Sylvia: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

together on her papers. I didn’t write any stories that I didn’t tear up and throw away. The writing was no good, but I liked being with Sylvia and this life in Cambridge.
    One afternoon, sitting on the front steps, waiting for Sylvia to return from class, I spotted her far down the street, walking slowly. When she saw me looking at her, she walked more slowly. Her right sandal was flapping. The sole had torn loose. At last she came up to me and showed me how a nail had poked up through the sole. She had walked home on the nail, sole flapping, her foot sloshing in blood. What else could she do? She smiled wanly, suffering, but good-spirited.
    I said she could have had the sandal fixed or walked barefoot or called for a taxi. There was something impatient in my voice. She seemed shocked. Her smile went from wan to screwy, perturbed, injured. I couldn’t call back the impatience in my voice, couldn’t undo its effect. For days thereafter, Sylvia walked about Cambridge pressingthe ball of her foot onto the nail, bleeding. She refused to wear other shoes. I pleaded, I argued with her. Finally, she let me take the sandal to be repaired. I was grateful. She was not grateful. I was not forgiven.
    “Go, I don’t love you. I hate you. I don’t hate, I despise you. If you love me, you’ll go. I think we can be great friends and I’m sorry we never became friends.”
    “Can I get you something?”
    “A menstrual pill. They’re in my purse.”
    I found the little bottle and brought her a pill.
    “Go now.”
    I lay down beside her. We slept in our clothes.
    JOURNAL, DECEMBER 1960
    At the end of the summer we returned to New York. Naomi moved out of the MacDougal Street apartment. Sylvia and I moved in. By then, fighting every day, we’d become ferociously intimate.
    Like a kid having a tantrum, she would get caught up in the sound of her own screaming. Screaming because she was screaming, screaming, screaming, as if building a little chamber of rage, herself at the center. It was all hers. She was boss. I wasn’t allowed inside. Her eyes and teeth were bright blacks and whites, everything exaggerated and contorted,like the maelstrom within. There was nothing erotic in this picture, and yet we sometimes went from fighting to sex. No passport was required. There wasn’t even a border. Time was fractured, there was no cause and effect, and one thing didn’t even lead toward another. As in a metaphor, one thing was another. Raging, hating, I wanted to fuck, and she did, too.
    Fights often began without warning. I’d be saying something ordinary and neutral, but Sylvia was suddenly rigid, staring at me. She knocked the telephone off the shelf. I stopped talking, startled, jerked to attention. She knocked the cup and saucer that had been sitting beside the telephone to the floor. They smashed to pieces. Now she was screaming, denouncing me, and I was screaming back at her. She went for the radio, to fling it against the wall, and I lunged at her, trying to stop her. She twisted loose and came at me. Then it was erotic; anyhow, sexual. Afterwards, usually, she slept. Neither of us mentioned what had happened. From yelling to fucking. From unreal to real was how it felt.
    Ordinary or violent, the sex was frequent, exhausting more than satisfying. Sylvia said she’d never had an orgasm. As if I were the one who stood between her and that ultimate pleasure, she announced, “I will not live my whole life without an orgasm.” She said she’d had several lovers better than I was. She wanted to talk about them, I think, make me suffer details.

    I began trying to write again. Sylvia began taking classes at NYU, a few blocks away across Washington Square Park, to complete her undergraduate work. She asked me what she ought to declare as her major. I said if I were doing it over, I’d major in classics. I should have said nothing. She registered for Latin and Greek, ancient history, and a class in eighteenth-century English