Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  He watched Rosa dovening. That’s what was bringing out the Jew in him: a Catholic down on the floor. Always did. You finished? Get off! Whores can fool you. Cleaning women can fool you. Anybody can fool you. Your mother can fool you. Oh, Sabbath so wanted to live! He thrived on this stuff. Why die? Had his father gone off at dawn to peddle butter and eggs so that both boys should die before their time? Had his impoverished grandparents crossed from Europe in steerage so that a grandson of theirs who had escaped the Jewish miseries should throw away a single fun-filled moment of American life? Why die when these envelopes are hidden away by women beneath their Bergdorf lingerie? There alone was a reason to live to a hundred.

  He still had the ten thousand bucks in his hands. Why is Michelle Cowan hiding this money? Whose is it? How did she earn it? With the money he’d had to pay Drenka that first time with Christa, she bought the power tools for Matthew; with the hundreds that Lewis, the credit-card magnate, slipped into her purse, she bought tchotchkees for the house—ornamental plates, carved napkin rings, antique silver candelabra. To Barrett, the electrician, she gave money, liked to stuff a twenty down into his jeans as he was pinching her nipples in their last embrace. He hoped Barrett had saved that money. He might not be fixing shorts for a while.

  Norman’s first wife had been Betty, the high school sweetheart, whom Sabbath no longer remembered. What Michelle looked like he now discovered from the contents of the second envelope. He had once again directed Rosa to take it from the drawer, and hurriedly she obliged when he began to edge his hand toward the pocket in which there was no gun.

  He’d been looking for pictures in the wrong room. Virtual replicas of his pictures of Drenka someone had taken of Michelle. Norman? After thirty years and three kids, unlikely. Besides, if Norman had taken them, why hide them? From Deborah? Best thing for Deborah would be to give her a good look at them.

  Michelle was an extremely slender woman—narrow shoulders, fleshless arms, and straight, polelike legs. Rather longish legs, like Nikki’s, like Roseanna’s, like the legs that, before Drenka, he used to like best to climb. The breasts were a pleasant surprise in one so thin—weighty, sizable, crowned with nipples that came out indigo on the Polaroid film. Maybe she’d painted them. Maybe the photographer painted them. She wore her black hair tautly pulled back. A flamenco dancer. She’s read her Ava Gardner. She in fact did resemble the white Cuban women about whom Sabbath used to say to Ron, “They look Jewish but without the ish.” Nose job? Hard to tell. The nose was not the focus of the inquiring photographer’s curiosity. The picture Sabbath liked best was the least anatomically detailed. In it Michelle was wearing nothing but soft brown kid boots widely cuffed at her upper thigh. Elegance and filth, his bread and butter. The other pictures were more or less standard issue, nothing mankind hadn’t known since Vesuvius had preserved Pompeii.

  The edge of a chair on which she was seated in one picture, the stretch of carpet across which she lay in another, the window curtains to which she made love in a third . . . he could smell the Lysol even from here. But as he knew from watching Drenka at the Bo-Peep, the sleazy motel was a kick, too, a kick similar to taking the lover’s money as though he were just a john.

  After inserting the photographs back into the envelope, he helped Rosa up off the floor and handed her the envelope to return to the drawer. He did the same with the money, counting off the ten paper-clipped piles of bills to show her that he hadn’t slipped one up his sleeve. He then lifted the nightgowns off the bed and, after holding them in his hands a minute—and shockingly, to his surprise, failing to discover in the feel of them sufficient reason to continue living—indicated that she should put them back atop the envelopes and shut the drawer.

  So that’s it. That’s all. “Terminado,” as the whores who pushed you off them would succinctly put it the split second after you’d come.

  He surveyed the whole room now. All so innocent, this luxe I disparaged. Yes, a failure in every department. A handful of fairy-tale years, and the rest a total loss. He’d hang himself. At sea, with his dexterous fingers, he’d been an ace with knots. In this room or Deborah’s? He looked for what best to hang himself from.

