Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Suddenly Sabbath raised his head from the table and said, “My mother was in a catatonic depression from the time I was fifteen.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “My brother was killed in the war.”

  “I didn’t know that either.”

  “We were one of those families with a gold star in the window. It meant that not only was my brother dead, my mother was dead. All day at school I thought, ‘If only when I get home, he’s there; if only when the war is over, he’s there.’ What a frightening thing that gold star was to see when I came home from school. Some days I’d actually manage to forget about him, but then I’d walk home and see the gold star. Maybe that’s why I went to sea, to get the fuck away from the gold star. The gold star said, ‘People have suffered something terrible in this house.’ The house with the gold star was a blighted house.”

  “Then you get married and your wife disappears.”

  “Yes, but that left me all the wiser. I could never again think about the future. What did the future hold for me? I never think in terms of expectations. My expectation is how to deal with bad news.”

  Trying to talk sensibly and reasonably about his life seemed even more false to him than the tears—every word, every syllable, another moth nibbling a hole in the truth.

  “And it still throws you to think about Nikki?”

  “No,” said Sabbath, “not at all. Thirty years later all I think is, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It becomes more unreal the older I get. Because the things I told myself when I was young—maybe she went here, maybe she went there—those things don’t apply any longer. She was struggling always for something only her mother seemed able to give—maybe she’s out there looking for it still. That’s what I thought then. At this distance, it’s just, ‘Did all that really happen?’”

  “And the ramifications?” Norman asked. He was relieved to see Sabbath back under control but continued nonetheless to hold on to him. And Sabbath allowed him to, however annoying that had become. “Its effect on you. How did it injure you?”

  Sabbath took time to think—and this is more or less what he was thinking: These questions are futile to answer. Behind the answer there is another answer, and an answer behind that answer, and on and on. And all Sabbath is doing, to satisfy Norman, is to pretend to be someone who does not understand this.

  “I seem injured?”

  They laughed together, and Norman only then let go of his hand. Another sentimental Jew. You could fry the sentimental Jews in their own grease. Something was always moving them. Sabbath could never really stand either of these morally earnest, supercoddled successes, Cowan or Gelman.

  “That’s like asking how much did it injure me to be born. How can I know? What can I know about it? I can only tell you that the idea of controlling anything is out of my mind. And that’s how I choose to move along in life.”

  “Pain, pain, so much pain,” said Norman. “How can you possibly get over minding it?”

  “What difference would it make if I minded? It wouldn’t change anything. Do I mind? It never occurs to me to mind. Okay, I got overemotional. But minding? What’s the point of minding? What was the point of trying to find reason or meaning in any of these things? By the time I was twenty-five I already knew there wasn’t any.”

  “And isn’t there any?”

  “Ask Linc tomorrow, when they open the coffin. He’ll tell you. He was antic and funny and full of energy. I remember Lincoln very well. He didn’t want to know anything ugly. He wanted it to be nice. He loved his parents. I remember when his old man came backstage. A carbonated-drink manufacturer. A tycoon in seltzer if I remember correctly.”

  “No. Quench.”

  “Quench. That was the stuff.”

  “Quench Wild Cherry sent Linc to Taft. Linc called it Kvetch.”

  “A suntanned little endurer with steel-gray hair, the old man. Started out with just the crap he bottled and a truck he drove himself. In his undershirt. Crude. Ungrammatical. Built like something that had been baled. Linc was sitting on a chair in Nikki’s dressing room and just took his father and pulled him onto his lap and held him there while we were all talking after the show, and neither of them thought anything of it. He adored his old man. He adored his wife. He adored his kids. At least when I knew him he did.”

  “He always did.”

  “So where’s the meaning?”

  “I have some ideas.”

  “You don’t know anything, Norman—you don’t know anything about anyone. Did I know Nikki? Nikki had another life. Everybody has another life. I knew she was eccentric. But so was I. I understood I wasn’t living with Doris Day. A little irrational, out of touch, prone to crazy outbursts, but irrational enough and crazy enough for what happened to happen? Did I know my mother? Sure. She went around whistling all day long. Nothing was too much for her. Look what became of her. Did I know my brother? The discus, the swimming team, the clarinet. Killed at twenty.”

