunk?”

  51.4. Perhaps the best emblem of what was good about the relationship was that it survived all this to return to days and nights that were, for all of us, as satisfying as anything in the first three—a kind of pleasure that to detail any more would simply be meaninglessly repetitious, indulgently salacious.

  What I remember, though, are a lot of good things from that time, some of them with Bob, some not—yet his being there seemed to fuel them. There was a day I spent with an old friend from Science, a little butterball named Richard, who outlined for me step by step the derivation of Güdel numbers as well as the proof of Güdel’s theorem. To pass a whole afternoon where the logic obtaining was all mathematical was like a walk in fresh snow after being cooped in an overheated apartment for a month. Since I’d read the Philip Horton biography of Hart Crane, I’d always planned to visit the New York Public Library and look over the works of the tragic prodigy, Samuel Greenberg. Now, on the long wooden tables, under the green glass reading lamps, I copied out various verses of Greenberg’s into my notebook from the delicate pamphlets no one had checked out in a decade. There was the quiet Sunday Marilyn spent, sitting with Bob at the round table, working on a translation from the Spanish—he’d always wanted to learn the language, and Marilyn knew it fairly well. Or, another day, with a small jeweler’s screwdriver, he dismantled, piece by intricate piece, her camera, showing her how its inner mechanism worked. Or, once, Joe—the trucker I’d briefly encountered on the docks the summer dawn in ’62 (though ironically, Joe didn’t remember it at all), now living around the corner with his lover Paul—hired Bob and me to work for a weekend with him on his transmission in a Jersey garage, where, on tracks across the girdered ceiling, a great grapple could be maneuvered by a remote-control box, like the waldoes in the SF stories I’d read as a boy.

  “Waldoes?” Bob asked, as we stood in the echoing concrete hangar, among the truck bodies, the piles of tires, the benches full of tools. “What’re they?”

  “Try to imagine,” I told him, “a mechanical glove you wear on your hand that controls a huge, mechanical hand that hangs in the middle of all this. You move your arm … and the great metal hand swings in the same direction. You raise yours … it raises. You drop yours … and it drops. It’s much stronger than you are. It’s bigger than you are. You can maneuver it over that chassis there, drop your own hand down, and just close two of your fingers: it closes two of its fingers … and picks the chassis right up when you lift your hand!”

  “That’s neat!” Bob said, looking at the grapple like a metal flower hanging from its cables. “And suppose you brung your hand down in front of you”—as I’d been doing, now he mimed the gesture—“so that them big metal fingers was right around you. Then you made a fist!” He laughed, sharply, squeezing his hand. “You could crush yourself to death, couldn’t you? If I’d a’ had one, that’s what I’d a’ done the night I got that letter from home!” But he laughed again.

  51.5. The only thing I remember that came close to an actual problem in our day-to-day living, among Bob, Marilyn, and me, was this. After two weeks at the tool-and-die shop, Bob came home, still in his jump suit, black from hair to shoes.

  “What,” Marilyn said, looking up from the table, “happened to you?”

  Bob held his filthy hands from his sides. “They put me down in the basement, cleaning off some old equipment there—man, that stuff is dirty! I gotta get a bath!” His light eyes blinked from the sooty smudge of his face.

  “Let me go run you a tub.” I left the stove to go back into the bedroom and, in the bathroom, put in the stopper and turned on the tub tap.

  When I came back into the kitchen, at the table Marilyn was laughing. “You look like somebody rolled you around in a coal scuttle!”

  “That’s about the way I feel.” Bob smiled. But his filthy face looked tired.

  “Sit down,” I said, as I came back out. “You want a beer?”

  “No. And I don’t wanna sit on nothin’ either, till that water’s ready.” But finally he perched at the edge of the wooden bench, leaning with his elbows on his knees, sooty hair hanging forward, now and then talking to Marilyn or me, while inside the water chattered and splashed.

  Finally he said, “That should be enough to get me started,” got up, and loped back into the bedroom.

  About half an hour later, he came out, a towel wrapped around his waist, his blond hair darkened and clinging to his forehead.

  “Just in time,” I said. “Dinner’s ready.” I’d set the table around Marilyn’s papers and books.

  She got up now and looked at Bob critically, one hand pulling at her chin. “Mmmmm …” She frowned.

  He looked at her, with a questioning smile.

  She reached forward and pulled the towel from around him.

  “Hey—!” Bob laughed.

  Marilyn nodded. “Well, you do look a little cleaner.” She put the towel over her shoulder.

  “Do I get that back?” he asked.

  “What for?” she asked, in mock surprise.

