Sabbath’s Theater

by Philip Roth

  If it was Roseanna’s wail earlier in the day that gave Sabbath the determination to decline what he had never before declined in his life, then that was a truly record-breaking wail.

  “Time to go home to blow Brian.”

  “But this isn’t fair. I didn’t do anything.”

  “Go home or I’ll kill you.”

  “Don’t say that—my God!”

  “You would not be the first woman I killed.”

  “Uh-huh. Sure. Who was?”

  “Nikki Kantarakis. My first wife.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “True enough. Murdering Nikki constitutes my sole claim to real gravitas. Or was it pure fun? I’m never entirely convinced by my assessment of anything. That ever happen to you?”

  “Jesus! Like, what are you even talking about?”

  “I’m only talking about what everybody talks about. You know what they say at the college. They say I had a wife who disappeared but that she didn’t just disappear. Can you deny you’ve heard’em say it—can you, Kathy?”

  “Well . . . people say everything—don’t they? I don’t even remember. Who even listens?”

  “Sparing my feelings, isn’t that nice. But you needn’t. You learn by sixty to accept in a sporting spirit the derision of virtuous bystanders. Besides, they happen to have it right. Thus proving that if, when speaking of a fellow creature, you give continual expression to your antipathy, a strange kind of truth may unfold.”

  “Why don’t you say anything seriously to me!”

  “I have never said anything more seriously to anyone: I killed a wife.”

  “Please stop this.”

  “You telephoned to play doctor on the phone with somebody who killed his wife.”

  “I did not.”

  “What drives you, anyway? At the highest levels of higher education, my identity as a murderer has been laid bare, and you phone to tell me that you are in your pj’s, all alone in bed. What’s inside of you scorching you? Your bondage is bondage to what? I am a notorious killer-diller who strangled his wife. Why else would I have to live in a place like this if I hadn’t strangled somebody? I did it with these very hands while we were rehearsing in our bedroom, on our bed, the final act of Othello. My wife was a young actress. Othello? It’s a play. It’s a play in which an African Venetian strangles his white wife to death. You never heard of it because it perpetuates the stereotype of the violent black male. But back in the fifties, humanity hadn’t figured out yet what was important, and students fell prey in college to a lot of wicked shit. Nikki was terrified of every new role. She suffered insufferable fears. One was of men. Unlike you, she was not wily in the ways of men. This made her perfect for the part. We rehearsed beforehand alone in our apartment to try to reduce Nikki’s fears. ‘I can’t do it!’ This I heard from her many times. I played the stereotypical violent black male. In the scene in which he murders her I did it—I went ahead and murdered her. Got carried away by the spell of her acting. It just opened something up in me to see it. Someone to whom the tangible and the immediate are repugnant, to whom only the illusion is fully real. This was the order Nikki made of her chaos. And you, what is the order you make of yours? Talking about your tits to an old man on the phone? You elude description, at least by me. Such a shameless creature and yet so bland. Perverse and treacherous, the French kiss of death, already deep into the disreputable thrills of a double life—and bland. As chaos goes, yours seems decidedly unchaotic. The chaos theorists ought to study you. How deep does what Katherine does or says reach down into Katherine? Whatever you want, however dangerous or deceitful, you pursue, like, impersonally, you know?”

  “Okay. How did you kill her?”

  Lifting his hands, he said, “I used these. I told you. ‘Put out the light, and then put out the light.’”

  “Whatja do with the body?”

  “I rented a boat at Sheepshead Bay. A harbor in Brooklyn. I was a sailor boy once. I loaded the body down with bricks and dumped Nikki overboard out at sea.”

  “And how did you get a dead body to Brooklyn?”

  “I was always carrying things around. I had an old Dodge in those days and I was always shoving into the trunk my portable stage and my props and my puppets. The neighbors saw me coming and going all the time like that. Nikki was a stringbean. She didn’t weigh much. I stuffed her doubled-over into my seaman’s bag. No big deal.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Too bad. Because I’ve never told anyone before. Not even Roseanna. And now I’ve told you. And as our little scandal teaches us, telling you isn’t exactly observing the dictates of prudence. Who do you tell first? Dean Kuziduzi, or will you go straight to the Japanese high command?”

  “Why must you be so racially prejudiced against Japanese!”

  “Because of what they did to Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Putting him in that fucking little box. I hate the bastards. Who will you tell first?”

  “No one! I’m not telling anyone, because it’s not true!”

  “And if it were? Would you tell anyone then?”

  “What? If you really were a murderer?”

  “Yes. And if you knew I was. Would you turn me in the way you turned in the tape?”

  “I forgot the tape! I left the tape accidentally!”

  “Would you turn me in, Kathy? Yes or no?”

  “Why must I answer these questions!”

  “Because it’s indispensable to my finding out just who the fuck you are working for.”

  “No one!”

  “Would you turn me in? Yes or no? If it were true that I was a murderer.”

  “Well . . . you want a serious answer?”

  “I’ll take what I get.”

  “Well . . . it would depend.”

  “On?”

  “On? Well, on our relationship.”

