17.5. And two writers, a poet and an SF novelist, walked down the stanchion steps to the wooden walkway, continuing their amble along the concrete ramp into Brooklyn.
Today, watching them, the only thing I can look back on with complete sympathy from that evening (and even that sympathy makes me smile) is the seriousness with which we leaped from “Gulf” to War and Peace to Starship Troopers to The Grapes of Wrath to The Cosmic Rape to Père Goriot to The Stars My Destination to Nightwood to … well, to whatever had struck me as effective, to whatever had seemed instructive.
Provençal poetry has its tradition of the dompna soisebuda, or “borrowed lady”—that ideal woman with the eyes of Judith, the complexion of Susan, the voice of Linda, the breasts of Roxanne. … Whatever its ambition, The Fall of the Towers was the most “borrowed” of SF works. Perhaps all that can be said for it is that, given the age and experience of the writer, it couldn’t have been much else.
Not thinking any of this, but caught up in it like blind moths in its flicker and heat, we continued through the June warmth into Brooklyn Heights, to join Dick and Alice for dinner, where they now lived in a small brownstone.
I don’t believe I’ve said: Dick was a playwright. Sometime later Alice was to become a psychotherapist.
The talk that evening was mostly over the play Dick was writing, The Tyrant, an intensely concentrated and intricately worked piece about a revolution in an imaginary Central American country. Mostly we argued over the presentation of its single woman character, although from time to time the conversation drifted to Stendhal, Flaubert, Pound, Eliot, Auden, or Provencal poetry. …
The next day, back on East Fifth Street, I sat down at my typewriter, ran a piece of paper around the narrow black platen, and typed:
THE
FALL
OF
THE
TOWERS
Then I rolled the paper down, moved it to the left and typed:
a trilogy of novels:
1) Out of the Dead City
2) The Towers of Toron
3) City of a Thousand Suns
I rolled the paper down farther and moved it right:
by
Samuel R. Delany
629 East Fifth Street
New York 9, New York
(Yes, this was before Zip Codes.) I took the page from the typewriter, slipped it into my notebook where I’d already begun to make notes on the organization of Book One’s first chapter and the last chapter of Book Three, and went on with what I’d begun in longhand of Chapter 1.
18
18. Hilda was understandably anxious for her daughter to return to school and get her degree. Anything that hinted of it, she encouraged: and that included the classes at the Art Students League. Mexico City College had a fine art school.
Marilyn had thought about going away to Mexico to study art, where a friend had gone some years before. At one point Hilda offered to supply money for the trip.
When Marilyn had been sixteen, she’d gone with her mother to Mexico City for a week or so. The time had been pleasant, and Marilyn had come back from that first trip to attend a performance of mine at the New York Repertory Theater on St. Marks Place, and, afterwards, in some coffee shop, had shown me, among the poems she had written on that early trip, an arch monologue entitled “Jeremy Bentham in Guanajuato,” where, at the inspiration of the famous Ray Bradbury short story, she and her mother had gone to visit. Coupled with an anecdote about the post-funeral instructions of the English pragmatist, it had produced the memento mori.
But this was a much longer trip: six weeks of art classes, two weeks of travel, a living allowance, new people in another country. Surely Marilyn would decide to give up this Lower East Side squalor and do something … sensible.
It was as naked and as clumsy an attempt as any of her mother’s to pull Marilyn away from me. Hilda was not subtle about her intentions; and Marilyn’s immediate response, when she told me about it after coming from seeing her mother, was anger and understandable resentment. But our own situation day to day was developing all the strains so similar in every relationship that does not work — open, as ours was, or closed — and which only bear chronicling when overall patterns can be teased from them.
One evening, as we lay in bed, I said, “I don’t know whether either one of us wants this relationship to go on. But I do know this: if we don’t get some time apart, it’s not going to last more than a couple of months longer.”
“Why are you always threatening me with leaving?”
“I’m not threatening you with anything,” I said. “But you know what we’ve been going through. How does it look to you?”
A couple of days later, Marilyn told Hilda she would spend the summer in Mexico.
I don’t think I ever threatened Marilyn with leaving, actually. Very early I’d decided that to talk about it when I wasn’t sure I was going to do it would be simply torturous. But for most of our first year, I lived daily with the thought: Maybe I can stand this for another three days — then it’s got to be over with! Maybe I can survive this another two weeks. Surely then I’ll have to tell her I’m getting out of this — it’s not her fault or mine, it’s just who we both are. Well, maybe till the end of the week. …
Unspoken, such thoughts must have made the atmosphere far more threatening than it would have been had they been stated, discussed, resolved.
18.1. “You’re not very happy about going,” plump Terry from upstairs said. “I can tell.”
“Of course she’s happy!” Billy declared. “Who wouldn’t be happy about spending a summer in Mexico City? I’d sure be happy!”
“She’s not happy,” Terry said. “Look at her — oh …!”
Because, in her chair, Marilyn had begun to cry.
“Billy, you always have to say something like that! You see what you’ve gone and done?” In her housedress, Terry pushed back her black hair, gone damp with the first summer’s heat. “He does that with me all the time!”
“I’m sorry,” Marilyn said. “Really.” What she could not say was that she had no idea if, in eight weeks, she would be coming back to any sort of relationship at all. She knuckled at one eye.
Terry laughed.
“You’re leaving Chip; you’re leaving New York. I’m sure you’re just worried to death about everything. If I were leaving him,” Terry thumbed toward her older, brown-skinned husband, “I’d be scared to death he’d get into some kind of horrible trouble! Well, I’ll tell you — you don’t have to worry about Chip. He can come up and eat with us.” Terry turned to me. “You give me ten dollars a week — unless that seems too much — and I’ll just include you in the shopping. You can come and eat dinner with us while Marilyn’s gone.” Terry nodded to Marilyn. “That way I can keep an eye on him, for you.”
“Oh, Jesus, Terry,” I said, “I can cook!”
“I know,” Terry said. “But I have to cook, so I might as well include you in. Besides, we can talk about science fiction. Billy never reads any. And if you feel guilty, you can always babysit for us every once in a while.”