Sylvia: A Novel Read online

  Through Willy, the healer-dealer, I had a sense of what it meant to be hip. He was my friend, but would have fucked Sylvia at the New Year’s Eve party, if she’d let him, while I was in the next room. We sat together in jazz clubs for hours, saying almost nothing. I’d feel myself entering a trance of music, the meaning of this minute. How sad, or exciting, or weird it was to be alive in the sixties. I heard it in the jazz voices in the dark, smoky clubs. One night, at the bar in Birdland, with Willy beside me, we listened to Sarah Vaughan. She sang “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise . . .” The wheeze in the rhyme of “breeze/Louise” vanished. She sang it out of existence, rendering only the exquisite mystery, such sweet and melancholy love as belonged to music in those days.

  Because of our fights, Sylvia often didn’t begin studying until after midnight. Sitting on the edge of the bed, remains of dinner all about, she held a grammar book in her lap and flipped pages, sometimes glaring at the words as if they were a distraction from her real concern—me. She said I was “doing this” to her, starting fights, trying to ruin her chances, make her fail. In fact I was proud of her, but it’s true I was at least partly responsible for her suffering. I regretted having influenced her decision to study classics. She wasn’t much interested in Latin and Greek, but she did the work because she feared academic disgrace, and, maybe, despite all the bad feeling, she wanted to please me. Night after night, she steeped herself in Homer and Virgil, a frenzy of mechanical performance that may have reminded her of her childhood schooling.

  She’d been admitted to the Hunter elementary school for gifted children. Every morning, before leaving for school, she would go into the bathroom and vomit. Nobody at Hunter knew she lived in Queens, rather than Manhattan, where students were required to live, and she was constantly afraid that she would be discovered and publicly shamed. At the end of the day, she’d ride the subway back to Queens and sometimes fall asleep and miss her stop. She’d wake up, then catch a train going back. When she got home she’d find her mother flat on the floor, eyes shut, looking dead. It was a joke—she’d died waiting for Sylvia—but it frightened Sylvia.

  I thought Sylvia went much too fast when she studied, flipping through pages she couldn’t have absorbed, then tossing the book aside and picking up another. If there was tension between us—I’d made another hurtful remark, or I wanted to visit my parents, or I looked at a girl who passed us in the street—Sylvia would repeat to herself as she studied, “You’re doing this to make me fail.” Doing what? Sometimes, I knew what she had in mind; sometimes not. I never asked. She said, almost chanting, “You’re doing this to make me fail,” as the pages flipped by.

  She’d say it again early in the morning as she flung out the door still wearing her clothes of the previous day, in which she’d slept, for maybe an hour, before leaving. Her long black hair bouncing and flying, blouse crumpled and half-buttoned, skirt twisted on her hips, she hustled through the Village streets to NYU, like a madwoman imitating a college student.

  We were sitting on the bed after dinner. I was looking at a magazine. Sylvia was beginning to study. I commented on the beauty of one of the models in an advertisement. Sylvia glanced at the photo, then said, “Your ideal of beauty is blue, slanted eyes.”

  “So?”

  Sylvia dropped backward on the bed, pulled the pillows against her ears, and began sobbing and thrashing. Then she stopped, sat up, and said, “I never went into detail about my sexual experiences.”

  I sat in silence and waited. She fell back again, made leering, hating faces, writhed like an epileptic, and then sat up and slapped my cheek and said, “I can’t see why you don’t adore me.”

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

  In the throes of hysteria, her voice might suddenly become cool and elegant, and she’d make a witty remark, as if she were detached from herself and every quality of the moment was clear to her—the hatefulness of her display as well as my startled appreciation of her wit. I took this as a good sign, thinking it meant she wasn’t really nuts. She felt the same way about it. “I know how I’m behaving,” she’d say whenever I tried to talk to her about seeing a psychiatrist. She couldn’t, then, see a psychiatrist. She knew herself; she couldn’t talk about her excesses. Too shameful, too embarrassing.

