Sylvia: A Novel (4 page)

Ordinary or violent, the sex was frequent, exhausting more than satisfying. Sylvia said she’d never had an orgasm. As if I were the one who stood between her and that ultimate pleasure, she announced, “I will not live my whole life without an orgasm.” She said she’d had several lovers better than I was. She wanted to talk about them, I think, make me suffer details.

I began trying to write again. Sylvia began taking classes at NYU, a few blocks away across Washington Square Park, to complete her undergraduate work. She asked me what she ought to declare as her major. I said if I were doing it over, I’d major in classics. I should have said nothing. She registered for Latin and Greek, ancient history, and a class in eighteenth-century English literature. She had to learn the complex grammars of two languages, read long poems and fat novels, and write papers, all while living in squalor and fighting with me every day. It seemed to me a maniacal program. I expected confusion and disaster, but she was abnormally bright and did well enough.

There was no desk in the apartment, but Sylvia didn’t need such conveniences, didn’t even seem to notice their absence. I don’t think she ever complained about anything in the miserable apartment, not even about the roaches, only about me. She studied sitting on the edge of the bed in a mess of papers. Her expression would go flat, her body limp. She would be utterly still except for her eyes. She didn’t scratch, didn’t stretch. She was doing the job, getting it over with. I’d sit with her sometimes for hours, reading a novel or a magazine. We ate together in bed, usually noodles, frozen vegetables, and orange juice, or else we went out for pizza or Chinese food. Neither of us cooked. My mother often gave us food. I’d carry it back to MacDougal Street after our visits downtown, two or three times a month.

One night, after dinner at my parents’ apartment, my mother slipped away to the bedroom with Sylvia’s coat and sewed up a tear in the sleeve. As we were about to leave, she surprised Sylvia with the mended coat. Sylvia seemed grateful and affectionate. In the street, however, she became hysterical with indignation, saying she’d been humiliated. I tried to make her understand that my mother was being sweet, doing something good for Sylvia. My mother intended kindness, not a comment on Sylvia’s coat. I didn’t say that Sylvia made a pitiable, waiflike impression in the torn coat. I said my mother wanted Sylvia to like her. Saying such things, I embarrassed myself. Then I became angry. What difference did motives make? Sylvia wanted to be pitied; my mother wanted to be liked. Who could care? What mattered was that my mother’s gesture had been affectionate. To defend her against Sylvia brought up questions of loyalty. Maybe that was the point. But, to my mind, my mother needed no defense. I was wrong to defend her. I shut up. Sylvia could interpret things however she liked. I couldn’t instruct her in feeling, and I refused to sink into a poisonous and boring morass of motives.

Thereafter, I visited my parents alone.

Sometimes, as if I were visiting out of bitter determination rather than a simple desire to be with them, I sat at the table and ate like a solemn pig. You like to feed me? Good, that’s why I’m here, I’m eating. In my own eyes, I seemed irrational, ill-tempered, spiteful, and unhappily confused about everything in my life. My mother had
done too much for me, beginning when I was a little kid who never went two weeks without an ear infection or lung disease. She carried me through the streets to the doctor because I couldn’t walk, always too sick, too weak. She sat beside my bed all night lest I were kidnapped by death. It’s hard to forgive self-sacrifice. As for Sylvia’s sensitivity to imagined insult, that was pathological, not on the side of life. My mother’s cooking was life.

“Who needs restaurants?” said my father, slurping his soup. “You can’t find better food no place.”

My mother sewed up the tear in the sleeve of Sylvia’s coat. She didn’t ask first. Big deal. She’d never do that again. I told her it was a mistake. I knew she would be shocked and her feelings would be hurt, but I had to tell her. I wanted to tell her. She didn’t in the least understand. I tried to explain how a person might be annoyed if you make a fuss over her torn clothing. It is important not to notice such things. Her personal business, not yours. The more I talked, the more exasperated I felt. I raised my voice, as if I were criticizing her for doing what she believed was nice. What did I believe? I also believed it was nice. I was criticizing her for doing what I believed was nice.

Barely five feet tall and always cooking, cleaning, shopping, sewing. To criticize “the Mommy”—my father’s expression—was, even if correct, incorrect in the eyes of
God. It was close to evil. In the background with his cigar, watching television, brooding, he made gloomy, silent judgments. (“That’s how you talk to the Mommy? What’s the matter with you? Don’t you know better?”)

I rode the F train to West Fourth Street, then hurried through the garish carnival of MacDougal Street, where tourists came nightly from all over the city to sit in neighborhood coffee shops like Cafe Bizarre, Cafe Wha?, Take Three, Cock and Bull, and Cafe Figaro, where they could listen to somebody strum a guitar and sing through his sinuses like a hillbilly. I entered our building and, without getting winded, though I smoked plenty, I ran up six flights of stairs. Lying in the dark land of the
cucarachas
, her Latin and Greek grammars flung into chaos, radio playing softly, my Sylvia waited, seething.

“I brought fried chicken, pickles, potato latkes, and mandel bread. Turn on the light. Sit up. My mother also knit a sweater for you.” I always brought food back to MacDougal Street. Sylvia would eat.

Once, when I was at my parents’ apartment, Sylvia phoned to say that she’d slit her wrists. She hadn’t wanted me to go alone to visit my parents for a few hours, and she had refused to come with me.

I picked up the phone and said, “Hello, Sylvia?”

A tiny voice said, “I just slit my wrists.”

I left my parents’ apartment, but not before my mother had packed a bag with a dozen bagels, two jars of gefilte fish, and a salad she made of onions and radishes.