  “Disappear. Even the word is strange.”

  “Stranger is the word reappear.”

  “How is Roseanna?”

  Sabbath looked at his watch, a round stainless steel watch half a century old this year. Black face, white luminous dial and hands. Morty’s Army Benrus, with twelve-and twenty-four-hour numbers and a second hand you could stop by pulling on the crown. For synchronization when you flew a mission. A lot of good the synchronization did Morty. Once a year Sabbath sent the watch to a place in Boston where they cleaned and oiled it and replaced worn-out parts. He had been winding the watch every morning since it became his in 1945. His grandfathers had laid tefillin every morning and thought of God; he wound Morty’s watch every morning and thought of Morty. The watch had been returned by the government with Morty’s things in 1945. The body came back two years later.

  “Well,” said Sabbath, “Roseanna . . . Just about seven hours ago, Roseanna and I split up. Now she’s disappeared. That’s what it comes down to, Mort: folks disappearin’ left and right.”

  “Where is she? Do you know?”

  “Oh, at home.”

  “Then it’s you who have disappeared.”

  “Trying,” said Sabbath, and again, suddenly, a great onslaught of tears, anguish so engulfing that in the first moment he could no longer even ask himself whether or not this second collapse of the evening was any more or less honestly manufactured than the first. He was drained of skepticism, cynicism, sarcasm, bitterness, mockery, self-mockery, and such lucidity, coherence, and objectivity as he possessed—had run out of everything that marked him as Sabbath except desperation; of that he had a superabundance. He had called Norman Mort. He was crying now the way anyone cries who has had it. There was passion in his crying—terror, great sadness, and defeat.

  Or was there? Despite the arthritis that disfigured his fingers, in his heart he was the puppeteer still, a lover and master of guile, artifice, and the unreal—this he hadn’t yet torn out of himself. When that went, he would be dead.

  “Are you all right, Mick?” Norman had come around the table to place his hands on Sabbath’s shoulders. “Did you leave your wife?”

  Sabbath reached up to cover Norman’s hands with his own. “I have amnesia suddenly about the circumstances, but . . . yes, it appears that way. She’s no longer enslaved by alcohol or me. Both demons driven out by AA. What it probably comes down to is she wants to keep the paycheck for herself.”

  “She was supporting you.”

  “I had to live.”

  “Where will you go after the funeral?”

  He looked at Norman, smiling broadly. “Why not with Linc?”

  “What are you telling me? You’re going to kill yourself? I want to know if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you thinking about suicide?”

  “No, no, I’ll go on to the end.”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “I’m inclined to think so. I’m a suicide like I’m everything: a pseudosuicide.”

  “Look, this is seriou
s business,” Norman told him. “We’re now in this together.”

  “Norman, I haven’t seen you in a hundred years. We’re not in anything together.”

  “We are in this together! If you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to do it in front of me. When you’re ready you have to wait for me to get there and then do it in front of me.”

  Sabbath did not reply.

  “You have to see a doctor,” Norman told him. “You have to see a doctor tomorrow. Do you need money?”

  From his wallet, full of illegible notes and telephone numbers scribbled on paper scraps and matchbook covers—fat with everything but credit cards and cash—Sabbath fished out a blank check for his and Roseanna’s account. He made it out for three hundred dollars. When he realized that Norman, watching him write, saw printed on the check the names of husband and wife both, Sabbath explained, “I’m cleaning it out. If she’s beaten me to it and it bounces, I’ll send you back the cash.”

  “Forget that. Where’s three hundred dollars going to get you? You’re in a bad way, boy.”

  “I have no expectations.”

  “You tried that on me. Why don’t you sleep here tomorrow night too? Stay as long as you need us. All the children are gone. The baby, Deborah, is away at Brown. The house is empty. You can’t rush off after the funeral not knowing where you’re going, and feeling the way you do. You have got to see a doctor.”

  “No,” said Sabbath, “no. I can’t stay here.”

  “Then you have to be hospitalized.”

  And this brought forth Sabbath’s third round of tears. He had cried like this only once before in his life, over Nikki’s disappearance. And when Morty died he had watched his mother cry worse than this.

