Sylvia: A Novel Read online

  I liked Sylvia’s nose, but I said nothing, certainly nothing about the fantasy doctor. I might easily say the wrong thing. My idea was that Sylvia wanted someone to do to her nose what she did to her dresses, which was to change them. She changed their length or width, or removed a collar or added a collar or tightened the shoulders. She always ruined her dresses, or else she decided, after much cutting and sewing, that the changes didn’t work for her. There were dozens of beautiful dresses and skirts, purchased with inheritance money soon after her mother’s death. None of them fit like another. They were stuffed into boxes and suitcases that were jammed under the couch and in the back of the closet and almost never opened. She wore only a few things and she had no memory of the extent of her wardrobe, no idea of how many thousands of dollars she had spent on clothes. Since she often fell asleep in her clothes—too depressed or too lazy to undress, or because she felt good in what she was wearing—she wore the same thing for days while hundreds of pieces of clothing, altered and realtered, were simply forgotten and never worn.

  I hoped that she’d leave her nose alone. As for Agatha’s doctor, he was like everything else in her life, an extravagant fantasy somehow related to boys. Agatha was subject to passionate fixations on boys, always younger than she, and always poor, ignorant, dark—Arab, Turk, Italian, Puerto Rican—sublimely handsome, and invariably vicious. If they weren’t vicious when they met Agatha, she helped them discover it in themselves. Then she told Sylvia about it. Sylvia told me. Month after month, I heard about the boys.

  Sprawling for hours on our couch, Agatha would tell Sylvia exceedingly detailed stories about the boys—how last night she waited in an alley behind the hotel where Abdul or Francisco or Julio worked as a bellhop or a busboy, and when he appeared after work, she surprised him. The boys were outraged by these surprises, but Agatha always brought gifts—jewelry, leather jackets, luscious silk shirts—tickets of admission to their lives. Trembling with humility and fear, she held the gift toward the boy. Unable to reject it, he relented, and she’d follow him down the street as he fondled the gift, maybe tried it on. Sylvia imitated Agatha imitating herself, whimpering about how gorgeous he looked, how she’d been absolutely right, “Magenta was Abdul’s color” or “Francisco looked divine in black silk.”

  Gradually, the boy’s anger gave way to a different, yet related feeling. The boy would lead Agatha into a doorway or a phone booth where he might allow her to blow him. Sometimes he’d turn her around and abuse her from behind, then leave her burning and bleeding and go to meet his real date. Agatha referred to the boy’s date as “a mean selfish bitch.” With monotonic matter-of-factness, she told Sylvia exactly what the boys did to her. She never seemed to notice that her stories always followed the same pattern—passionate fixation, gifts, debasement, abandonment. Her stories were true, I think, but so much the same it began to seem Agatha was enslaved by the pattern, living to do it again and again and to tell Sylvia that it had happened again. Telling about it was masturbatory, but just as important as the real experience; maybe more important, or maybe there was no difference any longer for Agatha. She and Sylvia would lie about for hours, sometimes drawing portraits of each other as they drank tea and Agatha told her story. They looked beautifully civilized in their intimacy.

  Agatha, always giving the boys gifts, might have been a gift sufficient in herself—a slender blonde about the same size and shape as Sylvia—but she indulged an enervated, unattractive manner. Her voice, kept low and dull to suggest feminine reserve, suggested instead a low-voltage brain and morbidity. Her complexion, embalmed for years in cosmetic chemicals, had the texture of tofu.

  Contempt, pity, prurient fascination, and affection bound Sylvia to Agatha. I liked her, too, and also felt the other things. She had a sickly, languid manner, making her seem physically weak, and an air of fear and injury, which gave her the appeal of a doomed kitten. A small face with light blue staring eyes; a small mouth with lips that hardly moved when she talked. Nobody was more harmless or perversely exciting. The boys sometimes beat up Agatha, but she never seemed to bruise or scar, at least not visibly. There was no tension in her. Nothing resisted; nothing broke.

