by Philip Roth
“The variation,” Sabbath offered, “accommodates a wide variety of desires, perhaps. But then,” he added, thinking again, “breasts, as you call them, are not there primarily to entice men—they’re there to feed children.”
“But I don’t think size has to do with milk production,” said Madeline. “No, that doesn’t solve the problem of what this enormous variation is for.”
“Maybe it’s that God hasn’t made up his mind. That’s often the case.”
“Wouldn’t it be more interesting,” asked Madeline, “if there were different numbers of breasts? Mightn’t that be more interesting? You know—some women with two, some with six . . .”
“How many times have you tried to commit suicide?”
“Only twice. How many times has your wife tried?”
“Only once. So far.”
“Why?”
“Forced to sleep with her old man. As a kid, her father’s girl.”
“Was she really? They all say that. The simplest story about yourself that explains everything—it’s the house specialty. These people read more complicated stories in the newspaper every day, and then they’re handed this version of their lives. In Courage to Heal they’ve been trying for three weeks to get me to turn in my dad. The answer to every question is either Prozac or incest. Talk about boring. All the false introspection. It’s enough in itself to make you suicidal. Your wife is one of the two or three I can even stand to listen to. She’s elegant-minded by comparison with the others. Her desire is passionate to face the losses. She doesn’t back away from the excavation. But you, of course, find nothing redeeming in these reflections back on origins.”
“Don’t I? I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, they’re trying to confront this awful stuff with their raw souls, and it’s way, way beyond them, and so they say all those stupid things that don’t sound much like ‘reflections.’ Still, there’s something about your wife that, in its own way, has a certain heroism. The way she stood up to an excruciating detox. There’s a kind of deliberateness to her that I sure don’t have: running around here collecting the shards of her past, struggling with her father’s letters. . . .”
“Don’t stop. You get more and more elegant-minded by the moment.”
“Look, she’s a drunk, drunks drive people nuts, and to the husband that’s the crux. Fair enough. She’s putting up a struggle that you disdain for its lack of genius. She doesn’t have your wit and so forth and so she can’t have the penetrating cynicism. But she has as much nobility as someone can within the limits of her imagination.”
“How do you know she does?”
“I don’t. I just made it up. I make it up as I go along. Doesn’t everyone?”
“Roseanna’s heroism and nobility.”
“I mean it’s clear to me that she did suffer a great blow and that she earned her pain, that’s all. She came by her pain honestly.”
“How?”
“Her father’s suicide. The awful way in which he suffocated her. Her father’s effort to become the great man in her life. And then the suicide. Wreaking that vengeance on her just for saving her own life. That was a huge blow for a young girl. You couldn’t really ask for a bigger one.”
“So you believe he fucked her or you don’t?”
“I don’t. I don’t believe it, because it’s not necessary. She had enough without it. You’re talking about a little girl and her father. Little girls love their fathers. There’s enough going on there. The courting is all you need. It doesn’t require a seduction. Could be he killed himself not because they had consummated it but so that they wouldn’t. A lot of suicides, gloomy people with guilty ruminations, think their families would be better off without them.”
“And did you think like that, Madeline?”
“Nope. I thought I might be better off without my family.”
“If you know all this,” said Sabbath, “or know enough to make it up, how come I’m meeting you here?”
“You’re meeting me here because I know all this. Guess who I’m reading in the library? Erik Erikson. I’m in the intimacy-versus-isolation stage, if I understand him correctly, and I think really not coming out ahead. You are in the generativity-versus-stagnation stage, but you are very quickly approaching the integrity-versus-despair stage.”
“I have no children. I haven’t generated shit.”
“You’ll be relieved to learn that the childless can generate through acts of altruism.”
“Unlikely in my case. What is it, again, I have to look forward to?”
“Integrity versus despair.”
“And how do things look for me, from what you’ve read?”
“Well, it depends whether life is basically meaningful and purposeful,” she said, bursting out laughing.
Sabbath laughed too. “What’s so funny about ‘purposeful,’ Madeline?”
“You do ask tough questions.”
“Yeah, well, it’s amazing what you find out when you ask.”
“Anyway, I don’t have to worry yet about generativity. I told you: I’m in intimacy versus isolation.”
“And how are you doing?”
“I think it’s questionable how I’m doing on the intimacy question.”
“And on the isolation one?”
“I get the feeling they’re somewhat meant by Dr. Erikson to be polar opposites. If you’re not doing well in one, you must be scoring fairly high in the other.”
“And you are?”
“Well, I guess mainly in the romantic arena. I didn’t realize, until I read Dr. Erikson, that this was my ‘developmental goal,’” she said, starting to laugh again. “I guess I haven’t achieved it.”
“What’s your developmental goal?”
“I suppose a stable little relationship with a man and all his fucking complex needs.”
“When was the last time you had that?”
“Seven years ago. It hasn’t been an abysmal failure. I can’t really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don’t give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.”
“Everything is acted.”
“Whatever. With me there’s some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don’t have. My life never seems real to me.”
“I have to see you again,” Sabbath said.
