Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  And now she was telling him that she no longer wished to be this woman unanimously acknowledged as unlike all others. At fifty-two, stimulating enough still to make even conventional men reckless, she wanted to change and become somebody else—but did she know why? The secret realm of thrills and concealment, this was the poetry of her existence. Her crudeness was the most distinguishing force in her life, lent her life its distinction. What was she otherwise? What was he otherwise? She was his last link with another world, she and her great taste for the impermissible. As a teacher of estrangement from the ordinary, he had never trained a more gifted pupil; instead of being joined by the contractual they were interconnected by the instinctual and together could eroticize anything (except their spouses). Each of their marriages cried out for a countermarriage in which the adulterers attack their feelings of captivity. Didn’t she know a marvel when she saw one?

  He was badgering her so relentlessly because he was fighting for his life.

  She not merely sounded as though she were fighting for hers but she looked it, looked as though she and not his mother were the ghost. During the last six months or so Drenka had been suffering with abdominal pains and nausea, and he wondered now if they were not symptoms of the anxiety that had been mounting in her as she approached the day in May that she had chosen to present this crazy ultimatum. Until today he had tended to account for her cramps and the occasional bouts of vomiting as the result of the pressures at the inn. Having been at the job for over twenty-three years, she was herself not surprised by the toll the work was now taking on her health. “You have to know food,” she lamented wearily, “you have to know the law, you have to know every aspect of life there is. This happens in this business, Mickey, when you have to serve the public all the time—you become a burnt-out case. And Matija still cannot be flexible. This rule, that rule—but the smarter thing is to accommodate the people where you can instead of to say always no. If I could just get a break from the bookkeeping part of it. If I could get away from the staff part of it. Our older staff, they are people full of problems all their lives. The people who are married, the housekeepers, the dishwashers, you can know from the way they behave something is going on that has nothing to do with us. They bring in what’s going on outside. And they never go to Matija to tell him what’s wrong. They go to me, because I’m the easier one. Every summer he is going, going, going, and I’ll say, ‘So-and-so did this, did that,’ and Matija says to me, ‘Why do you always bring me these problems? Why don’t you tell me something pleasant!’ Well, because I’m upset by what’s going on. To have these kids on the staff. I can’t take any more kids. They don’t know shit from Adams. So I wind up doing their job on the floor, like I’m the kid. Trays all over the place. I clean up. Carrying trays. A busgirl. It builds up, Mickey. If we had our son with us. But Matthew thinks the business is stupid. And sometimes I don’t blame him. We have a million dollars’ worth of liability insurance. Now I have to get another million dollars. We are advised to do this. The dock in the water at the inn’s beach that everybody enjoys? The insurance company says, ‘Don’t do that anymore. Somebody’s going to hurt themselves.’ So the good things you would like to provide to the American public, they will just get you in trouble. And now—computers!”

  The big thing was to get computers in before the summer, an expensive system that had to be wired all over the place. Everybody had to learn to use the new system, and Drenka had to teach them after she had learned herself at a two-month course at Mount Kendall Community College (a course taken also by Sabbath so that once a week they could meet afterward, just down from Mount Kendall, at the Bo-Peep Motel). For Drenka, with her bookkeeping skills, the computer course had been a snap, though teaching the staff was not. “You have to think like that computer thinks,” she told Sabbath, “and most of my staff don’t even think like a human being yet.” “Then why do you keep working so hard? You keep getting sick—you don’t enjoy anything any longer.” “I do. The money. I still enjoy that. And mine is not the hard job anyway. In the kitchen is the harder job. I don’t care how hard for me my job is, how big an emotional strain it is. The physical stamina that you need in the kitchen—you have to be a horse to do that. Matija is a gentleman, thank God, and he doesn’t resent that he has the horse’s job. Yes, I enjoy the profit. I enjoy that the business is running. Only this year for the first time in twenty-three years we will not go forward financially. That’s something else to get sick about. We will go backward. I keep the books, I see week by week how much our restaurant has been declining since Reagan. In the eighties the people from Boston were coming. They didn’t mind eating dinner at nine-thirty on a Saturday night, so we’d get the turnover. But the people from around here don’t want to do that. There was all the money around then, there was not the competition then. . . .”

