Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  Whores. Played a leading role in my life. Always felt at home with whores. Particularly fond of whores. The stewlike stink of those oniony parts. What has ever meant more to me? Real reasons for existence then. But now, preposterously, the morning hard-on was gone. The things one has to put up with in life. The morning hard-on—like a crowbar in your hand, like something growing out of an ogre. Does any other species wake up with a hard-on? Do whales? Do bats? Evolution’s daily reminder to male Homo sapiens in case, overnight, they forget why they’re here. If a woman didn’t know what it was, it might well scare her to death. Couldn’t piss in the bowl because of that thing. Had to force it downward with your hand—had to train it as you would a dog to the leash—so that the stream struck the water and not the upturned seat. When you sat to shit, there it was, loyally looking up at its master. There eagerly waiting while you brush your teeth—“What are we going to do today?” Nothing more faithful in all of life than the lurid cravings of the morning hard-on. No deceit in it. No simulation. No insincerity. All hail to that driving force! Human living with a capital L! It takes a lifetime to determine what matters, and by then it’s not there anymore. Well, one must learn to adapt. How is the only problem.

  He tried to think of a reason to get up, let alone to go on living. Deborah’s toilet seat? A glimpse of Linc’s corpse? Her things— and remembering delving into the things, he was out of the bed and across to the dresser beside the Bang & Olufsen music system.

  Brimming! A treasure trove! Brilliant hues of silk and satin. Childish cotton underpants with red circus stripes. String bikinis with satin behinds. Stretch satin thong bikinis. Floss your teeth with those thongs. Garter belts in purple, black, and white. Renoir’s palette! Rose. Pale pink. Navy. White. Purple. Gold. Red. Peach. Underwired black embroidered bras. Lace push-up bras with little bows. Scalloped lace half-bras. Satin half-bras. C cup. A vipers’ nest of multicolored pantyhose. In white, black, and a chocolatey brown, sheer silk-lace panty pantyhose of the kind that Drenka wore to drive him nuts. A delicious butterscotch-color silk camisole. Leopard-print panties with matching bra. Lace body stockings, three, and all black. A strapless black satin bodysuit with padded push-up cups, edged with lace and hooks and straps. Straps. Bra straps, garter straps, Victorian corset straps. Who in his right mind doesn’t adore straps, all the abracadabra of holding and lifting? And what about strapless? A strapless bra. Christ, everything works. That thing they call a teddy (Roosevelt? Kennedy? Herzl?), all in one a chemise up top and, down below, loose-fitting panties with leg holes that you slip right into without removing a thing. Silk floral bikini underpants. Half-slips. Loved the outmoded half-slip. A woman in a half-slip and a bra standing and ironing a shirt while seriously smoking a cigarette. Sentimental old Sabbath.

  He sniffed the pantyhose to find a pair that hadn’t been washed, then headed with it for the bathroom. Sat to piss the way D. did. D.’s seat. D.’s pantyhose. But the morning hard-on was of the past. . . . Drenka! It was a crowbar with you! Fifty-two years old, a source of life to a hundred men, and dead! It isn’t fair! The urge, the urge! You’ve seen it over and over again, done it over and over again, and five minutes later it fascinates you again. What every man knows: the urge to indulge again. I should never have given it up, thought Sabbath—the life of the sensual port like Bahia, even of the shitty little ports around the Amazon, literally jungle ports, where one could mix with the crews of all kinds of ships, sailors of as many colors as Debby’s underthings, from all kinds of countries, and they were all going to the same place, all ended up in the whorehouse. Everywhere, as in a lurid dream, sailors and women, women and sailors, and I was learning my trade. The eight-to-twelve watch and then working all day as a seaman on deck, chipping and painting, chipping and painting, and then the watch, the sea watch in the bow of the ship. And sometimes it was gorgeous. I had been reading O’Neill. I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoyevsky—everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music, rage like it was two hundred pounds to lose. Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoyevsky fell in love with him. Yes, I would stand in the bow on those starry nights in the tropical sea and promise myself that I would stick at it and go through all the shit and become a ship’s officer. I would urge myself to do all those exams and become a ship’s officer and live like that for the rest of my life. Seventeen, a strong young kid . . . and like a kid I didn’t do it.

