Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Now, however justified Sabbath’s anger may have been by what was either an unforgivable oversight or an out-and-out betrayal, as Kathy sat sobbing in the front seat of his car, unburdening herself of the news, even he knew himself to be being less than ingenuous. (He had parked, fatefully enough, across from the Battle Mountain cemetery where Drenka’s body would be laid to rest just a few years later.) The truth was that he, too, had taped their conversation, not only the conversation on the tape she’d left at the library but the three that preceded it. But then, Sabbath had been taping his workshop girls for years now and planned to leave the collection to the Library of Congress. Seeing to the collection’s preservation was one of the best reasons he had— the only reason he had—to one day get a lawyer to draw up a will.

  Including his four with Big Kathy, there were a total of thirty-three tapes, perpetuating the words of six different students who’d taken the puppetry workshop. All were locked away in the bottom drawer of an old file cabinet, stored in two shoeboxes marked “Corres.” (A third shoebox, marked “Taxes 1984,” contained Polaroids of five of the girls.) Each tape was dated and all were organized alphabetically—and responsibly—by Christian names only and filed chronologically within that classification. He kept the tapes in excellent order not only so that each was easy to locate when he needed it to hand but so that they could be quickly accounted for if he ever worried, as irrationally he sometimes did, that one or another had gotten misplaced. From time to time Drenka would like to listen to the tapes while sucking him off. Otherwise they never left the locked file cabinet, and whenever he took one of his favorites to play a patch for himself, he would double-lock the studio door. Sabbath knew the danger of what he had in those shoeboxes yet he could never bring himself either to erase the tapes or to bury them in garbage at the town dump. That would have been like burning the flag. No, more like defiling a Picasso. Because there was in these tapes a kind of art in the way that he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of innocence. There was a kind of art in his providing an illicit adventure not with a boy of their own age but with someone three times their age—the very repugnance that his aging body inspired in them had to make their adventure with him feel a little like a crime and thereby give free play to their budding perversity and to the confused exhilaration that comes of flirting with disgrace. Yes, despite everything, he had the artistry still to open up to them the lurid interstices of life, often for the first time since they’d given their debut “b.j.” in junior high. As Kathy told him in that language which they all used and which made him want to cut their heads off, through coming to know him she felt “empowered.” “I still have moments when I’m uncertain and scared. But for the most part,” she said, “I just want . . . I want to spend time with you. . . . I want—to take care of you.” He laughed. “You think I need taking care of?” “I mean it,” she said earnestly. “What do you mean?” “I mean I can care for you . . . I mean I can take care of your body. And your heart.” “Yes? You’ve seen my EKG? You’re afraid when I come I’ll have a coronary?” “I don’t know. . . . I mean . . . I don’t know what I mean but I mean it. That’s what I mean—what I just said.” “And can I take care of you?” “Yeah. Yeah. You kin.” “Which part of you?” “My body,” she dared to reply. Yes, they experienced not merely their capacity for deviancy—that they’d known of since seventh grade—but the larger risks that deviancy entailed. His gifts as a theater director and a puppet master he poured without stinting into these tapes. Once he’d passed into his fifties, the art in these tapes—the insidious art of giving license to what was already there—was the only art he had left.

  And then he got nailed.