  Thick grayish-blue wool carpet. Muted, pale plaid wallpaper. Sixteen-foot ceilings. Ornamented plaster. Pretty pine desk. Austere antique armoire. Comfortable easy chair in a darker plaid, one tone down from the gray plaid on the upholstered headboard of the king-size bed. Ottoman. Embroidered throw pillows. Cut flowers in crystal vases. Huge mirror in mottled pine frame on the wall back of the bed. A five-bladed ceiling fan hanging from a long stem above the foot of the bed. There it is. Stand up on the bed, tie the rope to the motor. . . . They’d catch sight of him first in the mirror, Manhattan south of 71st Street to frame his swinging corpse. An El Greco. Tormented figure in foreground, Toledo and its churches in the background, and my soul seen ascending to Christ in the upper right corner. Rosa will get me in.

  He held his hands up before her eyes. There were bulging nodes behind each of his cuticles, the ring and little fingers of both hands he could hardly move at all on a morning like this one, and long ago both his thumbs had taken on the shape of spoons. He could imagine how, to a simple mind like Rosa’s, his hands looked like the hands of someone bearing a curse. She might even be right—nobody really understands arthritis.

  “Dolorido?” she asked sympathetically, attentively appraising the deformity of each finger.

  “Sí. Muy dolorido. Repugnante.”

  “No, señor, no, no,” even as she continued to examine him as she would a creature in a circus sideshow.

  “Usted es muy simpática,” he told her.

  It now occurred to him that he and Ron had fucked Yvonne and the pregnant girl in the second whorehouse they’d visited that first night in Havana. What happened when they got off the ship was what happened back then in most of the places. Pimps or runners of some kind were there to urge you to the houses where they wanted to take you. They may have targeted us because we were young kids. The other sailors told them to piss off. So he and Ron were taken to a cruddy old decaying place with filthy tiled walls and tiled floors, into a salon practically barren of furniture, and out came a bunch of fat old women. That’s who Rosa reminded him of—the whores in that shithole. Imagine my having the presence of mind, two months out of Asbury High, to say, “No, no, thanks,” but I did. I said in English, “Young chickens. Young chickens.” So the guy took them to the other place, where they found Yvonne de Carlo and the pregnant girl, young women who passed for good-looking in the Cuban marketplace. You finished? Get off!

  “Vámonos,” he said, and obediently Rosa followed him down the corridor to Deborah’s bedroom, which did indeed look as though a thief had had at it. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find a mound of warm feces on the top of the desk. The savage license taken here astonished even the perpetrator.

  On Deborah’s bed.

  He seated himself at the edge of the bed while Rosa hung back by the disheveled closet.

  “I will not tell what you did, Rosa. I will not tell.”

  “No?”

  “Absolutamente no. Prometo.” He indicated, with a gesture so painful it nearly made him retch, that it was between the two of them. “Nostro segreto.”

  “Secreto,” she said.

  “Sí. Secreto.”

  “Me promete?”

  “Sí.”

  He pulled one of Norman’s fifties out of his wallet and motioned for her to come and take it.

  “No,” said Rosa.

  “I don’t tell. You don’t tell. I don’t tell you showed the señora’s money, the doctor’s money, you don’t tell you showed me her photographs. Her pictures. Comprende? Everything we forget. How do you say ‘to forget’ en español? ‘To forget.’” He tried to indicate with a hand something flying out of his head. Oh, oh! Voltaren! Volare! The Via Veneto! The whores of the Via Veneto, as flavorful as the perfumed peaches he’d buy in Trastevere, half a dozen for a dime’s worth of
lira.

  “Olvidar?”

  “Olvidar! Olvidar todos!”

  She came over and, to his delight, took the money. He clutched her hand with his deformed fingers while, with the other hand, he produced a second fifty.

  “No, no, señor.”

  “Donación,” he said humbly, holding on to her.

