Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  No, this is not a good marriage. You wouldn’t be far off guessing that much no matter whose table you happened to be eating at, but Sabbath could tell from that laugh—if not from the fact that he was being permitted to play footsie with her only ten minutes into the meal—that something had turned out wrong. In her laugh was the recognition that she was no longer in charge of the forces at work. In her laugh was the admission of her captivity: to Norman, to menopause, to work, to aging, to everything that could only deteriorate further. Nothing unforeseen that happens is likely ever again to be going to be good. What is more, Death is over in its corner doing deep knee bends and one day soon will leap across the ring at her as mercilessly as it leaped upon Drenka—because even though she’s at her heaviest ever, weighing in at around one thirty-five, one forty, Death is Two-Ton Tony Galento and Man Mountain Dean. The laugh said that everything had shifted on her while her back was turned, while she was facing the other way, the right way, her arms open wide to the dynamic admixture of demands and delights that had been the daily bread of her thirties and forties, to all that assiduous activity, all the extravagant, holidaylike living—so inexhaustibly busy. . . with the result that in no more time than it took for the Cowans to cross the ocean on the Concorde for a long weekend in Paris, she was fifty-five and seared with hot flashes, and her daughter’s was now the female form exuding the magnetic currents. The laugh said that she was sick of staying, sick of plotting leaving, sick of unsatisfied dreams, sick of satisfied dreams, sick of adapting, sick of not adapting, sick of just about everything except existing. Exulting in existing while being sick of everything—that’s what was in that laugh! A semidefeated, semiamused, semiaggrieved, semiamazed, seminegative, hilarious big laugh. He liked her, liked her enormously. Probably just as insufferable a mate as he was. He could discern in her, whenever her husband spoke, the desire to be just a little cruel to Norman, saw her sneering at the best of him, at the very best things in him. If you don’t go crazy because of your husband’s vices, you go crazy because of his virtues. He’s on Prozac because he can’t win. Everything is leaving her except for her behind, which her wardrobe informs her is broadening by the season—and except for this steadfast prince of a man marked by reasonableness and ethical obligation the way others are scarred by insanity or illness. Sabbath understood her state of mind, her state of life, her state of suffering: dusk is descending, and sex, our greatest luxury, is racing away at a tremendous speed, everything is racing off at a tremendous speed and you wonder at your folly in having ever turned down a single squalid fuck. You’d give your right arm for one if you are a babe like this. It’s not unlike the Great Depression, not unlike going broke overnight after years of raking it in. “Nothing unforeseen that happens,” the hot flashes inform her, “is likely ever again to be going to be good.” Hot flashes mockingly mimicking the sexual ecstasies. Dipped, she is, in the very fire of fleeting time. Aging seventeen days for every seventeen seconds in the furnace. He clocked her on Morty’s Benrus. Seventeen seconds of menopause oozing out all over her face. You could baste her in it. And then it just stops like a tap that’s been shut. But while she is in it, he can see how it seems to her that there’s no bottom to it—that this time they’re out to cook her like Joan of Arc.

  Nothing quite touches Sabbath like these aging dishes with the promiscuous pasts and the pretty young daughters. Especially when they’ve still got it in them to laugh like this one. You see all they once were in that laugh. I am what’s left of the famous motel fucking—hang a medal on my drooping boobs. It’s no fun burning on a pyre at dinner.

  And Death, he reminded her by evenly pressing down on her naked instep with the ball of his foot, on top of us, over us, ruling us, Death. You should have seen Linc. You should have seen him all quieted down like a good little boy, a good little boy with green skin and white hair. Why was he green? He wasn’t green when I knew him. “It’s frightening,” Norman had said after quickly identifying the corpse. They walked out into the street and over to a coffee shop for a Coke. “It’s spooky,” said Norman, with a shudder. Yet Sabbath enjoyed it. Exactly what he’d driven all this way to see. Learned a lot, Michelle. You lie in there like a good little boy who does what he is told.

