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

by Samuel R. Delany

  About one o’clock in the morning, while I was lying half asleep, with Bill on his stomach snoring beside me, there was a knock on the door. I got up, naked, went through the kitchen and the front room (something of a wreck by now, the combination storage room and writing room) to answer it. “Who is it?” I asked.

  A gruff voice from the other side said, “Hey, Chip, it’s Sonny!”

  I opened the door. Sonny grinned at me, thrusting out a six-pack still in its red cardboard holder. A man in his forties—i.e., work—with a tan jacket and glasses stood behind him. “Oh, excuse me …” I said. “I don’t have any clothes on.” (I knew Sonny well enough to answer the door naked.)

  “Oh, that’s okay,” Sonny said. “He don’t mind,” thumbing over his shoulder at his friend. “Can we come in for a minute? Marilyn here? We got some beer.”

  “Well, okay,” I said. “No, she’s not. But I’ve got company.”

  I led them into the kitchen, turned on the light, and Sonny and his friend sat down at the round, wooden picnic-style table. Sonny tore cardboard and broke out three beers. “You see, him and me—what’s your name?”

  It was something like “Joe.”

  “—Joe and me was lookin’ for a place to, you know … fuck around a little.” Sonny leaned over to whisper to me. “He wants me to fuck ’im in the ass, see. But we didn’t got no place. I told him I knew a guy, but we might have to make it a three-way. You wanna fool around with us?”

  I laughed. “It sounds kind of fun,” I told him. “Only I’ve already got somebody inside now. I don’t really know if he’ll go for it. Besides, he’s asleep. I think we better skip it tonight.”

  “Well, okay,” Sonny said, disappointed. “You sure …?”

  I didn’t really have a clear picture of Bill’s sexual tolerances, and it seemed to be pushing one-night-stand manners as I understood them at the time. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  “Yeah, he’s busy,” Joe (or whoever) said. “I think we better go.”

  “Yeah,” Sonny said. “Well, okay.”

  They got up, and I went with them to the door and closed it after them. I turned around and stood in the middle of my workroom, still naked, the length of a few breaths, then walked back to the kitchen and sat down on one of the two benches that served the table for seats, feeling the strange disorientation of debauchery coupled with coming travel. Perhaps thirty seconds later, there was another knock. Frowning, I went to answer it.

  Sonny’s gruff voice came through the door again. “It’s me!”

  I opened it again: he barged in, with a quick grin. “Forgot somethin’.” He strode to the kitchen table, picked up the remaining cans in their torn cardboard—I hadn’t even realized he’d left them—and hurried back to the door. “So long!” He was gone down the hall.

  I closed the door again.

  Our earlier meeting had no doubt put me in his mind when he’d picked up “Joe” that evening, and they’d needed a place to ball.

  After a few minutes, I stood up, pulled the cord to put out the kitchen’s unshaded ceiling bulb, and went back through the glass-paned doors to the bedroom and climbed into bed beside Bill, who asked sleepily, “Who was that?”

  “A friend of mine,” I said. “He brought some guy around and they wanted to ball.”

  Bill turned over. “You should have told them to come in and join us.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, I wasn’t sure.”

  “It would have been fun.”

  “Yeah,” I said. And we went back to sleep.

  59.9. Late the next morning we got up. Bill gave me his phone number, and I wrote it down in my omniscient notebook. I was taking a couple of shopping bags full of old journals, manuscripts, and various papers up to my mother’s apartment in Morningside Gardens for storage while I was away; I locked the apartment behind us, and Bill walked with me downstairs and up Sixth Street toward Avenue C. Halfway along the block, he saw someone he recognized across the street; a young man in a faded plaid shirt angled out between the cars, with a shy smile, to say hello. Bill introduced me. It was George, who moments after the introduction, I remembered was Bill’s lover. When perhaps three sentences had been exchanged, I glanced up to see Marilyn walking towards us, on her way home from wherever she’d spent the previous night. I introduced her to Bill and George, and hastily explained to her that I was on my way up to take stuff to my mother’s, left the three of them there in the street, and walked on to the Second Avenue subway station, pausing now and then to set the shopping bags down on the sidewalk because the twine handles were cutting into my fingers.

