Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  But mostly he did not follow the news because of Nikki. He couldn’t leaf through a paper, any paper anywhere, without searching still for some clue about Nikki. It was years before he was able to answer the ringing phone without thinking that it would be either Nikki or someone who knew about her. Crank phone calls were the worst. When Roseanna picked up the phone and it was an obscene caller or a breather, he would think, Was it somebody who knew my wife, somebody who is trying to tell me something? Could the breather have been Nikki herself? But did Nikki know where he’d moved to; had she ever even heard of Madamaska Falls? Did she know he had married Roseanna? Had she run away that night, leaving no hint of why she was going or where, because earlier in the evening she had seen him with Roseanna, the two of them crossing Tompkins Square Park and headed for his workshop?

  In New York her disappearance was all he could think about—out on the streets it was obsessional, it had no end—and this was why he’d never returned. Back when he was still in their apartment on St. Marks Place, he never went out that he did not think he would pass her in the street, and so he looked at everybody and started following people. If a woman was tall and had the right hair—not that Nikki couldn’t have dyed hers or taken to wearing a wig—he would follow her until he caught up and then he would measure himself against the person and, if she was about right, would step around to look directly at her face—Let me see if this is Nikki! It never was, though he made the acquaintance of some of these women anyway, took them for coffee, took them for a walk, tried to fuck them; half the time did. But he did not find Nikki, nor did the police or the FBI or the famous detective whom he went to hire with the help of Norman and Linc.

  Back in those days—the forties, the fifties, the early sixties—people didn’t disappear the way they do today. Today if somebody disappears you’re pretty sure, you immediately know, what happened: they were murdered, they’re dead. But in 1964 nobody thought first thing of foul play. If there was no certification of their death, you had to believe they were alive. People didn’t just drop off the edge of the earth with anything like the frequency they do now. And so Sabbath had to think she was alive somewhere. If there wasn’t a body to bury physically, he could not bury her mentally. Although since moving to Madamaska Falls he’d never told anybody, even Drenka, about the wife who disappeared, the fact was that Nikki wouldn’t die until he did. He had moved to Madamaska Falls when he felt himself beginning to go crazy looking for her on the New York streets. A person could still walk everywhere in the city in those days, and that’s what he did—walked everywhere, looked everywhere, found nothing.

  The police had distributed circulars to police departments all around the country and in Canada. Sabbath had himself sent out hundreds of circulars, to colleges, to convents, to hospitals, to newspaper reporters, to columnists, to Greek restaurants in Greek towns all over America. The “missing” circular had been assembled and printed by the police: Nikki’s photo, age, height, weight, and hair color, even what she was wearing. They knew what clothes she’d had on because Sabbath had spent a weekend going through her dresser and her closet until he was able to recall the items no longer there. She appeared to have left with only the clothes on her back. And how much money could she have had? Ten dollars? Twenty? Nothing had been drawn from their small bank account and not even the pile of change on the kitchen table had been disturbed. She had not taken even that.

  A description of what she’d been wearing and her photo were all he could offer the detective. She had left no note, and, according to the detective, most people did. “Voluntary disappearances,” he called these. The detective took down from the shelf behind his desk whole loose-leaf notebooks, as many as ten of them, with pictures and descriptions of people who had disappeared and still not been located. “Usually,” he said, “they leave something—a note, a ring. . . .” Sabbath told him that Nikki was obsessed with the dead mother she had loved and the living father she hated. Maybe she had been seized by an impulse—God knew she was a creature of impulse—and had flown out to Cleveland to forgive the crass vulgarian she had not seen since she was seven—or to murder him. Or perhaps, despite the fact that her passport was still in a drawer in their apartment, she had somehow made her way back to London and to the spot alongside the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens where on a Sunday morning, with all the children floating their boats and flying kites, he had watched her scatter the ashes over the water.

  But she could be anywhere, everywhere—where was the detective to begin? No, he wouldn’t take the case, and so Sabbath went back to sending out more circulars, always with a handwritten letter from him that read, “This is my wife. She disappeared. Do you know or have you seen this person?” He sent the circulars to wherever his imagination could take him. He even thought of whorehouses. Nikki was beautiful, submissive, and certainly eye-catching in America, with her long, long body and her longnosed black and white Greek looks—maybe she’d wound up in a whorehouse like the college girl in Sanctuary. He could remember once, though only once, coming upon a young woman of great refinement in a whorehouse, in Buenos Aires.

  Two things, the American girl next door (that was Roseanna) and the exotic (Nikki, the romance of port life, brothel life), came together for him in New York when he started to go to whorehouses looking for his wife. There were places on upper Third Avenue where you met the girl next door. You walked up the stairs into a kind of salon and sometimes they tried to make it look like an old-fashioned salon out of Lautrec or some fake version of that. And there were young women lounging around, and there one found the girl next door but never, never Nikki. He became a customer at three or four of these places and showed Nikki’s picture to the madams. He asked if they’d ever seen her around. The madams all gave the same answer: “I wish I had.”