  No wonder she had cramps . . . the hard work, the worry, profits down, new computers in, and all her men besides. And me—the work with me! Talk about the horse’s job. “I can’t do everything,” she complained to Sabbath when the pain was at its worst. “I can only be who I am.” Which, Sabbath still believed, was someone who could do everything.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  When, while he was fucking Drenka up at the Grotto, his mother hovering just above his shoulder, over him like the home plate umpire peering in from behind the catcher’s back, he would wonder if she had somehow popped out of Drenka’s cunt the moment before he entered it, if that was where his mother’s spirit lay curled up, patiently awaiting his appearance. Where else should ghosts come from? Unlike Drenka, who seemed for no reason to have been seized by the taboos, his tiny dynamo of a mother was now beyond all taboos—she could be on the lookout for him anywhere, and wherever she was he could detect her as though there were something supernatural about him as well, as though he transmitted a beam of filial waves that bounced off his invisible mother’s presence and gave him her exact location. Either that, or he was going crazy. One way or another, he knew she was about a foot to the right of Drenka’s blood-drained face. Perhaps she was not only listening to his every word from there, perhaps every provocative word he spoke she had a puppeteer’s power to make him speak. It might even be she who was leading him to the disaster of losing the only solace he had. Suddenly his mother’s focus had changed and, for the first time since 1944, the living son was more real to her than the dead one.

  The final kink, thought Sabbath, searching the dilemma for a solution—the final kink is for the libertines to be faithful. Why not tell Drenka, “Yes, dear, I’ll do it” ?

  Drenka had dropped in exhaustion onto the large granite outcropping near the center of the enclosure where they sometimes sat on beautiful days like this one eating the sandwiches she’d brought in her knapsack. There was a wilted bouquet at her feet, the first wildflowers of the spring, there from when she’d plucked them the week before while tramping up through the woods to meet him. Each year she taught him the names of the flowers, in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not remember even the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn’t have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime—the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazzling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, S
eptember, October, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April—name a month, and they had it in spades. They’d had endlessness. He’d grown up on endlessness and his mother—in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother . . . and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistling until December 1944.

  If Morty had come home alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning . . . Didn’t matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.

  “I’ll tell you what”—his milk-of-human-kindness intonation— “I’ll make a deal. I’ll make the sacrifice you want. I will give up every woman but you. I’ll say, ‘Drenka, I love only you and want only you and will take whatever oath you wish to administer itemizing everything that I am forbidden to do.’ But in return you must make a sacrifice.”

  “I will!” Excitedly she rose to her feet. “I want to! Never another man! Only you! To the end!”

  “No,” he said, approaching with his arms extended to her, “no, no, I don’t mean that. That, you tell me, constitutes no sacrifice. No, I’m asking for something to test your stoicism and to test your truthfulness as you will be testing mine, a task just as repugnant to you as breaking the sacrament of infidelity is to me.”

  His arms were around her now, grasping her plump buttocks through her jeans. You like when I turn around on you and you can see my ass. All men like that. But only you stick it in there, only you, Mickey, can fuck me there! Not true, but a nice sentiment.

  “I will give up all other women. In return,” he told her, “you must suck off your husband twice a week.”

  “Aacch!”

  “Aacch, yes. Aacch, exactly. You’re gagging already. ‘Aacch, I could never do that!’ Can’t I find something kinder? No.”

  Sobbing, she pulled herself free of him and pleaded, “Be serious—this is serious!”

  “I am being serious. How odious can it be? It’s merely monogamy at its most inhumane. Pretend it’s someone else. That’s what all good women do. Pretend it’s the electrician. Pretend it’s the credit-card magnate. Matija comes in two seconds anyway. You’ll be getting everything you want and surprising a husband in the bargain, and it’ll take only four seconds a week. And think of how it will excite me. The most promiscuous thing you have ever done. Sucking off your husband to please your lover. You want to feel like a real whore? That ought to do it.”

  “Stop!” she cried out, throwing her hands over his mouth. “I have cancer, Mickey! Stop! The pain has been because of cancer! I can’t believe it! I don’t! I can die!”

  Just then the oddest thing happened. For the second time in a year a helicopter flew over the woods and then circled back and hovered directly above them. This time it had to be his mother.

  “Oh, my God,” said Drenka and, with her arms around him, squeezed so tightly that the full weight of her clinging caused his knees to buckle—or perhaps they were about to buckle anyway.

  Mother, he thought, this can’t be so. First Morty, then you, then Nikki, now Drenka. There’s nothing on earth that keeps its promise.

  “Oh, I wanted, oh,” cried Drenka as the helicopter’s energy roared above them, a dynamic force to magnify the monstrous loneliness, a wall of noise tumbling down on them, their whole carnal edifice caving in. “I wanted you to say it without knowing, I wanted you to do it on your own,” and here she wailed the wail that authenticates the final act of a classical tragedy. “I can die! If they can’t stop it, darling, I will be dead in a year!”

  Mercifully she was dead in six months, killed by a pulmonary embolus before there was time for the cancer, which had spread omnivorously from her ovaries throughout her system, to torture Drenka beyond even the tough capacity of her own ruthless strength.

