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

by Samuel R. Delany

“Aw,” Tony said, “the baby’s just getting cuter and cuter; and bigger and bigger!”

  “She started off cute,” Ron said. “How big can she get in three months? Hey, Tony, you know Chip here plays the guitar, too.”

  “You do?” Tony asked. “Ron’s pretty good on that thing—you heard him play, yet?”

  “Naw,” Ron said. “I don’t mean like me. Chip can really play it.”

  Ron had a stalwart acoustic Gibson with him; we’d spent a couple of hours over a couple of days, playing together.

  “I like guitar music and singing—you play folk music?”

  “That’s the kind I like,” I said.

  “A couple of times I sat around listening to Ron play. That was really nice.”

  “If you liked that,” Ron said, “you should hear Chip.”

  “Yeah? Sandy likes it too,” Tony said. “Maybe we could come down to the boat, some evening. We’ll bring some beer. And we can all sit around and you guys can play and we could have a nice time. Would that be okay?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind. It’d be fun.”

  “I mean, it’s something to do,” Tony said. “After you’ve seen the movie, there isn’t much to do for the next two weeks till another one comes along. They never get any good ones anyway.”

  “You could come down to Elmer’s boat this evening,” Ron said. “Bring Sandy. Elmer’s not going to be there. He stays down with his family when he’s in port.”

  “Well, we aren’t doing anything this evening. If Sandy’s up to it, we’ll probably come on down. Maybe around seven-thirty or so. She really likes that kind of music. And so do I.”

  Bob’s boat came in that afternoon. He wandered down to Elmer’s that evening; Ron said it was okay if he stayed for dinner. (Elmer was up at his house again.) I cooked—and more or less forgot about Tony and his wife, till, while I was at the sink, washing up, outside on the dock someone called: “Hello? Well, I see a light on in the galley—so somebody’s gotta be home. Hey, hello in there?”

  At the galley table, Bob frowned and Ron looked up: “That’s Tony!”

  We went outside.

  I don’t know why there weren’t any mosquitoes that evening. Perhaps a breeze drove them all down to the south end of the harbor. A western workshirt over his fatigues and a six-pack in each hand, Tony introduced us to Sandy, a slim and friendly woman, with dark hair cut short. Wearing tan Bermudas and sandals, she held her new baby in a pink blanket against her blouse and reached over her to shake hands, firmly, with a warm smile. “It’s awfully nice of you boys to have us down here on the boat.”

  “Now let’s see who can play the guitar here,” Tony said.

  We went up on the foredeck and sat in front of the cabin, backs against the wall, with Tony’s workshoes and his wife’s sandals wedged against the green plank that ran around the edge of the entrance into the forepeak.

  “Who wants a beer?”

  “I do,” Bob said. “I don’t know about the rest of you.”

  “Ladies first,” Tony said.

  “Thank you, sweetheart—no,” Sandy said. “I don’t need one. You go on.”

  While Tony opened up a bottle for himself, I lifted my guitar case lid, while Ron—the neck up against the violet sky—slid the canvas cover down from his Gibson.

  Ron and I sang “Trouble in Mind” and “The Midnight Special.” Then I played an instrumental medley of “Buckdancer’s Choice” and “Railroad Bill” that sent me all up and down the neck of my Martin and drew applause from four of my audience of four and a half.

  “I think the baby must like that,” Tony said. “She’s being so good.”

  His wife looked down into the blanket. “She’s asleep, honey. That’s why she’s so quiet.”

  “Let’s do something we can all sing,” I suggested. So we sang “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Then we sang “Dark as a Dungeon,” which Tony didn’t know the words to. But Sandy did. By the time we finished, though, he was coming in heartily on the chorus—though (like Bob) when he sang out, he had a tendency to go wildly off key.

  But nobody minded.

  “Sing that one you did for me yesterday,” Ron said, dropping his fingers across his Gibson’s silk-and-steel to silence them. “I really want to learn this one. …”

  So I sang Fred Neil’s “Blues on the Ceiling.”

  Everybody really liked it.