  “You might not turn me in if we had the right relationship? And what would that be? Describe it.”

  “I don’t know. . . . I guess love.”

  “You would protect a murderer if you loved him.”

  “I don’t know. You never murdered anyone. These questions are stupid.”

  “Do you love me? Don’t worry about my feelings. Do you love me?”

  “In a way.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Old and loathsome as I am?”

  “I love . . . I love your mind. I love how you expose your mind when you talk.”

  “My mind? My mind is a murderer’s mind.”

  “Stop saying that. You’re scaring me.”

  “My mind? Well, this is quite a revelation. I thought you loved my ancient penis. My mind? This is quite a shock for a man of my years. Were you really only in it for my mind? Oh, no. All the time I was talking about fucking, you were watching me expose my mind! Paying unwanted attention to my mind! You dared to introduce a mental element into a setting where it has no place. Help! I’ve been mentally harassed! Help! I am the victim of mental harassment! God, I am getting a gastrointestinal disorder! You have extracted mental favors from me without my even knowing and against my will! I have been belittled by you! My dick has been belittled by you! Call the dean! My dick has been disempowered!”

  With this, Kathy finally found the initiative to push open the door, but so frantically, with such force, that she tumbled from the car to the shoulder of the road. But she was up on her Reeboks almost immediately and, through the windshield, could be seen speeding north toward Athena. Puppets can fly, levitate, twirl, but only people and marionettes are confined to running and walking. That’s why marionettes always bored him: all that walking they were always doing up and down the tiny stage, as though, in addition to being the subject of every marionette show, walking were the major theme of life. And those strings—too visible, too many, too blatantly metaphorical. And always slavishly imitating human theater. Whereas puppets . . . shoving your hand up a puppet and hiding your face behind a screen! Nothing like it
in the animal kingdom! All the way back to Petrushka, anything goes, the crazier and uglier the better. Sabbath’s cannibal puppet that won first prize from the maestro in Rome. Eating his enemies on the stage. Tearing them apart and talking about them all the while they were chewed and swallowed. The mistake is ever to think that to act and to speak is the natural domain of anyone other than a puppet. Contentment is being hands and a voice— looking to be more, students, is madness. If Nikki had been a puppet, she might still be alive.

  And down the road, Kathy fleeing by the oversize light of the preposterous moon. And the smokers now gathered in moonlight, too, beneath the cell of the detoxing Roseanna, whose wailing could still be heard 130 miles away. . . . Oh, she was in for it tonight, up against an even more horrifying trial than being married to him. The doctor had warned Sabbath that she might telephone to beg him to come get her out. He counseled Sabbath to ignore the bidding of compassion and tell her no. Sabbath promised to do his best. Rather than head home to hear her ringing, he sat a while longer in the car, where, for reasons he couldn’t figure out right off, he was remembering the guy who’d given him those books to read on the Standard Oil tanker, remembering how they unloaded through that great piping system at Curaçao and how that guy—one of those gentlemanly, quiet types who mysteriously spend their lives at sea when you would expect them to wind up as teachers or even maybe ministers—had given him a book of poems by William Butler Yeats. A loner. A self-educated loner. The guy’s silences gave you the creeps. Another American type. One met all our American types at sea. Even by that time, a good many of them Hispanic—tough, really tough Latino types. I remember one who looked like Akim Tamiroff. All kinds of our colored brothers, every type you can think of—sweet men, not so sweet men, everybody. There was a big, fat black cook on that ship where the guy who gave me that book started me off reading. I’d be lying in my top bunk with a book, and this cook would always come in and grab my balls. And start laughing. I’d have to wrestle him away. Guess that makes me “homophobic.” He didn’t make any more aggressive moves but would have been very pleased if I’d responded, no doubt about that. Interesting thing was that I used to see him in the whorehouses. Now, the guy who gave me the poetry was out-and-out queer yet never laid a glove on me, pretty green-eyed lad though I was. Told me which poems to read. Gave me a lot of books. Awfully nice of him, really. Guy from Nebraska. I’d memorize the poems on my watch.

  Of course! Yeats to Lady Goolsbee:

  I heard an old religious man

  But yesternight declare

  That he had found a text to prove

  That only God, my dear,

  Could love you for yourself alone

  And not your yellow hair.

  In only a few hours Kathy would be crossing the finish line. He could see her taping her breasts and falling into the embrace of the Immaculate Kamizoko. Breasting the tape. Kakizomi. Kazikomi. Who could remember their fucking names. Who wanted to. Tojo and Hirohito sufficed for him. Sobbing hysterically, she would tell the dean of his terrifying confession. And the dean might not resist believing it as Kathy had pretended to do.

  Driving home he played “The Sheik of Araby.” Few things in this world as right as those four zippy solos. Clarinet. Piano. Drums. Vibes.

