Sylvia: A Novel Read Online Free

things. She saidnothing about her boyfriend, and remembered only the sex, the indulgences. I’d wanted too much. She’d given too much. Years later, I still owed her something. It couldn’t be estimated, or even fully expressed. An infinite debt of feeling.
    At dawn, having slept not one minute, we went down into the street. The shining residue of night was strewn along the curb and overflowing trash cans, beginning to stink in the early light and heat. Broken, heaving sidewalks, the crust of a discontented, restless earth, oozed moisture and a steamy glow. There was no traffic; no people. Between dark and day, the city stood in stunned, fetid slumber. It had been deeply used. On a bench, in a small grassy area set back from Sixth Avenue, we sat and stared into each other’s eyes, adoring, yet with a degree of reserve, or belated concern to see who we’d been to bed with for the last ten hours.
    Sylvia said she was leaving for summer school at Harvard the next day. Instantly, I thought of her former boyfriend. He would be there. I felt jealous. I had no claim on Sylvia’s fidelity and perhaps I didn’t want it, but I felt jealous. She’d said she liked his blond looks, his gentle and Gentile old-money manners. I supposed, Sylvia being so dark, she found the blond irresistible. It wasn’t over between them. He was in Cambridge; she wasn’t—and that was all. They’d soon be together. She’d see him. Old sentiments would revive. I’d lose her. Then she asked if I would come up to Cambridge and live with her. She held her face high, stiff with anticipation, as if to receive a blow.

    I see her. Maybe I know what I’m looking at.
    I was taken by highlights along her cheekbones and the luscious expectancy in her lower lip. I liked the Asian cast of her face, its smoothness, length, and tilt of its bones. Her straight black hair, against a look of cool dark blood, seemed to bear on the question of me in Cambridge. 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.
    There was much to think about. None of it had to do with how Sylvia’s cheekbones caught the light, or the luscious weight of her lower lip, or the cool focus of her eyes. But I kept seeing her face. I didn’t think. I also saw the swimsuit turned inside out, hanging by the jock, like the carcass of a chicken disemboweled.
    A week later I took the train to Boston. Sylvia moved out of her dormitory. We found a room near the university in a big house with shadowy passages.
    I took the train. We found a room . . .
    The truth is I didn’t know what I was doing exactly, or why I was in Cambridge. Sylvia wanted me to be there. I had no immediate practical reason to be elsewhere—no job, nothing to do. My desire to write stories was nothing to do. It wouldn’t pay. It wasn’t work. When I looked atSylvia’s face, I liked what I saw, but I still wasn’t sure why I was in Cambridge. I was sure of little. I missed her during the week she was gone from New York, but my feelings were only as strong as they were uncertain. Being with her in Cambridge, I felt no urgency to be anywhere else. It would be a brilliant, blooming, fragrant summer. I had a girlfriend. No obligations. I had only to be.
    The room was in a house full of heavy, stolid things with white sheets thrown over them. Blinds were drawn, doors shut, defending against light and air. A man in his sixties lived in the house, creeping amid masses and shadows. He used almost nothing, apparently, and kept things undisturbed, hidden, as if waiting for the true owner of the house to return and pull away the sheets, use the furniture, live here. 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