by Philip Roth
Sabbath felt like offering a standing ovation. But seated in the car at the foot of the long dirt drive leading up nearly a hundred yards to the house, he could only stamp his feet and cry, “Brava, Rosie! Brava!” and lift his God Bless America yarmulke in admiration of the crescendos and the diminuendos, of the floating and the madness, of the controlled uncontrollableness, of the sustained finale’s driving force. Better than Bernstein. His wife. He’d forgotten all about her. Twelve, fifteen years since she let me watch. What would it be like to fuck Roseanna? A percentage of guys still do it to their wives, or so the pollsters would have us believe. Wouldn’t be totally freakish. Wonder what the smell is like. If she even. The swampy scent Roseanna exuded in her twenties, most unique, not at all fishy but vegetative, rooty, in the muck with the rot. Loved it. Took you right to the edge of gagging, and then, in its depths something so sinister that, boom-o, beyond repugnance into the promised land, to where all one’s being resides in one’s nose, where existence amounts to nothing more or less than the feral, foaming cunt, where the thing that matters most in the world—is the world—is the frenzy that’s in your face. “There! No—there! Right . . . there! There! There! There! Yes! There!” Their ecstatic machinery would have dazzled Aquinas had his senses experienced its economy. If anything served Sabbath as an argument for the existence of God, if anything marked creation with God’s essence, it was the thousands upon thousands of orgasms dancing on the head of that pin. The mother of the microchip, the triumph of evolution, right up with the retina and the tympanic membrane. I wouldn’t mind growing one myself, in the middle of my forehead like Cyclops’s eye. Why do they need jewelry, when they have that? What’s a ruby next to that? There for no reason other than the reason that it’s there for. Not to run water through, not to spread seed, but included in the package like the toy at the bottom of the old Cracker Jack box, a gift to each and every little girl from God. All hail the Maker, a generous, wonderful, fun-loving guy with a real soft spot for women. Much like Sabbath himself.
There was a home, inside it a wife; in the car were things to revere and protect, replacing Drenka’s grave as the meaning and the purpose of his life. He need never lie down weeping on her grave again, and, thinking that, he was seized by the miracle of having survived all these years in the hands of a person like himself, astonished at having discovered amid Fish’s squalor a reason to go on at the mercy of the inexplicable experience that he was, and astonished by the nonsensical thought that he wasn’t, that he hadn’t survived himself, that he had perished down there in Jersey, very likely by his own hand, and that he was at the foot of the drive of the afterlife, entering that fairy tale freed at last from the urge that was the hallmark of his living: the overwhelming desire to be elsewhere. He was elsewhere. He had achieved the goal. Now it was clear to him. If that little house halfway up that hill on the outskirts of this little village where I am the biggest scandal around, if that isn’t elsewhere, nothing is. Elsewhere is wherever you are; elsewhere, Sabbath, is your home and no one is your mate, and if ever anyone was no one it’s Rosie. Search the planet and you will not find at any latitude a setup more suitable than this one. This is your niche: the solitary hillside, the cozy cottage, the Twelve-Step wife. This is Sabbath’s Indecent Theater. Remarkable. As remarkable as the women coming out of their houses and onto the street to buy their stringbeans from Fish’s truck. Hello, remarkable.
♦ ♦ ♦
But nearly an hour after the lights had gone out at the front of the house and come on again in their bedroom around to the side by the carport, Sabbath was still a hundred yards away, down at the bottom of the drive. Was the afterlife really for him? He was having serious second thoughts about having killed himself. All he’d had to struggle through before was the prospect of oblivion. Alongside fellow mariner Schloss, across from the esteemed Weizmans, a stone’s throw from all the family, but oblivion is oblivion nonetheless, and getting himself ready for it had not been simple. What he could never have imagined was that, after being left there to rot overseen by those dogs, he would find himself not in oblivion, oblivious, but in Madamaska Falls; that instead of facing the eternal nothing he would be back in that bed with Rosie beside him, forever seeking inner peace. But then, he had never figured on Morty’s things.
