Authors: Philip Roth
She said she had forgotten earlier to give him the prescription for Zantac. Here it was. Zantac was what he took to try to control the stomach pains and the diarrhea produced by the Voltaren that lessened the pain in his hands, providing he didn’t use a knife and fork, drive a car, tie his shoelaces, or wipe his ass. If only he had the money, he could go out and hire some enterprising Jap to wipe his ass, one of the intellectually nimble, hardworking elite of 11,000 sitting atop—“sitting atop.” They know how to write in those enlightened papers. I should start taking the
Times
. Hep me with learn Engwish so no more get me burn by U.S. My brother’s legs were two charred timbers. Had he even lived, he would have been legless. The legless track star of Asbury High.
Pills and pain. Aldomet for my blood pressure and Zantac for my gut. A to Z. Then you die.
“Thanks,” he said. “Never before received a prescription from a doctor in a kimono.”
“Our era has lost much to commercial inelegance,” she replied, pleasing him no end with a geisha bow. “Norman thinks you might want to have those pants of yours dry-cleaned.” She pointed to his corduroys. “And that jacket, the mackinaw, that odd thing you wear with the pockets.”
“The Green Torpedo.”
“Yes. Maybe the Green Torpedo could use a cleaning.”
“You want the trousers now?”
“We are not children, Mr. Sabbath.”
He retreated into Debby’s bedroom and slipped off his pants. Norman’s robe, a colorful full-length velour robe with a belt long enough to hang himself, was still where he’d dropped it beside his jacket on the carpet. He returned to her, enwrapped in the robe, to make an offering of his dirty clothes. The robe trailed behind him like a gown. Norman was six two.
She took the clothes without a word, without the slightest manifestation of the squeamishness she had every right to feel. Those pants had had an active life during the last several weeks, a real full life such as would leave an ordinary person exhausted. Every indignity he had ever suffered seemed collected and preserved in the loose-fitting seat of those old pants, their cuffs encrusted with mud from the cemetery. But they did not appear to repel her, as he had momentarily feared while undressing. Of course not. She deals with dirt all day. Norman had narrated the whole saga. Pyorrhea. Gingivitis. Swollen gums. One
schmutzig
mouth after another.
Schmutz
is her métier. Crud is what she works away at with her instruments. Drawn not to Norman but to crud. Scrape the tartar. Scrape the pockets. . . . Seeing Michelle so enthrallingly kimono’d, his
schmutzig
clothes balled up under her arm—and with her geisha boy haircut lending just the right touch of transsexual tawdriness to the whole slatternly picture—he knew he could kill for her. Kill Norman. Push him out the fucking window. All that marmalade, mine.
So. Here we are. The moon is high, somewhere there’s music, Norman’s dead, and it’s just me and this betitted pretty-boy in his flowered kimono. Missed my chance with a man. That Nebraska
guy who gave me the books on the tanker. Yeats. Conrad. O’Neill. He would have taught me more than what to read if I’d let him. Wonder what it’s like. Ask her, she’ll tell you. The only other people who fuck men are women.
“Why do you like to look this way?” she asked, patting the dirty clothes.
“What other way is there to look?”
“Norman says that, when you were young, to look at you was to die. He says Linc used to say, ‘There’s a bull in Sabbath. He goes all out.’ He says people couldn’t take their eyes off of you. A force. A free spirit.”
“Why would he say that? To justify having seated at your dinner table a nobody nobody can possibly take seriously? Who of your social class can take seriously someone like me, steeped in selfishness, and with my terrible level of morality, and lacking all the appurtenances that go with all the right ideals?”
“You have great eloquence at your command.”
“I learned early on that people seem more easily to pass over how short I am when I am linguistically large.”
“Norman says you were the most brilliant young fellow he ever met.”
“Tell him he doesn’t have to.”
“He adored you. He still has a lot of feeling for you.”
