Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “First tell me why.”

  “I’m suffering.”

  She was. He’d seen her suffer and this was what it looked like. The blurriness broadened out from the middle of her face rather like an eraser crossing a blackboard and leaving in its wake a wide streak of negated meaning. You didn’t see a face any longer but a bowl of stupefaction. Whenever the rift between her husband and their son erupted in a screaming fight she invariably wound up looking just this awful when she ran to Sabbath, numb and incoherent with fear, her sprightly cunning having evaporated before their improbable capacity for rage and its vile rhetoric. Sabbath assured her—largely without conviction—that they would not kill each other. But more than once he had himself contemplated with a shudder what might be roiling away beneath the lid of the relentlessly genial good manners that made the Balich men so impenetrably dull. Why had the boy become a cop? Why did he want to be out risking his life looking for criminals with a revolver and handcuffs and a lethal little club when there was a small fortune to be made pleasing the happy guests at the inn? And, after seven years, why couldn’t the amiable father forgive him? Why did he wind up charging his son with wrecking his life every single time they met? Granted that each had his own hidden reality, that like everyone else they were not without duality, granted that they were not entirely rational people and that they lacked wit or irony of any kind—nonetheless, where was the bottom in these Matthews? Sabbath privately conceded that Drenka had good reason to be as agitated as she was by the tremendous force of their antagonism (especially as one of them was armed), but since she was never remotely their target, he advised her neither to take a side nor to intercede—in time the heat would have to die down, et cetera, et cetera. And eventually, when her terror had begun to lift and the liveliness that was Drenka repossessed her features, she told him that she loved him, that she couldn’t possibly live without him, that, as she so spartanly put it, “I couldn’t carry out my responsibilities without you.” Without what they got up to together, she could never be so good! Licking those sizable breasts, whose breastish reality seemed no less tantalizingly outlandish than it would have when he was fourteen, Sabbath told her that he felt the same about her, allowed it while looking up at her with that smile of his that did not make entirely clear who or what precisely he had it in mind to deride—confessed it certainly with nothing like her declamatory ardor, said it almost as though deliberately to make it appear perfunctory, and yet, stripped of all its derisive trappings, his “Feel the same way about you” happened to be true. Life was as unthinkable for Sabbath without the successful innkeeper’s promiscuous wife as it was for her without the remorseless puppeteer. No one to conspire with, no one on earth with whom to give free rein to his most vital need!

  “And you?” he asked. “Will you be faithful to me? Is that what you are suggesting?”

  “I don’t want anyone else.”

  “Since when? Drenka, I see you suffering, I don’t want you to suffer, but I cannot take seriously what you are asking of me. How do you justify wishing to impose on me restrictions that you have never imposed on yourself? You are asking for fidelity of a kind that you’ve never bothered to bestow on your own husband and that, were I to do what you request, you would still be denying him because of me. You want monogamy outside marriage and adultery inside marriage. Maybe you’re right and that’s the only way to do it. But for that you will have to find a more rectitudinous old man.” Elaborate. Formal. Perfectly overprecise.

  “Your answer is no.”

  “Could it possibly be yes?”

  “And so now you will get rid of me? Overnight? Like that? After thirteen years?”

  “I am confused by you. I can’t follow you. What exactly is happening here today? It’s not I but you who proposed this ultimatum out of the fucking blue. It’s you who presented me with the either/or. It’s you who is getting rid of me overnight . . . unless, of course, I consent to become overnight a sexual creature of the kind I am not and never have been. Follow me, please. I must become a sexual creature of the kind that you have yourself never dreamed of being. In order to preserve what we have remarkably sustained by forthrightly pursuing together our sexual desires—are you with me?—my sexual desires must be deformed, since it is unarguable that, like you—you until today, that is—I am not by nature, inclination, practice, or belief a monogamous being. Period. You wish to impose a condition that either deforms me or turns me into a dishonest man with you. But like all other living creatures I suffer when I am deformed. And it shocks me, I might add, to think that the forthrightness that has sustained and excited us both, that provides such a healthy contrast to the routine deceitfulness that is the hallmark of a hundred million marriages, including yours and mine, is now less to your taste than the solace of conventional lies and repressive puritanism. As a self-imposed challenge, repressive puritanism is fine with me, but it is Titoism, Drenka, inhuman Titoism, when it seeks to impose its norms on others by self-righteously suppressing the satanic side of sex.”