  In what had been my old room (and in which my grandmother now stayed) an upright orange crate stood at the back of the closet. In it were stored my various childhood papers and notebooks. To them I added what I’d culled from the wooden filing cabinet in our Sixth Street apartment of my last three or four years’ Lower East Side production. My mother reminded me, as she had done several times in the last weeks, that since my first stop was to be Luxembourg, a good friend of my Uncle Myles’s was a black woman, now the American ambassador there, Patricia Harris. Both my uncle and my Aunt Dorothy had urged me to visit her, if only to say hello. To this end, a week or so before, Mom had taken me to Bloomingdale’s and bought me a brown suit. When, during the fitting, it had come out that I was going to Europe and was hoping to get to Greece, the salesclerk had told us of his own trip, the previous summer, with much enthusiasm about his time on the Aegean island of Mykonos.

  “Aunt Mary left a note for you—it’s in the kitchen by the phone,” Mom called, just as I was starting to leave.

  “Oh. Thanks.” So I went in and unfolded the piece of paper beside the phone sitting under the cabinets.

  On it was written: “Baldwin” and a phone number.

  Aunt Mary, my father’s sister-in-law, was a member of the Harlem Writers’ Guild, to which James Baldwin also belonged; she’d been threatening to mention me to him for almost a year. “I think you two would like each other,” she’d said. “I’ll get his phone number next time I see him, and you can give him a call.” And here was the promised number—the day before I was leaving for Europe.

  Still, it might be nice to say hello. As I dialed, I felt nervous and expectant. I’d been as impressed by Baldwin’s essays as I had by any nonfiction I’d ever read. Remembering his fiction, though, I recalled a comment Marie Ponsot had once made when we’d been discussing his first three novels: “If Baldwin thought he was anywhere near as important a writer as I do, he’d be a much better one.”

  The phone on the other end rang: once, twice, three times.

  I was quite ready for no one to be home.

  But there was a click. Then a voice said: “Hello?”

  I said: “Mr. Baldwin?”

  “Yes?”

  “My name is Samuel Delany. My aunt, Mary Delany, may have mentioned me to you …?”

  “Yes.” It was not the warmest voice in the world.

  “She suggested I call you to say hello, that perhaps we might get together.”

  “That’s right.”

  “The problem, though, is that I’m leaving for Europe tomorrow.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I wanted to call just to say hello, anyway.”

  “I see.”

  “Perhaps we might speak together again when I get back.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, as I said: I just wanted to say hello to you. It was nice to talk to you. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  I hung up. The whole non-conversation (my single encounter with Baldwin) left me smiling. I would very much have liked to offer him some compliment, but the general awkwardness of the exchange seemed to have precluded it. Where, I wondered, might the conversation have gone if I hadn’t been leaving the next day, and I had been able to press him actually into meeting?

  I rode downtown again on the D train, relieved of my shopping bags, with only my current notebook in my lap.

&nbs
p; At the Second Avenue station (a few years later the D would be rerouted), I walked up from track level and stopped into the men’s john on the concourse level, where, for the past couple of years, most of my casual homosexual encounters had taken place in the odd ten or twenty minutes on my way back home from wherever I might be coming from. The soiled incandescent bulbs in their wire cages lit the dirty yellow walls and the foul washbasins. The night-green metal partitions stood between the three toilet bowls.

  A man about twenty-five sat on the middle one. He was muscular enough for me to think he worked out with weights. With reddish-brown hair, he wore jeans, a yellow T-shirt, and a pair of black basketball sneakers. I thought he had just come from some physical labor job. He had big hands (and big feet) and was a moderately serious nail-biter. He’d moved forward on the stall to massage his sizable meat in front of the porcelain rim. There was no one else in the John, and he beckoned me to come over. When I did, he pulled down my fly, took out my cock, and began to give me a very good blow job. In the middle of it, he sighed, sat back, and said, “Hey, you know I’d really like to get together with you again.”

