Sylvia: A Novel (10 page)

Sylvia appears in my room. “I can’t stand your typing.”

“I’ll be as quiet as possible.”

“It doesn’t matter. You exist.”

She assumed a haughty posture, lit one of my cigarettes, flicked ashes on the floor. I felt a spasm of hate, but showed nothing. She didn’t leave. I started to yawn. She pushed my jaw shut. I yelled. She looked concerned, then became angry, sneering at me. I was in pain. She could see it. She began wailing about all she had had to bear in the past year and a half.

I was in pain. She was wailing.

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962

In the spring of 1963 Sylvia completed her undergraduate work at NYU. We moved uptown to an apartment on West 104th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. She took night classes in German. I continued teaching at Paterson State and joined a car pool. It made the trip easier. I came home less exhausted, and could go to a movie with Sylvia and not fall asleep in the middle of it. One of the drivers in the car pool, Dan Slater, was completing his graduate work at Columbia, writing a dissertation on French theater. He was gay. Mornings when he drove and there were no other riders, he’d talk about his latest lover, telling me what he liked about him, how long it would last, what the guy looked like, what he said. He talked about things I’d never heard mentioned before. He told me his feelings about some guy’s cock. I was often shocked, but wouldn’t show it. I told him, in a light-hearted, lying style, about the silly fight I’d had with Sylvia last evening. I didn’t say we’d fought until 5 a.m., or that I’d had only an hour’s sleep. I never talked about my life the way he talked about his, as if I were strangely embarrassed by the conventional limitations of marriage. One of his lovers, said Dan, thought the look of black metal wire twisted across front teeth was sexy. He asked Dan to find a dentist who would do the work. Dan didn’t need braces. It would be expensive and painful, not to mention degrading.

“I said I won’t do it. There was really nothing more to discuss.”

“Who would do it?”

He laughed. “There are people who would.”

“There are?”

“Oh, come on.”

After a while, I was trying to write again. Another story was accepted by a literary magazine. I had also acquired a literary agent who became a good friend and visited us when we lived on MacDougal Street. One night he dragged me out to meet another writer represented by the agency. It was Jack Kerouac. I’d never spent an evening with a celebrity, but I had university friends who considered themselves intimates of Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, et al. Days later I asked one of them if he’d read Kerouac. He said, “Give me a break. I haven’t read Proust yet.”

In my agent’s Porsche convertible, with the top down, we circled Manhattan, Kerouac raving about reviews of his books to the night sky. He’d memorized the cruelest comments, none funny, but he wanted us to laugh. We laughed. The night ended in a seedy bar near Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue. The floor was made of tiny, hexagonal, white-and-black tiles. There were booths of dark brown wood along one wall. Allen Ginsberg was there with some friends. Kerouac introduced us. I’d been introduced to Ginsberg a few times before, in Berkeley, but he never remembered
me. It was like meeting on the great wheel of existence, going on to other lives, then meeting again, and not remembering we’d met before. Except I remembered.

When we moved uptown, we collected a new group of friends. Some of them taught at Columbia University, about ten short blocks north of our apartment. They often came by late at night, and we would sit talking and smoking marijuana until dawn. Our conversations, usually about literature or movies, were much influenced by marijuana, hence thrilling, but also very boring. As in Antonioni’s movies, there was strange gratification in the boredom of our long, smoky, moribund-hip, analytical nights. Most of the time Sylvia was the only woman in the room. She’d pull her legs up on the couch and half lie there, looking sensuously langorous, yet very attentive to whatever the Columbia friends wanted to talk about, but then, pretty soon, she’d begin to disintegrate, becoming helpless with marijuana giggles, laughing at herself for laughing so much, and the Columbia friends would be tickled and they would laugh with her, encouraging her too much, I thought. But they had nothing at stake. Sylvia’s susceptibility to marijuana was amusing, even endearing, to everyone except me. I feared and resented these moments, and I despised dope.

