Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “Why do you like to look this way?” she asked, patting the dirty clothes.

  “What other way is there to look?”

  “Norman says that, when you were young, to look at you was to die. He says Linc used to say, ‘There’s a bull in Sabbath. He goes all out.’ He says people couldn’t take their eyes off of you. A force. A free spirit.”

  “Why would he say that? To justify having seated at your dinner table a nobody nobody can possibly take seriously? Who of your social class can take seriously someone like me, steeped in selfishness, and with my terrible level of morality, and lacking all the appurtenances that go with all the right ideals?”

  “You have great eloquence at your command.”

  “I learned early on that people seem more easily to pass over how short I am when I am linguistically large.”

  “Norman says you were the most brilliant young fellow he ever met.”

  “Tell him he doesn’t have to.”

  “He adored you. He still has a lot of feeling for you.”

  “Yeah, well, a lot of well-bred people need their real-lifer. Normal enough. I’d been to sea. I’d been to Rome. Whores on more than one continent—a laudable achievement in those years. Showed’em I’d escaped the bourgeois trammels. Educated bourgeoisie like to admire someone who’s escaped the bourgeois trammels—reminds them of their college ideals. When I got written up in the Nation for taking a tit out on the street I was their noble savage for a week. Today they’d excoriate my balls off for so much as thinking about it, but in those days that made me heroic to all right-thinking people. Dissenter. Maverick. Menace to society. Great. I would bet you that even today part of being a cultivated millionaire in New York is having an interest in a disgraceful person. Linc and Norm and their friends got a big kick then out of just saying my name. Gave them a spacious feeling of being illegit. A puppeteer who takes tits out on the street—like knowing a boxer, like helping a convict publish his sonatinas. To add to the fun I had a crazy young wife. An actress. Mick and Nikk, their favorite pathological couple.”

  “And she?”

  “I murdered she.”

  “Norman says she disappeared.”

  “No. I murdered her.”

  “How much does this act cost you? How much of an act do you really need?”

  “What other way is there for me to be? If you know, I’d like you to tell me. There is no stupidity that fails to interest me,” he said, feigning anger only a little—the “really” had been a cheap shot. “What other way is there to act?”

  He liked that she did not appear intimidated. Refused to back off. That was good. Well schooled by her old man. Nonetheless, suppress the inclination to undo the kimono. Not yet.

  “You’ll do anything,” she said, “not to be winning. But why do you behave this way? Primal emotions and indecent language and orderly complex sentences.”

  “I’m not big on oughts, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t entirely believe that. As much as he wants to be the Marquis de Sade, Mickey Sabbath is not. The degraded quality is not in your voice.”

  “Neither was it in the Marquis de Sade’s. Neither is it in yours.”

  “Freed from the desire to please,” she said. “A giddy feeling. What has it got you?”

  “What has it got you?”

  “Me? I’m pleasing people all the time,” she said. “I’ve been pleasing people since I was born.”

  “Which people?”

  “Teachers. Parents. Husband. Children. Patients. All people.”

  “Lovers?”

  “Yes.”

  Now.

  “Please me, Michelle,” and, taking her by one wrist, he tried to pull her into Debby’s room.

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Come on, you’ve read Kant. ‘Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law.’ Please me.”

  Her arms were strong from scraping all that crud away and his were no longer a seaman’s. No longer even a puppeteer’s. He could not budge her.

  “Why were you pressing Norman’s foot throughout dinner?”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” she whispered—and that laugh, that laugh, a mere tendril of it was marvelous! “You were playing footsie with my husband. I expect an explanation.”

  “No.”

  And now she gave over the whole provocative thing—softly, because they were only down the hall from the conjugal bed, but the whole branching tangle of contradictions that was her laugh. “Yes, yes.” The kimono. The whispering. The haircut. The laugh. And so little time left.

  “Come in.”

  “Don’t be insane.”

  “You’re great. You’re a great woman. Come inside.”

  “Unbridled excess knows no limit in you,” she said, “but I suffer from a severe predilection not to ruin my life.”