  “It’s okay by me,” he said. “But if the neighbors across the yard start sayin’ somethin’—” he glanced toward the bright slab of our fourth story kitchen window, in which the only protection from outside eyes was a couple of plants—“don’t come talkin’ to me.” With water beads still on his shoulders, neck, and long, wide feet, he stepped over the bench to sit.

  After dinner, though, when I went back into the bathroom—Bob (naked) and Marilyn (clothed) were still at the table laughing over something—I looked at the tub.

  It was ringed with grime and streaked with black as high as the drain. I shook my head. But Bob’d had a hard day. I took a sponge and the scouring powder off the window sill, turned the water on again, got down, and scrubbe
d out the tub. Then I picked up the jumpsuit that was slopped half in a puddle and hung it over the back of a chair in the bedroom. When I came out to sit at the kitchen table again and pour myself a second cup of after-dinner coffee, I said: “That was some tub ring you left there, man.”

  “Sure was,” Bob said.

  He and Marilyn went on laughing. Pretty soon so was I.

  The next night, when Bob came in, he was as begrimed as before.

  “My God!” Marilyn said. “How long are they going to keep you down in that basement?”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. “Probably all week.” He stood rubbing a forehead gone darker than graphite with blackened fingers. “The first day it was kinda fun—the five of us down there, it was like a bunch of kids playin’ in mud. Today it was just work. Tomorrow I think it’s gonna feel like five grown men in a basement wadin’ around in shit—which is just about what it is.”

  I went back to turn on the tub.

  A few minutes later Bob went back to wash. When, several shades cleaner, he came out, naked, with the damp towel this time just hanging from his hand, he grinned at me, then stepped up behind Marilyn, who was sitting at the table, reading. “Hey.…”

  She turned around, somewhat surprised, to find nude Bob only about three inches away from her nose.

  He grinned down. “You want this?” Then he dropped the towel over her shoulder.

  We all began joking around again.

  But at one point, kind of on a hunch, I went into the bathroom. The tub was as ringed and befouled as it had been the day before. I sprinkled scouring powder around in it, then left it to go back outside and turn the chops in the broiler we were having for dinner. While we were eating, and laughing about something or other, I said: “You know, Bob, it’s a lot easier for you to wash the tub out while you’re still in it—and there’s water there—than it is for me to come along after you later and scour it. I don’t mind running a tub for you, but I’m damned if I feel like washing it out after you.”

  Bob took a large forkfull of greens on top of a piece of porkchop.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know.” And went on eating.

  It sounded like a pretty equivocal answer. And since we’d all been laughing about the other stuff, it was even hard to tell if he’d really heard me or not. Later, I decided I wasn’t going to give him a hard time that evening; and went back and finished washing the tub.

  The next evening, when he came in, black again, again I went to run the water. When he came out, drying his hair with the towel, I said: “Good to see you looking clean—but if that tub looks like it has for the last two days, it’s going to be you and me!” I had half a smile. But I hadn’t heard anything like extra scrubbing going on—and I’d been listening for it, with a kind of disgruntled, put-upon feeling.

  But Bob was smiling too. “Come on.” More wet than not, he put his arm around my shoulder. (Marilyn, whom I’d asked to go down and pick up a couple of large bottles of cream soda about fifteen minutes before, now came back in through the apartment door with a brown paper bag in her arms, and said: “Hello!”) “Come on, now,” Bob went on. “Let’s go—” and to Marilyn: “Hello.”

  Still holding a large kitchen spoon, red with spaghetti sauce, I let Bob take me back into the bathroom. “There,” he said, as we stood on the tile, him barefoot, me in the orange construction shoes I’d bought at Hudson’s three months back.

  The tub was gleaming white.

  “See, I ain’t deaf, you know.” He gave me a squeeze. “I heard what you said last night.”

  I grinned. “Okay.” I gave him a hug back. “I just wasn’t sure. Thanks.”

  “You better pick up some more scouring powder, though. We’re about out.”

  From the kitchen, Marilyn called: “What are you guys doing in there?”

  Bob (naked, yes) still stood with his arm around my shoulder. But he called back, “Why don’t you come in and watch. Maybe it’ll turn you on.”

  That night we had spaghetti for dinner. And Bob, in his jeans again and under Marilyn’s direction, made a pretty passable salad—with a volunteer to do chili, sometime on the weekend when he wasn’t working. I don’t remember if he ever got around to it.

  51.6. Irregular as Artie’s calls were, both Bob and I thought they’d peter out—especially after Bob said no to a few of them. (The johns paid Artie directly for the setups—then paid Bob.) But soon it seemed that the opposite was the case. Even while working at the die shop, Bob went out on a number of Artie’s jobs. One night when Artie phoned, Bob said, after a moment, “Well, he’s biggr’n me.” And a moment later, he put his hand over the mouthpiece, turned to me, and asked: “You wanna work tonight?”