  “Chip can sing the dirty blues, too,” Bob said, from where he perched on the edge of the forepeak entrance, his forearms on his knees, his beer bottle hanging like a giant pencil from the fingers of both hands.

  “Now, hey,” Tony said. “That sounds like some fun.”

  “And these are real dirty!” Bob grinned.

  “Yeah,” I said, “some of those get a little raunchy. Maybe this isn’t the time for—”

  There was a general protest. “Oh, no. … Go on. … Sure, let’s hear.”

  “Well,” I said. “There’s ‘The Chicago Blues.’…”

  “Oh, I know that one!” Sandy cried. “Go on, please! That’s fun. Sing that one!”

  “Well,” I said. “Okay—”

  In the version of the “Chicago Blues” I knew, there were no four letter words; but its level of suggestiveness more than made up for it. I’d gotten two verses of it from a Library of Congress archival recording. Two others—as well as a couple of verse fragments—I’d appropriated from one of the Lomax anthologies. And Marilyn had arranged the fragments and spliced them together around a handful of transitional couplets she’d written on her own—for a version I’d sung back in the Village, which had been taken over by any number of other Village singers. And I’d watched the crafted lines of the most conscientious of poets lose their authorial signature, absorbed back into folk tradition.

  Over the thumping eight-bar blues, I sang:

  I’m goin’ to Chicago

  To get my soup-bone boiled.

  On the dock, somebody walked by—stood for a moment, smiled, shook his head (I could just see his head over the rail), and walked on.

  I’m going to Chicago

  To get my soup-bone boiled

  ’Cause you New York women

  Let my soup-bone spoil.

  Ron popped the top off a second beer bottle, then looked around because the “pop” seemed so loud.

  You can lick it if you like it,

  But don’t you bite it.

  It don’t belong to you …

  Tony’s wife joggled the baby as if she were momentarily afraid it might wake.

  A little girl went to the dentist and smiled.

  She said, “I want my front teeth filed.”

  Yes, you can lick it if you like it,

  But don’t you bite it.

  It don’t belong to you.

  During the syncopations, the water whispered against the pilings, the hull.

  What’s that smells like fishes?

  I’ll tell you if you really wanna know.

  It ain’t sardines.

  It don’t come in no can.

  It’s what every woman

  Wants from every man.

  But keep your fingers off it,

  Now don’t you touch it.

  It don’t belong to you.

  The verses and the irregular chorus with its arbitrary repeats rang out over the deck. A trapezoid of light from the cabin window above us caught Ron’s frayed knee at one corner and, at the opposite, Sandy’s sandaled foot.

  Two old maids lyin’ in bed.

  One turned to the other and then she said:

  “You better keep your fingers off it;

  Now don’t you touch it.

  It don’t belong to you!”

  I looked around at grinning Bob and smiling Ron. Then I saw between them the worried look on Sandy’s face. She was bundling her baby closer.

  Once in summer camp, stretched out on my bed with the colored pages propped on the iron foot, I’d read a comic about a guy who could become invisible by m
aking himself stand so still that the vibrations between his molecules slowed, till finally the electrons ceased to circle their atoms. From then on the light passed right through him and he became completely and ideally transparent. Though I didn’t see him, Tony must have been in a state very near it that night.

  There hadn’t been any word between them, but he was sitting beside Sandy, his arm around her shoulder. What stiffenings, rigidities, or other bodily signals communicated it to her, I can’t know. But now Sandy got her feet under her, while Tony pushed her up. As she passed before me, with a small, frightened look back over her shoulder, I saw her face move from shadow to light to shadow. Her eyes were averted. Her face looked simply very concentrated. And in an outraged rush of sandals and workshoes on the deck between us, both were gone.

  Ron was the first one to say: “Huh …?”

  Bob put his hands on his knees, looked around, and said: “Well, what was that about?”

  I just felt chills prickle my back while my stomach constricted in front of them.

  Ron began: “I didn’t think you sang anything all that—”

  And stopped at the scramble of workshoes back up by the cabin. Tony lurched around the corner, planted himself in front of me, bent down, and whispered: “I don’t know if that’s what they sing when they have a good time up in New York! But we sure as hell don’t do it that way down here!”

