SEX AND/OR MR. MORRISON

Introduction to

SEX AND/OR MR. MORRISON:

No one writes like Carol Emshwiller. Absolutely no one. And no one ever has. She is her own woman, has her own voice, defies comparison, probes areas usually considered dangerous, and is as close to being the pure artist as any writer I have met.

It is difficult talking about Carol … even as it is difficult talking about her work. They don’t align with the usual symbologies and standards. And Carol (to strangers) has trouble talking for herself. In sessions of critical analysis, she has a tendency to fall into gesticulation, murmurs, gropings for sound. This hesitancy does not show up in her stories. (It may be true that she must go through rewrites to find the language for a particular story, but that is ex post facto. The idea was there, it is merely the craft of the writer to accept and reject the various vibratory elements till the special harmony is achieved.) From this disparity, I draw a natural conclusion: Carol Emshwiller speaks most eloquently through her work. It is often so with the best writers. It is often so with the most special people.

As to her being a pure artist, she is the first writer I ever encountered who said she wrote to please herself whom I believed. The kinds of stories Carol brings forth are seldom commercial. They are quite frankly personal visions. (I have always contended that a writer must first learn the basics of his craft, the commercial manner of telling a story in its simplest, most direct ways, before attempting to break the rules and establish new approaches. Carol is, again, an exception to that rule. From the very first work of hers I read, she was an innovator, an experimenter. Either she knows the rules so well, inherently, that she can accept or reject them according to the needs of the project, or she is—as I suspect— a natural talent that is not governed by the same rules as the rest of us. It’s academic, really, for the proof is in the reading. She gets away with it every time.) Her “visions” are never completely substantial. They shift and waver, like oil rainbows in a pool. It is almost as if Carol’s stories turn a corner into another dimension. Only a portion of the whole, intended work is visible. What she may really be saying is half glimpsed, shadowy, alluring, a beckoning from the mist. It isn’t like the visible part of an iceberg, or the hidden meaning of a haiku or anything encountered previously. Once again, it is singular. But for want of a handier explanation, I’ll stick with the turning-the-corner-to-another-dimension.

But being a “pure” artist is not merely a product of the kind of work one does. It is a state of mind, from the outset. And it is infinitely harder, by far, to hoe that row than simply to aspire to sell what one writes. Carol seems unconcerned about selling her stories—at least in the way most writers are concerned. She naturally wants the reality of seeing her work in print, but if that entails writing what she does not wish to write, she will pass. She has set herself a lofty reach of quality and attack that almost verges on the impossible. And she writes the stories full well aware that they may never sell. She is by no means an ivory tower writer, one who writes strictly for the trunk, one who is too insecure to release the work for public criticism. There is none of that in Carol. But she is cognizant of the facts of publishing life. There are too few magazines and editors who care to risk the experimental, the far out, the individual, when they can continue to make their sales break-even point with the hand-me-downs of antediluvian fantasy. None of this daunts Carol. She continues her own way, writing magnificently.

The genius of the Emshwiller talent (and I use the word “genius” with full awareness of every implication of its definition) is not confined to Carol, incidentally. As most people know, she is the wife of talented artist and film maker Ed Emshwiller, whose avant-garde films many of us have enjoyed for far longer than the teenie-boppers and underground cinemaphiles who erroneously lump Ed in with Warhol and Brakhage and Anger and David Brooks. The Emshwiller genius—both husband and wife—is a combination of professional expertise sparingly employed in the forming of lean, moody and occasionally ominous art, both in fiction and in film. It would be a happy inevitability if Ed were to translate Carol’s work for the screen.

In personally describing herself, Carol’s image of the pertinent facts paint her as a Levittown housewife—three kids, bad housekeeper, can cook if she makes the effort and now and then she does—and I suspect the view is a cultivated one. Carol the housewife is someone Carol the writer is forced to keep split off. But beneath the superficialities there are some fascinating things to learn about the woman: “I once hated everything and anything to do with writing, though if I’d ever had anyone give me a little tiny hint as to what it was about, I think I’d have loved it as I do now. I nearly flunked freshman English in college and had to take an agonizing extra semester of English because of my bad grade. (I feel strongly about the lousy way things to do with literature are generally taught.) I started out in music school, playing the violin, and then switched to art school. I was a bad musician but a good artist. I met Ed in art school at the University of Michigan. I got a Fulbright to France. It wasn’t until I’d met some writers, later, in New York, that I began to see what writing was all about. I see all the underground movies I can. I like interesting failures better than works where the artist always knows exactly what he’s doing.”