  Admiring the beauty of the model, an image in a magazine, meant I disliked Sylvia’s looks and didn’t love her. In casual chatter she heard inadvertent revelations of my true feelings. She was outraged. I loved the model. I’d said as much, damned myself.

  Sylvia discovered an incapacitating sentimental disease in me. Together, we nourished it. I wasn’t a good enough person, I’d think, whereas she was a precious mechanism in which exceedingly fine springs and wheels had been brutally mangled by grief. Grief gave her access to the truth. If Sylvia said I was bad, she was right. I couldn’t see why, but that’s because I was bad. Blinded by badness.

  She had to be right. I’d been living with her for months. I protected my investment, so to speak, by supposing that her hysteria and her accusations were not revolting and contemptible but a highly moral thing, like the paroxysm of an Old Testament prophet. They were fiery illuminations, moments of perverse grace. Not the manifestation of lunacy.

  In a normal, defensive way, I’d also think nobody had ever talked to me as Sylvia did. That meant I wasn’t bad, maybe. Nobody ever blamed me for having thoughts and feelings I didn’t have. But even if I’d had bad thoughts and a generally nasty mental life, so what? Didn’t I behave well? I was very affectionate, always touching. I came to believe the thoughts and feelings Sylvia hated in me were hers more than mine.

  It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it.

  Repetition, according to religious thinkers, is seriousness. Working, eating, sleeping is repetition. The rising sun, phases of the moon, revolutions of planets and stars—everything in the universe repeats. Everything is ritual. To stop repeating is death—not the reverse. It was a fact of our daily life, as serious as our fights and compulsive sex, that we climbed six flights of stairs to and from the street. Our footsteps sounded in the resonant stairwell, day and night. To go to classes at NYU, Sylvia climbed twice, five times a week. I listened to her going. I heard her returning. To go to the grocery, movies, local bars, or the mailbox, we climbed six flights down, six flights up. To buy a pack of cigarettes required the same number of steps as when I went to visit my father in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, after his second heart attack. The doctors said my father also had prostate cancer, but they didn’t want to operate in the summer. “It’s too hot.” I told this to Sylvia. Instantly, she said, “In the winter it will be too cold.” I was surprised by the pain her remark caused me. But of course she was right. I hadn’t understood the doctors, or hadn’t wanted to. They didn’t think my father would survive an operation. There was no point in operating. He wouldn’t live long enough to die of cancer. I had not understood.

  The stairway was the spine of the building, the steps were vertebrae. I climbed through a body. It exuded odors and made noises. I smelled food cooking, incense burning, and the gases of hashish and roach poison. I heard radios and phonograph players, the old Italian lady who screamed “Bassano” every day, and the boy’s footsteps running in the hall. Bassano never answered the old lady, presumably his grandmother, and I never once saw him. When I met her in the hallway or on the stairs, she always nodded and said, “Nice day,” regardless of the weather.

  At the landings, the hallway struck left and right toward the apartments. A light bulb burned at the landings where four toilets stood side by side, the doors shut. The toilets were closets about ten feet high, four feet wide, and six feet deep. Above the bowl was a water tank, it gurgled and clanked. When you finished, you pulled a chain. This wasn’t the kind of toilet where people settled down with literature.

  Because the street door didn’t lock and anyone might enter the building, our toilet was sometimes used by strangers. Toilet d
oors locked from the inside with hook-and-eye latches. I once saw a ruby of brilliant blood gleaming on the toilet seat. It had just been used by somebody to shoot up. Another time I opened the door on a boy and girl fucking. He sat on the bowl facing the door, his jeans and underwear around his ankles. She faced him, straddling his thighs, the divided flesh of her ass flaring. Her jeans and underwear lay in a pile. The boy stared over her left shoulder, his features squeezed by pleasure and strain. He stared directly at my eyes, oblivious to all but the feeling that beat in his cock. The girl was galloping hard. She didn’t hear me open the door, didn’t turn around, didn’t lose the rhythm. I shut the door and hurried back to our apartment, told Sylvia. She said, “What if I need to use the toilet? I don’t want to find people in there.” She ordered me to tell them to get out or we’d call the police. I didn’t want to. She didn’t really want to either, but she’d taken a proprietary stand, her bourgeois dignity—of which she had none—was at stake. “If you don’t go tell them,” she said, “I will.”