  UNABLE TO SLEEP, Sabbath lay beside Roseanna overcome by a stupendous, deforming emotion of which he had never before had firsthand knowledge. He was jealous now of the very men about whom, when Drenka was living, he could never hear enough. He thought about the men she had met in elevators, airports, parking lots, department stores, at hotel association conferences and food conventions, men she had to have because their looks appealed to her, men she slept with just once or had prolonged flings with, men who five and six years after she’d last been to bed with them would unexpectedly phone the inn to extol her, to praise her, often without sparing the graphic obscenities to tell her how she was the least inhibited woman they had ever known. He remembered her explaining to him—because he had asked her to—what exactly made her choose one man in a room over another, and now he felt like the most foolishly innocent of husbands who uncovers the true history of an unfaithful wife—he felt as stupid as the holy simpleton Dr. Charles Bovary. The diabolical pleasure this had once afforded him! The happiness! When she was alive, nothing excited or entertained him more than hearing, detail by detail, the stories of her second life. Her third life—he was the second. “It’s a very physical feeling that I get. It’s the appearance, it’s something chemical, I almost would like to say. There’s an energy that I sense. It makes me very aroused and I feel it then, I become sexualized, and I feel it in my nipples. I feel it inside, in my body. If he is physical, if he is strong, the way he walks, the way he sits, the way he’s himself, if he’s juicy. Guys with small dry lips, they turn me off, or if they smell bookish—you know, this dry pencil smell of men. I often look at their hands to see if they have strong, expressive hands. Then I imagine that they have a big dick. If there is any truth to this I don’t know, but I do it anyway as a little research. Some kind of confidence in the way they move. It isn’t that they have to look elegant—it is rather an animalistic appearance under the elegance. So it’s a very intuitive thing. And I know it right away and I have always known it. And so I say, ‘Okay, I go and fuck him.’ Well, I have to open the channels for him. So I look at him and I flirt with him. I just start laughing or show my legs and sort of show him that it’s all right. Sometimes I make a real bold gesture. ‘I wouldn’t mind having an affair with you.’ Yeah,” she said, laughing at the extent of her own impulsiveness, “I could say something like that. That guy I had in Aspen, I felt his interest. But he was in his fifties and there I always question how hard can they get. With a younger guy you know it’s an easier thing. With an older one you don’t know. But I felt this kind of vibration and I was really turned on. And, you know, you move your arm closer or he moves his arm closer and you know you’re in this aura of sexual feeling together and everybody else in the room is excluded. I think with that man I actually openly stated that it was okay, that I was interested.”

  The boldness with which she went after them! The ardor and skill with which she aroused them! The delight she found in watching them jerk off! And the pleasure she then took in telling all she’d learned about lust and what it is for men . . . and the torment all this was to him now. He’d not had the faintest idea that he could feel such distress. “What I enjoyed was to see how they were by themselves. That I could be the observer there, and to see how they played with their dick and how it was formed, the shape of it, and when it became hard, and also the way they held their hand—it turned me on. Everybody jerks their dick differently. And when they abandon themselves into it, when they allow themselves to abandon themselves, this is very exciting. And to see them come that way. This Lewis guy, he was in his sixties and he’d never jerked off, he said, in
front of a woman. And he was sort of holding his hand this way”—she turned her wrist so that the little finger was at the top of her fist and the second knuckle of her thumb at the bottom—“well, to see that particularity of it and, as I say, to see when they get so hot they can’t stop themselves in spite of being shy, that’s very exciting. That’s what I like best—watching them lose control.” The shy ones she would softly suck for a few minutes and then place their hands for them on themselves and help them along until they were safely into it and on their own. Then, beginning lightly to finger herself, she would lean back and look on. When she next saw Sabbath she would demonstrate on him the peculiar “particularity” of each man’s technique. He was tremendously stirred by this . . . and now it made him jealous, maddeningly jealous—now that she was dead he wanted to shake her and shout at her and tell her to stop. “Only me! Fuck your husband when you have to, but otherwise, no one but me!”

  In fact, he didn’t want her to fuck Matija either. Him least of all. On the rare occasions when she used to report those details to Sabbath, too, they had hardly engrossed him, provoked not the slightest erotic interest. Yet now there was barely a night when he was free of the mortifying memory of Drenka allowing her husband to take her like a wife. “Checking Matija in bed, I saw his erection. I was certain he would not act on it without my taking first initiative, so quickly I undressed. I could not get aroused even if I had strong, tender feelings for my husband. Seeing his hard cock, smaller than yours, Mickey, and with a foreskin, which when the skin is pulled down is much redder than yours . . . thinking about the way we had just fucked . . . well, longing for your big, hard dick, it was almost painful. How could I abandon myself to this man who loves me? When he penetrated me, lying on top of me, Matija was moaning louder than I ever recollect. It was almost as if he was crying. Since it never takes him long to come, the whole thing was over soon. After sleeping one or two hours I woke up sick to my stomach. I had to throw up and take some Mylanta.”