Sylvia: A Novel Read online

  Behind her, I saw a refrigerator and stove. A half-wall partition separated the kitchen from the living room, with a gap that let you pass through. The partition served as a shelf for a telephone, papers, books, and pieces of clothing. A raw brick wall dominated the living room. The floor was wide, rough, splintery planks, as in a warehouse. It was strewn with underwear, shoes, and newspapers. Light, falling through a tall window, came from the west. The window looked over rooftops all the way to the Hudson River, then beyond to the cliffs of New Jersey. Another tall window, in the kitchen, looked east across MacDougal Street at a tenement just like this one. I supposed that Naomi’s apartment, in the middle of Greenwich Village, must be considered desirable. Naomi said, “Don’t make wisecracks. The rent is forty bucks a month.” Then she introduced me to Sylvia Bloch.

  She stood barefoot in the kitchen dragging a hairbrush down through her long, black, wet Asian hair. Minutes ago, apparently, she had stepped out of the shower, which was a high metal stall in the kitchen, set on a platform beside the sink. A plastic curtain kept water from splashing onto the kitchen floor. She said hello but didn’t look at me. Too much engaged, tipping her head right and left, tossing the heavy black weight of hair like a shining sash. The brush swept down and ripped free until, abruptly, she quit brushing, stepped into the living room, dropped onto the couch, leaned back against the brick wall, and went totally limp. Then, from behind long black bangs, her eyes moved, looked at me. The question of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years.

  Sylvia was slender and suntanned. Her hair fell below the middle of her back. Long bangs obscured her eyes, making her look shy or modestly hiding, and also shorter than average. She was five-six. Her eyes, black as her hair, were quick and brilliant. She had a high fine neck, wide shoulders, narrow hips, delicately shaped wrists and ankles. Her figure and the smooth length of her face, with its wide sensuous mouth, reminded me of Egyptian statuary. She wore a weightless cotton Indian dress with an intricate flowery print. It was the same brown hue as her skin.

  We sat in the living room until Naomi’s boyfriend arrived. He was black, tall, light complexioned. Mixed couples were common, especially with Jewish women, but I was surprised. Conversation was awkward for me, determined not to stare at Sylvia. The summer heat and the messy living room with its dirty floor destroyed concentration, discouraged talk. Things were said, but it was dull obligatory stuff. Mainly we perspired and looked at one another. After a while, Naomi suggested we go for a walk. I was relieved and grateful. We all got up and left the apartment and went down into the street, staying loosely together, heading toward Washington Square Park. Naomi came up beside me and whispered, “She’s not beautiful, you know.”

  The remark embarrassed me. My feelings were too obvious. I’d been hypnotized by Sylvia’s flashing exotic effect. Naomi sounded vaguely annoyed, as though I’d disappointed her. She wanted to talk, wanted to put me straight, but we weren’t alone. I said “Ummm.” Incapable of anything better, I was literally meaningless. Naomi then said, as if she were making a concession, “Well, she is very smart.”

  We were supposed to have dinner together and go to a movie, but Naomi and her boyfriend disappeared, abandoning Sylvia and me in the park. Neither of us was talking. We’d become social liabilities, too stupid with feeling to be fun. We continued together, as if dazed, drifting through dreamy heat. We’d met for the first time less than an hour ago, yet it seemed we’d been together, in the plenitude of this moment, forever. We walked for blocks without becoming flirtatious, barely glancing at each other, staying close. Eventually, we turned back toward the tenement; with no reason, no words, slowly turning back through the crowded streets, then into the dismal green hall and up six flights of stairs, and into the squalid apartment, like a couple doomed to a sacrificial assignation. It started without beginning. We made love until afternoon became twilight and twilight became black night.

