Authors: Philip Roth
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 that 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?”
Now, however justified Sabbath’s anger may have been by what was either an unforgivable oversight or an out-and-out betrayal, as Kathy sat sobbing in the front seat of his car, unburdening herself of the news, even he knew himself to be being less than ingenuous. (He had parked, fatefully enough, across from the Battle Mountain cemetery where Drenka’s body would be laid to rest just a few years later.) The truth was that he, too, had taped their conversation, not only the conversation on the tape she’d left at the library but the three that preceded it. But then, Sabbath had been taping his workshop girls for years now and planned to leave the collection to the Library of Congress. Seeing to the collection’s preservation was one of the best reasons he had— the only reason he had—to one day get a lawyer to draw up a will.
Including his four with Big Kathy, there were a total of thirty-three tapes, perpetuating the words of six different students who’d taken the puppetry workshop. All were locked away in the bottom drawer of an old file cabinet, stored in two shoeboxes marked “Corres.” (A third shoebox, marked “Taxes 1984,” contained Polaroids of five of the girls.) Each tape was dated and all
were organized alphabetically—and responsibly—by Christian names only and filed chronologically within that classification. He kept the tapes in excellent order not only so that each was easy to locate when he needed it to hand but so that they could be quickly accounted for if he ever worried, as irrationally he sometimes did, that one or another had gotten misplaced. From time to time Drenka would like to listen to the tapes while sucking him off. Otherwise they never left the locked file cabinet, and whenever he took one of his favorites to play a patch for himself, he would double-lock the studio door. Sabbath knew the danger of what he had in those shoeboxes yet he could never bring himself either to erase the tapes or to bury them in garbage at the town dump. That would have been like burning the flag. No, more like defiling a Picasso. Because there was in these tapes a kind of
art
in the way that he was able to unshackle his girls from their habit of innocence. There was a kind of art in his providing an illicit adventure not with a boy of their own age but with someone three times their age—the very repugnance that his aging body inspired in them had to make their adventure with him feel a little like a crime and thereby give free play to their budding perversity and to the confused exhilaration that comes of flirting with disgrace. Yes, despite everything, he had the artistry still to open up to them the lurid interstices of life, often for the first time since they’d given their debut “b.j.” in junior high. As Kathy told him in that language which they all used and which made him want to cut their heads off, through coming to know him she felt “empowered.” “I still have moments when I’m uncertain and scared. But for the most part,” she said, “I just want . . . I want to spend time with you. . . . I want—to take care of you.” He laughed. “You think I need taking care of?” “I
mean
it,” she said earnestly. “
What
do you mean?” “I mean I can care for you . . . I mean I can take care of your body.
And
your heart.” “Yes? You’ve seen my EKG? You’re afraid when I come I’ll have a coronary?” “I don’t
know
. . . . I mean . . . I don’t know
what
I mean but I mean it. That’s what I mean—what I just said.” “And can I take care of you?” “Yeah. Yeah. You kin.” “Which part of you?” “My body,” she dared to reply. Yes, they experienced not merely their capacity
for deviancy—that they’d known of since seventh grade—but the larger risks that deviancy entailed. His gifts as a theater director and a puppet master he poured without stinting into these tapes. Once he’d passed into his fifties, the art in these tapes—the insidious art of giving license to what was already there—was the only art he had left.
And then he got nailed.
The tape Kathy “forgot” had not only landed by morning in Kakizaki’s office but was somehow hijacked and rerecorded, before it even reached the dean, by an ad hoc committee calling itself Women Against Sexual Abuse, Belittlement, Battering, and Telephone Harassment, whose acronym was formed from the last seven words. By dinnertime of the following day,
SABBATH
had opened up a phone line on which the tape was continuously played. The local phone number to call—722-2284, fortuitously enough
S-A-B-B-A-T-H
again—was announced by the committee’s cochairpersons, two women, an art history professor and a local pediatrician, during an hour-long call-in show on the college radio station. The introduction prepared by
SABBATH
for the telephonic transmission described the tape as “the most blatantly vile example of the exploitation, humiliation, and sexual defilement of a college student by her professor in the history of this academic community.” “You are about to hear,” the introduction began, spoken by the pediatrician, and sounding to Sabbath appropriately clinical though lawyerly as well—lawyerly with palpable hatred—“two people talking on the telephone: one a man of sixty and the other a young woman, a college student, who has just turned twenty. The man is her teacher, acting in loco parentis. He is Morris Sabbath, adjunct professor of puppet theater in the four-college program. In order to protect her privacy—and her innocence—the name of the young woman has been bleeped wherever it appeared on the tape. That is the only alteration that has been made in the original conversation, which was secretly transcribed by the young woman in order to document what she had been subjected to by Professor Sabbath from the day she enrolled in his course. In a candid, confidential statement given voluntarily to the steering
committee of
SABBATH
, the young woman revealed that this was not the first such conversation into which she had been lured by Professor Sabbath. Moreover, she turns out to have been only the latest of a series of students whom Professor Sabbath has intimidated and victimized during the years he has been associated with the program. This tape records the fourth such telephone conversation to which the student was subjected.
