Sylvia: A Novel (FSG Classics)

by Leonard Michaels

A few days later, I was driving a Cadillac convertible through mountains and prairies, going back home, an over-specialized man, twenty-seven years old, who smoked cigarettes and could give no better account of himself than to say “I love to read.”

Sometimes, I was awakened around noon or later by the smells of my mother’s cooking which, like sunlight, became more subtle as the hours passed. Days were much alike. I didn’t know Monday from Wednesday until I saw it in the newspaper. I’d forget immediately.

Whatever my regrets about school—lost years, no Ph.D.—I wasn’t yet damaged by judgment. I hadn’t failed badly at anything—like Francis Gary Powers, for example, whose name I heard every day. His U-2 spy plane had been shot down over Russia, and he’d failed to kill himself before being captured. Instead, he confessed to being a spy. President Eisenhower, who claimed the U-2 was a weather plane, looked like a liar.

The odor of fresh newsprint, an oily film on my fingertips, mixed with cigarette smoke and the taste of coffee. Pages turned and crackled like fire, or like breaking bones.

This was old-style journalism, respectfully distanced from personal tragedy. Nothing was said about how the sisters had arranged themselves in the tub. Their life drained away as the crowd vomited out of the stands to worship and mutilate Mickey Mantle. There were really no large meanings, only cries of the phenomena. I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species.

The brush swept down and ripped free until, abruptly, she quit brushing, stepped into the living room, dropped onto the couch, leaned back against the brick wall, and went totally limp. Then, from behind long black bangs, her eyes moved, looked at me. The question of what to do with my life was resolved for the next four years.

Neither of us was talking. We’d become social liabilities, too stupid with feeling to be fun. We continued together, as if dazed, drifting through dreamy heat. We’d met for the first time less than an hour ago, yet it seemed we’d been together, in the plenitude of this moment, forever.

It started without beginning. We made love until afternoon became twilight and twilight became black night.

“But Naomi loves me in theory, not in practice,” said Sylvia. “She’s very critical, always complaining because she can’t find a shoe or her glasses or something in the apartment. She sometimes threatens not to come home if I don’t clean up.”

I was listening without hearing.

He said, “Sylvia?” His quizzical tone carried no righteousness, only the fatigue and pain of his day. We lay very still, hardly breathing, bodies without mass or contour, dissolving, becoming the darkness. From his tone, from his one word, “Sylvia,” I read his mind, understood his anguish. She’d done painful things before. He didn’t want to prove to himself that she was in the apartment. He’d go stomping away down the hall.

Mainly, I was struck by Sylvia’s efficiency, how speedily she’d exchanged one man for another. Would it happen to me, too? Of course it would, but she lay beside me now and the cruel uncertainty of love was only an idea, a moody flavor, a pleasing sorrow of the summer night. We turned to each other, renewed by the drama of betrayal, and made love again.

I sensed that she expected to hear me say no, expected to be hurt. But the way she held herself was imperial. She had told me the story of her life, eliminated a boyfriend, and asked me to live with her. I don’t remember saying yes or no.

My desire to write stories was nothing to do. It wouldn’t pay. It wasn’t work.

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.

I don’t think she ever complained about anything in the miserable apartment, not even about the roaches, only about me.

My mother had done too much for me, beginning when I was a little kid who never went two weeks without an ear infection or lung disease. She carried me through the streets to the doctor because I couldn’t walk, always too sick, too weak. She sat beside my bed all night lest I were kidnapped by death. It’s hard to forgive self-sacrifice.

The more I talked, the more exasperated I felt. I raised my voice, as if I were criticizing her for doing what she believed was nice. What did I believe? I also believed it was nice. I was criticizing her for doing what I believed was nice.

In my frustration—refusing to be intimidated, yet feeling terrified—I became angry at my mother for detaining me as she packed food. She suspected things were bad on MacDougal Street, but if I left without the food she’d know they were very bad. I was ashamed and didn’t want her to know how Sylvia and I lived, but I didn’t want Sylvia to bleed to death.

She had sliced her wrists very superficially. Having done it before, she was good at it. There was almost no bleeding. There’d be no scars. She began picking at the food.

