Free Sylvia: A Novel by Leonard Michaels Page B

terror, like leaping from a high place. Now Sylvia was in tears, like a child, helpless with amazement, laughing. Our waiter stood beside our table, doubled over as if broken, clutching himself about the middle, paralyzed. Another waiter appeared and said, “Every fucking night this happens to you,” and put his arm around him and led him away, still doubled over, broken by laughter.

    Sylvia said she didn’t do well on the Greek test. She was wildly remorseful. Wouldn’t have sex. Got out of bed to brush her teeth, then had a small crying fit at the kitchen sink, and said, “I don’t want to get married.”
    I lay there thinking that it will make my parents miserable if I call off the wedding. I will have disappointed them again. I will fail in everything and Sylvia will go completely nuts. Then I thought we will get married, and I will bring our child with me when I visit Sylvia in the nuthouse.
    I won’t go mad. Not me. Mindless sanity sustains me. I am an ordinary person. I don’t know Latin and Greek. All I know is how to work. I went to my room and sat at the typewriter. My feet began to freeze, my knees felt numb. There was a steady crash of wind and rain against the window. Sylvia went back to bed. She might sleep until morning, I thought.
    JOURNAL, MARCH 1961
    In those days R. D. Laing and others sang praises to the condition of being nuts, and French intellectuals argued for allegiance to Stalin and the Marquis de Sade. Diane Arbus looked hard at freaks, searching maybe for a reservoir of innocence in this world. A few blocks east, at the Five Spot, Ornette Coleman eviscerated jazz essence through a raucous plastic sax. The great Charlie Minguswas also there, playing angular, complex, hard-driving music to a full house night after night. In salient forms of life and art, people exceeded themselves—or the self; our dashing President, John F. Kennedy, was screwing movie actresses. Everything dazzled.
    Movies, the quintessence of excess, were becoming known as “films.” To the reflective eye, Antonioni’s movies were among the most important. Sylvia and I never missed one. We’d emerge radically deadened, yet exhilarated, sorry the movie had to end. She whispered once, as the lights came on, “Why can’t they leave us alone?” It was truly painful, having to thrust back into the windy streets, back to our apartment. We carried away visions of despair and boredom, but also thrilling apprehensions of this moment, in this modern world, where emptiness could be exquisite, even a way of life, not only for Monica Vitti and Alain Delon but for us, too. Why not? Feelings were all that mattered, and they were available to us. We understood. We were susceptible to the ineffable strains and moods of modern life. We’d read Nietzsche. Our brainiest friends—not only sad little Agatha—brought regular news from the abyss. One of them, a graduate student in art history, was on heroin. Another, whose translations of Chinese poetry had won awards and a book contract, strolled the wall beside the Hudson River, a willing prey to rough trade.
    I would come back to the apartment after shopping for groceries, or doing the laundry—Sylvia never did these things—and find Agatha lying about, telling all. I couldhardly wait to hear it from Sylvia, stories about the wilderness of Manhattan where Agatha descended nightly. When she stayed very late, I’d walk her down into the street, then wait with her for a cab. I worried about her. She might run into trouble—hapless, defenseless girl—alone in the dark. I refused to acknowledge that she was excited by dangers of the unknown, running after trouble in the dark.
    “It’s too cold to wait out here,” she said.
    “No bother. I want to do it.”
    I peered down the avenue, freezing, praying for a cab to appear and take Agatha away. Then I hurried back to Sylvia. Agatha had told Sylvia how a boy forced her into prostitution. He took her to a boat docked on the West Side,