I never bought any dope, but it was often in the apartment. Friends “laid it on us,” joints and pills, in return for our hospitality. They frequently showed up at our MacDougal
Street apartment only to chat for a moment and get high before going on to some appointment in the neighborhood. Once, returning from the grocery store with a bag of food pressed to my chest, I passed an acquaintance who, saying hello, dropped three hashish cubes into the bag and went on. He’d never even visited the apartment, but dopers proselytized and were ordinarily very generous. Even the poorest of our drug friends would give part of whatever they had, as if with a religious spirit. They wanted you to get high with them, to feel the goodness they felt, and to see the world as they did. (Generosity stopped short of hard, expensive drugs.) The spirit of giving and religious community was good, I thought. Nothing like it had been seen before in the continuously murderous history of our country. But I’d put the joints and pills in a drawer, and forget about them until weeks later, when I came upon the stuff by accident and threw it out.

It never seemed to me, in the long hours of our marijuana nights, that Sylvia wasn’t having a good time, even when there was only gasping and hissing in the room, as three or four of us sat with nothing to say, passing a joint around. She always seemed very content, and she was interested when conversation resumed. She always smoked, and she swallowed whatever pill was offered. A drawing she made gives an impression of our evenings. It shows Agatha, two of the Columbia friends, and an old friend of mine who
stopped visiting after Sylvia and I got married. He is swooping in behind Sylvia with a knife, about to stab her in the back. The Columbia friends are stoned. I’m also in the drawing, typing, indifferent to everything happening in the room.

I was never indifferent, but I was trying to write, always trying again. That bothered Sylvia. Not the sound of my typing. I spent far more time with her than with the typewriter. What bothered her was that I wanted to do it. It was like going away, abandoning her. She’d listen patiently when I read my stories to her, and sometimes she liked them. She’d smile and say, “Yes.” Her one word was tremendously pleasing. She could also be pretty hard. Once, after I read her a story, she said, “I still believe our child will be very intelligent.”

The long conversational nights were also full of academic gossip about the English department at Columbia. Roger Lvov, an assistant professor who visited two or three times a week, often told us what had happened only hours earlier:

“I walked past Trilling’s office this morning. The door was open.”

Roger pressed the remains of his roach, pinched between the prongs of a bobby pin, to the tip of the funnel he made with his lips. We waited for him to suck and then go on talking. His pale eyelids drooped, his nostrils tensed and blanched, opening wide. He sucked in three short, hard
drafts. Essence of marijuana gas shot through the reticulations of his bronchial network. His eyes were crimson and glistening. He continued:

“Trilling looked at me as I went by the door. He could see me.”

“Did he say anything?” I asked.

Roger gazed at me. “What?”

The question left me annoyed at myself. It was too eager, too curious. Later Sylvia would say Roger was laughing at me. He was going to repeat my question up and down West End Avenue and Broadway. She’s say I’d humiliated myself.

I burned as I asked again, “Did Trilling say anything to you?”

“No.”

“Wow,” said Theodore Edelweiss, whom we called Teddy, also an assistant professor at Columbia. He was more stoned than Roger and he seemed to believe that he had just heard a fantastic story. But I was not sure what Teddy thought. He was a complicated person, and might have been laughing at Roger.

Our Columbia friends knew they were going to be fired. It was the department’s tradition to fire almost everyone, but no one could be absolutely sure if it would happen to him. Over the years, a few assistant professors had survived.
To determine why anyone in particular survived was impossible. There was a story about an assistant professor who, upon being fired, became enraged and shouted at the chairman, “What do you want? Ten books? I’ll write ten books. Twenty books? I’ll write twenty books.” Our friends didn’t expect to survive, but didn’t stop imagining they might. None of them published anything. Eventually, one by one, they lay before their senior colleagues who, like ancient Mayan priests, cut out their hearts. To their credit, they tried to destroy themselves first with drugs.

