Sylvia: A Novel by Leonard Michaels Read Free Book Online

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.”
    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 wasout 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