  Hospitalized. Until that word was spoken he had believed that all this crying could easily be spurious, and so it was a considerable disappointment to discover that it did not seem within his power to switch it off.

  While Norman coaxed him up out of the kitchen chair and walked him across the dining room, through the living room, and down the corridor to Deborah’s bedroom, then steered him onto the bed, untied the caked laces of his Dogpatch boots and pulled them off his feet, Sabbath shook. If he was not coming apart but only simulating, then this was the greatest performance of his life. Even as his teeth chattered, even as he could feel his jowls tremble beneath his ridiculous beard Sabbath thought, So, something new. And more to come. And perhaps less of it to be chalked up to guile than to the fact that the inner reason for his being—whatever the hell that might be, perhaps guile itself—had ceased to exist.

  He managed only three words Norman could fully understand. “Where is everybody?”

  “They’re here,” Norman said, to soothe him. “They’re all here.”

  “No,” replied Sabbath once he was alone. “They all escaped.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  While Sabbath ran a bath in the girlishly pretty pink and white bathroom just off Deborah’s room, he interested himself in the contents, all jumbled together, of the two drawers beneath the sink—the lotions, the ointments, the pills, the powders, the Body Shop jars, the contact lens cleaner, the tampons, the nail polish, the polish remover. . . . Working through the clutter to the bottom of each drawer, he found not a single photograph—let alone a stash—of the kind Drenka had unearthed from among Silvija’s things during the next-to-last summer of her life. The one item at all beguiling, aside from the tampons, was a tube of vaginal lubricating cream twisted back on itself and nearly empty. He removed the cap to squeeze a speck of the amber grease into the palm of his hand and rubbed it between his thumb and his middle finger, remembering things as he smeared the stuff over his fingertips, all sorts of things about Drenka. He screwed the cap back on and set the tube out on the tiled counter for experimentation later.

  After undressing in Deborah’s room, he had looked at all the photographs in their transparent plastic frames on her bureau and desk. He would get to the drawers and closets in time. She was a dark-haired girl with a demure, pleasing smile, an intelligent smile. He couldn’t tell much else because her figure was hidden from view by the other young people in the pictures; yet of all the faces hers alone had about it at least a touch of the enigmatic. Despite the juvenile innocence she so abundantly offered the camera, she looked to have something of a mind, even some wit, and lips whose protuberance was her greatest treasure, a hungry, seductive mouth set in the most undepraved face you could imagine. Or that’s how Sabbath read it at close to two A.M. He had been hoping for a girl more tantalizing, but the mouth and the youth would have to do. Before getting into the bath, he trundled in the nude back to her bedroom and took from the desk the largest picture of her he could find, a photograph in which Deborah was nestled up against the muscular shoulder of a burly redhead of about her age. He was beside her in virtually every photograph. The deadly boyfriend.

  All Sabbath did for the moment was lie in the wonderful warm bath in the pink-and-white-tiled bathroom and scrutinize the picture, as though in his gaze lay the power to transport Deborah home to her tub. Reaching out with one arm, Sabbath was able to raise the lid to expose the seat of Deborah’s pink toilet. He rubbed his hand round and round the satiny seat and was just beginning to harden when there was a light rap on the bathroom door. “You all right in there?” Norman asked and pushed the door open a ways to be sure Sabbath wasn’t drowning himself.

  “Fine,” said Sabbath. It had taken no time to retract his hand from the toilet seat, but the photograph was in the other hand and the twisted tube of vaginal cream was up on the counter. He held out the picture so that Norman could see which one it was. “Deborah,” Sabbath said.

  “Yes. That is Deborah.”

  “Sweet,” said Sabbath.

  “Why do you have the photograph in the bathtub?”

  “To look at it.”

  The silence was indecipherable—what it meant or foretold Sabbath could not imagine. All he knew for sure was that Norman was more frightened of him than he was of Norman. Being nude also seemed to bestow an advantage with a conscience as developed as Norman’s, the advantage of seeming defenselessness. Sabbath’s talent for this sort of scene Norman could not hope to equal: the talent of a ruined man for recklessness, of a saboteur for subversion, even the talent of a lunatic—or a simulated lunatic—to overawe and horrify ordinary people. Sabbath had the power, and he knew it, of being no one with anything much to lose.

