Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

But to my shame, my body burned for the black woman in high heels and a tweed suit who stood near me while waiting for the D train at the West Fourth Street station. Not another person anywhere on the platform. She stood nearer than she had to. Sexual excitement hit suddenly, left me breathless. Did she want me to start a conversation? I’d never known anything like this. Marriage to Sylvia introduced me to a terrifying imperative: I needed another woman. I couldn’t have said a word to this woman without seeming criminally deranged. There was also the woman who drove by in a silver Porsche at the corner of West Fourth and MacDougal. The car stopped for an instant in front of me. She gave me a deep look. It said our life together was about to begin if I seized the moment. Only to step forward, open the door, slide inside. She would drive me far away from here. We would never come back. And there was a young Puerto Rican mother carrying a shopping bag, who looked so weary and so beautifully appealing in the goodness of her dedication, her sacrifice. I felt love. I wanted to fuck her. She had magnificent lips and large green eyes. Instantly, these women were imprinted in my nerves and bones. I never said anything to them, never saw them again. I remembered them with love and despair. I began to remember them even before they were out of sight, as if they had never been more than memories, figures of a happier, former life.

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.