She began a conversation about infidelity. How would I feel if she were unfaithful? I said we’d be through. She said, “Why, if it’s just a mad moment brought on by general malaise?” I said, “Through. That’s all.” She said, “What if you didn’t know?” I said, “If I didn’t know, it’s the same as if it never happened.” She became increasingly angry, insisting that I accept her infidelity. “What if we’re married ten years from now and have three kids, and we’re at a party and both of us are unfaithful?” I said, “That’s different. We’d be dedicated to the kids.” She said, “You’re not dedicated to anyone but yourself.”
JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962
During the week, I rose at 5:30 a.m. and rode the subway to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, then took a bus to Paterson, then another to the college, where I struggled up a steep hill, icy in the winter, to the office I shared with everyone in the English department. I taught classes morning and afternoon, had conferences with students, and then, as the sky darkened above the New Jersey landscape, made the long trip back to MacDougal Street, where I found Sylvia waiting for me. She was in good spirits when she did well at school, and once was very happy. She’d been given a small scholarship. Another time, I found her sprawled in a chair, shining with perspiration. Drawers had been emptied, contents strewn about the apartment. The bed was overturned. I stood in the living room, looking at her, and I tried to understand what had happened. I was still carrying my briefcase and wearing my coat. She studied my face, an ironic light in her eyes, as if she were seeing through me.
“All right,” she said, “where is it?”
“Where is what?”
She laughed, tipping her head back arrogantly, as if to say I couldn’t fool her with my innocent-sounding question.
“What’s her name?”
I slowly realized she’d been searching the apartment for evidence of my infidelity — love notes, nude photos of my girlfriends, etc. There was no such evidence. There were only my journals, worse than love notes, but Sylvia never found them. We had an argument that lasted until long after midnight. My crime, real only in her head, couldn’t be proved or disproved. Bundled up and sweating in a heavy winter coat, my galoshes splashing in the sooty gray suck of New York snow, I lumbered down the empty, pre-dawn darkness of MacDougal Street toward the subway. My briefcase, fat with books and papers, bumped the side of my leg. At that hour, I’d see the big garbage truck from the city’s sanitation department, men emptying pails into its loud, churning maw. There was no other sound. Nothing else moved in the street except me. It was an ugly way to greet the morning, but I liked my loneliness, and I liked getting out of the apartment. By the time I walked into the bus terminal, I felt rather good. My heart beat with a sense of purpose. My head was clear, untroubled by psychological complications. For the next eight hours, there would be no thoughts of Sylvia, and I’d feel no guilt for not thinking of her. I was hot and sweaty in my heavy coat, lumbering with the heavy briefcase through the terminal.
There was always a crowd of hats and coats, men packed together at the steamy breakfast counter where other men sliced oranges, smearing the halves down onto the spinning nozzle of a juicer. They moved with speed and grace. The steam carried good smells — hot coffee, cigarette smoke, baked dough and doughnut sugars. Standing in the crowd of silent men, I hunched over my orange juice, careful not to spill it, the taste bright as its color; or I’d sip hot black coffee, cup in one hand, cigarette in the other. Nervous oppression lay in most faces. They had lived like this for years. For me, charged up on caffeine and nicotine, it was new and real, the hustle and crush of city action, the New York essence of it, the man’s place. Wallowing in my clumsy galoshes, smoking the first cigarette of my day, I joined the solemn brotherhood of workers. I was happy.
I wasn’t fucking my students, but I couldn’t not look at them, couldn’t not see that some of the Italian girls, from towns in New Jersey, were visually delicious. At night, surrendering to fatigue, letting go of another day, I exuded what had been repressed in the classroom, like radioactive emissions of elemental decay. Memories came to me of the girls from Secaucus, Trenton, Paterson, and Jersey City, gorgeous girls with olive skin and lustrous, wavy hair. I never touched any of them. They had the handwriting of little children and drew bubbles over the letter i.
I thought of a million reasons not to touch. I wanted to touch. I didn’t even flirt. I went home. I had sex only with Sylvia, me coming without much pleasure, she without coming. Our electrical frenzy — contortions, convulsions, thrashing, vicious kissing — left us wiped out and horny, needing something other, something more. I told myself I didn’t need it, it wasn’t important, though I looked at women in the subways and streets and my body said otherwise. I wasn’t looking for a woman who would console me, or even a woman to whom I could talk without inciting violence. My body lusted. This was my secret infidelity, never confessed to my journals. Despite the daily misery of marriage, I wrote that I loved Sylvia. I wrote it repeatedly into my journals, and I wiped sincerely pathetic tears from my eyes. “I love Sylvia.”
But to my shame, my body burned for the black woman in high heels and a tweed suit who stood near me while waiting for the D train at the West Fourth Street station. Not another person anywhere on the platform. She stood nearer than she had to. Sexual excitement hit suddenly, left me breathless. Did she want me to start a conversation? I’d never known anything like this. Marriage to Sylvia introduced me to a terrifying imperative: I needed another woman. I couldn’t have said a word to this woman without seeming criminally deranged. There was also the woman who drove by in a silver Porsche at the corner of West Fourth and MacDougal. The car stopped for an instant in front of me. She gave me a deep look. It said our life together was about to begin if I seized the moment. Only to step forward, open the door, slide inside. She would drive me far away from here. We would never come back. And there was a young Puerto Rican mother carrying a shopping bag, who looked so weary and so beautifully appealing in the goodness of her dedication, her sacrifice. I felt love. I wanted to fuck her. She had magnificent lips and large green eyes. Instantly, these women were imprinted in my nerves and bones. I never said anything to them, never saw them again. I remembered them with love and despair. I began to remember them even before they were out of sight, as if they had never been more than memories, figures of a happier, former life.
Sylvia appears in my room. “I can’t stand your typing.”
“I’ll be as quiet as possible.”
“It doesn’t matter. You exist.”
She assumed a haughty posture, lit one of my cigarettes, flicked ashes on the floor. I felt a spasm of hate, but showed nothing. She didn’t leave. I started to yawn. She pushed my jaw shut. I yelled. She looked concerned, then became angry, sneering at me. I was in pain. She could see it. She began wailing about all she had had to bear in the past year and a half.
I was in pain. She was wailing.
JOURNAL, JANUARY 1962
In the spring of 1963 Sylvia completed her undergraduate work at NYU. We moved uptown to an apartment on West 104th Street, between West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. She took night classes in German. I continued teaching at Paterson State and joined a car pool. It made the trip easier. I came home less exhausted, and could go to a movie with Sylvia and not fall asleep in the middle of it. One of the drivers in the car pool, Dan Slater, was completing his graduate work at Columbia, writing a dissertation on French theater. He was gay. Mornings when he drove and there were no other riders, he’d talk about his latest lover, telling me what he liked about him, how long it would last, what the guy looked like, what he said. He talked about things I’d never heard mentioned before. He told me his feelings about some guy’s cock. I was often shocked, but wouldn’t show it. I told him, in a light-hearted, lying style, about the silly fight I’d had with Sylvia last evening. I didn’t say we’d fought until 5 a.m., or that I’d had only an hour’s sleep. I never talked about my life the way he talked about his, as if I were strangely embarrassed by the conventional limitations of marriage. One of his lovers, said Dan, thought the look of black metal wire twisted across front teeth was sexy. He asked Dan to find a dentist who would do the work. Dan didn’t need braces. It would be expensive and painful, not to mention degrading.