Authors: Philip Roth
The mist was rising preternaturally from the river, and the pumpkins, ripe for carving, dotted like the freckles on Kathy’s face a big open field back of the greenhouse, and affixed to the trees, wouldn’t you know it, all the right leaves, every last one tinted to polychromatic perfection. The trees were resplendent
precisely as they’d been resplendent the year before—and the year before that—a perennial profusion of pigmentation to remind him that by the waters of the Madamaskas he had every reason to weep, because that was about as far as he could have got himself from the tropical sea and the Romance Run and those grand cities like Buenos Aires, where a common seaman of seventeen could eat for peanuts in 1946 at the greatest steak houses along the Florida—they called the main street in B.A. Florida—and then cross the river, the famous Plata, to where they had
the best places
, which meant the places where there were the most beautiful girls. And in South America that meant the most beautiful girls in the world. So many hot, beautiful women. And he had sequestered himself in New England! Colorful leaves? Try Rio. They got the colors too, only instead of on trees they’re on flesh.
Seventeen. Three years Kathy’s junior and no ad hoc committee of mollycoddling professors to keep me from getting clap, getting rolled, or getting stabbed to death, let alone getting my little ears
molested. I went there deliberately to get myself molly-bloomed! That’s what sevenfuckinteen is
for!
Frost, he mused—thought Sabbath—passing the time until Kathy got the idea that not even with
his
low standards would he dare to risk his dick again with an out-and-out adder and that she should just slither back to the Japanese viperina. The dim meatballs who were the proud descendants of the settlers who’d usurped these hills from the Original Goyim—an epithet historically more accurate than “Indians” and more respectful, too, as Sabbath had explained to that pal of Roseanna’s who taught “Hunting and Gathering” as a literature course. . . . Where was I? thought he, when once again the blandishments tumbling forth from perfidious Kathy caused him to lose his . . . the dim meatballs, long now the Reigning Goyim, all crowing gaily—as in “When Hearts Were Young and Gay”—about another frost, lower temperatures than even the night before, when Roseanna, wearing only a nightie, had been found by the state police at
three
A.M.
stretched on her back across Town Street, waiting to be run over.
An hour or so earlier she had left their house by car but had failed even to negotiate the first fifty feet of the hundred yards of curving dirt incline that lay between the carport and Brick Furnace Road. She had been speeding off not for town but for Athena, fourteen miles away, where Kathy shared an apartment with Brian a few blocks from the college, at 137 Spring. And despite having driven her Jeep into a boulder in the hay field that was their front yard, despite having to stumble without shoes or slippers two and a half miles down the twist of pitch-black lanes to the bridge that crossed the brook to Town Street, despite having lain on the asphalt insufficiently clad anywhere from fifteen minutes to half an hour before being spotted by the cop cruising by, she was clutching in one of her freezing hands a yellow Post-it note bearing—in a drunken scrawl legible by then not even to herself—the address of the girl who’d asked at the close of the
tape, “When is your wife coming back?” Roseanna’s intention was to tell this little whore in person just how fucking back she was, but having stumbled to the ground so many times without getting anywhere near Athena, Roseanna decided on Town that she’d be better off dead. That way the girl would never have to ask that question again. None of them would.
“I want to suck you right here.”
Sabbath had not only driven some six hours that day—getting Roseanna to the private psychiatric hospital in Usher and then himself back in time to meet Kathy—but had been up confronting this newest upheaval since just after three in the morning, when he had been awakened by a loud knock at the side door and the astonishing news that it was the police returning the wife whom he had assumed was sleeping all the while in their king-size bed, not cuddled close to him, needless to say, but safely over at the far edge, where, admittedly, he had not journeyed for many a year. When they had moved up from queen-size he had remarked to a
visitor that the new bed was so big he couldn’t find Roseanna in it. Overhearing him from where she happened to be gardening just outside the kitchen window, she had shouted into the house, “Why don’t you look?” But this was easily over a decade back, when he still spoke to people and she was drinking only a bottle a day and there was still a remnant of hope.
Yes, there at the door, earnestly polite now, stood Matthew Balich, whom his former art teacher had failed to recognize either because of the state trooper uniform or because of the booze. She had apparently whispered to Matthew, before he authoritatively made known his mission, that they must be very quiet to avoid awakening her hardworking husband. She had even tried to tip him. Heading for Kathy’s in only a nightgown, she’d still had the percipience to take her purse in case she needed to buy a drink.