  I looked down at him. “You’re not going to believe this, but I’m leaving for Europe tomorrow.”

  He gave me a rueful smile and went back to sucking.

  Later, as I walked home along Houston Street toward Avenue C, I thought: What the hell am I going to Europe for? No one under twenty-five, no matter what his or her sexual persuasion, goes to Europe (or, probably, anywhere else) without the goodly hope that sex will be better and more plentiful at the destination. But thinking about Bill, Sonny, and the guy in the john (especially the guy in the john!), not to mention Allan, I asked myself, “What are you going to Europe for if this is available here in New York?” Had the emotional confusion of Marilyn and Bob simply distracted me from what my own city had to offer? Somehow my last days in the city, now that I was leaving, seemed to have become some sort of sexual bonanza.

  60. For years after that, my next clear memory was of waking up, some hours after dinner on the plane, with Ron dozing beside me, while I looked out the oval window at walls of moonlit clouds rising beside us, as though we were at the bottom of some gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea. For those same years, I considered it a permanent irony of life that, when I returned from Europe, seven months later, Marilyn and Bill McNeill were living together in the Sixth Street apartment—on the strength of what I took to be no more than their chance encounter on the street the morning after my one-night stand. Many of the people Bill had mentioned that afternoon in the park were now part of Marilyn’s life and, subsequently, part of mine. Talking to Marilyn eighteen years later, however, I find she has no memory at all of that brief street meeting I recall so clearly. As I am able to reconstruct it with her help (rather than truly remember it, though here and there snippets of memory seem to confirm it), when I returned home from my mother’s that afternoon, Marilyn was home, and I told her about the interesting man I’d met the night before, Bill McNeill, who knew so many poets and artists and said he’d wanted to meet her. I had his phone number. Would she like to get together with him at closer range than a brush on the sidewalk? I could invite Bill over for dinner, I told her. Marilyn agreed. I called him, invited him and George to come over that evening—George, for one reason or another, couldn’t come. But Bill did.

  Marilyn’s first memory of Bill is my telling her about him, then inviting him over, and I have vague memories of the three of us sitting around the kitchen picnic table, eating. Though what I cooked, I have no notion.

  Her subsequent friendship with Bill dated from the dinner and not from the barely remembered street meeting hours before.

  60.1. Hans Santesson had invited me for that evening to a “Hydra Club” meeting—I found out later mystery writer Cornell Woolrich was one of the guests—at the home of a woman who was usually only talked of as Willy Ley’s girlfriend. (Debbie something …?) The party that evening was being held in honor of James Gunn, who was then visiting New York. I had no idea what the Hydra Club was, though I knew it was composed of SF writers; and I knew of Gunn from his books like Star-bridge and The Immortals. But at eight-thirty or nine, I excused myself from dinner, leaving Bill and Marilyn alone—while Bill made noises to the effect that he would be going soon too—and took off for the meeting.

  It was an apartment in a housing project, somewhere. My new agent, Henry, was there, and we talked a while. Willy Ley was also there—I asked Hans to point him out to me. But I must have missed the nod or the gesture, because the person I thought Hans indicated was a barrel-chested fellow moving animatedly around the apartment on two forearm crutches to make up for his withered legs. I even spoke to him once or twice that night, under my mistaken impression. For the next twenty-five years I thought that had been Ley—until the first version of this account was published and someone pointed out that I’d apparently missed the formidable, strapping German who was the actual Ley and confused him with a friend of Hans’s, also at the party that night, named Yonah.

