Sylvia: A Novel (6 page)

After dinner I lingered with her on the bed, reading a magazine as she collected notebooks, preparing to study. When she began to study, I’d begin to leave the bed. I never just left in a simple, natural way, but always with vague gradualness, letting Sylvia get used to the idea. I’d stir, lay aside the magazine, lean toward the cold room.

“Going to your hole?”

Sometimes I’d settle back onto the bed, thinking, “I’ll write tomorrow when she’s at school. Maybe she’ll go to sleep in a few hours. I’ll write then. A small sacrifice. Better than a fight.” That in itself—my desire not to fight—could be an incitement. “Why don’t we discuss this for a minute . . .” To sound rational, when she was wrought up, wrought her up further, like a smack in the face. She once threw the typewriter she’d given me—“To help you write”—at my head. An Olivetti portable, Lettera 22. It struck a wall, then the floor, but was undamaged. I still use it. She also failed to destroy the telephone, though she often tried, knocking it off the shelf, or flinging it against the brick wall.

I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn’t know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing
hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself.

Writing a story wasn’t as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I’d find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn’t. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.

Writing in the cold room, I’d sometimes become exhilarated, as if I’d transcended all difficulties, done something good. The story had written itself. It bore no residual trace of me. It was clean. A day later, rereading with a more critical eye, I sank into the blackest notions of my fate. I’d wanted so little, just a story that wouldn’t make me feel ashamed of myself next week, or five years from now. It was too much to want. The story I’d written was no good. It broke my heart. I was no good.

“Going to your hole?”

I felt I was digging it.

Sylvia had a pain in her shoulder. She lay in bed and asked me to rub it, but when I touched her she squirmed spasmodically and pushed my hand away. I kept trying to do it right, but she wouldn’t stop squirming and wouldn’t tell me just where to rub. Then she lunged out of bed and paced the room, rubbing her shoulder herself.

“I have a sore spot. A stranger could rub it better than you.”

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

Sylvia was often in pain or a nervous, defeated condition, especially when she got her period. She’d lie on the couch, our bed, groaning, whimpering, begging me to go buy her Tampax. I didn’t see how it could ease her pain, but she was insistent, whining and writhing. She needed Tampax. This invariably happened very late, long after midnight, when I was thinking about going to sleep. Instead of sleeping, I’d be out in the streets looking for an open drugstore. I dreaded the man at the counter, who would think I was an exceptionally bizarre Village transvestite. I asked for Tampax in a hoodlumish voice, as if it were manufactured for brutal males. One night, when I returned to the apartment with the box of Tampax, I detected the faintest smile on Sylvia’s lips. Having me buy her Tampax turned her on. I decided never to do it again. As if she’d read my mind, she stopped asking.

How much else was theater? Sylvia knew how she was behaving. She didn’t want to discuss it with a psychiatrist. Too embarrassing and there was no point. Maybe everything was theater. The difference between one person and another lay in what they knew about their private theaters. Willy Stark had some idea like that: everything is theater; nothing is real. Everybody had a role to play; or, everybody, like it or not, had to play a role. You played in your theater, or in somebody else’s, depending on your willpower and imagination. Around then, in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was telling the world that he’d never killed a Jew or a non-Jew. Killing wasn’t in his nature. But, he said, if he’d been ordered from high up in the SS to kill his father, he’d have done it.

Sylvia looks in the mirror and dreams about lovers as she cuts her hair. She worries about pimples, pains, and pregnancy, and she worries about what everyone thinks of her, and she spends a lot of time sleeping, or lying about eating candy and frosted rolls, complaining of pains. Occasionally, she will show me affection. She went on today about her periods, how much of her life has bled away.

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

I recorded our fights in a secret journal because I was less and less able to remember how they started. There would
be an inadvertent insult, then disproportionate anger. I would feel I didn’t know why this was happening. I was the object of terrific fury, but what had I done? What had I said? Sometimes I would have the impression that the anger wasn’t actually directed at me. I’d merely stepped into the line of fire, the real target being long dead. I wasn’t him. He wasn’t me. I’d somehow become Sylvia’s hallucination. Perhaps I didn’t really exist, at least not the way a table, a hat, or a person exists. Once, when I thought a bad scene was over, I lay down and threw my arm over my eyes. It was after 3 a.m., but Sylvia refused to turn off the light. She sat in a chair, six feet from the bed, and watched me. Then I heard her say, “I don’t know how you find the courage to go to sleep.” She might stick a knife in my heart, I supposed. But she couldn’t afford to kill me. She’d be alone. Sleep took no courage.

Another time she pulled all my shirts out of the dresser and threw them on the floor and jumped up and down on them and spit on them. I seized her wrists and pressed her down on the bed while I shouted into her face that I loved her. By tiny degrees, she seemed to relax, to relent. I urged her along, more observer than committed fighter, and I sensed the changes she passed through, each degree of feeling.

After a fight, unless there was sex, Sylvia usually collapsed into sleep. Ringing with anguish, exceedingly awake, I forced myself to rethink the fight, moment by moment, writing it all down in the cold room as Sylvia slept. It was
my way of knowing, if nothing else, that this was really happening. It was also a way of talking about it, though only to myself. I hid the journal in a space just below the surface of the table where I wrote stories. None of the stories were about life on MacDougal Street. My life wasn’t subject matter. It wasn’t to be exploited for the purpose of fiction. I’d never even talked about it to anyone, and I imagined that nobody knew how bad things were. As a matter of high principle and shame, I kept everything that happened on MacDougal Street to myself. By sneaking the events into my journal, when Sylvia collapsed, I made them seem even more secret. Then, one afternoon, Malcolm Raphael, another old friend from the University of Michigan, visited. We were alone in the apartment. He said he’d just come from Majorca, where he’d overheard some Americans, lying near him on the beach, talking about me and Sylvia. One of them lived in our building. He described our fights to the others.

