by Philip Roth
Not for the first time he thought of his mother sitting on the boardwalk waiting for Morty to come back from the war. She never believed he was dead, either. The one thing you can’t think is that they’re dead. They have another life. You give yourself all sorts of reasons why they haven’t come home. You get into the rumor business. Somebody would swear he had seen Nikki performing under another name in a summer theater in Virginia. The police would report that somebody had spotted a crazy woman who resembled her description on the Canadian border. Only Linc, when they were alone, had the courage to say to him, “Mick, don’t you really know she’s dead?” And the answer was always the same: “Where is the body?” No, the wound never closes, the wound remains fresh, as it had till the very end for his mother. She had been stopped when Morty was killed, stopped from going forward, and all the logic went out of her life. She wanted life, as all people do, to be logical and linear, as orderly as she made the house and her kitchen and the boys’ bureau drawers. She had worked so hard to be in control of a household’s destiny. All her life she waited not only for Morty but for the explanation from Morty: why? The question haunted Sabbath. Why? Why? If only someone will explain to us why, maybe we could accept it. Why did you die? Where did you go? However much you may have hated me, why don’t you come back so we can continue with our linear, logical life like all the other couples who hate each other?
Nikki had had a performance of Miss Julie that night, Nikki, who never once failed to show up to work, even reeling with a fever. Sabbath, as usual, was spending the evening with Roseanna and so had not found out what happened until he got home half an hour before Nikki was due back from the theater. That was what was wonderful about having an actress for a wife—at night you always knew her whereabouts and how long she would be gone. At first he thought that maybe she had gone out looking for him; maybe because she had her suspicions, she had taken a circuitous route to the theater and come upon Sabbath crossing the park with his hand on Roseanna’s ass. She might well have seen them going through the front door of the brownstone where he had his tiny workshop room at the rear of the top floor. Nikki was explosive, crazily emotional, and could do and say bizarre things and not even remember them afterward, or remember but fail to see why they were bizarre.
Sabbath had been complaining to Roseanna that night about his wife’s incapacity to separate fantasy from reality or to understand the connection between cause and effect. Early on in life either she or her mother, or both conspiring together, had cast little Nikki as the blameless victim, and consequently she could never see where she was responsible for anything. Only on the stage did she shed this pathological innocence and take over, herself determining how things were going to come out, and, with exquisite tact, turn something imagined into something real. He told Roseanna the story of her slapping the face of the ambulance driver in London and then talking to her mother’s corpse for three days, about how, even down to a few days before her disappearance, Nikki was repeating how glad she was she’d “said good-bye to Momma” as she had, how satisfying that remained. She even made a crack, as she did each time she recalled the three days of fondling the corpse, about how cruel it was of the Jews to “dump” their dead as soon as they could, a remark that Sabbath decided once more not to call her on. Why correct that idiocy rather than all the other idiocies? In Miss Julie she was everything she couldn’t be outside Miss Julie: cunning, knowing, radiant, imperious—everything but shrinking from the reality. The reality of the play. It was only the reality of reality by which she was benumbed. Nikki’s aversions, her fears, her hysteria—he was full of grievance, yet another spouse absolutely steeped in it, didn’t know, he told Roseanna, how much more he could take.
And he and Roseanna fucked and she left and he went to St. Marks Place, and there were Norman and Linc sitting on the steps of his building. Sabbath had hurried home to shower away Rosie’s smell before Nikki got in. One night when Nikki believed Sabbath was asleep, she had begun to sniff under the blankets and he realized only then that he had forgotten Rosie’s visit at lunchtime and had gone to bed having washed his face and nothing more. And that was just a week earlier.