  The tape Kathy “forgot” had not only landed by morning in Kakizaki’s office but was somehow hijacked and rerecorded, before it even reached the dean, by an ad hoc committee calling itself Women Against Sexual Abuse, Belittlement, Battering, and Telephone Harassment, whose acronym was formed from the last seven words. By dinnertime of the following day, SABBATH had opened up a phone line on which the tape was continuously played. The local phone number to call—722-2284, fortuitously enough S-A-B-B-A-T-H again—was announced by the committee’s cochairpersons, two women, an art history professor and a local pediatrician, during an hour-long call-in show on the college radio station. The introduction prepared by SABBATH for the telephonic transmission described the tape as “the most blatantly vile example of the exploitation, humiliation, and sexual defilement of a college student by her professor in the history of this academic community.” “You are about to hear,” the introduction began, spoken by the pediatrician, and sounding to Sabbath appropriately clinical though lawyerly as well—lawyerly with palpable hatred—“two people talking on the telephone: one a man of sixty and the other a young woman, a college student, who has just turned twenty. The man is her teacher, acting in loco parentis. He is Morris Sabbath, adjunct professor of puppet theater in the four-college program. In order to protect her privacy—and her innocence—the name of the young woman has been bleeped wherever it appeared on the tape. That is the only alteration that has been made in the original conversation, which was secretly transcribed by the young woman in order to document what she had been subjected to by Professor Sabbath from the day she enrolled in his course. In a candid, confidential statement given voluntarily to the steering committee of SABBATH, the young woman revealed that this was not the first such conversation into which she had been lured by Professor Sabbath. Moreover, she turns out to have been only the latest of a series of students whom Professor Sabbath has intimidated and victimized during the years he has been associated with the program. This tape records the fourth such telephone conversation to which the student was subjected.1 The listener will quickly recognize how by this point in his psychological assault on an inexperienced young woman, Professor Sabbath has been able to manipulate her into thinking that she is a willing participant. Of course, to get the woman to think that it is her fault, to get her to think that she is a ‘bad girl’ who has brought her humiliation on herself by her own cooperation and complicity. . .”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The car descended the slope of Battle Mountain to the lonely spot where he’d arranged to pick her up, the crossroad separating the woods from the fields that led to West Town Street. All the way down the eighteen hundred feet she wept with her whole body shaking, immersed in pain, as though he were lowering her alive into her grave. “Oh, it’s unbearable. Oh, it hurts. I’m so unhappy. I don’t understand why this is happening to me.” She was a big girl whose production of secretions was considerable, and her tears were no exception. He’d never seen tears so large. Someone less of a connoisseur might have taken them for real.

  “Extremely immature behavior,” he said. “The Sobbing Scene.”

  “I want to suck you,” she managed to moan through her tears.

  “The emotionality of young women. Why don’t they ever come up with something new?”

  Across the road a couple of pickup trucks were parked in the dirt lot of the roadside nursery whose greenhouses constituted the first reassuring signs of the white man’s intrusion into these wooded hills (once the heartland of the Madamaskas, to whose tribes the local falls were said—by those opposed to the profane installation of a parking lot and picnic tables—to have been sacred. It was in the numbingly cold pool of one of the remotest tributaries of those sacred falls, the brook that spilled down the rocky streambed beside the Grotto, that he and Drenka would gambol naked in the summer. See plate 4. Detail from the Madamaska vase of dancing nymph and bearded figure brandishing phallus. On bank of brook, note the wine jar, a he-goat, and a basket of figs. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. XX century A.D.).

  “Get out. Disappear.”

  “I want to suck you hard.”

  A worker in coveralls was loading mulch sacks onto one of the trucks—otherwise there wasn’t anyone in sight. Mist was rising beyond the woods to the west, the seasonal mist
that to the Madamaskas undoubtedly meant something about reigning divinities or departed souls—their mothers, their fathers, their Morties, their Nikkis—but to Sabbath recalled nothing more than the opening of “Ode to Autumn.” He was not an Indian, and the mist was the ghost of no one he knew. This local scandal, remember, was taking place in the fall of 1989, two years before the death of his senile mother and four before her reappearance jolted him into understanding that not everything alive is a living substance. This was back when the Great Disgrace was still to come, and for obvious reasons he could not locate its origins in the sensuous stimulus that was the innocuously experimental daughter of the Pennsylvania baker with the foreboding surname. You besmirch yourself in increments of excrement—everyone knows that much about the inevitabilities (or used to)—but not even Sabbath understood how he could lose his job at a liberal arts college for teaching a twenty-year-old to talk dirty twenty-five years after Pauline Réage, fifty-five years after Henry Miller, sixty years after D. H. Lawrence, eighty years after James Joyce, two hundred years after John Cleland, three hundred years after John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester—not to mention four hundred after Rabelais, two thousand after Ovid, and twenty-two hundred after Aristophanes. By 1989 you had to be a loaf of Papa Goolsbee’s pumpernickel not to be able to talk dirty. If only you could run a ’29 penis on ruthless mistrust, cunning negativity, and world-denouncing energy, if only you could run a’ 29 penis on relentless mischief, oppositional exuberance, and eight hundred different kinds of disgust, then he wouldn’t have needed those tapes. But the advantage a young girl has over an old man is that she is wet at the drop of a hat, while to engorge him it is necessary at times to drop a ton of bricks. Aging sets problems that are no joke. The prick does not come with a lifetime guarantee.