1
The listener will quickly recognize how by this point in his psychological assault on an inexperienced young woman, Professor Sabbath has been able to manipulate her into thinking that she is a willing participant. Of course, to get the woman to think that it is her fault, to get her to think that she is a ‘bad girl’ who has brought her humiliation on herself by her own cooperation and complicity. . .”
♦ ♦ ♦
The car descended the slope of Battle Mountain to the lonely spot where he’d arranged to pick her up, the crossroad separating the
woods from the fields that led to West Town Street. All the way down the eighteen hundred feet she wept with her whole body shaking, immersed in pain, as though he were lowering her alive into her grave. “Oh, it’s unbearable. Oh, it hurts. I’m so unhappy. I don’t understand why this is happening to me.” She was a big girl whose production of secretions was considerable, and her tears were no exception. He’d never seen tears so large. Someone less of a connoisseur might have taken them for real.
“Extremely immature behavior,” he said. “The Sobbing Scene.”
“I want to suck you,” she managed to moan through her tears.
“The emotionality of young women. Why don’t they ever come up with something new?”
Across the road a couple of pickup trucks were parked in the dirt lot of the roadside nursery whose greenhouses constituted the first reassuring signs of the white man’s intrusion into these wooded hills (once the heartland of the Madamaskas, to whose
tribes the local falls were said—by those opposed to the profane installation of a parking lot and picnic tables—to have been sacred. It was in the numbingly cold pool of one of the remotest tributaries of those sacred falls, the brook that spilled down the rocky streambed beside the Grotto, that he and Drenka would gambol naked in the summer. See plate 4. Detail from the Madamaska vase of dancing nymph and bearded figure brandishing phallus. On bank of brook, note the wine jar, a he-goat, and a basket of figs. From the collection of the Metropolitan Museum. XX century
A.D.
).
“Get out. Disappear.”
“I want to suck you hard.”
A worker in coveralls was loading mulch sacks onto one of the trucks—otherwise there wasn’t anyone in sight. Mist was rising beyond the woods to the west, the seasonal mist that to the Madamaskas undoubtedly meant something about reigning divinities or departed souls—their mothers, their fathers, their Morties,
their Nikkis—but to Sabbath recalled nothing more than the opening of “Ode to Autumn.” He was not an Indian, and the mist was the ghost of no one he knew. This local scandal, remember, was taking place in the fall of 1989, two years before the death of his senile mother and four before her reappearance jolted him into understanding that not everything alive is a living substance. This was back when the Great Disgrace was still to come, and for obvious reasons he could not locate its origins in the sensuous stimulus that was the innocuously experimental daughter of the Pennsylvania baker with the foreboding surname. You besmirch yourself in increments of excrement—everyone knows that much about the inevitabilities (or used to)—but not even Sabbath understood how he could lose his job at a liberal arts college for teaching a twenty-year-old to talk dirty twenty-five years after Pauline Réage, fifty-five years after Henry Miller, sixty years after D. H. Lawrence, eighty years after James Joyce, two hundred years after John Cleland, three hundred years after John Wilmot,
second earl of Rochester—not to mention four hundred after Rabelais, two thousand after Ovid, and twenty-two hundred after Aristophanes. By 1989 you had to be a loaf of Papa Goolsbee’s pumpernickel not to be able to talk dirty. If only you could run a ’29 penis on ruthless mistrust, cunning negativity, and world-denouncing energy, if only you could run a’ 29 penis on relentless mischief, oppositional exuberance, and eight hundred different kinds of disgust, then he wouldn’t have needed those tapes. But the advantage a young girl has over an old man is that she is wet at the drop of a hat, while to engorge him it is necessary at times to drop a ton of bricks. Aging sets problems that are no joke. The prick does not come with a lifetime guarantee.