  “You sound like stupid Tito when you lecture me like this! Please stop it!”

  They hadn’t spread their tarpaulin or removed a single item of their clothing but had remained in their sweatshirts and jeans, and Sabbath in his knitted seaman’s cap, sitting backed against a rock. Drenka meanwhile paced in rapid circles the high ring of elephantine boulders, her hands fluttering anxiously through her hair or reaching out to feel against her fingertips the cool familiar surface of their hideaway’s rough walls—and could not but remind him of Nikki in the last act of The Cherry Orchard. Nikki, his first wife, the fragile, volatile Greek American girl whose pervasive sense of crisis he’d mistaken for a deep spirit and whom he had Chekhovianly nicknamed “A-Crisis-a-Day” until a day came when the crisis of being herself simply swept Nikki away.

  The Cherry Orchard was one of the first plays he’d directed in New York after the two years of puppet school on the GI Bill in Rome. Nikki had played Madame Ranyevskaya as a ruined flapper, for someone so absurdly young in that role, counterbalancing delicately the satire and the pathos. In the last act, when everything has been packed and the distraught family is preparing to abandon forever the ancestral home, Sabbath had asked Nikki to go silently around the empty room brushing all the walls with the tips of her fingers. No tears, please. Just circle the room touching the bare walls and then leave—that’ll do it. And everything she was asked to do, Nikki did exquisitely . . . and it was for him rendered not quite satisfactory by the fact that whatever she played, however well, she was still also Nikki. This “also” in actors drove him eventually back to puppets, who had never to pretend, who never acted. That he generated their movement and gave each a voice never compromised their reality for Sabbath in the way that Nikki, fresh and eager and with all that talent, seemed always less than convincing to him because of being a real person. With puppets you never had to banish the actor from the role. There was nothing false or artificial about puppets, nor were they “metaphors” for human beings. They were what they were, and no one had to worry that a puppet would disappear, as Nikki had, right off the face of the earth.

  “Why,” Drenka cried, “are you making fun of me? Of course you outsmart me, you outsmart everyone, outtalk every—”

  “Yes, yes,” he replied. “Luxurious unseriousness was what the outsmarter often felt the greater the seriousness with which he conversed. Detailed, scrupulous, loquacious rationality was generally to be suspected when Morris Sabbath was the speaker. Though not even he could always be certain whether the nonsense so articulated was wholly nonsensical. No, there was nothing simple about being as misleading—”

  “Stop it! Stop it, please, being a maniac!”

  “Only if you stop it being an idiot! Why on this issue are you suddenly so stupid? Exactly what am I to do, Drenka? Take an oath? Are you going to administer an oath? What are the words to the oath? Please list all the things that I am not allowed to do. Penetration. Is that it, is that all? What about
a kiss? What about a phone call? And will you take the oath too? And how will I know if you’ve upheld it? You never have before.”