I didn’t want to go rushing back to MacDougal Street, intimidated by Sylvia’s threats of self-destruction or her announcement of the fait accompli. I didn’t believe she had slit her wrists. But I couldn’t be certain. (She had a small, fine, nearly imperceptible scar on one wrist, and claimed she’d once tried to kill herself.) In my frustration—refusing to be intimidated, yet feeling terrified—I became angry at my mother for detaining me as she packed food. She suspected things were bad on MacDougal Street, but if I left without the food she’d know they were very bad. I was ashamed and didn’t want her to know how Sylvia and I lived, but I didn’t want Sylvia to bleed to death. I waited for the food, then ran to the subway, then ran from the subway to MacDougal Street, through the crowds, up the six flights of stairs to our apartment, and I burst in hot and wild, the bag of food in my arms, shouting, “I don’t give a damn if you slashed your neck.”

She had sliced her wrists very superficially. Having done it before, she was good at it. There was almost no bleeding. There’d be no scars. She began picking at the food. She liked gefilte fish. It pleased me to see her eat. There was hope if Sylvia ate gefilte fish, homemade, delicious, nothing to fight about. She ate as if she were doing me a favor I didn’t deserve.

Sylvia never read a newspaper. I told her what was happening. She didn’t care one bit. I told her anyhow. She listened suspiciously, as if I had some dubious motive for obliging her to hear what I read in the newspaper. Mainly it was innocent chatter, but I admit I had a vague notion that mental health is more or less proportional to the attention you give to matters outside your head. It couldn’t be bad for her to hear about politics, scientific developments, sports, art, fashion, crime, various disasters, etc. The worst news—if it’s in a newspaper—probably didn’t happen to you, and it offers a reassuringly normal connection to daily life. The world goes on. Earthquakes, fires, airplane crashes, murders—whatever else they may be—are news, part of the flow of days, weeks, eras.

I told Sylvia that Russian scientists said the core of the earth is pure iron, and the temperature, 1,800 miles down, is about 12,000 degrees centigrade, much hotter than had been supposed. I told her that Nina Simone is at the Village Gate, and Thelonius Monk is at the Jazz Gallery. I told her that an eighteen-year-old light heavyweight boxer, Cassius Clay, won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics; Rafer Johnson won the gold in the decathlon.

I read her the report about a New York magistrate, an early feminist, who ordered the names of two men put into the record in a vice case. He said, “You have the girls’ names
here. Put the men’s names in, too.” So the names Whitey Doe and Larry Doe were changed to Whitford May and L. Sleeper. Coincidentally, it was reported the same day that The International Society for the Welfare of Cripples changed its name to The International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled.

I told Sylvia that Americans were dying in Vietnam. Every other week, in 1961, one of our military advisers was kidnapped, or an American contractor was shot. We were building airfields then and giving other forms of humanitarian aid to South Vietnam. Our efforts were impeded by the Viet Cong. Sylvia listened, and occasionally responded. I told her that a British physicist said Einstein’s idea of matter as a form of energy, E = MC
²
, was too simple. New atom-smashing technology had revealed that matter consisted of two major categories, leptons and baryons, which is to say light and heavy. Sylvia said, “He says Einstein is too simple?”

I told her that below the ice of Antarctica, huge trees had become coal, which meant the theory of continental drift was true; that Norell, an American designer, had introduced culottes—pants that looked like a skirt—for city street wear; and that American Orientalists had left for Egypt to save the temple of Ramses II from the waters of the Aswan High Dam, built by Russian engineers.

I wanted to see Marcel Marceau and his mime company at City Center, and
Krapp’s Last Tape
at the Province-town Playhouse, just down the street at 133 MacDougal.
Sylvia enjoyed both performances. I had to make the suggestion, buy tickets, and, when it was time to leave for the theater, say, “Come on, come on, let’s go. We’ll be late.”

She didn’t like to commit herself, far in advance, to leaving the apartment at a particular moment. Who knows how you’ll feel when the moment comes? Besides, it could be more pleasing to read reviews than actually go to a movie or a play.

I told Sylvia that Dr. Menges, professor of Central Asian languages at Columbia University, had been stopped by a gang of kids while taking his evening walk on Morning-side Drive and knocked to the pavement with a heavy board. He rose, flailed at them with his cane. They ran away. He spoke to a reporter and was quoted at length. “I have traveled alone through the interior of the Caucasus . . . amid primitive tribes. I have gone among bandits. But in a so-called civilized city,” he said, “near a large university, I am attacked by jungle beasts.” It was clear he meant “Negroes.” In the early sixties the word appeared with increasing frequency in the newspapers.

Awakened affectionately by Sylvia. She looked at my cigarettes beside the bed and said, “You shouldn’t smoke so much. For my sake.” I said, “I smoke because we fight.” She began biting my arm. I yelled. She leaped out of bed and announced, “That’s the beginning and the ending of a day.” I lay there a long time. Finally, I dragged myself out of bed
and turned on fire for coffee, got bread, honey, and an orange. Sylvia went back to bed and said, “You really take good care of yourself.” I ate a slice of bread and put everything else back. Then I sat on the bed beside her. I was about to make amends. She sat up, slapped my face, and said, “Have a cigarette.” Later, still in bed, me sitting beside her, Sylvia brought up the New Year’s Eve party we’d gone to in the Brooklyn tenement. She said that when Willy Stark kissed her, she had turned her face at the last moment so that he kissed her on the cheek, not the lips. She said she should have necked with him so I could have seen it and had my evening ruined. I said, “I would have left and never seen you again.” She said, “That’s impossible. You love me. Besides, your mother would make you return to me.”