“So. This is a flirtation. I wondered but couldn’t believe it. Are you always attracted to damaged women?”
“I didn’t know there were any other kind.”
“Being called damaged is a lot worse than being called cuckoo, isn’t it?”
“I believe you were called damaged by yourself.”
“Whatever. That’s the risk you take talking. In high school I was called ditsy.”
“What’s ‘ditsy’ mean?”
“Kind of an airhead. Call Mr. Kasterman, my math teacher. He’ll tell you. I’d always be coming in from cooking class with flour all over me.”
“I never slept with a girl who tried to commit suicide.”
“Sleep with your wife.”
“That is ditsy.”
Her laugh was very sly now, a delightful surprise. A delightful person, suffused by a light soulfulness that wasn’t at all juvenile, however juvenile she happened to look. An adventurous mind with an intuitive treasure that her suffering hadn’t shut down, Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an alert first grader who’d discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is reading. The sliding about of her self-possession was practically visible as she spoke. Self-possession was not her center of gravity, nor was anything else of hers that was on display, other perhaps than a way of saying things that was appealing to him for being just a little impersonal. Whatever had denied her a woman’s breasts and a woman’s face had made compensation of sorts by charging her mind with erotic significance—or so at least its influ
ence swept over Sabbath, ever vigilant to all stimuli. A sensual promise that permeated her intelligence disarranged pleasantly his hard-on’s time-worn hopes.
“What would it be like for you,” she asked him, “sleeping with me? Like sleeping with a corpse? A ghost? A corpse resurrected?”
“No. Sleeping with somebody who took the thing to the final step.”
“The adolescent romanticism makes you look like an asshole,” said Madeline.
“I’ve looked like an asshole before. So what? What are you so bitter about at your age?”
“Yes, my retrospective bitterness.”
“What’s it about?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you do.”
“You just like to dig right on in there, don’t you, Mr. Sabbath? What am I bitter about? All those years I worked and planned for things. It all seems . . . I’m not sure.”
“Come down to my car.”
She gave the suggestion serious consideration before she replied, “For a quart of vodka?”
“A pint,” he said.
“In return for sexual favors? A quart.”
“A fifth.”
“A quart.”
“I’ll get it,” he said.
“You do that.”
Sabbath ran to the parking lot, in a frenzy drove the three miles to Usher, found a liquor store, bought two quarts of Stolichnaya, and drove back to the parking lot, where Madeline was to be waiting. He’d done the whole thing in twelve minutes but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t among the smokers outside the Mansion, she wasn’t in the Mansion lounge playing cards with the two old ladies or in the parlor, where the battered Wellesley girl was now doggedly trying her luck with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and, when he retraced their steps, she was not anywhere along the route to Roderick House. So there he was, alone in the shadows on a beautiful fall night, two quarts of the best hundred-proof Russian vodka in a brown paper bag beneath his arm, stood up by someone whom he’d had every reason to trust, when a guard appeared behind him—a very large black man in a blue security officer’s uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie—and asked him politely what his business was. The explanation having proved inadequate, two more guards appeared, and though no one assaulted him physically, there were insults to be endured from the youngest and most vigilant of the guards while Sabbath voluntarily allowed himself to be escorted to his car. There the three examined his license and registration by flashlight, wrote down his name and his out-of-state license number, and then took the car keys and got in the car, two in the back with Sabbath and the Stolichnaya and one up front to drive the car off the grounds. Mrs. Sabbath would be questioned before she went to bed and a report filed with the chief doctor (who happened to be Roseanna’s doctor) first thing in the morning. If the patient had arranged for her visitor to bring her the alcohol, his wife would be ejected on the spot.
He arrived in Madamaska Falls close to one A.M. Exhausted as he was, he drove to the lake and then followed Fox Run Crossing up past the inn to where the Baliches lived atop the hill overlooking the water, in a new house as spacious and lavish as any on the mountain. The house was the realization for Matija of a dream—the dream of a grand family castle that was a country unto itself—and the dream dated back to elementary school, when, for homework, he had to write about his parents and tell the teacher truthfully, like a good Pioneer, what their relationship was to the regime. Matija had even brought a blacksmith over from Yugoslavia, an artisan from the Dalmatian coast, to stay for six months in the inn’s annex and work at a forge near Blackwall where he made the outdoor railings for the vast green terrace that looked onto the sunsets staged at the western end of the lake, the indoor banisters for the wide central staircase that twisted up toward a dome ceiling, and the filigreed iron entrance gates operated electronically from the house. The iron chandelier had come by sea from Split. Matija’s brother was a contractor and he had bought it from gypsies who sold all that kind of antique stuff. The chain forged for the chandelier by the resident blacksmith hung menacingly down the two stories from the sky-blue dome into a foyer where there were leaded stained-glass window panels to either side of a mahogany double door. Through the doorway you could have driven a horse-drawn carriage onto the marble floor (cut especially for the house after Matija had gone to Vermont to inspect the quarry). It seemed to Sabbath—the first day that Matija had taken Silvija to see the sights, and Drenka was fucked on Silvija’s bed in Silvija’s dirndl—that no two rooms in the house were level with each other but had to be reached by going up or down three, four, or five highly varnished, broad steps. And there were wood carvings of kings on pedestals beside the stairways between the rooms. A Boston antiques dealer had found them in Vienna—seventeen medieval kings who, together, had to have beheaded at least as many of their subjects as Matija had beheaded chickens for his popular chicken paprikash with noodles. There were six beds in the house, all with brass frames. The pink marble Jacuzzi could seat six. The modernistic kitchen with the state-of-the-art cooking island at its heart could seat sixteen. The dining room with the tapestried walls could seat thirty. Nobody, however, used the Jacuzzi or entered the dining room, the Baliches slept in just one claustrophobic bed, and the prepared food they carried up from the inn late at night, they ate in front of a TV console installed on four empty egg crates in a room as barren and humble as any you could have found in a worker’s housing block built by Tito.
