by Philip Roth
At Usher a kindly, handsome doctor twenty years Sabbath’s junior assured him that if Roseanna cooperated with “the program” she would be home and on the path to sobriety in twenty-eight days. “Wanna bet?” Sabbath said, and drove back to Madamska Falls to kill Kathy. Ever since three A.M., when he learned how Roseanna, because of that tape, had stretched out on Town Street in her nightgown, waiting to be run over, he had been planning to take Kathy to the top of Battle Mountain and strangle her.
As a ripe, enormous pumpkin floated free from the darkening field across from the car and the high drama of a full harvest moon began, Sabbath could not have said where he found the strength to refrain—as, for the fifth time in as many minutes, she extended yet again the offer to entrap him—from either commencing the strangulation with his once-powerful fingers or going ahead and taking it out in a car for the millionth time in this life.
“Kathy,” he said, exhaustion giving him the sensation that he was glimmering and fading like a dying light bulb, “Kathy,” he said, thinking as he watched the moon ascend that if only he’d had the moon on his side things would have turned out differently, “do us all a favor—do Brian instead. That may even be what he’s angling for by turning into a deaf-mute. Didn’t you say that the shock of hearing the tape has turned him into a deafmute? Well, go home and sign him that you’re going to blow him and see if his face doesn’t light up.”
Not too hard on Sabbath, Reader. Neither the turbulent inner talkathon, nor the superabundance of self-subversion, nor the years of reading about death, nor the bitter experience of tribulation, loss, hardship, and grief make it any easier for a man of his type (perhaps for a man of any type) to get good use out of his brain when confronted by such an offer once, let alone when it is made repeatedly by a girl a third his age with an occlusion like Gene Tierney’s in Laura. Don’t be too hard on Sabbath for beginning to begin to think that maybe she was telling the truth: that she had left the tape in the library accidentally, that it had fallen into the Kakumoto’s hands accidentally, that she had been helpless to resist the pressures brought on her and had capitulated only to save her skin, as who among her “peers”—that was what she called her friends—would have done otherwise? She was really a sweet and decent kid, good-natured, involved, she had presumed, in some half-crazy but harmless extracurricular amusement, Professor Sabbath’s Audio-Visual Club; a large, graceless girl, ill-educated, coarse, and incoherent in the preferred style of the late-twentieth-century undergraduate, but utterly without the shifty ruthlessness necessary for the vicious stunt he was charging her with. Maybe merely because he was so enraged and exhausted, a great misapprehension had taken hold of him and he was falling victim to another of his stupid mistakes. Why would she be crying so pitifully for so long if she was conspiring against him? Why would she cling to his side like this, if her true ties and affinities were with his supervirtuous antagonists and their angry, sinister fixed ideas about what should and should not constitute an education for twenty-year-old girls? She didn’t begin to have Sabbath’s skill at feigning what looked like genuine feeling . . . or did she? Why else would she be begging to blow someone wholly alien to her, inessential to her, someone who was already a month into his seventh decade on earth, if not to assert without equivocation that she was farcically, illogically, and incomprehensibly his? So little in life is knowable, Reader—don’t be hard on Sabbath if he gets things wrong. Or on Kathy if she gets things wrong. Many farcical, illogical, incomprehensible transactions are subsumed by the manias of lust.
Twenty. Could I even survive saying no to twenty? How many twenties are left? How many thirties or forties are left? Under the sad end-of-days spell of the smoky dusk and the waning year, of the moon and its ostentatious superiority to all the trashy, petty claptrap of his sublunar existence, why does he even hesitate? The Kamizakis are your enemies whether you do anything or not, so you might as well do it. Yes, yes, if you can still do something, you must do it—that is the golden rule of sublunar existence, whether you are a worm cut in two or a man with a prostate like a billiard ball. If you can still do something, then you must do it! Anything living can figure that out.
