Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  These connections—between the mother, the father, and him—were far clearer to Barbara than they were to Sabbath; if there was, as she liked to put it, a “pattern” in it all, the pattern eluded him.

  “And the pattern in your life,” Roseanna asked, angrily, “that eludes you, too? Deny till you’re red in the face, but it’s there, it’s there.”

  “Deny it. The verb is transitive, or used to be before the eloquence of the blockheads was loosed upon the land. As for the ‘pattern’ governing a life, tell Barbara it’s commonly called chaos.”

  “Nikki was a helpless child you could dominate and I was a drunk looking for a savior, who thrived on degradation. Is that not a pattern?”

  “A pattern is what is printed on a piece of cloth. We are not cloth.”

  “But I was looking for a savior, and I did thrive on degradation. I thought I had it coming to me. Everything in my life was frenzy and noise and mess. Three girls from Bennington living together in New York, with black underwear hanging up and drying everywhere. Boyfriends calling everybody all the time. Men calling. Older men. Some married poet naked in somebody’s room. The place a mess. Never any meals. A perpetual soap opera of angry lovers and outraged parents. And then one day in the street I saw your screwy finger show and we met and you invited me to your workshop for a drink. Avenue B and 9th Street, just by the park. Five flights up and this perfectly still, tiny white room with everything in place and dormer windows. I thought I was in Europe. All the puppets in a row. Your workbench—every tool hanging in place, everything tidy, clean, orderly, in place. Your file cabinet. I couldn’t believe it. How calm and rational and steady-seeming, and yet on the street, performing, it could have been a madman behind that screen. Your sobriety. You didn’t even offer me a drink.”

  “Jews never do.”

  “I didn’t know. All I knew was that you had your crazy art and that all that mattered to you in the world was your crazy art, that why I had come to New York was for my art, to try to paint and to sculpt, and instead all I had was a crazy life. You were so focused. So intense. The green eyes. You were very handsome.”

  “In his thirties, everyone is handsome. What are you doing with me now, Roseanna?”

  “Why did you stay with me when I was a drunk?”

  Had the moment come to tell her about Drenka? Some moment had come. Some moment had been coming for months now, since the morning he learned that Drenka was dead. For years he had been drifting without any sense of anything being imminent and now not only was the moment galloping toward him but he was rushing into the moment and away from all he’d lived through.

  “Why?” Roseanna repeated.

  They’d just had dinner and she was off to a meeting, and he was off, after she’d gone, to the cemetery. She was already in her denim jacket, but because she no longer feared the “confrontations” she formerly evaded via the chardonnay, she was not leaving the house until she had forced him, this once, to take seriously their miserable history.

  “I am sick of the humorous superiority. I am sick of the sarcasm and the perpetual joke. Answer me. Why did you stay with me?”

  “Your paycheck. I stayed,” he said, “to be supported.”

  She seemed about to cry, and bit her lip rather than try to speak.

  “Come off it, Rosie. Barbara didn’t break the news today.”

  “It’s just hard to believe.”

  “Doubt Barbara? Next thing you know you’ll be doubting God. How many people are there left in the world, let alone here in Madamaska Falls, with a full understanding of what is going on? It has always been a premise of my life that there are no such people left, and that I am their leader. But to find someone, like Barbara, with a full grasp of what is happening, to discover, out in the sticks, someone with a fairly complete idea of everything, a human being in the largest sense of the word, whose judgment is grounded in the knowledge of life she acquired at college studying psychology . . . what other dark mystery has Barbara helped you to penetrate?”

  “Oh, not such a mystery.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “That there may have been real pleasure for you in watching me destroy myself. As you watched Nikki destroy herself. That could have been another inducement to stay.”

  “Two wives whose destruction I have had the pleasure of watching. The pattern! But doesn’t the pattern now call for me to enjoy your disappearance as much as I enjoyed Nikki’s? Doesn’t the pattern now call for you to disappear, too?”

  “It does; it did. It’s precisely where I was headed four years ago. I was as close to death as I could come. I couldn’t wait for winter. I wanted only to be under the ice of the pond. You were hoping Kathy Goolsbee would put me there. Instead she saved me. Your masochistic student-slut saved my life.”

  “And why do I so much enjoy the misery of my wives? I’ll bet it’s because I hate them.”

  “You hate all women.”

  “Can’t hide a thing from Barbara.”

  “Your mother, Mickey, your mother.”

  “To blame? My little mother, who went to her death half out of her mind?”

  “She’s not ‘to blame.’ She was what she was. She was the first to disappear. When your brother was killed, she disappeared from your life. She deserted you.”

  “And that, if I follow Barbara’s logic, that is why I find you so fucking boring?”

  “Sooner or later you’d find any woman boring.”

  Not Drenka. Never Drenka.

  “So when is Barbara planning to have you throw me out?”

  This was further along in the confrontation than Roseanna had planned to go just yet. He knew this because she looked suddenly as she had the previous April on Patriots’ Day, when she’d taken her first crack at the Boston Marathon and fainted just beyond the finish line. Yes, the subject of getting rid of Sabbath wasn’t to have come up until she was just a little better prepared to be on her own.