  How come nobody hates Tojo anymore? Nobody remembers that killer except me. They think Tojo’s a car. But ask the Koreans about the Japanese sitting on their faces for thirty-five years. Ask the Manchurians about the civility of their conquerors. Ask the Chinese about the wonderful understanding shown them by those little flat-faced imperialist bastards. Ask about the brothels the Japs stocked for their soldiers with girls just like you. Younger. The dean thinks I’m the enemy. Ho, ho! Ask her about the boys back home and how they bravely fucked their way through Asia, the foreign women they enslaved and made into whores. Ask’em in Manila about the bombs, tons of bombs dropped by Japs after Manila was an open city. Where is Manila? How would you know? Maybe one day Teacher will take an hour off from harassment lessons to mention to all her spotless lambs a little horror called World War II. The Japaneez. As racially arrogant as anyone anywhere—beside them the Ku Klux Klan is . . . But how would you know about the Ku Klux Klan? How would you know anything, given whose clutches you’re in? You want the lowdown on the Japaneez? Ask my mother, also a woman harassed in life. Ask her.

  Expansively he sang along with the quartet, pretending to be Gene Hochberg, who could really get a crowd of kids up and swingin’; delighting himself, Sabbath was, not just in the multide-meaning lyric of the old twenties anthem celebrating date rape and denigrating Arabs but in the unending, undecorous, needling performance, the joy of the job of being their savage. How could the missionaries puff themselves up without their savage? Their naive fucking impertinence about carnal lusting! Seducer of the young. Socrates, Strindberg, and me. Yet feeling great all the same. The glassy chiming of Hampton’s hammering—that could fix about anything. Or maybe it was having Rosie out of the way. Or maybe it was knowing that he’d never had to please and wasn’t starting now. Yes, yes, yes, he felt uncontrollable tenderness for his own shit-filled life. And a laughable hunger for more. More defeat! More disappointment! More deceit! More loneliness! More arthritis! More missionaries! God willing, more cunt! More disastrous entanglement in everything. For a pure sense of being tumultuously alive, you can’t beat the nasty side of existence. I may not have been a matinee idol, but say what you will about me, it’s been a real human life!

  I’m the Sheik of Araby,

  Your love belongs to me.

  At night when you’re asleep,

  Into your tent I’ll creep.

  The stars that shine above,

  Will light our way to love.

  You’ll rule the land with me,

  I’m the Sheik of Araby.

  Life is impenetrable. For all Sabbath knew, he had just thrown over a girl who had neither betrayed nor bebitched him and never could—a simple, adventurous girl who loved her father and would never deceive any grown man (except Father, with Sabbath); for all he knew he had just frightened off the last twenty-year-old into whose tent he would ever again creep. He had mistaken innocent, loving, loyal Cordelia for her villainous sisters Goneril and Regan. He’d got it as backward as old Lear. Lucky for his sanity there was some consolation to be had in the big bed up on Brick Furnace Road by fucking Drenka there that night and the twenty-seven nights to follow.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The only communication Sabbath received during the two weeks before he was allowed to visit Roseanna was a resoundingly factual postcard sent to him from Usher at the end of her first week there: no salutation and mailed simply to their street address in Madamaska Falls—she would not even write his name. “Meet me at Roderick House, 23rd, 4:30 p.m. Dinner at 5:15. I have AA meeting 7-8 p.m. Stay Ragged Hill Lodge in Usher if you don’t want to drive home same night. R.C.S.”

  Just as he was getting into the car at 1:30 on the 23rd, the phone rang in the house and he raced back through the kitchen door, thinking that it must be Drenka. When he heard Roseanna, reversing the charges, he figured she was calling to ask him not to come. He’d phone Drenka with the news as soon as she hung up.

  “How are you, Roseanna?”

  Her voice, never highly inflected, was ironed flat, stern and angry and flat. “Are you coming?”

  “I was just getting into the car. I had to run back to the house to get the phone.”

  “I want you to bring something. Please,” she added, as though someone were there instructing her on what to say and how to say it.

  “Bring something? Of course,” he said. “Anything.”

  Her reply to this was a harsh, unscripted laugh. Followed icily by “In my file. Top drawer at the back. A blue three-ring binder. I have to have it.”

  “I’ll bring it. But I’ll have to get into the file.”

  “You’ll need the key.” More icily still, if that could be possible.

  “Yes? Where woul
d I find it?”

  “In my riding boots. . . . The left boot.”

  But over the years he’d searched through all her boots, shoes, and sneakers. She must have moved it there recently from wherever it had been hidden from him before.

  “Go get it now,” she said. “Find it now. It’s important. . . . Please.”

  “Sure. Okay. The right boot.”

  “The left!”

  No, it wasn’t hard to make her lose hold. And that was with two weeks already under her belt and only two to go.

  He found the key and, from the file, got the blue three-ring binder and came back to the phone to assure her he had it.

  “Did you lock the file?”

  He lied and said yes.

  “Bring the key with you. The file key. Please.”

  “Of course.”

  “And the binder. It’s blue. There are two elastic bands around it.”

  “Got it right here.”

  “Please don’t lose it!” she exploded. “It is a matter of life or death!”

  “Are you sure you really want it?”

  “Don’t argue with me! Do as I ask you! It’s not easy for me even to talk to you!”