Sylvia: A Novel Page 5

  I felt myself going blind and deaf, repudiating the news, denying it in my physiology. It was like fainting. Malcolm saw my reaction, laughed, and told me about the fights he’d had with his wife. It was an extraordinary moment. Men never talked to each other this way. His fights were as bad as mine, but he made them seem funny. He was unashamed.

  I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too, even a charming, sophisticated guy like Malcolm. We laughed together. I felt happily irresponsible. Countless men and women, I supposed, all over America, were tearing each other to pieces. How great. I was normal. It was a delightful feeling, but to think this way also gave me the creeps. I was reminded of some former acquaintances, flamboyant gay kids I’d met years ago, while learning how to skate at Iceland, the rink next to Madison Square Garden. I’d find them speeding about, slashing ice, or gathered at the edge of the rink watching the skaters and gossiping. They referred to everyone as a “faggot.” The cop we passed in the street was a “cop-faggot.” The mayor of New York was a “mayor-faggot.” A famous football player was a “football-faggot.” Every “he” was a “she.” The more manly, strict, correct, official, moral, authoritative, the more faggot she.

  Now, after listening to Malcolm, I felt like the gay kids—shame notwithstanding—onstage, my secret life subject to the voracious curiosity of everybody, and in their gayish manner, I let myself think every man and woman who lived together were like Sylvia and me. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable. Whatever people thought of me, I could think it first of them. I could flaunt my shame as a form of contempt for others. No better disguise for shame than contempt, and nothing is easier to do than to sneer and denigrate. Nothing is more pleasing to the vanity of others. Any two people chatting are making invidious remarks about a third. It is a perverse form of generosity, and self-adoration.

  Sylvia knew nothing about the gossip. Since she lived in constant fear of humiliation, I didn’t tell her. The fact that our cover was blown strengthened my commitment to her. She’d really been hurt, virtually killed, even if she didn’t know it. We weren’t yet married, but Sylvia wanted to do it soon, and the simple idea that it would be unwise for us to marry did not occur to me. If I did not want to marry Sylvia, I couldn’t think I didn’t, couldn’t let myself know it. I had no thoughts or feelings that weren’t moral. When I added two and two, a certain moral sensation arrived with the number four.

  Sylvia complained again of a swollen spot on the back of her neck. I rubbed the area for a little while. I felt nothing swollen. Anyhow, the complaining stopped. I then said I wanted to go do some work. She said she had a stomachache. I didn’t believe her, and I despised myself for not believing her. She needed comfort. Whether or not she had real pain was irrelevant. She lay on her stomach and moaned in different ways, emitted small shrieks. I asked her to stop, turned her over. She moaned through bared teeth, her eyes wide and fixed on mine. I cupped her mouth. She bit my hand, then sobbed and said I could go. She wanted me to go. I could continue living with her if I liked, but I was also free to go. She let me hold her. I cried a little, kissing her, holding her. I showed love, but it felt like a self-accusation, or an apology. That was my apology—very sincere—but it was for nothing specific. Like a religious convulsion. You apologize for being alive, for not being sick, for not being physically deformed, for not being as bad off as other people. I don’t know what I apologized for. Maybe for the love I desecrated by not believing in Sylvia’s pain. I felt utterly sincere, apologizing, kissing her. It was too delicious, I think.

  JOURNAL, MARCH 1961

  I was affected by cultural radiations from newspapers, radio, movies, television, but my life was MacDougal Street, voices through the walls, traffic noises through the windows, odors floating up the stairwell, and always Sylvia. A visit to my parents lasted only a few hours. There was no place to go where I might forget MacDougal Street and Sylvia for a little while.

  With few exceptions, Sylvia imagined my friends were her enemies. Once, hurrying back to the apartment from a twenty-minute meeting with a friend in the San Remo bar, a hundred feet from the entrance to our building, I opened the apartment door on madness. Sylvia, at the stove, five feet away, turned toward me holding a plate of spaghetti in her hand—already startling, since she never cooked—and the plate came sailing toward my face, strands of spaghetti untangling like a ball of snakes. “Dinner,” she said. I caught it against my forearm.

