Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  When Sabbath saw Lewis bending over the grave to place a bouquet on the plot, he thought, But she’s mine! She belongs to me!

  What Lewis did next was such an abomination that Sabbath reached crazily about in the dark for a rock or a stick with which to rush forth and beat the son of a bitch over the head. Lewis unzipped his fly and from his shorts extracted the erection whose outlined drawing Sabbath had retained in his files, he now remembered, under “Misc.” He was a long time rocking back and forth, rocking and moaning, until at last he turned his face upward to the starry sky and a full, fervent basso profundo echoed across the hills. “Suck it, Drenka, suck me dry!”

  Though it was not phosphorescent, enabling Sabbath visually to chart its course, though it was not sufficiently clotted or dense for him to hear it splatter to the ground even in that mountaintop silence, simply from the stillness of Lewis’s silhouette and from the fact that his breathing was audible thirty feet away, Sabbath knew that the tall lover had just commingled his wad with the short one’s. In the next moment Lewis had fallen to his knees and, before her grave, in a low tearful voice he was lovingly reciting, “. . . tits . . . tits . . . tits . . . tits. . . .”

  Sabbath could endure only so much. A rock he’d kicked out from between the large, protuberant roots of the maple, a rock as big around as a bar of soap, he picked up and hurled in the direction of Drenka’s grave. It clanged against a tombstone nearby, causing Lewis to leap to his feet and look frantically about. Then he ran down the hill to the waiting limo, whose engine immediately started up. The car backed out of the drive and into the road, and only then did the headlights come on and the limousine whiz away.

  When he rushed across to Drenka’s grave, Sabbath saw that Lewis’s bouquet was huge, containing perhaps as many as four dozen flowers. The only ones he could recognize, with the aid of his flashlight, were the roses and the carnations. He didn’t know any of the others by name, despite all those summers of Drenka’s tutoring. Kneeling down, he gathered up the bouquet by its bulky bundle of stems and clutched it to his chest as he started along the dirt path toward the highway and his car. At first he imagined that the bouquet was wet from the shop, where the flowers would have been kept fresh in vases of water, but then the texture made him understand what, of course, the wet substance was. The flowers were drenched with it. His hands were covered with it. So was the chest of the dirty old hunting jacket with the enormous pockets in which he used to carry puppets down to the college before the scandal with Kathy Goolsbee.

  Drenka had once told Sabbath that after her marriage, when, within their first year as émigrés, Matija grew depressed and lost all interest in fucking her, she was so desolated that she went to a doctor in Toronto, where they lived briefly after fleeing Yugoslavia, and asked him how many times a husband was supposed to do it with a wife. The doctor asked her what she thought a reasonable expectation might be. Without even stopping to think, the young bride replied, “Oh, about four times a day.” The doctor asked where a working couple was to find the time that would take, other perhaps than on the weekend. She explained, her fingers doing the calculating, “You do it once about three in the morning when sometimes you hardly know you do it. You do it at seven when you wake up. You do it when you come home from work and before you sleep. You can even do it two times before you go to sleep.”

  Why this story had come to him as he cautiously descended the dark cemetery hill—the bespattered flowers still clutched in his hands—was because of that triumphant Friday, only seventy-two hours after Matija’s Rotary speech, when she had ended the day—not the week, the day—awash with the sperm of four men. “Nobody can accuse you, Drenka, of being timid in the face of your fantasies. Four,” he said. “Well, I’d be honored to be numbered among them should there ever be a next time.” He found, on hearing this story, not merely his desire inflamed but his veneration, too—there was something great about it: something heroic. This shortish woman a little on the plump side, darkly pretty but with an oddly damaged-looking nose, this refugee who knew hardly anything of the world beyond her schoolgirl Split (pop. 99,462) and the picturesque New England village of Madamaska Falls (pop. 1,109), seemed to Sabbath a woman of serious importance.

