After pulling my T-shirt down over my head, I shrugged into the dress shirt I’d carried in, buttoned it — incorrectly, I realized — unbuttoned it, breathed three times, sat again and rebuttoned it. Looking around, I realized I had left my socks in my room.
Standing, opening the door, jeans hanging from one fist, I stepped out barefoot into the hall.
Still in his wicker-back, Tom smiled.
I said, “Well, thank you — for telling me.” It was at least three minutes since he had stopped talking, and I felt foolish.
The full version is, Oh, why thank you so much for taking the time to tell me. That’s very nice of you. Before (and since) I’ve used it in such situations. That morning, however, I hadn’t made it all the way through, and had waited too long — and was wondering if the hungover version had only been confusing. Or if I’d sounded very foolish. In that state, though, every other thing you do is infected with foolishness, and you spend a lot of time wondering how and why nothing you say or do feels right.
Feeling foolish, I walked to my room, glancing at smiling Tom — who got up and followed. Inside, putting my jeans over a chair back and sitting on the iron stead’s mattress edge, I got my socks, shoes, and sport jacket on, reached over, and picked up my notebook and my talk.
We went out and down the steps to the door. I felt foolish because I went out first then realized I hadn’t let the older Tom step from the house before me. I mistook the car he indicated and felt foolish as I walked on to the one, in a moment, I realized was his. Tom drove us to breakfast, and I sat — foolishly — on the front seat beside him, fixated on the fact that my attempt to thank him for his compliment had been so inept.
I was quiet, but my mind kept running on, obsessively, unstoppably, uncomfortably: nobody had suggested I say it, you understand. Rather, after several encounters with people who had complimented me without warning — with the result that I’d felt awkward and clearly they’d felt awkward too — I’d sat down, a few years back, and decided, since probably I’d be in the situation from time to time, that I’d better put together a response that let people know I hadn’t been annoyed and that acknowledged their good intentions. “Why, thank you so much for taking the time…” is what I’d come up with; if I responded with that, both of us would feel a little better and neither of us would leave the encounter feeling…well, like a fool. I sat beside Tom, mumbling it over and over without moving my lips and wondered if I should say it out loud again, properly this time — but I was sure, if I did, it would sound…foolish. (The next time it happened, months later, it worked perfectly well.) At that point, however, the most foolish thing since I’d waked seemed Tom’s preference for Beta-2. (Was I becoming a writer who couldn’t bear his previous work…?) I hadn’t felt this way yesterday.
Could all this be chemical…?
Then we were walking into a San Francisco breakfast place, with loud construction for the new BART line outside, and aluminum doors and mirrored walls inside, on the way to the MLA convention hotel, to join Tom’s wife, Alice. She had dark hair and sat smiling in one of the booths.
I ate some toast and bacon (I wasn’t up to eggs) and drank some black coffee — and was surprised I could.
We got to the MLA hotel twenty minutes before my talk.
Among the anecdotes above, whether someone is talking about a book in detail or just running up and saying, “Hey, I really liked…” and running off again, I have not been recounting all this to speak about either popularity or quality.
Because I’m not talking about popularity, that’s why, except in one case — to come — I give only one example per person. (That’s also why I’m not giving numbers, of people or of books.) Of course it happens with some books more than with others. Those mentioned more often are ones that have been better advertised — though not always — by whatever method — or have simply been more available; and we all know what a meaningless indicator advertising or hearsay is for quality.
Well, then, what am I talking about?
A lesson comes with someone running up to you, taking the time and putting out the energy to cross the natural barrier that exists between strangers (and though I’d known Clareson a couple of years, I’d only met him in person four times), telling you she or he liked something you wrote. The lesson is not entirely about politeness — or kindness, either. The lesson occurs, yes, when someone tells you why he or she likes a particular work, and — through the fog of your own current concerns (we always have them even if we’re not hungover) — it even makes a kind of sense. It also occurs when you encounter a full-fledged academic paper that seems preternaturally astute (or completely wrongheaded).
It occurred fourteen years later too on an afternoon when I was at a theater in New York City for the matinee of a musical. I was stouter. My beard was bushier — and largely gray.
And I had a ten-year-old daughter, whom I’d brought with me. (With a music teacher at Columbia and a Chase bank vice president, I’d helped found a gay father’s group, which met monthly and now had more than forty members — though, at this point, it has little to do with the tale, in parentheses it will play it part. Marilyn and I had separated for good nine years earlier, though we’d arranged for joint custody.) Just that week a well-known rock musician had taken over the lead in the show, and at that matinee the rest of his band had come to sit in the front orchestra seats to see their lead singer’s first performance that afternoon. During intermission, a third of the audience had moved to the balcony rail to gaze down at them, and, once we stood up, from our own seats in the balcony’s rear, both my daughter and I could see that downstairs, another third in the theater’s orchestra had moved to the front to crowd around the young men, who were being friendly and behaving as if they were old hands at this; but there was no leaving the theater for them to get a breath of air outside, as my daughter and I were getting ready to do.
My daughter attended a school where, if there were not a lot of celebrities, there were a few celebrities’ children. As she looked down, she commented: “They’re not even letting them leave. That doesn’t seem very nice.”
“Probably,” I said, “they’re tourists, and they haven’t seen a lot of famous people before.”
My supremely cool New York ten-year-old turned away, and we went to the orange stairway and down to street level, to stretch and get a breath before the bell rang, the lights under the marquee blinked (a custom discontinued in Broadway theaters how many years ago?), and we returned to our balcony seats for the second act.
Occasionally I’ve written about how rarely our lives actually conform to the structure of stories that writers have been using for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But, sometimes, they do. A reason I remember that day is because, through coincidence and propinquity, things approached one.
After the show, while we were standing out on Eighth Avenue at the bus stop, the bus pulled up, the door folded back, and two teenage boys got off as I was getting ready to guide my ten-year-old on, to take her home. (My sister had given us the tickets; back at the apartment, my partner — and Iva’s co-dad since she was three — had said he’d make spaghetti, Iva’s favorite, that evening.)
One of the young men frowned at me:
“You’re Samuel Delany, aren’t you? You wrote that book I really liked. What was it, again…?” The young man’s friend had read it too and supplied the title.
“Yes, I am. Why, thank you for taking the time to tell me. That’s very nice of you.” I smiled.