Norman told him what had happened, while Linc sat there with his head in his hands. Nikki had no understudy and so, even though the house was sold out, as it had been since the opening, the performance had to be canceled, the money refunded, and everybody sent home. And nobody could find Sabbath to tell him. His producers had been waiting on the steps for over an hour. Linc, woefully wracked by all this, pleadingly asked Sabbath if he knew where she was. Sabbath assured him that as soon as she had calmed down and had begun to get over whatever it was that had upset her, she’d call and come back. He wasn’t worried. Nikki could behave oddly, very oddly; they didn’t know how oddly. “This,” said Sabbath, “is just one of her strange things.”
But upstairs in the apartment his two young producers made Sabbath call the police.
♦ ♦ ♦
He was in New York less than five minutes when he began to be haunted all over again by “Why?” He had to restrain himself from using the tip of his muddied old boots (muddied from the treks out to the graveyard) to awaken, one by one, those bodies buried under their rags, to see if perhaps a white woman was among them who had once been his wife. Withdrawn, mannerly, intense, tremulous, unearthly, moody, mesmeric Nikki, a difficult personality impossible ever to grasp, whose mark on him was indelible, who could more confidently imitate someone than be someone, who’d clung to her emotional virginity until the day she’d disappeared, whose fears, even without danger or misfortune at hand, were streaming through her all the time, whom he had married out of sheer fascination with her gift, at only twenty-two, for unartificial self-transformation, for duplicating realities she knew virtually nothing about, who unfailingly imparted to everything anyone ever said an inward, idiosyncratic, insulting significance, who was never really at home outside the fairy tale, a juvenile whose theatrical specialty was the most mature roles . . . into whom had she been changed by an existence free of him? What had become of her? And why?
As of April 12, 1994, there was still no certification of her death, and though our need to bury our dead is strong, we have first to be sure the person is dead. Had she returned to Cleveland? To London? To Salonika to pretend there to be her mother? But she’d had neither a passport nor money. Had she run away from him or from everything, or had she run away from being an actress just when it had become overwhelmingly apparent that she could not avoid an extraordinary career? That had already begun to terrify her, the demands of that kind of success. She would be fifty-seven in May. He never failed to remember her birthday or the date she’d disappeared. What did Nikki look like now? Her mother before the formaldehyde or after? She had already outlived her mother by twelve years—if she had lived beyond November 7,1964.
What would Morty look like now if he had walked away from his downed plane in 1944? What did Drenka look like now? If they dug her up, could you still tell she’d been a woman, the most womanly of women? Could he have fucked her after she was dead? Why not?
Yes, fleeing for New York that evening he’d believed he was running off to see Linc’s corpse, but it was the body of his first wife he could never stop thinking about, her body, alive, that he might at last be shepherded to. It did not matter that the idea made no sense. Sabbath’s sixty-four years of life had long ago released him from the falsity of sense. You would think this would make him deal better with loss than he did. Which only goes to show what everyone learns sooner or later about loss: the absence of a presence can crush the strongest people.
“But why bring it up?” he snarled at his mother. “Why Nikki, Nikki, Nikki when I’m close to death myself!” And she finally spoke out, his little mother, gave it to him on the corner of Central Park West and West 74th Street as she never dared to in life once he was twelve and already muscular and belligerently grown-up. “That’s the thing you know best,” she told him, “have thought abo
ut most, and you don’t know anything.”
STRANGE,” Norman said, reflecting on Sabbath’s tribulations.
Sabbath waited to let sympathy work the man over just a little more before he quietly corrected him. “Extremely,” said Sabbath.
“Yes,” Norman shot back, “I think it’s fair to say extremely.”
They were at the kitchen table, a beautiful table, large glazed ivory-colored Italian tiles bordered by bright hand-painted tiles of vegetables and fruit. Michelle, Norman’s wife, was asleep in their bedroom, and the two old friends, seated across from each other, were speaking softly of the night when Nikki failed to turn up at the theater and nobody knew where she was. Norman wasn’t at all as at ease with Sabbath as he’d been on the phone the night before; the scope of Sabbath’s transfiguration seemed to astonish him, in part perhaps because of his own mammoth treasure of satisfied dreams, apparent everywhere Sabbath looked, including into Norman’s bright, brown, benevolent eyes. Tanned from a tennis vacation in the sun and as thin and athletically flexible as he’d been as a young man, he showed no sign that Sabbath could see of his recent depression. Since he was already bald by the time he left college, nothing about him seemed changed.
