Sylvia: A Novel Read online

  Outside the Carnegie delicatessen, I took my money out of my pocket to see if I had enough for tickets and dinner. I needed about ten dollars. Sylvia said, “You’re not going to count your money in the street, I hope.” After that, I had no choice but to count my money, but I didn’t do it. I stuffed the bills back into my pocket. Irascible and silent, we waited for Roger and his Rosalie. The minutes in the afternoon heat stood like buildings along the avenue, utterly still. Sylvia asked me to feel her lower back. I put my hand there. Her blouse was damp with sweat. I said, “Mm. Yeah.” My tone was sympathetic. Then she asked for money to buy a can of talcum powder. She wanted to shake talcum powder into her shoes in front of the Carnegie delicatessen. I gave her all my change, about thirty-five cents. It must have seemed to her enough for only one can of talcum powder, which cost about twenty cents. I had not brought several million dollars with me for the tons of talcum powder she might need. She was visibly angry and spun away from me and hustled off to a drugstore. In a minute she returned without talcum powder, and said, “The drugstore is full of Scandinavian airline people.” She meant she couldn’t get service. “This ruins the evening. I can’t possibly enjoy anything after this.” She also meant tall blond gorgeous men and women.

  I said, “Let’s get coffee,” and I started across the avenue toward a diner. Sylvia’s hatred pushed me ahead of her, but I made myself go slow. We walked together for half a minute in silence. Then she said, “I’m going to Fifth Avenue. I’ll take the bus home from there.”

  Without a word, I walked into the diner, sat at the counter. Sylvia watched me through the plate glass window. When I looked at her, she frowned with dark hurt angry disbelief, then walked away. A surging weight, like a body within my body, lunged after her, running out of the diner and down the street to catch her, beg her not to take the bus home, but stay, meet Roger and Rosalie, go to the movie. I didn’t move. I’d begged too many times. Please come with me to visit my father in the hospital, please come with me to dinner at my parents’ apartment, please come with me to the party, please let’s go to the psychiatrist, please get out of bed. I ordered a hamburger. When it came, I bit into it once or twice, swallowed without chewing, and left the rest of it on the plate. I walked back to the Carnegie.

  Roger was there in his jacket and tie, stick-like, pale as a vampire in the sunlight. He grinned, holding air in his rigid neck. I saw no Rosalie. I knew he wanted to ask, “Where’s Sylvia?” But he was unsure if he could. Unbearable revelations might follow. Better not to ask. Think. Suspect. Sniff about for clues. Analyze. I was irritated at him for being like himself. What I’d found endearing other times was suddenly contemptible. I didn’t explain Sylvia’s absence. Too ashamed. “Where’s Rosalie?” I asked. Roger muttered about a migraine headache. I didn’t believe Rosalie had a migraine headache. I knew damn well Rosalie was a man. Roger had decided once again that a Jewish boy from Brooklyn does not come out. We went to the movie, This Sporting Life, together. At one point the hero says, “I can love, can’t I?” Movies often asked that depressing question.

  I told Sylvia I would see a psychiatrist when we separated. She said it wouldn’t do any good because I couldn’t remember facts. I’d give a distorted account of our marriage. Then we talked about her girlfriend Betty whose boyfriend, Matthew, is very loving. “He took her skin diving in Puerto Rico.”

  “Do you want to go skin diving in Puerto Rico?”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Sylvia said Matthew doesn’t worry about Betty not being good-looking enough for him. I said, “I don’t worry either. You’re a fanatic on the subject of looks.” She rolled away. Then she turned and said, “You didn’t think I was a fanatic when I was your little jewel.” There were tears in her eyes. She rolled away again and asked me to shut off the light. I did, then went into the bathroom and picked at my face, making it bleed. When I crawled back into bed, she said, “Agatha’s parents have been divorced and married twice—to each other.” I said, “There are no happy marriages.” She said, “What about your parents?” I said, “They live in another world.”

  JOURNAL, AUGUST 1963

  The train from Grand Central to Ann Arbor, Michigan, was called the Wolverine. The trip took ten hours, from dark to dawn. In the long clattering night, hungry, unable to sleep, I opened the paper bag of sandwiches, cookies, and coffee Sylvia prepared for me. She had never done anything like that before. Now that we were separating, I’d been unable to stop her. When I unscrewed the aluminum cap of the thermos bottle, a small folded paper fell out. I opened it and read a penciled note from Sylvia: I love you.

  She loves me, I thought, and nothing more, as night hurtled by the window, a black animal pierced by the tiny lights of houses in the distant countryside. I ate everything in the bag and drank the coffee. I smoked until I felt only the heat and tear of cigarette devastations.

