Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  But I was the disorder. I am disorder.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  According to Morty’s Benrus, eternity was officially beginning for Linc Gelman at the Riverside Memorial Chapel on Amsterdam Avenue in just about half an hour. Yet dedicated as Sabbath was to seeing what a man could make of a wreck of a life if only he had the wherewithal, when he reached the Astor Place station, instead of hurrying down for the train, he became engrossed by a small company of gifted players enacting, with effectively minimalist choreography, the last degrading stages of the struggle for survival. Their amphitheater was this acre or two of lower Manhattan where everything running north, south, east, and west comes unstuck and together again in an intricate angling of intersections and odd-shaped oases of open space.

  “Don’t have to be a Rockefella to help a fella, don’t have to be a Rockefella to help a fella—” A black tiny being with a bashed-in face hopped up with his cup to recite for Sabbath in a gentle singsong voice rather belying the chain of events three centuries long that had culminated in this pinprick of tormented existence. This guy was barely living and yet—thought Sabbath, counting how many others were working the adjoining territory with cups of their own—clearly he was Man of the Year.

  Sipping at the dregs in his own cup, Sabbath at last looked up from the submerged blunder that was his past. The present happened also to be in progress, manufactured day and night like the troop ships at Perth Amboy during the war, the venerable present that goes back to antiquity and runs right from the Renaissance to today—this always-beginning, never-ending present was what Sabbath was renouncing. Its inexhaustibility he finds repugnant. For this alone he should die. So what if he has led a stupid life? Anyone with any brains knows that he is leading a stupid life even while he is leading it. Anyone with any brains understands that he is destined to lead a stupid life because there is no other kind. There is nothing personal in it. Nonetheless, childish tears well up in his eyes as Mickey Sabbath—yes, the Mickey Sabbath, of that select band of 77 billion prize saps who constitute human history—bids good-bye to his one-and-onlyness with a half-mumbled, heartbroken “Who gives a shit?”

  A grizzled black face, wild and wasted, eyes bereft of any desire to see—blurred, muzzy eyes that Sabbath took to be at the twilight edge of sanity—appeared only inches from his own grizzled face. For such wretched affliction Sabbath had the stomach and so he did not turn away. His own anguish he knew to be but the faintest imitation of a sublife as abhorrent as this one. The black man’s eyes were terrifying. If deep in that pocket his fingers are twisted around the handle of a knife, I may not be doing what I should be doing by holding my ground like this.

  The beggar shook his cup like a tambourine, causing the change to rattle dramatically. A heavy odor of rot polluted his breath as into Sabbath’s beard he whispered conspiratorially, “It’s just a job, man—somebody’s got to do it.”

  It was a knife. Jabbing into Sabbath’s jacket, a knife. “What’s the job?” Sabbath asked him.

  “Bein’ a borderline case.”

  Try to remain calm and to look unperturbed. “You do appear to have had your share of disappointment.”

  “America love me.”

  “If you say so.” But when the beggar lurched heavily against him, Sabbath cried out, “Let’s not have violence—you hear me? No violence!”

  This provoked from his assailant a gruesome grin. “Vi-o-lence? Vi-o-lence? I told you—America love me!”

  Now, if what Sabbath felt pushing into him was indeed the tip of a knife milliseconds from impaling his liver, if Sabbath truly had the-desire-not-to-be-alive-any-longer, why did he bring the heel of his big boot so forcefully down on that beloved American’s foot? If he no longer gave a shit, why did he give a shit? On the other hand, if this limitless despair was only so much simulation, if he was not so steeped in hopelessness as he pretended to be, whom was he deceiving other than himself? His mother? Was a suicide required for his mother to understand that Mickey had amounted to nothing? Why else was she haunting him?

  The black man howled and stumbled backward, whereupon Sabbath, fiery still with whatever impulse had saved his life, looked quickly down to discover that what he had taken for the tip of a knife was something in the shape of a grub or a slug or a maggot, a soft worm of a thing that looked as though it had been dipped in coal dust. It made you wonder what all the fuss was for.

