Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

She’d been admitted to the Hunter elementary school for gifted children. Every morning, before leaving for school, she would go into the bathroom and vomit. Nobody at Hunter knew she lived in Queens, rather than Manhattan, where students were required to live, and she was constantly afraid that she would be discovered and publicly shamed. At the end of the day, she’d ride the subway back to Queens and sometimes fall asleep and miss her stop. She’d wake up, then catch a train going back. When she got home she’d find her mother flat on the floor, eyes shut, looking dead. It was a joke — she’d died waiting for Sylvia — but it frightened Sylvia.

I thought Sylvia went much too fast when she studied, flipping through pages she couldn’t have absorbed, then tossing the book aside and picking up another. If there was tension between us — I’d made another hurtful remark, or I wanted to visit my parents, or I looked at a girl who passed us in the street — Sylvia would repeat to herself as she studied, “You’re doing this to make me fail.” Doing what? Sometimes, I knew what she had in mind; sometimes not. I never asked. She said, almost chanting, “You’re doing this to make me fail,” as the pages flipped by.

She’d say it again early in the morning as she flung out the door still wearing her clothes of the previous day, in which she’d slept, for maybe an hour, before leaving. Her long black hair bouncing and flying, blouse crumpled and half-buttoned, skirt twisted on her hips, she hustled through the Village streets to NYU, like a madwoman imitating a college student.

We were sitting on the bed after dinner. I was looking at a magazine. Sylvia was beginning to study. I commented on the beauty of one of the models in an advertisement. Sylvia glanced at the photo, then said, “Your ideal of beauty is blue, slanted eyes.”

“So?”

Sylvia dropped backward on the bed, pulled the pillows against her ears, and began sobbing and thrashing. Then she stopped, sat up, and said, “I never went into detail about my sexual experiences.”

I sat in silence and waited. She fell back again, made leering, hating faces, writhed like an epileptic, and then sat up and slapped my cheek and said, “I can’t see why you don’t adore me.”

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

In the throes of hysteria, her voice might suddenly become cool and elegant, and she’d make a witty remark, as if she were detached from herself and every quality of the moment was clear to her — the hatefulness of her display as well as my startled appreciation of her wit. I took this as a good sign, thinking it meant she wasn’t really nuts. She felt the same way about it. “I know how I’m behaving,” she’d say whenever I tried to talk to her about seeing a psychiatrist. She couldn’t, then, see a psychiatrist. She knew herself; she couldn’t talk about her excesses. Too shameful, too embarrassing.

Admiring the beauty of the model, an image in a magazine, meant I disliked Sylvia’s looks and didn’t love her. In casual chatter she heard inadvertent revelations of my true feelings. She was outraged. I loved the model. I’d said as much, damned myself.

Sylvia discovered an incapacitating sentimental disease in me. Together, we nourished it. I wasn’t a good enough person, I’d think, whereas she was a precious mechanism in which exceedingly fine springs and wheels had been brutally mangled by grief. Grief gave her access to the truth. If Sylvia said I was bad, she was right. I couldn’t see why, but that’s because I was bad. Blinded by badness.

She had to be right. I’d been living with her for months. I protected my investment, so to speak, by supposing that her hysteria and her accusations were not revolting and contemptible but a highly moral thing, like the paroxysm of an Old Testament prophet. They were fiery illuminations, moments of perverse grace. Not the manifestation of lunacy.

In a normal, defensive way, I’d also think nobody had ever talked to me as Sylvia did. That meant I wasn’t bad, maybe. Nobody ever blamed me for having thoughts and feelings I didn’t have. But even if I’d had bad thoughts and a generally nasty mental life, so what? Didn’t I behave well? I was very affectionate, always touching. I came to believe the thoughts and feelings Sylvia hated in me were hers more than mine.

It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it.

Repetition, according to religious thinkers, is seriousness. Working, eating, sleeping is repetition. The rising sun, phases of the moon, revolutions of planets and stars — everything in the universe repeats. Everything is ritual. To stop repeating is death — not the reverse. It was a fact of our daily life, as serious as our fights and compulsive sex, that we climbed six flights of stairs to and from the street. Our footsteps sounded in the resonant stairwell, day and night. To go to classes at NYU, Sylvia climbed twice, five times a week. I listened to her going. I heard her returning. To go to the grocery, movies, local bars, or the mailbox, we climbed six flights down, six flights up. To buy a pack of cigarettes required the same number of steps as when I went to visit my father in the hospital, in the intensive care unit, after his second heart attack. The doctors said my father also had prostate cancer, but they didn’t want to operate in the summer. “It’s too hot.” I told this to Sylvia. Instantly, she said, “In the winter it will be too cold.” I was surprised by the pain her remark caused me. But of course she was right. I hadn’t understood the doctors, or hadn’t wanted to. They didn’t think my father would survive an operation. There was no point in operating. He wouldn’t live long enough to die of cancer. I had not understood.

The stairway was the spine of the building, the steps were vertebrae. I climbed through a body. It exuded odors and made noises. I smelled food cooking, incense burning, and the gases of hashish and roach poison. I heard radios and phonograph players, the old Italian lady who screamed “Bassano” every day, and the boy’s footsteps running in the hall. Bassano never answered the old lady, presumably his grandmother, and I never once saw him. When I met her in the hallway or on the stairs, she always nodded and said, “Nice day,” regardless of the weather.

At the landings, the hallway struck left and right toward the apartments. A light bulb burned at the landings where four toilets stood side by side, the doors shut. The toilets were closets about ten feet high, four feet wide, and six feet deep. Above the bowl was a water tank, it gurgled and clanked. When you finished, you pulled a chain. This wasn’t the kind of toilet where people settled down with literature.

Because the street door didn’t lock and anyone might enter the building, our toilet was sometimes used by strangers. Toilet doors locked from the inside with hook-and-eye latches. I once saw a ruby of brilliant blood gleaming on the toilet seat. It had just been used by somebody to shoot up. Another time I opened the door on a boy and girl fucking. He sat on the bowl facing the door, his jeans and underwear around his ankles. She faced him, straddling his thighs, the divided flesh of her ass flaring. Her jeans and underwear lay in a pile. The boy stared over her left shoulder, his features squeezed by pleasure and strain. He stared directly at my eyes, oblivious to all but the feeling that beat in his cock. The girl was galloping hard. She didn’t hear me open the door, didn’t turn around, didn’t lose the rhythm. I shut the door and hurried back to our apartment, told Sylvia. She said, “What if I need to use the toilet? I don’t want to find people in there.” She ordered me to tell them to get out or we’d call the police. I didn’t want to. She didn’t really want to either, but she’d taken a proprietary stand, her bourgeois dignity — of which she had none — was at stake. “If you don’t go tell them,” she said, “I will.”