by Philip Roth
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Drenka’s grave was near the base of the hill about forty feet from a pre-Revolutionary stone wall and a row of enormous maples fencing off the cemetery from the blacktop that meandered over the mountaintop. In all these months, the headlights of maybe half a dozen rattling vehicles—pickup trucks from the sound of them—had flickered by while Sabbath grieved there over his loss. He had only to drop to his knees to be as invisible from the road as any of those buried around him, and often he was on his knees already. There had not yet been a single nighttime visitor to the cemetery other than himself—a remote rural graveyard eighteen hundred feet above sea level did not strike people, even in springtime, as a place to come to roam around in after dark. Noises from beyond the cemetery—deer abounded on Battle Mountain—had seriously agitated Sabbath during his first months visiting the grave, and he was often quite sure that at the edge of his vision there was something darting among the tombstones, something he believed was his mother.
In the beginning he hadn’t known that he was to become a regular visitor. But then he hadn’t imagined that, looking down at the plot, he would see through to Drenka, see her inside the coffin raising her dress to the stimulating latitude at which the tops of her stockings were joined to the suspenders of her garter belt, once again see that flesh of hers that reminded him always of the layer of cream at the top of the milk bottle when he was a child and Borden delivered. It was stupid not to have figured on carnal thoughts. “Go down on me,” she said to Sabbath. “Eat me, Country, the way Christa did,” and Sabbath threw himself onto the grave, sobbing as he could not sob at the funeral.
Now that she was gone for good, it was incredible to Sabbath that not even when he was very much the crazy, cuntstruck lover, before Drenka became just an absorbing diversion there to have fun with, to fuck with, to plot and to scheme with, that not even back then had he thought to exchange the excruciating boredom of a drunk, de-eroticized Roseanna for marriage to someone whose affinity to him was unlike any woman’s he had known outside a whorehouse. A conventional woman who would do anything. A respectable woman who was enough of a warrior to challenge his audacity with hers. There couldn’t be a hundred such women in the entire country. Couldn’t be fifty in all of America. And he’d had no idea. Never in thirteen years had he tired of looking down her blouse or looking up her skirt, and still he’d had no idea!
But now the thought undid him—no one would believe the scandalous town polluter, swinish Sabbath, to be susceptible to such a flood of straightforward feeling. He let go with a convulsive ardor that exceeded even her husband’s on the icy November morning of the funeral. Young Matthew, wearing his trooper’s uniform, betrayed no emotion other than hard-bitten rage mutely contained, the most violent of urges masterfully organized by a cop with a conscience. It was as though his mother had died not of a terrible disease but from an act of violence perpetrated by a psychopath he would go out and find and quietly take in, once the ceremony was over. Drenka had always wished that he could show the same admirable restraint as a son with his father that he did out on the road, where, to hear her tell it, he never got upset or lost control, whatever the provocation. Drenka ingenuously repeated to Sabbath, in Matthew’s words, whatever Matthew boasted to her about himself. Her reveling in the boy’s achievements was, to Sabbath, perhaps not the most beguiling thing about her, but it was far and away the most innocent. You wouldn’t have thought—if you were yourself a guileless ingenue—that such extreme polarity in any one person was possible, but Sabbath, a great fan of human inconsistency, was often transfixed by how worshipful his taboo-free, thrill-seeking Drenka could be of the son who saw the impeccable enforcement of the law as the most serious thing in life, who no longer had any friends but cops—who, he explained to her, had become totally mistrustful of people who weren’t cops. When he was still fresh out of the academy, Matthew used to tell his mother, “You know something, I have more power than the president. You know why? I can take people’s rights away. Their rights of freedom. ‘You’re under arrest. You’re pinched. Your freedom is gone.’” And it was a sense of responsibility to all this power that caused Matthew so assiduously to toe the line. “He never gets upset,” his mother told Sabbath. “If there’s another cop who is mouthing off, calling the suspect a this or a that, Matthew tells him, ‘It’s not worth it. You’re going to get yourself in trouble. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do.’ Last week they brought a guy in, he was kicking the cruiser and everything, and Matthew said, ‘Let him do what he’s going to do, he’s pinched. What are we going to prove by screaming at him and swearing at him? This is all stuff he can bring up in court. It’s just another reason for this guy to get out of what he’s done wrong.’ Matthew says they can swear, they can do whatever they want—they’ve got handcuffs on, he’s in control of the situation, not them. Matthew says, ‘He’s trying to get me to lose control. There are cops who do lose control. They start screaming at them—and why, Ma? For what?’ Matthew is just quiet and takes them in.”