  In the meantime, nobody on those streets seemed to have noticed either the pecker that was nothing to write home about or the crazy bastard to whom it belonged and who, in what was admittedly a clumsy effort not entirely thought through, had wanted merely to become Sabbath’s friend. Nor had anyone noticed Sabbath stomp him. The encounter that had left Sabbath in a sweat appeared to have been as good as invisible to two beggars who were no farther from the puppeteer than one corner of the boxing ring is from the other. They were intimately talking together across a supermarket cart and a load of transparent plastic bags stuffed to bursting with empty soda bottles and cans. The lanky one, who appeared, from the proprietary way he sprawled across it, to be the owner of the cart and its loot, was wearing a decent-enough sweat suit and sneakers that were practically brand-new. The other, shorter man was wrapped in rags that could well have been appropriated off the floor of an auto garage.

  The more prosperous of the two spoke in a large, declamatory voice. “Man, there ain’t enough hours in the day for me to do all the things I got scheduled.”

  “You fuckin’ thief,” replied the other weakly. Sabbath saw that he was weeping. “You stole it, you shitface.”

  “Sorry, man. I’d pencil you in, but my computers are down. The automatic car wash don’t work. You don’t do a drive-through at McDonald’s in under seven minutes, and they get it all wrong anyway. Things we supposed to be really good at we ain’t good at anymore. I call IBM. I ask them where I can buy one of them laptop computers. Call their 800 number. He says, ‘I’m sorry, the computers are down.’ IBM,” he repeated, looking gleefully at Sabbath, “and they ain’t got it together.”

  “I know, I know,” said Sabbath. “The TV fucked it up.”

  “The TV fucked it up good, man.”

  “The challah machine,” said Sabbath, “is the last thing that works. Look at a window full of challah. No two exactly alike, and yet all within the genre. And they still look like they’re plastic. And that’s what a challah wants to do. Wanted to look like plastic even before plastic. There’s where they got the idea for plastic. From challahs.”

  “No shit. How you know that?”

  “National Public Radio. They help you understand things. There’s always National Public Radio to help me understand, no matter how confused I may be.”

  The only other white man anywhere nearby was standing in the middle of Lafayette Street, one of those bantamweight red-faced bums of indeterminate age and Irish descent who’d been making a home of the Bowery for decades now and so was familiar to Sabbath from back when he had lived in the neighborhood. He was clutching a bottle in a brown paper bag and talking quietly to a pigeon, a wounded pigeon that couldn’t get itself up on its legs and take more than a wobbly step or two before keeling over on its side. In the midst of the early afternoon traffic it vainly fluttered its wings, trying to get moving. The bum stood straddling the pigeon, using his free hand to direct the cars to drive around and on through the intersection. Some drivers, angrily honking their horns, came perilously close to deliberately running him down, but the bum only cursed them and continued to stand guard over the bird. With the flapping sole of one of the sandals he was wearing, trying gently to help the pigeon find its equilibrium, he repeatedly nudged the bird up to its feet only to see it tumble to its side once the assistance was removed.

  It looked to Sabbath as though the pigeon had been struck by a car or was ill and dying. He came over to the curb to watch as the bum with the bottle, wearing a red and white baseball cap with the logo “Handy Home Repair,” leaned down toward the helpless cr
eature. “Here,” he said, “have a little . . . have some . . .” and he spilled a few drops from the mouth of the bottle onto the street. Though the pigeon obstinately worked to recover the power of self-locomotion, it was clear how with each succeeding effort its strength was ebbing away. So, too, was the magnanimity of the bum. “Here—here, it’s vodka, take some.” But the pigeon remained oblivious to the offering. It lay on its side barely stirring, its wings unable to do much more than intermittently twitch and collapse. The bum warned, “You’re gonna get killed out here—drink, you fucker!”

  Finally, when he could no longer endure the bird’s indifference, he reared back and kicked the pigeon as hard as he could out of the path of the oncoming traffic.

  It landed in the gutter only feet from where Sabbath was standing to watch. The bum marched over and kicked it again, and that took care of the problem.