  We went together.

  I opened the door. The couple was gone.

  Mother phoned just to talk, got Sylvia. Sylvia said she’d cut her hair badly, was too upset to talk, gave the phone to me.

  Mother said, “How is Sylvia’s finger?”

  I said, “Nothing is wrong with her finger.”

  “No? She told me she cut her finger.”

  “No. It’s her hair,” I said. “She cut her hair badly. She doesn’t like the way it looks.”

  “Oh, I thought she cut her finger. I was worried. Daddy heard and he was also aggravated.”

  He must have heard through mental telepathy. My mother sounded confused, intimidated by Sylvia.

  Hurt, insulted, confused, my mother doesn’t understand why Sylvia dislikes her. She is helpless to do anything about it. Her greatest worry was that I might marry a shikse. Nothing to worry about.

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

  A main cause of our fights was my desire to get off the bed after dinner and go into the tiny room adjoining the living room. It contained a cot, a kitchen chair, and a shaky wooden table where I set my typewriter. The table was shoved against the tall window, leaving only inches between the back of my chair and the cot. I sat at the table, looking out over the rooftops, with their chimneys, clotheslines, water tanks, and pigeon coops, toward the Hudson River and the Upper West Side. If I looked down, I looked into the bedroom windows of a tenement about fifty feet away. Winds from the west rattled the window glass, penetrating old loose putty, carrying icy air from the Hudson River to my fingers. They stiffened as I typed. My chin and the tip of my nose became numb. I’d hear Sylvia sigh and lip the pages of her books. I could hear the sound of her pencil when she made notes. I was four steps away. Nevertheless, she’d feel abandoned, excluded, lonely, angry, and God knows what else. Only four steps away, but I was out of sight and not seeing her. She may have felt herself ceasing to exist. She didn’t want me to go into the cold room.

  After dinner I lingered with her on the bed, reading a magazine as she collected notebooks, preparing to study. When she began to study, I’d begin to leave the bed. I never just left in a simple, natural way, but always with vague gradualness, letting Sylvia get used to the idea. I’d stir, lay aside the magazine, lean toward the cold room.

  “Going to your hole?”

  Sometimes I’d settle back onto the bed, thinking, “I’ll write tomorrow when she’s at school. Maybe she’ll go to sleep in a few hours. I’ll write then. A small sacrifice. Better than a fight.” That in itself—my desire not to fight—could be an incitement. “Why don’t we discuss this for a minute . . .” To sound rational, when she was wrought up, wrought her up further, like a smack in the face. She once threw the typewriter she’d given me—“To help you write”—at my head. An Olivetti portable, Lettera 22. It struck a wall, then the floor, but was undamaged. I still use it. She also failed to destroy the telephone, though she often tried, knocking it off the shelf, or flinging it against the brick wall.

  I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn’t know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself.

  Writing a story wasn’t as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I’d find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn’t. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.

  Writing in the cold room, I’d sometimes become exhilarated, as if I’d transcended all difficulties, done something good. The story had written itself. It bore no residual trace of me. It was clean. A day later, rereading with a more critical eye, I sank into the blackest notions of my fate. I’d wanted so little, just a story that wouldn’t make me feel ashamed of myself next week, or five years from now. It was too much to want. The story I’d written was no good. It broke my heart. I was no good.

  “Going to your hole?”

  I felt I was digging it.

  Sylvia had a pain in her shoulder. She lay in bed and asked me to rub it, but when I touched her she squirmed spasmodically and pushed my hand away. I kept trying to do it right, but she wouldn’t stop squirming and wouldn’t tell me just where to rub. Then she lunged out of bed and paced the room, rubbing her shoulder herself.

  “I have a sore spot. A stranger could rub it better than you.”