For Madamaska Falls, the crowd at the funeral had been huge. Aside from friends from town and the many past and present employees of the inn, there were, up from New York, in from Providence and Portsmouth and Boston, dozens of guests to whom Drenka had been the gracious, energetic hostess over the years—and among the guests were a number of men she had fucked. In the face of each the haggard look of loss and sorrow was clearly visible to Sabbath, who chose to observe them from the rear of the crowd. Which was Edward? Which was Thomas? Which was Patrick? That very tall guy must be Scott. And not far from where Sabbath was standing, also back as far from the coffin as he could get, was Barrett, the new young electrician from Blackwall, the shabby town just to the north that was home to five tough taverns and a state mental hospital. Sabbath had happened to pull in behind Barrett’s pickup down in the crowded cemetery lot—across the truck’s tailgate were painted the words “Barrett Electric Co. ‘We’ll fix your shorts.’”
Barrett, who wore his hair in a ponytail and sported a Mexican mustache, stood beside his pregnant wife. She was holding a bundle that was their tiny baby and weeping openly. Two mornings a week, when Mrs. Barrett drove down to the valley to her secretarial job with the insurance company, Drenka would drive up past the reservoir to Blackwall and take baths with Mrs. Barrett’s husband. He didn’t look at all well that day, maybe because his suit was tight or maybe because without a coat to wear he was freezing to death. He shifted from one long leg to the other constantly as though at the conclusion of the service he was in danger of being lynched. Barrett was Drenka’s latest catch from among the workers making repairs around the inn. Last catch. A year younger than her son. He rarely spoke except when the bath was over, and then, with his hick enthusiasm, he would delight Drenka by telling her, “You are somethin’, you are really somethin’ else.” Aside from the youth and the youthful body, what excited Drenka was that he was “a physical man.” “He is not unhandsome,” she told Sabbath. “He has this animal thing that I like. He is like I have a twenty-four-hour fucking service if I want it. His muscles are strong and his stomach is completely flat, and then he has this big dick, and he sweats a lot, there is all this sweat coming out of him, he is all red in his face, and he is like you, he is also, ‘I don’t want to come yet, Drenka, I don’t want to come yet.’ And then he says, ‘Oh my God, I’m coming, I’m coming,’ and then ‘Ohhh. Ohhh,’ those big sounds he makes. And the relief, it’s like they collapse almost. And that he lives in a working-class environment and that I go there—all that adds to the excitement. A little apartment building with horrible horses on the walls. They have two rooms, and the taste is horrible. The other people there are attendants from the insane asylum. The bathroom has one of those old bathtubs that stand on the floor. And I say to him, ‘Turn the bathtub on so I can take a bath.’ I remember one time I came there at noon and I was very hungry and we were going to have a pizza. I undressed right away and I run to the bathtub. Yes, I think w
e get very hot in the bathtub, jerking him a little, you know. You can fuck in the bathtub, and we did, but then the water runs over. What I like is the way we are fucking, which is specific to him. He will sort of sit up and, because his prick is big, we sort of sit and fuck that way. We work very hard and there is a lot of sweating, a lot of physical movement, much more than I can think of with anyone else. I love to take baths and showers. Part of the excitement is the lathering. The soap. You start at the face and then the chest and the stomach and then you come down to the dick, and that gets big, or it is big already. And then you start to fuck. If you’re standing in the shower, you stand up and fuck. Sometimes he will lift my legs up and he carries me like that in the shower. If it’s in the bathtub, then I will tend to sit on top of him and fuck that way. Or I can bend over and he will fuck me. I love the bathtub, to fuck my stupid electrician there. I love it.”
