Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “On which grounds?” Michelle asked. “All of them?”

  “No, no. Disorderly conduct and obscenity. Obscene performance on the street.”

  “What is ‘disorderly conduct’ anyway?”

  “I am disorderly conduct. The judge can sentence me anywhere up to a year for each offense. But he’s not a bad guy. It’s almost four o’clock now in the afternoon. He looks out into the courtroom and he’s got twelve more cases out there, or twenty, and he wants to go home and have a drink in the worst way. He looks like he’s four hundred miles southwest of the nearest drink. He does not look good. I didn’t know what arthritis was then. Today my heart goes out to him. He’s got it all over and the pain is driving him nuts, but still he says to me, ‘Are you going to do this again, Mr. Sabbath?’ ‘It’s how I make my living, Your Honor.’ He covers his face and tries me a second time. ‘Are you going to do this again? I want you to promise me that, if I don’t put you in jail, you won’t do this and you won’t touch that and you won’t touch this.’ ‘I can’t,’ I say. St. John’s sneers. Mulchrone: ‘If you’re telling me that you committed a crime and you’re going to do it again, I’m going to give you thirty days in jail.’ Here Jerry Glekel, my ACLU lawyer, whispers in my ear, ‘Say you won’t do it. Fuck him. Just say it.’ Jerry leans over and says, ‘Fuck him—let’s get out of here.’ ‘Your Honor, I won’t do it.’ ‘You won’t do it. That’s wonderful. Thirty days, sentence suspended. A fine of one hundred dollars, payable now.’ ‘I have no money, Your Honor.’ ‘What do you mean, you don’t have any money? You have a lawyer, you pay for a lawyer.’ ‘No, the ACLU gave me this lawyer.’ ‘Your Honor,’ Jerry says, ‘I’ll put up the hundred dollars, I’ll pay the hundred dollars, and we all go home.’ And then on the way out, St. John’s passes by us and says, so nobody but us can hear, ‘And which of you gets to screw with the girl?’ I said to him, ‘You mean, which of us Jews? We all do. We all get to screw the girl. Even my old zaydeh gets to screw her. My rabbi gets to screw her. Everybody gets to screw her except you, St. John’s. You get to go home and screw your wife. That’s what you’re sentenced to— screwing for life Mary Elizabeth, who worships her older sister the nun.’ So there was the flare-up, a fight mercifully cut short by Linc and Norm and Glekel, and this cost another hundred bucks, which Glekel paid, and then Linc and Norm paid Glekel back, and in all I got off lucky. It didn’t have to be an Enlightenment philosopher like Mulchrone up there. I could have got Savonarola.”

  I did, thought Sabbath. Thirty-three years later, I got Savonarola dressed up to look like a Japanese woman. Helen Trumbull. Kathy Goolsbee. The Savonarolas break them down. They don’t want my foot on hers or on anyone else’s. They want my foot like Linc’s in the casket, touching nothing and dead to the touch.