The story Carol tells here is by no means a failure. It is a complete success, easily the strangest sex story ever written, and functionally science fiction as well. It is considerably further out than the bulk of the stories Carol has had published in the commercial magazines, and is as close to being “the new thing” as anything in this book. I recommend it to younger writers breaking in, looking for new directions.

SEX AND/OR MR. MORRISON

by Carol Emshwiller

I can set my clock by Mr. Morrison’s step upon the stairs, not that he is that accurate, but accurate enough for me. 8:30 thereabouts. (My clock runs fast anyway.) Each day he comes clumping down and I set it back ten minutes, or eight minutes or seven. I suppose I could just as well do it without him but it seems a shame to waste all that heavy treading and those puffs and sighs of expending energy on only getting downstairs, so I have timed my life to this morning beat. Funereal tempo, one might well call it, but it is funereal only because Mr. Morrison is fat and therefore slow. Actually he’s a very nice man as men go. He always smiles.

I wait downstairs sometimes looking up and sometimes holding my alarm clock. I smile a smile I hope is not as wistful as his. Mr. Morrison’s moonface has something of the Mona Lisa to it. Certainly he must have secrets.

“I’m setting my clock by you, Mr. M.”

“Heh, heh … my, my,” grunt, breath. “Well,” heave the stomach to the right, “I hope…”

“Oh, you’re on time enough for me.”

“Heh, heh. Oh. Oh yes.” The weight of the world is certainly upon him or perhaps he’s crushed and flattened by a hundred miles of air. How many pounds per square inch weighing him down? He hasn’t the inner energy to push back. All his muscles spread like jelly under his skin.

“No time to talk,” he says. (He never has time.) Off he goes. I like him and his clipped little Boston accent, but I know he’s too proud ever to be friendly. Proud is the wrong word, so is shy. Well, I’ll leave it at that.

He turns back, pouting, and then winks at me as a kind of softening of it. Perhaps it’s just a twitch. He thinks, if he thinks of me at all: What can she say and what can I say talking to her? What can she possibly know that I don’t know already? And so he duck-walks, knock-kneed, out the door.

And now the day begins.

There are really quite a number of things that I can do. I often spend time in the park. Sometimes I rent a boat there and row myself about and feed the ducks. I love museums and there are all those free art galleries and there’s window-shopping and, if I’m very careful with my budget, now and then I can squeeze in a matinee. But I don’t like to be out after Mr. Morrison comes back. I wonder if he keeps his room locked while he’s off at work?

His room is directly over mine and he’s too big to be a quiet man. The house groans with him and settles when he steps out of bed. The floor creaks under his feet. Even the walls rustle and the wallpaper clicks its dried paste. But don’t think I’m complaining of the noise. I keep track of him this way. Sometimes, here underneath, I ape his movements, bed to dresser, step, clump, dresser to closet and back again. I imagine him there, flat-footed. Imagine him. Just imagine those great legs sliding into pants, their godlike width (for no mere man could have legs like that), those Thor-legs into pants holes wide as caves. Imagine those two landscapes, sparsely fuzzed in a faint, wheat-colored brush finding their way blindly into the waist-wide skirt-things of brown wool that are still damp from yesterday. Ooo. Ugh. Up go the suspenders. I think I can hear him breathe from here.

I can comb my hair three times to his once and I can be out and waiting at the bottom step by the time he opens his door.

“I’m setting my clock by you, Mr. M.”

“No time. No time. I’m off. Well …” and he shuts the front door so gently one would think he is afraid of his own fat hands.

And so, as I said, the day begins.

The question is (and perhaps it is the question for today): Who is he really, one of the Normals or one of the Others? It is not going to be so easy to find out with someone so fat. I wonder if I’m up to it. Still, I’m willing to go to certain lengths and I’m nimble yet. All that rowing and all that walking up and down and then, recently, I’ve spent all night huddled under a bush in Central Park and twice I’ve crawled out on the fire escape and climbed to the roof and back again (but I haven’t seen much and I can’t be sure of the Others yet).