  A few weeks passed before Sylvia decided to join me in Michigan. Her decision was impulsive and sentimental. I didn’t object. I missed her. I never looked at my journals and I remembered none of the small, mean daily miseries that were the texture of our life in New York. I might have remembered if I tried, but I didn’t try. I didn’t think. I was a little anxious, but mainly very happy to see her when she got off the train, her black bangs and bright black eyes. As she came toward me, she smiled broadly and walked with a rocking motion, like a fat little kid, showing me how full of goodness she felt, as if she’d just eaten a big meal. Proud and silly at once, showing her happiness.

  Our fights began again in Michigan and were as bad as those in New York. One night she stood at the bathroom mirror and methodically smashed at her reflection with a metal ashtray, the glass streaking and flashing out of the frame. She said:

  “You (smash) don’t (smash) love (smash) me (smash). But you will miss me.”

  I helped her pack and I took her to the train station. Though very anxious, we didn’t fight. We were, instead, melancholy and affectionate. This was it. The end. She was wearing a plain black cocktail dress, hemmed slightly above the knee. She looked very sophisticated and pretty. I kissed her on the lips. She didn’t quite kiss me back. She returned to New York, and then I was wretched in a whole new way, because I wasn’t really wretched and I felt guilty about it. I wrote to her and phoned her frequently. It was over and yet we persisted, though a bit less and a bit less as the weeks went by. My letters were playful and affectionate. On visits to New York during school vacations, I stayed with my parents, or occasionally with Sylvia in her new apartment on Sullivan Street. Like the one on MacDougal Street, it was hardly more than a room. We made love again, in our manner, as if we believed we could make real whatever it was that bound us to each other. Before my last visit, Christmas vacation, 1964, Sylvia returned to the apartment near Columbia, which she had sublet while living on Sullivan Street. I went to New York with the intention of talking to her about a divorce. We’d never mentioned divorce. I didn’t know how to bring it up. I expected fury and violence, and I very much dreaded it.

  I can’t remember exactly how we first agreed to separate, only that there had been a fight and I said I was going to leave, go back to Michigan. Sylvia hadn’t seemed distressed by the idea. I thought maybe she looked forward to being free and independent in Manhattan. The adventure of total availability. Then, a few weeks before I left for Michigan, she said very obliquely that other men would be interested in her. “I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding somebody when I’m gone,” I answered. Instantly, she flew at me, tearing at my face. I swatted her hands away reflexively, with a sidewise motion, and must have brushed her nose or slapped her hands into her nose. I felt only her hands. I didn’t feel any part of her face. She shrieked, “You broke my nose,” and lunged at the living room window, tearing at the blinds and shrieking for the police. She mutilated the blinds but didn’t manage to open the window, and she was still shrieking, “Police, police, help,” as I dragged her away from the window and tried to hold her still and look
at her nose. She pushed me back and dashed into the bathroom. Leaning over the sink, she stared closely at her face in the mirror, saying, “It’s broken. Look.” It looked no different, and then it did look different. I couldn’t tell.

  I hadn’t felt my hand touch her nose, but I apologized again and again, and I studied her nose carefully, respectfully, almost hoping to see that it was broken. In her mind she had a broken nose and I had broken it. There was no other way of looking at the situation, and nothing to think about. Her nose was broken. She stayed at the mirror a long time, slowly turning her face this way and that, an excited glow in her eyes, like an artist studying a piece of work with quiet satisfaction.

  Finally, in a mood of strained reconciliation, we went out to find a doctor. Our apartment was only a block from West End Avenue, where the ground floor of many buildings was given over to the offices of doctors, dentists, and psychiatrists. Like a great medical center, every specialty was available to the thousands who lived in the buildings. We picked a name and rang the bell. The doctor himself answered and agreed to look at Sylvia’s nose right then. It was late afternoon. There happened to be no patients in his waiting room. His nurse and receptionist had gone home. He had wispy gray hair, brown philosophical eyes, and a middle-European accent. He touched Sylvia’s nose, pressing lightly on one side, then the other. Glancing at me, he said with mock dismay, “He didn’t do it, did he?”

  Sylvia said, “No. He’s too kind.”

  They sounded as if they were related, both of them mildly witty and ironical. The doctor said he didn’t think her nose was “fractured,” let alone broken. I was pleased by his word, but I knew Sylvia wouldn’t accept it. She asked if he would refer her to a specialist.

  “What kind of specialist?”

  “A plastic surgeon.”

