Sylvia: A Novel

by Leonard Michaels

  It’s possible we frightened them with our horrendous daily battles, but I assumed they just didn’t like us. They were repressed Midwestern types. Towheaded, hyperclean, quiet kids in flight from a small town, hiding in New York so they could be lovers, never supposing that their neighbors, just across the hall, would be maniacs. It struck me as paradoxical that being gay didn’t mean you couldn’t be disapproving and intolerant. I liked eighteenth-century music. Couldn’t they tell? Forgive a little? Were their domestic dealings, because they behaved better, so different from ours? Sharing a bed, were they never deranged by sexual theatrics or loony compulsions? They passed us with rigid, wraithlike, blind faces. No hello, no little nod, only the sound of old linoleum crackling beneath us. They pressed toward the wall so as not to touch us inadvertently. We were an order of life beneath recognition. Their soaring music damned us. Their silence and their music threw me back on myself, made me think Sylvia and I—not the gay kids—were marginal creatures, morally offensive, in very bad taste. We were, but they seemed unjust. They really didn’t know. I didn’t either as I held Sylvia in my arms and called her names and said that I loved her. Didn’t know we were lost.

  I have no job, no job, no job. I’m not published. I have nothing to say. I’m married to a madwoman.

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962

  Soon after we were married, Sylvia said, “I have girlfriends who make a hundred dollars a week,” which was a good salary in the early sixties. It would have paid two months’ rent and our electric bills. But Sylvia meant, compared to her girlfriends, I was a bum. Eventually, I published a story or two in literary magazines, which made me happy, but the magazines paid nearly nothing. So I began looking for a job and, to my surprise, I was hired almost immediately as an assistant professor of English at Paterson State College in New Jersey. Then I stopped writing. I had much less time for stories, but more important was the fact that I was married. It changed my idea of myself. As a married man, I had to work for a living. I’d never believed writing stories was work. It was merely hard. The sound of my typewriter, hour after hour, caused Sylvia pain, and this was another reason to stop. But then whatever had importantly to do with me—family, friends, writing—shoved her to the margins of my consciousness, and she’d feel neglected and insulted. This also happened if I stayed in the hall toilet too long, and it happened sometimes when we walked in the street. I’d be talking about a friend or a magazine article, maybe laughing, and I’d suppose that I was entertaining her, but then I’d notice she wasn’t beside me. I’d look back. There she was, twenty feet behind me, down the street, standing still, staring after me with rage. “You make me feel like a whore,” she said. “Don’t you dare walk ahead of me in the street.” Then she walked past me and I trailed her home, very annoyed, but also wondering if there wasn’t in fact something wrong with my personality—talking, laughing, and having a good time, as if, like a moron or a dog, I was happy enough merely being alive. At the door to our building, Sylvia waited for me to arrive and open it for her, so that she could feel I was treating her properly, like a lady, not a whore.

  She’d never say, “You’re walking too fast. Please slow down.” She’d slow down, lag behind, let me discover that I was treating her like a whore. And then it was too late. I’d done it, proved for the ten-thousandth time that I was bad. It was hard, from moment to moment—walking, talking, laughing, writing, shitting—not to say or do something that hurt Sylvia.

  It was a nice day. I felt only a little miserable. I was going out to buy a winter coat. I was at the door when, suddenly, Sylvia wanted to make love, and she persisted endearingly. I didn’t want to do it, and I didn’t know how to say I didn’t. Only Sylvia has that privilege. It became late afternoon, too late to go buy a coat. Sat in my room. I don’t deserve a winter coat.