  “What did Norman say about my foot? How come he didn’t just throw me out?”

  “He thinks you’re having a breakdown. He thinks you’re cracking up. He thinks you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. He’s intent on getting you to his psychiatrist. He says you need help.”

  “You’re all I thought you were. You’re more, Michelle. Norman told me the whole story. Those upper third molars. Like cleaning windows at the top of the Empire State Building.”

  “Your mouth could use a little going-over. The interdental papilla? That little piece of flesh that sticks out between each tooth? Red. Swollen. Might want to investigate that further.”

  “Then come in, for God’s sake. Investigate the papilla. Investigate the molars. Pull’em out. Whatever makes you happy. I want to make you happy. My teeth, my gums, my larynx, my kidneys— if it works and you like it, take it, it’s yours. I cannot believe that I was playing with Norman’s foot. It felt so good. Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he get down there under the table and pick it up and place it where it was supposed to be? I thought he was such a great host. I thought he had all this feeling for me. Yet he placidly sits there and allows my foot not to be where he knows full well I want it to be. And at his dinner table. Where I am an invited guest. I didn’t beg to eat here, he asked me to. I’m really surprised at him. I want your foot.”

  “Not now.”

  “Don’t you find that the simplest formulations in English are barely endurable? ‘Not now.’ Say that again. Treat me like shit. Temper me like steel—”

  “Calm down. Control yourself. Quiet, please.”

  “Say it again.”

  “Not now.”

  “When?”

  “Saturday. Come to my office Saturday.”

  “Today’s Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—no, no. Absolutely not. I’m sixty-four years old. Saturday’s too late.”

  “Calm.”

  “If Yahweh wanted me to be calm, he would have made me a goy. Four days. No. Now.”

  “We can’t,” she whispered. “Come Saturday—I’ll give you a periodontal probe.”

  “Oh, okay. You’ve got a customer. Saturday. Okay. Wonderful. How do you do it?”

  “I’ve got an instrument for it. I stick my instrument into your periodontal pocket. I enter the gingival crevice.”

  “More. More. Speak to me about the business end of your instrument.”

  “It’s a very fine instrument. It won’t hurt. It’s slender. It’s flat. It’s about a millimeter wide. Perhaps ten millimeters long.”

  “You think metrically.” Drenka.

  “It’s the only area in which I think metrically.”

  “Will I bleed?” he asked.

  “Just a drop or two.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Christ . . .” she said and allowed her forehead to fall forward onto his. To rest there. It was a moment unlike any he’d had all day. Week. Month. Year. He calmed down.

  “How,” she asked, “did we arrive at this so soon?”

  “It’s a consequence of living a long time. There
isn’t forever to fuck around.”

  “But you are a maniac,” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know. It takes two to tangle.”

  “You do a lot of things that most people don’t do.”

  “What do I do that you don’t do?”

  “Express yourself.”

  “And you don’t do that?”

  “Hardly. You have the body of an old man, the life of an old man, the past of an old man, and the instinctive force of a two-year-old.”

  What is happiness? The substantiality of this woman. The compound she was. The wit, the gameness, the shrewdness, the fatty tissue, the odd indulgence in high-flown words, that laugh marked with life, her responsibility to everything, not excluding her carnality—there was stature in this woman. Mockery. Play. The talent and taste for the clandestine, the knowledge that everything subterranean beats everything terranean by a mile, a certain physical poise, the poise that is the purest expression of her sexual freedom. And the conspiratorial understanding with which she spoke, her terror of the clock running down . . . Must everything be behind her? No! No! The ruthless lyricism of Michelle’s soliloquy: and no I said no I will No.

  “Adultery is a tough business,” he whispered to her. “The main thing is to be clear about wanting it. The rest is incidental.”

  “Incidental,” she sighed.