  “It was the time I went to Boston,” she told him, “to see my dermatologist. That was very exciting. You sit in the doctor’s office and you know you’re his mistress and he’s turned on and he shows you he has a big hard-on right in the examination room, and he takes it out and he fucked me right there. During the appointment. I used to go years ago to fuck him in his office on Saturdays. And he was a good fuck. And anyway from there I went to the credit-card magnate, the Lewis guy. And it was exciting that another man was waiting, that I could turn another guy on. Maybe I felt strong about that, to be able to seduce more than one man. Lewis fucked me and came inside me. That made me feel good. Nobody knows it but I. I am a woman walking around who has this sperm from two guys. The third guy was the dean, that college guy who stayed at the inn with his wife. His wife was in Europe so I was having dinner with him. I didn’t know him— that was the first time. You want me to be really blunt about the whole thing? I discovered that I had got my period. I’d met him when we have our cocktail party for the guests. He stood next to me and he had pushed his arms onto my nipples. And he told me that he had a big hard-on, and I could almost see it. A dean at a college—this is the way we were talking at the cocktail party. Those kind of settings are what turn me on, when you do it in public, but secretly in public. So he had prepared this elaborate dinner. We were both very passionate but very shy at the same time or nervous about it. We ate in their dining room and I was answering his questions about my childhood under Communism and eventually we went upstairs, and he was sort of a strong guy and he held me and he really almost crushed my ribs. He had unbelievable manners. Maybe he was shy and frightened. He said, ‘Well, we don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.’ I was a little hesitant because by now I had my period but I wanted to fuck him, so I went into the bathroom and took out my tampon. We started undressing and it was all very hot and very exciting. A tall guy, very strong, and he said many beautiful words. I was very excited and wanted to know the size his dick was. So when we finally undressed I was disappointed that he seemed to have a very small dick. I don’t know if he was frightened of me so he couldn’t really get it up. Then I said, ‘Well, I have my period,’ and he said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’ I said, ‘Let me go and get a towel.’ So we put a towel down on the bed and we really went into it. He was doing everything with me. He couldn’t really get a very good hard-on. I worked hard on getting him to have a hard-on but I think he was scared. He was frightened about me, that I was so free. That’s what I sensed—that he was a bit overwhelmed. Though he did actually come three times.” “Without a hard-on. And overwhelmed. Quite a feat,” noted Sabbath. “It was a small hard-on,” she explained. “How did he come? You sucked him?” “No, no, he came inside me, actually. And he sucked me even though I was bleeding all over the place. So that was a big mess, a lot of fucking and a lot of blood coming out. The fact that there was the blood—there was an added drama to it. A lot of juice and grease—it’s not grease; how do I describe it? It’s thick liquid, body fluids that were mixed in together. And after it’s all finished and we get up—you get up, and what do you do, you don’t know this person, and you’re a little embarrassed, and we’re stuck with this towel.” “Describe the towel.” “It was a white towel. And it was not completely red. The size of a bath towel. There were enormous spots. If I would wring it, it would come out, blood from it. It was like juice, a juicy liquid. But it wasn’t that the whole thing was completely red, by any means. There were big, big spots on it, and it was very heavy. It’s a definite—not an alibi; how do you say it in English? The opposite of that?” “Evidence?” “Yes, it’s evidence of the crime. So we were discussing it and he said, ‘Well, what can I do with this?’ And he stood there, this tall man, this strong man, holding th
is towel like a child. A little embarrassed, but not wanting to show that to me. And I didn’t want to be crimelike, I didn’t want to pretend, ‘Oh, this is a bad thing.’ This was natural to me to do it, so I wanted to be cool about it. He said, ‘I can’t let the maid wash it and I can’t throw it in the hamper. I guess I have to throw it out. But where can I throw it?’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ And the relief on his face was enormous. And I put it in a plastic bag and I took it with me, this wet bundle, in a shopping bag. So he was very happy and then I drove home, and I put it into the washing. And it came out clean. And then of course he called me the next day and he said, ‘Dear Drenka, this was certainly very dramatic,’ and I said, ‘Well, I have the towel and it’s clean. Do you want it back?’ and he said, ‘No, thank you.’ He didn’t want the towel back and I guess his wife never found out about it.” “And so who is the fourth you fucked that day?” “Well, I came home and I went down to the basement and threw the towel into the machine and then I came upstairs and Matija wants me to perform my marital duty at midnight. He sees me going naked into the shower and it excites him. This is something I have to do, so I do it. Thank God it’s not often.” “And so how does it feel after four men?” “Well, Matija fell asleep. I guess I felt very chaotic, if you really want to know. I think it is very taxing to do that. I had done three before, a number of times, but never four. Sexually it was very—very defiant and somehow exciting, even if the fourth was Maté. And maybe slightly perverse in a way. Part of me enormously enjoyed that. But in terms of what I really felt—I couldn’t sleep, Mickey; it made me feel unsettled, restless, and it made me feel I did not know to whom I belong. I kept thinking of you, and that helped, but that was a high price to pay for it, all that confusion. If I could take the confusion away, how do you say—extrapolate it?—and make it just a sexual thing, I think that it’s an exciting thing to do.” “The most exciting ever, Donna Giovanna?” “Oh, my God,” she said, laughing heartily, “I don’t know about that. Let me think.” “Yes, think. Il catalogo.” “Oh, in the past, maybe thirty years ago, maybe more, I would go on a train, for example, through Europe, and do it with the train conductor. You know, it was pre-AIDS time. Yes, the Italian train conductor.” “Where do you do it with a train conductor?” She shrugged. “You find a compartment that isn’t busy.” “Is that true?” Laughing again, she said, “Yes. True.” “Were you married?” “No, no, this is when I worked a year in Zagreb. I guess he would come in the train car, a little good-looking Italian guy who speaks Italian, and you know, they’re sexy, and maybe my friends, we’re having a party or something like that—I can’t remember who initiates what. No, I did it. I sold him cigarettes. It was expensive to travel in Italy and so you take with you something to sell. You buy it cheaply in Yugoslavia. Cigarettes were inexpensive. And Italians would buy out these cigarettes. They had the names of rivers, the Yugoslav cigarettes. Drina. Morava. Ibar. Yes, they were then all words of rivers. You make twice as much, maybe three times as much as you paid, so I sold him cigarettes. That’s how it started. When I was working in Zagreb that year after high school, I loved to be fucked. It made me feel very, very good to have my cunt full of sperm, of come, it was a wonderful, maybe a powerful feeling. Whoever was the boyfriend, you would go to work that next day knowing you had been well fucked and you’re all wet and the pants were wet and you walked around wet—I enjoyed that. And I remember I knew this older guy. He was a retired gynecologist and somehow we were talking about this and he thought it was very healthy to keep the come in the cunt after you had fucked, and I agreed with him. This turned him on. But it was no use. He was too old. I was curious to do it with a very old man, but he was already seventy and it was a closed and shut case.”