  And as if pressing Michelle Cowan’s foot beneath his own wasn’t sufficient reason to live, there were his new khaki trousers and his new Jockey briefs. A big bagful of clothes such as he had not thought to buy for himself in years. Even handkerchiefs. Long time between handkerchiefs. All the tattered shit he wore, the T-shirts yellowing under the arms, the boxer shorts with the elasticity shot, the unmatched remnants that were his socks, the big-tipped boots he sported like Mammy Yokum twelve months a year. . . . Were the boots what they call a “statement”? This fucking way they talk made him feel like a curmudgeon. Diogenes in his tub? Making a statement! He’d noticed that the college girls down in the valley were all now wearing clodhoppers not unlike his own, kind of lace-up construction boots, along with lacy maiden-aunt dresses. Feminine in the dress but not conventionally feminine, because there’s something else there in the shoes. The shoes say, “I’m tough. Don’t mess with me,” while the lacy, long, old-fashioned dress says . . . so that altogether we’ve got ourselves a statement, something like, “If you would be kind enough, sir, to try to fuck me, I’ll kick your fucking head in.” Even Debby, with her low self-esteem, gets burnished up like Cleopatra. Haute couture has been passing me by, along with everything else. Wait’ll I hit the streets in my khakis. Manhattan, let me in!

  He was sublimely effervescent about not being the good little boy in the box doing what he was told. Also over not having been turned in by Rosa. She’d said nothing to anyone about their morning. The mercy there is in life, and none of it deserved. All our crimes against each other, and still we get another shot at it in a new pair of pants!

  Outside the funeral home, after the service, Linc’s eight-year-old grandson, Joshua, had said to his mother—whose hand was in Norman’s—“Who were the people talking about?”

  “Grandpa. Linc was his name. You know that. Lincoln.”

  “But that wasn’t Grandpa,” the boy said. “That wasn’t what he was like.”

  “Wasn’t it?”

  “No. Grandpa was like a baby.”

  “But not always, Josh. When he got sick he became like a baby. But before, he was just as all his friends described him.”

  “That wasn’t Grandpa,” he replied, determinedly shaking his head. “Sorry, Mom.”

  Linc’s littlest grandchild named Laurie. A tiny, energetic girl with large, dark, sensual eyes who raced up to Sabbath on the pavement after the service and said, “Santa, Santa, I’m three! They put Grandpa in a box!”

  The box that never failed to impress. Whatever your age, the sight of that box never lost its power. One of us takes up no more room than that. You can store us like shoes or ship us like lettuce. The simpleton who invented the coffin was a poetic genius and a great wit.

  “What would you like for Christmas?” Sabbath asked the child, kneeling to satisfy her desire to touch his beard.

  “Chanukah!” Laurie shouted with great excitement.

  “It’s yours,” he told her and restrained the impulse to touch with a crooked finger her clever little mouth and thereby wind up where he began.

  Where he began. That indeed was the subject. The obscene performance with which he’d begun.

  It was Norman who’d started it off, describing for Michelle the skit that had got Sabbath arrested out in front of the gates of Columbia back in 1956, that skit in which the middle finger of his left hand would beckon a pretty young student right up to the screen and then enter into conversation with her while the five fingers of the other hand had begun deftly to unbutton her coat.

  “Describe it, Mick. Tell Shel how you got arrested.”

  Mick and Shel. Shel and Mick. A duo if ever there was one. And Norman seemed to recognize that already, to understand after less than half an hour at the dinn
er table that in Sabbath’s down-and-outness there might be more to stir his wife than in all his own orderly success. There was in the aging Sabbath’s failure a threat of disarray not unlike the danger there used to be to Norman in young Sabbath’s eruptive-disruptive vitality. My misbehaving always imperiled him. He should know what it’s done to me. This mighty fortress built to withstand the remotest intimation of mayhem, and yet here near the end, as at the beginning, he continues to be humbled by the stinky little mess I make of things. I frighten him. As my father said, “Bolbotish.” This generous, lovely, bolbotish success continues to kowtow to a putz. You’d think I’d burst forth in a boiling blaze, incandescent from Pandemonium, instead of having driven down 684 in an ancient Chevy with a busted tailpipe.

  “How I got arrested,” Sabbath said. “Four decades, Norm. Almost forty years. I don’t know that I remember anymore how I got arrested.” He did, of course. Had never forgotten any of it.

  “You remember the girl.”

  “The girl,” he repeated.

  “Helen Trumbull,” Norman said.

  “That was her name? Trumbull? And the judge?”

  “Mulchrone.”

  “Yes. Him I remember. Gave a great performance. Mulchrone. The cop was Abramowitz. Right?”

  “Officer Abramowitz, yes.”

  “Yes. The cop was a Jew. And the prosecutor another Irishman. That kid with the crew cut.”

  “Just out of St. John’s,” said Norman. “Foster.”