  He took a breath, stood up, looked around, bent to snatch up the remaining six-pack, and stalked off around the cabin again.

  Yes, I’d thought for a moment I might get punched; and I’d lost my breath before it. “Oh, Jesus …” I said.

  Bob was indignant. “Well, how do you like that?”

  Ron was bewildered. “That was a surprise. I didn’t think they were gonna feel that way—”

  We came back in and sat in the galley, talking about it for the next hour.

  I felt bad.

  Bob said: “You told ’em it was raunchy stuff—”

  Ron said: “They told us they wanted to hear it—”

  But what distressed me so much was that I had so completely misread a set of social signs, alien to this shore, but, for all Tony’s professions of northern complicity, equally alien to me. “I’ll go apologize tomorrow. The last thing I wanted to do was offend him or his wife.”

  “Yeah,” Ron said. “That’s probably a good idea.”

  “Hell,” Bob said. “I wouldn’t apologize about nothin’. You didn’t do anything. They’re the ones who got all hot and bothered.”

  I figured it would still be a good idea.

  By eight o’clock next morning, we’d been up for a couple of hours already. (Elmer wouldn’t arrive till about ten or eleven.) So I walked up the waterfront, away from the supermarket and toward the nigger boats.

  On his deck, he was carrying a pail down beside the cabin.

  “Tony,” I called. “I just came down to say I was sorry for what happened last night. I wanted to apologize to you and your wife. I really wasn’t thinking when I sang that song—”

  “You don’t owe me any apology.” He put the pail down. Full of bolts and wrenches, it clunked on the deck. “There wasn’t any call for me to get all upset like that. You didn’t do anything.”

  “Well,” I said. “I didn’t want there to be any hard feelings. We were all sitting out there, and I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “There aren’t any hard feelings,” he said.

  Then he said:

  “Hell,” and turned from the cabin wall to walk over to the rail. “You see, Sandy said she knew the song and wanted you to sing it. And I was all bent out of shape because I didn’t want you to think that my wife was that kind of woman who knew all about that stuff.”

  Where this had come from, I couldn’t have told you. Whether this was his morning’s rationalization or had fallen out of some late conversation between him and Sandy last night, the move by which this had somehow all become Sandy’s fault left me as befuddled as Tony’s initial outrage.

  “So if she hadn’t’ve said anything, we probably would have just sat there and laughed and thought it was real funny.”

  “Well, Tony,” I said. “I sure didn’t think anything about Sandy—believe me!”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “Will you tell her I came by to apologize? I really didn’t mean any offense—and if I’d known I was going to cause any, I wouldn’t have sung it.”

  “Like I said, you didn’t need to apologize.”

  “Well,” I said. “I wanted to, anyway.”

  We shook hands, awkwardly.

  Then I went back to the boat.

  A refrigeration truck, into which the shrimps were loaded, grumbled up along the gravel as I climbed back over the rail of Elmer’s boat.

  When I explained it later, while Ron stood beside me on deck and Bob, on the dock, waited with his arms folded just on the other side of the rail, Ron just frowned.

  And Bob said: “Because of somethin’ she said? Well, now, if that don’t just beat all!” Laughing, his shoulders sunburned to a red that had already grown near dirt brown, he turned to amble back up to his boat.

  58.3. I remember sitting in the wheelhouse at night, while we rocked at the dock. Under the light that blackened the windows and the water outside, on my folded back notebook I wrote a letter to Marilyn that ran on twelve, thirteen, fourteen double-sided notebook pages.

  I remember standing in the same wheelhouse during the hot day, with Ron, asking him if the gray metal box to the left on the counter, with the circular coil over it, was the “loran”—the wondrous navigation instrument Bob had described to Marilyn and me back in New York.

  “Yeah,” Ron said. “That’s it. With that, anybody can be a navigator.”

  I remember how, when we were out on the water, a combination of rough seas and a twenty-four-hour virus slid me into my first bout of seasickness.

  “Get to the rail, boy,” Elmer said. “Don’t stand around and mess up the deck. You just gonna have to clean it up if you do.”