  She’d been enraged by my meeting downstairs, so she cooked spaghetti. Why? She saw herself standing at the stove and cooking spaghetti like a woman who does such things for a man. The man, however, being viciously ungrateful, abandoned her. While Sylvia slaved over a boiling pot of spaghetti, I regaled myself with conversation and a glass of beer. In a bitterly hideous way, it struck me as funny, but I wasn’t laughing.

  The telephone, if it rang for me, was also her enemy. She’d say, “His master’s voice,” and hand me the phone. After I put it down, she’d jeer, “You love Bernie, don’t you?” He was a witty guy. I’d laughed too hard at his remarks during the phone call, and Sylvia resented all that flow of feeling in his direction. Eventually, when answering the phone, if Sylvia was in the room, I kept my voice even and dull, or edged with annoyance, as if the call were tedious. I learned to talk in two voices, one for the caller, the other for Sylvia, who listened nearby in the tiny apartment, storing up acid criticisms.

  I liked Sylvia’s friends, and I was glad when they phoned or visited. They proved Sylvia was lovable, and they let me believe that we were good company. I wanted Sylvia to have lots of friends, but she was carefully selective and soon got rid of her prettiest girlfriends, keeping only those who didn’t remind her of her physical imperfections. In a department store, if a saleslady merely told Sylvia that a dress was too long for her, she took it as a comment on her repulsive shortness. If a saleslady said bright yellow was wrong for Sylvia, it was a judgment on her repulsive complexion. She would quickly drag me out into the street, telling me that I thought the same as the saleslady.

  “Why don’t you admit it?” she said.

  If the saleslady was affectionate and sincerely attentive, Sylvia would buy anything from her. For every hundred dollars she spent on clothes, she got about fifty cents in value, and would have done better, at much less cost, in a Salvation Army thrift shop, blindfolded. When she liked some piece of clothing and felt good wearing it—a certain cashmere sweater, a cotton blouse, or her tweed coat with the torn sleeve—she’d wear it for days. She’d sleep in it.

  Saturday was spent making up for Friday. We slept, made love, ate. I didn’t write, she didn’t study. We tried to sleep again, couldn’t sleep. Made love. Not well, but exhaustingly. She said, “You’re not natural.” We slept.

  JOURNAL, MARCH 1961

  My mother’s way of trying to help was to send food. I carried large grocery bags of bagels, fried chicken, potato latkes, cakes, and cookies to MacDougal Street. My father’s way was silence and looks of sad philosophical concern, which was no help, but he also gave me money. Our expenses were low, forty dollars a month for rent, maybe a little more for the food we kept in the refrigerator where it would be safe from roaches—spaghetti, oranges, eggs, coffee, milk, bread, and the pastries Sylvia loved. Gas and electric cost us about ten or eleven dollars a month.

  The one time I tried to tell my father about my life with Sylvia, I became incoherent and suffered visibly. As in a dream, I couldn’t seem to say what I intended. My mouth felt weak and too big, my words sloppy. But he understood. Even before I did, he understood I was asking for his permission to do something terrible. He cut me off, saying, “She’s an orphan. You cannot abandon her.” A plain moral law. He couldn’t bear listening to me, seeing my torment. So he didn’t allow discussion, didn’t let me speak evil. Then he told about the wretchedness of husbands. He knew a man, seventy-seven years old, an i
mmigrant Jew from Poland with a butcher shop on Hester Street, whose wife told the FBI he was a communist. They investigated him, and he spent nine days in jail. Fortunately, his name was good in the neighborhood. He wasn’t a communist. I got the point. Wives might do bad things to their husbands, but nothing could or should be done to end the miseries of the couple. The couple is absolute, immutable as the sea and the shore. With his little story, my father condemned me to marriage.

