Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  “It’s like the music in cartoons. You know, the cartoons for kids on TV?”

  “Yes?” said Sabbath. “And it was thought to be hot stuff at the time. The innocent old ways of life—everywhere you look, except in our sleepy village here,” he said, stroking his beard, “the world’s at war against them. And you, what brings you to Madamaska Falls?” asked Father Time jovially. There is no other way to play it.

  She told him about the tedium of her au pair job in New York, how by the second year she couldn’t stand the child anymore, and so she had just picked up one day and run off. She had found Madamaska Falls by closing her eyes and putting her finger down on a map of the Northeast. Madamaska Falls wasn’t even on the map, but she had got a ride as far as the traffic light by the green, stopped for a coffee at the gourmet shop, and, when she asked if there was any work around, a job materialized right there. For five months now the gentleman’s sleepy village had been her home.

  “You were escaping your job in New York with the kid.”

  “I was going crazy.”

  “What else are you escaping?” he asked, but lightly, lightly, probing not at all.

  “Me? I’m not escaping anything. Just to get a taste of life. In Germany there is no adventure for me. I know everything and how it works. Here a lot of things happen to me that would never have happened to me back home.”

  “You don’t get lonely?” asked the nice, concerned man.

  “Sure. I get lonely. It’s hard to make friendships with Americans.”

  “Is it?”

  “In New York it is. Sure. They want to use you. In any possible way. That’s the first idea that comes to their mind.”

  “I’m surprised to hear this. People in New York are worse than people in Germany? History would seem to some to tell a different story.”

  “Oh no, definitely. And cynical. In New York they keep their true motives to themselves and announce to you other motives.”

  “Young people?”

  “No, mostly older than me. In their twenties.”

  “Did you get hurt?”

  “Yeah. Yeah. But then they’re very friendly—‘Hi, how are you doing? It’s very lovely to see you.’” She enjoyed her imitation of an American dope and he laughed appreciatively, too. “And you don’t even know this person. Germany is very different,” she told him. “Here there’s all this friendliness—and it’s fake. ‘Hey, hi, how are you?’ You have to. The American way. I was very naive when I came here. I was eighteen. I run into lots of people, strangers I don’t know. I go out for coffee. You have to be naive when you come as a stranger. Of course you learn. You learn all right.”

  The trio—Benny, Krupa, Teddy Wilson’s piano. “Body and Soul.” Very dreamy, very danceable, just lovely, right down to the Krupa three-thump finale. Though Morty thought that Krupa’s pyrotechnics were always ruining the damn thing. “Just let it swing,” Morty would say. “Krupa is the worst thing that ever happened to Goodman. Too obtrusive,” and Mickey would repeat this as his own opinion at school. Morty would say, “Benny’s never shy about taking up half the piece,” and Mickey would repeat that. “A beautiful clarinet player, nobody near him,” and that, too, he repeated. . . . He wondered if it might not soften up this German girl, the late-night languor-inducing beat and that tactful, torchy something in Goodman’s playing, and so for three minutes he said nothing to her and, to the seductive coherence of “Body and Soul,” the two drove on through the dark of the wooded hills. Nobody else abroad. Also seductive. He could take her anywhere. He could turn at Shear Shop Corner and take her up to Battle Mountain and strangle her to death in her tuxedo. Painting by Otto Dix. Maybe not in congenial Germany but in cynical, exploitative America she was running a risk out on the road in that tuxedo. Or would have been, had she been picked up by one of those Americans rather more American than I.

  “The Man I Love.” Wilson playing Gershwin like Gershwin was Shostakovich. Uncanny eeriness of Hamp on the vibes. January 1938. I am almost nine, Morty is soon to be fourteen. Winter. McCabe Avenue beach. He is teaching me to throw the discus on the empty beach after school. Endless.

  “May I ask how you got hurt?” said Sabbath.

  “They’re there for you if you’re pretty and outgoing and smiling, but if you have any trouble, ‘Come back when you’re better.’ I had very few true friends in New York. Most of them were just crap.”

  “Where did you meet these people?”

