Sylvia: A Novel (14 page)

“Your daughter died. I am so sorry.”

I then understood his expression. He’d imitated what he saw in their faces, their expectation, to show that he felt as they did. It was instinctive, a reflex of imitation, he wasn’t deliberately showing anything; he was simply feeling as they did. The black gentleman said, “She only fell down the stairs.” The women embraced each other and cried, and then the man cried. I felt sorry for all of them and for me.

I restrained my own tears. The thought came to me that there had been a sacrifice. A woman had died. Therefore, Sylvia would now wake up. Too bad it had to be this way, but in God’s scheme of things, there is terrible justice. Sylvia and I would soon be leaving the hospital.

I thought, If I were rich, I’d give a fortune to this hospital for the many who would receive its care, and the many who would cry. I was adrift on dreams of myself as a seer and immensely generous benefactor, and though I was sure I could run a fast mile or lift great weights if necessary, I was very tired. Somebody found me wandering about the halls. I was told to go home, Sylvia would be all right. I could go home, take a shower, change my clothes. I left the hospital. It was okay to shower.

While I had wandered in the hospital and sat beside Sylvia’s bed, I’d hardly noticed the days passing. Mornings were a vague brightness. Electric lights went on and it was night. I stood now in plain, cold sunlight and was surprised to see that the city hadn’t ceased for a minute. Streets flourished. There was noisy traffic. People were everywhere. A taxi pulled up. I got inside. For an instant, I didn’t know what to say. Where was I going? I gave the driver the address on 104th Street. We sped west. As the meter clicked off the seconds, I studied the driver’s license, his name and photo, clipped to the dashboard. It shivered with jolts sent
up from cobbles and holes in the frozen asphalt. Through the taxi windows, I saw steam lifting from vents in the street and the exhaust pipes of automobiles. I looked at people on the sidewalks, each of them extravagantly particular. A mustache, like a black horizontal slash, crossed out a man’s mouth, forbade attention to his weak chin. A woman wearing sunglasses, furs, and heels held a little terrier on a leash. It trembled and sniffed the concrete, seeking a place to squat.

It felt good to see familiar things, but all of it was faintly colored by fear. I’d been told Sylvia would be all right. Nevertheless, I remained vigilant. I remembered the unchanging stillness of Sylvia’s face, how she didn’t look back at me. Then I remembered a doctor who had arrived late the second night. His name was Warsaw. He made an impression of great competence and, as if challenged personally, he showed concern to understand Sylvia’s condition. He asked, “What exactly did she take?”

“She said ‘Seconal.’”

“Can you find out for sure?”

From a phone booth in the lobby, I dialed Roger Lvov. I didn’t want to talk to him, but I had no choice. He’d know what Sylvia took. Sylvia told me they had taken drugs together, and I remembered that he’d given her drugs in the past. His phone rang for a long time. I hung up, dialed again, let it ring for a while, then hung up and dialed once more. At last someone picked up the phone. A man said,
“It’s after 3 a.m., Hamilton. You’re so fucking needy, so fucking tedious.”

In the background, Roger said, “Give it to me.” Then, speaking into the phone, in his choked, gasping voice, he said, “If you call me names, Hamilton, I won’t talk to you. What do you want?”

“Sylvia overdosed. She’s in the hospital.”

Silence.

Then Roger said, “Yes.”

“The doctor wants to know exactly what she took.”

Silence.

I heard a match being struck. Roger inhaled, exhaled. “What did she tell you?”

“Seconal.”

“That’s right.”

“Forty-seven Seconals.”

“That’s right.”

I hung up and went to find the doctor. Then I sat beside Sylvia’s bed. The conversation with Roger only confirmed what Sylvia had said, but I kept repeating the words to myself, like an obsessed detective, as if a solution to the whole mystery of my life might suddenly occur to me. Seconals. That’s right. Forty-seven Seconals. That’s right.

When the taxi crossed West End Avenue, I saw the building we’d left three nights ago, the ambulance waiting in the street with its hysteria of flashing lights. I remembered the rush across town to the hospital.

Feeling about in my pants pocket for money to give the taxi driver, I realized I had no keys. I rang the manager’s bell. She let me in and then gave me an extra set of keys. “Your wife is coming home soon, too?” I nodded, thanked her for the keys, walked upstairs.

The cat with the broken tail was gone. Someone had probably released it in the street. For a few minutes, I stood at a window and watched the street, as if I might spot the cat. I remembered standing at this window one night and hearing a sound in the sky. I’d looked up and seen geese, high above the city, in a V formation, heading north.

