Authors: Philip Roth
“And how is it here?”
“It’s great. People turn out to be very friendly. Very nice. I don’t feel a stranger here. Which is nice. In New York everywhere I go people try to pick me up. It happens all the time. That’s what New Yorkers love to do. I tell them go away and they go away. I’m pretty good at handling the situation. The thing is, don’t show fear. I’m not afraid of you. People in New York can get a little strange. But not here. I feel at home here. I like America now. I even do patchwork,” she said, with a giggle. “
Me
. I’m a real American. I make quilts.”
“How did you learn?”
“I read about it in books.”
“Well, I love quilts. I collect quilts,” said Sabbath. “I’d like to see yours someday. Would you sell me one?”
“Sell?” she said, laughing heartily now, laughing huskily, like a boozer twice her age. “Why not? Sure, I’ll sell it, Country. It’s your money.”
And he erupted in laughter, too. “By God, we
are
lost!”—and he made a sharp U-turn and got her back to her place over the gourmet shop in fifteen minutes. All the way there they talked animatedly about their common interest. Unimaginable as it seemed, the gap was bridged—antipathy evaporates, affinity is established, a date is made. Quilts. The American way.
“Thank you,” Drenka had said to Christa when it was time for the old couple to get up and get dressed and go home, “thank
you,” she said, her voice faintly tremulous, “thank you thank you thank you. . . .” She took Christa back into her arms and rocked her there like a baby. “Thank you thank you.” Christa gently kissed each of Drenka’s breasts. Her little mouth broke out in a warm, youthful smile when she cuddled closer to Drenka and, making big eyes, girlishly said, “A lot of straight women like it.”
Though Sabbath had masterminded the evening and given Drenka the money she had demanded to participate, he’d found himself more or less superfluous from the moment Drenka knocked on the door and he let her into the attic room where he’d arrived early himself, thinking that it might be necessary, even after a month of delicate diplomacy, to continue negotiations right down to the wire. There was nothing small about this endeavor, and he was still not sure how reliable a person Christa was—she had not entirely cleansed herself in Madamaska Falls of her European suspicions, nor had Sabbath observed in her, as he hoped to, a single encouraging sign of the development of a more selfless point of view. “Drenka,” he said when he opened the door to let her in, “this is my friend Christa,” and though previously Drenka had seen Christa only through the window of the gourmet shop—strolled by a few times at Sabbath’s suggestion—she walked directly across to where Christa was sitting on the secondhand couch in tight torn jeans and a sequined velvet jacket a shade of violet matching her eyes. Sinking to her knees on the bare floorboards, Drenka grabbed Christa’s close-cropped head between her two hands and kissed her strongly on the mouth. The speed with which Drenka unbuttoned Christa’s jacket and with which Christa undid Drenka’s silk blouse and cleared aside her push-up bra astonished Sabbath. But Drenka’s boldness always astonished him. He had imagined a warm-up would be required—talking and joking overseen by him, a heart-to-heart talk, maybe even a sympathetic look through Christa’s boring quilts to put the two of them at their ease—when, in fact, the five hundred dollars in Drenka’s purse had emboldened her, in her words, “to just go in like a whore and do it.”
Afterward Drenka couldn’t say enough wonderful things about
Christa. While Sabbath drove Drenka to where she’d parked behind Town Street, she snuggled adoringly into his side, kissing his beard, licking his neck—she, the woman of forty-eight, as excited as a child just home from the circus. “With a lesbian, there is a sense of
love
that I received from her. Such great experience she had in how to touch a woman’s body. And the kissing! Her knowledge of the female body, how to caress it, how to kiss it, how to touch my skin and to make my nipples hard and to suck my nipples, and that loving, giving, very sexual way, very like a man, that kind of erotic vibration that she would deliver to me made me so very hot. To know exactly how to touch my body in a way almost
more
superior than sometimes men can know how to do it. To find on my cunt the little button, and to hold it there exactly the amount of time that was needed to make me come. And when she started kissing me—you know, going down and sucking me—the skill of the tongue pressure right on the right place . . . oh, that was very exciting.”