  “Clubs. At night I go to clubs. To get away from the job. To get my mind on something else. Being with a kid all day . . . brrrr. I couldn’t stand it, but it got me to New York. I would just go to clubs where people I know come.”

  “Clubs? I’m out of my element. What are clubs?”

  “Well, I have one club I go to. I get in free. I get drinks, tickets. I don’t have to worry about that, I just show up. I was going there for over a year. The same people come all the time. People you don’t even know their names. They have club names. You never know what they’re doing in the daytime.”

  “And they come to the club to do what?”

  “To have a good time.”

  “Do they?”

  “Sure. Where I go there are five different floors. The basement is reggae, and black people come there. The next floor is dance music, disco. Yuppies stay on the floor with the disco, people like that. And then there is techno, and then there is more techno—music made by a machine. It’s a sound that just makes you dance. The lights can make you crazy. But that’s because you get to feel the music very good. You dance. You dance for three, four hours.”

  “Whom do you dance with?”

  “People just stand and dance by themselves. It’s a meditation kind of thing. The big main scene is a mix of everybody, standing and dancing by themselves.”

  “Well, you can’t dance by yourself to ‘Sugarfoot Stomp.’ Hear that?” said Sabbath, good-natured and grinning. “To ‘Sugarfoot Stomp’ you’ve got to dance the lindy and you’ve got to dance the lindy with somebody else. To this you must jitterbug, my dear.”

  “Yes,” she said politely, “it’s very beautiful.” Respect for the aged. This callous girl has a sweet side after all.

  “What about drugs—at the clubs?”

  “Drugs? Yeah, it exists.”

  He’d fucked up with “Sugarfoot Stomp.” Alienated her completely, managed even to arouse her repugnance by overplaying how unmenacing, unfrightening an old fuddy-duddy he was. And deprived her of the spotlight. But then this was a situation in which there was never really a right thing to do, except to remember to be tirelessly patient. If it takes a year, it takes a year. You’ve just got to bank on living one more year. This is the contact. Delight in that. Get her back to drugs, get her onto herself and the significance of her life in the clubs.

  He turned off the tape. All she had to hear was Elman’s klezmer trumpet oleaginizing “Bei Mir Bist Du Sheyn” and she’d leap from the moving car, even out in the middle of nowhere.

  “What drugs? Which drugs?”

  “Marijuana,” she said. “Cocaine. They have this drug, heroin and cocaine mixed together, and they call it Special K. It’s what the drag queens take to go really nuts. It’s a lot of fun. They dance. They’re fascinating. It’s a gay scene, definitely. A lot of Hispanic. Puerto Rican guys. Lots of black men. A lot of them are young boys, nineteen, twenty. They lip-synch to some old song and they’re all dressed up like Marilyn Monroe. You laugh a lot.”

  “How did you dress up?”

  “I wore a black dress. Tight long dress. Low neck. A ring in my nose. Long jumbo eyelashes. Big platform shoes. Everybody’s hugging each other and kissing each other and all you do is party and dance all night long. Go there at midnight. Stay till three. That’s the New York I knew. The America. That’s all. I thought I should see more. So here I come.”

  “Because you were exploited. People exploited you.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that. There was a whole thing that just broke
down. Comes down to money. I thought I had a friend but I had a friend who was using me.”

  “Really? How terrible. Using you how?”

  “Oh, I was working with her and she gave me half of the money I was supposed to have. And I’d been working for her a lot. I thought this was a girlfriend of mine. I said, ‘You cheated me out of my money. How could you do this to me?’ ‘Oh, you found out?’ she says. ‘I’m not able to pay you back.’ So I’ll never talk to her again. But what can you expect? The American way. Next time I have to be ready.”

  “I’ll say. How did you meet this person?”

  “Through the club scene.”

  “Was it painful?”

  “I felt so stupid.”

  “What were you doing? What was the work?”

  “I was dancing in a club. My past.”

  “You’re young to have a past.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, laughing loudly at her unmaidenly precocity, “I do have a past.”

  “A girl of twenty with a past. What’s your name?”