  Then there were the fifty or so letters addressed to him at the theater, from people who had seen Nikki perform and who wanted to communicate their sympathy. He had stored the letters for her return in her dresser drawer, with the jewelry she had inherited from her mother, among them the pieces he and the embalmer had removed from the corpse—she had not taken any of that either. If he could forward her these letters—no, better if he could send the writers, transport them to wherever she was hiding out and seat her in a chair in the middle of the room, ask her to be still and to let them pass before her one at a time and take as long as they liked to tell her what she had meant to them in Strindberg, Chekhov, Shakespeare. Long before they’d all stepped up to deliver to her their emotional tributes, she would be weeping uncontrollably, not for her mother but for herself now and for the gift she had abandoned. And only after her last admirer had spoken would Sabbath enter the room. And here she would stand and put on her coat—the black form-fitting coat that was missing from the closet, the one they’d bought together at Altman’s—and, without any resistance, allow him to lead her back to where she could feel coherent, of a piece, and strong, where she could think of herself as controlling events, if only for two hours—back to the stage, the only place on earth where she wasn’t acting and her demons ceased to be. Being on stage was what held her together—what held them together. The intensification she gave everything by stepping out under the lights!

  The unending mourning for her mother had made her unendurable to him; it was the actress he had to save.

  As with millions upon millions of young couples, in the beginning was the sexual excitement. However baffling a mixture, Nikki’s narcissism, pure as a gushing geyser, and her stupendous talent for self-abnegation seemed faultlessly wedded in her when she lay nude on the bed imploringly looking up to see what he would do with her first. And the soulfulness was there, that was always there, the romantic, ethereal side of her, her ineffectual protest against everything ugly. The taut concavity that was her belly, the alabaster apple that was her cleft behind, the pale, maidenly nipples of a fifteen-year-old, the breasts so small that you could cup them in your hand the way you hold a ladybug to prevent its flyin
g away, the impenetrability of the eyes that drew you in and in and told you nothing, yet told you nothing so eloquently—the excitement of the yielding of all that fragility! Merely looking down at her he felt that his prick was about to burst.

  “You’re a vulture standing there,” she said. “Does that horrify you?” “Yes,” she replied. They were both surprised by what they were doing together when he first struck her backside with his belt. Nikki, who was tyrannized by nearly everyone, displayed no true fear of being whipped a little. “Not too hard,” but the leather grazing her, at first lightly, then not so lightly, as she lay obligingly on her stomach, put her into an exalted state. “It’s, it’s . . .” “Tell me!” “It’s tenderness— going wild!” It was impossible to tell who was imposing whose will on whom—was it merely Nikki once again submitting or was this the meat of her desire?

  There was a nonsensical side too, of course, and more than once, disengaged from the drama by its comic dimension, Sabbath would leap up on the bed to portray that. “Oh, don’t take it to heart,” said Nikki, laughing; “other things hurt more than that.” “For example?” “Getting up in the morning.” “I like your base qualities so much, Nikoleta.” “I only wish I had more for you.” “You will.” Smiling and frowning at once, she said sadly, “I don’t think so.” “You’ll see,” said the triumphant puppeteer, standing statuelike above her, erection in one hand and the silky sash to tie her to the bedstead in the other.

  It was Nikki who turned out to be right. In time, item after item disappeared from the night table—the belt, the sash, the gag, the blindfold, the baby oil heated a little in a saucepan on the stove; after a while he could enjoy fucking her only when they’d smoked a joint, and then it needn’t have been Nikki who was there, or any human thing at all.

  Even the orgasms that so enthralled him began to bore him after a while. Climaxes overtook her seemingly from without, breaking upon her like a caprice, a hailstorm freakishly exploding in the middle of an August day. All that had been going on before the orgasm was for her some sort of attack that she did nothing to repel but that, however arduous, she could endlessly absorb and easily survive; yet the frenzy of her climax, the thrashing, the whimpering, the loud groaning, the opaque eyes staring fixedly upward, the fingernails digging into his scalp—that seemed a barely tolerable experience from which she might never recover. Nikki’s orgasm was like a convulsion, the body bolting its skin.

  Roseanna’s, on the other hand, had to be galloped after like the fox in the hunt, with herself in the role of bloodthirsty foxhuntress. Roseanna’s orgasm required a great deal of her, an urging onward that was breathtaking to watch (until he grew bored watching that). Roseanna had to fight against something resisting her and committed to another cause entirely—orgasm was not a natural development but an oddity so rare that it had to be laboriously hauled into existence. There was a suspenseful, heroic dimension to her achieving a climax. You never knew until the final moment whether or not she was going to make it or whether you yourself could stand fast without an infarction. He began to wonder if there wasn’t an exaggerated and false side to her struggle, as there is when an adult plays checkers with a child and pretends to be stymied by the child’s every move. Something was wrong, seriously wrong. But then, when you’d about given up hope, she made it, she did it, in at the kill, riding atop him, her entire being compressed in her cunt. He eventually came to feel that he needn’t have been there. He could have been one of those antique marionettes with a long wooden dick. He needn’t have been there—so he wasn’t.