  Despite righteous anger at the terrible boys, and sympathy for Agatha, it was impossible not to taste their nasty gratification. Her very harmlessness invoked torturers. Being rich and pampered was already potentially offensive. The expensive gifts, which the boys were unable to reject, pleased them and compromised them at once. In some strange way, the gifts seemed to beg for a return in affectionate cruelty. The boys did what she wanted them to do. They served her need to grovel, to feel pain, to collect experience for her stories. Otherwise, nothing happened to Agatha. She spent hours and hours shopping, but, aside from the time she spent with boys, she didn’t seem to live. She never had a conversation with anyone that she thought was worth repeating. She was never impressed by anything in Paris or Rome or wherever she vacationed; at least she never said what she’d seen or done in Europe unless it had to do with boys. She never mentioned a book. She did nothing athletic aside from the few sexual contortions in which she accommodated boys. She did go to movies, but she was never able to remember what the movies had been about, only what the actors looked like and maybe what they wore.

  Nevertheless, she always had something to talk about. Lying on the couch in our small, roach-infested apartment, wearing the smartest frock from the smartest shop, Agatha produced her tales of abomination. It was her life. She was interested in almost nothing. She had everything she wanted. Every pleasure, every pain. From smart shop to sleazy joint, the limp, colorless bit of girl burned along the extremist cutting edge of the sixties until her mother had her committed to a Manhattan madhouse. When Sylvia heard it cost several hundred dollars a day, she was outraged. She didn’t want to visit Agatha, but finally the old feelings returned.

  Agatha received us in a clean gray room—empty except for a bed, a table with a flower vase, and a chair—with barred windows, high above the city. She looked even softer and more languid. She looked chastened into quiet, spiritual composure. It was indeed a look. Plain and pure and holy. It was also sexy. The look was Agatha’s, not a designer’s. Basic Agatha, the look of her soul, her true, plain being. All connection with her former self, and the material world of glamour and depravity, had been severed. She looked good, and also like a good person.

  We asked how she felt living in the hospital, incarcerated, under constant scrutiny. She answered by naming celebrities who had stayed in this hospital, and then she talked about several young people, presently among the inmates, who were marvelously interesting. She’d fallen among sensitive kids like herself. Artists, really, not lunatics. She had many new friends.

  We’d gone to the hospital feeling pity for her. It was a cold dark day, and we’d had to walk against the wind for blocks and blocks, but it seemed necessary and decent to be doing this for Agatha. We felt good about ourselves. When we left the hospital the wind instantly reminded us of the painful streets, and we didn’t feel good anymore; we laughed at ourselves and hurried home feeling annoyed and foolish, like poor ignorant folks who’d had no idea that a hospital, even with bars on the windows, might be chic and fascinating. Agatha loved the place, was in no hurry to leave. She stayed about five weeks and came out a lesbian, having met and fallen in love with a wonderful crazy girl who treated her badly.

  Only about twenty days before the wedding and we had a fight. Not worse than other fights but, the wedding so close, it felt more bitter, more wrong. I tried to get Sylvia out of bed at 8 a.m., when the alarm went off. She shrieked, slapped the blanket, demanded to be let alone. I cuddled and rocked her, trying very gently to get her out of bed. It was important to me—since we are getting married—that we begin trying to live in a normal, regular way. She knew what I thought, took it as a criticism. Refused to get up. Around noon she got up and said she wanted to buy some bras and a wedding dress. She wanted me to go with her. She insisted I go with her. I
said I needed a shave; didn’t want to walk into a woman’s clothing store looking the way I did. The truth is I didn’t want to go. She said it didn’t matter how I looked. I shaved. We went. It was very windy and burning cold. She said that if she’d known how cold it was, she wouldn’t have insisted that I go with her. In a store on Eighth Street, she tried on two dresses. The first was red with a flat neck. It set off her complexion, eyes, and hair. She looked nice, but a red dress didn’t look right for a wedding. I don’t know why she bothered putting it on. Maybe she thought this dress would be an exception, as if there were a kind of red that a bride might wear. She did look good in it. The second dress was yellow and had a flared skirt. It made her look rather wide, and it brought out yellowish tones in her skin. Later, she said that my face had been ugly with disapproval in the clothing store. “You know I’m a pig, and I know I’m a pig,” she said. In the apartment again, she sat on the bed in her coat. Nothing had been accomplished. She hadn’t bought bras or a wedding dress. I said, “Let’s clean up this place.” She said, “Yes.” Her answer raised my spirits and I began to move about, picking things up. She noticed my show of energy, my optimism. She collapsed onto the bed, still in her coat, and she closed her eyes and started to go to sleep. I think I knew, before she collapsed, that I’d made a big mistake. My bustling about wouldn’t inspire Sylvia to do the same. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was my way of being insensitive, pretending not really to know her feelings, my way of not loving her. Seeing her lie there, in her coat, I quit trying to clean up. It was all very depressing, my stupid bustling and her collapse. I was more conscious than ever before of the havoc in our apartment, and in my heart. She keeps telling me that I think she is a pig. She doesn’t like her face, doesn’t like her body. I don’t want to love her anymore. Too hard. I’m not good enough.