In Rome . . . in Rome, he was now remembering while Kathy continued her sobbing beside him, an elderly Italian puppeteer said to have once been quite famous had come to the school to judge a competition that Sabbath proceeded to win, and afterward the puppeteer, having given a demonstration of stale wizardry with a puppet looking exactly like himself, had asked young Sabbath to accompany him to a café in the Piazza del Popolo. The puppeteer was in his seventies, small, pudgy, and bald with a poor yellowish complexion, but so haughtily autocratic was his bearing that Sabbath spontaneously followed the example of his awestruck professor and, even enjoying for a change being deferential—albeit impudently so—he addressed the old man, whose name meant nothing to him, as Maestro. In addition to his insufferable posturing there was an ascot that half hid a substantial wattle, a beret that, out-of-doors, concealed the baldness, a stick with which he tapped the table to draw the attention of the waiter—and all of this readied Sabbath for a flood of boring old bohemian self-adoration that he would just have to endure for having won the prize. But instead, no sooner had the puppeteer ordered cognac for both of them than he said, “Dimmi di tutte le ragazze che ti sei scopato a Roma”—Tell me about all the girls you fucked in Rome. And then while Sabbath answered, speaking plainly and freely of the arsenal of allurement Italy was to him, describing how more than once he had been provoked to emulate the locals and follow someone clear across the city to nail down a pickup, the master’s eyes were eloquent with a sardonic superiority that caused even the ex-merchant seaman, a veteran six times over of the Romance Run, to feel a little like a model child. The old man’s attention did not waver, however, nor did he interrupt other than to press for more elaboration than the American could always furnish in his limited Italian—and, repeatedly, to demand from Sabbath the precise age of each girl whose seduction he described. Eighteen, replied Sabbath obediently. Twenty, Maestro. Twenty-four. Twenty-one. Twenty-two . . .
Only when Sabbath had finished did the maestro announce to him that his own current mistress was fifteen. Abruptly he rose to leave—to leave the café and to leave Sabbath with the check—but not before adding, with a derisive flick of his cane, “Naturalmente la conosco da quando aveva dodici anni”—Of course I’ve known her since she’s twelve.
And only now, practically forty years later, with Kathy still crying for him and the oblivious blank of a moon still rising for him, with folks here in the hills and down in the valley settling in by the fire for a pleasant fall evening of listening on the phone to Kathy and him coming, did Sabbath believe that the old puppeteer had been telling him the truth. Twelve. Capisco, Maestro. You might as well go for broke.
“Katherine,” he said sadly, “you were once my most trusted accomplice in the fight for the lost human cause. Listen to me. Stop crying long enough to listen to what I have to say. Your people have on tape my voice giving reality to all the worst things they want the world to know about men. They have got a hundred times more proof of my criminality than could be required by even the most lenient of deans to drive me out of every decent antiphallic educational institution in America. Must I now ejaculate on CNN? Where is the camera? Is there a telephoto lens in that pickup truck over by the nursery? I’ve got my breaking point, too, Kathy. If they send me up for sodomy, the result could be death. And that might not be as much fun for you as you may have been led to believe. You may have forgotten, but not even at Nuremberg was everyone sentenced to die.” On he continued—in the circumstances, a lovely speech; it should be taped, thought he. Yes, on Sabbath went, developing with increasing cogency the argument in support of a constitutional amendment to make coming illegal for American men, regardless of race, creed, color, or ethnic origin, until Kathy cried out, “I’m of age!” and wiped her face dry of tears with the shoulder of her running jacket.
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�I do what I want,” she angrily asserted.
Maestro, what would you do? To peer down at her head cradled in your lap, your cock encircled by her foaming lips, and to watch her blowing you in tears, to patiently lather that undissipated face with that sticky confection of spit, semen, and tears, a delicate meringue icing her freckles—could life bestow any more wonderful last thing? She had never looked more soulful to Sabbath, and he pointed this out to the maestro. She had never before looked soulful to Sabbath at all. But tears made her radiant, and even to the jaded maestro she seemed to be digging into a spiritual existence that was news to her, as well. She was of age! Kathy Goolsbee had just grown up! Yes, not only something spiritual but something primordial was going on, as there had been on that hot summer day up in the picturesque brook beside the Grotto when he and Drenka had pissed on each other.