  Spontaneously Sabbath applauded. As far as he could tell, there were no longer street performers like himself—streets far too dangerous for that—the street performers now were homeless beggars and bums. Beggar’s cabaret, beggar’s cabaret that was to his own long-extinct Indecent Theater what the Grand Guignol was to the darling Muppets and their mouths, all the decent Muppets, making people happy with their untainted view of life: everything is innocent, childlike, and pure, everything is going to be okay—the secret is to tame your prick, draw attention away from the prick. Oh, the timidity! His timidity! Not Henson’s, his! The cowardice! The meekness! Finally afraid to be utterly unspeakable, choosing to hide out in the hills instead! To everyone he had ever horrified, to the appalled who’d considered him a dangerous man, loathsome, degenerate, and gross, he cried, “Not at all! My failure is failing to have gone far enough! My failure is not having gone further!”

  In response, a passerby dropped something into his coffee cup. “Cocksucker, I haven’t finished!” But when he plucked the object out of the cup, it wasn’t chewed chewing gum or a cigar butt—for the first time in four years, Sabbath had earned a quarter.

  “God bless you, sir,” he called after his benefactor. “God bless you and your loved ones and your cherished home with the electrical security system and the computer-accessed long-distance services.”

  At it again. How he’d begun was how he’d end, he who had gone gloomily around for years believing his life of adulteries and arthritis and professional embitterment to have been senselessly lived outside the conventions, without purpose or unity. But far from being disappointed at the malicious symmetry of his finding himself thirty years later once again on the street with his hat in his hand, he had the humorous sensation of having meandered blindly back into his own grand design. And you had to call that a triumph: he had perpetrated on himself the perfect joke.

  By the time he went off to panhandle in the subway, his cup contained over two dollars in change. Clearly Sabbath had the touch, the look, the patter, the battered, capsized, repellent what-ever-it-was that got under people’s skins sufficiently fast for them to want to shut him down just long enough to scoot on by and never see him or hear him again.

  Between Astor Place and Grand Central, where he had to change for the Suicide Express, he lumbered dutifully from car to car, shaking his cup and reciting from King Lear the role he hadn’t had occasion to perform since he’d been assailed by his own tomatoes. A new career at sixty-four! Shakespeare in the subway, Lear for the masses—rich foundations love that stuff. Grants! Grants! Grants! At least let Roseanna see that he was out hustling, on his feet again, after the scandal that had cost them his twenty-five hundred a year. He was meeting her halfway. Financial equity between them was restored. Yet, even as he was regaining a working man’s dignity, a residual sense of self-preservation cautioned him that he wasn’t clowning on Town Street. In Madamaska Falls human corruption was considered to reside pretty much in him, Sabbath alone the menace, no one as dangerous anywhere around . . . no one but that midget Jap dean. He hated her fucking midget guts, not for her leading the coven that cost him his job—he hated the job. Not for losing the dough—he hated the dough, hated being an employee on a payroll who got a paycheck that he took to a bank where behind the counter there was a person they called a teller because she had it in her to tell even Sabbath to have a good day. He could not think of anything he hated more than endorsing that check, except perhaps looking at the stub where all the deductions were tallied up. It always got him, trying to figure out that stub, always pissed him off. Here I am at the bank endorsing my check—just what I always wanted. No, it wasn’t the job, it wasn’t the money, it was losing those girls that killed him, a dozen of them a year, none over twenty-one, and always at least one. . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  That year—the fall of ’89—it had been Kathy Goolsbee, a freckled redhead with the shiksa overbite, a hefty, big-limbed scholarship kid from Hazleton, PA, another of his treasured six-footers, a baker’s daughter who’d worked in the shop after school from the time she was twelve and who pronounced can “kin” and going to the way Fats Waller did when he sang, “I’m gunna sit right down and write myself a lettuh.” Kathy displayed an unlikely flair for meticulous puppet design that reminded him of Roseanna when she started out as his partner, and so more than likely it would have been Kathy that year had she not “accidentally” left on the sink of the second-floor women’s room of the college library the tape that, unknown to her teacher, she had made of a phone conversation they’d had only days earlier, their fourth. She swore to him that all she intended to do was to take the tape into a toilet stall so she could listen there in privacy; she swore to him that she’d brought it with her to the library only because, since they’d got going together on the telephone, her head, even without her headset, was ablaze with little else. She swore to him that vengefully robbing him of his only source of income had never entered her mind.

