Sylvia: A Novel (11 page)

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 television, 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 lips, 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.

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?”