  Not for a second had Sabbath let her foot be. So close already to copulation! Not once throughout the entire performance did he lose her—unlike Norman, she was too entertained by him to seize up even momentarily each time he called Helen Debby or when, for her benefit, he put in the bit about licking the girl’s feet. She was right at his side, from the farce out on the street to the playground finale in Mulchrone’s courtroom, her large, plump laugh filled half with her earthy happiness and half with her wild distress. She was thinking, like Lear, “Let copulation thrive!” She was thinking (thought Sabbath) that in cahoots with this loathsome freak there might yet be a use to which she might put her old propensities and her pendulating breasts, still a chance for the old juicy way of life to make one big, last thumping stand against the inescapable rectitude, not to mention the boredom, of death. Linc did look bored. Good and green and bored. Don’t admonish me, Drenka—you’d do it in a shot. This is the crime we were wedded to. I’ll be as bored as you and Linc soon enough.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Everybody went to bed early. Sabbath knew enough not to get right into Debby’s things, and sure enough, only ten minutes after the dinner dishes had been cleared away and they’d all said good night, Norman had knocked at the door to give him a bathrobe and to ask if he wanted to see last Sunday’s Times before they threw it away. Had numerous sections of it clutched in his arms, and Sabbath decided to accept them, if for no other reason than so Norman could deceive himself, assuming he was so inclined, into thinking that the chazerai in the Sunday papers was the soporific his guest was using to put himself to sleep. It was probably no less dependable than ever, but Sabbath had a better idea. “I haven’t seen last Sunday’s Times for over thirty years,” Sabbath said, “but why not?” “Don’t you get the New York papers up there?” “I don’t get anything up there. If I read the New York papers, I’d be on Prozac too.” “Can you at least get a bagel on a Sunday morning?” “Any morning. We were a bagel-free zone for a very long time. One of the last. But now, except for a county in Alabama where the citizens voted no on a referendum, I believe the poor goy cannot elude the bagel anywhere in America. They’re everywhere. They’re like guns.” “And you don’t read the papers, Mickey? This is unimaginable to me,” Norm said. “I gave up reading the papers when I found that every day there was another story about the miracle of Japan. I can’t take the photographs of all those Japs wearing suits. What happened to their little uniforms? They must do a quick change for the photographer. When I hear the word Japan, I reach for my thermonuclear device.” Now that should send him packing . . . but no, he’d gone so far as to cause Norman to worry again. They were in the doorway of Debby’s room still and Sabbath could see that Norman, tired as he was, was about to come in now and have a talk—probably again about going to Graves. The guy’s name was Graves. Sabbath had begged off after the funeral, said he’d think about seeing the doctor another day. “I know what you’re wondering,” Sabbath quickly put in, “you’re wondering where do I get my news from—from television? No. Can’t. They’ve got Japs on TV too. All over the screen, little Japs holding elections, little Japs buying and selling stock, little Japs even shaking hands with our president—with the president of the United States! In his grave Franklin Roosevelt is spinning like an atomic dreydl. No, I prefer to live without the news. I got all the news I need about those bastards a long time ago. Their prosperity creates difficulties for my sense of fair play. The Land of the Rising Nikkei Average. I’m proud to say I still have all my marbles as far as racial hatred is concerned. Despite all my many troubles, I continue to know what matters in life: profound hatred. One of the few remaining things I take seriously. Once, at my wife’s suggestion, I tried to go a whole week without it. Nearly did me in. Week of great spiritual tribulation that was for me. I’d say hating the Japanese plays a leading role in every aspect of my life. Here, of course, in New York, you New Yorkers love the Japanese because they brought you raw fish. The great bonanza of raw fish. They serve raw fish to people of our race, and, as though we were prisoners on the Bataan death march who have no choice, who would starve to death otherwise, the people of our race eat it. And pay for it. Leave tips. I don’t get it. After the war was over we shouldn’t have allowed them ever to fish again. You lost the right to fish, you bastards, on December 7, 1941. Catch one fish, one, and we will show you the rest of the arsenal. Who else would so relish eating fish raw? Between their cannibalism and their prosperity, they affront me, you know? His Highness. Do they still have ‘His Highness’? Do they still have their ‘glory’? Are they still glorious, the Japanese? I don’t know, for some reason all my racial hatred leaps to the fore just thinking about how glorious they are. Norman, I have so much to put up with in life. Professional failure. Physical deformity. Personal disgrace. My wife is a recovering alcoholic who goes to AA to learn how to forget to speak English. Never blessed with children. Children never blessed with me. Many, many disappointments. Do I have to put up with the prosperity of the Japanese, too? That could really push me over the edge. Maybe it’s what did it to Linc. What the yen has done to the dollar, who knows if that didn’t do it to him. Me it kills. Oh, it kills me so much I wouldn’t mind—what’s the ex
pression they use now when they want to bomb the shit out of someone? ‘Send them a message.’ I’d like to send them a message and rain just a little more terror down on their fucking heads. Still great believers, are they, in taking things by force? Still inspired, are they, by the territorial imperative?—” “Mickey, Mickey, Mickey—whoa, slow down, cool it, Mick,” pleaded Norman. “Do they still have that fucking flag?” “Mick—” “Just answer that. I’m asking a guy who reads the New York Times a question. You read the ‘News of the Week in Review.’ You watch Peter Jennings. You’re an up-to-the-minute guy. Do they still have that flag?” “Yes, they have that flag.” “Well, they shouldn’t have a flag. They shouldn’t be allowed to fish and they shouldn’t have a flag, and they shouldn’t come over here and shake anybody’s hand!” “Kid, you’re off and runnin’ tonight, you haven’t stopped,” Norman said, “you’re—” “I’m fine. I’m just telling you why I gave up on the news. The Japs. That’s it in a nutshell. Thanks for the paper. Thanks for everything. The dinner. The handkerchiefs. The money. Thanks, buddy. I’m going to sleep.” “You should.” “I will. I’m beat.” “Good night, Mick. And slow down. Just slow down and get some sleep.”

