Leonard Michaels - Sylvia

We went together.

I opened the door. The couple was gone.

Mother phoned just to talk, got Sylvia. Sylvia said she’d cut her hair badly, was too upset to talk, gave the phone to me.

Mother said, “How is Sylvia’s finger?”

I said, “Nothing is wrong with her finger.”

“No? She told me she cut her finger.”

“No. It’s her hair,” I said. “She cut her hair badly. She doesn’t like the way it looks.”

“Oh, I thought she cut her finger. I was worried. Daddy heard and he was also aggravated.”

He must have heard through mental telepathy. My mother sounded confused, intimidated by Sylvia.

Hurt, insulted, confused, my mother doesn’t understand why Sylvia dislikes her. She is helpless to do anything about it. Her greatest worry was that I might marry a shikse. Nothing to worry about.

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

A main cause of our fights was my desire to get off the bed after dinner and go into the tiny room adjoining the living room. It contained a cot, a kitchen chair, and a shaky wooden table where I set my typewriter. The table was shoved against the tall window, leaving only inches between the back of my chair and the cot. I sat at the table, looking out over the rooftops, with their chimneys, clotheslines, water tanks, and pigeon coops, toward the Hudson River and the Upper West Side. If I looked down, I looked into the bedroom windows of a tenement about fifty feet away. Winds from the west rattled the window glass, penetrating old loose putty, carrying icy air from the Hudson River to my fingers. They stiffened as I typed. My chin and the tip of my nose became numb. I’d hear Sylvia sigh and lip the pages of her books. I could hear the sound of her pencil when she made notes. I was four steps away. Nevertheless, she’d feel abandoned, excluded, lonely, angry, and God knows what else. Only four steps away, but I was out of sight and not seeing her. She may have felt herself ceasing to exist. She didn’t want me to go into the cold room.

After dinner I lingered with her on the bed, reading a magazine as she collected notebooks, preparing to study. When she began to study, I’d begin to leave the bed. I never just left in a simple, natural way, but always with vague gradualness, letting Sylvia get used to the idea. I’d stir, lay aside the magazine, lean toward the cold room.

“Going to your hole?”

Sometimes I’d settle back onto the bed, thinking, “I’ll write tomorrow when she’s at school. Maybe she’ll go to sleep in a few hours. I’ll write then. A small sacrifice. Better than a fight.” That in itself — my desire not to fight — could be an incitement. “Why don’t we discuss this for a minute. .” To sound rational, when she was wrought up, wrought her up further, like a smack in the face. She once threw the typewriter she’d given me—“To help you write”—at my head. An Olivetti portable, Lettera 22. It struck a wall, then the floor, but was undamaged. I still use it. She also failed to destroy the telephone, though she often tried, knocking it off the shelf, or flinging it against the brick wall.

I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn’t know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself.

Writing a story wasn’t as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed. Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I’d find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relations of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn’t. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.

Writing in the cold room, I’d sometimes become exhilarated, as if I’d transcended all difficulties, done something good. The story had written itself. It bore no residual trace of me. It was clean. A day later, rereading with a more critical eye, I sank into the blackest notions of my fate. I’d wanted so little, just a story that wouldn’t make me feel ashamed of myself next week, or five years from now. It was too much to want. The story I’d written was no good. It broke my heart. I was no good.

“Going to your hole?”

I felt I was digging it.

Sylvia had a pain in her shoulder. She lay in bed and asked me to rub it, but when I touched her she squirmed spasmodically and pushed my hand away. I kept trying to do it right, but she wouldn’t stop squirming and wouldn’t tell me just where to rub. Then she lunged out of bed and paced the room, rubbing her shoulder herself.

“I have a sore spot. A stranger could rub it better than you.”

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

Sylvia was often in pain or a nervous, defeated condition, especially when she got her period. She’d lie on the couch, our bed, groaning, whimpering, begging me to go buy her Tampax. I didn’t see how it could ease her pain, but she was insistent, whining and writhing. She needed Tampax. This invariably happened very late, long after midnight, when I was thinking about going to sleep. Instead of sleeping, I’d be out in the streets looking for an open drugstore. I dreaded the man at the counter, who would think I was an exceptionally bizarre Village transvestite. I asked for Tampax in a hoodlumish voice, as if it were manufactured for brutal males. One night, when I returned to the apartment with the box of Tampax, I detected the faintest smile on Sylvia’s lips. Having me buy her Tampax turned her on. I decided never to do it again. As if she’d read my mind, she stopped asking.

How much else was theater? Sylvia knew how she was behaving. She didn’t want to discuss it with a psychiatrist. Too embarrassing and there was no point. Maybe everything was theater. The difference between one person and another lay in what they knew about their private theaters. Willy Stark had some idea like that: everything is theater; nothing is real. Everybody had a role to play; or, everybody, like it or not, had to play a role. You played in your theater, or in somebody else’s, depending on your willpower and imagination. Around then, in Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann was telling the world that he’d never killed a Jew or a non-Jew. Killing wasn’t in his nature. But, he said, if he’d been ordered from high up in the SS to kill his father, he’d have done it.

Sylvia looks in the mirror and dreams about lovers as she cuts her hair. She worries about pimples, pains, and pregnancy, and she worries about what everyone thinks of her, and she spends a lot of time sleeping, or lying about eating candy and frosted rolls, complaining of pains. Occasionally, she will show me affection. She went on today about her periods, how much of her life has bled away.

JOURNAL, JANUARY 1961

I recorded our fights in a secret journal because I was less and less able to remember how they started. There would be an inadvertent insult, then disproportionate anger. I would feel I didn’t know why this was happening. I was the object of terrific fury, but what had I done? What had I said? Sometimes I would have the impression that the anger wasn’t actually directed at me. I’d merely stepped into the line of fire, the real target being long dead. I wasn’t him. He wasn’t me. I’d somehow become Sylvia’s hallucination. Perhaps I didn’t really exist, at least not the way a table, a hat, or a person exists. Once, when I thought a bad scene was over, I lay down and threw my arm over my eyes. It was after 3 a.m., but Sylvia refused to turn off the light. She sat in a chair, six feet from the bed, and watched me. Then I heard her say, “I don’t know how you find the courage to go to sleep.” She might stick a knife in my heart, I supposed. But she couldn’t afford to kill me. She’d be alone. Sleep took no courage.