  And just when Silvija is coming back, Sabbath was thinking. Is that what’s provoked all this, her fear of what she might be impelled to do for Sabbath in the excitement of the excitement? The summer before, Silvija, Matija’s niece, had lived with the Baliches up at the house while working as a waitress in the inn’s dining room. Silvija was an eighteen-year-old college student in Split and had taken her vacation in America to improve her English. Having shed any and all qualms in twenty-four hours, Drenka had brought to Sabbath, sometimes stuffed in her pocket, sometimes hidden in her purse, Silvija’s soiled underthings. She wore them for him and pretended to be Silvija. She passed them up and down the length of his long white beard and pressed them to his parted lips. She bandaged his erection in the straps and cups, stroked him enwrapped in the silky fabric of Silvija’s tiny bra. She drew his feet through the legs of Silvija’s bikini underpants and worked them up as far as she could along his heavy thighs. “Say the things,” he told her, “say everything,” and she did. “Yes, you have my permission, you dirty man, yes,” she said, “you can have her, I give her to you, you can have her tight young pussy, you dirty, filthy man. . . .” Silvija was a slight, seraphic thing with very white skin and reddish ringlets who wore small round glasses with metal frames that made her look like a studious child. “Photographs,” Sabbath instructed Drenka, “find photographs. There must be photographs, they all take photographs.” No, no way. Not meek little Silvija. Impossible, said Drenka, but the next day, going through Silvija’s dresser, Drenka uncovered from beneath her cotton nighties a stack of Polaroids that Silvija had brought from Split to keep from becoming homesick. They were mainly pictures of her mother and father, her older sister, her boyfriend, her dog, but one photograph was of Silvija and another girl her age wearing only pantyhose and posing sideways in the doorway between two rooms of an apartment. The other girl was much larger than Silvija, a robust, bulky, big-breasted girl with a pumpkinish face who was hugging Silvija from behind while Silvija bent forward, her minute buttocks thrust into the other one’s groin. Silvija had her head thrown back and her mouth wide open, feigning ecstasy or perhaps just laughing heartily at the silliness of what they were up to. On the reverse side of the photograph, in the half inch at the top where she carefully identified the people in each of the pictures, Silvija had written, in Serbo-Croatian, “Nera odpozadi”—Nera from the rear. The “odpozadi” was no less inflammatory than the picture, and he looked from one side of the photograph to the other all the while that Drenka improvised for him with Silvija’s toylike brassiere. One Monday, when the kitchen at the inn was closed and Matija had taken Silvija off for the day to see historic Boston, Drenka squeezed into the folk dirndl with the full black skirt and the tight, embroidered bodice in which Silvija, like the other waitresses, served the Baliches’ customers and, in the guest room where Silvija was spending the summer, laid herself fully clothed across the bed. There was she “seduced,” “Silvija” protesting all the while that “Mr. Sabbath” must promise never to tell her aunt and her uncle what she had agreed to do for money. “I never had a man before. I only had my boyfriend, and he comes so soon. I never had a man like you.” “Can I come inside you, Silvija?” “Yes, yes, I always wanted a man to come inside me. Just don’t tell my aunt and my uncle!” “I fuck your aunt. I fuck Drenka.” “Oh, do you? My aunt? Do you? Is she a better fuck than me?” “No, never, no.” “Is her pussy tight like me?” “Oh, Silvija—your aunt is standing at the door. She’s watching us!” “Oh, my God—!” “She wants to fuck with us, too.” “Oh, my God, I never tried that before—”

  Little was left undone that first afternoon, and Sabbath was still safely out of Silvija’s room hours before the girl returned with her uncle. They couldn’t have enjoyed themselves more—so said Silvija, Matija, Drenka, Sabbath. Everybody was happy that summer, including even Sabbath’s wife, to whom he was more kindly disposed than he had been for years—there were times now over breakfast when he not only pretended to inquire about her AA meeting but pretended to listen to her answer. And Matija, who on his Mondays off drove Silvija into Vermont and New Hampshire and, on one occasion, to the very end of Cape Cod, seemed to have rediscovered in the role of uncle to his brother’s daughter something akin to the satisfaction he had once derived from, all too successfully, making a real American out of his son. The summer had been an idyll for everyone, and when she left for home after Labor Day Silvija was speaking endearingly unidiomatic English and carried a letter from Drenka to her parents—not the one devilishly composed in English by Sabbath—reiterating the invitation for the youngster to return to work in the restaurant and live with them again the next summer.

  To Sabbath’s question—whether, if she herself were to swear to an oath of fidelity, she would have the strength to uphold it—Drenka replied of course she would, yes, she loved him.

  “You love your husband, too. You love Matija.”

  “That is not the same.”