  When Sabbath reached his car, he walked beyond it some twenty feet along the hiking trail into the woods and there he hurled the bouquet into the dark mass of the trees. Then he did something strange, strange even for a strange man like him, who believed himself inured to the limitless contradictions that enshroud us in life. Because of his strangeness most people couldn’t stand him. Imagine then if someone had happened upon him that night, in the woods a quarter mile down from the cemetery, licking from his fingers Lewis’s sperm and, beneath the full moon, chanting aloud, “I am Drenka! I am Drenka!”

  Something horrible is happening to Sabbath.

  BUT HORRIBLE THINGS are happening to people all the time. The next morning Sabbath learned about Lincoln Gelman’s suicide. Linc had been the producer of Sabbath’s Indecent Theater (and the Bowery Basement Players) during those few years in the fifties and early sixties when Sabbath had amassed his little audience on the Lower East Side. After Nikki’s disappearance, he had stayed a week with the Gelmans in their big Bronxville house.

  Norman Cowan, Linc’s partner, called with the news. Norman was the subdued member of the duo, if not the office’s imaginative spearhead then its levelheaded guardian against Linc’s overreaching. He was Linc’s equilibrium. In any discussion, even of the location of the men’s room down the hall, he could come to the point in about one-twentieth of the time that Linc liked to take to explain things to people. The educated son of a venal Jersey City jukebox distributor, Norman had shaped himself into a precise and canny businessman exuding the aura of quiet strength that lean, tall, prematurely balding men often appear to possess, particularly when they come, as Norman did, scrupulously attired in gray pinstripes.