Up on the bed, only inches away, following every movement like a medical student observing his first surgical procedure, he’d had a good time too and once even been able to be of assistance when Christa, her muscular tongue anchored between Drenka’s thighs, went groping around the sheets searching blindly for a vibrator. Earlier on, she had removed three of them from the bedside table—ivory-colored vibrators ranging in length from three to six inches—and Sabbath was able to locate one for her, the longest of them, and to place it, correctly oriented, into her outstretched hand. “So, you didn’t need me at all,” he said. “Oh, no. I find it very wonderful and exciting to have another woman, but,” said Drenka, lying, as it would later turn out, “I wouldn’t want to have to do it alone with her. It couldn’t turn me on. I have to have the male penis there, the male excitement to urge me on. But I do find very erotic a young woman’s body, the beauty of it, the round curves, the small breasts, the way she is shaped, and the smell of it, and the softness of it, and then as I come down myself to the cunt, I find the cunt actually quite beautiful. I never would have thought that looking in the mirror. You come with your
shame to look at yourself and you look at your sexual organs and they are not acceptable from the aesthetic perspective. But in this setting, I can see the whole thing, and although it is a mystique that I am a part of, it’s a mystery to me, a total mystery.”
♦ ♦ ♦
Drenka’s grave was near the base of the hill about forty feet from a pre-Revolutionary stone wall and a row of enormous maples fencing off the cemetery from the blacktop that meandered over the mountaintop. In all these months, the headlights of maybe half a dozen rattling vehicles—pickup trucks from the sound of them—had flickered by while Sabbath grieved there over his loss. He had only to drop to his knees to be as invisible from the road as any of those buried around him, and often he was on his knees already. There had not yet been a single nighttime visitor to the cemetery other than himself—a remote rural graveyard eighteen hundred feet above sea level did not strike people, even in springtime, as a place to come to roam around in after dark. Noises from beyond the cemetery—deer abounded on Battle Mountain—had seriously agitated Sabbath during his first months visiting the grave, and he was often quite sure that at the edge of his vision there was something darting among the tombstones, something he believed was his mother.
In the beginning he hadn’t known that he was to become a regular visitor. But then he hadn’t imagined that, looking down at the plot, he would see through to Drenka, see her inside the coffin raising her dress to the stimulating latitude at which the tops of her stockings were joined to the suspenders of her garter belt, once again see that flesh of hers that reminded him always of the layer of cream at the top of the milk bottle when he was a child and Borden delivered. It was stupid not to have figured on carnal thoughts. “Go down on me,” she said to Sabbath. “Eat me, Country, the way Christa did,” and Sabbath threw himself onto the grave, sobbing as he could not sob at the funeral.
Now that she was gone for good, it was incredible to Sabbath that not even when he was very much the crazy, cuntstruck lover,
before Drenka became just an absorbing diversion there to have fun with, to fuck with, to plot and to scheme with, that not even back then had he thought to exchange the excruciating boredom of a drunk, de-eroticized Roseanna for marriage to someone whose affinity to him was unlike any woman’s he had known outside a whorehouse. A conventional woman who would do anything. A respectable woman who was enough of a warrior to challenge his audacity with hers. There couldn’t be a hundred such women in the entire country. Couldn’t be fifty in all of America. And he’d had no idea. Never in thirteen years had he tired of looking down her blouse or looking up her skirt, and still he’d had no idea!
But now the thought undid him—no one would believe the scandalous town polluter, swinish Sabbath, to be susceptible to such a flood of straightforward feeling. He let go with a convulsive ardor that exceeded even her husband’s on the icy November morning of the funeral. Young Matthew, wearing his trooper’s uniform, betrayed no emotion other than hard-bitten rage mutely contained, the most violent of urges masterfully organized by a cop with a conscience. It was as though his mother had died not of a terrible disease but from an act of violence perpetrated by a psychopath he would go out and find and quietly take in, once the ceremony was over. Drenka had always wished that he could show the same admirable restraint as a son with his father that he did out on the road, where, to hear her tell it, he never got upset or lost control, whatever the provocation. Drenka ingenuously repeated to Sabbath, in Matthew’s words, whatever Matthew boasted to her about himself. Her reveling in the boy’s achievements was, to Sabbath, perhaps not the most beguiling thing about her, but it was far and away the most innocent. You wouldn’t have thought—if you were yourself a guileless ingenue—that such extreme polarity in any one person was possible, but Sabbath, a great fan of human inconsistency, was often transfixed by how worshipful his taboo-free, thrill-seeking Drenka could be of the son who saw the impeccable enforcement of the law as the most serious thing in life, who no longer had any
friends but cops—who, he explained to her, had become totally mistrustful of people who
weren’t
cops. When he was still fresh out of the academy, Matthew used to tell his mother, “You know something, I have more power than the president. You know why? I can take people’s rights away. Their rights of freedom. ‘You’re under arrest. You’re pinched. Your freedom is gone.’” And it was a sense of responsibility to all this power that caused Matthew so assiduously to toe the line. “He never gets upset,” his mother told Sabbath. “If there’s another cop who is mouthing off, calling the suspect a this or a that, Matthew tells him, ‘It’s not worth it. You’re going to get yourself in trouble. We’re doing what we’re supposed to do.’ Last week they brought a guy in, he was kicking the cruiser and everything, and Matthew said, ‘Let him do what he’s going to do, he’s pinched. What are we going to prove by screaming at him and swearing at him? This is all stuff he can bring up in court. It’s just another reason for this guy to get out of what he’s done wrong.’ Matthew says they can swear, they can do whatever they want—they’ve got handcuffs on, he’s in control of the situation, not them. Matthew says, ‘He’s trying to get me to lose control. There are cops who do lose control. They start screaming at them—and why, Ma? For what?’ Matthew is just quiet and takes them in.”
