Sylvia: A Novel

by Leonard Michaels

  I was never indifferent, but I was trying to write, always trying again. That bothered Sylvia. Not the sound of my typing. I spent far more time with her than with the typewriter. What bothered her was that I wanted to do it. It was like going away, abandoning her. She’d listen patiently when I read my stories to her, and sometimes she liked them. She’d smile and say, “Yes.” Her one word was tremendously pleasing. She could also be pretty hard. Once, after I read her a story, she said, “I still believe our child will be very intelligent.”

  The long conversational nights were also full of academic gossip about the English department at Columbia. Roger Lvov, an assistant professor who visited two or three times a week, often told us what had happened only hours earlier:

  “I walked past Trilling’s office this morning. The door was open.”

  Roger pressed the remains of his roach, pinched between the prongs of a bobby pin, to the tip of the funnel he made with his lips. We waited for him to suck and then go on talking. His pale eyelids drooped, his nostrils tensed and blanched, opening wide. He sucked in three short, hard drafts. Essence of marijuana gas shot through the reticulations of his bronchial network. His eyes were crimson and glistening. He continued:

  “Trilling looked at me as I went by the door. He could see me.”

  “Did he say anything?” I asked.

  Roger gazed at me. “What?”

  The question left me annoyed at myself. It was too eager, too curious. Later Sylvia would say Roger was laughing at me. He was going to repeat my question up and down West End Avenue and Broadway. She’s say I’d humiliated myself.

  I burned as I asked again, “Did Trilling say anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “Wow,” said Theodore Edelweiss, whom we called Teddy, also an assistant professor at Columbia. He was more stoned than Roger and he seemed to believe that he had just heard a fantastic story. But I was not sure what Teddy thought. He was a complicated person, and might have been laughing at Roger.

  Our Columbia friends knew they were going to be fired. It was the department’s tradition to fire almost everyone, but no one could be absolutely sure if it would happen to him. Over the years, a few assistant professors had survived. To determine why anyone in particular survived was impossible. There was a story about an assistant professor who, upon being fired, became enraged and shouted at the chairman, “What do you want? Ten books? I’ll write ten books. Twenty books? I’ll write twenty books.” Our friends didn’t expect to survive, but didn’t stop imagining they might. None of them published anything. Eventually, one by one, they lay before their senior colleagues who, like ancient Mayan priests, cut out their hearts. To their credit, they tried to destroy themselves first with drugs.

  I was afraid that marijuana would intensify Sylvia’s paranoia, and I pleaded with her not to smoke it unless I was there with her in the room. She would hide cigarettes and pills that came to her when I wasn’t around. A few times she confessed that she’d smoked while I was in New Jersey or visiting my parents. I became outraged, I made puritanical scenes, but I wasn’t consistent. If she took pills, I did, too. It was a way of being close, and as everyone knows, dope makes sex dreamy and long, when it doesn’t just kill desire. We spent a three-day weekend in the apartment, eating speed, smoking grass, and reading and rereading The Turn of the Screw, for the evil feeling in this gruesome masterpiece. We ate no meals, didn’t answer the phone, and we had bouts of hard, compulsive sex, after which we lay there aching for more. Toward the end of the third day, Sylvia began saying, “Open the window,” as if these three words made a marvelous little poem:

  O-pen.

  The win-dow.

  I asked her to stop, but she repeated it about a thousand times, in singsong tones, before collapsing beside me in a stupor, and then she told me what The Turn of the Screw is really about. Not the excruciating pleasure, taken by Henry James, in the fairy-tale tradition of tortured children. Sylvia was going on and on, both of us overwhelmed by her luminous ravings.

  “I’ll tell you what it’s really about. Oh, my god, it’s so obvious.”

  “I think you’re right. That is it. That’s what it’s about.”

  She was so terrifically brilliant we had to have sex immediately. Later, neither of us remembered what she had said, not one word.

