Sylvia: A Novel (5 page)

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

Almost all of our friends were Jewish, black, homosexual, more or less drug-addicted, very intelligent, very nervous, or a combination of two or three of these things. Willy Stark was from Mississippi, very black, very handsome. We met at the University of Michigan. When he moved to New York, we’d go out to jazz clubs and sit for hours, listening to the music, hardly talking. He never said very much. We heard Charlie Mingus at the Five Spot. Another time, we heard Miles Davis at Basin Street. It was a rainy night in the middle of the week, and there were few people
in the audience. After one of Davis’s solos, performed with his back to the audience, Willy whispered, “He’s a poet.” Though I couldn’t say exactly what Willy had in mind, I was moved by his comment. The university hadn’t made his feelings thin and literary. He’d been raised on a farm. He knew about guns, wild weather, snakes, jazz, and much else that was real. Compared to Willy, I considered myself effete. He hardly talked; I talked too much and too easily. He made me wonder if I’d believe the things I said, let alone think them in the first place, if I didn’t get caught up in the momentum of talk. Sylvia never objected to me spending time with Willy. He was among the few exceptions to her rage.

Willy invited us to a New Year’s Eve party in Brooklyn. At midnight, everyone kissing, Willy kissed Sylvia. Later, back on MacDougal Street, as we fell asleep, Sylvia said he had wanted more than a kiss. “He said you wouldn’t mind. He said you were hip.”

She thought about Willy’s kiss during the next few months, mentioning it several times, as if it had settled in her nervous system like a slow-growing virus. She also wanted more, at least in her fantasies, if not at the moment he kissed her. She said she’d turned her face away. That wasn’t enough.

Willy worked as a counselor three days a week in a drug rehabilitation program for high school kids. On weekends, he sometimes made extra money by selling heroin, sharing the profits with a radical group in Ann Arbor. Willy had no politics, only tremendous anger. The radicals took to
him. In his silence, they heard what they wanted to hear. They introduced Willy to a heroin source in Montreal, and gave him the money for his first buy. Heroin came by freighter from refineries in Bulgaria. Willy drove to Montreal, picked up the heroin, then drove back to New York.

He rented three or four apartments in Manhattan, and would arrange to meet his distributors in one of the apartments. He didn’t tell them which apartment until the last minute. When they entered, the phone rang. It was Willy. He’d say they had ten minutes or so to get to another of his apartments. When they arrived there, the phone rang again, or else Willy was waiting with the heroin, a gun, and a bodyguard. If the distributors were two minutes late, Willy left. He believed that being punctual was crucial. He said, “If somebody’s late, somebody’s dead.”

When he completed a sale, he flew to an island in the Caribbean, checked into a hotel, and stayed drunk until he stopped feeling frightened. A few times he rented a car and crashed into a tree or a wall. For some reason, it helped to free him of his fear. He told me all this after the kissing incident, as if to give me something personal and keep our friendship whole. He also offered me a chance to sell drugs. I was very touched, and actually thought about doing it. He said all I had to do was wear a suit and stand on a street corner with a briefcase. I said no. We didn’t see each other again. Years later, I learned he had died of pancreatic cancer.

Through Willy, the healer-dealer, I had a sense of what it meant to be hip. He was my friend, but would have fucked Sylvia at the New Year’s Eve party, if she’d let him, while I was in the next room. We sat together in jazz clubs for hours, saying almost nothing. I’d feel myself entering a trance of music, the meaning of this minute. How sad, or exciting, or weird it was to be alive in the sixties. I heard it in the jazz voices in the dark, smoky clubs. One night, at the bar in Birdland, with Willy beside me, we listened to Sarah Vaughan. She sang “Every little breeze seems to whisper Louise . . .” The wheeze in the rhyme of “breeze/Louise” vanished. She sang it out of existence, rendering only the exquisite mystery, such sweet and melancholy love as belonged to music in those days.

Because of our fights, Sylvia often didn’t begin studying until after midnight. Sitting on the edge of the bed, remains of dinner all about, she held a grammar book in her lap and flipped pages, sometimes glaring at the words as if they were a distraction from her real concern—me. She said I was “doing this” to her, starting fights, trying to ruin her chances, make her fail. In fact I was proud of her, but it’s true I was at least partly responsible for her suffering. I regretted having influenced her decision to study classics. She wasn’t much interested in Latin and Greek, but she did the work because she feared academic disgrace, and, maybe,
despite all the bad feeling, she wanted to please me. Night after night, she steeped herself in Homer and Virgil, a frenzy of mechanical performance that may have reminded her of her childhood schooling.