I went to the bedroom. When I opened a closet door to look for a bath towel, I noticed a stack of letters on a shelf and I recognized my handwriting on the face of the envelopes. They were letters I’d written to Sylvia from Michigan. Affectionate, funny letters, but I could see from the way I’d written her name and address—too big, too exuberantly scrawled—that I’d been childlike in spirit, much too happy living away from her.

In the heat and steam of the shower, eyes shut, breathing slowly, I stood like a post, and tried not to see my handwriting on those letters, tried not to think or feel. When I got out of the shower, the phone rang. It was the hospital. They told me to come back. I dressed quickly, ran out, found a taxi.

As I entered the hospital, I was stopped at the desk. There had been a phone call from my brother. A nurse told me to return the call before going to Sylvia’s room. She insisted.
I phoned. My brother answered. He said Sylvia had died.

The nurse waited outside the phone booth. She told me to go now to Sylvia’s room, collect her things. I’d been told to come, told to go. My feet walked to her room. I didn’t remember what things I was supposed to collect. I saw a clean, white, empty bed. I saw emptiness. I left the hospital with nothing, nothing at all.

After the autopsy, I went to the morgue to make an identification. The body came into view on a lift, lying on a gurney, rising from the floor. It was about ten feet away, behind a glass partition. A black woman attendant, in a white uniform, stood at the head. Both she and Sylvia were in profile and motionless, as if both were waiting for me to give a sign that this was indeed Sylvia. She was covered with a sheet from foot to neck. I spun away, as if struck by a fist, bumped into a chair, and nearly fell. The attendant didn’t look in my direction, but she’d seen my response and took it as confirmation. She and Sylvia, like figures performing in a tableau, descended slowly, silently, below the floor. In another setting it might have been hard to say which of them was dead.

Funeral arrangements were made. I bought a dark suit. Services were held in a synagogue uptown, on the West Side, and then came the drive to the cemetery. It was a bright, freezing day. When the coffin was lowered into the
ground, my father broke and cried. His grief surprised me. It seemed inappropriate, difficult to understand. After the hospital, the morgue, and the funeral services, nothing was left in me. No one else was crying.

On the way to the cemetery, the limousine carrying one of Sylvia’s aunts had raced by mine, making itself the lead car. The same happened on the way out. I had seen Sylvia’s aunt about three times in the past four years. Sylvia rarely talked about her, only her husband. Sylvia liked him a great deal. He wasn’t at the burial, but he’d gone to the funeral parlor with me, where he said, “I’m not going to the cemetery. I’ve been there too much lately.”

I ate and slept at my parents’ apartment. From their balcony, I looked at the city. The buildings seemed bigger in their vast indifference to me, and weirdly menacing. Street noises in the freezing air were exquisitely sharp, as if the traffic were embattled, and kids running about in Seward Park were killing one another. The roar of an airplane gashed the sky. Everything came to me as sensations, not feelings. I had no feelings that I could name. I had no human feelings.

I returned to Ann Arbor and rented an apartment, one room with a tiny kitchen and a tiny bathroom. It was the converted attic of a house that sat on a hill above a graveyard, which I hadn’t noticed when I decided to take the
apartment. It was inexpensive and near campus. The light was good, the house was quiet. A graduate student in biochemistry lived downstairs with his wife and baby. Across the street was a girls’ dormitory.

In the mornings before leaving for campus, I sat with a newspaper and cup of coffee at the kitchen table, or I’d look out over the trees and paths of the graveyard. A young woman visited a certain grave several times a week. She wore only a suit, despite the cold weather, and was always alone. For long minutes she stood facing the gravestone, head slightly bowed, arms hanging loosely at her sides. A heavy, simple sadness. My heart went out to her, as if I could easily afford to commiserate. Poor woman, I thought, and the tears would start rising.

I didn’t know what I felt for myself. I believed I was doing all right, attending classes, studying for exams. It didn’t seem strange to me that I’d wake up in the middle of the night feeling certain she had called my name, but I began to dread going to sleep. I was afraid I might dream. I stayed up late, reading until my eyes burned and I could no longer follow the sense of the pages. Then I’d go to sleep, and hope to fall quickly below the level of dreams into oblivion. Once I fell into the morgue, Sylvia lying there, a white sheet up to her chin. It was like the old days, the two of us in a small room, Sylvia asleep, me miserable. I started crying, pleading with her, making no concessions to reality. My need was the only reality, more real than death. Sylvia had to stop
this. She had to open her eyes and sit up. She did. I hugged her and asked if she would like to go to the movies. She said yes, but could we get something to eat first? I said we could do anything she wanted, anything at all, and we went out to look for a restaurant, desperately happy.