Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

Roger phoned, then came by. He told me that he shot up last night, and had gone to sleep at eight in the morning. He was awakened by a phone call, at 9:45 a.m., from his aunt. Wretched with no sleep, he tried to be polite. While talking to his aunt, he noticed tiny bugs moving about his crotch. I imagined Roger sprawled in bed, talking on the phone, playing with himself, and suddenly noticing the local fauna. The aunt said, “I’ve got a girl for you.”

Roger said, “Really?”

“She’s blonde, works in television, and is charming. Promise me you’ll call.”

Roger said, “I promise.”

After hanging up, Roger spent twenty minutes immobilized by horror and fascination, staring at tiny white bugs crawling on his skin.

Before he could tell me all this, Roger said I had to swear not to repeat a word of it. He always does something to make me wait before saying what he has in mind. He lights a cigarette, or stares into my eyes and says nothing. The effect is eerily suspenseful. Finally, whatever he says is anticlimactic. I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone. He said:

“I think I have syphilis.”

I asked why he thought so.

“A late stage of syphilis.”

I asked again why he thought so.

“There are little animals crawling on me. I also have a rash.”

I didn’t laugh. I advised him to call a doctor. From my place he phoned his doctor friend, Jerry, Roger’s roommate at Harvard. Jerry told Roger he probably didn’t have syphilis, and he explained about pubic lice. Jerry phoned in a prescription to a nearby drugstore. Roger and I walked up Broadway together to pick it up. I wondered if it is remarkable that Roger Lvov, a genius from Brooklyn who has a Harvard Ph.D., thinks pubic lice indicate a late stage of syphilis.

JOURNAL, JULY 1963

At the end of the school year, I resigned from my job at Paterson State, applied for readmission to graduate school at the University of Michigan, and began to audit classes at Columbia to recover the feeling of lectures and the formal study of literature. I also started reading again in a scholarly mood, with attention to style and meaning, and no pleasure. There were more fights with Sylvia. After a bad fight, when both of us were spent, I said quietly that I would leave New York. She said nothing. I took her silence as agreement.

One night, around 11 p.m., we were going to an all-night movie house on 42nd Street. As we descended into the subway, a rush of air, urinous and greasy, lifted about us. I said, “I can’t go down there. Let’s walk.” Sylvia didn’t mind walking. We’d gone only a few blocks when it began to drizzle. The sidewalk became slick. She tripped, soiled her white dress, and tore the strap of her sandal. I thought she’d blame me, but she didn’t. She was ready to go on walking. I wasn’t. I hailed a cab. As we were driving down Broadway, the cab rattling and clicking, the wide street shining on either side, I saw that in her soiled white dress, her black hair sparkling with rain, she was very pretty. I looked at her, memorizing the shape of her neck and mouth and the bones of her face, and I thought, She is my wife. I am leaving her. Sometimes, after a fight, we went to the movies. It was like going to church. We entered with the people, found our seats, faced the light, and succumbed to the vast communal imagination. We came away feeling affectionate and good, wounds healed. In the all-night movies on 42nd Street, we’d sit in the balcony with the great smokers and popcorn people, their fingers scrabbling, mouths gnashing. Others sucked chocolate, licked ice cream, and rattled candy wrappers. There were drunks and half-wits who talked to the screen. Bums spit on the floor. This was honest-to-god-movies, place of Manhattan’s sleepless people, like a zoo but in its massive anonymity, private-feeling. We could go to the movies together even though, twenty minutes earlier, we’d been screaming murder. In the silent desolation after a fight, I might say:

“You want to go to the movies?”

Sylvia would straighten her clothes, check her face in the bathroom mirror, grab her leather coat and tie the wraparound belt as we went out the door. I loved seeing her quickness, particularly in her hands, when she gave herself to something. We’d hurry off to the subway without finding out when the movie began, because there would always be two movies. We could watch at least one from the beginning.

Sitting in the balcony, the eating and smoking all around, I sank into creaturely happiness, and then I noticed my arm was around Sylvia’s shoulder, and she had leaned her head on my arm. Our bad feelings were annihilated by big faces of love shining on the wall. Later, back in the street world, electricity lashed at our eyes, crowds mauled us, traffic wanted to kill us, and evil birds of marriage, black flecks soaring high in our brains, threatened to descend, but we were going home, we’d soon be in bed, hidden, pressed closely together.

A few years earlier, in 1959, I had stood in line to buy tickets outside the Guild, a movie house in Berkeley, owned by Pauline Kael. Her brief movie reviews, posted near the box office, were masterpieces of tone, often better than the movies. She made them feel crucially personal, like novels and poems. Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer , published in 1961, about the time Sylvia and I got married, said movies were personally redemptive; in the loneliness of an American life, moments of grace.

Teddy asked if I would do him a favor and listen to him read a chapter of his dissertation aloud. I told him I would come to his place this afternoon. Spending time with Teddy, without Sylvia present, felt awkward, as if I were betraying her. She’d be resentful. She likes Teddy. He’s attractive and smart, and he flatters her with small attentions, laughing at her least joke. She’d feel left out. Teddy read for almost an hour. It was a great pleasure. Two of us in a room thinking about literature as if nothing could be more serious. Teddy says when the ghost in Hamlet walks onto the stage, one kind of hero becomes another in tragedies of revenge. I wanted to applaud. In my excitement I blurted out, “The ghost is wearing armor, he’s dressed for battle, but he can’t do anything except talk and scare people. He’s just like his son.” Teddy looked as if I’d made him sick. I should have listened, and said his ideas are good, that’s all. My enthusiasm had been wrong in spirit, a touch competitive. Before he finished, the phone rang. It was his ex-wife. She needed advice about an abortion for a relative. Teddy looked nervous after the call. He talked about his ex-wife’s habit of jumping into the troubles of other people. Before saying goodbye, she asked Teddy what he was doing. He said he was writing his dissertation. She said, “You’ve found something to torture yourself with.” Teddy said their conversations begin innocuously, then something gives her a chance to slash at him. I had ruined his mood, and then she knocked him off balance. He was confused, didn’t know how to stop talking. He’s the smoothest drawing-room man in New York, but he’d embarrassed himself, showing me his distress, bad-mouthing his ex-wife. He said, “She’s not like Sylvia, right?” The question was ironical, a thrust at me, but I didn’t know what was intended. He is protected by fifty smooth surfaces; never has a feeling that isn’t a little hidden. He didn’t want to go on reading now, and smoked a whole joint by himself, forgetting to offer me a drag. I didn’t want a drag, but I was uncomfortable not being offered one. It seemed more hostile than forgetful. He asked suddenly if I had seen the Rodin show.

“Yes.”

“Great, isn’t he?”

“I suppose. I always liked Degas’s sculptures.”