  I’d wanted him to say something, but not that. I went away lonely and wretched. More than ever, I had to talk to somebody and I wondered about seeing a psychiatrist. In graduate school, I had read an essay on Jonathan Swift by the psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre. It was well written and, unlike much psychoanalytic writing, seemed conscious of literary values. Maybe I could talk to her. I thought about what I could say or dare not say. Finally, I dialed her number. She gave me an appointment.

  Her living room was her office. A big room, with chairs and couches covered by lovely fabrics. The atmosphere was entirely domestic and pleasant, not the least medical. Had people come here to rave about their miserable lives? There were literary magazines, like the Hudson Review, on a coffee table. I felt out of place, not so much that I’d brought misery to this lovely room, but that I lacked the cultivation necessary to discuss my ugly case. Again I was having trouble talking. How could I say what brought me here? Where would I find the words? Where would I begin? Then I noticed Greenacre was suffering from an attack of hay fever, and it became hard to think about anything else. She was on the verge of sneezing, sniffling constantly, pressing tissues to her nose, trying to look at me through teary eyes. Her head was full of turbulent waters. It was discouraging.

  I began by apologizing for not being able to talk objectively about my problems. I said I wasn’t sure I could get things right, or even review the events of my story correctly—what came first, what next. It was important, I said, no matter what I might say, not to misjudge Sylvia. I didn’t want to make her sound like something she wasn’t. Greenacre should be suspicious of every word I uttered. It was probably all lies. I’d try to tell the truth, but it was probably going to be a lie. My life, after all, wasn’t a story. It was just moments, what happens from day to day, and it didn’t mean anything, and there was no moral. I was unhappy, but that was beside the point, not that there was a point. I couldn’t be objective. I couldn’t be correct. I’d be entertaining, maybe, because that’s how I was. A fool. Greenacre interrupted:

  “Just talk. Don’t worry about being objective.”

  Her remark was very brutal, I thought; also embarrassing. She seemed not to appreciate how I’d been struggling to make clear the difficulty, for me, in saying anything, and therefore how amazing it was that I’d come this far, sitting here with a doctor, trying desperately to make it understood that I could never make anything clear, and the entire enterprise was worthless. Suddenly—jolted by her brutal interruption—I heard myself. I’d merely bumbled for five minutes. I’d been boring. I’d frustrated the doctor. If I had only this incoherent stuff to offer, she couldn’t do her job. I was virtually demented.

  She waited, also struggling, if not against boredom then against hay fever for composure and concentration.

  I then plunged ahead; talked for fifty minutes, withholding a little, but without being incoherent. She sniffled and responded to nothing, just took it all in. At the end, she said Sylvia and I both needed psychoanalysis. She would recommend someone, if I liked. She was no longer practicing, only acting as a consultant.

  I asked if she had any idea about Sylvia and me, any impression she might be able to give me. She seemed reluctant to say another word. But I’d come across, told her so much. I was going to pay for the hour. With a shrug and a dismissive tone, she said, “You’re feeding on each other.”

  Toward the end of our time on MacDougal Street, I convinced Sylvia to visit a psychiatrist at Columbia Neuro-psychiatric. A friend of Sylvia’s had been seeing him, and he said the doctor knew his business and was a decent guy. Sylvia let me make an appointment for her. The day of the appointment, Sylvia refused to get out of bed. I begged her. I argued and cajoled and yelled. Finally, I ran out the door, down the stairs, and hailed a taxi. I went to the appointment. It was extremely embarrassing. I explained as best I could. The doctor let me talk, listened to me for about an hour and a half. For the first time, I had no trouble talking. The bad scene with Sylvia before leaving the apartment, and the wild rush uptown, had thrust me into the middle of our saga. I talked about what happened minutes ago and what was happening day after day. I talked rapidly and lucidly, and I produced a voluminously detailed picture. At last, as if he’d heard something crucial, he said, “Has she started calling you a homosexual?” I told him about the Tampax. He said this is very serious. Sylvia ought to be committed. If I’d sign papers, he’d do the rest. He followed me to the head of the stairs, calling after me, “This is very serious.”