  Through the tall open window of the living room we saw the night sky and heard the people proceed along Mac-Dougal Street, as in a lunatic carnival, screaming, breaking glass, wanting to hit, needing meanness. Someone played a guitar in a nearby apartment. Someone was crying. Lights flew across the walls and ceiling. The city made its statement in the living room. None of it had to do with us, lying naked on the couch, just wide enough for two, against the brick wall. Released by sex into simple confidence, we talked. Sylvia told me she was nineteen, and had recently left the University of Michigan, where she had met Naomi. Some years earlier, Sylvia’s father, who worked for the Fuller Brush company, died of a heart attack. The doctors had told him not to smoke and he tried to give it up, tearing his cigarettes in half, carrying the halves behind his ears until he couldn’t not put one between his lips and light it. Her mother was a housewife who did well playing the stock market as a hobby. Soon after her husband’s death, she became ill with cancer. Sylvia visited her in the hospital every day after high school. She said her mother became exquisitely sensitive as she declined, until even the odor of the telephone cord beside her bed nauseated her. After her mother died, Sylvia lived with an aunt and uncle in Queens. She had bad dreams and heard jeering voices, as if the loss of her parents had made her contemptible. To get out of New York, she applied to the University of Michigan and Radcliffe. Her boyfriend was at Harvard. She described him as very kind and nice-looking, a lean, fine-featured blond. She said she was brighter than her boyfriend, but Radcliffe turned her down. They didn’t need her; they could easily fill every class with German Jews. Sylvia took the rejection personally. That was the end of her boyfriend. Her present boyfriend worked in a local restaurant. He was a tall, sweet, handsome Italian; very sensitive and loving. He would show up tonight, she said. His swimsuit was in the apartment and he’d come for it after work.

  Sylvia was telling me how she’d met Naomi, and then telling me how much she loved Naomi. “But Naomi loves me in theory, not in practice,” said Sylvia. “She’s very critical, always complaining because she can’t find a shoe or her glasses or something in the apartment. She sometimes threatens not to come home if I don’t clean up.”

  “Really?”

  I was listening without hearing.

  The boyfriend would show up tonight. Sylvia hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend before she let me take off her clothes. I felt deceived. I wanted to go. She had a boyfriend. I’d have done it anyway, maybe, but I felt suddenly distanced from Sylvia, as if I’d dropped through the darkness into a well, darkness more dense. I wanted to get out and I imagined my clothes on the floor beside the bed. I could reach down, grab my underwear and pants, dress, go. I didn’t move.

  “He has a key?”

  “No.”

  “The door is locked?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look, I should go. I’ll phone you in the morning.”

  “Stay.”

  She got up. Without turning on a light, which would show in the glass window of the door, she moved quickly in the chaos of the apartment, shoving books and papers about, tossing pieces of clothing, and then she found it, with blind feel only, a rag amid rags. His swimsuit. She hung it on the doorknob outside the apartment by the jock, then returned to the bed.

  We lay in the balmy darkness, waiting for him. I wanted to get dressed, but I didn’t move. After a while we heard a slow trudge coming up the stairway. It was a man. He seemed to heave himself up from step to step, wearily. We heard him on the linoleum in the hallway. From the weight of his steps, I figured he knew Sylvia had been unfaithful. He was big. He could break my head. His steps ended at the door, ten feet from where we lay. He didn’t knock. He’d seen his swimsuit and was contemplating it, reading its message. He’d worked all day, he’d climbed six flights of steps, and he was rewarded with this disgusting spectacle. I supposed he wasn’t stupid, but even a genius might kick in the flimsy door, and make a moral scene. He said, “Sylvia?” His quizzical tone carried no righteousness, only the fatigue and pain of his day. We lay very still, hardly
breathing, bodies without mass or contour, dissolving, becoming the darkness. From his tone, from his one word, “Sylvia,” I read his mind, understood his anguish. She’d done painful things before. He didn’t want to prove to himself that she was in the apartment. He’d go stomping away down the hall. He’d fly down the stairs. Never come back. His voice was there again.

  “Sylvia?”

  Then he did it, he went away, stomping down the hall, down the stairs. His voice stayed with me. I felt sorry for him, and responsible for his disappointment. Mainly, I was struck by Sylvia’s efficiency, how speedily she’d exchanged one man for another. Would it happen to me, too? Of course it would, but she lay beside me now and the cruel uncertainty of love was only an idea, a moody flavor, a pleasing sorrow of the summer night. We turned to each other, renewed by the drama of betrayal, and made love again.