“Yeah, well, a lot of well-bred people need their real-lifer. Normal enough. I’d been to sea. I’d been to Rome. Whores on more than one continent—a laudable achievement in those years. Showed’em I’d escaped the bourgeois trammels. Educated bourgeoisie like to admire someone who’s escaped the bourgeois trammels—reminds them of their college ideals. When I got written up in the
Nation
for taking a tit out on the street I was their noble savage for a week. Today they’d excoriate my balls off for so much as thinking about it, but in those days that made me heroic to all right-thinking people. Dissenter. Maverick. Menace to society. Great. I would bet you that even today part of being a cultivated millionaire in New York is having an interest in a disgraceful person. Linc and Norm and their friends got a big kick then
out of just saying my name. Gave them a spacious feeling of being illegit. A puppeteer who takes tits out on the street—like knowing a boxer, like helping a convict publish his sonatinas. To add to the fun I had a crazy young wife. An actress. Mick and Nikk, their favorite pathological couple.”
“And she?”
“I murdered she.”
“Norman says she disappeared.”
“No. I murdered her.”
“How much does this act cost you? How much of an act do you really need?”
“What other way is there for me to be? If you know, I’d like you to tell me. There is no stupidity that fails to interest me,” he said, feigning anger only a little—the “really” had been a cheap shot. “What other way is there to act?”
He liked that she did not appear intimidated. Refused to back off. That was good. Well schooled by her old man. Nonetheless, suppress the inclination to undo the kimono. Not yet.
“You’ll do anything,” she said, “not to be winning. But why
do
you behave this way? Primal emotions and indecent language and orderly complex sentences.”
“I’m not big on oughts, if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t entirely believe that. As much as he wants to be the Marquis de Sade, Mickey Sabbath is not. The degraded quality is not in your voice.”
“Neither was it in the Marquis de Sade’s. Neither is it in yours.”
“Freed from the desire to please,” she said. “A giddy feeling. What has it got you?”
“What has it got
you?
”
“
Me?
I’m pleasing people all the time,” she said. “I’ve been pleasing people since I was born.”
“Which people?”
“Teachers. Parents. Husband. Children. Patients. All people.”
“Lovers?”
“Yes.”
Now.
“Please me, Michelle,” and, taking her by one wrist, he tried to pull her into Debby’s room.
“Are you crazy?”
“Come on, you’ve read Kant. ‘Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law.’
Please me
.”
Her arms were strong from scraping all that crud away and his were no longer a seaman’s. No longer even a puppeteer’s. He could not budge her.
“Why were you pressing Norman’s foot throughout dinner?”
“No.”
“Yes,” she whispered—and that laugh, that laugh, a mere
tendril
of it was marvelous! “You were playing footsie with my husband. I expect an explanation.”
“No.”
And now she gave over the whole provocative thing—softly, because they were only down the hall from the conjugal bed, but the whole branching tangle of contradictions that was her laugh. “Yes, yes.” The kimono. The whispering. The haircut. The laugh. And so little time left.
“Come
in
.”
“Don’t be insane.”
“You’re great. You’re a great woman.
Come inside
.”
“Unbridled excess knows no limit in you,” she said, “but I suffer from a severe predilection not to ruin my life.”
“What did Norman say about my foot? How come he didn’t just throw me out?”
“He thinks you’re having a breakdown. He thinks you’re cracking up. He thinks you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. He’s intent on getting you to his psychiatrist. He says you need help.”
“You’re all I thought you were. You’re more, Michelle. Norman told me the whole story. Those upper third molars. Like cleaning windows at the top of the Empire State Building.”
“Your mouth could
use
a little going-over. The interdental papilla?
That little piece of flesh that sticks out between each tooth? Red. Swollen. Might want to investigate that further.”
“Then come in, for God’s sake. Investigate the papilla. Investigate the molars. Pull’em out. Whatever makes you happy. I want to make you happy. My teeth, my gums, my larynx, my kidneys— if it works and you like it, take it, it’s yours. I cannot believe that I was playing with Norman’s foot. It felt so good. Why didn’t he say anything? Why didn’t he get down there under the table and pick it up and place it where it was supposed to be? I thought he was such a great host. I thought he had all this feeling for me. Yet he placidly sits there and allows my foot
not
to be where he knows full well I
want
it to be. And at
his
dinner table. Where I am an invited guest. I didn’t beg to eat here, he
asked
me to. I’m really surprised at him. I want
your
foot.”
“Not now.”
“Don’t you find that the simplest formulations in English are barely endurable? ‘Not now.’ Say that again. Treat me like shit. Temper me like steel—”
“Calm down. Control yourself. Quiet,
please
.”
“Say it again.”
“Not now.”