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962

  The one time I got sick, I wanted only to go to sleep. I felt an apologetic reflex. If I went to sleep, Sylvia would feel abandoned. Still, I had to go to bed; sleep. I had a fever. I ached all over. It was only a cold, no big deal. But really, I had to lie down and sleep. The moment I shut my eyes, Sylvia began to sweep the floor around the bed. She decided I couldn’t be allowed to lie there, sick, surrounded by a filthy floor, though we had roaches, fleas, and sometimes rats in the apartment, and there were holes in the walls through which spilled brown, hairy, fibrous insulation. She swept with great force. Then she washed the dishes, making a racket. Everything had to be cleaned because I was sick. She put clothes away in drawers, slamming them shut to make clear that order was being established, and she hustled about picking things up, straightening the place. When the apartment was as clean and orderly as she could make it, she said I couldn’t lie on those sheets. We’d slept on them for several weeks. They were stained and dirty. I got out of bed and stood in my underwear, hot and shivering, while she changed the sheets. When she finished, I flopped back into bed. I fell asleep, but was soon awakened by an unnatural silence. I saw Sylvia standing at the foot of the bed, staring at me, shifting her weight from side to side as if she had to pee, looking frightened.

  “You have to see a doctor,” she said. “Get up. Get up.”

  “I come from peasant stock. Nothing can kill me.”

  “That isn’t funny. Get up.”

  There was desperate urgency in her voice. I was too sick to argue with her. I got up and put on my clothes. We walked downstairs and then eight or nine blocks through the freezing night to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s, then waited in line with drug addicts and crazies. Eventually, I was seen by a doctor. He said I had a cold. I should go to bed. Two or three hours after I’d gone to bed, I went to bed. Sylvia felt much better. In the morning, I was well.

  She began a conversation about infidelity. How would I feel if she were unfaithful? I said we’d be through. She said, “Why, if it’s just a mad moment brought on by general malaise?” I said, “Through. That’s all.” She said, “What if you didn’t know?” I said, “If I didn’t know, it’s the same as if it never happened.” She became increasingly angry, insisting that I accept her infidelity. “What if we’re married ten years from now and have three kids, and we’re at a party and both of us are unfaithful?” I said, “That’s different. We’d be dedicated to the kids.” She said, “You’re not dedicated to anyone but yourself.”

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962

  During the week, I rose at 5:30 a.m. and rode the subway to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then took a bus to Paterson, then another to the college, where I struggled up a steep hill, icy in the winter, to the office I shared with everyone in the English department. I taught classes morning and afternoon, had conferences with students, and then, as the sky darkened above the New Jersey landscape, made the long trip back to MacDougal Street, where I found Sylvia waiting for me. She was in good spirits when she did well at school, and once was very happy. She’d been given a small scholarship. Another time, I found her sprawled in a chair, shining with perspiration. Drawers had been emptied, contents strewn about the apartment. The bed was overturned. I stood in the living room, looking at her, and I tried to understand what had happened. I was still carrying my briefcase and wearing my coat. She studied my face, an ironic light in her eyes, as if she were seeing through me.

  “All right,” she said, “where is it?”

  “Where is what?”

  She laughed, tipping her head back arrogantly, as if to say I couldn’t fool her with my innocent-sounding question.

  “What’s her name?”

  I slowly realized she’d been searching the apartment for evidence of my infidelity—love notes, nude photos of my girlfriends, etc. There was no such evidence. There were only my journals, worse than love notes, but Sylvia never found them. We had an argument that lasted until long after midnight. My crime, real only in her head, couldn’t be proved or disproved. Bundled up and sweating in a heavy winter coat, my galoshes splashing in the sooty gray suck of New York snow, I lumbered down the empty, pre-da
wn darkness of MacDougal Street toward the subway. My briefcase, fat with books and papers, bumped the side of my leg. At that hour, I’d see the big garbage truck from the city’s sanitation department, men emptying pails into its loud, churning maw. There was no other sound. Nothing else moved in the street except me. It was an ugly way to greet the morning, but I liked my loneliness, and I liked getting out of the apartment. By the time I walked into the bus terminal, I felt rather good. My heart beat with a sense of purpose. My head was clear, untroubled by psychological complications. For the next eight hours, there would be no thoughts of Sylvia, and I’d feel no guilt for not thinking of her. I was hot and sweaty in my heavy coat, lumbering with the heavy briefcase through the terminal.