  Afterwards, Sylvia sat naked on the window ledge, outlined against the western skyline of the city and the lights of New Jersey. She stared at me and seemed to collect a power of decision, or to wonder what decision had been made. What had we just done? What did it mean? Years later, in fury, she would say, “The first time we went to bed. The first time . . . ,” resurrecting the memory with bitterness, saying I’d made her do extreme things. She said nothing about her boyfriend, and remembered only the sex, the indulgences. I’d wanted too much. She’d given too much. Years later, I still owed her something. It couldn’t be estimated, or even fully expressed. An infinite debt of feeling.

  At dawn, having slept not one minute, we went down into the street. The shining residue of night was strewn along the curb and overflowing trash cans, beginning to stink in the early light and heat. Broken, heaving sidewalks, the crust of a discontented, restless earth, oozed moisture and a steamy glow. There was no traffic; no people. Between dark and day, the city stood in stunned, fetid slumber. It had been deeply used. On a bench, in a small grassy area set back from Sixth Avenue, we sat and stared into each other’s eyes, adoring, yet with a degree of reserve, or belated concern to see who we’d been to bed with for the last ten hours.

  Sylvia said she was leaving for summer school at Harvard the next day. Instantly, I thought of her former boyfriend. He would be there. I felt jealous. I had no claim on Sylvia’s fidelity and perhaps I didn’t want it, but I felt jealous. She’d said she liked his blond looks, his gentle and Gentile old-money manners. I supposed, Sylvia being so dark, she found the blond irresistible. It wasn’t over between them. He was in Cambridge; she wasn’t—and that was all. They’d soon be together. She’d see him. Old sentiments would revive. I’d lose her. Then she asked if I would come up to Cambridge and live with her. She held her face high, stiff with anticipation, as if to receive a blow.

  I see her. Maybe I know what I’m looking at.

  I was taken by highlights along her cheekbones and the luscious expectancy in her lower lip. I liked the Asian cast of her face, its smoothness, length, and tilt of its bones. Her straight black hair, against a look of cool dark blood, seemed to bear on the question of me in Cambridge. I sensed that she expected to hear me say no, expected to be hurt. But the way she held herself was imperial. She had told me the story of her life, eliminated a boyfriend, and asked me to live with her. I don’t remember saying yes or no.

  There was much to think about. None of it had to do with how Sylvia’s cheekbones caught the light, or the luscious weight of her lower lip, or the cool focus of her eyes. But I kept seeing her face. I didn’t think. I also saw the swimsuit turned inside out, hanging by the jock, like the carcass of a chicken disemboweled.

  A week later I took the train to Boston. Sylvia moved out of her dormitory. We found a room near the university in a big house with shadowy passages.

  I took the train. We found a room . . .

  The truth is I didn’t know what I was doing exactly, or why I was in Cambridge. Sylvia wanted me to be there. I had no immediate practical reason to be elsewhere—no job, nothing to do. My desire to write stories was nothing to do. It wouldn’t pay. It wasn’t work. When I looked at Sylvia’s face, I liked what I saw, but I still wasn’t sure why I was in Cambridge. I was sure of little. I missed her during the week she was gone from New York, but my feelings were only as strong as they were uncertain. Being with her in Cambridge, I felt no urgency to be anywhere else. It would be a brilliant, blooming, fragrant summer. I had a girlfriend. No obligations. I had only to be.

  The room was in a house full of heavy, stolid things with white sheets thrown over them. Blinds were drawn, doors shut, defending against light and air. A man in his sixties lived in the house, creeping amid masses and shadows. He used almost nothing, apparently, and kept things undisturbed, hidden, as if waiting for the true owner of the house to return and pull away the sheets, use the furniture, live here. It came to me that someone close to him had died, and the man’s life had stopped, too, or he feared death extremely, and so brought about this eerily reduced condition, using less and less, changing nothing, moving only in the shadows. He wasn’t guilty of being in this world. Since he didn’t exist, he’d never die.