She’d been admitted to the Hunter elementary school for gifted children. Every morning, before leaving for school, she would go into the bathroom and vomit. Nobody at Hunter knew she lived in Queens, rather than Manhattan, where students were required to live, and she was constantly afraid that she would be discovered and publicly shamed. At the end of the day, she’d ride the subway back to Queens and sometimes fall asleep and miss her stop. She’d wake up, then catch a train going back. When she got home she’d find her mother flat on the floor, eyes shut, looking dead. It was a joke—she’d died waiting for Sylvia—but it frightened Sylvia.

I thought Sylvia went much too fast when she studied, flipping through pages she couldn’t have absorbed, then tossing the book aside and picking up another. If there was tension between us—I’d made another hurtful remark, or I wanted to visit my parents, or I looked at a girl who passed us in the street—Sylvia would repeat to herself as she studied, “You’re doing this to make me fail.” Doing what? Sometimes, I knew what she had in mind; sometimes not. I never asked. She said, almost chanting, “You’re doing this to make me fail,” as the pages flipped by.

She’d say it again early in the morning as she flung out the door still wearing her clothes of the previous day, in
which she’d slept, for maybe an hour, before leaving. Her long black hair bouncing and flying, blouse crumpled and half-buttoned, skirt twisted on her hips, she hustled through the Village streets to NYU, like a madwoman imitating a college student.

We were sitting on the bed after dinner. I was looking at a magazine. Sylvia was beginning to study. I commented on the beauty of one of the models in an advertisement. Sylvia glanced at the photo, then said, “Your ideal of beauty is blue, slanted eyes.”

“So?”

Sylvia dropped backward on the bed, pulled the pillows against her ears, and began sobbing and thrashing. Then she stopped, sat up, and said, “I never went into detail about my sexual experiences.”

I sat in silence and waited. She fell back again, made leering, hating faces, writhed like an epileptic, and then sat up and slapped my cheek and said, “I can’t see why you don’t adore me.”

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

In the throes of hysteria, her voice might suddenly become cool and elegant, and she’d make a witty remark, as if she were detached from herself and every quality of the moment was clear to her—the hatefulness of her display as
well as my startled appreciation of her wit. I took this as a good sign, thinking it meant she wasn’t really nuts. She felt the same way about it. “I know how I’m behaving,” she’d say whenever I tried to talk to her about seeing a psychiatrist. She couldn’t, then, see a psychiatrist. She knew herself; she couldn’t talk about her excesses. Too shameful, too embarrassing.

Admiring the beauty of the model, an image in a magazine, meant I disliked Sylvia’s looks and didn’t love her. In casual chatter she heard inadvertent revelations of my true feelings. She was outraged. I loved the model. I’d said as much, damned myself.

Sylvia discovered an incapacitating sentimental disease in me. Together, we nourished it. I wasn’t a good enough person, I’d think, whereas she was a precious mechanism in which exceedingly fine springs and wheels had been brutally mangled by grief. Grief gave her access to the truth. If Sylvia said I was bad, she was right. I couldn’t see why, but that’s because I was bad. Blinded by badness.

She had to be right. I’d been living with her for months. I protected my investment, so to speak, by supposing that her hysteria and her accusations were not revolting and contemptible but a highly moral thing, like the paroxysm of an Old Testament prophet. They were fiery illuminations, moments of perverse grace. Not the manifestation of lunacy.

In a normal, defensive way, I’d also think nobody had ever talked to me as Sylvia did. That meant I wasn’t bad,
maybe. Nobody ever blamed me for having thoughts and feelings I didn’t have. But even if I’d had bad thoughts and a generally nasty mental life, so what? Didn’t I behave well? I was very affectionate, always touching. I came to believe the thoughts and feelings Sylvia hated in me were hers more than mine.

It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it.