Her mistake was to take to Barrett the bad news. “You told me,” he said, “you promised me—you weren’t going to complicate everything, and here you go. I’ve got a baby to support, I’ve got a pregnant wife to look after. I got a new business to worry about, and one thing I don’t need right now, from you, me, or anybody, is cancer.”
Drenka phoned Sabbath and drove immediately to meet him at the Grotto. “You should never have told him,” Sabbath said, seated on the granite outcropping and rocking her in his lap. “But,” she said, crying pitifully, “we’re lovers—I wanted him to know. I didn’t know he was this shit.” “Well, if you’d looked at it from the point of view of the pregnant wife, that might have occurred to you. You knew he was stupid. You liked that he was stupid. ‘My stupid electrician.’ It turned you on that he had this animal thing, lived in a horrible place, was stupid.” “But I was talking to him about cancer. Even a stupid person—” “Shhh. Shhh. Not one, apparently, as stupid as Barrett.”
Sabbath was completing his mourning—by scattering his seed across Drenka’s oblong patch of Mother Earth—when the headlights of a car turned off the blacktop and into the wide gravel drive where the hearses ordinarily entered the cemetery. The headlights advanced waveringly and then they were out and the quiet engine went dead. Zipping up his trousers, Sabbath scurried, bent over, toward the nearest maple tree. There, on his knees, he hid his white beard between the massive tree trunk and the old stone wall. He could discern from the silhouette of the car—more or less the shape and the size of a hearse—that it was a limousine. And a figure was marching steadily up in the direction of Drenka’s grave, tall, in a large overcoat, and wearing what looked to be high boots. He was guiding himself by the beam of a flashlight that he kept switching on and off. In the hazy half-dark of the moonlit cemetery he looked gigantic bounding forward on those boots. He must have been expecting cold weather up here. He must be from—it was the credit-card magnate! It was Scott!
Six feet five inches tall. Scott Lewis. Five-foot two-inch Drenka had smiled up at him in an elevator in Boston and asked if he knew the correct time. It took only that. She used to sit on his dick in the backseat of the limo while the driver took a slow tour of the suburbs, driving sometimes past Lewis’s own house. Scott Lewis was one of those men who told Drenka that there was no other woman like her in the world. Sabbath had heard him say it from the telephone of the limousine.
“He is very interested in my body,” she reported promptly to Sabbath. “He wants to take photographs and he wants to look at me and he wants to kiss me all the time. He is a big cunt licker— and very tender.” Yet, tender fellow that he was, the second evening she rendezvoused with him at a Boston hotel, a call girl Lewis had ordered came knocking at their door only ten minutes after Drenka’s arrival. “What I didn’t like about it,” Drenka told Sabbath on the phone the next morning, “was that I didn’t have a say in it, that it was just put upon me.” “So what did you do about it?” “I just had to make the best of it, Mickey. She comes to the hotel room dressed like an upper-class whore. She pulls open her bag and she has all these things in there. Do you want a little maid’s uniform? Do you want it Indian style? And then she takes out her dildos and she says, ‘Do you like this or that?’ And then, okay, now you start. But how do you get aroused by that? That was kind of hard even for me. Anyway, I guess we sort of got started. The idea was that the guy was more the voyeur. Interested in seeing how two women do it. He asked her mostly to go down on me. It all seemed to me so technical and cold, but I decided, okay, I’m going to be game for it. So eventually I did some work and I was able to get excited by it. But finally I fucked more Lewis—we two were fucking while she was just sort of in the picture somewhere. After he came, I started kissing her pussy, but it was very dry, though after a while she started moving a little bit and that then became sort of my mission. Could I make a whore hot? I think maybe I did to some extent, but it was hard to know if she wasn’t just playing it. You know what she said to me? To me? She says, when we’re all getting dressed, ‘You’re very hard to make come!’ She was angry. ‘The husbands want me to do this all the time’—she thought we were husband and wife—‘but you took unusually hard work.’ Husbands and wives are very common, Mickey. The whore said that’s what she does all the time.” “That’s difficult for you to believe?” he asked. “You mean,” she replied, laughing happily, “everybody is crazy like us?” “Crazier,” Sabbath assured her, “much, much crazier.”