  Maybe I’d wanted to hear him say something like that. Whether or not we were “feeding on each other” was less important than the fact that Sylvia was certifiably, technically nuts. This knowledge was horribly exciting. It made me very high. I ran to the subway, sobbing a little, running back to my madwoman. I’d been strengthened by new, positive knowledge, and a sense of connection to the wisdom of our healing institutions. As a result, nothing changed.

  Awakened by a phone call. Sylvia, in a hurry to go to school, asks for the mailbox key on her way out the door. I say, “Will you let me know if I got any mail?” She says, “No. I need something to read during class.” She leaves. I hang up the phone. She comes back carrying a letter from my brother. She says, “Can I read it?” I say, “No.” She says, “Why not?” I say, “He might have intended it for me.” She shouts, stomps the floor, pulls the door shut with a great bang, runs down the stairs. I make coffee and gobble up half a loaf of bread without slicing it, tearing off wads, smearing the wads with butter, jamming them into my mouth.

  JOURNAL, MARCH 1961

  One evening, after another long fight, Sylvia went raging out of the apartment to take an exam in Greek, saying she would fail, she had no hope of passing, she would fail disgracefully, it was my fault, and “I will get you for this.” The door slammed. I sat on the bed listening to her footsteps hurry down the hall, then down the stairs. I was immobilized by self-pity, and, as usual, unable to remember how the fight had started, or even what it was about except that Sylvia was going to tell my parents about me, and report me to the police, and she would do something personally, too. In a spasm of strange determination, I got up, went out the door, and followed her through the streets to NYU. I was stunned and blank, but moving, crossing streets, walking through the park, then joining a crowd of students and entering the main building of NYU, following Sylvia down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, and down another hallway to her exam room. I stood outside the room and looked in. She sat in the last row and hadn’t removed her thin, brown leather wraparound winter coat, its tall collar standing higher than her ears. The coat was nothing against a New York winter, but Sylvia thought she looked great in it and wore it constantly, even on the coldest days. She was bent, huddled over the questions printed on her exam paper, as if the exam itself delivered heavy blows to her shoulders and the top of her head. Her ballpoint pen, clutched in a bloodless fist, moved very quickly, her face close to the page, breathing on the words she wrote. Five minutes after the hour, she surrendered the paper to her professor and came out of the room with a yellowish face, looking killed. When she saw me, she came to me without seeming in the least surprised, and whispered that she had been humiliated, had failed, it was my fault. But her tone was not reproachful. She leaned against me a little as we started away from the room. I could feel how glad she was to find me waiting for her. I put my arm around her. She let me kiss her. We walked home together, my arm around her, keeping her warm.

  Her exam was the best in the class, and the professor urged her to persist in classical st
udies. She was pleased, more or less, but whatever she felt lacked the depth and intensity of her feelings before the exam. Her pleasure in being praised had no comparable importance, no comparable meaning. The success wasn’t herself. It had no necessity, like the shape of her hands or knees. It didn’t matter to her.

  She didn’t always do that well; but considering how we lived, it was a miracle she passed any course. She took no pride in her success and never exhibited her learning in conversation, never referred to it. She was basically uninterested; only performing. Academic achievements, to her, were an embarrassment.

  “I’d give thirty points off my IQ for a shorter nose.”

  “Nothing is wrong with your nose.”

  “It’s too long, a millimeter too long.”

  Agatha Seaman, who lived in Yonkers and visited Sylvia regularly, told her about a doctor in Switzerland who could reshape her nose without surgery, molding it by hand over a period of weeks at his clinic in the Alps, where you could also ski and the meals were marvelous. “Everybody goes there.” Sylvia cared less about the shape of her nose than its length, but she yearned for the mythical doctor. He’d been mentioned in a fashion magazine and described as the darling of European society. Sylvia was resentful of Agatha, because she could easily afford to spend weeks at the alpine clinic. Not that Sylvia would go if she could afford it. Still, she wanted to believe there was such a doctor, and hope existed for her nose, and it was available to her, not just Agatha.