31. Through connections that had begun at Breadloaf, an assistant editor, named Lorn, at Bobbs-Merrill had read Those Spared by Fire and had been impressed enough with it to write me a note, to talk with me on the phone—and to pass the manuscript on to a senior editor who’d liked it enough to take the two of us to lunch. Through total happenstance, her name was Bobs (less one b) Pinkerton. She was well-dressed, white-haired, and could easily have been Rosemary’s sister. “What I’ve decided to do,” she explained, “is give the manuscript to an old friend of mine whom I worked with for many years. Name’s Bill Rainey. He’s a literary editor, of the best sort, and I think he’d have some real sympathy for the kind of thing you’re doing.” (I didn’t mention that the work had actually been written four years before. But I was very pleased that, while I had been at Breadloaf, Rainey’s name had been mentioned to me on several occasions. I’d seen a novel he’d published himself only a year or so ago. Now, apparently, he would finally see my work.) “I think that’s really the wisest course.”

31.1. Three weeks after Rainey was sent my manuscript, he killed himself.

31.2. “I’m so sorry,” Bobs said to me. She’d invited me up to her Stuyvesant Town apartment for drinks, rather than to the office. “It’s just devastating—first, because I was so fond of him and had so much respect for him; and because I’ve put you in this dreadful position. You understand, he never got to it. I gather his whole life had rather fallen apart and he did very little in the last three months.”

I tried to reassure her that I had nothing less now than I’d had before. Besides, I was finishing another novel, Voyage, Orestes!, far more ambitious and—I hoped—far more skillfully written. Was there anyone who might be interested in it? “Well,” she said, “I can’t think of any reason not to submit it to Bobbs-Merrill. But I must warn you beforehand: they’re interested only in very commercial properties right through here. What you’re doing—and what I’ve seen of yours so far—is far more literary; that’s why I’d wanted Bill to take a look at it.”

31.3. Days later, Marilyn and I invited Lorn over for dinner. Bobs seemed too grand a personage to invite to our slum flat; and since she was the senior editor involved, it would have looked too much as if we were currying favor. At the same time, I can still recall with how much awe we looked at Lorn. After all, he was twenty-five—four and five years older than Marilyn and I. He was an assistant editor at a real, hardcover publishing company. Also, his name had been on the masthead of an international literary review.

Sue, as she often did when we had guests, absented herself for the evening.

The night he came over, I prepared the identical shrimp curry I’d fixed for Auden and Kallman. We knew enough, at that point, to supply white wine instead of red—and Lorn, in his blue suit and conservative maroon tie, with a dashing gesture of adult sophistication, brought a bottle of his own as a house present.

“I thought you might like to see Bobs’s report on what you’ve shown her so far of your new book,” he told us. “I really shouldn’t have brought it, of course. But since there was nothing she wouldn’t want you to see …” He handed me a carbon of the typed memo. Marilyn moved to my side to read it over my shoulder. After a remarkably faithful and professionally economical outline of the plot of the first seven hundred pages of Voyage, Orestes!, she went on to say, “… The writing is energetic and often polished. The sensibility is full of unusual urban insights. Delany is still a few weeks shy of his twenty-first birthday and has already published two remarkably literate science fiction novels with a paperback house, Ace Books. He’s completing another. Obviously, he’s a real writer. Clearly we ought to snap him up before someone beats us to him.”

The uninvited guest that evening was Ana, who, joining us for dessert and coffee, actually shocked me by asking Lorn, after half an hour’s desultory conversation. “Are you queer?”

And Lorn shocked me even more by, first, clearly not taking offense and, second, answering. “Yes. You could say so. Are you?”

“More or less,” said Ana. “But tell me, what do you want to do with your life, then?”

“I suppose,” Lorn said, “I’m trying to learn how to be the perfect lover.”

But these were ideas, phrases, bits of rhetoric (Sue, just about now, came in, nodded a quick and smiling hello to all of us sitting in the living room, then disappeared into the small cubicle on the side that was hers) from a discourse so foreign to me that I listened to it as I might to strangers speaking another language.