  The mist was rising preternaturally from the river, and the pumpkins, ripe for carving, dotted like the freckles on Kathy’s face a big open field back of the greenhouse, and affixed to the trees, wouldn’t you know it, all the right leaves, every last one tinted to polychromatic perfection. The trees were resplendent precisely as they’d been resplendent the year before—and the year before that—a perennial profusion of pigmentation to remind him that by the waters of the Madamaskas he had every reason to weep, because that was about as far as he could have got himself from the tropical sea and the Romance Run and those grand cities like Buenos Aires, where a common seaman of seventeen could eat for peanuts in 1946 at the greatest steak houses along the Florida—they called the main street in B.A. Florida—and then cross the river, the famous Plata, to where they had the best places, which meant the places where there were the most beautiful girls. And in South America that meant the most beautiful girls in the world. So many hot, beautiful women. And he had sequestered himself in New England! Colorful leaves? Try Rio. They got the colors too, only instead of on trees they’re on flesh.

  Seventeen. Three years Kathy’s junior and no ad hoc committee of mollycoddling professors to keep me from getting clap, getting rolled, or getting stabbed to death, let alone getting my little ears molested. I went there deliberately to get myself molly-bloomed! That’s what sevenfuckinteen is for!

  Frost, he mused—thought Sabbath—passing the time until Kathy got the idea that not even with his low standards would he dare to risk his dick again with an out-and-out adder and that she should just slither back to the Japanese viperina. The dim meatballs who were the proud descendants of the settlers who’d usurped these hills from the Original Goyim—an epithet historically more accurate than “Indians” and more respectful, too, as Sabbath had explained to that pal of Roseanna’s who taught “Hunting and Gathering” as a literature course. . . . Where was I? thought he, when once again the blandishments tumbling forth from perfidious Kathy caused him to lose his . . . the dim meatballs, long now the Reigning Goyim, all crowing gaily—as in “When Hearts Were Young and Gay”—about another frost, lower temperatures than even the night before, when Roseanna, wearing only a nightie, had been found by the state police at three A.M. stretched on her back across Town Street, waiting to be run over.

  An hour or so earlier she had left their house by car but had failed even to negotiate the first fifty feet of the hundred yards of curving dirt incline that lay between the carport and Brick Furnace Road. She had been speeding off not for town but for Athena, fourteen miles away, where Kathy shared an apartment with Brian a few blocks from the college, at 137 Spring. And despite having driven her Jeep into a boulder in the hay field that was their front yard, despite having to stumble without shoes or slippers two and a half miles down the twist of pitch-black lanes to the bridge that crossed the brook to Town Street, despite having lain on the asphalt insufficiently clad anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour before being spotted by the cop cruising by, she was clutching in one of her freezing hands a yellow Post-it note bearing—in a drunken scrawl legible by then not even to herself—the address of the girl who’d asked at the close of the tape, “When is your wife coming back?” Roseanna’s intention was to tell this little whore in person just how fucking back she was, but having stumbled to the ground so many times without getting anywhere near Athena, Roseanna decided on Town that she’d be better off dead. That way the girl would never have to ask that question again. None of them would.

  “I want to suck you right here.”

  Sabbath had not only driven some six hours that day—getting Roseanna to the private psychiatric hospital in Usher and then himself back in time to meet Kathy—but had been up confronting this newest upheaval since just after three in the morning, when he had been awakened by a loud knock at the side door and the astonishing news that it was the police returning the wife whom he had assumed was sleeping all the while in their king-size bed, not cuddled close to him, needless to say, but safely over at the far edge, where, admittedly, he had not journeyed for many a year. When they had moved up from queen-size he had remarked to a visitor that the new bed was so big he couldn’t find Roseanna in it. Overhearing him from where she happened to be gardening just outside the kitchen window, she had shouted into the house, “Why don’t you look?” But this was easily over a decade back, when he still spoke to people and she was drinking only a bottle a day and there was still a remnant of hope.

  Yes, there at the door, earnestly polite now, stood Matthew Balich, whom his former art teacher had failed to recognize either because of the state trooper uniform or because of the booze. She had apparently whispered to Matthew, before he authoritatively made known his mission, that they must be very quiet to avoid awakening her hardworking husband. She had even tried to tip him. Heading for Kathy’s in only a nightgown, she’d still had the percipience to take her purse in case she needed to buy a drink.

