Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

While I was waiting for the pills, a young man came in and asked for cigarettes. The druggist stopped working on my prescription, and went for the carton of cigarettes. Then the man asked to have them wrapped.

The druggist said, “What for? Is it a gift?”

The man said, “It’s against the law to leave with a carton of cigarettes that is not wrapped.”

I wanted the twenty-six pills. I wanted to get out of there.

The druggist said, “I never heard of such a law.”

I realized that he was no less of a nut than his customer.

The man said, “If I walk out of this drugstore with a naked carton of cigarettes, people will think I stole it.”

The druggist said, “I’ll testify in your behalf.”

I groaned. The druggist heard me. With an expression of disgust, he wrapped the carton of cigarettes.

I thought, This is New York. I will be leaving soon.

When the man walked away with his wrapped carton of cigarettes, the druggist said, “I’ll drive him crazy before he drives me crazy.” Then he gave me twenty-six sleeping pills. I hurried back to the apartment.

I’d merely said she would have no trouble finding somebody after I left, and the result was the “broken nose.” To talk about a divorce might result in more destruction. But I had to talk about divorce. We’d been living separate lives for over a year. I’d been seeing another woman. I didn’t tell Sylvia about her. I didn’t know if Sylvia was seeing other men. She intimated things on the telephone, but was always so vague that, without sounding jealous, I couldn’t ask if she was telling me that she was fucking somebody. I didn’t want to hear about it, anyway. She did the best she could, I suppose, to be honest. Neither of us had the courage to speak plainly.

In New York, near the end of my vacation, December 30, 1964, I went uptown from my parents’ apartment to meet Sylvia. I was determined to talk about a divorce, and I was sure it would be the hardest thing I ever had to do.

I don’t remember if I met Sylvia at the apartment or if we met in a restaurant, but we were in a restaurant late in the evening, and I was surprised to find another man present. Sylvia’s friend. He was blond and French, a graduate student at Yale. He had a soft, sensuously handsome face and a heavily suggestive, ironic smile. It suggested he was amused by complexities that left other people baffled and in pain. I thought, This guy is an asshole, but if Sylvia likes him, I like him. Anyhow, Sylvia’s friend was too beautiful, obviously a lover, nobody’s friend. With him in the picture, talking about a divorce might be no problem. Sylvia might even bring it up herself. At some point in the evening, Sylvia said good-night to the Frenchman. I don’t remember that he and I said good-night to each other, or that we had even been introduced. He was just no longer at the table. I was surprised again, having expected Sylvia to say good-night to me, not him. With him gone, Sylvia and I walked to the apartment.

The New Year’s Eve celebration had begun early. There was garbage and broken glass everywhere. Streets were splattered with vomit, as if strewn with hideous bouquets of blazing color. Things seemed nightmarish, but Sylvia and I were walking home as we had many times, as if nothing essential had changed between us. She’d surely been involved with the Frenchman, but I didn’t think about it. The naturalness of our being together this minute made me wonder: Is this love? and, if you’re ever in love, does the feeling for that person go away? Sylvia pressed my side and held my arm. I felt married to her forever, and I assumed that she would expect me to spend the night, and we would have sex. Whenever I came to the city, I spent some nights with her. But I didn’t want to spend the night. I didn’t want sex. I had to talk about divorce. The subject seemed incongruous. The mood was all wrong. I felt no anger, no bitterness, only vague anxiety about the future. There was no feeling in me that could usher the subject into words.

I told Sylvia that I would be taking my preliminary exams in two weeks. She talked about her civil service job. At the apartment, she changed into a short gray cotton nightgown and poured herself a glass of bourbon. She then joined me on the living room couch, lying on her back with her head in my lap. It wasn’t the moment to talk about divorce, but if I talked about anything else, it would be a lie. I was calm, listening to her, waiting for my chance to mention the serious matter, the one real thing, and put an end to this comfortable, mechanical, unreal domestic intimacy. Even if, somehow, I loved her and would always love her, our life together was hell, and could never be otherwise. I told myself to remember this.

Sylvia talked easily, addressing the air above, not my face. I noticed a black cat in the apartment. It had a broken tail, shaped like a flattened Z, or a lightning bolt. I watched the cat and it watched me. It was wretched-looking, a cat that skulked about, as if it felt guilty of being unlikeable.

Sylvia told about men she’d been seeing in the past several months. Some were my friends. She let me know that she’d been sleeping with them by telling me little gossipy stories.

“Teddy found out I was seeing one of his colleagues. He was very jealous. He said, ‘Now I know what Othello feels like.’”

Her tone was amused and blasé, as if none of this could be painful to me. She went on for a long time, quite comfortable reviewing her affairs while lying with her head in my lap. I listened without saying a word. Her French friend, I supposed, had been an object lesson, an introduction to what she planned to say when we were alone. She was mildly theatrical, stopping occasionally to lift her head and take another sip of bourbon. When the glass was empty, she refilled it, then went on about this one and that one. She’d even slept with Roger, who was still trying to decide whether he preferred men. They’d taken drugs together. One night Roger and Teddy were both in the apartment. They each knew the other was sleeping with Sylvia. There was awful tension in the room. Everyone smoked a lot of grass, and, for hours, they talked about sexual perversion in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Neither Roger nor Teddy would leave before the other. Then, around 3 a.m., Roger went to the bathroom. The moment he left the room, Teddy pushed Roger’s chair all the way to the kitchen door, almost out of the living room. When Roger returned he saw the empty space and, of course, being himself, he was baffled. He suspected something had changed, but he wasn’t sure. He certainly wouldn’t ask. Then he saw his chair near the kitchen door. He went to it and sat there the rest of the night while Teddy and Sylvia sat in the living room in a normal way, and nobody said anything about what had happened. Sylvia laughed a little as she told the story, still feeling flattered by the idea of her two highly intellectual lovers. She also mentioned an editor of gourmet cookbooks who, even in literary circles of Manhattan where there is no shortage of satyrs, was notorious. I knew the guy. I hadn’t seen him in years, but we had friends in common and I heard plenty about him. He was a pretty man with curly brown hair, curly mouth, angelic blue eyes, rosy cheeks, and a soft lyrical voice. He had the grand style of a courtly, sentimental seducer. He read poems and sang songs to women. Several thousand women had been laid in his midtown apartment. I’d heard that the full-length mirror inside his closet door reflected the bed, but you couldn’t see the reflection from the bed unless you knew where to look. It was cast down the hall to another mirror inside the hall closet door. In bed with the woman of the moment, he could watch her in the closet mirror. He’d turn her this way and that, and she wouldn’t know she was being watched. The idea of self-conscious Sylvia subjected to his mirrors was sad.