  Sylvia told me that Agatha thinks of herself as being emotionally mature because she suffers no guilt for sleeping with anyone, male or female, friend or stranger, or for having sex in public, as she does with her girlfriend from the madhouse. “The two of them fondle each other while getting laid by their respective partners. At the same time.”

  “Emotionally mature?”

  “She thinks.”

  “Agatha is depraved. I think.”

  Sylvia said angrily, “Agatha wouldn’t hurt a soul. She just can’t refuse herself anything. If she sees a pair of shoes she likes, she buys four pair. Same with sex.”

  “She’s also a terrible gossip,” I said. “No more idea of privacy in her mind than between her legs.”

  Afterwards, I regretted talking that way. I like Agatha. Maybe I was jealous. Sylvia and Agatha need each other. Agatha wants to talk, Sylvia wants to listen. Agatha’s confessions are probably less depraved and more pleasing to her than her life, and they have kept her close to Sylvia. They are close even in their looks—same height, same shape. I found them asleep together, on the living room couch, one black-haired girl, one blonde. The difference only showed how much they looked the same, two girls lying on the couch in late afternoon. They looked like words that rhyme.

  JOURNAL, APRIL 1963

  In the conversational style of the day, everything was always about something; or, to put it differently, everything was always really about something other than what it seemed to be about. A halo of implication shimmered about innocuous words, movies, faces, and events reported in the newspapers. The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and the songs of Dylan were all equally about something. The murder of President Kennedy was, too. Nothing was fully resident in itself. Nothing was plain.

  Stoned on grass or opium or bennies or downers, lying side by side in our narrow bed as streetlights came on, we’d follow their patterns on the walls and ceiling as we listened to late-night radio talk shows. Our favorite was Long John Nebel. One night a caller said, in a slow, ignorant drawl, “Long John, you have missed the whole boat.” Naked in our drugged darkness, we turned to each other with a rush of sweet, gluey love and happiness. For months thereafter, we said affectionately, “You have missed the whole boat.”

  Sylvia could be happy and funny, but it is easier to remember the bad times. They were more sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved. There were moments when we’d happen to look up at each other while sitting a few yards apart in a crowded subway train, or across a room at a party, or in the slow flow of drugged conversation with four others in our living room, the gray dawn beginning to light the windows, and we’d smile with our eyes, as if we were embarrassed by our luck, having each other.

  One afternoon, alone in the apartment, I found myself staring at Sylvia’s sneaker lying on the floor beside the bed. It was still laced. She’d shoved it off her foot with the heel of the other sneaker, which was nowhere in sight. What came to me was the terrifying emptiness of the sneaker. I couldn’t remain alone in the apartment. I left and walked quickly toward the Columbia campus, trying to spot her in the crowd, black hair flying, brown leather coat.

  Roger phoned, then came by. He told me that he shot up last night, and had gone to sleep at eight in the morning. He was awakened by a phone call, at 9:45 a.m., from his aunt. Wretched with no sleep, he tried to be polite. While talking to his aunt, he noticed tiny bugs moving about his crotch. I imagined Roger sprawled in bed, talking on the phone, playing with himself, and suddenly noticing the local fauna. The aunt said, “I’ve got a girl for you.”

  Roger said, “Really?”

  “She’s blonde, works in tele
vision, and is charming. Promise me you’ll call.”

  Roger said, “I promise.”

  After hanging up, Roger spent twenty minutes immobilized by horror and fascination, staring at tiny white bugs crawling on his skin.

  Before he could tell me all this, Roger said I had to swear not to repeat a word of it. He always does something to make me wait before saying what he has in mind. He lights a cigarette, or stares into my eyes and says nothing. The effect is eerily suspenseful. Finally, whatever he says is anticlimactic. I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone. He said:

  “I think I have syphilis.”

  I asked why he thought so.

  “A late stage of syphilis.”

  I asked again why he thought so.

  “There are little animals crawling on me. I also have a rash.”

