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.