  All through the fifties and into the sixties, though he himself wrote no science fiction to speak of, Ley was one of the most important names associated with SF. His regular science column in Galaxy was the prototype for Asimov’s in Fantasy and Science Fiction; along with his numerous nonfiction titles and association with people like Wernher von Braun, it had made him as much a household name as any popular science writer to date. (At his death in ’69, a crater was named after him on the far side of the moon.) Hans came in, took me into the crowded kitchen, and introduced me to Gunn.

  Suited, tied, and “imperially slim,” as E. A. Robinson has written of someone else, Gunn was leaning against the icebox after having had perhaps a drink or so more than he might have. “And what does this young man do?” he asked.

  “Well, he writes SF,” Hans explained.

  “Have you published anything?” Gunn asked.

  “Oh,” I said, “three or four SF novels.” I thought that was a modest way to say five.

  “And what’s your name—again?”

  “Chip Delany,” I said. “Eh … Samuel R. Delany.”

  “That’s amazing. I’ve never seen any of them. I really thought I kept up with the field.” Then he turned and announced over his glass, “Now, you see, these are the people whom we should be paying attention to. This is where the future of the field lies. Right here, in people like this.”

  I was impressed—indeed, I couldn’t help thinking he had a point. That no one was really listening wasn’t important; even Hans was now speaking to a heavy woman in blue with metallic blond hair. (Our hostess …?) Feeling that the evening couldn’t offer me too much more than that, I made my round of goodnights and walked home.

  Bill was gone when I got in, but Marilyn was still up. I told her somewhere between seriousness and joking about Gunn’s comment. I don’t think she was very interested.

  60.2. The next day I left the house with a small bag (full of that suit my mother had bought me at Bloomingdale’s, a change of jeans, some shirts and undershirts), and my Martin double-oh-eighteen guitar in its bulky case (clean socks stuffed all around the neck) and my notebook: inside the front cover were folded copies of the poems Marilyn had so far written in the Navigators sequence, sketching the dissolution of the affair with Bob, and which I would take out to read, silently and thoughtfully, two or three times in every European city I visited. Two poems in the sequence remained to be written; but what is the closing today was the closing then:

  Orpheus and animus,

  drawing back to journeys now,

  leaving me on shores behind

  streets and shutters of the mind

  as a new October streaks

  dry hollows underneath our cheeks:

  all that I have learned from you,

  all that I have failed to learn,

  I will order up again

  with an overcautious pen,

  making models, giving
names

  (nothing ever stays the same),

  initiate the change that moves

  the peripheries of love.28

  On a bench at the West Side Airlines Terminal (it no longer exists), I finished rereading them, folded them up inside my gray passport book (passports were gray then) along with the yellow vaccination folder (vaccination folders are no longer required in Europe). Soon a crease in the page made the twelfth line almost unreadable (and months later a vertical one nearly split the pages into separate columns). But “The Navigators” went with me off on the Carey Bus out to Kennedy Airport, where I met Ron, and, by prop-jet (Icelandic used the last of them and they were discontinued, when …?), flew away with me via Iceland to Luxembourg.

  28. Ibid, p. 30.

  61. Thus again conflicting memory and memory give me several notes, several images, from which I might choose an ending to these most arbitrary fragments.

  I’ll choose from words already written:

  … I looked out the window at walls of moonlit cloud rising beside us as though we were at the bottom of some, gray and ivory canyon, hung above the moon-smashed sea …

  Ron was beside me. We’d been joined by a Canadian named Bill, met on the plane, who would travel with us for several months. (In life nothing ever ends neatly, cleanly.) But, with whatever hindsight, I suppose the reason that I want to close on a consideration of these words is that the moon-solid progress through high, drifting cumulus is—read them again—at the very opposite of what we perceive on a liquid’s tilting and untilting top, and so becomes the other privileged pole among the images of this study, this essay, this memoir.

  Or perhaps, as it is only a clause whose syntactic place has been questioned by my own unscholarly researches, I merely want to fix it before it vanishes like water, like light, like the play between them we only suggest, but never master, with the word motion.

  —New York

  August 1987

  Acknowledgments