  Drawing open the curtains, he discovered that Deborah’s was a corner room whose windows looked out across Central Park to the apartment buildings on the East Side. The daffodils and the leafing of the trees still had three weeks to work their way to Madamaska Falls, but Central Park could have been Savannah. The panorama Debby had teethed on, but he’d still take the shore any day. What had he been doing in a forest on a mountaintop? When he’d fled Nikki’s disappearance, he and Roseanna should have gone to Jersey to live by the sea. Should have become a commercial fisherman. Should have dumped Roseanna and gone back to sea. Puppets. Of all the fucking callings. Between puppets and whores, he chooses puppets. For that alone he deserves to die.

  Only now did he see the assorted pieces of Deborah’s underwear strewn about at the foot of the bureau, as though she had just hurriedly undressed—or been undressed—and run from the room. Pleasant to imagine. He could only guess that he had already been into the underwear during the night—he had no recollection. He must have got up in his sleep to look at her things and spilled some onto the floor. Deep into self-caricature now. I am more of a menace than I realize. This is serious. Premature senility. Senilitia, dementia, hell-bent-for-disaster erotomania.

  And what of it? A natural human occurrence. The word’s rejuvenation. Drenka is dead but Deborah lives and, round the clock at the sex factory, the furnaces are burning away.

  As he dressed in what he wore wherever he went, day in and day out—frayed flannel shirt over an old khaki T-shirt, baggy bottom-heavy corduroys—he listened to hear if anyone was home. Only eight-fifteen but already emptied out. He could not at first choose, from what lay on the floor, between a black underwire bra and a pair of silk floral bikini underpants, but thinking that the bra, because of the wiring, might prove bulky and draw attention, he took the panties, shoved them into his trouser pocket, and dropped the rest into the piled-up drawer. He could play there again tonight. And in the other drawers. And in the closet.

  He noticed now two sachets in that top drawer, one of mauve velvet that was lavender-scented and one of red gingham giving off the crisp odor of pine needles. Neither was the smell he was looking for. Funny—modern kid, Dalton graduate, already a connoisseur of the Metropolitan’s Manets and Cézannes, yet didn’t appear to have the slightest understanding that what men pay good money to sniff is not the needles of the pine. Well, Miss Cowan will find out, one way or another, once she starts wearing this underwear to something other than class.

  Old salt that he was, he made up her bed square and tight.

  Her bed.

  Two simple words, each a syllable as old as English, and their power over Sabbath was nothing short of tyrannical. How tenaciously he clings to life! To youth! To pleasure! To hard-ons! To Deborah’s underthings! And yet all the while he had been looking down from the eighteenth floor across the green tinge of the park and thinking that the time had come to jump. Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Arshile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there. Faulkner as good as killed himself with booze. As did (said Roseanna, authority now on the distinguished dead who might be alive had they “shared” at AA) Ava Gardner. Blessed Ava. Wasn’t much about men could astonish Ava. Elegance and filth, immaculately intertwined. Dead at sixty-two, two years younger than me. Ava, Yvonne de Carlo— those are role models! Fuck the laudable ideologies. Shallow, shallow, shallow! Enough reading and rereading of A Room of One’s Own�
�get yourself The Collected Works of Ava Gardner. A tweaking and fingering lesbian virgin, V. Woolf, erotic life one part prurience, nine parts fear—an overbred English parody of a borzoi, effortlessly superior, as only the English can be, to all her inferiors, who never took her clothes off in her life. But a suicide, remember. The list grows more inspiring by the year. I’d be the first puppeteer.

  The law of living: fluctuation. For every thought a counterthought, for every urge a counterurge. No wonder you either go crazy and die or decide to disappear. Too many urges, and that’s not even a tenth of the story. Mistressless, wifeless, vocationless, homeless, penniless, he steals the bikini panties of a nineteen-year-old nothing and, riding a swell of adrenaline, stuffs them for safekeeping in his pocket—these panties are just what he needs. Does no one else’s brain work in quite this way? I don’t believe that. This is aging, pure and simple, the self-destroying hilarity of the last roller coaster. Sabbath meets his match: life. The puppet is you. The grotesque buffoon is you. You’re Punch, schmuck, the puppet who toys with taboos!