Norman was no fool, had read books and traveled widely, but to comprehend, in the flesh, a failure like Sabbath’s appeared to be as difficult as coming to terms with Linc’s suicide, and maybe more so. Linc’s condition he had observed worsening each year, while the Sabbath who had forsaken New York in 1965 had virtually no affinity to the man sighing over a sandwich at the kitchen table in 1994. Sabbath had washed his hands, face, and beard in the bathroom, and still, he realized, he unnerved Norman no less than if he had been a tramp whom Norman had foolishly invited home to spend the night. Perhaps over the years Norman had come to inflate Sabbath’s departure to a high artistic drama—a search for independence in the sticks, for spiritual purity and tranquil meditation; if Norman thought of him at all, he would, as a spontaneously good-hearted person, have tried to remember what he admired about him. And why did that annoy Sabbath? He was irritated not nearly so much by the perfect kitchen and the perfect living room and the perfect everything in all the rooms that opened off the book-lined corridor as by the charity. That he, Sabbath, could inspire such feelings of course entertained him. Of course it was fun to see himself through Norman’s eyes. But it was hideous as well.
Norman was asking if Sabbath had ever come close to picking up Nikki’s trail after she had disappeared. “I left New York in order to stop trying,” Sabbath replied. “It bothered me sometimes to realize that she didn’t know where I lived. What if she wanted to find me? But if she did, she’d find Roseanna, too. Once I was up in the mountains I never allowed myself the pleasure of keeping Nikki in my life. I didn’t imagine her with a husband and children. I was going to find her, she was going to turn up—I stopped all that. The only way for me to understand it was not to think about it. You have to take this bizarre thing and put it away in order to proceed with your life. What was the point of thinking about it?”
“And is that what the mountain represents? A place not to think about Nikki?”
Norman was trying to ask only intelligent questions, and they were intelligent, and they missed entirely the point of Sabbath’s descent.
Sabbath went on exchanging sentences with Norman that could as well have been true as not. It was a matter of indifference to him. “My life was changed. I just couldn’t go forward with that amount of speed anymore. I couldn’t go forward at all. The idea of controlling anything went completely out of my head. The thing with Nikki left me,” he said, smiling with what he hoped would be a wan expression, “in a somewhat awkward position.”
“I would think.”
If I had appeared at the door without having called from the road, if I had got by the doorman unnoticed and taken the elevator to the eighteenth floor and knocked on the Cowans’ door, Norman would never have recognized the man in the foyer as me. With the oversize hunting jacket atop the rube’s flannel shirt and these big muddy boots on my feet, I look like a visitor from Dogpatch, either like a bearded character in a comic strip or somebody at your doorstep in 1900, a wastrel uncle from the Russian pale who is to sleep in the cellar next to the coal bin for the rest of his American life. Through the lens of unforewarned Norman, Sabbath saw what he looked like, had come to look like, didn’t care that he looked like, deliberately looked like—and it pleased him. He’d never lost the simple pleasure, which went way back, of making people uncomfortable, comfortable people especially.
Yet there was something thrilling in seeing Norman. Sabbath felt much as poor parents do when they visit their kids in the suburbs who’ve made it big—humbled, mystified, out of their element, but proud. He was proud of Norman. Norman had lived in the theatrical shit-world for a lifetime and had not himself become a stupid shit. Could he be so considerate on the job, so goodnatured and decent and thoughtful? They would tear him to pieces. And still to Sabbath it seemed that Norman’s humane disposition had only enlarged with age and success. There wasn’t enough he could do to make Sabbath feel at home. Maybe it wasn’t repulsion at all that he felt but something like awe at the sight of white-bearded Sabbath, come down from his mountaintop like some holy man who has renounced ambition and worldly possessions. Can it be that there is something religious about me? Has what I’ve done—i.e., failed to do—been saintly? I’ll have to phone Rosie and tell her.