It had been a long night, morning, and afternoon for Sabbath. First the Jeep had to be towed off the boulder where she’d run
aground, then arrangements had to be made through the family doctor to get her a bed at Usher, then the effort had to be undertaken to force her, hung over and hysterical though she was, to agree to twenty-eight days in Usher’s rehab program, and then at last there was the six-hour round-trip to the hospital, Roseanna ranting at him from the backseat the whole way there, pausing only to instruct him angrily to pull over at each service station they passed so she could try to relieve herself of her cramps.
Why she had to get plastered by stages in those putrid rest-rooms instead of openly guzzling from the bottle in her purse Sabbath did not bother to inquire. Her pride? After last night, her pride? Nor did Sabbath do anything to stop her when she listed the ways in which a wife whose intentions had merely been to assist him at his work and to comfort him when there were setbacks and to look after him when the arthritis was most acute had herself been ruthlessly ignored, insulted, exploited, and betrayed.
Up front in the car Sabbath played the Goodman tapes to which he and Drenka used to dance together in the motel rooms he rented up and down the valley when first they’d become enraptured lovers. During the 130-mile drive west to Usher, the tapes more or less drowned out Roseanna’s tirade and allowed Sabbath some respite from all that he’d been through since Matthew had kindly returned her. First they fucked, then they danced, Sabbath and Matthew’s mom, and while Sabbath faultlessly sang the lyrics into her grinning, incredulous face, his come would leak out of her, making even more lubricious the inner roundness of her thighs. The come would stream all the way down to her heels, and after they’d danced he would massage her feet with it. Nestled down at the end of the motel bed, he would suck on her big toe, pretending it was her cock, and she pretended that his come was her own.
(And where did all those 78s disappear to? After I went to sea, what happened to the 1935 Victor recording of “Sometimes I’m
Happy” that was Morty’s treasure of treasures, the one with the Bunny Berigan solo that Morty called “the greatest trumpet solo ever, by anyone”? Who got Morty’s records? What happened to his things after Mother died? Where are they?) Stroking with one spoon-shaped thumb the breadth of Croatian cheekbone while with the other jiggling her on-off switch, Sabbath sang “Stardust” to Drenka, not like Hoagy Carmichael, in English, but in French no less—“Suivant le silence de la nuit / Répète ton nom. . .”—exactly the way it was sung for the prom crowds by Gene Hochberg, who led the swing band in which Morty played clarinet (and who, amazingly, would wind up just like Morty flying B-25s in the Pacific and who Sabbath had always secretly wished had been the one to be shot down). A bearded barrel he indisputably was, yet Drenka cooed ecstatically, “My American boyfriend. I have an American boyfriend,” while the great Goodman performances of the thirties transformed into the pavilion over the LaReine Avenue beach the room reeking of disinfectant that he had rented for
six bucks in the name of Goodman’s maniac trumpeter on “We Three and the Angels Sing,” Ziggy Elman. At the LaReine Avenue pavilion Morty taught Mickey to jitterbug one August night in 1938, when the little boy who was his shadow was just nine. The kid’s birthday present. Sabbath taught the girl from Split how to jitterbug on a snowy afternoon in 1981 in a motel in New England called the Bo-Peep. By the time they left at six to drive, in two cars, the plowed roads home, she could tell Harry James’s solos from Elman’s on “St. Louis Blues,” she could imitate very funnily Hamp going “Ee-ee” in that screechy way he did it in the final solo of “Ding Dong Daddy,” she could knowingly say about “Roll ’Em” what Morty used to knowingly say to Mickey about “Roll ’Em” after the boogie-woogie beginning starts petering out in the Stacy solo: “It’s really just a fast blues in F.” She could even bang out on Sabbath’s hairy hindquarters the Krupa tom-tom beat in her own accompaniment to “Sweet Leilani.” Martha Tilton taking over from Helen Ward. Dave Tough taking over from
Krupa. Bud Freeman coming over in ’38 from the Dorsey band. Jimmy Mundy, from the Hines band, coming over as staff arranger. In one long winter afternoon at the Bo-Peep her American boyfriend taught Drenka things she could never learn from the devoted husband whose pleasure that day was to be out all alone in the snow, building stone walls until it got too dark even to see his own breath.
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.