Sylvia: A Novel (13 page)

I told Sylvia that I would be taking my preliminary exams in two weeks. She talked about her civil service job. At the apartment, she changed into a short gray cotton nightgown and poured herself a glass of bourbon. She then
joined me on the living room couch, lying on her back with her head in my lap. It wasn’t the moment to talk about divorce, but if I talked about anything else, it would be a lie. I was calm, listening to her, waiting for my chance to mention the serious matter, the one real thing, and put an end to this comfortable, mechanical, unreal domestic intimacy. Even if, somehow, I loved her and would always love her, our life together was hell, and could never be otherwise. I told myself to remember this.

Sylvia talked easily, addressing the air above, not my face. I noticed a black cat in the apartment. It had a broken tail, shaped like a flattened Z, or a lightning bolt. I watched the cat and it watched me. It was wretched-looking, a cat that skulked about, as if it felt guilty of being unlikeable.

Sylvia told about men she’d been seeing in the past several months. Some were my friends. She let me know that she’d been sleeping with them by telling me little gossipy stories.

“Teddy found out I was seeing one of his colleagues. He was very jealous. He said, ‘Now I know what Othello feels like.’”

Her tone was amused and blasé, as if none of this could be painful to me. She went on for a long time, quite comfortable reviewing her affairs while lying with her head in my lap. I listened without saying a word. Her French friend, I supposed, had been an object lesson, an introduction to what she planned to say when we were alone. She was mildly theatrical, stopping occasionally to lift her head and
take another sip of bourbon. When the glass was empty, she refilled it, then went on about this one and that one. She’d even slept with Roger, who was still trying to decide whether he preferred men. They’d taken drugs together. One night Roger and Teddy were both in the apartment. They each knew the other was sleeping with Sylvia. There was awful tension in the room. Everyone smoked a lot of grass, and, for hours, they talked about sexual perversion in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Neither Roger nor Teddy would leave before the other. Then, around 3 a.m., Roger went to the bathroom. The moment he left the room, Teddy pushed Roger’s chair all the way to the kitchen door, almost out of the living room. When Roger returned he saw the empty space and, of course, being himself, he was baffled. He suspected something had changed, but he wasn’t sure. He certainly wouldn’t ask. Then he saw his chair near the kitchen door. He went to it and sat there the rest of the night while Teddy and Sylvia sat in the living room in a normal way, and nobody said anything about what had happened. Sylvia laughed a little as she told the story, still feeling flattered by the idea of her two highly intellectual lovers. She also mentioned an editor of gourmet cookbooks who, even in literary circles of Manhattan where there is no shortage of satyrs, was notorious. I knew the guy. I hadn’t seen him in years, but we had friends in common and I heard plenty about him. He was a pretty man with curly brown hair, curly mouth, angelic blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a soft lyrical voice. He had the grand style of a courtly,
sentimental seducer. He read poems and sang songs to women. Several thousand women had been laid in his midtown apartment. I’d heard that the full-length mirror inside his closet door reflected the bed, but you couldn’t see the reflection from the bed unless you knew where to look. It was cast down the hall to another mirror inside the hall closet door. In bed with the woman of the moment, he could watch her in the closet mirror. He’d turn her this way and that, and she wouldn’t know she was being watched. The idea of self-conscious Sylvia subjected to his mirrors was sad.

About an hour passed with me locked in my old psychological prison, wondering if I’d ever feel good again. She’d given me plenty of reason to bring up divorce, to say simply that I wanted a divorce, but she was doing all the talking, sipping her bourbon, gaily confessing her infidelities. I might have said that I was seeing somebody, too, but it was only one person and she seemed irrelevant. I had nothing very dramatic, or interesting, to say about her. She didn’t even smoke, let alone take drugs. The moment belonged to Sylvia. I could say nothing at all. Then she asked, “Would you like to try once more?” She meant resume our life in Michigan, while I completed work for the Ph.D. The question was stupefying. I hadn’t expected anything like that, but maybe I should have known it was coming.

