Sylvia: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

12,000 degrees centigrade, much hotter than had been supposed. I told her that Nina Simone is at the Village Gate, and Thelonius Monk is at the Jazz Gallery. I told her that an eighteen-year-old light heavyweight boxer, Cassius Clay, won a gold medal at the Rome Olympics; Rafer Johnson won the gold in the decathlon.
    I read her the report about a New York magistrate, an early feminist, who ordered the names of two men put into the record in a vice case. He said, “You have the girls’ nameshere. Put the men’s names in, too.” So the names Whitey Doe and Larry Doe were changed to Whitford May and L. Sleeper. Coincidentally, it was reported the same day that The International Society for the Welfare of Cripples changed its name to The International Society for the Rehabilitation of the Disabled.
    I told Sylvia that Americans were dying in Vietnam. Every other week, in 1961, one of our military advisers was kidnapped, or an American contractor was shot. We were building airfields then and giving other forms of humanitarian aid to South Vietnam. Our efforts were impeded by the Viet Cong. Sylvia listened, and occasionally responded. I told her that a British physicist said Einstein’s idea of matter as a form of energy, E = MC 2 , was too simple. New atom-smashing technology had revealed that matter consisted of two major categories, leptons and baryons, which is to say light and heavy. Sylvia said, “He says Einstein is too simple?”
    I told her that below the ice of Antarctica, huge trees had become coal, which meant the theory of continental drift was true; that Norell, an American designer, had introduced culottes—pants that looked like a skirt—for city street wear; and that American Orientalists had left for Egypt to save the temple of Ramses II from the waters of the Aswan High Dam, built by Russian engineers.
    I wanted to see Marcel Marceau and his mime company at City Center, and
Krapp’s Last Tape
at the Province-town Playhouse, just down the street at 133 MacDougal.Sylvia enjoyed both performances. I had to make the suggestion, buy tickets, and, when it was time to leave for the theater, say, “Come on, come on, let’s go. We’ll be late.”
    She didn’t like to commit herself, far in advance, to leaving the apartment at a particular moment. Who knows how you’ll feel when the moment comes? Besides, it could be more pleasing to read reviews than actually go to a movie or a play.
    I told Sylvia that Dr. Menges, professor of Central Asian languages at Columbia University, had been stopped by a gang of kids while taking his evening walk on Morning-side Drive and knocked to the pavement with a heavy board. He rose, flailed at them with his cane. They ran away. He spoke to a reporter and was quoted at length. “I have traveled alone through the interior of the Caucasus . . . amid primitive tribes. I have gone among bandits. But in a so-called civilized city,” he said, “near a large university, I am attacked by jungle beasts.” It was clear he meant “Negroes.” In the early sixties the word appeared with increasing frequency in the newspapers.
    Awakened affectionately by Sylvia. She looked at my cigarettes beside the bed and said, “You shouldn’t smoke so much. For my sake.” I said, “I smoke because we fight.” She began biting my arm. I yelled. She leaped out of bed and announced, “That’s the beginning and the ending of a day.” I lay there a long time. Finally, I dragged myself out of bedand turned on fire for coffee, got bread, honey, and an orange. Sylvia went back to bed and said, “You really take good care of yourself.” I ate a slice of bread and put everything else back. Then I sat on the bed beside her. I was about to make amends. She sat up, slapped my face, and said, “Have a cigarette.” Later, still in bed, me sitting beside her, Sylvia brought up the New Year’s Eve party we’d gone to in the Brooklyn tenement. She said that when Willy Stark kissed her, she had turned