  Norman hadn’t seemed to notice the vaginal cream tube.

  Which of us is lonelier at this moment, Sabbath wondered. And what is he thinking? “Enter our terrorist. I should drown him.” But Norman needed admiration in the ways that Sabbath never had, and more than likely he wouldn’t do it.

  “It would be a shame,” Norman finally said, “if it got wet.”

  Sabbath didn’t believe he had an erection, but an ambiguity in Norman’s words caused him to wonder. He didn’t look to see but instead asked a perfectly innocent question. “Who’s the lucky boy?”

  “Freshman-year sweetheart. Robert.” Norman spoke with his hand extended toward the photograph. “Only recently replaced by Will.” Sabbath leaned forward in the tub and handed the photograph over, noting, alas, as he moved, his dick angled upward in the water.

  “You’re feeling like yourself again,” Norman said, staring Sabbath in the eyes.

  “I am, thank you. Much better.”

  “It’s never been easy to say what you really are, Mickey.”

  “Oh, failure will do.”

  “But at what?”

  “Failure at failing, for one.”

  “You always fought being a human being, right from the beginning.”

  “To the contrary,” said Sabbath. “To being a human being I’ve always said, ‘Let it come.’”

  Here Norman picked up the vaginal cream from the tile counter, opened the bottom drawer beneath the sink, and tossed in the tube. He seemed to have surprised himself more than Sabbath by the force with which he
slammed the drawer shut.

  “I’ve left a glass of milk on the nightstand,” Norman said. “You may need it. Warm milk sometimes helps sedate me.”

  “Great,” Sabbath said. “Good night. Sleep tight.”

  As Norman was about to leave, he took a look over at the toilet. He would never guess why the cover was up. And yet the final glance he turned on Sabbath suggested otherwise.

  After Norman’s departure, Sabbath lifted himself out of the tub and, dripping water as he moved, went to get the photograph from where Norman had returned it to Deborah’s desk.

  In the bathroom again, Sabbath opened the drawer, withdrew the vaginal cream, and held the tube to his lips. He squirted a pea-size gob on his tongue and rolled it across his palate and up against his teeth. A vaguely Vaseline-like aftertaste. That was all. But then, what was he hoping for? The tang of Deborah herself?

  Back in the tub with the photograph, he resumed at the point where he had been interrupted.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Up not once to use the john. First time in years. The father’s milk pacifying the prostate, or was it the daughter’s bed? First he’d removed the fresh pillowcase and, scavenging with his nose, hunted down the odor of her hair clinging to the pillow itself. Then, by a process of trial and error, he’d detected a barely perceptible furrow just to the right of the mattress’s vertical midpoint, a minuscule groove cast by the mold of her body, and between her sheets, on her caseless pillow, in that groove, he had slept. In this Laura Ashley’d room of pink and yellow, a computer comatose on the desk, a Dalton School decal decorating the mirror, teddy bears tumbled together in a wicker basket, Metropolitan Museum posters up on the walls, K. Chopin, T. Morrison, A. Tan, V. Woolf in the bookcase, along with childhood favorites—The Yearling, Andersen’s Fairy Tales—and on the desk and the dresser framed photos in abundance of the gang, wearing swimsuits, skiing gear, formal attire . . . in this candy-striped room with the flowery border, where she’d first fallen upon her clitoral entitlements, Sabbath was himself seventeen again, aboard a tramp steamer full of drunken Norwegians docking at one of the great Brazilian ports—Bahia, at the entrance of Todos os Santos Bay, the Amazon, the great Amazon, unwinding not far away. There was that smell. Unbelievable. Cheap perfume, coffee, and pussy. His head wrapped round with Deborah’s pillow, a full body press on her groove, he was remembering Bahia, where there was a church and a whorehouse for every day of the year. So said the Norwegian seamen, and at seventeen he had no reason not to believe them. Be nice to go back and check it out. If she were mine, I’d send Deborah there for her junior year. Free play for the imagination in Bahia. With the American sailors alone she’d have the time of her life—Hispanic, black, even Finns, Finnish Americans, every type of redneck, old men, young boys. . . . Learn more about creative writing in one month in Bahia than in four years at Brown. Let her do something unreasonable, Norman. Look what it did for me.