Because Matija was fearful lest his good fortune arouse envy in his guests no less than in his staff, the house had deliberately been situated behind a triangular expanse of firs said to be as old as any in New England. The stand of trees pointed dramatically heavenward, stately schooner masts that had been spared the colonial ax, and yet the roof lines of Matija’s million-dollar house—conforming to his fanciful immigrant aim—looked at first glance to be going in every direction except up. Strange. The tamed, abstemious, frugal foreigner, beneficiary not merely of his own dedicated hard work but of the fat-cat blowout of the eighties, conceives for himself a palace of abundance, as grand a manifestation as he can imagine of his personal triumph over Comrade Tito, while his wife’s intemperate lover, the native-born American hog, lives in a four-room little box built without a basement in the 1920s, a pleasant enough house by now but one that only Roseanna’s ingenuity with a paintbrush and a sewing machine, and a hammer and nails, had been able to salvage from the dank Tobacco Road horror it was when, in the mid-sixties, Roseanna came up with the bright idea of domesticating Sabbath. Home and Hearth. The woods, the streams, the snow, the thaw, the spring, New England’s spring, that surprise that is among the greatest reinvigorators of humankind on record. She pinned her hopes on the mountainous north—and a child. A family: a mother, a father, cross-country skis, and the kids, a lively, healthy band of shrieking kids, running unmenaced all over the place, enabled, by the very air they breathed, to avoid growing up like their malformed parents, entirely at the mercy of living. Rural domestication, the city dweller’s old agrarian dream of “Live Free or Die” license plates on the Volvo, was the purifying rubric not simply by which she hoped and prayed she could put to rest her father’s ghost but by which Sabbath could silence Nikki’s. Little wonder Roseanna was in orbit from there on out.
There were no lights on at the Baliches’, at least not that Sabbath could see through the fir-tree wall. He tapped twice on the horn, waited, tapped twice, and then sat for ten minutes till it was time to tap the horn once again and allow her five minutes more before driving away.
Drenka was a light sleeper. She’d become a light sleeper when she became a mother. The smallest noise, the tiniest cry of distress from little Matthew’s room, and she was out of the bed and had him in her arms. She told Sabbath that when Matthew was a baby she would lie down and sleep on the floor beside his crib to be certain that he didn’t stop breathing. And even when he got to be four and five, she would sometimes be seized in her bed by fears for his safety or his health and s
pend the night on the floor of his room. She had done her mothering the way she did everything, as though she were breaking down a door. Lead her into temptation, into motherhood, into software, you got the impress of all of her, all that rash energy without a single restraint. In full force this woman was extraordinary. To whatever was demanded, she had no aversion. Fear, of course, plenty of fear; but aversions, none. An amazing experience, this thoroughly unaloof Slav for whom her existence was a great experiment, the erotic light of his life, and he had found her not dangling a little key from her finger on Rue St. Denis between Châtelet and the archway of the Porte St. Denis but in Madamaska Falls, capital of caution, where the local population is content to be in raptures about changing the clock twice a year.
He rolled down the window and heard the Baliches’ horses breathing in the paddock across the road. Then he saw two of them looming up by the fence. He opened a Stolichnaya bottle. He’d been drinking some since he went to sea but never like Roseanna. That moderation—and circumcision—were about all he had to show for being a Jew. Which was probably the best of it, anyway. He took two drinks and there she was, in her nightgown, with a shawl drawn around her shoulders. He reached out the window and there they were. Two hundred and sixty miles round-trip, but it was worth it for Drenka’s breasts.
“What is it? Mickey, what’s wrong!”
“Not much chance of a blow job, I guess.”
“Darling, no.”
“Get in the car.”
“No. No. Tomorrow.”
He took her flashlight out of her hand and shined it into his lap.
“Oh, it’s so big. My darling! I can’t now. Maté—”
“If he wakes up before I come, fuck it, we’ll run away, we’ll do it—I’ll just turn on the motor and off we go like Vronsky and Anna. Enough of this hiding-out shit. Our whole lives are hiding.”
“I mean Matthew. He’s working. He could come by.”
“He’ll think we’re kids necking. Get in, Drenka.”