At the moment, I didn’t try to figure things out. I could repeat every word she said, but I understood little, maybe nothing. She seemed a different person, no longer the shy,
pathologically sensitive, explosive Sylvia, the one who was attractive to men yet felt she was repulsive. This was a glamorous Sylvia, an intellectual’s whore, sipping bourbon and flaunting her adventures in love, then asking if I’d like to have her back, as if she’d proved herself ravishingly depraved, brilliant in destructive spirit, perversely irresistible. I sat bloated by misery, heavy, stupid, burning. She’d said enough. She waited for my answer.

“Wait till I finish my exams,” I said. “Then come to Ann Arbor.”

She heard me. I said it clearly. I never felt worse. Sylvia lay still for a while, weighing my words. Then she sat up and walked into the bedroom. I continued to sit on the couch, unable to talk, a dummy. She reappeared, stood at the end of the couch, and said, “I just swallowed forty-seven Seconals.” In her eyes, I saw a flat look of that’s that, and there you have it.

I said, “You’re kidding.”

She walked off to the bathroom. I stayed where I was, on the couch, not believing her, not disbelieving, and then I heard her groan. Her body fell to the floor, which is how it sounds. It does not sound like anything else. I hurried to the bathroom. She was sprawled on the tile, underpants still hooked to one ankle. Apparently she’d fallen off the bowl while sitting on it. I dragged her to the couch, shouting at her, slapping her face, shaking her. Then I tried to walk her around the living room. I stopped only to phone the police, and open the apartment door wide, and then I
went back to the bathroom, picked up her underpants, and pulled them up her legs. I tried again to make her walk, hooking her left arm around my shoulder, my right arm around her waist. It was no use. I was dragging her, not walking her. I dropped her back on the couch, straddled her, and pleaded and shouted while shaking her and furiously rubbing her wrists. I thought to make her vomit, but she was unconscious and I was afraid she would choke. Minutes later, two policemen entered the apartment. They did the same thing with Sylvia that I’d been doing, one on either side of her, walking her about. Then there was an ambulance, lights flashing in the street. We carried Sylvia downstairs. I got into the ambulance with her. We shot across town to Knickerbocker Hospital, in Spanish Harlem.

A medical team was waiting to receive Sylvia. They went to work in an efficient, military way. I saw them cup her mouth with a respirator mask, then somebody asked me and the two policemen not to stand so close. We retreated to the doorway. As if I weren’t there, one policeman said to the other, “She won’t make it.”

It had been less than half an hour since she fell. She was healthy; only twenty-four years old. It was impossible that she could just die, regardless of the liquor and the pills; but there she was, unconscious and responding to nothing. I was scared. I thought only in the most primitive manner. She’d always been right about everything. I’d always been wrong.
I loved her. I couldn’t live without her. She’d proved it. I was convinced. No more proof was necessary, only that she open her eyes and live. I’d be what she liked. I’d do what she wanted and that would also be what I wanted. She would know that I loved her and always had. My mind went round and round with the same little prayer. I had only to keep saying it, not let any other thought interfere. It was important not to be distracted. In this trancelike state, I could see other people all about and I could converse, and yet I was isolated, I was pure, dedicated to my prayer, as if it were keeping Sylvia alive. I loved her, I had always loved her, we were going to Michigan . . .

One of the medical staff asked me if I knew what Sylvia had swallowed. I told him what she said. He then said they must do a tracheotomy. Sylvia wasn’t breathing. But no one present had authority to perform a surgical procedure. I noticed that all of them had foreign accents, Spanish and German. Perhaps they weren’t fully licensed to practice medicine in America. They were standing around, suddenly doing nothing. I didn’t understand how there could be nothing to do. I urged the one who spoke to me to do the tracheotomy. I said, “Please do it.” I begged with my face and body and voice. He wanted to do it, but was frightened. Another doctor appeared, wearing street clothes, coming down the hall, walking briskly to the exit. He was a tall, strong-boned man with a Nordic face, sallow complexion, thin lips, icy eyes. He looked authoritative, like a hero or a
god, one who could perform surgery, climb a mountain, kill people, anything. I saw in his eyes that he was thinking only of leaving the emergency room, going away from this hospital, going to a place far away. The one who’d spoken to me, a short dark Spanish doctor—if he was a doctor—stopped the one who was leaving. He explained the situation to him in a deferential tone; a slight bend appeared in his spine and his elbows pressed his ribs, as if he were making the shape of apology, begging forgiveness. With a gesture of disgust, the tall one brushed him aside and went out the door.