  “Yes. Very disagreeable, Foster. Didn’t like me. Outraged. Genuinely outraged. How can anyone do this? Yes. Guy from St. John’s. That’s right. Crew cut, rep tie, his father’s a cop, he never thinks he’ll earn more than ten thousand dollars a year and he wants to send me up for life.”

  “Tell Shelly.”

  Why? What’s he up to, showing me in my best light or in my worst? Turning her on to me or turning her off? It had to be off, because before dinner, alone in the living room with Sabbath, he had lavished on his wife and her work a uxorious deluge of admiration—what Roseanna had been dying for, thirsting for, all her married life. While Michelle was showering and changing for dinner, Norman had shown him, in a recent alumni magazine from the University of Pennsylvania dental school, a photograph of Michelle and her father, an old man in a wheelchair, one of several pictures illustrating a story about parents and children who were Penn dental school graduates. Before his stroke and well into his seventies, Michelle’s father had been a dentist in Fairlawn, New Jersey, according to Norman an overbearing bastard whose own father had been a dentist and who had pronounced at Michelle’s birth, “I don’t give a shit that she’s a girl—this is a dental family, and she’s going to be a dentist!” As it turned out, she had not merely gone to his dental school but outdone the hard-driving son of a bitch by taking two more years to become a periodontist and ending up at the top of her class. “I can’t tell you,” said Norman, nursing the evening glass of wine he said he was allowed while on Prozac, “what a physical trial being a periodontist is. Most days she gets home just like tonight, beat. Imagine going with an instrument and trying to clean the back outer corner of an upper second or third molar and trying to get up into that pocket there, up in the gum. Who can see? Who can reach? She’s physically amazing. Over twenty years of this. I’ve said to her, why don’t you think of cutting the practice back to three days a week? With periodontal disease you see your patients year after year, forever—her patients will wait for her. But no, she’s out every morning at seven-thirty and isn’t home until seven-thirty, and some weeks she’s even in there on Saturdays.” Yes, Saturday, Sabbath was thinking, must be a big day for Shelly. . . while Norman was explaining, “If you’re meticulous in the way that Michelle is, and you’ve got to do a cleaning around every surface of every tooth in unreachable places . . . Granted, she’s got instruments with curves that help; she’s got these instruments she cleans these roots with called scalers and curettes, because she’s not just dealing with the crown portion like a hygienist. She’s got to do this up to the root surfaces if there are pockets, if there is bone loss—” How he praises her! How much he cares! How much he knows—and doesn’t. Before dinner, Sabbath had been wondering whether the encomium was designed to keep him at bay or whether it was the drug speaking. I may be listening to Prozac. Or maybe I am merely listening to his wife’s elaborate excuses for Working Late at the Office—to somebody lamely repeating, as if he believed it, something somebody else told them to believe about them. “Because up there,” Norman continued, “is where the action is. It’s not just to shine the enamel and make pretty teeth. It’s to pick the tartar, which can be very adherent—and I’ve seen her come home limp after a day of this stuff—it’s to snap the tartar off the roots. Sure, there are ultrasonic instruments that help. They use an ultrasonic device, runs on an electrical current, emits ultrasonic energy, goes up into the pocket there to help crack off all the crap. But so it doesn’t overheat, there’s of course a water spray, and it’s like living in a fog, with that water spray. Living in the mist. It’s like spending twenty years in the rain forest. . . .”

  So she was an Amazon, was that it? Daughter of a once-terrifying tribal chief whom she had conquered and gone beyond, an Amazon warrior, emitting ultrasonic energy, armed against barnacled tartar with stainless steel scalers and curving curettes. . .what was Sabbath to conclude? That she was too much for Norman? That he was as perplexed by her as he was proud of her—and overpowered? That now that the youngest child was off at college and it was just him and the dental dynasty heiress alone together side by side . . . Sabbath didn’t know what to think in the living room, before dinner, any more than he did at the table, with Norman urging him to tell the story of the defiant outsider that he’d been in his twenties, so unlike Norman himself starting out, the well-groomed, well-mannered Columbia-educated son of the jukebox distributor whose croaking voice and crude success had shamed Norman throughout his youth. The son and the daughter of two brutes. Only I had the gently loving father and look how it all turned out.