  I did.

  And, like a parody of all the descriptions I’d ever heard or read of the illness in which, with aching head and weak knees, I was now sunk, I heaved my breakfast bile into the rushing foam beneath.

  “Okay,” Elmer said, “now come on and get back to work. Just ’cause you’re sick don’t excuse you from nothing.” I wasn’t even sure I could stay standing, though. Ron glanced at me, worried.

  With the light-streaked sea all around, during that night, under the full moon with high, marble clouds banked above the water, it was pretty clear I wasn’t good for much—and Elmer’s temper was wearing thin. I picked up the gaff, which I thought was going to tear off my arms and probably burst my belly. Ron had gone into the wheelhouse. Elmer went over to the winch, when the motor suddenly yowled and went out—

  —some coil had burned through; some gear ground, grating and roaring, to a stop. Elmer shouted “God damn it!” and flung down, to crash against the deck, the detachable metal lever he worked the winch with.

  We did no more that night.

  Later, as dawn spilled its pink and gold over the sea, I explained to Ron: “It’s this way, I think. There’s a moon goddess—she’s much older than any of the other gods around. She’s always taken over the protection of artists and poets and people who make music. And she likes me. If I get into trouble, she’s the one who gets me out. In the dark of the moon, she does it in some ass-backwards way. Like getting me out of the rain with a ride in a car full of drunks, but she’ll stick us in a traffic jam so they can’t wreck us. During the full moon, she’ll get me out in some direct way: like breaking the damned engine.”

  Ron said, “Now is this something you really believe? Or is this just something you’re making up—maybe because you’re still feeling seasick …?”

  Lying on the top berth, while Ron stretched out on the bottom one, Elmer would put down his Zane Grey reprint, take on a little boy’s voice and call down: �
��Come on, Ron. Tell us a story!”

  “What do you mean, tell you a story?” Ron would suck his teeth and glance up at the bunk bottom. “Once upon a time, there were three bears. A poppa bear, a momma bear, and a—”

  “Naw, Ron!” Elmer would call down in his infant parody. “Tell us a dirty story! A story about a girl—doin’ somethin’ nasty! You want him to tell us a dirty story, don’t you, Chip?”

  I laughed, shrugged.

  And Ron said: “Oh, Elmer—”

  “Go on. Tell us about the last time you got laid.” Elmer had both hands between his legs now, and was rocking back and forth. “Tell us a dirty story, Ron!”

  “I haven’t been laid in so long I’ve forgotten how you do it,” Ron said. “Besides, I think I’m turning into a virgin.”

  “You told us a dirty story last month. Go on, now.”

  “I don’t know any more.”

  “Well, then—” Elmer dropped back into his own voice—“make one up, stupid!”

  It never came to anything. But, back at the dock, when I mentioned it to him, Bob’s comment was: “Well, that’s what happens on some boats. One guy tells about fuckin’ some broad and everybody else lies around in his bunk, beats off, and don’t say nothin’ about it later. Even with all the work, a couple of days out there an’ you can get horny.”

  And at night, on shore, I’d go to the dockside phone to call Marilyn, while gnats and moths crawled over the circular fluorescent light on the booth’s ceiling or darted at the corners of the glass. (Once in Aransas, Bob pretty much ceased to call, while I only really started then.) But only for a few less than half the calls, those evenings, was she home.

  58.4. At least one reason I’d come down to work on the boats was because I was in the midst of a novel about a crew working on a spaceship, and I’d thought that by crewing here, I might pick up insights that could lend my book verisimilitude. What I’d learned, however, was that a three-man boat crew, on a dock where leisure meant drinking or fighting—and work meant there was no leisure at all—simply wasn’t a proper model for the family-like complement of fourteen to sixteen I’d envisioned for my story.

  That evening’s trip to the dockside phone booth came a little early: the sky was deep blue over the water, with violet streaks slanting above the supermarket roof. What I poured out to Marilyn over the miles ran something like this: If I were home and was putting as much energy into my new book as I’d been putting into surviving here on the docks, I’d have something extraordinary. I knew it.