The famous “Introduction,” where the young are exhorted to abandon the arts and the humanities and take up science and engineering instead, I’m afraid just didn’t register — or, at any rate, seemed a kind of crackpot metaphor for something else I wasn’t quite clear on. But the opening section of the argument proper, on Greek history, I found fascinating. Tony was staying with a diminutive black friend, a cornet player in the Sun Ra jazz band, who came in later.
“Do you live with anybody?” Tony wanted to know.
“My wife,” I explained. “And my lover.”
“Both at the same time?” his friend asked.
“Yep. We all sleep in the one big bed.”
Tony raised an eyebrow.
It wasn’t true, of course. But now, prompted by whatever desire, it was easier to say that than it was to describe the situation that had come to replace it.
By the time I left, Tony and his friend had invited me to a concert at the Museum of Modern Art, which, sadly, I missed. But somehow the friendship kept up. Months later, finally letting me know for the first time that they were lovers, they moved into Bob’s and Joanne’s abandoned apartment at the end of the hall, just before I took off for Europe.
And more than a decade later, when, in England, I purchased a copy of The Decline of the West for myself and read it through (much of it, alas, of the same crackpot stripe as the exhortation; though the erudition was often awesome), it was very much with the memory of that March afternoon under the blowing branches above the wall by Central Park.
52.5. Three weeks after she arrived, Joanne announced she was pregnant. “I don’t know how she could be,” Bob said. “I ain’t fucked her since she got here. Once, in the mornin’, I woke up with her riding me with a piss-on, and told her to get the hell off. I don’t know. She says maybe I leaked.”
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53. Now Bob ceased entirely to go to work. After a week his job called our place to say he’d been fired. We passed the news along. It didn’t seem to mean much to him. What went on in the apartment at the other end of the hall, I didn’t know. Bob had stopped shaving, stopped washing — and in two more weeks, he looked about as strange and preoccupied as I had just before I’d gone into the hospital.
Joanne was worried, too — now she told him that the pregnancy had been a false alarm, or, as Bob put it, “A fuckin’ lie.” Late one night, only a little later, dirty and distracted, he came knocking on our door, upset, to explain that Joanne had just slit her wrists. We rushed in. Bloody as it was, the cuts were not deep. It was a childish suicide attempt. But she was still in hysterics. Bob was in no condition to do anything. He wanted me to stay with him. So Marilyn took Joanne in a cab up to Bellevue.
The next day, Bob was together enough to get Joanne and bring her home. New York welfare hospitals are grim places, and I think he was shocked at just how grim it was — and even at Marilyn and me for bringing Joanne there.
But we had done the best we could.
53.1. On April 15, 1965, the first page of Part Two of Babel-17 was in my typewriter.
I had just typed the phrase “Semiotic, Semantic, and Syntactic Ambiguities …”
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54. … when Bob and Joanne, together, knocked on our door. They came inside and explained they’d had a long, serious talk. Bob had decided he was going to take off hitchhiking to Texas to work on the boats, out of Aransas Pass, as he had done every spring for four years since he was eighteen.
It was presented as a decision that would solve their growing problems. It was clear that Bob basically wanted to get away from everything.
“I sure wish you’d come along with me,” he told me. “You could work there too.”
Marilyn and I, at this point, had already talked of separating.
Leaving Marilyn and Joanne in apartments at opposite ends of the hall was probably not the best idea. But I think all of us — at least Marilyn, Bob, and I — hoped Joanne would tire of waiting through the summer and eventually would return to Florida and her children, who were still with her in-laws, going on six weeks now.
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55. I decided to take my notebook and my guitar.
“You really gonna take that?” Joanne was dubious about my carrying a guitar case on a cross-country hitchhiking trip. But Bob said: “Oh, you see guys out on the road with stranger stuff than that. He might lose it. But some of them must make it.”
Marilyn was just distant. I was preoccupied — and curious where her preoccupations had placed her. As I moved around the apartment, putting things away — while Marilyn looked in drawers and examined bookshelves — our eyes would catch. One of us would give a quizzical look that asked: “Did you have something you wanted to say …?” that the other, after a moment, would ignore.
Since Bob’s and my destination was Aransas Pass, with places like Galveston and Port Arthur as possible stopping points, one thing I put in the neck of my guitar case was my dog-eared paperback of Sturgeon’s E Pluribus Unicorn (the spine green, the cover by Powers). The opening movement of the book’s last story, the wonderful “A Way of Thinking,” was set on the Gulf. I was curious what it would read like when I was down there.
The plan was to leave early the next morning.
Around six I pushed back the covers from the bed in which Marilyn seemed so far away, stepped onto the wooden floor and walked into the bathroom. When I came out, Marilyn was sitting on the bed, pulling her bathrobe around her shoulders. She stood up and started for the kitchen. In the doorway, she stopped and looked back. “Can I fix you some breakfast?”
“Thanks.” I smiled. “Sure.”
I sat around while she made bacon, coffee, eggs. Then we ate together, talking about the trip, about writing, about the weather — outside the kitchen window, beyond the plants, moments of sun were already alternating with fifteen minutes now and again of gray. Finally the clock on the back of the stove said seven. “I’ll go and get Bob,” I told her.
She nodded, a little worried, a little distant.
I went through the front room, where the typewriter sat across from the clutter, before the airshaft window, yesterday’s page still in the roller. I picked up my guitar case, packed the night before, unlocked the door, and stepped into the hall.