Sylvia: A Novel (FSG Classics)

by Leonard Michaels

Among thousands upon thousands of jobs, none said my name. I wanted to do something. I didn’t want something to do.

Before 1960, could you have had this thought, made this joke? There had been developments in sensibility, a visionary contagion derived maybe from drugs—marijuana, heroin, uppers, downers—the poetry of common conversation.

Afterwards, usually, she slept. Neither of us mentioned what had happened. From yelling to fucking. From unreal to real was how it felt.

What difference did motives make? Sylvia wanted to be pitied; my mother wanted to be liked. Who could care? What mattered was that my mother’s gesture had been affectionate. To defend her against Sylvia brought up questions of loyalty. Maybe that was the point.

To criticize “the Mommy”—my father’s expression—was, even if correct, incorrect in the eyes of God. It was close to evil.

She ate as if she were doing me a favor I didn’t deserve.

She thought about Willy’s kiss during the next few months, mentioning it several times, as if it had settled in her nervous system like a slow-growing virus. She also wanted more, at least in her fantasies, if not at the moment he kissed her.

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.

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’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.

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.”

Maybe everything was theater. The difference between one person and another lay in what they knew about their private theaters.

You played in your theater, or in somebody else’s, depending on your willpower and imagination.

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.

I let myself think every man and woman who lived together were like Sylvia and me. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.

No better disguise for shame than contempt, and nothing is easier to do than to sneer and denigrate. Nothing is more pleasing to the vanity of others.

With few exceptions, Sylvia imagined my friends were her enemies.

I liked Sylvia’s friends, and I was glad when they phoned or visited. They proved Sylvia was lovable, and they let me believe that we were good company. I wanted Sylvia to have lots of friends, but she was carefully selective and soon got rid of her prettiest girlfriends, keeping only those who didn’t remind her of her physical imperfections.

The one time I tried to tell my father about my life with Sylvia, I became incoherent and suffered visibly. As in a dream, I couldn’t seem to say what I intended. My mouth felt weak and too big, my words sloppy. But he understood.

“Just talk. Don’t worry about being objective.” Her remark was very brutal, I thought; also embarrassing. She seemed not to appreciate how I’d been struggling to make clear the difficulty, for me, in saying anything, and therefore how amazing it was that I’d come this far, sitting here with a doctor, trying desperately to make it understood that I could never make anything clear, and the entire enterprise was worthless. Suddenly—jolted by her brutal interruption—I heard myself. I’d merely bumbled for five minutes. I’d been boring. I’d frustrated the doctor. If I had only this incoherent stuff to offer, she couldn’t do her job. I was virtually demented.

Academic achievements, to her, were an embarrassment. “I’d give thirty points off my IQ for a shorter nose.” “Nothing is wrong with your nose.” “It’s too long, a millimeter too long.”

She had a sickly, languid manner, making her seem physically weak, and an air of fear and injury, which gave her the appeal of a doomed kitten. A small face with light blue staring eyes; a small mouth with lips that hardly moved when she talked. Nobody was more harmless or perversely exciting. The boys sometimes beat up Agatha, but she never seemed to bruise or scar, at least not visibly. There was no tension in her. Nothing resisted; nothing broke.

She doesn’t like her face, doesn’t like her body. I don’t want to love her anymore. Too hard. I’m not good enough.

Movies, the quintessence of excess, were becoming known as “films.”

I’d notice she wasn’t beside me. I’d look back. There she was, twenty feet behind me, down the street, standing still, staring after me with rage. “You make me feel like a whore,” she said. “Don’t you dare walk ahead of me in the street.” Then she walked past me and I trailed her home, very annoyed, but also wondering if there wasn’t in fact something wrong with my personality

My body lusted. This was my secret infidelity, never confessed to my journals.

Instantly, these women were imprinted in my nerves and bones. I never said anything to them, never saw them again. I remembered them with love and despair. I began to remember them even before they were out of sight, as if they had never been more than memories, figures of a happier, former life.

Allen Ginsberg was there with some friends. Kerouac introduced us. I’d been introduced to Ginsberg a few times before, in Berkeley, but he never remembered me. It was like meeting on the great wheel of existence, going on to other lives, then meeting again, and not remembering we’d met before. Except I remembered.

I was never indifferent, but I was trying to write, always trying again. That bothered Sylvia. Not the sound of my typing. I spent far more time with her than with the typewriter. What bothered her was that I wanted to do it. It was like going away, abandoning her.

Sylvia could be happy and funny, but it is easier to remember the bad times. They were more sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved.

“You (smash) don’t (smash) love (smash) me (smash). But you will miss me.”

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.

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?

Everything came to me as sensations, not feelings. I had no feelings that I could name. I had no human feelings.