  In the large kitchen with the terra-cotta floor, a kitchen ablaze with sunshine on polished copperware, robust as a greenhouse with gleaming potted plants, Sabbath found a place set for him at the table, facing the view. Surrounding his dishes and cutlery were boxes of four brands of cereals, three differently shaped, differently shaded loaves of hearty-looking bread, a tub of margarine, a dish of butter, and eight jars of preserves, more or less the band of colors you get by passing sunlight through a prism: Black Cherry, Strawberry, Little Scarlet . . . all the way to Greengage Plum and Lemon Marmalade, a spectral yellow. There was half a honeydew as well as half a grapefruit (segmented) under a taut sheet of Saran Wrap, a small basket of nippled oranges of a suggestive variety he’d not come across before, and an assortment of tea bags in a dish beside his place setting. The breakfast crockery was that heavy yellow French stuff decorated with childlike renderings of peasants and windmills. Quimper. Beyond quimper.

  Now why do I alone in America think this is shit? Why didn’t I want to live like this? To be sure, producers characteristically provide for themselves more like pashas than transgressive puppeteers do, but this is awfully nice to wake up to. Pocket full of panties and jar upon jar of Tiptree Preserves. Affixed to its lid, the Little Scarlet sported a price tag reading “$8.95.” What have I achieved that could possibly quimper? It’s hard not to be disgusted with yourself when you see a spread like this. There is so much and I have so little of it.

  There was the park again, out the kitchen window, and, to the south, the spectacle of metropolitan spectacles, midtown Manhattan. In his absence, while up on a northern mountain Sabbath futzed away the years with puppets and his prick, Norman had grown rich and remained an exemplary person, Linc had gone nuts, and Nikki had, for all he knew, become a bag lady shitting on the floor of a 42nd Street subway station, fifty-seven years old, gaga, obese—“Why?” he would cry, “Why?” and she wouldn’t even know who he was. But then, she could as easily be living in a Manhattan apartment as large and luxurious as Norman’s, with a Norman of her own. She could have disappeared for as ordinary a reason as that. . . . It’s the shock of seeing New York still here that’s reminded me of Nikki. I will not think about it. I cannot. That is the perennial time bomb.

  Strange. The one thing you never think is that she’s dead. That even goes for the dead. Me up here in the light and the warmth and, fucked-over as I am, with five senses, a mind, and eight kinds of preserves—and the dead dead. Immediate reality is outside that window; so big it is, so much of it, everything entangled in everything else. . . . What large thought was Sabbath struggling to express? Is he asking, “Whatever did happen to my own true life?” Was it taking place elsewhere? But how then can looking out of this window be so gigantically real? Well, that is the difference between the true and the real. We don’t get to live in the truth. That’s why Nikki ran away. She was an idealist, an innocent, touching, talented illusionist who wanted to live in the truth. Well, if you found it, kid, you’re the first. In my experience the direction of life is toward incoherence—precisely what you would never confront. Maybe that was the only coherent thing you could think to do: die to deny incoherence.

  “Right, Ma? You had incoherence in spades. The death of Morty still defies belief. You were right to shut up after that.”

  “You think like a failure,” Sabbath’s mother replied.

  “I am a failure. I was saying that to Norm only last night. I am at the very pinnacle of failure. How else should I think?”

  “All you ever wanted were whorehouses and whores. You have the ideology of a pimp. You should have been one.”

  Ideology, no less. How knowing she had become in the afterlife. They must give courses.

  “It’s too late, Ma. The black guys have got the market cornered. Try again.”

  “You should have led a normal and productive life. You should have had a family. You should have had a profession. You shouldn’t have run away from life. Puppets!”

  “It seemed a good idea at the time, Mother. I even studied in Italy.”

  “You studied whores in Italy. You deliberately set out to live on the wrong side of existence. You should have had my worries.”