“Oh, if only I could believe that you weren’t in cahoots with these filthy, lowlife, rectitudinous cunts who tell you children these terrible lies about men, about the sinister villainy of what is simply the ordinary grubbing about in reality of ordinary people like your dad and me. Because that is who they are against, honey—me and your dad. That’s what it comes down to: caricaturing us, insulting us, abhorring in us what is nothing more than the delightful Dionysian underlayer of life. Tell me, how can you be against what has been inherently human going back to antiquity—going back to the virginal peak of Western civ—and call yourself a civilized person? Maybe it’s because she’s Japanese that she doesn’t dig the unparalleled mythologies of ancient Attica. I don’t get it otherwise. How would they like you to be sexually initiated? Intermittently by Brian, while he takes poli sci notes at the library? Are they going to leave it to a dry-as-dust scholar to initiate a girl like you? Or are you supposed to pick it up on your own? But if you’re not expected to pick up chemistry on your own, if you’re not expected to pick up physics on your own, then why are you supposed to pick up the erotic mysteries on your own? Some need seduction and don’t need initiation. Some don’t need initiation but still need seduction. Kathy, you needed both. Harassment? I remember the good old days when patriotism was the last refuge of a scoundrel. Harassment? I have been Virgil to your Dante in the sexual underworld! But then, how would those professors know who Virgil is?”
“I want,” she said yearningly, “to suck you so hard.”
That “so”! And yet hearing the so intensifying “so,” feeling the familiar, lifelong urge to crude, natural bodily satisfaction creep uncontrollably across every square inch of his two square yards of yearning old hide, Sabbath thought not, as he would have hoped, of his estimable mentor, the unplatitudinous maestro, obedient to the end to the edict of excitement, but of his sick wife suffering in the hospital. Of all people! It isn’t fair! The ’29 as stiff as a horse’s and who should he start thinking about but Roseanna! He saw before him the little cell of a room to which they’d assigned her after admission, a room beside the nurse’s station, where she could be conveniently observed during the twenty-four-hour detox watch. They would take her blood pressure every half hour and do what they could for the shakes she was going to have because she had been drinking steadily for the previous three days—drinking hard right up to the hospital door. He saw her standing beside that narrow bed with the sad chenille spread, so stoop-shouldered that she looked no taller than he was. On the bed lay her suitcases. Two pleasant un-uniformed nurses, who had asked her politely to open them for inspection, meticulously went through her things, removing her eyebrow tweezers, her nail scissors, her hair dryer, her dental floss (so she wouldn’t stab, electrocute, or hang herself), impounding a bottle of Listerine (so she would not drink it all down in desperation or smash the bottle to use the shards to slit her wrists or cut her throat), examining everything in her wallet and extracting from it her credit cards, driver’s license, and all her cash (so she could not buy contraband whiskey smuggled into the hospital or wander off grounds to a bar in Usher village or jump-start a staff member’s car and head home), rummaging through all the jeans, sweaters, underwear, and jogging stuff; and all the while Roseanna, lost, lifeless, immensely alone, hollowly looked on, her aging folksingerish good looks demolished—a woman decarnalized: simultaneously a preerotic juvenile and a post erotic wreck. She might have been living all these years, not in a simple box of a house where every fall the deer fed off the apple trees in the hillside orchard beyond the screen porch, but locked away inside an automatic car wash, where there was no hiding from the battering rain and the big turning brushes and the gaping blowers pouring forth their hot air. Roseanna restored to its roots in stripped-to-its-skin, nickel-and-dime, down-to-earth reality the exalted phrase “the bludgeonings of fate.”