  “So for when,” he repeated, “is the date set to throw me out?”

  Sabbath watched her come to the decision to abandon the old schedule and tell him “Now.” This necessitated her sitting down and putting her face in her hands, the keys to the car still dangling from one finger. When she looked up again there were tears running down her face—and only that morning he had overheard her telling someone on the phone, maybe even Barbara herself, “I want to live. I’ll do anything it takes to get well, anything. I’m feeling strong and able to give everything to my work. I go off to work and I love every minute of it.” And now she was in tears. “This isn’t the way I wanted it to happen,” she said.

  “When is Barbara planning for you to throw me out?”

  “Please. Please. You’re talking about thirty-two years of my life! This is not easy at all.”

  “Suppose I make it easy. Throw me out tonight,” Sabbath said. “Let’s see if you have the sobriety for it. Throw me out, Roseanna. Tell me to go and never come back.”

  “This is not fair of you,” she said, weeping more hysterically than he had seen her weep in years. “After my father, after all that, please don’t say ‘throw me out.’ I cannot hear that.”

  “Tell me that if I don’t go you’re calling the cops. They’re probably all pals from AA. Call the state trooper, the innkeeper’s kid, the Balich boy; tell him that you have a family at AA that is more loving, more understanding, less judgmental than your husband and you want him to be thrown out. Who wrote the Twelve Steps? Thomas Jefferson? Well, call him, share with him, tell him that your husband hates women and must be thrown outtt! Call Barbara, my Barbara. I’ll call her. I want to ask her how long you two blameless women have been planning my eviction. You’re as sick as your secrets? Well, for just how long has off-loading Morris been your little secret, dear?”

  “I cannot take this! I don’t deserve this! You have no anxiety about relapse—you live in a permanent relapse!—but I do! With great effort and enormous suffering I have reclaimed myself, Mickey. Reclaimed myself from
a horrendously devastating and potentially deadly disease. And don’t make a face! If I didn’t tell you my difficulties, you would never know. I say this without self-pity or sentimentality. To get well has taken all my energy and commitment. But I am still in a great state of change. It is still often painful and frightening. And this shouting I cannot stand. I will not stand! Stop it! You are shouting at me like my father.”

  “The fuck that’s who I’m shouting at you like! I’m shouting at you like myself!”

  “Shouting is irrational,” she cried despairingly. “You cannot think straight if you’re shouting! Nor can I!”

  “Wrong! It’s only when I’m shouting that I begin to think straight! It’s my rationality that makes me shout! Shouting is how a Jew thinks things through!”

  “What does ‘Jew’ have to do with it? You’re saying ‘Jew’ deliberately to intimidate me!”

  “I do everything deliberately to intimidate you, Rosie!”

  “But where will you go, if you g You are not thinking. How can you live? You’re sixty-four years old. You don’t have a penny. You cannot go away,” she wailed, “to kill yourself!”

  It did not pain him to say “No, you couldn’t endure that, could you?”

  And that’s how it happened. Five months after Drenka’s death, that was all it took for him to disappear, to leave Roseanna, to pick up finally and leave their home, such as it was—to get into his car and drive to New York to see what Linc Gelman looked like.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Sabbath took the long way to Amsterdam and 76th. He had eighteen hours for a three-and-a-half-hour trip, so instead of driving east for twelve miles to hook up with the turnpike, he decided to cross over Battle Mountain to 92 and then take the back roads and catch the turnpike some forty miles south. That way he could pay a last visit to Drenka. He had no idea where he was going or what he was doing and he did not know if he would visit that cemetery ever again.

  And what the hell was he doing? Get off her ass about AA. Ask her about the kids at school. Give her a hug. Take her on a trip. Eat her pussy. It’s no big deal and might turn things around. When she was a rangy aspiring artist fresh out of college living in that flat full of sex-crazed girls, you did it all the time, couldn’t get enough of those long bones of hers encircling your ears. Spirited, open, independent—someone he’d thought not in need of round-the-clock protection, the wonderful new antithesis of Nikki. . . .