Whatever lay behind it, Norman couldn’t have been more solicitous. But then, he and Linc, sons of prosperous fathers and Jersey City friends since childhood, could not have been kinder from the moment they set up their partnership fresh out of Columbia and paid the expenses arising from Sabbath’s obscenity trial. They had extended to Sabbath that respect edged with reverence which was associated in Sabbath’s mind less with the way you deal with an entertainer (the most he’d ever been—Nikki was the artist) than with the manner in which you approach an elderly clergyman. There was something exciting for these two privileged Jewish boys in having, as they liked to say then, “discovered Mick Sabbath.” It kindled their youthful idealism to learn that Sabbath was the son of a poor butter-and-egg man from a tiny working-class Jersey shore town, that instead of attending college he had shipped out as a merchant seaman at seventeen, that he’d lived two years in Rome on the GI Bill after coming out of the Army, that married only a year he was already on the prowl, that the spookily beautiful young wife whom he bossed around off the stage as well as on—an oddball herself but obviously much better born than he and probably, as an actress, a genius, too—couldn’t seem to survive half an hour without him. There was an excitement about the way he affronted people without caring. He was not just a newcomer with a potentially huge theatrical talent but a young adventurer robustly colliding with life, already in his twenties a real-lifer, urged on to excess by a temperament more elemental than either of their own. Back in the fifties there was something thrillingly alien about “Mick.”
Sitting safely in the Manhattan kitchen sipping the last of the beer Norman had poured him, Sabbath was by now certain whose head Officer Balich had meant to split open. Either something incriminating had turned up in Drenka’s belongings or Sabbath had been observed at the cemetery at night. Wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless . . . and now, to top things off, on the run. If he weren’t too old to go back to sea, if his fingers weren’t crippled, if Morty had lived and Nikki hadn’t been insane, or he hadn’t been—if there weren’t war, lunacy, perversity, sickness, imbecility, suicide, and death, chances were he’d be in a lot better shape. He’d paid the full price for art, only he hadn’t made any. He’d suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings—isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction—and nobody knew or cared. And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.
Obey
ing the laws of disappointment, disobedient Sabbath began to cry, and not even he could tell whether the crying was an act or the measure of his misery. And then his mother spoke up for the second time that evening—in the kitchen now, and trying to comfort her only living son. “This is human life. There is a great hurt that everyone has to endure.”
Sabbath (who liked to think that distrusting the sincerity of everyone armed him a little against betrayal by everything): I’ve even fooled a ghost. But while he thought this—his head a lumpish, sobbing sandbag on the table—he also thought, And yet how I crave to cry!
Crave? Please. No, Sabbath didn’t believe a word he said and hadn’t for years; the closer he tried to get to describing how he arrived at becoming this failure rather than another, the further he seemed from the truth. True lives belonged to others, or so others believed.
Norman had reached across the table to take one of Sabbath’s hands in his.
Good. They’d let him stay for at least a week.
“You,” he said to Norman, “you understand what matters.”
“Yeah, I’m a master of the art of living. That’s why I’m eight months on Prozac.”
“All I know how to do is antagonize.”
“Well, that and a few other things.”
“A really trivial, really shitty life.”
“The beers went to your head. When someone is exhausted and down like you, everything gets exaggerated. Linc’s suicide has a lot to do with it. We’ve all been through it.”
“Repugnant to everyone.”
“Come on,” Norman replied, increasing the firmness of his hold on Sabbath’s hand . . . but when was he going to tell him, “I think you had better move in with us”? Because Sabbath could not go back. Roseanna wouldn’t have him in the house, and Matthew Balich had found him out and was furious enough to kill him. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Unless Norman said, “Move in,” he was finished.