“When?”
“Saturday. Come to my office Saturday.”
“Today’s Tuesday. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday—no, no. Absolutely not. I’m sixty-four years old. Saturday’s too late.”
“
Calm
.”
“If Yahweh wanted me to be calm, he would have made me a goy. Four days. No.
Now
.”
“We
can’t
,” she whispered. “Come Saturday—I’ll give you a periodontal probe.”
“Oh, okay. You’ve got a customer. Saturday. Okay. Wonderful. How do you do it?”
“I’ve got an instrument for it. I stick my instrument into your periodontal pocket. I enter the gingival crevice.”
“More. More. Speak to me about the business end of your instrument.”
“It’s a very fine instrument. It won’t hurt. It’s slender. It’s flat. It’s about a millimeter wide. Perhaps ten millimeters long.”
“You think metrically.” Drenka.
“It’s the only area in which I think metrically.”
“Will I bleed?” he asked.
“Just a drop or two.”
“That’s all?”
“Christ . . .” she said and allowed her forehead to fall forward onto his. To rest there. It was a moment unlike any he’d had all day. Week. Month. Year. He calmed down.
“How,” she asked, “did we arrive at this so soon?”
“It’s a consequence of living a long time. There isn’t forever to fuck around.”
“But you are a maniac,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know. It takes two to tangle.”
“You do a lot of things that most people don’t do.”
“What do I do that you don’t do?”
“Express yourself.”
“And you don’t do that?”
“Hardly. You have the body of an old man, the life of an old man, the past of an old man, and the instinctive force of a two-year-old.”
What is happiness? The substantiality of this woman. The compound she was. The wit, the gameness, the shrewdness, the fatty tissue, the odd indulgence in high-flown words, that laugh marked with life, her responsibility to everything, not excluding her carnality—there was stature in this woman. Mockery. Play. The talent and taste for the clandestine, the knowledge that everything subterranean beats everything terranean by a mile, a certain physical poise, the poise that is the purest expression of her sexual freedom. And the conspiratorial understanding with which she spoke, her terror of the clock running down . . . Must everything be behind her? No! No! The ruthless lyricism of Michelle’s soliloquy: and no I said no I will No.
“Adultery is a tough business,” he whispered to her. “The main thing is to be clear about wanting it. The rest is incidental.”
“Incidental,” she sighed.
“God, I’m fond of adultery. Aren’t you?” He dared to take her face in his crippled hands and to trace the boyish haircut around at the neckline with that middle finger for which they had once arrested him, the middle finger whose sweet talk was thought to have traumatized or hypnotized or tyrannized Helen Trumbull. Yeah, they had it all figured out in 1956. They still have. “The softness it brings to the hardness,” he went on. “A world without adultery is unthinkable. The brutal inhumanity of those against it. Don’t you agree? The sheer fucking depravity of their views. The
madness
. There is no punishment too extreme for the crazy bastard who came up with the idea of fidelity. To demand of human flesh fidelity. The cruelty of it, the mockery of it, is simply unspeakable.”
He would never let her get away. Here was Drenka, only instead of the colloquialisms that she fucked up in her ardor to engage the teacher and enjoy his games, speaking charmingly humorous, delectable English. Drenka, it’s
you
, only from suburban New Jersey instead of Split. I know because this high degree of excitement I experience with no one
but
you—this is your warm body resurrected! Out o’ the grave. Morty next.
He chose then to undo his own robe rather than hers—the six-footer’s velour robe, with the Paris label, that made him look like the Little King in the old comic strip—to introduce her to his hard-on. They should meet. “Behold the arrow of desire,” said Sabbath.
But one glimpse caused her to recoil. “Not
now
,” she warned again, and this breathy utterance won his heart. Even better was watching her run off. Like a thief. Running but willing. Running but ready.
He had a reason to live until Saturday. A new collaborator to replace the old one. The vanishing collaborator, indispensable to Sabbath’s life—it wouldn’t have been Sabbath’s life otherwise: Nikki disappearing, Drenka dying, Roseanna drinking, Kathy indicting him . . . his mother . . . his brother. . . . If only he could stop replacing them. Miscasting them. Since the latest loss, he’d
really been out there calibrating the dread. And to think that as a puppeteer he could do it without even a puppet, a full life with just his fingers.