I was afraid that marijuana would intensify Sylvia’s paranoia, and I pleaded with her not to smoke it unless I was there with her in the room. She would hide cigarettes and pills that came to her when I wasn’t around. A few times she confessed that she’d smoked while I was in New Jersey or visiting my parents. I became outraged, I made puritanical scenes, but I wasn’t consistent. If she took pills, I did, too. It was a way of being close, and as everyone knows, dope makes sex dreamy and long, when it doesn’t just kill desire. We spent a three-day weekend in the apartment, eating speed, smoking grass, and reading and rereading
The Turn of the Screw
, for the evil feeling in this gruesome masterpiece. We ate no meals, didn’t answer the phone, and we had bouts of hard, compulsive sex, after which we lay there aching for more. Toward the end of the third day, Sylvia began saying, “Open the window,” as if these three words made a marvelous little poem:

O-pen.

The win-dow.

I asked her to stop, but she repeated it about a thousand times, in singsong tones, before collapsing beside me in a stupor, and then she told me what
The Turn of the Screw
is really about. Not the excruciating pleasure, taken by Henry James, in the fairy-tale tradition of tortured children. Sylvia was going on and on, both of us overwhelmed by her luminous ravings.

“I’ll tell you what it’s really about. Oh, my god, it’s so obvious.”

“I think you’re right. That is it. That’s what it’s about.”

She was so terrifically brilliant we had to have sex immediately. Later, neither of us remembered what she had said, not one word.

Sylvia told me that Agatha thinks of herself as being emotionally mature because she suffers no guilt for sleeping with anyone, male or female, friend or stranger, or for having sex in public, as she does with her girlfriend from the madhouse. “The two of them fondle each other while getting laid by their respective partners. At the same time.”

“Emotionally mature?”

“She thinks.”

“Agatha is depraved. I think.”

Sylvia said angrily, “Agatha wouldn’t hurt a soul. She
just can’t refuse herself anything. If she sees a pair of shoes she likes, she buys four pair. Same with sex.”

“She’s also a terrible gossip,” I said. “No more idea of privacy in her mind than between her legs.”

Afterwards, I regretted talking that way. I like Agatha. Maybe I was jealous. Sylvia and Agatha need each other. Agatha wants to talk, Sylvia wants to listen. Agatha’s confessions are probably less depraved and more pleasing to her than her life, and they have kept her close to Sylvia. They are close even in their looks—same height, same shape. I found them asleep together, on the living room couch, one black-haired girl, one blonde. The difference only showed how much they looked the same, two girls lying on the couch in late afternoon. They looked like words that rhyme.

JOURNAL, APRIL 1963

In the conversational style of the day, everything was always
about
something; or, to put it differently, everything was always
really about
something other than what it seemed to be about. A halo of implication shimmered
about
innocuous words, movies, faces, and events reported in the newspapers. The plays and sonnets of Shakespeare and the songs of Dylan were all equally
about
something. The murder of President Kennedy was, too. Nothing was fully resident in itself. Nothing was plain.

Stoned on grass or opium or bennies or downers, lying side by side in our narrow bed as streetlights came on, we’d
follow their patterns on the walls and ceiling as we listened to late-night radio talk shows. Our favorite was Long John Nebel. One night a caller said, in a slow, ignorant drawl, “Long John, you have missed the whole boat.” Naked in our drugged darkness, we turned to each other with a rush of sweet, gluey love and happiness. For months thereafter, we said affectionately, “You have missed the whole boat.”

Sylvia could be happy and funny, but it is easier to remember the bad times. They were more sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved. There were moments when we’d happen to look up at each other while sitting a few yards apart in a crowded subway train, or across a room at a party, or in the slow flow of drugged conversation with four others in our living room, the gray dawn beginning to light the windows, and we’d smile with our eyes, as if we were embarrassed by our luck, having each other.