  He remembered donación, all right. In the days of the Romance Run, each time you went back to the same whorehouses and you brought nylons to your favorite girls. The guys said, “You like her? Give her a little donación. Pick her up something, and when you come back you’ll give it to her. Whether she remembers you or not is another matter. She’ll be glad to take the nylons anyhow.” The names of those girls? In the dozens and dozens of brothels in the dozens and dozens of places, there must have been a Rosa somewhere.

  “Rosa,” he murmured softly, trying to pull her so that she would slide between his legs, “para usted de parte mía.”

  “No, gracias.”

  “Por favor.”

  “No.”

  “De mí para tí.”

  A glare that was all blackness but that looked to be the go-ahead signal anyway—you win, I lose, do it and get it over with. On Deborah’s bed.

  “Here,” he said and managed to wedge the mass of her lower torso between his widespread legs. He grasps the sword. He eyes the bull. El momento de verdad. “Take it.”

  Without speaking, Rosa did as she was told.

  Secure it with a third fifty, or was agreement reached? Cuánto dinero? Para qué cosa? To be back there, to be seventeen in Havana and ramming it in! Vente y no te pavonees. That crone, that one old bitch, always sticking her head in my room and trying to hurry me up. A madam’s hard eye, heavy makeup, a butcher’s thick shoulders, and, after only fifteen minutes, the scornful harangue of the slavedriver. “Vente y no te pavonees!” 1946. Come and don’t show off!

  “Look,” he said to her sadly. “The room. Chaos.”

  She turned her head. “Sí. Caos.” She breathed deeply—resignation? disgust? If he slipped her the third fifty, would she just slide to her knees as easily as when she prayed? Interesting if she prayed and blew him both at once. Happens a lot in Latin countries.

  “I made this caos,” Sabbath told her, and when he rubbed the tip of a spoon-shaped thumb across the pockmarked cheeks, she offered no objection. “Me. Por qué? Because I lost something. I could not find something I lost. Comprende?”

  “Comprendo.”

  “I lost my glass eye. Ojo artificial. This one.” He drew her a little closer and pointed to his right eye. He began to smell her, armpits first, then the rest. Something familiar. It is not lavender. Bahia! “This isn’t a real eye. This is a glass eye.”

  “Vidrio?”

  “Sí! Sí! Este ojo, ojo de vidrio. Glass eye.”

  “Glasseye,” she repeated.

  “Glasseye. That’s it. I lost it. I took it out last night to go to sleep, just as I usually do. But because I wasn’t at home, a mi casa, I didn’t put it in the usual place. You follow all this? I am a guest here. Amigo de Norman Cowan. Aquí para el funeral de señor Gelman.”

  “No!”

  “Sí.”

  “El señor Gelman está muerto?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Ohhhhh.”

  “I know. But that’s how I come to be here. If he hadn’t died, we two would never have met. Anyhow, I took out my glasseye to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I had to get to the funeral. But could I go to a funeral without an eye? Understand me? I was trying to find my eye and so I opened all the drawers, the desk, the closet”—feverishly he pointed around the room as she nodded and nodded, her mouth no longer grimly set but rather innocently ajar—“to find the fucking eye! Where had it gone? Looking everywhere, going crazy. Loco! Demente!”

  Now she was beginning to laugh at the scene he was so slap-shtikishly playing out for her. “No,” she said, tapping him disapprovingly on the thigh, “no loco.”

  “Sí! And guess where it was, Rosa? Guess. Dónde was the ojo?”

  Sure a joke was on the way, she began shaking her head from side to side. “No sé.”

  Here he hopped energetically off the bed and, while she now sat on the bed to watch him, he began to mime for her how before going to sleep he popped the eye out of his head and, after looking and finding nowhere to put it—and fearful that someone who came in and saw it on Deborah’s desk, say, would be horrified (this too he mimed for her, making her laugh a beguiling ripple of a girlish laugh)—he just dropped it into his trouser pocket. Then he brushed his teeth (showed her this), washed his face (showed her that), and came back into the bedroom to undress and stupidly—“Estúpido! Estúpido!” he cried, knocking his poor fists against the sides of his head and not even stopping to acknowledge the pain—hung his trousers on a pants hanger in Deborah’s closet. He showed her a pants hanger on which were hanging a pair of Deborah’s wide blue silk pants. Then he showed her how he had turned his pants upside down to hang them in the closet and how, of course, the ojo had fallen out of the pocket and into one of her running shoes on the floor. “Can you beat that? Into the kid’s zapato! My eye!”

