Sylvia: A Novel by Leonard Michaels

then down into a small room. He kept her there until the men came, bestial types. While one did things to her, others watched. I imagined a steel room in the bottom of the boat, echoing with animal noises.
    Repeating it to me—the boat, the small room, the men—Sylvia was ironically amused, posturing in her voice, mimicking Agatha’s dull tones, as if to measure the distance between Agatha’s lust for degrading experience and herself. I listened, feeling entertained without feeling guilty. I let myself imagine that Agatha was far gone, beyond recall, object more than subject, without claims on my humanity. I owed only politeness. A few minutes in the street waiting for a cab. What sympathy I felt was easy. Liking her was also easy. Affectations, corrosive cosmetics, stylish clothes, an aura of self-destructive debauch—she was utterlyharmless, even sort of cute. I liked myself for liking her. She reported every peculiarity of her soul to Sylvia, but I didn’t see, beneath Sylvia’s contempt in retelling the stories, that she was involved in Agatha’s fate. Then, one night in bed, Sylvia said, “Call me whore, slut, cunt . . .”
    I was eventually to call her my wife. The old-fashioned name would make our life proper, okay. Things would change, I believed, though our fights had become so ugly that the gay couple across the hall wouldn’t ever say hello to us. We passed frequently, almost touching, along the dingy route to the hall toilets, one dank closet for each apartment. They turned up their phonograph until it boomed above our shrieking. Eighteenth-century pieces, wildly flourishing strings and an extravaganza of golden trumpets, as if to remind us of high, vigorous civilization, where even the most destructive passions are sublimed. They hoped to drown us, maybe shame us, into silence. It never happened.
    It’s possible we frightened them with our horrendous daily battles, but I assumed they just didn’t like us. They were repressed Midwestern types. Towheaded, hyperclean, quiet kids in flight from a small town, hiding in New York so they could be lovers, never supposing that their neighbors, just across the hall, would be maniacs. It struck me as paradoxical that being gay didn’t mean you couldn’t be disapproving and intolerant. I liked eighteenth-century music. Couldn’t they tell? Forgive a little? Were their domestic dealings, because they behaved better, so different from ours? Sharing a bed, were they never deranged by sexual theatricsor loony compulsions? They passed us with rigid, wraithlike, blind faces. No hello, no little nod, only the sound of old linoleum crackling beneath us. They pressed toward the wall so as not to touch us inadvertently. We were an order of life beneath recognition. Their soaring music damned us. Their silence and their music threw me back on myself, made me think Sylvia and I—not the gay kids—were marginal creatures, morally offensive, in very bad taste. We were, but they seemed unjust. They really didn’t know. I didn’t either as I held Sylvia in my arms and called her names and said that I loved her. Didn’t know we were lost.
    I have no job, no job, no job. I’m not published. I have nothing to say. I’m married to a madwoman.
    JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962
    Soon after we were married, Sylvia said, “I have girlfriends who make a hundred dollars a week,” which was a good salary in the early sixties. It would have paid two months’ rent and our electric bills. But Sylvia meant, compared to her girlfriends, I was a bum. Eventually, I published a story or two in literary magazines, which made me happy, but the magazines paid nearly nothing. So I began looking for a job and, to my surprise, I was hired almost immediately as an assistant professor of English at Paterson State College in New Jersey. Then I stopped writing. I had much less time for stories,but more important was the fact that I was married. It changed my idea of myself. As a married man, I had to work