  “God, I’m fond of adultery. Aren’t you?” He dared to take her face in his crippled hands and to trace the boyish haircut around at the neckline with that middle finger for which they had once arrested him, the middle finger whose sweet talk was thought to have traumatized or hypnotized or tyrannized Helen Trumbull. Yeah, they had it all figured out in 1956. They still have. “The softness it brings to the hardness,” he went on. “A world without adultery is unthinkable. The brutal inhumanity of those against it. Don’t you agree? The sheer fucking depravity of their views. The madness. There is no punishment too extreme for the crazy bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity. To demand of human flesh fidelity. The cruelty of it, the mockery of it, is simply unspeakable.”

  He would never let her get away. Here was Drenka, only instead of the colloquialisms that she fucked up in her ardor to engage the teacher and enjoy his games, speaking charmingly humorous, delectable English. Drenka, it’s you, only from suburban New Jersey instead of Split. I know because this high degree of excitement I experience with no one but you—this is your warm body resurrected! Out o’ the grave. Morty next.

  He chose then to undo his own robe rather than hers—the six-footer’s velour robe, with the Paris label, that made him look like the Little King in the old comic strip—to introduce her to his hard-on. They should meet. “Behold the arrow of desire,” said Sabbath.

  But one glimpse caused her to recoil. “Not now,” she warned again, and this breathy utterance won his heart. Even better was watching her run off. Like a thief. Running but willing. Running but ready.

  He had a reason to live until Saturday. A new collaborator to replace the old one. The vanishing collaborator, indispensable to Sabbath’s life—it wouldn’t have been Sabbath’s life otherwise: Nikki disappearing, Drenka dying, Roseanna drinking, Kathy indicting him . . . his mother . . . his brother. . . . If only he could stop replacing them. Miscasting them. Since the latest loss, he’d really been out there calibrating the dread. And to think that as a puppeteer he could do it without even a puppet, a full life with just his fingers.

  Saturday, he decided, we’ll make the quick reassessment. No shortage of sharp objects lying about in her dental tray. He’d swipe a curette, end it that way, if, that is, it all went nowhere. Let the adventure occur, O Lord Dionysus, Noble Bull, Mighty Maker of the Sperm of All Male Creatures. It’s not life repossessed that I expect to encounter. That exaltation is long gone. It’s more what Krupa used to call to Goodman when Benny was ridin’ solo on “China Boy.” “Take one more, Ben! Take one more!”

  Providing she doesn’t come to her senses, the last of the collaborators. Take one more.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Of the second night that Sabbath spent in Debby’s room, suffice it to say—before moving on to the crisis of the morning—that his thoughts were of both mother and daughter, singly and together. He was under the spell of the tempter whose task it is to pump the hormone preposterone into the male bloodstream.

  In the morning, after a leisurely bath in Debby’s tub, he took a wonderful crap in her toilet—satisfying stools easily urged forth, density, real dimension, so unlike the sickbed stuff that, on an ordinary day, streamed intermittently out of him because of the agitating action of Voltaren. He bequeathed unto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm. The robust road again! I have a mistress! He felt as overcome and nonsensical as Emma Bovary out riding with Rodolphe. In the masterpieces they’re always killing themselves when they commit adultery. He wanted to kill himself when he couldn’t.

  After meticulously returning to the dresser and the closet every stitch of Debby’s he’d venerated during the night, adorned for the first time in decades in all new clothes, he came stomping into the kitchen to find the party was over. Norman had delayed his departure to tell Sabbath that he was to get out after breakfast. Michelle was off at work but her instructions were that Sabbath be ejected immediately. Norman told him to go ahead and have breakfast but to leave after that. In the jacket Sabbath had given Michelle to send to the cleaners, she’d found a bag of crack, which Norman had in front of him on the table. Sabbath remembered having bought it the morning before on the streets of the Lower East Side, bought it for a joke, for no reason at all, because he was getting a kick out of the dealer.

  “And these. In your trousers.”

