Authors: Philip Roth
In her robe, reading that shit. He imagines her, robe undone, holding her book with her right hand while diddling herself idly with the left. Ambidextrous, but happens to feel more comfortable playing around with the left. Reading and not even aware for a while that she is starting up. A bit distracted by the reading. Tends to like to have some cloth between her hand and her pussy. Nightgown, robe—tonight, panties. The material turns her on; why that is she doesn’t quite know. Uses three fingers: outer fingers on the lips, middle finger pressing the button. Circular movement of the fingers, and soon the pelvis in a circular movement, too. Middle finger on the button—not the tip of the finger, the ball of the finger. First a very light pressure. Knows automatically where the button is, of course. Then a little pause, because she’s still reading. But it’s getting more difficult to concentrate on what she is reading. Not sure she wants to do it yet. The pressure of the ball of the two fingers surrounding the button. As she gets more excited, the ball of one finger is right on the button yet the feeling is somehow spread by the other fingers. Finally she puts the book down. Intermittently now, her fingers are still while her pelvis does the moving. Then back on the button, round and round, the other hand on her breast, on her nipples, squeezing. She has now decided that she is not going to be reading for a while. Takes her
right hand down from her breast and rubs the whole thing forcefully with both hands, still outside the material. Three fingers next, over where the button is. Always knows exactly where it is, which is better than I can say for myself. Nearly fifty years on the job, and still the damn thing is there and then it’s here and then it’s gone and you can spend half a minute looking everywhere before kindly her hands reposition you. “There! No,
there!
Right there! Yes! Yes!” And now she stretches her legs straight out, a long cat stretch, her hands pressed tight between her thighs. Squeezing. Manages a pre-come that way, a
forshpeis
, squeezing the whole cunt hard as she can, and now she has decided: she doesn’t want to stop. Sometimes she does it through the cloth the whole way; tonight she wants her fingers on the inside of the lips and she pushes the panties aside. Going up and down now, straight up and down, and not in a circular motion. And faster, going much faster. Then, using the other hand, she slips her middle finger (elegant long finger it is, too) into her cunt. Very fast with it, until she feels the first premonitory convulsions. Moves her legs back up now, spreading the legs apart while bending the knees and bringing the feet together so that, almost beneath her buttocks, the toes are touching. Opens herself up all the way. Wide open now. And constant contact with two fingers on the clit, the middle finger and the ring finger. Up and down. Tensing herself. Buttocks up now, raising herself up on her bent legs. Now she slows down a little. Stretches her legs out to slow it down, bringing it all almost to a stop. Almost. And now she bends her legs up again. This is the position in which she wants to come. Here begins the muttering. “Can I? Can I?” All the while she is making the decision
when
, she is muttering aloud, “Can I? Can I? Can I come?” Whom does she ask? The imaginary man. Men. The whole lot of them, one of them, the leader, the masked one, the boy, the black one, asking herself maybe or her father, or asking no one at all. The words alone are enough, the begging. “Can I? Can I come? Please, can I?” And now she is keeping the pressure even, now a little harder, increasing the pressure, constant pressure,
just right there
, and now she feels it, she feels it, now she’s got to keep
going—“Can I? Can I? Please?”—and here are the noises, ladies and gentlemen, in combinations peculiar to each woman alone, the noises that could serve as well as fingerprints to individualize the whole sex for the FBI—ohh, ummmm, ahhh—because now she’s started, she’s coming, and the pressure is harder but not extremely hard, not so hard that it hurts, two fingers up and down, wide pressure, she wants
wide pressure
because she wants to come again, and now the feeling is moving down toward the cunt, and she puts her finger in, and now she thinks she could enjoy having a dildo there, but she’s got her finger there, and that’s, that’s IT! And so she goes up and down with her finger as though somebody were fucking her, and voluntarily now she tightens her cunt to increase the feeling, squeezes tight to give herself more feeling, up and down, while still working the clit. It changes what she feels when she introduces her finger into her cunt—on the button it’s very precise, but with the finger in her cunt the feeling is distributed, and that’s what she wants:
the distribution of the feeling
. Though it’s physically not easy to coordinate the two hands, with supreme concentration she works to overcome the difficulty. And does. Ohhhh. Ohhhh. Ohhhh. And then she lies there and she pants for a while, and then she picks up the book and goes back to her reading, and, in all, there is much here to be compared with Bernstein conducting Mahler’s Eighth.
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 grass 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.