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

  Sylvia was often in pain or a nervous, defeated condition, especially when she got her period. She’d lie on the couch, our bed, groaning, whimpering, begging me to go buy her Tampax. I didn’t see how it could ease her pain, but she was insistent, whining and writhing. She needed Tampax. This invariably happened very late, long after midnight, when I was thinking about going to sleep. Instead of sleeping, I’d be out in the streets looking for an open drugstore. I dreaded the man at the counter, who would think I was an exceptionally bizarre Village transvestite. I asked for Tampax in a hoodlumish voice, as if it were manufactured for brutal males. One night, when I returned to the apartment with the box of Tampax, I detected the faintest smile on Sylvia’s lips. Having me buy her Tampax turned her on. I decided never to do it again. As if she’d read my mind, she stopped asking.

  How much else was theater? Sylvia knew how she was behaving. She didn’t want to discuss it with a psychiatrist. Too embarrassing and there was no point. Maybe everything was theater. The difference between one person and another lay in what they knew about their private theaters. Willy Stark had some idea like that: everything is theater; nothing is real. Everybody had a role to play; or, everybody, like it or not, had to play a role. You played in your theater, or in somebody else’s, depending on your willpower and imagination. Around then, in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was telling the world that he’d never killed a Jew or a non-Jew. Killing wasn’t in his nature. But, he said, if he’d been ordered from high up in the SS to kill his father, he’d have done it.

  Sylvia looks in the mirror and dreams about lovers as she cuts her hair. She worries about pimples, pains, and pregnancy, and she worries about what everyone thinks of her, and she spends a lot of time sleeping, or lying about eating candy and frosted rolls, complaining of pains. Occasionally, she will show me affection. She went on today about her periods, how much of her life has bled away.

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

  I recorded our fights in a secret journal because I was less and less able to remember how they started. There would be an inadvertent insult, then disproportionate
anger. I would feel I didn’t know why this was happening. I was the object of terrific fury, but what had I done? What had I said? Sometimes I would have the impression that the anger wasn’t actually directed at me. I’d merely stepped into the line of fire, the real target being long dead. I wasn’t him. He wasn’t me. I’d somehow become Sylvia’s hallucination. Perhaps I didn’t really exist, at least not the way a table, a hat, or a person exists. Once, when I thought a bad scene was over, I lay down and threw my arm over my eyes. It was after 3 a.m., but Sylvia refused to turn off the light. She sat in a chair, six feet from the bed, and watched me. Then I heard her say, “I don’t know how you find the courage to go to sleep.” She might stick a knife in my heart, I supposed. But she couldn’t afford to kill me. She’d be alone. Sleep took no courage.

  Another time she pulled all my shirts out of the dresser and threw them on the floor and jumped up and down on them and spit on them. I seized her wrists and pressed her down on the bed while I shouted into her face that I loved her. By tiny degrees, she seemed to relax, to relent. I urged her along, more observer than committed fighter, and I sensed the changes she passed through, each degree of feeling.

  After a fight, unless there was sex, Sylvia usually collapsed into sleep. Ringing with anguish, exceedingly awake, I forced myself to rethink the fight, moment by moment, writing it all down in the cold room as Sylvia slept. It was my way of knowing, if nothing else, that this was really happening. It was also a way of talking about it, though only to myself. I hid the journal in a space just below the surface of the table where I wrote stories. None of the stories were about life on MacDougal Street. My life wasn’t subject matter. It wasn’t to be exploited for the purpose of fiction. I’d never even talked about it to anyone, and I imagined that nobody knew how bad things were. As a matter of high principle and shame, I kept everything that happened on MacDougal Street to myself. By sneaking the events into my journal, when Sylvia collapsed, I made them seem even more secret. Then, one afternoon, Malcolm Raphael, another old friend from the University of Michigan, visited. We were alone in the apartment. He said he’d just come from Majorca, where he’d overheard some Americans, lying near him on the beach, talking about me and Sylvia. One of them lived in our building. He described our fights to the others.