  “Christa.”

  “Mine is Mickey, but up here the boys call me Country.”

  “Hi, Country.”

  “Most girls of twenty,” he said, “haven’t begun to live.”

  “That’s the American girls. I never made an American girlfriend. Guys, yeah.”

  “Is meeting women what the adventure is about?”

  “Yes, I would like to meet girlfriends. But mostly it’s older women. You know, mother kind of types. Which is okay with me. But girls my own age? Just doesn’t work out. They’re kids.”

  “So it’s mother types for Christa.”

  “I guess,” she said, laughing again.

  At Shear Shop Corner he took the turn up to Battle Mountain. The voice counseling patience was having trouble being heard. Mother kind of types. He could not let her get away. He could never in his life let a new discovery get away. The core of seduction is persistence. Persistence, the Jesuit ideal. Eighty percent of women will yield under tremendous pressure if the pressure is persistent. You must devote yourself to fucking the way a monk devotes himself to God. Most men have to fit fucking in around the edges of what they define as more pressing concerns: the pursuit of money, power, politics, fashion, Christ knows what it might be—skiing. But Sabbath had simplified his life and fit the other concerns in around fucking. Nikki had run away from him, Roseanna was fed up with him, but all in all, for a man of his stature, he had been improbably successful. Ascetic Mickey Sabbath, at it still into his sixties. The Monk of Fucking. The Evangelist of Fornication. Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

  “What was dancing in the club like?”

  “It’s like—what can you say? I liked it. It was something I had to do for my own curiosity. I don’t know. I just have to do everything in life.”

  “How long did you do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to talk about it. I listen to advice from everybody, then I go out and do my own thing.”

  He stopped talking and on they drove. In that silence, in that darkness, every breath assumed its importance as that which kept you alive. His aims were clear. His dick was hard. He was on automatic pilot, excited, exultant, following behind his own headlights as though in a torch-led procession to the nocturnal moisture of the starry mountaintop, where celebrants were convening already for the wild worship of the stiff prick. Dress optional.

  “Hey, are we lost?” she asked.

  “No.”

  By the time they had ascended halfway up the mountain she could take her own silence no longer. Yep, played it perfectly. “I entertained more at private parties, if you want to know. Bachelor parties. For about a year. With my girlfriend. But then you go shopping together and spend all the money anyway. These girls who do this are very lonesome. They have a bitchy mouth because they’ve been through a lot. And I just look at them, and I say, ‘Oh, my God, I’m too young, I gotta get out of this.’ Because it was because of money that I did it. And I got cheated. But that’s New York. Anyway, I needed a change. I want to spend my time doing something else, a job dealing with people. And I missed the nature. In Germany I was a child in a village till my parents got divorced. I miss the nature and all that’s peaceful. There are more things in life than money. So I came to live here.”

  “And how is it here?”

  “It’s great. People turn out to be very friendly. Very nice. I don’t feel a stranger here. Which is nice. In New York everywhere I go people try to pick me up. It happens all the time. That’s what New Yorkers love to do. I tell them go away and they go away. I’m pretty good at handling the situation. The thing is, don’t show fear. I’m not afraid of you. People in New York can get a little strange. But not here. I feel at home here. I like America now. I even do patchwork,” she said, with a giggle. “Me. I’m a real American. I make quilts.”

  “How did you learn?”

  “I read about it in books.”

  “Well, I love quilts. I collect quilts,” said Sabbath. “I’d like to see yours someday. Would you sell me one?”

  “Sell?” she said, laughing heartily now, laughing huskily, like a boozer twice her age. “Why not? Sure, I’ll sell it, Country. It’s your money.”

  And he erupted in laughter, too. “By God, we are lost!”—and he made a sharp U-turn and got her back to her place over the gourmet shop in fifteen minutes. All the way there they talked animatedly about their common interest. Unimaginable as it seemed, the gap was bridged—antipathy evaporates, affinity is established, a date is made. Quilts. The American way.