  The father was holding in his hand the daughter’s floral underpants. During all of the day’s excitements and difficulties, when exactly had Sabbath forgotten that the panties were in his pocket? He could clearly remember, at the funeral, rolling them around in his pocket through the two-hour amusement of the eulogies. Who wouldn’t have? Overflow crowd. Broadway and Hollywood people—Linc’s most famous friends—each in turn recollecting the corpse. The predictable torrent of claptrap. The two sons spoke and the daughter—the architect, the lawyer, the psychiatric social worker. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. Except Enid, heavyset, white-haired, dowagerly, as unrecognizable to him at first as he was to her. “It’s Mickey Sabbath,” Norm had said to her. He and Sabbath, after identifying Linc’s body, had come back to the anteroom where Enid sat alone with the family. “He drove down from New England.” “My God,” said Enid, and clutching Sabbath’s hand she began to cry. “And I haven’t shed a tear all day,” she told Sabbath with a helpless laugh. “Oh, Mickey, Mickey, I did a terrible thing just three weeks ago.” Hadn’t seen Sabbath in over thirty years, and yet to him she confessed the terrible thing she had done. Because he knew what it was to do terrible things? Or because terrible things had been done to him? Most likely the former. Reaching into my pocket, knowing they were there, silk putty to knead painfully while each of the eulogists stood across from the coffin and described the suicide’s comic antics, how he loved to play with children, how everybody’s kids loved him, how endearingly, wonderfully eccentric he was. . . . Then the young rabbi. Take the beauty out of the tragedy. Half an hour to explain to us how that’s done. Lincoln isn’t really dead, in our hearts this love lives on. True, true. Yet at the open coffin, when I asked, “Linc, what would you like for dinner tonight?” I got no answer. That proves something, too. Guy next to me, without a pocketful of panties to ease the pain, couldn’t resist the anti-clerical aperçu. “He plays it a little girlish for my taste.” “I think he’s auditioning,” I replied. He liked that. “I’m not going to mind never seeing him again,” the guy whispered. I thought he meant the rabbi, only out on the street realized that he’d meant the deceased. A young TV star gets up, sleek in a black sheath dress, smiling to beat the band, and she tells everybody to hold hands with everybody else and observ
e a minute of silence remembering Linc. I held the hand of the nasty guy next to me. Had to take a hand out of my pocket to do it—and that’s when I forget the underpants! Then Linc: green. The man was green. Then my hideous fingers clasped in Enid’s while she confessed the terrible thing she’d done. “I couldn’t take the tremor any longer and I hit him. I hit him, with a book, and I shouted, ‘Stop shaking! Stop shaking!’ There were some times when he could stop—he would bring all his strength to bear on it and the shaking would stop. He’d hold out his hands for me to see. But if he succeeded in doing that, he couldn’t do anything else. All his systems had to be recruited to stop shaking. The result was he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t answer the simplest question.” “Why was he shaking?” I asked her, because just that morning, in Rosa’s embrace, I’d been shaking myself. “Either the medication,” she said, “or the fear. They released him from the hospital when he could eat again and sleep again, and they said he was no longer suicidal. But he was still depressed and frightened and crazy. And he had the tremor. I couldn’t live with him any longer. I moved him to an apartment around the corner a year and a half ago. I phoned him every day, but this last winter three months went by when I didn’t see him. He phoned me. Sometimes ten times a day he phoned me. To see if I was all right. He was terrified that I was going to get sick and disappear. When he saw me he’d burst into tears. He was always the crier in the family, but this was something else. This was ultrahelplessness. He cried from the pain—from the terror. It never let up. But still I thought he was going to get better. I thought, Someday it’s going to be the way it used to be. He’ll make us all laugh.” “Enid, do you know who I am,” asked Sabbath, “who you are telling all this to?” But she did not even hear his words, and Sabbath understood that she was telling this to everyone. He was just the last one to hit the anteroom. “Three months in the hospital with a lot of crazy people,” she said. “But after the first week he felt safe there. The first night they put him in bed next to a man who was dying—it terrorized him. Then in a room with three others, truly screwy people. Near the end of his stay I took him out to lunch twice, but apart from that he never left the hospital. Bars on the windows. The suicide watch. Seeing his face behind the barred windows, waiting for us to come—” She told him so much, she held him to her so long, that in the end he forgot what in his pocket he had been clinging to. Then at dinner he started telling his story. . . .