  “But I do. I do. . .” Crying again. “I do. I have your worries exactly.”

  “Then why do you go around with an alte kocker’s beard and wearing your playground clothes—and with whores!”

  “Quarrel, if you like, with the clothes and the whores, but the beard is essential if I don’t want to look at my face.”

  “You look like a beast.”

  “And what should I look like? A Norman?”

  “Norman was always a lovely boy.”

  “And I?”

  “You always got your excitement in other ways. Always. Even as a tiny child you were a little stranger in the house.”

  “Is that true? I didn’t know that. I was so happy.”

  “But always a little stranger, making everything into a farce.”

  “Everything?”

  “You? Of course. Look now. Making death itself into a farce. Is there anything more serious than dying? No. But you want to make it into a farce. Even killing yourself you won’t do with dignity.”

  “That’s asking a lot. I don’t think anyone who kills himself kills himself ‘with dignity.’ I don’t believe that’s possible.”

  “Then you be the first. Make us proud.”

  “But how, Mother?”

  Beside his place setting was a longish note beginning GOOD MORNING. In caps. The note was from Norman, computer-generated.

  GOOD MORNING

  We’re off to work. Linc’s service begins at two. Riverside at 76th. See you there—will save seat with us. Cleaning woman (Rosa) comes at nine. If you want her to wash or iron anything, just ask her to. Need anything, ask Rosa. I’m at office all morning (994-6932). I hope sleep restored you some. You’re under tremendous stress. I wish you would talk to a psychiatrist while you’re here. Mine’s no genius but smart enough. Dr. Eugene Graves (surname unfortunate but gets the job done). I phoned him and he said you should call if you want to (562-1186). He has cancellation late this afternoon. Please consider it seriously. He got me out of my summer mess. You could be helped with medication—and by talking to him. You’re in bad shape and you need help. ACCEPT IT. Please call Gene. Michelle sends her regards. She’ll be at the service. We expect you to have dinner at home with us tonight. Quiet, the three of us. Until you’re back on your feet, we expect you to stay. The bed is yours. The place is yours. You and I are old friends. There aren’t that many left.

  Norman

  Paper-clipped to the note there was a plain white envelope. Fifty-dollar bills. Not just the six that would have covered the check from the joint account that Sabbath had made payable to Norman the evening before but four more in addition. Mickey Sabbath had five hundred bucks. Enough to pay Drenka to fuck in a threesome if Drenka . . . Well, she wasn’t, an
d since chances were Norman had no intention of cashing Sabbath’s check—probably already had torn it up to ensure Roseanna wouldn’t get screwed out of her share of the dough—Sabbath had only to hurry, find one of those check-cashing places that take ten percent for commission, and write out a new check for three hundred on the joint account. That would give him seven seventy altogether. Suddenly he had thirty to fifty percent less reason to die.

  “First you make a farce of suicide, now again you make a farce of life.”

  “I don’t know any other way to do it, Mother. Leave me be. Shut up. You don’t exist. There are no ghosts.”

  “Wrong. There are only ghosts.”

  Sabbath proceeded then to enjoy an enormous breakfast. He hadn’t eaten with such pleasure since before Drenka had taken ill. It made him feel magnanimous. Let Roseanna have the three hundred. Deborah’s furrow was now his furrow. Michelle, Norman, and Dr. Coffin were going to put him back on his feet.

  Graves.

  After packing himself full as a suitcase so stuffed with clothing you can’t zipper it shut, he rollingly strolled around the apartment with his old sailor’s gait, inspecting all the rooms, the baths, the library, the sauna; opened all the closets and examined the hats, the coats, the boots, the shoes, the stacks of sheets, the differently colored piles of soft towels; wandered down the hallway lined with mahogany bookcases holding only the world’s best books; admired the rugs on the floors, the watercolors on the walls; scrutinized the Cowans’ quietly elegant everything—lamps, fixtures, doorknobs, even the toilet bowl cleaners appeared to have been designed by Brancusi—all the while devouring the hard heel of the seeded pumpernickel plastered thick with Little Scarlet at $8.95 a jar and pretending that the place was his.