Drenka called Lewis’s erection “the rainbow” because, as she liked to explain, “His dick is rather long and sort of curved. And there is a little bend to it, to one side.” On Sabbath’s instruction she had traced its outline on a piece of paper—Sabbath still had the drawing somewhere, probably in among those dirty pictures of her that he had not been able to look at since her death. Lewis was the only one of her men other than Sabbath whom she had allowed to fuck her in the ass. He was that special. When Lewis had wanted to do it to the whore as well, the whore said sorry, that was where she drew the line.
Oh yes, the jolly time Drenka had with this guy’s crooked dick! Infuriating! And yet, back when it was happening, Sabbath frequently had to slow her down while she was telling him her stories, had to remind her that nothing was too trivial to recount, no detail too minute to bring to his attention. He used to solicit this kind of talk from her, and she obeyed. Exciting to them both. His genital mate. His greatest pupil.
It had, however, taken him years to make Drenka a decent narrator of her adventures, since her inclination, in English at least, was to pile truncated sentences one on the other until he couldn’t understand what she was talking about. But gradually, as she listened to him and talked to him, there was an ever-increasing correlation between all she was thinking and what she said. She certainly became syntactically more urbane than nine-tenths of the locals up on their mountain, even though her accent remained to the end remarkably juicy: chave for have, cheart for heart; at the conclusion of stranger and danger, a strong rolling r; and her l’s almost like a Russian’s, emerging from a long way back in the mouth. The effect was of a delightful shadow cast on her words, making just a little mysterious the least mysterious utterance— phonetic seduction enthralling Sabbath all the more.
She was weakest at retaining idiomatic English but managed, right up to her death, to display a knack for turning the clichéd phrase, proverb, or platitude into an objet trouvé so entirely her own that Sabbath wouldn’t have dreamed of intervening—indeed, some (such as “it takes two to tangle”) he wound up adopting. Remembering the confidence with which she believed herself to be smoothly idiomatic, lovingly recalling from over all the years as many as he could of Drenka’s malapropisms stripped him now of every defense, and once again he descended to the very pit of his sorrow: bear and grin it . . . his days are counted . . . a roof under my head . . . when the shithouse hit the fan . . . you can’t compare apples and apples . . . the boy who cried “Woof!” . . . easy as a log . . . alive and cooking . . . you’re pulling my leg out . . . I’ve got to get quacking . . . talk for yourself, Johnny . . .
a closed and shut case . . . don’t keep me in suspension . . . beating a dead whore . . . a little salt goes a long way . . . he thinks I’m a bottomless piss . . . let him eat his own medicine . . . the early bird is never late . . . his bark is worse than your cry . . . it took me for a loop . . . it’s like bringing coals to the fireplace . . . I feel as though I’ve been run over by a ringer . . . I have a bone to grind with you . . . crime doesn’t pay off . . . you can’t teach an old dog to sit. . . . When she wanted Matija’s dog to stop and wait at her side, instead of saying “Heel!” Drenka called out, “Foot!” And once when Drenka came up to Brick Furnace Road to spend an afternoon in the Sabbaths’ bedroom—Roseanna was visiting her sister in Cambridge—though it was raining only lightly when she arrived, by the time they had eaten the sandwiches Sabbath had prepared and had smoked a joint and gotten into bed, the day had all but turned into a moonless night. An eerie black hour of silence passed and then the storm broke over their mountain—on the radio Sabbath later learned that a tornado had torn apart a trailer park only fifteen miles west of Madamaska Falls. When the turbulence overhead was most noisily dramatic, hammering down like artillery that had found its target in Sabbath’s property, Drenka, clinging to him beneath the sheet, said to Sabbath in a woozy voice, “I hope there is a thunder catcher on this house.” “I am the thunder catcher on this house,” he assured her.