JOURNAL, MARCH 1961
I was affected by cultural radiations from newspapers, radio, movies, television, but my life was MacDougal Street, voices through the walls, traffic noises through the windows, odors floating up the stairwell, and always Sylvia. A visit to my parents lasted only a few hours. There was no place to go where I might forget MacDougal Street and Sylvia for a little while.
With few exceptions, Sylvia imagined my friends were her enemies. Once, hurrying back to the apartment from a twenty-minute meeting with a friend in the San Remo bar, a hundred feet from the entrance to our building, I opened the apartment door on madness. Sylvia, at the stove, five feet away, turned toward me holding a plate of spaghetti in her hand — already startling, since she never cooked — and the plate came sailing toward my face, strands of spaghetti untangling like a ball of snakes. “Dinner,” she said. I caught it against my forearm.
She’d been enraged by my meeting downstairs, so she cooked spaghetti. Why? She saw herself standing at the stove and cooking spaghetti like a woman who does such things for a man. The man, however, being viciously ungrateful, abandoned her. While Sylvia slaved over a boiling pot of spaghetti, I regaled myself with conversation and a glass of beer. In a bitterly hideous way, it struck me as funny, but I wasn’t laughing.
The telephone, if it rang for me, was also her enemy. She’d say, “His master’s voice,” and hand me the phone. After I put it down, she’d jeer, “You love Bernie, don’t you?” He was a witty guy. I’d laughed too hard at his remarks during the phone call, and Sylvia resented all that flow of feeling in his direction. Eventually, when answering the phone, if Sylvia was in the room, I kept my voice even and dull, or edged with annoyance, as if the call were tedious. I learned to talk in two voices, one for the caller, the other for Sylvia, who listened nearby in the tiny apartment, storing up acid criticisms.
I liked Sylvia’s friends, and I was glad when they phoned or visited. They proved Sylvia was lovable, and they let me believe that we were good company. I wanted Sylvia to have lots of friends, but she was carefully selective and soon got rid of her prettiest girlfriends, keeping only those who didn’t remind her of her physical imperfections. In a department store, if a saleslady merely told Sylvia that a dress was too long for her, she took it as a comment on her repulsive shortness. If a saleslady said bright yellow was wrong for Sylvia, it was a judgment on her repulsive complexion. She would quickly drag me out into the street, telling me that I thought the same as the saleslady.
“Why don’t you admit it?” she said.
If the saleslady was affectionate and sincerely attentive, Sylvia would buy anything from her. For every hundred dollars she spent on clothes, she got about fifty cents in value, and would have done better, at much less cost, in a Salvation Army thrift shop, blindfolded. When she liked some piece of clothing and felt good wearing it — a certain cashmere sweater, a cotton blouse, or her tweed coat with the torn sleeve — she’d wear it for days. She’d sleep in it.
Saturday was spent making up for Friday. We slept, made love, ate. I didn’t write, she didn’t study. We tried to sleep again, couldn’t sleep. Made love. Not well, but exhaustingly. She said, “You’re not natural.” We slept.
JOURNAL, MARCH 1961
My mother’s way of trying to help was to send food. I carried large grocery bags of bagels, fried chicken, potato latkes, cakes, and cookies to MacDougal Street. My father’s way was silence and looks of sad philosophical concern, which was no help, but he also gave me money. Our expenses were low, forty dollars a month for rent, maybe a little more for the food we kept in the refrigerator where it would be safe from roaches — spaghetti, oranges, eggs, coffee, milk, bread, and the pastries Sylvia loved. Gas and electric cost us about ten or eleven dollars a month.
The one time I tried to tell my father about my life with Sylvia, I became incoherent and suffered visibly. As in a dream, I couldn’t seem to say what I intended. My mouth felt weak and too big, my words sloppy. But he understood. Even before I did, he understood I was asking for his permission to do something terrible. He cut me off, saying, “She’s an orphan. You cannot abandon her.” A plain moral law. He couldn’t bear listening to me, seeing my torment. So he didn’t allow discussion, didn’t let me speak evil. Then he told about the wretchedness of husbands. He knew a man, seventy-seven years old, an immigrant Jew from Poland with a butcher shop on Hester Street, whose wife told the FBI he was a communist. They investigated him, and he spent nine days in jail. Fortunately, his name was good in the neighborhood. He wasn’t a communist. I got the point. Wives might do bad things to their husbands, but nothing could or should be done to end the miseries of the couple. The couple is absolute, immutable as the sea and the shore. With his little story, my father condemned me to marriage.
I’d wanted him to say something, but not that. I went away lonely and wretched. More than ever, I had to talk to somebody and I wondered about seeing a psychiatrist. In graduate school, I had read an essay on Jonathan Swift by the psychoanalyst Phyllis Greenacre. It was well written and, unlike much psychoanalytic writing, seemed conscious of literary values. Maybe I could talk to her. I thought about what I could say or dare not say. Finally, I dialed her number. She gave me an appointment.
Her living room was her office. A big room, with chairs and couches covered by lovely fabrics. The atmosphere was entirely domestic and pleasant, not the least medical. Had people come here to rave about their miserable lives? There were literary magazines, like the Hudson Review, on a coffee table. I felt out of place, not so much that I’d brought misery to this lovely room, but that I lacked the cultivation necessary to discuss my ugly case. Again I was having trouble talking. How could I say what brought me here? Where would I find the words? Where would I begin? Then I noticed Greenacre was suffering from an attack of hay fever, and it became hard to think about anything else. She was on the verge of sneezing, sniffling constantly, pressing tissues to her nose, trying to look at me through teary eyes. Her head was full of turbulent waters. It was discouraging.
I began by apologizing for not being able to talk objectively about my problems. I said I wasn’t sure I could get things right, or even review the events of my story correctly — what came first, what next. It was important, I said, no matter what I might say, not to misjudge Sylvia. I didn’t want to make her sound like something she wasn’t. Greenacre should be suspicious of every word I uttered. It was probably all lies. I’d try to tell the truth, but it was probably going to be a lie. My life, after all, wasn’t a story. It was just moments, what happens from day to day, and it didn’t mean anything, and there was no moral. I was unhappy, but that was beside the point, not that there was a point. I couldn’t be objective. I couldn’t be correct. I’d be entertaining, maybe, because that’s how I was. A fool. Greenacre interrupted:
“Just talk. Don’t worry about being objective.”
Her remark was very brutal, I thought; also embarrassing. She seemed not to appreciate how I’d been struggling to make clear the difficulty, for me, in saying anything, and therefore how amazing it was that I’d come this far, sitting here with a doctor, trying desperately to make it understood that I could never make anything clear, and the entire enterprise was worthless. Suddenly — jolted by her brutal interruption — I heard myself. I’d merely bumbled for five minutes. I’d been boring. I’d frustrated the doctor. If I had only this incoherent stuff to offer, she couldn’t do her job. I was virtually demented.