  “Well, so there I am. 1956. On 116th and Broadway, just by the university gates there. Twenty-seven years old. The cop has been standing around for days watching. There are usually about twenty, twenty-five students. Some passersby, but mostly students. Afterward I pass the hat. The whole thing takes less than thirty minutes. I think I got a breast out once before. To get a kid to go that far with me, rare in those days. I didn’t expect it. The idea of the act was that I couldn’t get that far. But this time it happened. The tit is out. It’s out. And the cop comes up and he says, ‘Hey, you, you can’t do that.’ He’s calling this down to me back of the screen. ‘It’s all right, Officer,’ I tell him, ‘it’s part of the show.’ I stayed down and the middle finger said it to him, the one that had been talking to the girl. I figure, ‘Great, now I’ve got a cop in the show.’ The kids watching aren’t sure he isn’t part of the show. They start laughing. ‘You can’t do that,’ he tells me. ‘There are children here. They can see the breast.’ ‘There aren’t any children here,’ the finger says. ‘Get up,’ he tells me, ‘stand up. You can’t expose that breast on the street. You can’t have a breast exposed in the middle of Manhattan at twelve-fifteen at 116th Street and Broadway. And also, you’re taking advantage of this young woman. Do you want him to do this to you?’ the cop asks her. ‘Is there a sexual molestation charge here?’ ‘No,’ she says, ‘I permitted him to do it.’”

  “The girl’s a student,” Michelle said.

  “Yep. Barnard student.”

  “Brave,” said Michelle. “‘I permitted him to do it.’ What’d the policeman do?”

  “He says, ‘Permitted? You were hypnotized. This guy hypnotized you. You didn’t know he was doing it to you.’ ‘No,’ she says to him defiantly, ‘it was okay.’ She was frightened when the cop came but there she was with all the other students, and students are generally anti-cop, so she just picked up the mood and she went with it. She said, ‘It’s all
right, Officer—leave him alone. He wasn’t doing anything wrong.’”

  “Sound like Debby?” Michelle said to Norman.

  Sabbath waited to see how the Prozac would field that one. “Let him go on,” Norman said.

  “So the cop says to the girl, ‘I can’t leave him alone. There could be kids here. What would people say about the police if they just allowed blouses to be opened and breasts to be out on the street and someone publicly twisting a nipple? You want me to let him do it in Central Park? Have you done it,’ he asks me, ‘in Central Park?’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I have my show in Central Park.’ ‘No, no,’ he says to me, ‘you can’t do this. People are complaining. The guy who owns the drugstore over there is complaining, get these people away from here, it’s not good for his business.’ I told him I wasn’t aware of that—if anything, I felt the drugstore hurt my business. This got a rise from the kids, and now he’s getting pissed off. ‘Listen, this young woman didn’t want her breast out and she wasn’t even aware of it until I pointed it out to her. She was hypnotized by you.’ ‘I was aware of it,’ the girl says, and all the kids applaud her—they’re really impressed by her. ‘Officer, listen,’ I said, ‘what I did was okay. She agreed to it. It was just fun.’ ‘It was not fun. It’s not my idea of fun. It’s not that druggist over there’s idea of fun. You can’t use that kind of behavior here.’ ‘Okay, so okay,’ I said, ‘now what are you going to do about it? I can’t stand around talking all day. I got a living to make.’ The kids love this, too. But the cop remains decent, given the circumstances. All he says is, ‘I want you to tell me you’re not going to do it again.’ ‘But it’s my act. It’s my art.’ ‘Oh, don’t give me that shit about your art. What does playing with a nipple have to do with art?’ ‘It’s a new art form,’ I tell him. ‘Oh, bullshit, bullshit, you bums are always telling me about your art.’ ‘I’m not a bum. This is what I do for my livelihood, Officer.’ ‘Well, you’re not doing this livelihood in New York. You have a license?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why don’t you have a license?’ ‘You can’t get a license for it. I’m not selling potatoes. There is no license for a puppeteer.’ ‘I don’t see puppets.’ ‘I carry my puppet between my legs,’ I said. ‘Watch it, shorty. I don’t see puppets. I just see fingers. And there is a license for a puppeteer—there’s a street license for acting—’ ‘I can’t get that.’ ‘Of course you can get it,’ he tells me. ‘I can’t. And I can’t go down there and wait four or five hours to find out I can’t.’ ‘Okay,’ says the cop, ‘so you’re vending without a license.’ ‘There’s no vending license,’ I tell him, ‘for touching women’s breasts on the street.’ ‘So you admit that’s what you do.’ ‘Oh, shit,’ I say, ‘this is ridiculous.’ And the whole thing starts to get belligerent and he tells me he’s going to take me in.”