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

She listened suspiciously, as if I had some dubious motive for obliging her to hear what I read in the newspaper. Mainly it was innocent chatter, but I admit I had a vague notion that mental health is more or less proportional to the attention you give to matters outside your head.

She didn’t like to commit herself, far in advance, to leaving the apartment at a particular moment. Who knows how you’ll feel when the moment comes? Besides, it could be more pleasing to read reviews than actually go to a movie or a play.

Willy had no politics, only tremendous anger. The radicals took to him. In his silence, they heard what they wanted to hear.

When he completed a sale, he flew to an island in the Caribbean, checked into a hotel, and stayed drunk until he stopped feeling frightened. A few times he rented a car and crashed into a tree or a wall. For some reason, it helped to free him of his fear.

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.

Laterally me

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.

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.

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.

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.

I never just left in a simple, natural way, but always with vague gradualness, letting Sylvia get used to the idea.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But she couldn’t afford to kill me. She’d be alone. Sleep took no courage.

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.

We weren’t yet married, but Sylvia wanted to do it soon, and the simple idea that it would be unwise for us to marry did not occur to me. If I did not want to marry Sylvia, I couldn’t think I didn’t, couldn’t let myself know it. I had no thoughts or feelings that weren’t moral. When I added two and two, a certain moral sensation arrived with the number four.

I showed love, but it felt like a self-accusation, or an apology. That was my apology—very sincere—but it was for nothing specific. Like a religious convulsion. You apologize for being alive, for not being sick, for not being physically deformed, for not being as bad off as other people. I don’t know what I apologized for. Maybe for the love I desecrated by not believing in Sylvia’s pain. I felt utterly sincere, apologizing, kissing her. It was too delicious, I think.

She’d been enraged by my meeting downstairs, so she cooked spaghetti. Why? She saw herself standing at the stove and cooking spaghetti like a woman who does such things for a man. The man, however, being viciously ungrateful, abandoned her. While Sylvia slaved over a boiling pot of spaghetti, I regaled myself with conversation and a glass of beer. In a bitterly hideous way, it struck me as funny, but I wasn’t laughing.

I learned to talk in two voices, one for the caller, the other for Sylvia, who listened nearby in the tiny apartment, storing up acid criticisms.

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. In a department store, if a saleslady merely told Sylvia that a dress was too long for her, she took it as a comment on her repulsive shortness. If a saleslady said bright yellow was wrong for Sylvia, it was a judgment on her repulsive complexion. She would quickly drag me out into the street, telling me that I thought the same as the saleslady.

Me

It was important, I said, no matter what I might say, not to misjudge Sylvia. I didn’t want to make her sound like something she wasn’t. Greenacre should be suspicious of every word I uttered. It was probably all lies. I’d try to tell the truth, but it was probably going to be a lie. My life, after all, wasn’t a story. It was just moments, what happens from day to day, and it didn’t mean anything, and there was no moral. I was unhappy, but that was beside the point, not that there was a point. I couldn’t be objective. I couldn’t be correct. I’d be entertaining, maybe, because that’s how I was. A fool.

I’d been strengthened by new, positive knowledge, and a sense of connection to the wisdom of our healing institutions. As a result, nothing changed.

She was pleased, more or less, but whatever she felt lacked the depth and intensity of her feelings before the exam. Her pleasure in being praised had no comparable importance, no comparable meaning. The success wasn’t herself. It had no necessity, like the shape of her hands or knees. It didn’t matter to her.

Me

It was important to me—since we are getting married—that we begin trying to live in a normal, regular way. She knew what I thought, took it as a criticism. Refused to get up.

I said, “Let’s clean up this place.” She said, “Yes.” Her answer raised my spirits and I began to move about, picking things up. She noticed my show of energy, my optimism. She collapsed onto the bed, still in her coat, and she closed her eyes and started to go to sleep. I think I knew, before she collapsed, that I’d made a big mistake. My bustling about wouldn’t inspire Sylvia to do the same. But I couldn’t stop myself. It was my way of being insensitive, pretending not really to know her feelings, my way of not loving her.

I don’t want to love her anymore. Too hard. I’m not good enough.