“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.
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
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.