  It had all begun when Kathy phoned his home one evening to tell Professor Sabbath she had the flu and couldn’t turn in her project the next day, and Sabbath, seizing on the surprising call to quiz her paternally about her “goals,” learned that she was living with a boyfriend who tended bar at night in the student hangout and was at the library during the day writing a “poli sci” dissertation. They talked for half an hour, exclusively about Kathy, before Sabbath said, “Well, at least don’t worry about the workshop—you stay in bed with that flu,” and she replied, “I am.” “And your boyfriend?” “Oh, Brian’s at Bucky’s, working.” “So you’re not only in bed, you’re not only sick, you’re all alone.” “Yeah.” “Well, so am I,” he said. “Where is your wife?” she asked, and Sabbath understood that Kathy was his nominee for the school year 1989–90. When you feel a strike like that at the end of the line, you don’t have to be much of a fisherman to know you’ve hooked a beaut. You get a move on when a girl who speaks only in the stunted argot of her age-group asks in an uncharacteristically languid, slitheringly restless voice, with words that waft out of her more like an odor than a sound, “Where is your wife?”

  “Out,” he replied. “Hmmmm.” “Are you warm enough, Kathy? Is it the chills making you make that noise?” “Uh-uh.” “You must be sure you’re warm enough. What are you wearing in bed?” “My pj’s.” “With the flu? That’s all?” “Oh, I’m boiling in just these. I keep having flashes. Flushes.” “Well,” laughing, “I do, too—” and yet, even as he began to reel her in cautiously, gently, without haste, taking all the time in the world to haul her on board, big and speckled and thumpingly alive, inwardly Sabbath was so excited he did not begin to realize that it was he being guided up through leagues of lust by the hook with which she’d pierced him; had no idea, he who’d passed into his sixties only the month before, that it was he being craftily landed and that someday very soon now he would discover himself eviscerated, stuffed, and hung as a trophy on the wall above the desk of Dean Kimiko Kakizaki. All the way back in Havana, when Yvonne de Carlo had said to the young merchant seaman, “You finished? Get off!” he had come to understand tha
t in dealing with the wayward you must never allow your cunning to be set aside along with your skivvies simply because of the mad craving to come . . . and yet it never occurred to Sabbath, no, not even to wily old Sabbath, cynical now for a good fifty years, that a big strapping Pennsylvanian with all those freckles could be quite so deficient in ideals as to be setting him up for bringing him down.

  It was not three weeks after her first call that Kathy was explaining to Sabbath that she had begun her evening’s work listening to their tape in the stacks, at a carrel piled high with books for “Western Civ,” but that after only ten minutes, the tape had made her so wet she had left everything and taken off with the headset for the ladies’ bathroom. “But how did the tape wind up on the sink,” Sabbath asked, “if you were listening to it in a toilet stall?” “I was taking it out to put something else in.” “Why didn’t you do that in the stall?” “Because I would only have started listening again. I mean, I just didn’t know what to do, basically. I thought, ‘This is really crazy.’ I was, like, so wet and swollen, how could I concentrate? I was in the library to research my paper, only I couldn’t stop masturbating.” “Everybody masturbates in libraries. That’s what they’re for. This does not explain to me why you walk away leaving a tape—” “Somebody came in.” “Who? Who came in?” “It doesn’t matter. Some girl. I got confused. By then I didn’t even know what I was doing anymore. This whole thing has made me crazy. I was, like, afraid from getting so crazy from the tape, and so I just walked out. I felt really awful. I was gunna call. But I was, like, afraid of you.” “Who put you up to this, Kathy? Who put you up to taping me?”