  I then realized Sylvia wanted to believe she had a broken nose. Fixing it would be her excuse to shorten it. That evening Roger phoned and said, “I have a grotesque request. I need two hundred dollars.” I said I could lend him fifty dollars. Sylvia overheard. Much annoyed, she said, “You have to pay for my operation.” I’d leave for Michigan. She’d have a nose job.

  The surgeon’s office was on Park Avenue. Well-dressed women sat in his waiting room, one or two with bandaged noses. There were no magazines, only photo albums showing patients before and after plastic surgery, noses much shortened. There were no pictures of men. Nostril holes stood up and gaped like a second pair of eyes. I noticed that the surgeon’s receptionist and two nurses had noses like the ones in the photos—Pekingese snouts—his mark, his vision. The women, it seemed, had wanted to please the surgeon. It was unimaginable that they’d pleased themselves. I thought to warn Sylvia against the doctor, but she hadn’t yet decided to have surgery and it might have caused a dispute in the waiting room. I showed her one of the albums, turning pages without comment, letting her see what this doctor could do with a nose.

  When one of the nurses called Sylvia, I went too. I was uncomfortable being there, but she wanted me along. I followed her through a room divided into half a dozen curtained stalls, where the surgeon saw post-operative patients, perhaps five or six an hour. He received us in his office, a big, thick-chested man with a mangled-looking, heavy Jewish face, a huge nose, and a voice that seemed to rumble at us through a sewer pipe.

  Sylvia talked shyly about her broken nose, saying not a word about surgery. I supposed she had been shaken by the photo albums. As she talked, the surgeon stared at her nose. She was hesitant, smiling pitifully, and said only that she thought her nose might have been broken. It didn’t look quite straight. Perhaps something could be done.

  He told Sylvia to sit on a stool, then stood before her, cupped the back of her head with both hands, and pulled her face toward him, gradually mashing her nose against his belly, harder and harder, holding it there for about ten seconds. Then he released her. Sylvia was in great pain. The doctor wrote her a prescription for six sleeping pills, and said, in an offhand manner, her nose “could be shorter.” His fee was a hundred dollars.

  When we were back in the apartment, Sylvia took a ballpoint pen and put a two before the six in the prescription. I was reluctant to take it to the drugstore. Why would a doctor prescribe twenty-six of anything? The druggist might phone the doctor to confirm the amount. Sylvia said there was nothing to worry about. I owed it to her, after breaking her nose, to take the risk. I went.

  While I was waiting for the pills, a young man came in and asked for cigarettes. The druggist stopped working on my prescription, and went for the carton of cigarettes. Then the man asked to have them wrapped.

  The druggist said, “What for? Is it a gift?”

  The man said, “It’s against the law to leave with a carton of cigarettes that is not wrapped.”

  I wanted the twenty-six pills. I wanted to get out of there.

  The druggist said, “I never heard of such a law.”

  I realized that he was no less of a nut than his customer.

  The man said, “If I walk out of this drugstore with a naked carton of cigarettes, people will think I stole it.”

  The druggist said, “I’ll testify in your behalf.”

  I groaned. The druggist heard me. With an expression of disgust, he wrapped the carton of cigarettes.

  I thought, This is New York. I will be leaving soon.

  When the man walked away with his wrapped carton of cigarettes, the druggist said, “I’ll drive him crazy before he drives me crazy.” Then he gave me twenty-six sleeping pills. I hurried back to the apartment.

  I’d merely said she would have no trouble finding somebody after I left, and the result was the “broken nose.” To talk about a divorce might result in more destruction. But I had to talk about divorce. We’d been living separate lives for over a year. I’d been seeing another woman. I didn’t tell Sylvia about her. I didn’t know if Sylvia was seeing other men. She intimated things on the telephone, but was always so vague that, without sounding jealous, I couldn’t ask if she was telling me that she was fucking somebody. I didn’t want to hear about it, anyway. She did the best she could, I suppose, to be honest. Neither of us had the courage to speak plainly.

  In New York, near the end of my vacation, December 30, 1964, I went uptown from my parents’ apartment to meet Sylvia. I was determined to talk about a divorce, and I was sure it would be the hardest thing I ever had to do.

