Sylvia: A Novel Read Free Page B

down. They didn’t need her; they could easily fill every class with German Jews. Sylvia took the rejection personally. That was the end of her boyfriend. Her present boyfriend worked in a local restaurant. He was a tall, sweet, handsome Italian; very sensitive and loving. He would show up tonight, she said. His swimsuit was in the apartment and he’d come for it after work.
    Sylvia was telling me how she’d met Naomi, and then telling me how much she loved Naomi. “But Naomi loves me in theory, not in practice,” said Sylvia. “She’s very critical, always complaining because she can’t find a shoe or her glasses or something in the apartment. She sometimes threatens not to come home if I don’t clean up.”
    “Really?”
    I was listening without hearing.
    The boyfriend would show up tonight. Sylvia hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend before she let me take off her clothes. I felt deceived. I wanted to go. She had a boyfriend. I’d have done it anyway, maybe, but I felt suddenly distanced from Sylvia, as if I’d dropped through the darkness into a well,darkness more dense. I wanted to get out and I imagined my clothes on the floor beside the bed. I could reach down, grab my underwear and pants, dress, go. I didn’t move.
    “He has a key?”
    “No.”
    “The door is locked?”
    “Yes.”
    “Look, I should go. I’ll phone you in the morning.”
    “Stay.”
    She got up. Without turning on a light, which would show in the glass window of the door, she moved quickly in the chaos of the apartment, shoving books and papers about, tossing pieces of clothing, and then she found it, with blind feel only, a rag amid rags. His swimsuit. She hung it on the doorknob outside the apartment by the jock, then returned to the bed.
    We lay in the balmy darkness, waiting for him. I wanted to get dressed, but I didn’t move. After a while we heard a slow trudge coming up the stairway. It was a man. He seemed to heave himself up from step to step, wearily. We heard him on the linoleum in the hallway. From the weight of his steps, I figured he knew Sylvia had been unfaithful. He was big. He could break my head. His steps ended at the door, ten feet from where we lay. He didn’t knock. He’d seen his swimsuit and was contemplating it, reading its message. He’d worked all day, he’d climbed six flights of steps, and he was rewarded with this disgusting spectacle. I supposed he wasn’t stupid, but even a genius might kick in theflimsy door, and make a moral scene. He said, “Sylvia?” His quizzical tone carried no righteousness, only the fatigue and pain of his day. We lay very still, hardly breathing, bodies without mass or contour, dissolving, becoming the darkness. From his tone, from his one word, “Sylvia,” I read his mind, understood his anguish. She’d done painful things before. He didn’t want to prove to himself that she was in the apartment. He’d go stomping away down the hall. He’d fly down the stairs. Never come back. His voice was there again.
    “Sylvia?”
    Then he did it, he went away, stomping down the hall, down the stairs. His voice stayed with me. I felt sorry for him, and responsible for his disappointment. Mainly, I was struck by Sylvia’s efficiency, how speedily she’d exchanged one man for another. Would it happen to me, too? Of course it would, but she lay beside me now and the cruel uncertainty of love was only an idea, a moody flavor, a pleasing sorrow of the summer night. We turned to each other, renewed by the drama of betrayal, and made love again.
    Afterwards, Sylvia sat naked on the window ledge, outlined against the western skyline of the city and the lights of New Jersey. She stared at me and seemed to collect a power of decision, or to wonder what decision had been made. What had we just done? What did it mean? Years later, in fury, she would say, “The first time we went to bed. The first time . . . ,” resurrecting the memory with bitterness, saying I’d made her do extreme