He took the driveway curves just as slowly as the car could negotiate them. If he was years in reaching the house it would make no difference now. He was dead, death was changeless, and there was no longer the illusion of ever escaping. Time was endless or it had stopped. Amounted to the same thing. All the fluctuation’s gone—that’s the difference. No flux, and flux was human life all over.
To be dead and to know it is a bit like dreaming and knowing it, but, oddly, everything was more firmly established dead. Sabbath didn’t feel spectral in any way: his sense couldn’t have been sharper that nothing was growing, nothing altering, nothing aging; that nothing was imaginary and nothing was real, no longer was there objectivity or subjectivity, no longer any question as to what things are or are not, everything simply held together by death. No way around his knowing that he was no longer on a day-to-day basis. No worry about suddenly dying. Suddenness was over. Here for good in the nonworld of no choice.
Yet if this was death, whose pickup truck was parked in the carport beside Rosie’s old Jeep? A rippling American flag was resplendently painted across the width of its tailgate. Local plates. If all flux was gone, what the fuck was this? Somebody with local plates. There was more to death than people realized—and more to Roseanna.
In bed, they were watching television. That’s why nobody heard him drive up. Though he got the feeling—looking at the two of them nestled together, taking turns biting into a plump green pear, whose juice they licked from each other’s taut bellies whenever it dribbled from their mouths—he got the feeling that nothing might have pleased Rosie more than knowing that her husband was back and couldn’t miss finding out what had been happening while he was gone. In a corner of the bedroom all his clothes had been dumped on the floor, everything of his removed from the closet and the bureau drawers and piled in the corner, waiting to be bagged or cartoned or, when the weekend came, dragged up the hill to the ravine and pushed by the bedmates over the side.
Dispossessed. Ida had usurped his plot at the cemetery, and Christa from the gourmet shop—whose tongue Drenka had held in such high esteem and whom Rosie had waved hello to in town, just someone she knew from AA—had taken his place in the house.
If this was death, then death was just life incognito. All the blessings that make this world the entertaining place that it is exist no less laughably in the nonworld, too.
They watched television while, from the dark beyond the window, Sabbath watched them.
Christa would by now be twenty-five, but the only change that he could see was that the close-clipped blond hair had grown in black and that it was her cunt that had been shaved. Not the model child—never that, far from that—but the child model most provocatively. The hair fell elfinly in ragged little points about her head, as though an eight-year-old had scissored Christa an upside-down crown. The mouth was still no gaping thing, but the cold opening of a German slot machine, and yet the violet surprise of her eyes and the glazed Teutonic snowdrift of her ass, the sweet lure of those uncorroded curves, made her no less pleasant to ogle than when he’d faithfully stood by as assistant tool handler and she worked her lesbian magic on Drenka. And Roseanna, though nearly a foot taller than Christa—even Sabbath was taller than Christa—could hardly have been taken for more than twice Christa’s age: even more slender than Christa, small-breasted like her, the breasts probably shaped much the same as when she moved to her mother at thirteen. . . . Four years of no booze, followed by forty-eight hours without him, and his childless wife, in her sixth decade of life, miraculously looked to be still in bud.
The program they had on was about gorillas. Occasionally Sabbath got a glimpse of the gorillas knuckle-walking around in the tall gras
s or sitting about, scratching their heads and their asses. He discovered that gorillas do a lot of scratching.
When the program was over, Rosie switched off the set and, without a word, began to pretend that she was a mother gorilla grooming her little one, who was Christa. Watching from the window while they passed themselves off as gorilla mom and child, he began to remember how extensive a talent Rosie once displayed for following his lead when he was trying out stage voices at the dinner table or amusing her along these lines in bed, lipsticking a beard and cap onto the head of his prick and using his hard-on for a puppet. After the show she got to play with the puppet, every child’s dream. The real ring of openness in her laughter then—spunky, heedless, a little wicked, nothing to hide (except everything), nothing to fear (except everything) . . . yes, distantly he could remember her enjoying his foolishness very much.