  JOURNAL, MARCH 1961

  We went to the Village Vanguard, about five or six blocks from MacDougal Street, to see Lenny Bruce. The room was jammed and very dark. You couldn’t make out the ceiling, or the faces of people who stood along the bar. Hardly enough light for the waiters to pass between the tables. Light seemed concentrated in the spotlight on Lenny Bruce.

  He wore a black leather jacket and had a hunched, scrawny, unwholesome, ratlike ferocity. His face, flattened and drained by the spotlight, looked hard, a poolroom face, not an entertainer. He began by reading a letter from a priest. It said Lenny Bruce is a moral genius, a great satirist. After reading the letter, Bruce began a routine made up mainly of shock words. He said “nigger,” “kike,” “spic,” while pointing to people in the audience. The audience tittered, laughed, then laughed more—and then—laughed as if we’d all gone over the edge, crazed by the annihilation of proprieties, or whatever had kept us from this until now. But Sylvia wasn’t laughing. She smiled tentatively, as if more frightened than amused.

  Bruce said a word like “nigger” had power because it was suppressed. He spoke quickly. Nothing must be suppressed. We mustn’t keep ourselves from knowing how depraved we are. At once scary and hilarious, he seemed to make sense. Who could resist him? A hysterically funny dead-white ratface attacked political hypocrisies and puritanical attitudes toward sex. He did a long routine on the word “snot.” The word became the thing. He said imagine it on the sleeve of his suede jacket, shining, stiff, impossible to remove. He rushed toward the audience with the medal of snot on his sleeve. People shrieked with pleasure. Another routine was about a lady selling cosmetics, the Avon Lady, who came to Bruce’s house. She wanted to speak to his wife, who was in the bedroom, lying naked and unconscious in bed, sleeping off some drug. Bruce described himself dashing into the bedroom to make his wife presentable. He hung galoshes on her feet. Then he led the Avon Lady into the room. The audience laughed and screamed. In another routine, about an auto accident, Bruce made a picture of a man being lifted from a mangled car, half dead, bleeding heavily, in terrible pain. As he is carried to an ambulance, this man cannot help studying the beautiful ass of a nurse. The audience laughed and screamed. I laughed as much as anyone and felt a pleasing terror, like leaping from a high place. Now Sylvia was in tears, like a child, helpless with amazement, laughing. Our waiter stood beside our table, doubled over as if broken, clutching himself about the middle, paralyzed. Another waiter appeared and said, “Every fucking night this happens to you,” and put his arm around him and led him away, still doubled over, broken by laughter.

  Sylvia said she didn’t do well on the Greek test. She was wildly remorseful. Wouldn’t have sex. Got out of bed to brush her teeth, then had a small crying fit at the kitchen sink, and said, “I don’t want to get married.”

  I lay there thinking that it will make my parents miserable if I call off the wedding. I will have disappointed them again. I will fail in everything and Sylvia will go completely nuts. Then I thought we will get married, and I will bring our child with me when I visit Sylvia in the nuthouse.