  “His death,” Norman confided, “was a relief to many. Most of the people we’re lining up to speak at the funeral haven’t seen him in five years.”

  Sabbath hadn’t seen him in thirty.

  “These are all current business associates, close Manhattan friends. But they couldn’t see him. Linc was impossible to be with—depressed, obsessive, trembling, frightened.”

  “How long was he like that?”

  “Seven years ago he fell into a depression. He never again had a painless day. A painless hour. We carried him in the office for five years. He’d just float around with a contract in his hand, saying, ‘Are we sure this is all right? Are we sure this isn’t illegal?’ The last two years he’s been at home. A year and a half ago, Enid couldn’t take it any longer and they found an apartment for Linc around the corner and Enid furnished it and he lived there. A housekeeper came every day to feed him and to clean up. I would try to get over once a week, but I had to force myself. It was awful. He would sit and listen to you and then sigh and shake his head and say, ‘You don’t know, you don’t know. . . .’ For years now that’s all I heard him say.”

  “You don’t know what?”

  “The dread. The anguish. Unceasing. No medication helped. His bedroom looked like a pharmacy, but not a single drug worked. They all made him sick. He hallucinated on the Prozac. He hallucinated on the Wellbutrin. Then they started giving him amphetamines—Dexedrine. For two days it looked as though something was happening. Then the vomiting began. All he ever got were the side effects. Hospitalization didn’t work, either. He was hospitalized three months, and when they sent him home they said he was no longer suicidal.”

  His drive, his gusto, his pep, his speediness, his effectiveness, his diligence, his loquacious joking, someone—Sabbath remembered—wholly at one with his time and place, a highly adapted New Yorker tailor-made for that frenetic reality and oozing with the passion to live, to succeed, to have fun. His sentiments transported tears to his eyes too easily for Sabbath’s taste, he talked rapidly in a flood of words that revealed how strong the compulsions were that fueled his hyperdynamism, but his life was a solid achievement, full of aim and purpose and the delight of being the energizer of others. And then life took a turn and never righted itself. Everything vanished. The irrational overturned everything. “Something specific set it off?” Sabbath asked.

  “People come apart. And aging doesn’t help. I know a number of men our age, right here in Manhattan, clients, friends, who’ve been going through crises like this. Some shock just undoes them around
sixty—the plates shift and the earth starts shaking and all the pictures fall off the wall. I had my bout last summer.”

  “You? Hard to believe about you.”

  “I’m still on Prozac. I had the whole thing—fortunately the abridged version. Ask why and I couldn’t tell you. I just stopped sleeping at some point and then, a couple of weeks later, the depression descended—the fear, the trembling, the suicide thoughts. I was going to buy a gun and blow the top of my head off. Six weeks until the Prozac kicked in. On top of that, it happens not to be a dick-friendly drug, at least for me. I’m on it eight months. I don’t remember what a hard-on feels like. But at this age it’s an up-and-down affair anyway. I got out alive. Linc didn’t. He got worse and worse.”

  “Could it have been something other than just depression?”

  “Just depression’s enough.”

  But Sabbath knew as much. His mother had never gone ahead to take her life, but then, for fifty years after losing Morty, she had no life to take. In 1946, at seventeen, when, instead of waiting a year to be drafted, Sabbath went to sea only weeks after graduating high school, he was motivated as much by his need to escape his mother’s tyrannical gloom—and his father’s pathetic brokenness—as by an unsatisfied longing that had been gathering force in him since masturbation had all but taken charge of his life, a dream that overflowed in scenarios of perversity and excess but that he now, in a seaman’s suit, was to encounter thigh-to-thigh, mouth-to-mouth, face-to-face: the worldwide world of whoredom, the tens of thousands of whores who worked the docks and the portside saloons wherever ships made anchor, flesh of every pigmentation to furnish every conceivable pleasure, whores who in their substandard Portuguese, French, and Spanish spoke the scatological vernacular of the gutter.