Nothing could have been more serious than the attention Rosie gave to Christa’s gorilla coat. It was as though she were not only cleansing her of insects and lice but purifying both of them through this studious contact. All the emotions were invisible, and yet not a lifeless second passed between them. Rosie’s gestures were of such delicacy and precision that they appeared to be in the conscientious service of some pure religious idea. Nothing was going on other than what was going on, but to Sabbath it seemed tremendous. Tremendous. He had arrived at the loneliest moment of his life.
Under his eyes, Christa and Rosie developed complete gorilla personalities—the two of them living in the gorilla dimension, embodying the height of gorilla soulfulness, enacting the highest act of gorilla rationality and love. The whole world was the other one. The great importance of the other body. Their unity: giver the taker, taker the giver, Christa perfectly confident of Rosie’s hands grazing her, a map on which Rosie’s fingers trace a journey of sensual tact. And between them that liquid, intensely wordless gorilla look, the only noises rising from the bed Christa’s chicken-like baby-gorilla clucks of comfort and contentment.
Roseanna Gorilla. I am nature’s tool. I am the fulfiller of every need. If only the two of them, husband and wife, had pretended to be gorillas, nothing but gorillas all the time! Instead they had pretended, only too well, to be being human beings.
When the two had had enough, they fell into a laughing embrace, each gave the other a juicy, demonstrably human kiss, and the lights were flicked off at either side of the bed. But before Sabbath could size up the situation and decide what to do next—move on or move in—he heard Rosie and Christa reciting together. A prayer? Of course! “Dear God . . .” Rosie’s nightly AA prayer—he was finally to hear it spoken aloud. “Dear God . . .”
The duet was faultlessly rendered, neither of them groping for either the words or the feeling, two voices, two females, harmoniously interlaced. Young Christa was the ardent one, whereas Roseanna’s recitation was marked by the careful thought that she had clearly given every word. There was in her voice both gravity and mellowness. She had battled her way to that inner peace so long unattainable; the agony of that childhood—deprivation, humiliation, injustice, abuse—was behind her, and the tribulation of the—for her—inescapable adulthood with a stand-in savage for her father was behind her, and the relief from the pain was audible. Her utterance was quieter and calmer than Christa’s, but the effect was of a communion profoundly absorbed. New beginning, new being, new beloved . . . although, as Sabbath could virtually guarantee her, formed from more or less the same mold as the old beloved. He could envision the letter posted to Hell the day after Christa took off with Roseanna’s mother’s antique silver. If Mother hadn’t had to run for her life, if I hadn’t had to attend that girls’ school until she returned, if you hadn’t forced me to wear that loden jacket, if you didn’t scream at the housekeepers, if you didn’t fuck the housekeepers, if you hadn’t married that monstrous Irene, if you hadn’t written me those crazy letters, if you hadn’t had those disgusting lips and hands that gripped me like a vise . . . Father, you’ve done it again! You rob me of a normal relationship with a normal man, you rob me of a normal relationship with a normal woman! You rob me of everything!
“Dear God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe this. I believe . . .”
In Sabbath their prayer encountered no resistance. If only he could get everything else he detested to leave not so much as a pinhole in his brain. He himself prayed that God was omniscient. Otherwise He wasn’t going to know what the fuck these two were talking about.
“I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. I hope I have that desire in everything I do. I hope I never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it at the time. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost, and in the shadow of death, I will not be afraid because I know You will never leave me to face my troubles alone.”