I felt myself going blind and deaf, repudiating the news, denying it in my physiology. It was like fainting. Malcolm saw my reaction, laughed, and told me about the fights he’d had with his wife. It was an extraordinary moment. Men never talked to each other this way. His fights were as bad as mine, but he made them seem funny. He was unashamed.

I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too, even a charming, sophisticated
guy like Malcolm. We laughed together. I felt happily irresponsible. Countless men and women, I supposed, all over America, were tearing each other to pieces. How great. I was normal. It was a delightful feeling, but to think this way also gave me the creeps. I was reminded of some former acquaintances, flamboyant gay kids I’d met years ago, while learning how to skate at Iceland, the rink next to Madison Square Garden. I’d find them speeding about, slashing ice, or gathered at the edge of the rink watching the skaters and gossiping. They referred to everyone as a “faggot.” The cop we passed in the street was a “cop-faggot.” The mayor of New York was a “mayor-faggot.” A famous football player was a “football-faggot.” Every “he” was a “she.” The more manly, strict, correct, official, moral, authoritative, the more faggot she.

Now, after listening to Malcolm, I felt like the gay kids—shame notwithstanding—onstage, my secret life subject to the voracious curiosity of everybody, and in their gayish manner, I let myself think every man and woman who lived together were like Sylvia and me. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable. Whatever people thought of me, I could think it first of them. I could flaunt my shame as a form of contempt for others. No better disguise for shame than contempt, and nothing is easier to do than to sneer and denigrate. Nothing is more pleasing to the vanity of others. Any two people
chatting are making invidious remarks about a third. It is a perverse form of generosity, and self-adoration.

Sylvia knew nothing about the gossip. Since she lived in constant fear of humiliation, I didn’t tell her. The fact that our cover was blown strengthened my commitment to her. She’d really been hurt, virtually killed, even if she didn’t know it. We weren’t yet married, but Sylvia wanted to do it soon, and the simple idea that it would be unwise for us to marry did not occur to me. If I did not want to marry Sylvia, I couldn’t think I didn’t, couldn’t let myself know it. I had no thoughts or feelings that weren’t moral. When I added two and two, a certain moral sensation arrived with the number four.

Sylvia complained again of a swollen spot on the back of her neck. I rubbed the area for a little while. I felt nothing swollen. Anyhow, the complaining stopped. I then said I wanted to go do some work. She said she had a stomachache. I didn’t believe her, and I despised myself for not believing her. She needed comfort. Whether or not she had real pain was irrelevant. She lay on her stomach and moaned in different ways, emitted small shrieks. I asked her to stop, turned her over. She moaned through bared teeth, her eyes wide and fixed on mine. I cupped her mouth. She bit my hand, then sobbed and said I could go. She wanted me to go. I could continue living with her if I liked, but I was also free to go. She let me hold her. I cried a little, kissing her, holding her. I showed love, but it felt like a self-accusation, or
an apology. That was my apology—very sincere—but it was for nothing specific. Like a religious convulsion. You apologize for being alive, for not being sick, for not being physically deformed, for not being as bad off as other people. I don’t know what I apologized for. Maybe for the love I desecrated by not believing in Sylvia’s pain. I felt utterly sincere, apologizing, kissing her. It was too delicious, I think.

JOURNAL, MARCH 1961

I was affected by cultural radiations from newspapers, radio, movies, television, but my life was MacDougal Street, voices through the walls, traffic noises through the windows, odors floating up the stairwell, and always Sylvia. A visit to my parents lasted only a few hours. There was no place to go where I might forget MacDougal Street and Sylvia for a little while.

With few exceptions, Sylvia imagined my friends were her enemies. Once, hurrying back to the apartment from a twenty-minute meeting with a friend in the San Remo bar, a hundred feet from the entrance to our building, I opened the apartment door on madness. Sylvia, at the stove, five feet away, turned toward me holding a plate of spaghetti in her hand—already startling, since she never cooked—and the plate came sailing toward my face, strands of spaghetti untangling like a ball of snakes. “Dinner,” she said. I caught it against my forearm.

She’d been enraged by my meeting downstairs, so she
cooked spaghetti. Why? She saw herself standing at the stove and cooking spaghetti like a woman who does such things for a man. The man, however, being viciously ungrateful, abandoned her. While Sylvia slaved over a boiling pot of spaghetti, I regaled myself with conversation and a glass of beer. In a bitterly hideous way, it struck me as funny, but I wasn’t laughing.

The telephone, if it rang for me, was also her enemy. She’d say, “His master’s voice,” and hand me the phone. After I put it down, she’d jeer, “You love Bernie, don’t you?” He was a witty guy. I’d laughed too hard at his remarks during the phone call, and Sylvia resented all that flow of feeling in his direction. Eventually, when answering the phone, if Sylvia was in the room, I kept my voice even and dull, or edged with annoyance, as if the call were tedious. I learned to talk in two voices, one for the caller, the other for Sylvia, who listened nearby in the tiny apartment, storing up acid criticisms.