Throughout my own junior year of high school and Marilyn’s first year of college, however, we became better and better friends.
Marilyn’s father, Albert, had been an inventor and engineer without a degree. He had died from cancer of the pancreas at the end of her first year at Science, three months after her fourteenth birthday, some months after we’d met on the school roof. Her mother, Hilda, was a small, nervous woman who taught elementary school and later became an assistant principal, coming in first in the city on the assistant principal social service exam. Many years before, she’d gotten a Ph.D. in psychology that she’d never used professionally. The opinion of most of her colleagues for the many, many years she’d taught second grade (she didn’t begin to study for the assistant principal’s position till two or three years after Marilyn and I were married) was that she was working far below her intellectual capacity. Marilyn’s relation with her mother was — the only word I can use — disastrous. Her mother was diabetic and prone to go into insulin shock with near-suicidal frequency.
Now Marilyn and I took long walks in the Village, where we made endless jokes to each other about fourteen-year-old poets — which we had been when we’d started joking. Was that only a few months ago?
6.6. When I was sixteen, I got my father to take me to see Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, where it had recently opened at the then comparatively new New Yorker Theater. We both went expecting some sort of medieval costume fantasy — after all, the Sunday Times had printed a picture of a knight playing chess with death on a desolate beach. And a clip of the same sequence had been shown on a TV program. But the film’s patina of intellectuality troubled, perhaps even offended, and, probably, excluded my father.
I’d found it fascinating.
Dad said he didn’t understand it. Nor could he understand why I’d liked it. He rather pooh-poohed and even laughed at my so clearly having been moved at the film.
We didn’t get in a really big argument over it. But it meant that another cord of communication between us (and there were very few) had broken — as now it seemed that I liked one kind of film and he liked another.
6.61. Both Marilyn and I now wanted to be writers, at least as part of whatever else we might do. And I was now sixteen and had launched into a third novel. It was called Those Spared by Fire, and it was the first time I had tried to tackle directly characters and institutions around me — my school, the community center where I went in the evenings, the kids who were my friends over in the General Grant Houses.
It also essayed a good deal of nonlinear storytelling. I’d begun to read in Faulkner and Joyce, and had been as influenced — in all the predictable and awkward ways — as one could be.
Our downstairs neighbor, Jesse, the children’s book writer, read it over and wrote me a note in which he declared, “If you keep on like this, you will probably be in print before you reach voting age.” A friend I’d made through Marilyn, the poet Marie Ponsot, found a typist for me in Queens (and gave me a hardcover copy of Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood). After several deep and intense conversations with Jesse, my father decided he would pay the sixty-eight dollars to the Queens housewife who worked out of her kitchen (thirty-five cents a page) with an old Remington on the formica table, to retype the book for me.
This parental support was so out of keeping with his usual disparaging attitude toward all my extracurricular projects that, after my initial gratitude, I really had no idea how to respond.
On a warm Saturday morning toward the end of summer, Dad drove me out to Queens to deliver the finished manuscript. I sat beside him in the car’s beige interior, my blue typing-paper box held in my moist hands and resting on my lap. In the white-haired housewife’s yellow kitchen, Dad even paid her in advance — with a check. And two or three weeks later, with my friend Ian, a diminutive kid from my creative writing class, who wore thick glasses and liked to wrestle, I went out by subway to pick up the finished job. The coppery sunlight had already taken on an autumnal slant; the first leaves scattered the Queens sidewalk. We rode home on the E train, carrying the box — with two manila envelopes, now — containing the original, the retyping, and two carbons. And I began to submit my third novel here and there — and receive my first rejections. It intrigues me that I do not remember to which publishers those early submissions went. But they were rather mechanical, and I was already involved with more writing projects.
6.611. … and I seemed to recede down a hall, so that everything fell into the distance, as if I were observing it through the hollow cardboard tube from a paper towel roll. Only, as I recognized what, again, was happening, I emerged from the tube’s other end. Blinking, I looked around me, at the grass, at the blanket I sat on. It was wonderfully sunny, with the light itself like a fog or haze. A boy sat on the other side of the blanket from me, cross legged, in jeans. He was barefoot. His plaid shirt was too big. One rolled-up sleeve hung midway down his arm. And the buttons were open over his dark chest. He was a year older than I — we were of the same racial makeup.
“Hello,” I said.
His mouth moved a little, but there were no words.
“You can’t talk …?” I said, only a little surprised.
He touched his throat and smiled at me with the pleasure of not having to explain.
“That’s okay. I can understand you.” I moved nearer; he moved nearer. He took one of my hands in both of his, and came even closer. We leaned our heads together and his toes now pressed the top of my sneaker. His cheek beside mine was warm. I felt his breath against my neck. Without words, he told me his name was Snake. Bad people had cut his tongue out, and he’d been afraid no one would ever understand what he was saying again. He’d tried to learn some sign language, but not many people knew it. He moved his fingers on my palm to let me feel the shapes they made, as if we were both blind in that luminous mist. … Finding someone who could understand him made him want to cry with relief and release. So we held each other — and sometimes cried.
When I woke the next morning, in my bed, I thought back on the astonishingly satisfying dream — had it only been the night before? Or had it been going on over several nights? Had, in other dreams, Snake and I talked — silently — of other things?
But even before I pushed back the spread, I knew this strange, gentle youngster, castrated of language and rephallicized by his name, was some version of myself, who both doubled me and split something off from me, as though my self (itself) had itself been split by an astonishing gap. Outside my windows, birds were chirruping, and the sun dazzled in the trees of Morningside Gardens.
6.62. And on Saturday mornings, with redheaded, full-breasted Ellen and tall Hispanic Ruben, I went down to the Hunter College Dramatic Workshop for Young People, and took drama lessons and wrote plays for them (which, somehow, I never got around to showing them, but some of which, after the fact, became still more “dreams” in Lost Stars), and talked to Marilyn’s friend Judy for hours from the drugstore phone booth out on Amsterdam Avenue or walked barefoot down by St. Marks Church in the Bowery and across Ninth Street to visit her friend Gail, and took my first job, as a page in the library at the St. Agnes branch on Amsterdam Avenue at Eighty-first Street, and on Thursday afternoons attended ballet class at Ballet Theater (suggested by Judy), and even auditioned for the Donald McKyle Dance Company, only to be told, kindly but firmly, to take a few more years of lessons, and joined a little group called Chamber Theater and the New York Repertory Company on St. Marks Place, and spent two weeks on Martha’s Vineyard with my family, reading Atlas Shrugged in the car up to New England and on the ferry across from Woods Hole. When I came back, I plunged into a cycle of short stories about the sea, called Cycle for Toby, then another novel about bohemian life in Greenwich Village, called Afterlon.