Now Bob returned to Sixth Street.
The three of us had begun to sleep together again. There were even moments, in bed, when one or all of us, perhaps, were convinced that things were back to normal.
One story Bob now told from his brief stay in the Aransas Pass jail remains with me — probably because it was the only indication of homosexuality anywhere in that small town (the story of Red notwithstanding) I ever had. My own weeks there, possibly through my own blindness (but I doubt it), had presented a landscape that, for most of the unattached men on those docks, was, despite their endless stories, as sexually bleak along heterosexual as it was along homosexual lines.
Sitting in the clutter of the front room, where there was an old couch, Bob explained (while I typed): “When I got me arrested and thrown in the drunk tank — ” Marilyn stood in the door, listening — “there was this little queen in there — good-lookin’ guy, too. Maybe twenty, twenty-two. I don’t know what they’d picked her up for. But man, she wanted to get fucked in the worst way. She was still drunk, and she was goin’ around to every guy in that tank, just beggin’ him to fuck her. An’, of course, we was all sittin’ around laughin’ at her an talkin’ about how, later, maybe we just would. And how she would probably be a pretty good piece of tail. An’ after all, there weren’t nothin’ better around. Well, later, I went over to her, an’ told her, sure, I’ll do it. So I got her pants down there in the corner, and just climbed into that nice little asshole. An’ you know, after I’d finished, none of the other guys in there would speak to me no more? Like I done somethin’ funny an’ there was something wrong with me! Can you believe that?” he ended, with the disingenuous belligerence I can honestly say he never turned on either Marilyn or me, but which, by now I knew, was his response to any situation that did not go exactly as he might have wished, no matter if it was Tony’s outrage, Joanne’s sulks, Artie’s prices, or a night’s ostracism by three or four Gulf coast alcoholics.
But I was working hard again on my book.
58.8. I finished Babel-17 in July of ’65. Bob read a first draft of the manuscript sitting on the bench at the round table, sometime after Marilyn. “That’s not bad,” was his comment.
“Well, I’ve got to put it through the typewriter again,” I told him.
There were pleasant moments, certainly, when we sat around the kitchen and I taught Bob half a dozen chords on my guitar; or when, leaning back against the wall and shuffling the cards at the table, Bob taught Marilyn one or another brand of jailhouse poker — and discovered, to his surprise, that the poet was a natural pokerface with fewer tells than he.
But the pieces of our triple just didn’t fit together the way they once had. Depressed, Bob really wanted to return to Florida. Marilyn worried about him; and I found myself pulling away from both his doldrums and her glum feelings of powerlessness. There was a week of long, serious talks — between Bob and me, between Marilyn and Bob, between me and Marilyn, now in the hot apartment (which Bob left less and less, much as he’d done before in the apartment at the other end of the hall with Joanne), now in the city’s summer streets. Finally, though, there was nothing to do but send him home.
It’s what he said he wanted.
The night he left, Marilyn said: “Suppose he doesn’t come back?”
“Don’t be surprised,” I said, “if he doesn’t.”
Marilyn wrote:
Shortly, in Florida, Bob was arrested for a series of bad checks, some of which dated from before he’d come to New York — but some of which had been written after he’d left. These, he told us (in another call), had been written by Joanne. But there didn’t seem to be any need for both of them to go to jail, especially since she had the kids. It wouldn’t make that much difference in the sentence — which, he told us in his next call, was twenty years.
By now we’d talked to his parents a few times.
Bernie received a couple of letters from Bob in jail, in the telltale envelope bearing a return address but no name for the institution. In one, which Bernie showed us, he went on at great length about how much he loved us, how sorry he was he hadn’t stayed with us, but how — more than likely — for us, if not for him, this was the best.
Marilyn was drained.
Bob had been the lynchpin holding us together; now we were very much apart.
59
59. A day or so later, I received a letter from Ron, still working on the boats. In it, he brought up the idea of going to Europe in the fall, though he felt it would be too expensive. I had been toying with the idea myself since … well, since 1961. Ron and I had worked well together, living easily in close quarters. In my answering letter, I volunteered to pay for a roundtrip Icelandic Air Lines ticket for him if he wanted to go with me. Ron returned a letter full of enthusiastic agreement, if I was serious.
I wrote back that I definitely was.
59.1. I began a short book (really a long story) called Empire Star soon after I received Ron’s second letter. There were at least three motivations behind it, and at this distance I can’t honestly say which was the strongest. More money for the trip was one of them. Also, the final strain of the affair with Bob had left Marilyn and myself both exhausted with, and distanced from, one another. In an emotionally drained state myself, I felt I had to take on some new project that I could complete and feel some satisfaction in, if only to bolster my own shaky sense of well-being. Never a fast writer nor, by my own estimation, a very disciplined one, I wanted to do a thoroughly planned-out work.
More important, I wanted to write to a rigorous schedule, just to see if I could. The long story (which I’d initially thought would appear on the back of Babel-17 in an Ace Double format) was written as a kind of endurance test, writing in the morning, rewriting in the afternoon. The third reason was that there was still much from Marilyn’s and my time with Bob (including the trip to Texas) that would not settle until at least some of it had become art.
It had been true of Babel-17.
It was true of Empire Star.
And it was true of “The Star Pit,” the story whose first two thirds I completed right afterwards.
Empire Star’s thirty thousand words were finished in eleven days.
59.2. About the time I was finishing the last retyping, Ron arrived at his parents’ home in New Jersey, gave me a call, and we met a couple of times to discuss our coming trip. Ron was a pretty insightful guy. Not only had he realized (without being told) that I was black, but he’d put together the outlines of the relation between Bob, Marilyn, and myself. From Bob he’d learned that I was a published writer. Oddly, the whole confusing story, instead of making him move away, seemed to make him like me more. We’d actually become pretty good friends.