  I don’t remember if I met Sylvia at the apartment or if we met in a restaurant, but we were in a restaurant late in the evening, and I was surprised to find another man present. Sylvia’s friend. He was blond and French, a graduate student at Yale. He had a soft, sensuously handsome face and a heavily suggestive, ironic smile. It suggested he was amused by complexities that left other people baffled and in pain. I thought, This guy is an asshole, but if Sylvia likes him, I like him. Anyhow, Sylvia’s friend was too beautiful, obviously a lover, nobody’s friend. With him in the picture, talking about a divorce might be no problem. Sylvia might even bring it up herself. At some point in the evening, Sylvia said good-night to the Frenchman. I don’t remember that he and I said good-night to each other, or that we had even been introduced. He was just no longer at the table. I was surprised again, having expected Sylvia to say good-night to me, not him. With him gone, Sylvia and I walked to the apartment.

  The New Year’s Eve celebration had begun early. There was garbage and broken glass everywhere. Streets were splattered with vomit, as if strewn with hideous bouquets of blazing color. Things seemed nightmarish, but Sylvia and I were walking home as we had many times, as if nothing essential had changed between us. She’d surely been involved with the Frenchman, but I didn’t think about it. The naturalness of our being together this minute made me wonder: Is this love? and, if you’re ever in love, does the feeling for that person go away? Sylvia pressed my side and held my arm. I felt married to her forever, and I assumed that she would expect me to spend the night, and we would have sex. Whenever I came to the city, I spent s
ome nights with her. But I didn’t want to spend the night. I didn’t want sex. I had to talk about divorce. The subject seemed incongruous. The mood was all wrong. I felt no anger, no bitterness, only vague anxiety about the future. There was no feeling in me that could usher the subject into words.

  I told Sylvia that I would be taking my preliminary exams in two weeks. She talked about her civil service job. At the apartment, she changed into a short gray cotton nightgown and poured herself a glass of bourbon. She then joined me on the living room couch, lying on her back with her head in my lap. It wasn’t the moment to talk about divorce, but if I talked about anything else, it would be a lie. I was calm, listening to her, waiting for my chance to mention the serious matter, the one real thing, and put an end to this comfortable, mechanical, unreal domestic intimacy. Even if, somehow, I loved her and would always love her, our life together was hell, and could never be otherwise. I told myself to remember this.

  Sylvia talked easily, addressing the air above, not my face. I noticed a black cat in the apartment. It had a broken tail, shaped like a flattened Z, or a lightning bolt. I watched the cat and it watched me. It was wretched-looking, a cat that skulked about, as if it felt guilty of being unlikeable.

  Sylvia told about men she’d been seeing in the past several months. Some were my friends. She let me know that she’d been sleeping with them by telling me little gossipy stories.

  “Teddy found out I was seeing one of his colleagues. He was very jealous. He said, ‘Now I know what Othello feels like.’”

  Her tone was amused and blasé, as if none of this could be painful to me. She went on for a long time, quite comfortable reviewing her affairs while lying with her head in my lap. I listened without saying a word. Her French friend, I supposed, had been an object lesson, an introduction to what she planned to say when we were alone. She was mildly theatrical, stopping occasionally to lift her head and take another sip of bourbon. When the glass was empty, she refilled it, then went on about this one and that one. She’d even slept with Roger, who was still trying to decide whether he preferred men. They’d taken drugs together. One night Roger and Teddy were both in the apartment. They each knew the other was sleeping with Sylvia. There was awful tension in the room. Everyone smoked a lot of grass, and, for hours, they talked about sexual perversion in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Neither Roger nor Teddy would leave before the other. Then, around 3 a.m., Roger went to the bathroom. The moment he left the room, Teddy pushed Roger’s chair all the way to the kitchen door, almost out of the living room. When Roger returned he saw the empty space and, of course, being himself, he was baffled. He suspected something had changed, but he wasn’t sure. He certainly wouldn’t ask. Then he saw his chair near the kitchen door. He went to it and sat there the rest of the night while Teddy and Sylvia sat in the living room in a normal way, and nobody said anything about what had happened. Sylvia laughed a little as she told the story, still feeling flattered by the idea of her two highly intellectual lovers. She also mentioned an editor of gourmet cookbooks who, even in literary circles of Manhattan where there is no shortage of satyrs, was notorious. I knew the guy. I hadn’t seen him in years, but we had friends in common and I heard plenty about him. He was a pretty man with curly brown hair, curly mouth, angelic blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a soft lyrical voice. He had the grand style of a courtly, sentimental seducer. He read poems and sang songs to women. Several thousand women had been laid in his midtown apartment. I’d heard that the full-length mirror inside his closet door reflected the bed, but you couldn’t see the reflection from the bed unless you knew where to look. It was cast down the hall to another mirror inside the hall closet door. In bed with the woman of the moment, he could watch her in the closet mirror. He’d turn her this way and that, and she wouldn’t know she was being watched. The idea of self-conscious Sylvia subjected to his mirrors was sad.