Leonard Michaels: Sylvia

When we came down in the morning, the man sat waiting in a straight-backed chair in the parlor. He was bald, gaunt, lean as a plank. His long platter face stared at the floor between his knees, as if into a pool of trouble.

“You two will have to go,” he said. The command was drawn from a strange personal hell of New England propriety and constipation. In the middle of the night, maybe, he heard us. It occurred to him that Sylvia and I were touching, doing evils to each other’s body, though we labored to be quiet, and fucked with Tantric subtlety, measuring pleasure slow and slow, out of respect for his ethical domain. He’d begun thinking things, driving himself to this moral convulsion. We didn’t ask why we had to go. It was clear and final. We had to do it — go. We went back up to our room, packed, made no fuss, and were soon adrift in the busy, hot, bright streets around Harvard Square, carrying our bags.

Sylvia refused to return to her dormitory, though we had no place to go if we stayed together. I couldn’t reason with her, couldn’t argue. As far as she was concerned, she had no dormitory room, no place but here in the street with me.

The glorious summer day made things more difficult. Storefronts and windshields flashed threats. Everyone walked with energetic purpose. They belonged in Cambridge and were correct. We’d been thrown into the street. For this to have happened, one must have done something wrong. We were embarrassed and confused, squinting in the sunlight, carrying bags, the weight of blighted romance. I expected to spend the night in a sleazy hotel or in a park, but then, after phoning friends, we heard about a house where three undergraduates lived, in a working-class neighborhood, a long walk from the university. Maybe they’d rent us a room. We didn’t phone. We went there, just showed up with our bags.

It was an ugly falling-down sloppy happy house. One of the men began talking to Sylvia, the moment he saw her, in baby talk. She said, “Hello.” He said, “Hewo,” with a goofy grin. She thought he was hilarious, and she loved being treated like a little girl in a house full of men. They all treated her the same way, affectionately teasing. She inspired it: shy, hiding behind long bangs, darkly sensuous. There was one empty room in the house. Nobody said we couldn’t have it.

In the mornings Sylvia went to class and I tried to begin writing stories. Our room, just off the kitchen, was noisy with refrigerator traffic and running water. Sometimes people stood outside the door talking. I didn’t mind. After our night in the mausoleum, I liked noises. The soft suck and thud of a refrigerator door was good. The sound of talking was good.

Sylvia was gone during the day, in class or studying in a library on campus. At night there were some irascible moments, heavy sighs, angry whispers, but the room was narrow, hot, airless. There were mosquitoes. Nothing personal. Through most of the slow, lovely summer, we were happy. Sylvia was taking a class in art history. We went to museums, and worked together on her papers. I didn’t write any stories that I didn’t tear up and throw away. The writing was no good, but I liked being with Sylvia and this life in Cambridge.

One afternoon, sitting on the front steps, waiting for Sylvia to return from class, I spotted her far down the street, walking slowly. When she saw me looking at her, she walked more slowly. Her right sandal was flapping. The sole had torn loose. At last she came up to me and showed me how a nail had poked up through the sole. She had walked home on the nail, sole flapping, her foot sloshing in blood. What else could she do? She smiled wanly, suffering, but good-spirited.

I said she could have had the sandal fixed or walked barefoot or called for a taxi. There was something impatient in my voice. She seemed shocked. Her smile went from wan to screwy, perturbed, injured. I couldn’t call back the impatience in my voice, couldn’t undo its effect. For days thereafter, Sylvia walked about Cambridge pressing the ball of her foot onto the nail, bleeding. She refused to wear other shoes. I pleaded, I argued with her. Finally, she let me take the sandal to be repaired. I was grateful. She was not grateful. I was not forgiven.

“Go, I don’t love you. I hate you. I don’t hate, I despise you. If you love me, you’ll go. I think we can be great friends and I’m sorry we never became friends.”

“Can I get you something?”

“A menstrual pill. They’re in my purse.”

I found the little bottle and brought her a pill.

“Go now.”

I lay down beside her. We slept in our clothes.

JOURNAL, DECEMBER 1960

At the end of the summer we returned to New York. Naomi moved out of the MacDougal Street apartment. Sylvia and I moved in. By then, fighting every day, we’d become ferociously intimate.

Like a kid having a tantrum, she would get caught up in the sound of her own screaming. Screaming because she was screaming, screaming, screaming, as if building a little chamber of rage, herself at the center. It was all hers. She was boss. I wasn’t allowed inside. Her eyes and teeth were bright blacks and whites, everything exaggerated and contorted, like the maelstrom within. There was nothing erotic in this picture, and yet we sometimes went from fighting to sex. No passport was required. There wasn’t even a border. Time was fractured, there was no cause and effect, and one thing didn’t even lead toward another. As in a metaphor, one thing was another. Raging, hating, I wanted to fuck, and she did, too.

Fights often began without warning. I’d be saying something ordinary and neutral, but Sylvia was suddenly rigid, staring at me. She knocked the telephone off the shelf. I stopped talking, startled, jerked to attention. She knocked the cup and saucer that had been sitting beside the telephone to the floor. They smashed to pieces. Now she was screaming, denouncing me, and I was screaming back at her. She went for the radio, to fling it against the wall, and I lunged at her, trying to stop her. She twisted loose and came at me. Then it was erotic; anyhow, sexual. Afterwards, usually, she slept. Neither of us mentioned what had happened. From yelling to fucking. From unreal to real was how it felt.

Ordinary or violent, the sex was frequent, exhausting more than satisfying. Sylvia said she’d never had an orgasm. As if I were the one who stood between her and that ultimate pleasure, she announced, “I will not live my whole life without an orgasm.” She said she’d had several lovers better than I was. She wanted to talk about them, I think, make me suffer details.

I began trying to write again. Sylvia began taking classes at NYU, a few blocks away across Washington Square Park, to complete her undergraduate work. She asked me what she ought to declare as her major. I said if I were doing it over, I’d major in classics. I should have said nothing. She registered for Latin and Greek, ancient history, and a class in eighteenth-century English literature. She had to learn the complex grammars of two languages, read long poems and fat novels, and write papers, all while living in squalor and fighting with me every day. It seemed to me a maniacal program. I expected confusion and disaster, but she was abnormally bright and did well enough.

There was no desk in the apartment, but Sylvia didn’t need such conveniences, didn’t even seem to notice their absence. I don’t think she ever complained about anything in the miserable apartment, not even about the roaches, only about me. She studied sitting on the edge of the bed in a mess of papers. Her expression would go flat, her body limp. She would be utterly still except for her eyes. She didn’t scratch, didn’t stretch. She was doing the job, getting it over with. I’d sit with her sometimes for hours, reading a novel or a magazine. We ate together in bed, usually noodles, frozen vegetables, and orange juice, or else we went out for pizza or Chinese food. Neither of us cooked. My mother often gave us food. I’d carry it back to MacDougal Street after our visits downtown, two or three times a month.