  There was always a crowd of hats and coats, men packed together at the steamy breakfast counter where other men sliced oranges, smearing the halves down onto the spinning nozzle of a juicer. They moved with speed and grace. The steam carried good smells—hot coffee, cigarette smoke, baked dough and doughnut sugars. Standing in the crowd of silent men, I hunched over my orange juice, careful not to spill it, the taste bright as its color; or I’d sip hot black coffee, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. Nervous oppression lay in most faces. They had lived like this for years. For me, charged up on caffeine and nicotine, it was new and real, the hustle and crush of city action, the New York essence of it, the man’s place. Wallowing in my clumsy galoshes, smoking the first cigarette of my day, I joined the solemn brotherhood of workers. I was happy.

  I wasn’t fucking my students, but I couldn’t not look at them, couldn’t not see that some of the Italian girls, from towns in New Jersey, were visually delicious. At night, surrendering to fatigue, letting go of another day, I exuded what had been repressed in the classroom, like radioactive emissions of elemental decay. Memories came to me of the girls from Secaucus, Trenton, Paterson, and Jersey City, gorgeous girls with olive skin and lustrous, wavy hair. I never touched any of them. They had the handwriting of little children and drew bubbles over the letter i.

  I thought of a million reasons not to touch. I wanted to touch. I didn’t even flirt. I went home. I had sex only with Sylvia, me coming without much pleasure, she without coming. Our electrical frenzy—contortions, convulsions, thrashing, vicious kissing—left us wiped out and horny, needing something other, something more. I told myself I didn’t need it, it wasn’t important, though I looked at women in the subways and streets and my body said otherwise. I wasn’t looking for a woman who would console me, or even a woman to whom I could talk without inciting violence. My body lusted. This was my secret infidelity, never confessed to my journals. Despite the daily misery of marriage, I wrote that I loved Sylvia. I wrote it repeatedly into my journals, and I wiped sincerely pathetic tears from my eyes. “I love Sylvia.”

  But to my shame, my body burned for the black woman in high heels and a tweed suit who stood near me while waiting for the D train at the West Fourth Street station. Not another person anywhere on the platform. She stood nearer than she had to. Sexual excitement hit suddenly, left me breathless. Did she want me to start a conversation? I’d never known anything like this. Marriage to Sylvia introduced me to a terrifying imperative: I needed another woman. I couldn’t have said a word to this woman without seeming criminally deranged. There was also the woman who drove by in a silver Porsche at the corner of West Fourth and MacDougal. The car stopped for an instant in front of me. She gave me a deep look. It said our life together was about to begin if I seized the moment. Only to step forward, open the door, slide inside. She would drive me far away from here. We would never come back. And there was a young Puerto Rican mother carrying a shopping bag, who looked so weary and so beautifully appealing in the goodness of her dedication, her sacrifice. I felt love. I wanted to fuck her. She had magnificent lips and large green eyes. Instantly, these women were imprinted in my nerves and bones. I never said anything to them, never saw them again. I remembered them with love and despair. I began to remember them even before they were out of sight, as if they had never been more than memories, figures of a happier, former life.

  Sylvia appears in my room. “I can’t stand your typing.”

  “I’ll be as quiet as possible.”

  “It doesn’t matter. You exist.”

  She assumed a haughty posture, lit one of my cigarettes, flicked ashes on the floor. I felt a spasm of hate, but showed nothing. She didn’t leave. I started to yawn. She pushed my jaw shut. I yelled. She looked concerned, then became angry, sneering at me. I was in pain. She could see it. She began wailing about all she had had to bear in the past year and a half.

  I was in pain. She was wailing.

  JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962

  In the spring of 1963 Sylvia completed her undergraduate work at NYU. We moved uptown to an apartment on West 104th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. She took night classes in German. I continued teaching at Paterson State and joined a car pool. It made the trip easier. I came home less exhausted, and could go to a movie with Sylvia and not fall asleep in the middle of it. One of the drivers in the car pool, Dan Slater, was completing his graduate work at Columbia, writing a dissertation on French theater. He was gay. Mornings when he drove and there were no other riders, he’d talk about his latest lover, telling me what he liked about him, how long it would last, what the guy looked like, what he said. He talked about things I’d never heard mentioned before. He told me his feelings about some guy’s cock. I was often shocked, but wouldn’t show it. I told him, in a light-hearted, lying style, about the silly fight I’d had with Sylvia last evening. I didn’t say we’d fought until 5 a.m., or that I’d had only an hour’s sleep. I never talked about my life the way he talked about his, as if I were strangely embarrassed by the conventional limitations of marriage. One of his lovers, said Dan, thought the look of black metal wire twisted across front teeth was sexy. He asked Dan to find a dentist who would do the work. Dan didn’t need braces. It would be expensive and painful, not to mention degrading.

