Sylvia

by Leonard Michaels

Whatever my regrets about school – lost years, no PhD – I wasn’t yet damaged by judgement.

Years later, I still owed her something. It couldn’t be estimated, or even fully expressed. An infinite debt of feeling.

I supposed, Sylvia being so dark, she found the blond irresistible.

It came to me that someone close to him had died, and the man’s life had stopped, too, or he feared death extremely, and so brought about this eerily reduced condition, using less and less, changing nothing, moving only in the shadows.

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

It’s hard to forgive self-sacrifice.

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?

By sneaking the events into my journal, when Sylvia collapsed, I made them seem even more secret.

I felt myself going blind and deaf, repudiating the news, denying it in my physiology. It was like fainting. Malcolm saw my reaction, laughed, and told me about fights he’d had with his wife. It was an extraordinary moment. Men never talked to each other this way. His fights were as bad as mine, but he made them seem funny. He was unashamed. I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too, even a charming, sophisticated guy like Malcolm. We laughed together. I felt happily irresponsible. Countless men and women, I supposed, all over America, were tearing each other to pieces.

I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.

Once, returning from the grocery store with a bag of food pressed to my chest, I passed an acquaintance who, saying hello, dropped three hashish cubes into the bag and went on. He’d never even visited the apartment, but dopers proselytised and were ordinarily very generous. Even the poorest of our drug friends would give part of whatever they had, as if with a religious spirit.

Sylvia could be happy and funny, but it is easier to remember the bad times. They were more sensational;

Before he could tell me all this, Roger said I had to swear not to repeat a word of it. He always does something to make me wait before saying what he has in mind. He lights a cigarette, or stares into my eyes and says nothing. The effect is eerily suspenseful. Finally, whatever he says is anticlimactic. I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone. He said: ‘I think I have syphilis.’ I asked why he thought so. ‘A late stage of syphilis.’ I asked again why he thought so. ‘There are little animals crawling on me. I also have a rash.’ I didn’t laugh. I advised him to call a doctor. From my place he phoned his doctor friend, Jerry, Roger’s roommate at Harvard. Jerry told Roger he probably didn’t have syphilis, and he explained about pubic lice. Jerry phoned in a prescription to a nearby drugstore. Roger and I walked up Broadway together to pick it up. I wondered if it is remarkable that Roger Lvov, a genius from Brooklyn who has a Harvard PhD, thinks pubic lice indicate a late stage of syphilis.

Hilarious

Sometimes, after a fight, we went to the movies. It was like going to church. We entered with the people, found our seats, faced the light, and succumbed to the vast communal imagination.

Even with good reason to leave, the leaver is in the wrong.

She returned to New York, and then I was wretched in a whole new way, because I wasn’t really wretched and I felt guilty about it.