Sylvia: A Novel by Leonard Michaels Read Free Book Online Page 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 doinghard 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