  She’d been his puppet partner for years. When they met she had sculpted nude figures for six months and painted abstractions for six months and then started doing ceramics and making necklaces, and then, even though people liked them and began buying them, after a year she’d lost interest in the necklaces and begun doing photography. Then through Sabbath she discovered puppets and a use for all her skills, for drawing, sculpting, painting, tinkering, even for collecting bits and pieces of things, squirreling all sorts of things away, which she had always done before but to no purpose. Her first puppet was a bird, a hand puppet with feathers and sequins, nothing like Sabbath’s idea of a puppet. He explained that puppets were not for children; puppets did not say, “I am innocent and good.” They said the opposite. “I will play with you,” they said, “however I like.” She stood corrected, but that didn’t mean that, as a puppetmaker, she ever really stopped looking for the happiness that she’d known at seven, when she still had a Mom and a Dad and a childhood. Soon she was sculpting puppets’ heads for Sabbath, sculpting them out of wood like the old European puppets. Sculpted them, sanded them, painted them beautifully in oil paint, taught herself how to make the eyes blink and the mouths move, sculpted the hands. In her excitement at the beginning she naively told people, “I start with one thing and something else happens. A good puppet makes itself. I just go with it.” Then she went out and bought a machine, the cheapest Singer, read the instructions, and started to design and sew the costumes. Her mother had sewed and Roseanna hadn’t had the slightest interest. Now she was at the machine half the day. All the things people discarded, Roseanna collected. “Whatever you don’t want,” she began telling her friends, “give to me.” Old clothes, stuff off the street, the stuff people cleaned out of closets, it was amazing how she could use everything—Roseanna, recycler of the world. She designed the sets on a big pad, made them, painted them—sets that rolled up, sets that turned like pages—and always fastidiously, for ten and twelve hours a day the most fastidious worker. For her a puppet was a little work of art, but even more, it was a charm, magical in the way it could get people to give themselves to it, even at Sabbath’s theater, where the atmosphere was insinuatingly anti-moral, vaguely menacing, and at the same time, rascally fun. Sabbath’s hands, she said, gave her puppets life. “Your hand is right where the puppet’s heart is. I am the carpenter and you are the soul.” Though she was softly romantic about “art,” high-flown and a bit superficial where he was remorselessly mischievous, they were a team nonetheless, and if never quite aglow with happiness and unity, a team that worked for a long time. A fatherless daughter, she encountered her man so soon, at a time when she was not yet fully exposed to the spikes of the world, that she was never fully exposed to her own mind, and for years and years she did not know what to think without Sabbath to tell her. There was something exotic to her about the amount of life to which he had opened himself while still so young, and that included the loss of Nikki. If she was sometimes the victim of his withering presence, she was too enamored of the withering presence to dare to be a young woman without it. He had been an avid pupil early of the hard lessons, and she innocently saw, no less in his seafaring than in his cleverness and cynicism, a crash course in survival. True, she was always in danger around him, on edge, afraid of the satire, but it was even worse if she wasn’t around him. It wasn’t until she went down in a vomiting stupor in her early fifties and got to AA that she located there, in that language they spoke, in those words she embraced without a shadow of irony, criticism, or even, perhaps, full understanding, a wisdom for herself that wasn’t Sabbath’s skepticism and sardonic wit.

  Drenka. One of them is driven to drink and one of them is driven to Drenka. But then, ever since he’d been seventeen he couldn’t resist an enticing whore. He should have married that one in the Yucatán when he was eighteen years old. Instead of becoming a puppet artist he should have become a pimp. At least pimps have a public and make a living and don’t have to go crazy every time they turn on TV and catch sight of the Muppets’ fucking mouths. Nobody thinks of whores as entertainment for kiddies—like puppetry that means anything, whores are meant to delight adults.

  Delightful whores. When Sabbath and his best friend, Ron Metzner, hitchhiked up to New York a month after high school graduation and someone in New York told them they could get out of the country without a passport by going down to the Norwegian Seamen’s Center in Brooklyn, young Sabbath had no idea that at the other end there was all that pussy. His sexual experience till then had been feeling up the Italian girls from Asbury and, at every opportunity, masturbating. The way he remembered it now, as a ship approached harbor in Latin America, you got this unbelievable smell of cheap perfume, coffee, and pussy. Whether it was Rio, or Santos, or Bahia, or any of the other South American ports, there was that delicious smell.

  The motive, to begin with, was simply to run away to sea. He’d been looking at the Atlantic every morning of his life and thinking, “One day, one day. . . .” It was very insistent, that feeling, and he did not then wholly attach it to a desire to escape his mother’s gloom. He had been looking at the sea and fishing in the sea and swimming in the sea all his life. It seemed to him—if not to his bereft parents a mere nineteen months after Morty’s death—only natural that he should go to sea to get a real education now that obligatory schooling had taught him to read and write. He learned about the pussy the moment he got aboard the Norwegian tramp steamer to Havana and he saw that everybody was talking about it. To the old hands on board the fact that when you got off the ship you
would head for the whores was in no way extraordinary, but to Sabbath, at seventeen—well, you can imagine.

  As if it weren’t sufficiently exciting to slip by moonlight past the Morro Castle in Havana harbor, as memorable an entrance to a port as any in the world, once they’d tied up he was off the ship and heading straight for the one thing he had never done before. This was in Batista’s Cuba, which was one big American whorehouse and gambling casino. In thirteen years, Castro was going to come down out of the hills and put an end to all the fun, but ordinary seaman Sabbath was lucky enough to get his licks in just in the nick of time.

  When he got his merchant mariner documents and joined the union, he could choose his ships. He hung around the union hall and—since he had tasted paradise—waited for the “Romance Run”: Santos, Monte, Rio, and B.A. There were guys who spent their whole lives doing the Romance Run. And the reason, for them as for Sabbath, was whores. Whores, brothels, every kind of sex known to man.