Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

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.

One afternoon, alone in the apartment, I found myself staring at Sylvia’s sneaker lying on the floor beside the bed. It was still laced. She’d shoved it off her foot with the heel of the other sneaker, which was nowhere in sight. What came to me was the terrifying emptiness of the sneaker. I couldn’t remain alone in the apartment. I left and walked quickly toward the Columbia campus, trying to spot her in the crowd, black hair flying, brown leather coat.