  Sleep? How could he ever sleep again? There they are. Sabbath tossed the heap of paper onto the bed, and what slides out of the center but the business section—and there they are! Big headline running across all but one column of the page: “The Men Who Really Run Fortress Japan.” That can gall ya! Fortress Japan! And under it, “Bad news for business: The Prime Minister is quitting. But the bureaucrats not.” Headlines, photos, paragraph after infuriating paragraph not only dominating the front of the business section but running over and taking up most of page 8, where there’s a graph, and another photo of another Jap, and that headline again, ending with “Fortress Japan.” Three of them on the front page, each with his own picture. None of them wearing their little uniforms. All of them in ties and shirts, pretending to be ordinary peace-loving people. They’ve got mock-ups of offices behind them, so as to make the readers of the Times think they work in offices like human beings and aren’t flying around conquering countries in their fucking Zeroes. “They are among an intellectually nimble, hard-working elite of 11,000 sitting atop Japan’s million or so national civil servants. They oversee perhaps the most closely regulated economy in . . .” The caption beneath one of the photographs—Sabbath could not believe it. According to the caption, the Jap in the photograph “says he was burned by U.S. negotiators. . . .” Burned? His skin burned? How much of it? Morty’s burns covered eighty percent of his body. How much of his body did the U.S. negotiators burn on this son of a bitch? Doesn’t look very burned to me. I don’t see any burns at all. We’ve got to give our negotiators more kerosene—we’ve got to get negotiators who know how to build a fire under these bastards! “What has gone wrong? Japanese officials say that the United States has demanded too much. . . .” Oh, you fuckers, you filthy, fanatical, fucking imperialist Jap fuckers . . .

  His speaking aloud must have been what prompted the knock on the door. But when he opened it once again to assure Norman that he was fine, just reading the Japanese papers, there was Michelle. At dinner she’d been wearing black tights and a narrow rust-colored velvety top that came down to her thighs: sham waifdom. Intended to awaken what fantasy in me? Or maybe she was confiding in him an original of her own: I am Robin Hood; I give to the poor. At any rate, she had changed now into—Christ, a kimono. Flowers all over it. Those wide sleeves. Into a Japanese kimono down to her feet. Yet the abhorrence inflamed by that paper’s contemptible paean to Fortress Japan was subsumed instantaneously in his excitement. Beneath the kimono there appeared to be only her biography. He liked the extreme boyish way her hair was cut. Big tits and a boy’s short haircut. And a well-worn woman’s lines around the eyes. This look took a firmer hold on him than the first, the Central Park West Peter Pan. Something French now wafting around her. You get this look in Paris. You get this in Madrid. You get this in Barcelona, in the really classy places. There were a few times in my life, in Paris and other places, where I liked her so well that I gave her my number and my address and I said, “Anytime you come to America, look me up.” I remember one said she was going to do some traveling. I’ve been waiting for that whore to call ever since. Michelle’s family background was, in fact, French—Norman had told him so before dinner. Maiden name Boucher. And she looked it now, too, whereas in the dirty pictures, with her hair tautly back and the body unsurpassingly gaunt, she had looked to him like some rich Jewish husband’s Canyon Ranch Carmen. The middle-aged dieters from the spa down in Lenox sometimes came to Madamaska Falls to visit the Indian sites when they were bored with their tofu at a hundred smackers a plate. Some ten years back he’d made a stab at picking up two of them who’d driven all the way out from Canyon Ranch for an afternoon of sightseeing. But when he offered—admittedly, early in the game—to guide them along the falls to the ridge where the Madamaskas used to initiate their maidens into the sacred mysteries with a gourd, all their anthropological ignorance was glaringly revealed and they drove off. “It wasn’t my idea,” he called after the Audi, “it was theirs, the Native Americans’!” He’d be hearing from those two when he heard from that whore.