I don’t think the closet will do because there’s no keyhole, though I could open the door a crack and maybe wedge my shoe there. (It’s double A.) He might not notice it. Or there’s the bed to get under. While it’s true that I am thin and small, almost child-sized, one might say, still it will not be so easy, but then neither has it been easy to look for lovers on the roof.

Sometimes I wish I were a little fast-moving lizard, dull green or a yellowish brown. I could scamper in under his stomach when he opened the door and he’d never see me, though his eyes are as quick as his feet are clumsy. Still I would be quicker. I would skitter off behind the bookcase or back of his desk or maybe even just lie very still in a corner, for surely he does not see the floor so much. His room is no larger than mine and his presence must fill it, or rather his stomach fills it and his giant legs. He sees the ceiling and the pictures on the wall, the surface of night table, desk and bureau, but the floor and the lower halves of everything would be safe for me. No, I won’t even have to regret not being a lizard, except for getting in. But if he doesn’t lock his room it will be no problem and I can spend all day scouting out my hiding places. I’d best take a snack with me too if I decide this is the night for it. No crackers and no nuts, but noiseless things like cheese and fig newtons.

It seems to me, now that I think about it, that I was rather saving Mr. Morrison for last, as a child saves the frosting of the cake to eat after the cake part is finished. But I see that I have been foolish, for, since he is really one of the most likely prospects, he should have been first.

And so today the day begins with a gathering of supplies and an exploratory trip upstairs.

The room is cluttered. There is no bookcase but there are books and magazines by the hundreds. I check behind the piles. I check the closet, full of drooping, giant suit coats I can easily hide in. Just see how the shoulders extend over the ordinary hangers. I check under the bed and the kneehole of the desk. I squat under the night table. I nestle among the dirty shirts and socks tossed in the corner. Oh, it’s better than Central Park for hiding places. I decide to use them all.

There’s something very nice about being here, for I do like Mr. Morrison. Even just his size is comforting; he’s big enough to be everybody’s father. His room reassures with all his father-sized things in it. I feel lazy and young here.

I eat a few fig newtons while I sit on his shoes in the closet, soft, wide shoes with their edges all collapsed and all of them shaped more like cushions than shoes. Then I take a nap in the dirty shirts. It looks like fifteen or so but there are only seven and some socks. After that I hunch down in the kneehole of the desk, hugging my knees, and I wait and I begin to have doubts. That pendulous stomach, I can already tell, will be larger than all my expectations. There will certainly be nothing it cannot overshadow or conceal so why do I crouch here clicking my fingernails against the desk leg when I might be out feeding pigeons? Leave now, I tell myself. Are you actually going to spend the whole day, and maybe night too, cramped and confined in here? Yet haven’t I done it plenty of times lately and always for nothing too? Why not one more try? For Mr. Morrison is surely the most promising of all. His eyes, the way the fat pushes up his cheeks under them, look almost Chinese. His nose is Roman and in an ordinary face it would be overpowering, but here it is lost. Dwarfed. “Save me,” cries the nose, “I’m sinking.” I would try, but I will have other more important duties, after Mr. Morrison comes back. Duty it is, too, for the good of all and I do mean all, but do not think that I am the least bit prejudiced in this.

You see, I did go to a matinee a few weeks ago. I saw the Royal Ballet dance “The Rites of Spring” and it occurred to me then … Well, what would you think if you saw them wearing their suits that were supposed to be bare skin? Naked suits, I called them. And all those well-dressed, cultured people clapping at them, accepting even though they knew perfectly well … like a sort of Emperor’s New Clothes in reverse. Now just think, there are only two sexes and everyone of us is one of those and certainly, presumably that is, knows something of the other. But then that may be where I have been making my mistake. You’d think … why, just what I did start thinking: that there must be Others among us.

But it is not out of fear or disgust that I am looking for them. I am open and unprejudiced. You can see that I am when I say that I’ve never seen (and doesn’t this seem strange?) the very organs of my own conception, neither my father nor my mother. Goodness knows what they were and what this might make me?

So I wait here, tapping my toes inside my slippers and chewing hangnails off my fingers. I contemplate the unvarnished underside of the desk top. I ridge it with my thumbnail. I eat more cookies and think whether I should make his bed for him or not but decided not to. I suck my arm until it is red in the soft crook opposite the elbow. Time jerks ahead as slowly as a school clock, and I crawl across the floor and stretch out behind the books and magazines. I read first paragraphs of dozens of them. What with the dust back here and lying in the shirts and socks before, I’m getting a certain smell and a sort of gray, animal fuzz that makes me feel safer, as though I really did belong in this room and could actually creep around and not be noticed by Mr. Morrison at all except perhaps for a pat on the head as I pass him.