  “Thank you,” Drenka had said to Christa when it was time for the old couple to get up and get dressed and go home, “thank you,” she said, her voice faintly tremulous, “thank you thank you thank you. . . .” She took Christa back into her arms and rocked her there like a baby. “Thank you thank you.” Christa gently kissed each of Drenka’s breasts. Her little mouth broke out in a warm, youthful smile when she cuddled closer to Drenka and, making big eyes, girlishly said, “A lot of straight women like it.”

  Though Sabbath had masterminded the evening and given Drenka the money she had demanded to participate, he’d found himself more or less superfluous from the moment Drenka knocked on the door and he let her into the attic room where he’d arrived early himself, thinking that it might be necessary, even after a month of delicate diplomacy, to continue negotiations right down to the wire. There was nothing small about this endeavor, and he was still not sure how reliable a person Christa was—she had not entirely cleansed herself in Madamaska Falls of her European suspicions, nor had Sabbath observed in her, as he hoped to, a single encouraging sign of the development of a more selfless point of view. “Drenka,” he said when he opened the door to let her in, “this is my friend Christa,” and though previously Drenka had seen Christa only through the window of the gourmet shop—strolled by a few times at Sabbath’s suggestion—she walked directly across to where Christa was sitting on the secondhand couch in tight torn jeans and a sequined velvet jacket a shade of violet matching her eyes. Sinking to her knees on the bare floorboards, Drenka grabbed Christa’s close-cropped head between her two hands and kissed her strongly on the mouth. The speed with which Drenka unbuttoned Christa’s jacket and with which Christa undid Drenka’s silk blouse and cleared aside her push-up bra astonished Sabbath. But Drenka’s boldness always astonished him. He had imagined a warm-up would be required—talking and joking overseen by him, a heart-to-heart talk, maybe even a sympathetic look through Christa’s boring quilts to put the two of them at their ease—when, in fact, the five hundred dollars in Drenka’s purse had emboldened her, in her words, “to just go in like a whore and do it.”

  Afterward Drenka couldn’t say enough wonderful things about Christa. While Sabbath drove Drenka to where she’d parked behind Town Street, she snuggled adoringly into his side, kissing his beard, licking his neck—she, the woman of forty-eight, as excited as a child just home from the circus. “With a lesbian, there is a sense of
love that I received from her. Such great experience she had in how to touch a woman’s body. And the kissing! Her knowledge of the female body, how to caress it, how to kiss it, how to touch my skin and to make my nipples hard and to suck my nipples, and that loving, giving, very sexual way, very like a man, that kind of erotic vibration that she would deliver to me made me so very hot. To know exactly how to touch my body in a way almost more superior than sometimes men can know how to do it. To find on my cunt the little button, and to hold it there exactly the amount of time that was needed to make me come. And when she started kissing me—you know, going down and sucking me—the skill of the tongue pressure right on the right place . . . oh, that was very exciting.”

  Up on the bed, only inches away, following every movement like a medical student observing his first surgical procedure, he’d had a good time too and once even been able to be of assistance when Christa, her muscular tongue anchored between Drenka’s thighs, went groping around the sheets searching blindly for a vibrator. Earlier on, she had removed three of them from the bedside table—ivory-colored vibrators ranging in length from three to six inches—and Sabbath was able to locate one for her, the longest of them, and to place it, correctly oriented, into her outstretched hand. “So, you didn’t need me at all,” he said. “Oh, no. I find it very wonderful and exciting to have another woman, but,” said Drenka, lying, as it would later turn out, “I wouldn’t want to have to do it alone with her. It couldn’t turn me on. I have to have the male penis there, the male excitement to urge me on. But I do find very erotic a young woman’s body, the beauty of it, the round curves, the small breasts, the way she is shaped, and the smell of it, and the softness of it, and then as I come down myself to the cunt, I find the cunt actually quite beautiful. I never would have thought that looking in the mirror. You come with your shame to look at yourself and you look at your sexual organs and they are not acceptable from the aesthetic perspective. But in this setting, I can see the whole thing, and although it is a mystique that I am a part of, it’s a mystery to me, a total mystery.”