  The room was on the second floor. It had gray floral wallpaper, a mahogany dresser, two lavishly upholstered chairs—all wood surfaces veneered in hard slick brown—and a giant bed that stood high off the floor. Sitting on the edge of the bed, Sylvia’s feet dangled in the air. She looked like a child. Pulling back the bedcovers demanded a strong grip and snap. Sheets were tucked in tight, making a hard flat field, perfect for a corpse. The mattress, unusually thick, like a fat luxurious heart, was sealed, lashed down by bedcovers and sheets. Basically, an excellent bed, but resistant to the pressures of a living human shape. It was an excellent, principled bed with a hatred of comfort. We used it most of the night, high above the floor, to make love.

  When we came down in the morning, the man sat waiting in a straight-backed chair in the parlor. He was bald, gaunt, lean as a plank. His long platter face stared at the floor between his knees, as if into a pool of trouble.

  “You two will have to go,” he said. The command was drawn from a strange personal hell of New England propriety and constipation. In the middle of the night, maybe, he heard us. It occurred to him that Sylvia and I were touching, doing evils to each other’s body, though we labored to be quiet, and fucked with Tantric subtlety, measuring pleasure slow and slow, out of respect for his ethical domain. He’d begun thinking things, driving himself to this moral convulsion. We didn’t ask why we had to go. It was clear and final. We had to do it—go. We went back up to our room, packed, made no fuss, and were soon adrift in the busy, hot, bright streets around Harvard Square, carrying our bags.

  Sylvia refused to return to her dormitory, though we had no place to go if we stayed together. I couldn’t reason with her, couldn’t argue. As far as she was concerned, she had no dormitory room, no place but here in the street with me.

  The glorious summer day made things more difficult. Storefronts and windshields flashed threats. Everyone walked with energetic purpose. They belonged in Cambridge and were correct. We’d been thrown into the street. For this to have happened, one must have done something wrong. We were embarrassed and confused, squinting in the sunlight, carrying bags, the weight of blighted romance. I expected to spend the night in a sleazy hotel or in a park, but then, after phoning friends, we heard about a house where three undergraduates lived, in a working-class neighborhood, a long walk from the university. Maybe they’d rent us a room. We didn’t phone. We went there, just showed up with our bags.

  It was an ugly falling-down sloppy happy house. One of the men began talking to Sylvia, the moment he saw her, in baby talk. She said, “Hello.” He said, “Hewo,” with a goofy grin. She thought he was hilarious, and she loved being treated like a little girl in a house full of men. They all treated her the same way, affectionately teasing. She inspired it: shy, hiding behind long bangs, darkly sensuous. There was one empty room in the house. Nobody said we couldn’t have it.

  In the mornings Sy
lvia went to class and I tried to begin writing stories. Our room, just off the kitchen, was noisy with refrigerator traffic and running water. Sometimes people stood outside the door talking. I didn’t mind. After our night in the mausoleum, I liked noises. The soft suck and thud of a refrigerator door was good. The sound of talking was good.

  Sylvia was gone during the day, in class or studying in a library on campus. At night there were some irascible moments, heavy sighs, angry whispers, but the room was narrow, hot, airless. There were mosquitoes. Nothing personal. Through most of the slow, lovely summer, we were happy. Sylvia was taking a class in art history. We went to museums, and worked together on her papers. I didn’t write any stories that I didn’t tear up and throw away. The writing was no good, but I liked being with Sylvia and this life in Cambridge.

  One afternoon, sitting on the front steps, waiting for Sylvia to return from class, I spotted her far down the street, walking slowly. When she saw me looking at her, she walked more slowly. Her right sandal was flapping. The sole had torn loose. At last she came up to me and showed me how a nail had poked up through the sole. She had walked home on the nail, sole flapping, her foot sloshing in blood. What else could she do? She smiled wanly, suffering, but good-spirited.

  I said she could have had the sandal fixed or walked barefoot or called for a taxi. There was something impatient in my voice. She seemed shocked. Her smile went from wan to screwy, perturbed, injured. I couldn’t call back the impatience in my voice, couldn’t undo its effect. For days thereafter, Sylvia walked about Cambridge pressing the ball of her foot onto the nail, bleeding. She refused to wear other shoes. I pleaded, I argued with her. Finally, she let me take the sandal to be repaired. I was grateful. She was not grateful. I was not forgiven.