For Madamaska Falls, the crowd at the funeral had been huge. Aside from friends from town and the many past and present employees of the inn, there were, up from New York, in from Providence and Portsmouth and Boston, dozens of guests to whom Drenka had been the gracious, energetic hostess over the years—and among the guests were a number of men she had fucked. In the face of each the haggard look of loss and sorrow was clearly visible to Sabbath, who chose to observe them from the rear of the crowd. Which was Edward? Which was Thomas? Which was Patrick? That very tall guy must be Scott. And not far from where Sabbath was standing, also back as far from the coffin as he could get, was Barrett, the new young electrician from Blackwall, the shabby town just to the north that was home to five tough taverns and a state mental hospital. Sabbath had
happened to pull in behind Barrett’s pickup down in the crowded cemetery lot—across the truck’s tailgate were painted the words “Barrett Electric Co. ‘We’ll fix your shorts.’”
Barrett, who wore his hair in a ponytail and sported a Mexican mustache, stood beside his pregnant wife. She was holding a bundle that was their tiny baby and weeping openly. Two mornings a week, when Mrs. Barrett drove down to the valley to her secretarial job with the insurance company, Drenka would drive up past the reservoir to Blackwall and take baths with Mrs. Barrett’s husband. He didn’t look at all well that day, maybe because his suit was tight or maybe because without a coat to wear he was freezing to death. He shifted from one long leg to the other constantly as though at the conclusion of the service he was in danger of being lynched. Barrett was Drenka’s latest catch from among the workers making repairs around the inn. Last catch. A year younger than her son. He rarely spoke except when the bath was over, and then, with his hick enthusiasm, he would delight Drenka by telling her, “You are somethin’, you are really somethin’ else.” Aside from the youth and the youthful body, what excited Drenka was that he was “a physical man.” “He is not unhandsome,” she told Sabbath. “He has this animal thing that I like. He is like I have a twenty-four-hour fucking service if I want it. His muscles are strong and his stomach is completely flat, and then he has this big dick, and he sweats a lot, there is all this sweat coming out of him, he is all red in his face, and he is like you, he is also, ‘I don’t want to come yet, Drenka, I don’t want to come yet.’ And then he says, ‘Oh my God, I’m coming, I’m coming,’ and then ‘Ohhh. Ohhh,’ those big sounds he makes. And the relief, it’s like they collapse almost. And that he lives in a working-class environment and that I go there—all that adds to the excitement. A little apartment building with horrible horses on the walls. They have two rooms, and the taste is horrible. The other people there are attendants from the insane asylum. The bathroom has one of those old bathtubs that stand on the floor. And I say to him, ‘Turn the bathtub on so I can take a bath.’ I remember one time I came there at noon and I was very hungry and we were
going to have a pizza. I undressed right away and I run to the bathtub. Yes, I think we get very hot in the bathtub, jerking him a little, you know. You can fuck in the bathtub, and we did, but then the water runs over. What I like is the
way
we are fucking, which is specific to him. He will sort of sit up and, because his prick is big, we sort of sit and fuck that way. We work very hard and there is a lot of sweating, a lot of physical movement, much more than I can think of with anyone else. I love to take baths
and
showers. Part of the excitement is the lathering. The soap. You start at the face and then the chest and the stomach and then you come down to the dick, and that gets big, or it is big already. And then you start to fuck. If you’re standing in the shower, you stand up and fuck. Sometimes he will lift my legs up and he carries me like that in the shower. If it’s in the bathtub, then I will tend to sit on top of him and fuck that way. Or I can bend over and he will fuck me. I love the bathtub, to fuck my stupid electrician there. I love it.”