Thump … pause. Clump … pause. One can’t miss his step. The house shouts his presence. The floors wake up squeaking and lean towards the stairway. The banister slides away from his slippery ham-hands. The wallpaper seems suddenly full of bugs. He must think: Well, this time she isn’t peeking out of her doorway at me. A relief. I can concentrate completely on climbing up. Lift the legs against the pressure. Ooo. Ump. Pause and seem to be looking at the picture on the wall.

I skitter back under the desk.

It’s strange that the first thing he does is to put his newspaper on the desk and sit down with his knees next to my nose, regular walls, furnaces of knees, exuding heat and dampness, throwing off a miasma delicately scented of wet wool and sweat. What a wide roundness they have to them, those knees. Mother’s breasts pressing towards me. Probably as soft. Why can’t I put my cheek against them? Observe how he can sit so still with no toe tapping, no rhythmic tensing of the thigh. He’s not like the rest of us, but could a man like this do little things?’

How the circumstantial evidence piles up, but that is all I’ve had so far and it is time for something concrete. One thing, just one fact, is all I need.

He reads and adjusts the clothing at his crotch and reads again. He breaths out winds of sausages and garlic and I remember that it is after supper and I take out my cheese and eat it as slowly as possible in little rabbit bites. I make a little piece last a half an hour.

At last he goes down the hall to the bathroom and I shift back under the shirts and socks and stretch my legs. What if he undresses like my grandmother did, under a nightgown? under, for him, some giant, double-bed-sized thing?

But he doesn’t. He hangs his coat on the little hanger and his tie on the closet doorknob. I receive his shirt and have to make myself another spy hole. Then off with the shoes, then socks. Off come the huge pants with slow, unseeing effort (he stares out the window). He begins on his yellowed undershorts, scratching himself first behind and starting earthquakes across his buttocks.

Where could he have bought those elephantine undershorts? In what store were they once folded on the shelf? In what factory did women sit at sewing machines and put out one after another after another of those other-wordly items? Mars? Venus? Saturn more likely. Or, perhaps, instead, a tiny place, some moon of Jupiter with less air per square inch upon the skin and less gravity, where Mr. Morrison can take the stairs three at a time and jump the fences (for surely he’s not particularly old) and dance all night with girls his own size.

He squints his oriental eyes towards the ceiling light and takes off the shorts, lets them fall loosely to the floor. I see Alleghenies of thigh and buttock. How does a man like that stand naked even before a small-sized mirror? I lose myself, hypnotized. Impossible to tell the color of his skin, just as it is with blue-gray eyes or the ocean. How tan, pink, olive and red and sometimes a bruised elephant-gray. His eyes must be used to multiplicities like this, and to plethoras, conglomerations, to an opulence of self, to an intemperant exuberance, to the universal, the astronomical.

I find myself completely tamed. I lie in my cocoon of shirts not even shivering. My eyes do not take in what they see. He is utterly beyond my comprehension. Can you imagine how thin my wrists must seem to him? He is thinking (if he thinks of me at all), he thinks: She might be from another world. How alien her ankles and leg bones. How her eyes do stand out. How green her complexion in the shadows at the edge of her face. (For I must admit that perhaps I may be as far along the scale at my end of humanity as he is at his.)

Suddenly I feel like singing. My breath purrs in my throat in hymns as slow as Mr. Morrison himself would sing. Can this be love, I wonder? My first real love? But haven’t I always been passionately interested in people? Or rather in those who caught my fancy? But isn’t this feeling different? Can love really have come to me this late in life? (La, la, lee la from whom all blessings flow.) I shut my eyes and duck my head into the shirts. I grin into the dirty socks. Can you imagine him making love to me!

Well below his abstracted, ceilingward gazes, I crawl on elbows and knees back behind the old books. A safer place to shake out the silliness. Why, I’m old enough for him to be (had I ever married) my youngest son of all. Yes if he were a son of mine, how he would have grown beyond me. I see that I cannot ever follow him (as with all sons). I must love him as a mouse might love the hand that cleans the cage, and as uncomprehendingly too, for surely I see only a part of him here. I sense more. I sense deeper largenesses. I sense excesses of bulk I cannot yet imagine. Rounded afterimages linger on my eyeballs. There seems to be a mysterious darkness in the corners of the room and his shadow covers, at the same time, the window on one wall and the mirror on the other. Certainly he is like an iceberg, seven eighths submerged.

