Sylvia: A Novel Read online

  As I entered the hospital, I was stopped at the desk. There had been a phone call from my brother. A nurse told me to return the call before going to Sylvia’s room. She insisted. I phoned. My brother answered. He said Sylvia had died.

  The nurse waited outside the phone booth. She told me to go now to Sylvia’s room, collect her things. I’d been told to come, told to go. My feet walked to her room. I didn’t remember what things I was supposed to collect. I saw a clean, white, empty bed. I saw emptiness. I left the hospital with nothing, nothing at all.

  After the autopsy, I went to the morgue to make an identification. The body came into view on a lift, lying on a gurney, rising from the floor. It was about ten feet away, behind a glass partition. A black woman attendant, in a white uniform, stood at the head. Both she and Sylvia were in profile and motionless, as if both were waiting for me to give a sign that this was indeed Sylvia. She was covered with a sheet from foot to neck. I spun away, as if struck by a fist, bumped into a chair, and nearly fell. The attendant didn’t look in my direction, but she’d seen my response and took it as confirmation. She and Sylvia, like figures performing in a tableau, descended slowly, silently, below the floor. In another setting it might have been hard to say which of them was dead.

  Funeral arrangements were made. I bought a dark suit. Services were held in a synagogue uptown, on the West Side, and then came the drive to the cemetery. It was a bright, freezing day. When the coffin was lowered into the ground, my father broke and cried. His grief surprised me. It seemed inappropriate, difficult to understand. After the hospital, the morgue, and the funeral services, nothing was left in me. No one else was crying.

  On the way to the cemetery, the limousine carrying one of Sylvia’s aunts had raced by mine, making itself the lead car. The same happened on the way out. I had seen Sylvia’s aunt about three times in the past four years. Sylvia rarely talked about her, only her husband. Sylvia liked him a great deal. He wasn’t at the burial, but he’d gone to the funeral parlor with me, where he said, “I’m not going to the cemetery. I’ve been there too much lately.”

  I ate and slept at my parents’ apartment. From their balcony, I looked at the city. The buildings seemed bigger in their vast indifference to me, and weirdly menacing. Street noises in the freezing air were exquisitely sharp, as if the traffic were embattled, and kids running about in Seward Park were killing one another. The roar of an airplane gashed the sky. Everything came to me as sensations, not feelings. I had no feelings that I could name. I had no human feelings.

  I returned to Ann Arbor and rented an apartment, one room with a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. It was the converted attic of a house that sat on a hill above a graveyard, which I hadn’t noticed when I decided to take the apartment. It was inexpensive and near campus. The light was good, the house was quiet. A graduate student in biochemistry lived downstairs with his wife and baby. Across the street was a girls’ dormitory.

  In the mornings before leaving for campus, I sat with a newspaper and cup of coffee at the kitchen table, or I’d look out over the trees and paths of the graveyard. A young woman visited a certain grave several times a week. She wore only a suit, despite the cold weather, and was always alone. For long minutes she stood facing the gravestone, head slightly bowed, arms hanging loosely at her sides. A heavy, simple sadness. My heart went out to her, as if I could easily afford to commiserate. Poor woman, I thought, and the tears would start rising.

  I didn’t know what I felt for myself. I believed I was doing all right, attending classes, studying for exams. It didn’t seem strange to me that I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling certain she had called my name, but I began to dread going to sleep. I was afraid I might dream. I stayed up late, reading until my eyes burned and I could no longer follow the sense of the pages. Then I’d go to sleep, and hope to fall quickly below the level of dreams into oblivion. Once I fell into the morgue, Sylvia lying there, a white sheet up to her chin. It was like the old days, the two of us in a small room, Sylvia asleep, me miserable. I started crying, pleading with her, making no concessions to reality. My need was the only reality, more real than death. Sylvia had to stop this. She had to open her eyes and sit up. She did. I hugged her and asked if she would like to go to the movies. She said yes, but could we get something to eat first? I said we could do anything she wanted, anything at all, and we went out to look for a restaurant, desperately happy.