Outside the Carnegie delicatessen, I took my money out of my pocket to see if I had enough for tickets and dinner. I needed about ten dollars. Sylvia said, “You’re not going to count your money in the street, I hope.” After that, I had no choice but to count my money, but I didn’t do it. I stuffed the bills back into my pocket. Irascible and silent, we waited for Roger and his Rosalie. The minutes in the afternoon heat stood like buildings along the avenue, utterly still. Sylvia asked me to feel her lower back. I put my hand there. Her blouse was damp with sweat. I said, “Mm. Yeah.” My tone was sympathetic. Then she asked for money to buy a can of talcum powder. She wanted to shake talcum powder into her shoes in front of the Carnegie delicatessen. I gave her all my change, about thirty-five cents. It must have seemed to her enough for only one can of talcum powder, which cost about twenty cents. I had not brought several million dollars with me for the tons of talcum powder she might need. She was visibly angry and spun away from me and hustled off to a drugstore. In a minute she returned without talcum powder, and said, “The drugstore is full of Scandinavian airline people.” She meant she couldn’t get service. “This ruins the evening. I can’t possibly enjoy anything after this.” She also meant tall blond gorgeous men and women.
I said, “Let’s get coffee,” and I started across the avenue toward a diner. Sylvia’s hatred pushed me ahead of her, but I made myself go slow. We walked together for half a minute in silence. Then she said, “I’m going to Fifth Avenue. I’ll take the bus home from there.”
Without a word, I walked into the diner, sat at the counter. Sylvia watched me through the plate glass window. When I looked at her, she frowned with dark hurt angry disbelief, then walked away. A surging weight, like a body within my body, lunged after her, running out of the diner and down the street to catch her, beg her not to take the bus home, but stay, meet Roger and Rosalie, go to the movie. I didn’t move. I’d begged too many times. Please come with me to visit my father in the hospital, please come with me to dinner at my parents’ apartment, please come with me to the party, please let’s go to the psychiatrist, please get out of bed. I ordered a hamburger. When it came, I bit into it once or twice, swallowed without chewing, and left the rest of it on the plate. I walked back to the Carnegie.
Roger was there in his jacket and tie, stick-like, pale as a vampire in the sunlight. He grinned, holding air in his rigid neck. I saw no Rosalie. I knew he wanted to ask, “Where’s Sylvia?” But he was unsure if he could. Unbearable revelations might follow. Better not to ask. Think. Suspect. Sniff about for clues. Analyze. I was irritated at him for being like himself. What I’d found endearing other times was suddenly contemptible. I didn’t explain Sylvia’s absence. Too ashamed. “Where’s Rosalie?” I asked. Roger muttered about a migraine headache. I didn’t believe Rosalie had a migraine headache. I knew damn well Rosalie was a man. Roger had decided once again that a Jewish boy from Brooklyn does not come out. We went to the movie, This Sporting Life, together. At one point the hero says, “I can love, can’t I?” Movies often asked that depressing question.
I told Sylvia I would see a psychiatrist when we separated. She said it wouldn’t do any good because I couldn’t remember facts. I’d give a distorted account of our marriage. Then we talked about her girlfriend Betty whose boyfriend, Matthew, is very loving. “He took her skin diving in Puerto Rico.”
“Do you want to go skin diving in Puerto Rico?”
“That’s not the point.”
Sylvia said Matthew doesn’t worry about Betty not being good-looking enough for him. I said, “I don’t worry either. You’re a fanatic on the subject of looks.” She rolled away. Then she turned and said, “You didn’t think I was a fanatic when I was your little jewel.” There were tears in her eyes. She rolled away again and asked me to shut off the light. I did, then went into the bathroom and picked at my face, making it bleed. When I crawled back into bed, she said, “Agatha’s parents have been divorced and married twice — to each other.” I said, “There are no happy marriages.” She said, “What about your parents?” I said, “They live in another world.”
JOURNAL, AUGUST 1963
The train from Grand Central to Ann Arbor, Michigan, was called the Wolverine. The trip took ten hours, from dark to dawn. In the long clattering night, hungry, unable to sleep, I opened the paper bag of sandwiches, cookies, and coffee Sylvia prepared for me. She had never done anything like that before. Now that we were separating, I’d been unable to stop her. When I unscrewed the aluminum cap of the thermos bottle, a small folded paper fell out. I opened it and read a penciled note from Sylvia: I love you.
She loves me, I thought, and nothing more, as night hurtled by the window, a black animal pierced by the tiny lights of houses in the distant countryside. I ate everything in the bag and drank the coffee. I smoked until I felt only the heat and tear of cigarette devastations.
A few weeks passed before Sylvia decided to join me in Michigan. Her decision was impulsive and sentimental. I didn’t object. I missed her. I never looked at my journals and I remembered none of the small, mean daily miseries that were the texture of our life in New York. I might have remembered if I tried, but I didn’t try. I didn’t think. I was a little anxious, but mainly very happy to see her when she got off the train, her black bangs and bright black eyes. As she came toward me, she smiled broadly and walked with a rocking motion, like a fat little kid, showing me how full of goodness she felt, as if she’d just eaten a big meal. Proud and silly at once, showing her happiness.
Our fights began again in Michigan and were as bad as those in New York. One night she stood at the bathroom mirror and methodically smashed at her reflection with a metal ashtray, the glass streaking and flashing out of the frame. She said:
“You (smash) don’t (smash) love (smash) me (smash). But you will miss me.”
I helped her pack and I took her to the train station. Though very anxious, we didn’t fight. We were, instead, melancholy and affectionate. This was it. The end. She was wearing a plain black cocktail dress, hemmed slightly above the knee. She looked very sophisticated and pretty. I kissed her on the lips. She didn’t quite kiss me back. She returned to New York, and then I was wretched in a whole new way, because I wasn’t really wretched and I felt guilty about it. I wrote to her and phoned her frequently. It was over and yet we persisted, though a bit less and a bit less as the weeks went by. My letters were playful and affectionate. On visits to New York during school vacations, I stayed with my parents, or occasionally with Sylvia in her new apartment on Sullivan Street. Like the one on MacDougal Street, it was hardly more than a room. We made love again, in our manner, as if we believed we could make real whatever it was that bound us to each other. Before my last visit, Christmas vacation, 1964, Sylvia returned to the apartment near Columbia, which she had sublet while living on Sullivan Street. I went to New York with the intention of talking to her about a divorce. We’d never mentioned divorce. I didn’t know how to bring it up. I expected fury and violence, and I very much dreaded it.