Repetition, according to religious thinkers, is seriousness. Working, eating, sleeping is repetition. The rising sun, phases of the moon, revolutions of planets and stars—everything in the universe repeats. Everything is ritual. To stop repeating is death—not the reverse. It was a fact of our daily life, as serious as our fights and compulsive sex, that we climbed six flights of stairs to and from the street. Our footsteps sounded in the resonant stairwell, day and night. To go to classes at NYU, Sylvia climbed twice, five times a week. I listened to her going. I heard her returning. To go to the grocery, movies, local bars, or the mailbox, we climbed six flights down, six flights up. To buy a pack of cigarettes required the same number of steps as when I went to visit my father in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, after his second heart attack. The doctors said my father also had prostate cancer, but they didn’t want to operate in the summer. “It’s too hot.” I told this to Sylvia. Instantly, she said, “In the winter it will be too cold.” I was surprised by the
pain her remark caused me. But of course she was right. I hadn’t understood the doctors, or hadn’t wanted to. They didn’t think my father would survive an operation. There was no point in operating. He wouldn’t live long enough to die of cancer. I had not understood.

The stairway was the spine of the building, the steps were vertebrae. I climbed through a body. It exuded odors and made noises. I smelled food cooking, incense burning, and the gases of hashish and roach poison. I heard radios and phonograph players, the old Italian lady who screamed “Bassano” every day, and the boy’s footsteps running in the hall. Bassano never answered the old lady, presumably his grandmother, and I never once saw him. When I met her in the hallway or on the stairs, she always nodded and said, “Nice day,” regardless of the weather.

At the landings, the hallway struck left and right toward the apartments. A light bulb burned at the landings where four toilets stood side by side, the doors shut. The toilets were closets about ten feet high, four feet wide, and six feet deep. Above the bowl was a water tank, it gurgled and clanked. When you finished, you pulled a chain. This wasn’t the kind of toilet where people settled down with literature.

Because the street door didn’t lock and anyone might enter the building, our toilet was sometimes used by strangers. Toilet doors locked from the inside with hook-and-eye latches. I once saw a ruby of brilliant blood gleaming on the toilet seat. It had just been used by somebody to shoot up. Another time I opened the door on a boy and girl fucking.
He sat on the bowl facing the door, his jeans and underwear around his ankles. She faced him, straddling his thighs, the divided flesh of her ass flaring. Her jeans and underwear lay in a pile. The boy stared over her left shoulder, his features squeezed by pleasure and strain. He stared directly at my eyes, oblivious to all but the feeling that beat in his cock. The girl was galloping hard. She didn’t hear me open the door, didn’t turn around, didn’t lose the rhythm. I shut the door and hurried back to our apartment, told Sylvia. She said, “What if I need to use the toilet? I don’t want to find people in there.” She ordered me to tell them to get out or we’d call the police. I didn’t want to. She didn’t really want to either, but she’d taken a proprietary stand, her bourgeois dignity—of which she had none—was at stake. “If you don’t go tell them,” she said, “I will.”

We went together.

I opened the door. The couple was gone.

Mother phoned just to talk, got Sylvia. Sylvia said she’d cut her hair badly, was too upset to talk, gave the phone to me.

Mother said, “How is Sylvia’s finger?”

I said, “Nothing is wrong with her finger.”

“No? She told me she cut her finger.”

“No. It’s her hair,” I said. “She cut her hair badly. She doesn’t like the way it looks.”

“Oh, I thought she cut her finger. I was worried. Daddy heard and he was also aggravated.”

He must have heard through mental telepathy. My mother sounded confused, intimidated by Sylvia.

Hurt, insulted, confused, my mother doesn’t understand why Sylvia dislikes her. She is helpless to do anything about it. Her greatest worry was that I might marry a
shikse.
Nothing to worry about.

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

A main cause of our fights was my desire to get off the bed after dinner and go into the tiny room adjoining the living room. It contained a cot, a kitchen chair, and a shaky wooden table where I set my typewriter. The table was shoved against the tall window, leaving only inches between the back of my chair and the cot. I sat at the table, looking out over the rooftops, with their chimneys, clotheslines, water tanks, and pigeon coops, toward the Hudson River and the Upper West Side. If I looked down, I looked into the bedroom windows of a tenement about fifty feet away. Winds from the west rattled the window glass, penetrating old loose putty, carrying icy air from the Hudson River to my fingers. They stiffened as I typed. My chin and the tip of my nose became numb. I’d hear Sylvia sigh and lip the pages of her books. I could hear the sound of her pencil when she made notes. I was four steps away. Nevertheless, she’d feel abandoned, excluded, lonely, angry, and God knows what else. Only four steps away, but I was
out of sight and not seeing her. She may have felt herself ceasing to exist. She didn’t want me to go into the cold room.