“I said I won’t do it. There was really nothing more to discuss.”
“Who would do it?”
He laughed. “There are people who would.”
“There are?”
“Oh, come on.”
After a while, I was trying to write again. Another story was accepted by a literary magazine. I had also acquired a literary agent who became a good friend and visited us when we lived on MacDougal Street. One night he dragged me out to meet another writer represented by the agency. It was Jack Kerouac. I’d never spent an evening with a celebrity, but I had university friends who considered themselves intimates of Plato, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, et al. Days later I asked one of them if he’d read Kerouac. He said, “Give me a break. I haven’t read Proust yet.”
In my agent’s Porsche convertible, with the top down, we circled Manhattan, Kerouac raving about reviews of his books to the night sky. He’d memorized the cruelest comments, none funny, but he wanted us to laugh. We laughed. The night ended in a seedy bar near Fourteenth Street and Second Avenue. The floor was made of tiny, hexagonal, white-and-black tiles. There were booths of dark brown wood along one wall. Allen Ginsberg was there with some friends. Kerouac introduced us. I’d been introduced to Ginsberg a few times before, in Berkeley, but he never remembered me. It was like meeting on the great wheel of existence, going on to other lives, then meeting again, and not remembering we’d met before. Except I remembered.
When we moved uptown, we collected a new group of friends. Some of them taught at Columbia University, about ten short blocks north of our apartment. They often came by late at night, and we would sit talking and smoking marijuana until dawn. Our conversations, usually about literature or movies, were much influenced by marijuana, hence thrilling, but also very boring. As in Antonioni’s movies, there was strange gratification in the boredom of our long, smoky, moribund-hip, analytical nights. Most of the time Sylvia was the only woman in the room. She’d pull her legs up on the couch and half lie there, looking sensuously langorous, yet very attentive to whatever the Columbia friends wanted to talk about, but then, pretty soon, she’d begin to disintegrate, becoming helpless with marijuana giggles, laughing at herself for laughing so much, and the Columbia friends would be tickled and they would laugh with her, encouraging her too much, I thought. But they had nothing at stake. Sylvia’s susceptibility to marijuana was amusing, even endearing, to everyone except me. I feared and resented these moments, and I despised dope.
I never bought any dope, but it was often in the apartment. Friends “laid it on us,” joints and pills, in return for our hospitality. They frequently showed up at our MacDougal Street apartment only to chat for a moment and get high before going on to some appointment in the neighborhood. Once, returning from the grocery store with a bag of food pressed to my chest, I passed an acquaintance who, saying hello, dropped three hashish cubes into the bag and went on. He’d never even visited the apartment, but dopers proselytized and were ordinarily very generous. Even the poorest of our drug friends would give part of whatever they had, as if with a religious spirit. They wanted you to get high with them, to feel the goodness they felt, and to see the world as they did. (Generosity stopped short of hard, expensive drugs.) The spirit of giving and religious community was good, I thought. Nothing like it had been seen before in the continuously murderous history of our country. But I’d put the joints and pills in a drawer, and forget about them until weeks later, when I came upon the stuff by accident and threw it out.
It never seemed to me, in the long hours of our marijuana nights, that Sylvia wasn’t having a good time, even when there was only gasping and hissing in the room, as three or four of us sat with nothing to say, passing a joint around. She always seemed very content, and she was interested when conversation resumed. She always smoked, and she swallowed whatever pill was offered. A drawing she made gives an impression of our evenings. It shows Agatha, two of the Columbia friends, and an old friend of mine who stopped visiting after Sylvia and I got married. He is swooping in behind Sylvia with a knife, about to stab her in the back. The Columbia friends are stoned. I’m also in the drawing, typing, indifferent to everything happening in the room.
I was never indifferent, but I was trying to write, always trying again. That bothered Sylvia. Not the sound of my typing. I spent far more time with her than with the typewriter. What bothered her was that I wanted to do it. It was like going away, abandoning her. She’d listen patiently when I read my stories to her, and sometimes she liked them. She’d smile and say, “Yes.” Her one word was tremendously pleasing. She could also be pretty hard. Once, after I read her a story, she said, “I still believe our child will be very intelligent.”
The long conversational nights were also full of academic gossip about the English department at Columbia. Roger Lvov, an assistant professor who visited two or three times a week, often told us what had happened only hours earlier:
“I walked past Trilling’s office this morning. The door was open.”
Roger pressed the remains of his roach, pinched between the prongs of a bobby pin, to the tip of the funnel he made with his lips. We waited for him to suck and then go on talking. His pale eyelids drooped, his nostrils tensed and blanched, opening wide. He sucked in three short, hard drafts. Essence of marijuana gas shot through the reticulations of his bronchial network. His eyes were crimson and glistening. He continued:
“Trilling looked at me as I went by the door. He could see me.”
“Did he say anything?” I asked.
Roger gazed at me. “What?”
The question left me annoyed at myself. It was too eager, too curious. Later Sylvia would say Roger was laughing at me. He was going to repeat my question up and down West End Avenue and Broadway. She’s say I’d humiliated myself.
I burned as I asked again, “Did Trilling say anything to you?”
“No.”
“Wow,” said Theodore Edelweiss, whom we called Teddy, also an assistant professor at Columbia. He was more stoned than Roger and he seemed to believe that he had just heard a fantastic story. But I was not sure what Teddy thought. He was a complicated person, and might have been laughing at Roger.