  With Drenka, it was like tossing a pebble into a pond. You entered and the rippling uncoiled sinuously from the center point outward until the entire pond was undulating and aquiver with light. Whenever they had to call it quits for the day or the night, it was because Sabbath was not just at the end of his endurance but dangerously beyond it for a fatso over fifty. “Coming is an industry with you,” he told her; “you’re a factory.” “Old-timer,” she said—a word he’d taught her—while he struggled to recover his breath, “you know what I want next time you get a hard-on?” “I don’t know what month that will be. Tell me now and I’ll never remember.” “Well, I want you to stick it all the way up.” “And then what?” “Then turn me inside out over your cock. Like somebody peels off a glove.”

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  After the first year he began to fear that he might go mad looking for Nikki. And it didn’t help any to leave town. Out of New York, he searched for her name in the local telephone directory. She could have changed it, of course, or shortened it, as Greek Americans frequently shortened their names for convenience’ sake. The short version of Kantarakis was generally Katris—at one point Nikki had been thinking of taking Katris for a stage name, or that was the reason she gave, perhaps not even herself understanding that a new name was not going to lessen in any way her loathing for the father who had made a decent life impossible for her mother.

  One winter day Sabbath was flying back from a performance at a puppet festival in Atlanta when the weather in New York became stormy and his plane was diverted to Baltimore. In the waiting room he went to a phone booth and looked up Kantarakis and Katris. There it was: N. Katris. He dialed the number but got no answer, and so he ran out of the airport and had a taxi take him to the address. The house was a brown wooden bungalow, not much more than a large shack, on a street of little wooden bungalows. A BEWARE DOG sign was stuck into the ground in the middle of the untended front yard. He climbed the broken steps and knocked on the door. He wandered all around the house trying to look in the windows, even going so far as to climb almost to the top of the six-foot-high wire-mesh fence surrounding the front yard. One of the neighbors must have called the police, because two officers drove up and arrested Sabbath. Only at the station house, when he was able to phone Linc and tell him what had happened and get him to explain to the police that Mr. Sabbath had indeed had a wife who had disappeared a year ago, were the charges dropped. Outside the station, despite the police’s warning him against going back and prowling, he hailed another taxi to return him to the shack belonging to N. Katris. It was evening now but there were no lights on. This time in response to his knock he got the barking of what sounded like a very large dog. Sabbath shouted, “Nikki, it’s me. It’s Mickey. Nikki, you are in there! I know you are in there! Nikki, Nikki, please open the door!” The only answer came from the dog. Nikki would not open the door, because she never wanted to see the son of a bitch again or because she was not there, because she was dead, because she had killed herself or been raped and murdered and cut into pieces and thrown overboard in a weighted sack a couple of miles out to sea from Sheepshead Bay.

  To escape the increasing wrath of the dog he ran to the next bungalow and knocked on that door. A black woman’s voice called from within, “Who is that?” “I’m looking for your neighbor—Nikki!” “For what?” “I’m looking for my wife, Nikki Katris.” “Nope” was all he got back from her. “Next door. Number 583, your neighbor, N. Katris. Please, I have to find my wife. She disappeared!” The door was opened by an alarmingly thin and wrinkled elderly black woman, holding herself upright with a cane and wearing dark glasses. She spoke with tender amusement. “You beat her, now you want her back to beat again.” “I did not beat her.” “How come she disappear? You beat a woman, she got half a brain, she run away.” “Please, who lives next door? Answer me!” “Your wife, she got herself a new boyfriend by now. And know what? He gonna beat her. Some women is like that.” With this observation she shut the door.

  He got a flight to New York later that evening. It had taken that blind old black woman to get him to understand that he had been jilted, discarded, abandoned! She had spurned him, left a year ago with somebody else and he was still out looking for her and grieving for her and wondering where she was! It wasn’t him fucking Roseanna that had caused her to flee! It was Nikki fucking somebody new!

  At home he began to fall apart for the first time since she had disap
peared, and, up with the Gelmans in Bronxville, he had cried in his room every night for two weeks. Roseanna was living with him in the apartment now, making her ceramic necklaces again and selling them to a shop in the Village so they had some money to survive on. Sabbath’s drama company had very nearly dissolved and the audience had deserted him, largely because there was no one in the company—maybe no one her age in New York—with anything like Nikki’s magic. Over the months the acting had become worse and worse because of Sabbath’s inattention—he would watch a rehearsal and see not a thing. And he rarely went out in the streets with his finger act, because all he did out on the street was begin to look for Nikki. Look at women and follow women. Sometimes he screwed them. Might as well.

  Roseanna had been hysterical when he reached home that night. “Why didn’t you phone me! Where were you? Your plane landed without you! What was I to think? What do you think I thought?”

  In the bathroom, Sabbath got down on his knees on the tile floor and said to himself, “You can’t do this anymore or you will go crazy. Roseanna will go crazy. You will be insane for the rest of your life. I cannot cry about it ever again. Oh, God, just don’t let me do this ever again!”