Sylvia

I’ll drive him crazy before he drives me crazy.

He always does something to make me wait before saying what he has in mind. He lights a cigarette, or stares into my eyes and says nothing. The effect is eerily suspenseful. Finally, whatever he says is anticlimactic.

Our conversations, usually about literature or movies, were much influenced by marijuana, hence thrilling, but also very boring.

No better disguise for shame than contempt, and nothing is easier to do than to sneer and denigrate.

‘I know how I’m behaving,’ she’d say whenever I tried to talk to her about seeing a psychiatrist. She couldn’t, then, see a psychiatrist. She knew herself; she couldn’t talk about her excesses. Too shameful, too embarrassing.

He hardly talked; I talked too much and too easily. He made me wonder if I’d believe the things I said, let alone think them in the first place, if I didn’t get caught up in the momentum of talk.

Being with her in Cambridge, I felt no urgency to be anywhere else. It would be a brilliant, blooming, fragrant summer. I had a girlfriend. No obligations. I had only to be

Years later, I still owed her something. It couldn’t be estimated, or even fully expressed. An infinite debt of feeling.

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 flavour, a pleasing sorrow of the summer night.

Weird delirium was in the air, and in the sluggish, sensual bodies trudging down MacDougal Street.