  I didn’t laugh. I advised him to call a doctor. From my place he phoned his doctor friend, Jerry, Roger’s roommate at Harvard. Jerry told Roger he probably didn’t have syphilis, and he explained about pubic lice. Jerry phoned in a prescription to a nearby drugstore. Roger and I walked up Broadway together to pick it up. I wondered if it is remarkable that Roger Lvov, a genius from Brooklyn who has a Harvard Ph.D., thinks pubic lice indicate a late stage of syphilis.

  JOURNAL, JULY 1963

  At the end of the school year, I resigned from my job at Paterson State, applied for readmission to graduate school at the University of Michigan, and began to audit classes at Columbia to recover the feeling of lectures and the formal study of literature. I also started reading again in a scholarly mood, with attention to style and meaning, and no pleasure. There were more fights with Sylvia. After a bad fight, when both of us were spent, I said quietly that I would leave New York. She said nothing. I took her silence as agreement.

  One night, around 11 p.m., we were going to an all-night movie house on 42nd Street. As we descended into the subway, a rush of air, urinous and greasy, lifted about us. I said, “I can’t go down there. Let’s walk.” Sylvia didn’t mind walking. We’d gone only a few blocks when it began to drizzle. The sidewalk became slick. She tripped, soiled her white dress, and tore the strap of her sandal. I thought she’d blame me, but she didn’t. She was ready to go on walking. I wasn’t. I hailed a cab. As we were driving down Broadway, the cab rattling and clicking, the wide street shining on either side, I saw that in her soiled white dress, her black hair sparkling with rain, she was very pretty. I looked at her, memorizing the shape of her neck and mouth and the bones of her face, and I thought, She is my wife. I am leaving her. Sometimes, after a fight, we went to the movies. It was like going to church. We entered with the people, found our seats, faced the light, and succumbed to the vast communal imagination. We came away feeling affectionate and good, wounds healed. In the all-night movies on 42nd Street, we’d sit in the balcony with the great smokers and popcorn people, their fingers scrabbling, mouths gnashing. Others sucked chocolate, licked ice cream, and rattled candy wrappers. There were drunks and half-wits who talked to the screen. Bums spit on the floor. This was honest-to-god-movies, place of Manhattan’s sleepless people, like a zoo but in its massive anonymity, private-feeling. We could go to the movies together even though, twenty minutes earlier, we’d been screaming murder. In the silent desolation after a fight, I might say:

  “You want to go to the movies?”

  Sylvia would straighten her clothes, check her face in the bathroom mirror, grab her leather coat and tie the wraparound belt as we went out the door. I loved seeing her quickness, particularly in her hands, when she gave herself to something. We’d hurry off to the subway without finding out when the movie began, because there would always be two movies. We could watch at least one from the beginning.

  Sitting in the balcony, the eating and smoking all around, I sank into creaturely happiness, and then I noticed my arm was around Sylvia’s shoulder, and she had leaned her head on my arm. Our bad feelings were annihilated by big faces of love shining on the wall. Later, back in the street world, electricity lashed at our eyes, crowds mauled us, traffic wanted to kill us, and evil birds of marriage, black flecks soaring high in our brains, threatened to descend, but we were going home, we’d soon be in bed, hidden, pressed closely together.

  A few years earlier, in 1959, I had stood in line to buy tickets outside the Guild, a movie house in Berkeley, owned by Pauline Kael. Her brief movie reviews, posted near the box office, were masterpieces of tone, often better than the movies. She made them feel crucially personal, like novels and poems. Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, published in 1961, about the time Sylvia and I got married, said movies were personally redemptive; in the loneliness of an American life, moments of grace.