  “But what about six months from now? For years you were angry at him and hated him. Felt so imprisoned by him you even thought of poisoning him. That’s how crazy one man was making you. Then you began to love another man and discovered in time that you could now love Matija as well. If you didn’t have to pretend to desire him, you could be a good and happy wife to him. Because of you I’m not entirely horrible to Roseanna. I admire Roseanna, she’s a real soldier, trooping off to AA every night—those meetings are for her what this is for us, a whole other life to make home endurable. But now you want to change all that, not just for us, but for Roseanna and Matija. Yet why you want to do this you won’t tell me.”

  “Because I want you to say, after thirteen years, ‘Drenka, I love you, and you are the only woman I want.’ The time has come to tell me that!”

  “Why has it come? Have I missed something?”

  She was crying again when she said, “I sometimes think you miss everything.”

  “I don’t. No. I disagree. I actually don’t think I miss anything. I haven’t missed the fact that you were frightened to leave Matija even when things were at their worst, because if you left you’d be high and dry, without your share of the inn. You were afraid to leave Matija because he speaks your language and ties you to your past. You were afraid to leave Matija because he is, without doubt, a kind, strong, responsible man. But mostly Matija means money. Despite all this love you have for me, you never once suggested that we leave our mates and run off together, for the simple reason that I am penniless and he is rich. You don’t want to be a pauper’s wife, though it is all right to be a pauper’s girlfriend, especially when you are able, with the pauper’s encouragement, to fuck everybody else on the side.”

  This made Drenka smile—even in her misery the cunning smile that few aside from Sabbath had ever got to admire. “Yes? And if I had announced I was leaving Matija, you would have run away with me? As stupid as I am? Yes? As bad an accent as I have? Without all the life that I am bound by? Of course it’s you that makes marriage to Matija possible—but it’s Matija that makes it work for you.”

  “So you stay with Matija to make me happy.”

  “As much as anything—yes!”

  “And that explains the other men as well.”

  “But it does!”

  “And Christa?”

  “Of course it was for you. You know it was for you. To please you, to excite you, to give you what you wanted, to give you the woman you never had! I love you, Mickey. I love being dirty for you, doing everything for you. I would give you anything, but I can no longer endure you to have other women. It hurts too much. The pain is just too great!”

  As it happened, since picking up Christa several years back Sabbath had not really been the adventurous libertine Drenka claimed she could no longer endure, and consequently she already had the monogamous man she wanted, even if she didn’t know it. To wom
en other than her, Sabbath was by now quite unalluring, not just because he was absurdly bearded and obstinately peculiar and overweight and aging in every obvious way but because, in the aftermath of the scandal four years earlier with Kathy Goolsbee, he’d become more dedicated than ever to marshaling the antipathy of just about everyone as though he were, in fact, battling for his rights. What he continued to tell Drenka, and what Drenka continued to believe, were lies, and yet deluding her about his seductive powers was so simple that it amazed him, and if he failed to stop himself it was not to delude himself as well, or to preen himself in her eyes, but because the situation was irresistible: gullible Drenka hotly pleading, “What happened? Tell me everything. Don’t leave anything out,” even while he eased into her the way Nera pretended in the Polaroid to be penetrating Silvija. Drenka remembered the smallest detail of his exciting stories long after he had forgotten even the broad outline, but then he was as naively transfixed by her stories, the difference being that hers were about people who were real. He knew they were real because, after each new liaison had got under way, he would listen on the extension while, beside him on the bed, holding the portable phone in one hand and his erection in the other, she drove the latest lover crazy with the words that never failed to do the trick. And afterward, each of these sated fellows said to her exactly the same thing: the ponytailed electrician with whom she took baths in his apartment, the uptight psychiatrist whom she saw alternate Thursdays in a motel across the state line, the young musician who played jazz piano one summer at the inn, the nameless middle-aged stranger with the JFK smile whom she met in the elevator of the Ritz-Carlton . . . each one of them said, once he had recovered his breath—and Sabbath heard them saying it, craved their saying it, exulted in their saying it, knew it himself to be one of the few wonderfully indisputable, unequivocal truths a man could live by—each one conceded to Drenka, “There’s no one like you.”