And here began the bliss. Stirring each other up took no time at all. These weren’t the cluckings of two contented gorillas Sabbath was overhearing now. The two of them were no longer playing at anything; there was nothing nonsensical any longer about a single sound they made. No need for dear God now. They had taken unto themselves the task of divinity and were laying bare the rapture with their tongues. Amazing organ, the human tongue. Take a good look at it someday. He himself well remembered Christa’s—the muscular, vibrating tongue of the snake—and the awe it inspired in him no less than in Drenka. Amazing all a tongue can say.
A digital clock face, aglow, green, was the sole object Sabbath could discern in the room. It was on the unseen table at the side of the unseen bed that previously had been his side. He believed he still had some of his death books piled there, unless they were in among the clothes dumped in the corner. He felt as though he had been expelled from an enormous cunt whose insides he’d been roaming freely all his life. The very house where he had lived had become a cunt into which he could never insert himself again. This observation, arrived at independently of the intellect, only intensified as the odors that exist only within women wafted out of them and through the opening of the window, where they enveloped the flag-draped Sabbath in the violent misery of everything lost. If irrationality smelled, it would smell like this; if delirium smelled, it would smell like this; if anger, impulse, appetite, antagonism, ego . . . Yes, this sublime stink of spoilage was the smell of everything that converges to become the human soul. Whatever the witches were cooking up for Macbeth must have smelled just like this. No wonder Duncan doesn’t make it through the night.
It seemed for a long while as though they would never be finished and that, consequently, on this hillside, at this window, hidden behind this night, he was to be chained to his ridiculousness forever. They could not seem to find what they needed. A piece or a fragment of something was missing, and they were speaking fluently together, purportedly about the missing piece, in a language consisting entirely of gasps and moans and exhalations and shrieks, a musical miscellany of explosive shrieks.
First one of them seemed to imagine she had found it and the other seemed to imagine she had found it, and then, in the voluminous blackness of their house of cunt, in the same immense instant, they landed on it together, and never before had Sabbath heard in any language anything like the speech pouring out of Rosie and Christa upon discovering the whereabouts of that little piece that made the whole picture complete.
In the end, she had been satisfying herself in a way that, were she Drenka, he might have enjoyed. It wasn’t that he felt shut out and tragically abandoned because Roseanna was doing anything that, from another tangent, might not actually have stirred him to fellow feeling. Why should he regard as other than resonant with his own greatest creations her creation of an orgasmic haven apart from him? Roseanna’s roundabout journey had,
from all appearances, carried her back to where they’d begun as insatiable lovers hiding from Nikki in his puppet studio. In fact, his entire fantasy of her masturbating was precisely what he’d been conning himself with as a part of his getting ready to go back and try to . . . try to what? To reassert what? To recover what? To reach back into the past for what? For the residue of what?
And that’s when he erupted. When male gorillas get angry, it’s terrifying. The largest and heaviest of the primates, they get angry on a very grand scale. He had not known that he could open his mouth so wide, nor had he ever before realized, even as a puppet performer, what a rich repertoire of frightening noises he was able to produce. The hoots, the barks, the roars—ferocious, deafening—and all the while jumping up and down and pounding his chest and tearing out by the roots the plants growing at the foot of the window, and then dashing to and fro, and at last hammering his crippled fists on the window until the frame gave way and went crashing into the room, where Rosie and Christa were screaming hysterically.
Beating a tattoo on his chest he enjoyed the most. All these years he’d had the chest for it, and all these years he had let it go to waste. The pain in his hands was excruciating but he did not desist. He was the wildest of the wild gorillas. Don’t you dare to threaten me! Thumping and thumping his large chest. Breaking apart the house.
In the car, he flipped on the headlights and saw that he had frightened the raccoons off as well. They had been out working the garbage cans back of the kitchen. Rosie must have forgotten to latch shut the slatted wooden cover to the rack where the four cans were stored, and though the raccoons were now gone, there was garbage strewn everywhere. That explained the smell of spoilage that, standing outside the window, he had attributed to the women on the bed. He should have known they didn’t have it in ’em.