  “What’s the matter,” I asked, “You don’t want to go?”

  “No,” Bob explained, “he’s got two jobs. He said you can have one, if you want.”

  On half a dozen occasions, I went out—once to do a joint job with Bob in Westchester, where we tried—ineffectually—to sell an album of pornographic pictures the three of us had taken of each other and developed and printed up in our bathroom, and several times around Brooklyn and Manhattan on my own. And at least once Marilyn, not to be outdone by the boys, went out when Artie asked Bob if he knew any women who were working.

  I think she wanted to know what Bob was going through. What we learned was much the lesson I’d learned at the Endicott. It turned out to be neither the most awful and degrading thing in the world, nor was it the most exciting and depraved of experiences.

  Like Sonny had said: It’s just work.

  “You mind me goin’ out and hustlin’?” Bob asked Marilyn, one evening.

  “No, of course I don’t,” she said. “Though don’t you think it’s a little late to ask me?”

  “I’m just doin’ it for the money,” Bob said.

  “No, you’re not,” she said. “You’ve got a job that pays you over a hundred a week. You’re doing it because you like it.”

  “Well,” Bob said, “I’m always hornier when I get back anyway. Ain’t I?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You are. Besides, I already noticed that about Chip when he just went out cruising on his own.”

  “A couple of days ago,” Bob said, “I was in this real fancy apartment on Park Avenue. The guy was an asshole. But the apartment—man, I ain’t never seen a place like it before in my life! Maybe in a movie somewhere, but not for real!”

  “That’s what I mean,” Marilyn said.

  “Yeah!” Bob said. “That’s really funny, now. I wonder why it makes you hornier? Since it’s just work.”

  51.61. Marilyn wrote:

  Between us on our wide bed we cuddle an incubus

  whom we have filled with voyages …

  Real, grimy and exiled, he

  eludes us.

  I would show him books and bridges,

  and make a language we could all speak.

  No blond fantasy

  Mother has sent to plague us in the spring,

  he has his own bad dreams, needs work, gets drunk,

  maybe would not have chosen to be beautiful…21

  51.7. Big Dave had carried his bike up all four nights one weekend afternoon to stop by and say hello. In the course of it, while all of us were sitting around, there was a call for Bob. “It’s Artie,” Marilyn said.

  Bob moved over by the kitchen window and took the receiver: “… Okay … yeah … okay. …Naw, I don’t like to take it up the ass. … Okay. … He can blow me if he wants … Yeah, I’ll blow him if I have to, but I’d rather save it for home, you know …?”

  Dave frowned at Marilyn, at me, then inclined his head toward Bob with a curious look. He looked at Marilyn again and mouthed without sound: “What’s he doing?”

  Marilyn looked back at Dave and just shrugged.

  “Okay,” Bob said, “tell him I’ll be there at eight. … Yeah, I got the address: No, not twenty—thirty-five, if that’s what he wants me to do. All right? … Okay, thanks.
”

  Later, Dave walked his bike along with me while I went down to the supermarket. “What’s Bob doing, huh? I mean that stuff he was setting up on the phone?”

  “Hustling,” I said, “actually.”

  “Yeah?” Dave said. “That’s sure what it sounded like.” Dave asked more questions. I gave the best answers I could.

  “Both you guys are sleeping with him,” Dave said, at last and carefully, “and you don’t mind?”

  I shrugged.

  Dave narrowed his eyes. “You ever do it? Hustle, I mean?”

  “Yeah,” I said, in my most noncommittal manner. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

  “Mmm,” Dave said. “I wonder if I could.”

  Which rather surprised me.

  “I mean,” Dave said, “I’ve known—or known of—a couple of guys who’ve done it. And I’ve thought about it. But I guess I just wouldn’t really know how to start. Still. I always kind of wondered about that, you know?”

  “Well,” I said. “We could always give your name to Artie.”

  Dave considered. “Naw, I don’t think I’d want to do that. Going with somebody who was a complete stranger—maybe if it was somebody I knew. Or at least somebody who somebody I knew knew—you know what I mean?”

  “I do know,” I said. “But basically, it’s business. You just can’t be all that picky.”

  “I guess so. Probably that means it’s not the business for me, then.”

  “Probably,” I said. As far as I knew—and we’d discussed it pretty openly—Dave’s only sexual experiences with males had been at ten or eleven when, once, out of curiosity he’d masturbated his dog.

  “But I’d still be interested,” he said, rather bluntly, almost challengingly.