I’d known instantly that the Spanish doctor had used the wrong tone. He should have been assertive and demanding. He should have said in a loud voice for everyone to hear, “Do it. She isn’t breathing. She’ll die.” Instead, he was a whispering, servile man. I’d been afraid the doctor with icy eyes would react just as he did, brushing the Spanish doctor aside. I could do nothing except watch the two men, as if I were dreaming their entire exchange.

The Spanish doctor then returned to Sylvia. The others stood about the table, grimly watching as he performed the tracheotomy. I watched from the doorway, forbidden to step closer. The Spanish doctor was taking a chance with his career and his life. At least that’s what I thought. With everything to lose, he did the job.

Moments later he turned to me and said Sylvia would be all right. She was breathing normally. He was pleased, exultant, reassuring; his successful performance had left us
nothing to worry about. They wheeled her away to a room upstairs. I followed and sat beside her bed. When we were alone, I told her we would go to Michigan, and that I wished she would open her eyes. She didn’t open her eyes, didn’t move.

I left the room to phone family and friends. Some arrived in the middle of the night, others early the next morning. Two of Sylvia’s aunts and an uncle were among those who came. They spoke to one another, not to me. I overheard a few things they said while they stood talking outside Sylvia’s room.

“I feel terrible. I never visited her. She would call me sometimes.” It was a woman’s voice, matronly, with a faintly foreign intonation.

“She was always neurotic. I don’t know why he married her.” A second woman.

“Is she getting the best possible attention? I want to call in another doctor.” The first woman again, agitation building in her voice. She continued: “Get the key to her apartment. We should investigate, find out what she took. We’ll need her medical insurance papers. I believe she had a cat. Has somebody fed the cat?”

Sylvia didn’t wake, but she continued to breathe normally. Her face turned once in my direction, following me as I crossed to the other side of the bed. It seemed her mind was alert and she knew I was in the room, and yet she was taking in my presence through a void, as if from
another planet. I watched her for hours. I held her hand, smoothed her hair. Mainly, I just sat beside her bed. I believed she could hear me, feel my touch, sense movement, and that she was perfectly conscious and alert, but simply couldn’t respond. She was suspended, floating in a strange sleep. When she awoke, she would remember everything. Now and then I left the room and dozed in the hall, on a wooden bench.

For two nights and days, I sat with Sylvia or tried to sleep on the bench, afraid to leave the hospital before she woke up. I thought it was dangerous to leave her; too unlucky, too risky. I’d be out in the city, far away, doing nothing to sustain her. My presence was necessary; touch, voice, thoughts.

The Spanish doctor drew me into an office on the second morning. He said again that Sylvia would recover, but he was more sober, more judicious. He said it was a medical miracle that she was alive, but I mustn’t expect too much. She’d been unconscious for a long time. No telling if she had suffered brain damage. “She might no longer be the person you remember.”

I noticed, for the first time, that he was very young and had a round face and thick, curly black hair. He made an impression of physical compactness, energy, and warmth. I began to sense the qualities of his personality, his desire to be kind, and something about his idea of himself as a doctor. He was probably younger than me, but speaking in a fatherly manner, doing what he believed he should, trying
to prepare me for the worst that could happen. I didn’t believe Sylvia had suffered brain damage.

During the third night, as I slept on the wooden bench outside her room, I was awakened by terrible shouts in a German accent—“Seel-vya”—and the sound of hard slaps. I rose and looked into the room. The doctor who had refused to do the tracheotomy was bent over Sylvia, shouting her name and slapping her face, as if she were a very disobedient child who refused to wake up. I pitied him, but I hated him, too, and wished him ill. Sylvia didn’t open her eyes.

The next morning I went downstairs and sat in the reception area. A black man and two women, perhaps his wife and his sister, stood waiting there. They were nicely dressed, as if to show respect for the hospital. The Spanish doctor appeared. As he walked toward them, his round face opened with expectation, like their faces. For an instant it seemed he was about to receive news from them. But it was he who spoke.