  “I said I won’t do it. There was really nothing more to discuss.”

  “Who would do it?”

  He laughed. “There are people who would.”

  “There are?”

  “Oh, come on.”

  After a while, I was trying to write again. Another story was accepted by a literary magazine. I had also acquired a literary agent who became a good friend and visited us when we lived on MacDougal Street. One night he dragged me out to meet another writer represented by the agency. It was Jack Kerouac. I’d never spent an evening with a celebrity, but I had university friends who considered themselves intimates of Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, et al. Days later I asked one of them if he’d read Kerouac. He said, “Give me a break. I haven’t read Proust yet.”

  In my agent’s Porsche convertible, with the top down, we circled Manhattan, Kerouac raving about reviews of his books to the night sky. He’d memorized the cruelest comments, none funny, but he wanted us to laugh. We laughed. The night ended in a seedy bar near Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue. The floor was made of tiny, hexagonal, white-and-black tiles. There were booths of dark brown wood along one wall. Allen Ginsberg was there with some friends. Kerouac introduced us. I’d been introduced to Ginsberg a few times before, in Berkeley, but he never remembered me. It was like meeting on the great wheel of existence, going on to other lives, then meeting again, and not remembering we’d met before. Except I remembered.

  When we moved uptown, we collected a new group of friends. Some of them taught at Columbia University, about ten short blocks north of our apartment. They often came by late at night, and we would sit talking and smoking marijuana until dawn. Our conversations, usually about literature or movies, were much influenced by marijuana, hence thrilling, but also very boring. As in Antonioni’s movies, there was strange gratification in the boredom of our long, smoky, moribund-hip, analytical nights. Most of the time Sylvia was the only woman in the room. She’d pull her legs up on the
couch and half lie there, looking sensuously langorous, yet very attentive to whatever the Columbia friends wanted to talk about, but then, pretty soon, she’d begin to disintegrate, becoming helpless with marijuana giggles, laughing at herself for laughing so much, and the Columbia friends would be tickled and they would laugh with her, encouraging her too much, I thought. But they had nothing at stake. Sylvia’s susceptibility to marijuana was amusing, even endearing, to everyone except me. I feared and resented these moments, and I despised dope.

  I never bought any dope, but it was often in the apartment. Friends “laid it on us,” joints and pills, in return for our hospitality. They frequently showed up at our MacDougal Street apartment only to chat for a moment and get high before going on to some appointment in the neighborhood. Once, returning from the grocery store with a bag of food pressed to my chest, I passed an acquaintance who, saying hello, dropped three hashish cubes into the bag and went on. He’d never even visited the apartment, but dopers proselytized and were ordinarily very generous. Even the poorest of our drug friends would give part of whatever they had, as if with a religious spirit. They wanted you to get high with them, to feel the goodness they felt, and to see the world as they did. (Generosity stopped short of hard, expensive drugs.) The spirit of giving and religious community was good, I thought. Nothing like it had been seen before in the continuously murderous history of our country. But I’d put the joints and pills in a drawer, and forget about them until weeks later, when I came upon the stuff by accident and threw it out.

  It never seemed to me, in the long hours of our marijuana nights, that Sylvia wasn’t having a good time, even when there was only gasping and hissing in the room, as three or four of us sat with nothing to say, passing a joint around. She always seemed very content, and she was interested when conversation resumed. She always smoked, and she swallowed whatever pill was offered. A drawing she made gives an impression of our evenings. It shows Agatha, two of the Columbia friends, and an old friend of mine who stopped visiting after Sylvia and I got married. He is swooping in behind Sylvia with a knife, about to stab her in the back. The Columbia friends are stoned. I’m also in the drawing, typing, indifferent to everything happening in the room.