She waited, also struggling, if not against boredom then against hay fever for composure and concentration.
I then plunged ahead; talked for fifty minutes, withholding a little, but without being incoherent. She sniffled and responded to nothing, just took it all in. At the end, she said Sylvia and I both needed psychoanalysis. She would recommend someone, if I liked. She was no longer practicing, only acting as a consultant.
I asked if she had any idea about Sylvia and me, any impression she might be able to give me. She seemed reluctant to say another word. But I’d come across, told her so much. I was going to pay for the hour. With a shrug and a dismissive tone, she said, “You’re feeding on each other.”
Toward the end of our time on MacDougal Street, I convinced Sylvia to visit a psychiatrist at Columbia Neuro-psychiatric. A friend of Sylvia’s had been seeing him, and he said the doctor knew his business and was a decent guy. Sylvia let me make an appointment for her. The day of the appointment, Sylvia refused to get out of bed. I begged her. I argued and cajoled and yelled. Finally, I ran out the door, down the stairs, and hailed a taxi. I went to the appointment. It was extremely embarrassing. I explained as best I could. The doctor let me talk, listened to me for about an hour and a half. For the first time, I had no trouble talking. The bad scene with Sylvia before leaving the apartment, and the wild rush uptown, had thrust me into the middle of our saga. I talked about what happened minutes ago and what was happening day after day. I talked rapidly and lucidly, and I produced a voluminously detailed picture. At last, as if he’d heard something crucial, he said, “Has she started calling you a homosexual?” I told him about the Tampax. He said this is very serious. Sylvia ought to be committed. If I’d sign papers, he’d do the rest. He followed me to the head of the stairs, calling after me, “This is very serious.”
Maybe I’d wanted to hear him say something like that. Whether or not we were “feeding on each other” was less important than the fact that Sylvia was certifiably, technically nuts. This knowledge was horribly exciting. It made me very high. I ran to the subway, sobbing a little, running back to my madwoman. I’d been strengthened by new, positive knowledge, and a sense of connection to the wisdom of our healing institutions. As a result, nothing changed.
Awakened by a phone call. Sylvia, in a hurry to go to school, asks for the mailbox key on her way out the door. I say, “Will you let me know if I got any mail?” She says, “No. I need something to read during class.” She leaves. I hang up the phone. She comes back carrying a letter from my brother. She says, “Can I read it?” I say, “No.” She says, “Why not?” I say, “He might have intended it for me.” She shouts, stomps the floor, pulls the door shut with a great bang, runs down the stairs. I make coffee and gobble up half a loaf of bread without slicing it, tearing off wads, smearing the wads with butter, jamming them into my mouth.
JOURNAL, MARCH 1961
One evening, after another long fight, Sylvia went raging out of the apartment to take an exam in Greek, saying she would fail, she had no hope of passing, she would fail disgracefully, it was my fault, and “I will get you for this.” The door slammed. I sat on the bed listening to her footsteps hurry down the hall, then down the stairs. I was immobilized by self-pity, and, as usual, unable to remember how the fight had started, or even what it was about except that Sylvia was going to tell my parents about me, and report me to the police, and she would do something personally, too. In a spasm of strange determination, I got up, went out the door, and followed her through the streets to NYU. I was stunned and blank, but moving, crossing streets, walking through the park, then joining a crowd of students and entering the main building of NYU, following Sylvia down a hallway, up a flight of stairs, and down another hallway to her exam room. I stood outside the room and looked in. She sat in the last row and hadn’t removed her thin, brown leather wraparound winter coat, its tall collar standing higher than her ears. The coat was nothing against a New York winter, but Sylvia thought she looked great in it and wore it constantly, even on the coldest days. She was bent, huddled over the questions printed on her exam paper, as if the exam itself delivered heavy blows to her shoulders and the top of her head. Her ballpoint pen, clutched in a bloodless fist, moved very quickly, her face close to the page, breathing on the words she wrote. Five minutes after the hour, she surrendered the paper to her professor and came out of the room with a yellowish face, looking killed. When she saw me, she came to me without seeming in the least surprised, and whispered that she had been humiliated, had failed, it was my fault. But her tone was not reproachful. She leaned against me a little as we started away from the room. I could feel how glad she was to find me waiting for her. I put my arm around her. She let me kiss her. We walked home together, my arm around her, keeping her warm.
Her exam was the best in the class, and the professor urged her to persist in classical studies. She was pleased, more or less, but whatever she felt lacked the depth and intensity of her feelings before the exam. Her pleasure in being praised had no comparable importance, no comparable meaning. The success wasn’t herself. It had no necessity, like the shape of her hands or knees. It didn’t matter to her.
She didn’t always do that well; but considering how we lived, it was a miracle she passed any course. She took no pride in her success and never exhibited her learning in conversation, never referred to it. She was basically uninterested; only performing. Academic achievements, to her, were an embarrassment.
“I’d give thirty points off my IQ for a shorter nose.”
“Nothing is wrong with your nose.”
“It’s too long, a millimeter too long.”
Agatha Seaman, who lived in Yonkers and visited Sylvia regularly, told her about a doctor in Switzerland who could reshape her nose without surgery, molding it by hand over a period of weeks at his clinic in the Alps, where you could also ski and the meals were marvelous. “Everybody goes there.” Sylvia cared less about the shape of her nose than its length, but she yearned for the mythical doctor. He’d been mentioned in a fashion magazine and described as the darling of European society. Sylvia was resentful of Agatha, because she could easily afford to spend weeks at the alpine clinic. Not that Sylvia would go if she could afford it. Still, she wanted to believe there was such a doctor, and hope existed for her nose, and it was available to her, not just Agatha.
I liked Sylvia’s nose, but I said nothing, certainly nothing about the fantasy doctor. I might easily say the wrong thing. My idea was that Sylvia wanted someone to do to her nose what she did to her dresses, which was to change them. She changed their length or width, or removed a collar or added a collar or tightened the shoulders. She always ruined her dresses, or else she decided, after much cutting and sewing, that the changes didn’t work for her. There were dozens of beautiful dresses and skirts, purchased with inheritance money soon after her mother’s death. None of them fit like another. They were stuffed into boxes and suitcases that were jammed under the couch and in the back of the closet and almost never opened. She wore only a few things and she had no memory of the extent of her wardrobe, no idea of how many thousands of dollars she had spent on clothes. Since she often fell asleep in her clothes — too depressed or too lazy to undress, or because she felt good in what she was wearing — she wore the same thing for days while hundreds of pieces of clothing, altered and realtered, were simply forgotten and never worn.