But now he has turned towards me. I peep from the books holding a magazine over my head as one does when it rains. I do so more to shield myself from too much of him all at once than to hide.

And there we are, confronting each other eye to eye. We stare and he cannot seem to comprehend me any more than I can comprehend him, and yet usually his mind is ahead of mine, jumping away on unfinished phrases. His eyes are not even wistful and not yet surprised. But his belly button, that is another story. Here is the eye of God at last. It nestles in a vast, bland sky like a sun on the curve of the universe flashing me a wink of heat, a benign, fat wink. The stomach eye accepts and understands. The stomach eye recognizes me and looks at me as I’ve always wished to be looked at. (Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.) I see you now.

But I see him now. The skin hangs in loose, plastic folds just there, and there is a little copper-colored circle like a fifty-cent piece made out of pennies. There’s a hole in the center and it is corroded green at the edges. This must be a kind of “naked suit” and whatever the sex organs may be, they are hidden behind this hot, pocked and pitted imitation skin.

I look up into those girlish eyes of his and they are as blank as though the eyeballs were all whites, as blank as having no sex at all, eggs without yolks, like being built like a boy-doll with a round hole for the water to empty out.

God, I think. I am not religious, but I think, My God, and then I stand up and somehow, in a limping run, I get out of there and down the stairs as though I fly. I slam the door of my room and slide in under my bed. The most obvious of hiding places but after I am there I can’t bear to move out. I lie and listen for his thunder on the stairs, the roar of his feet splintering the steps, his hand tossing away the banister.

I know what I’ll say. “I accept. I accept,” I’ll say. “I will love, I love already, whatever you are.”

I lie listening, watching the hanging edges of my bedspread in the absolute silence of the house. Can there be anyone here at all in such a strange quietness? Must I doubt even my own existence?

“Goodness knows,” I’ll say, “if I’m normal myself.” (How is one to know such things when everything is hidden?) “Tell all of them that we accept. Tell them it’s the naked suits that are ugly. Your dingles, your dangles, wrinkles, ruts, bumps and humps, we accept whatever there is. Your loops, strings, worms, buttons, figs, cherries, flower petals, your soft little toad-shapes, warty and greenish, your cats’ tongues or rats’ tails, your oysters, one-eyed between your legs, garter snakes, snails, we accept. We think the truth is lovable.”

But what a long silence this is. Where is he? for he must (mustn’t he?) come after me for what I saw. But where has he gone? Perhaps he thinks I’ve locked my door, but I haven’t. I haven’t.

Why doesn’t he come?

*

Afterword:

Blake wrote: “The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.”

It would be nice to live in a society where the genitals were really considered Beauty. It seems to me any other way of seeing is obscene. After all, there they are. Why not like them? You can’t have all this hiding and have people grow up not thinking there’s a reason for hiding. (And when you think that every animal, or almost every animal, in the world had come into being from what we call a “dirty” word, it does seem a sick society.)

I wrote a series of stories on this theme. “Sex and /or Mr. Morrison” really did come into my head while I was attending “The Rites of Spring” ballet at the Metropolitan Opera House. Not the sort of thing I usually do, by the way, but the tickets were gifts. The dancers wore “naked suits,” skin-colored leotards with hand prints and striped in imitation body paint. Sitting there with all those mature-looking, married-looking people in the audience (each of them was one of the sexes and there are only two … for goodness’ sake, only two!), I suddenly remembered that as a small child I really did feel people must be hiding themselves so carefully because they were each entirely different from one another. I figured there may be general male-female opposition, you know, males out, females in (though at that age I suppose I felt, males out, females nothing), but that was all the similarity there could be. And if people didn’t wear clothes, I thought, what peculiar and wondrous things we’d see.

This all came back to me as I sat there at the ballet. It suddenly seemed very strange to have those naked suits onstage, as though what I thought as a child was the only possible, logical explanation for all the hiding. Why else should adults, especially this audience, educated-looking and rather elderly, each one sex and looking married to the other, why should they have to see a program with pretend skin on the dancers? Ludicrous!

So, this story. …