“The cause,” sobbed Roseanna, “goes free, the effect goes to jail.” “Isn’t that life exactly,” he agreed. “Only it’s not jail. It’s a hospital, Rosie, and a hospital that doesn’t even look like one. As soon as you stop suffering, you’ll see that it’s very pretty, like a big country inn. There are a lot of trees and nice walks to walk on with your friends. I noticed driving in that there is even a tennis court. I’ll send your racket Federal Express.” “Why are they taking my Visa card!” “Because you don’t pay nightmare by nightmare and tremor by tremor; as your Catholic upbringing should have taught you, you pay through the nose at the end.” “It’s your things they should be searching! They’d come up with enough to put you away for good!” “Do you want the nurses to do that, to search me? For what?” “The handcuffs you use on your teenage whore!” Twenty, Sabbath thought to inform the two nurses, no longer a teenager, unfortunately; but neither nurse appeared the least bit amused or appalled by the Sabbaths’ farewell banter and so he didn’t bother. Foul language and loud shouting the nurses had heard before. The drunk frenetic, terrified, extremely angry at the mate, the mate even angrier with the drunk. Husbands and wives yelling and screaming and accusing were nothing new to them, nothing new to anyone—you don’t have to work in a mental hospital to know about husbands and wives. He watched the nurses dutifully checking each and every pocket of all of Roseanna’s jeans for a stray joint or a razor blade. They impounded her keys. Good. That was in her own best interest. Now there was no chance of her bursting unannounced into the house. He wouldn’t have wanted Roseanna, in her condition, to have to deal with Drenka, too. Let’s deal first with the addiction. “You should be locked up, Mickey—and everyone who knows you knows it!” “I’m sure one day they will lock me up, if that is truly the consensus. But let the others see to that. You just get sober real quick now, ya hear?” “You don’t want me s-s-sober! You prefer a drunk. S-so you can s-s-s—” “Seem,” he whispered, to help her over the hump. Her s’s always bested her when she mixed her rage with more than a quart of vodka. “S-seem to be the long s-s-s—” “Long-suffering husband?” “Yes!” “No. No. Sympathy isn’t my bag. You know that. I don’t ask to be s-s-seen as anything other than what I am. Though tell me again what that is—I wouldn’t want to forget during the days we’re apart.” “A failure! A fucking nons-s-s-stop failure! A s-s-s-scheming, lying, s-s-s-sick, deceiving total failure who lives off his wife and fucks children! He’s the one,” she weepingly told the nurses, “who put me here. I was fine till I met him. I wasn’t this at all!” “And,” he rushed to reassure her, “in only twenty-eight days it’ll all be over and you’ll be just the way you were before I made you into ‘this.’” He raised his hand beside his face to shyly wave good-bye. “You cannot leave me here!” she cried. “The doctor said I get to see you after the first two weeks.” “But what if they give me shock treatment!” “For drinking? I don’t think they do that—do they, nurse? No, no. All they give you is a new outlook on life. I’m sure all they want you to do is to drop your illusions and adapt to reality like me. Bye-bye. Two little weeks.” “I’ll be counting the days,” said Rosie’s old self, but then, when she saw that he was really going to leave her there, something from within contorted her spiteful smile into a knotted lump and
she began to wail.
This sound accompanied Sabbath along the corridor and down the flight of stairs and out the main hospital door, where a group of patients were having a smoke and looking upstairs to see in which of the rooms the new wailer was suffering. It accompanied him to the parking lot and into the car and then out onto the highway, and it was with him all the way back to Madamaska Falls. Louder and louder Sabbath played the tapes, but even Goodman couldn’t cancel it out—even Goodman, Krupa, Wilson, and Hampton in their heyday, breaking loose with “Running Wild,” even Krupa opening dramatically out with the bass drum on that last great chorus couldn’t obliterate Roseanna’s eight-bar solo flourish. A wife going off like a siren. The second crazy wife. Was there any other kind? Not for him. A second crazy wife who’d begun life hating her father and then discovered Sabbath to hate instead. But then Kathy loved her protective, self-sacrificing dad, who’d worked day and night in the bakery to put three Goolsbee kids into college, and a lot of good it did her. Or Sabbath. I can’t win. No one can, when they follow Father with me.