  She was laughing so hard she had to squeeze herself with her arms as though to prevent her belly from splitting open. If you’re going to fuck her, just step up to the bed and fuck her now, man. On Deborah’s bed, the fattest woman you will have ever fucked. One last enormous woman, and then with a clear conscience you can hang yourself. Life won’t have been for nothing.

  “Here,” he said and, taking one of her hands in his own, drew it toward his right eye. “Did you ever feel a glasseye before? Go ahead,” he said. “Be gentle, Rosa, but go ahead, feel it. You may not have this chance again. Most men are ashamed of their infirmities. Not me; I love ’em. Make me feel alive. Touch it.”

  She shrugged uncertainly. “Sí?”

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s all part of the deal. Touch it. Touch it gently.”

  She gasped, drawing in her breath as she laid the padded tip of her tiny pointing finger lightly on the surface of his right eye.

  “Glass,” he said. “Hundred percent glass.”

  “Feel real,” she said and, indicating that it wasn’t so spooky as she first had feared, looked eager to take another poke at the thing. Contrary to appearances, she was not a slow learner. And she was game. They’re all game, if you take your time and use your brains—and aren’t sixty-four years old. The girls! All the girls! It was killing to think about.

  “Of course it feels real,” he replied. “That’s because it’s a good one. The best. Mucho dinero.”

  Life’s last fuck. Working since she was nine. No school. No plumbing. No money. A pregnant, illiterate Mexican out of some slum somewhere or up from peasant poverty, and weighing about the same as yourself. It couldn’t have ended otherwise. Final proof that life is perfect. Knows where it’s going every inch of the way. No, human life must not be extinguished. No one could come up with anything like it again.

  “Rosa, will you be a good soul and clean the room? You are a good soul. You weren’t trying to fool me down there praying to Jesus. You were just asking his forgiveness for your leading me into temptation. You just swung right into it the way you were taught. I admire that. I wouldn’t mind somebody like Jesus to turn to. Maybe he could get me some Voltaren without a prescription. Isn’t that one of his specialties?” He didn’t know precisely what he was saying, because his blood began draining into his boots.

  “No comprendo.” But she wasn’t frightened, for while smiling at her, he was barely speaking above a whisper and had weakly settled back down onto the bed.

  “Make order, Rosa. Make regularidad.”

  “Okay,” she said and began zealously to pick Deborah’s things up off the floor instead of having to do what this madman with the white beard and the crazy fingers and the glass eye—and more than likely a loaded pistol—expected for two lousy fifties.r />
  “Thank you, dear,” said Sabbath woozily. “You’ve saved my life.”

  And then, while he was fortunately anchored to the edge of the bed, the vertigo took him by the ears, a shot of bile surged into his throat, and he felt as he had felt riding the waves as a kid after catching a big one too late and it broke over him like the chandelier at Asbury’s palatial Mayfair, the great chandelier that, in dreams he’d been having for half a century, ever since Morty was killed in the war, was tearing loose from its moorings and falling on top of his brother and him as they sat there innocently, side by side, watching The Wizard of Oz.

  He was dying, had given himself a heart attack by going all out for Rosa’s amusement. Final performance. Will not be held over. Puppet master and prick conclude career.

  Rosa was kneeling next to the bed now, stroking his scalp with one of her warm little hands. “Sick?” she asked.

  “Low self-esteem.”

  “Want doctor here?”

  “No, ma’am. Hands hurt, that’s all.” Did they! He assumed at first the pain-riddled fingers were causing him to shake. Then the teeth began to chatter as they had the evening before and he had suddenly to fight with all his fortitude to prevent himself from throwing up. “Mother?” No answer. Her silent act again. Or was she not there? “Mama!”