  But here was the former Mademoiselle Boucher, New Jersey’s Colette, brimming over with boredom. She did not love her husband and she had come to a decision. Thus the kimono. Nothing Japanese about it at all—it was the most scandalous thing she could get away with in the circumstances. She was shrewd. He knew her lingerie drawer. He knew she could do better. He knew she would, too. Isn’t it something the way the course of a life can change overnight? Never, never would he voluntarily depart this stupendous madness over fucking.

  She said she had forgotten earlier to give him the prescription for Zantac. Here it was. Zantac was what he took to try to control the stomach pains and the diarrhea produced by the Voltaren that lessened the pain in his hands, providing he didn’t use a knife and fork, drive a car, tie his shoelaces, or wipe his ass. If only he had the money, he could go out and hire some enterprising Jap to wipe his ass, one of the intellectually nimble, hardworking elite of 11,000 sitting atop—“sitting atop.” They know how to write in those enlightened papers. I should start taking the Times. Hep me with learn Engwish so no more get me burn by U.S. My brother’s legs were two charred timbers. Had he even lived, he would have been legless. The legless track star of Asbury High.

  Pills and pain. Aldomet for my blood pressure and Zantac for my gut. A to Z. Then you die.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Never before received a prescription from a doctor in a kimono.”

  “Our era has lost much to commercial inelegance,” she replied, pleasing him no end with a geisha bow. “Norman thinks you might want to have those pants of yours dry-cleaned.” She pointed to his corduroys. “And that jacket, the mackinaw, that odd thing you wear with the pockets.”

  “The Green Torpedo.”

  “Yes. Maybe the Green Torpedo could use a cleaning.”

  “You want the trousers now?”

  “We are not children, Mr. Sabbath.”

  He retreated into Debby’s bedroom and slipped off his pants. Norman’s robe, a colorful full-length velour robe with a belt long enough to hang himself, was still where he’d dropped it beside his jacket on the carpet. He returned to her, enwrapped in the robe, to make an offering of his dirty clothes. The robe trailed behind him like a gown. Norman was six two.

  She took the clothes without a word, without the slightest manifestation of the squeamishness she had every right to feel. Those pants had had an active life during the last several weeks, a real full life such as would leave an ordinary person exhausted. Every indignity he had ever suffered seemed collected and preserved in the loose-fitting seat of those old pants, their cuffs encrusted with mud from the cemetery. But they did not appear to repel her, as he had momentarily feared while undressing. Of course not. She deals with dirt all day. Norman had narra
ted the whole saga. Pyorrhea. Gingivitis. Swollen gums. One schmutzig mouth after another. Schmutz is her métier. Crud is what she works away at with her instruments. Drawn not to Norman but to crud. Scrape the tartar. Scrape the pockets. . . . Seeing Michelle so enthrallingly kimono’d, his schmutzig clothes balled up under her arm—and with her geisha boy haircut lending just the right touch of transsexual tawdriness to the whole slatternly picture—he knew he could kill for her. Kill Norman. Push him out the fucking window. All that marmalade, mine.

  So. Here we are. The moon is high, somewhere there’s music, Norman’s dead, and it’s just me and this betitted pretty-boy in his flowered kimono. Missed my chance with a man. That Nebraska guy who gave me the books on the tanker. Yeats. Conrad. O’Neill. He would have taught me more than what to read if I’d let him. Wonder what it’s like. Ask her, she’ll tell you. The only other people who fuck men are women.