  Teddy asked if I would do him a favor and listen to him read a chapter of his dissertation aloud. I told him I would come to his place this afternoon. Spending time with Teddy, without Sylvia present, felt awkward, as if I were betraying her. She’d be resentful. She likes Teddy. He’s attractive and smart, and he flatters her with small attentions, laughing at her least joke. She’d feel left out. Teddy read for almost an hour. It was a great pleasure. Two of us in a room thinking about literature as if nothing could be more serious. Teddy says when the ghost in Hamlet walks onto the stage, one kind of hero becomes another in tragedies of revenge. I wanted to applaud. In my excitement I blurted out, “The ghost is wearing armor, he’s dressed for battle, but he can’t do anything except talk and scare people. He’s just like his son.” Teddy looked as if I’d made him sick. I should have listened, and said his ideas are good, that’s all. My enthusiasm had been wrong in spirit, a touch competitive. Before he finished, the phone rang. It was his ex-wife. She needed advice about an abortion for a relative. Teddy looked nervous after the call. He talked about his ex-wife’s habit of jumping into the troubles of other people. Before saying goodbye, she asked Teddy what he was doing. He said he was writing his dissertation. She said, “You’ve found something to torture yourself with.” Teddy said their conversations begin innocuously, then something gives her a chance to slash at him. I had ruined his mood, and then she knocked him off balance. He was confused, didn’t know how to stop talking. He’s the smoothest drawing-room man in New York, but he’d embarrassed himself, showing me his distress, bad-mouthing his ex-wife. He said, “She’s not like Sylvia, right?” The question was ironical, a thrust at me, but I didn’t know what was intended. He is protected by fifty smooth surfaces; never has a feeling that isn’t a little hidden. He didn’t want to go on reading now, and smoked a whole joint by himself, forgetting to offer me a drag. I didn’t want a drag, but I was uncomfortable not being offered one. It seemed more hostile than forgetful. He asked suddenly if I had seen the Rodin show.

  “Yes.”

  “Great, isn’t he?”

  “I suppose. I always liked Degas’s sculptures.”

  “I hate Degas.”

  I went home feeling sad. The cost of our friendship exceeded its value.

  JOURNAL, AUGUST 1963

  In July 1963, shortly before I separated from Sylvia and went to Michigan, I scribbled a note in my journal: “Movie. Sylvia fled. I met Roger alone. No Rosalie.” What happened was that Roger phoned and we made a date to meet in front of the Carnegie delicatessen, then go to a movie. Roger said he was bringing Rosalie. We’d heard about Rosalie for months, but never met her. This would be an exciting occasion. Roger told us the clever things Rosalie said about movies. But does Rosalie go to school? Does Rosalie have a job? Roger smiled in his weirdly embarrassed manner, repeating the words “school” and “job,” and he looked arch, as if we’d said much more than we knew. It was his sort of game. He had a secret. We knew what he was being secret about, but, out of affection for Roger, we played along. Eventually, we stopped asking about Rosalie. We thought of her mainly as a mind who went to movies with Roger and made clever comments. She had no body. Roger, a bookish man, looked as if he’d never been introduced to his own body. He was skinny, with flat buttocks, broad Slavic face, thin li
ps, exceptionally pale complexion, gray eyes, and dark-blond hair combed straight back. His posture was stick-like, and he seemed to carry unusual pressure high up in his chest, like a drowning man, gasping for air before going under. His lips worked with thoughts, tasting words before he spoke them.

  We took a bus downtown and got to the Carnegie delicatessen earlier than we expected, leaving us twenty minutes to wait, probably longer. Roger never arrived on time. Sylvia complained about the heat and was annoyed because I hadn’t worn a tie. On this particular afternoon, not wearing a tie showed disrespect for her. It was too hot for a tie, but I didn’t make that point. I was trying to be pleasant, not fight about anything. I was the one who was leaving town. Even with good reason to leave, the leaver is in the wrong. I’d have surely put on a tie, though it was unnecessary and uncomfortable, but Sylvia hadn’t mentioned it until we were out in the street. I felt set up, frustrated, given no chance to be good and avoid trouble. Roger would be wearing a tie and jacket. Sylvia had him in mind, comparing him to me, his tie showing respect for Rosalie. Roger always had a formal air, like a boy whose mother once told him, “You should always wear a jacket and tie.” His trousers rode too high on his hips. Grease spots appeared on his shirt fronts, like a family crest. He mixed materials, heavy tweed jacket with shiny gabardine slacks. The effect was formal and tasteless, almost sleazy.