  It had been a long night, morning, and afternoon for Sabbath. First the Jeep had to be towed off the boulder where she’d run aground, then arrangements had to be made through the family doctor to get her a bed at Usher, then the effort had to be undertaken to force her, hung over and hysterical though she was, to agree to twenty-eight days in Usher’s rehab program, and then at last there was the six-hour round-trip to the hospital, Roseanna ranting at him from the backseat the whole way there, pausing only to instruct him angrily to pull over at each service station they passed so she could try to relieve herself of her cramps.

  Why she had to get plastered by stages in those putrid rest-rooms instead of openly guzzling from the bottle in her purse Sabbath did not bother to inquire. Her pride? After last night, her pride? Nor did Sabbath do anything to stop her when she listed the ways in which a wife whose intentions had merely been to assist him at his work and to comfort him when there were setbacks and to look after him when the arthritis was most acute had herself been ruthlessly ignored, insulted, exploited, and betrayed.

  Up front in the car Sabbath played the Goodman tapes to which he and Drenka used to dance together in the motel rooms he rented up and down the valley when first they’d become enraptured lovers. During the 130-mile dr
ive west to Usher, the tapes more or less drowned out Roseanna’s tirade and allowed Sabbath some respite from all that he’d been through since Matthew had kindly returned her. First they fucked, then they danced, Sabbath and Matthew’s mom, and while Sabbath faultlessly sang the lyrics into her grinning, incredulous face, his come would leak out of her, making even more lubricious the inner roundness of her thighs. The come would stream all the way down to her heels, and after they’d danced he would massage her feet with it. Nestled down at the end of the motel bed, he would suck on her big toe, pretending it was her cock, and she pretended that his come was her own.

  (And where did all those 78s disappear to? After I went to sea, what happened to the 1935 Victor recording of “Sometimes I’m Happy” that was Morty’s treasure of treasures, the one with the Bunny Berigan solo that Morty called “the greatest trumpet solo ever, by anyone”? Who got Morty’s records? What happened to his things after Mother died? Where are they?) Stroking with one spoon-shaped thumb the breadth of Croatian cheekbone while with the other jiggling her on-off switch, Sabbath sang “Stardust” to Drenka, not like Hoagy Carmichael, in English, but in French no less—“Suivant le silence de la nuit / Répète ton nom. . .”—exactly the way it was sung for the prom crowds by Gene Hochberg, who led the swing band in which Morty played clarinet (and who, amazingly, would wind up just like Morty flying B-25s in the Pacific and who Sabbath had always secretly wished had been the one to be shot down). A bearded barrel he indisputably was, yet Drenka cooed ecstatically, “My American boyfriend. I have an American boyfriend,” while the great Goodman performances of the thirties transformed into the pavilion over the LaReine Avenue beach the room reeking of disinfectant that he had rented for six bucks in the name of Goodman’s maniac trumpeter on “We Three and the Angels Sing,” Ziggy Elman. At the LaReine Avenue pavilion Morty taught Mickey to jitterbug one August night in 1938, when the little boy who was his shadow was just nine. The kid’s birthday present. Sabbath taught the girl from Split how to jitterbug on a snowy afternoon in 1981 in a motel in New England called the Bo-Peep. By the time they left at six to drive, in two cars, the plowed roads home, she could tell Harry James’s solos from Elman’s on “St. Louis Blues,” she could imitate very funnily Hamp going “Ee-ee” in that screechy way he did it in the final solo of “Ding Dong Daddy,” she could knowingly say about “Roll ’Em” what Morty used to knowingly say to Mickey about “Roll ’Em” after the boogie-woogie beginning starts petering out in the Stacy solo: “It’s really just a fast blues in F.” She could even bang out on Sabbath’s hairy hindquarters the Krupa tom-tom beat in her own accompaniment to “Sweet Leilani.” Martha Tilton taking over from Helen Ward. Dave Tough taking over from Krupa. Bud Freeman coming over in ’38 from the Dorsey band. Jimmy Mundy, from the Hines band, coming over as staff arranger. In one long winter afternoon at the Bo-Peep her American boyfriend taught Drenka things she could never learn from the devoted husband whose pleasure that day was to be out all alone in the snow, building stone walls until it got too dark even to see his own breath.