  I won’t go mad. Not me. Mindless sanity sustains me. I am an ordinary person. I don’t know Latin and Greek. All I know is how to work. I went to my room and sat at the typewriter. My feet began to freeze, my knees felt numb. There was a steady crash of wind and rain against the window. Sylvia went back to bed. She might sleep until morning, I thought.

  JOURNAL, MARCH 1961

  In those days R. D. Laing and others sang praises to the condition of being nuts, and French intellectuals argued for allegiance to Stalin and the Marquis de Sade. Diane Arbus looked hard at freaks, searching maybe for a reservoir of innocence in this world. A few blocks east, at the Five Spot, Ornette Coleman eviscerated jazz essence through a raucous plastic sax. The great Charlie Mingus was also there, playing angular, complex, hard-driving music to a full house night after night. In salient forms of life and art, people exceeded themselves—or the self; our dashing President, John F. Kennedy, was screwing movie actresses. Everything dazzled.

  Movies, the quintessence of excess, were becoming known as “films.” To the reflective eye, Antonioni’s movies were among the most important. Sylvia and I never missed one. We’d emerge radically deadened, yet exhilarated, sorry the movie had to end. She whispered once, as the lights came on, “Why can’t they leave us alone?” It was truly painful, having to thrust back into the windy streets, back to our apartment. We carried away visions of despair and boredom, but also thrilling apprehensions of this moment, in this modern world, where emptiness could be exquisite, even a way of life, not only for Monica Vitti and Alain Delon but for us, too. Why not? Feelings were all that mattered, and they were available to us. We understood. We were susceptible to the ineffable strains and moods of modern life. We’d read Nietzsche. Our brainiest friends—not only sad little Agatha—brought regular news from the abyss. One of them, a graduate student in art history, was on heroin. Another, whose translations of Chinese poetry had won awards and a book contract, strolled the wall beside the Hudson River, a willing prey to rough trade.

  I would come back to the apartment after shopping for groceries, or doing the laundry—Sylvia never did these things—and find Agatha lying about, telling all. I could hardly wait to hear it from Sylvia, stories about the wilderness of Manhattan where Agatha descended nightly. When she stayed very late, I’d walk her down into the street, then wait with her for a cab. I worried about her. She might run into trouble—hapless, defenseless girl—alone in the dark. I refused to acknowledge that she was excited by dangers of the unknown, running after trouble in the dark.

  “It’s too cold to wait out here,” she said.

  “No bother. I want to do it.”

  I peered down the avenue, freezing, praying for a cab to appear and take Agatha away. Then I hurried back to Sylvia. Agatha had told Sylvia how a boy forced her into prostitution. He took her to a boat docked on the West Side, then down into a small room. He kept her there until the men came, bestial types. While one did things to her, others watched. I imagined a steel room in the bottom of the boat, echoing with animal noises.

 
Repeating it to me—the boat, the small room, the men—Sylvia was ironically amused, posturing in her voice, mimicking Agatha’s dull tones, as if to measure the distance between Agatha’s lust for degrading experience and herself. I listened, feeling entertained without feeling guilty. I let myself imagine that Agatha was far gone, beyond recall, object more than subject, without claims on my humanity. I owed only politeness. A few minutes in the street waiting for a cab. What sympathy I felt was easy. Liking her was also easy. Affectations, corrosive cosmetics, stylish clothes, an aura of self-destructive debauch—she was utterly harmless, even sort of cute. I liked myself for liking her. She reported every peculiarity of her soul to Sylvia, but I didn’t see, beneath Sylvia’s contempt in retelling the stories, that she was involved in Agatha’s fate. Then, one night in bed, Sylvia said, “Call me whore, slut, cunt . . .”

  I was eventually to call her my wife. The old-fashioned name would make our life proper, okay. Things would change, I believed, though our fights had become so ugly that the gay couple across the hall wouldn’t ever say hello to us. We passed frequently, almost touching, along the dingy route to the hall toilets, one dank closet for each apartment. They turned up their phonograph until it boomed above our shrieking. Eighteenth-century pieces, wildly flourishing strings and an extravaganza of golden trumpets, as if to remind us of high, vigorous civilization, where even the most destructive passions are sublimed. They hoped to drown us, maybe shame us, into silence. It never happened.