Sabbath’s Theater (11 page)

Her mistake was to take to Barrett the bad news. “You told me,” he said, “you promised me—you weren’t going to complicate everything, and here you go. I’ve got a baby to support, I’ve got a pregnant wife to look after. I got a new business to worry about, and one thing I don’t need right now, from you, me, or anybody, is cancer.”

Drenka phoned Sabbath and drove immediately to meet him at the Grotto. “You should never have told him,” Sabbath said, seated on the granite outcropping and rocking her in his lap. “But,” she said, crying pitifully, “we’re lovers—I wanted him to know. I didn’t know he was this
shit
.” “Well, if you’d looked at it from the point of view of the pregnant wife, that might have occurred to you. You knew he was stupid. You liked that he was stupid. ‘My stupid electrician.’ It turned you on that he had this animal thing, lived in a horrible place, was stupid.” “But I was talking to him about
cancer
. Even a
stupid
person—” “Shhh. Shhh. Not one, apparently, as stupid as Barrett.”

Sabbath was completing his mourning—by scattering his seed across Drenka’s oblong patch of Mother Earth—when the
headlights of a car turned off the blacktop and into the wide gravel drive where the hearses ordinarily entered the cemetery. The headlights advanced waveringly and then they were out and the quiet engine went dead. Zipping up his trousers, Sabbath scurried, bent over, toward the nearest maple tree. There, on his knees, he hid his white beard between the massive tree trunk and the old stone wall. He could discern from the silhouette of the car—more or less the shape and the size of a hearse—that it was a limousine. And a figure was marching steadily up in the direction of Drenka’s grave, tall, in a large overcoat, and wearing what looked to be high boots. He was guiding himself by the beam of a flashlight that he kept switching on and off. In the hazy half-dark of the moonlit cemetery he looked gigantic bounding forward on those boots. He must have been expecting cold weather up here. He must be from—it was the credit-card magnate! It was Scott!

Six feet five inches tall. Scott Lewis. Five-foot two-inch Drenka had smiled up at him in an elevator in Boston and asked if he knew the correct time. It took only that. She used to sit on his dick in the backseat of the limo while the driver took a slow tour of the suburbs, driving sometimes past Lewis’s own house. Scott Lewis was one of those men who told Drenka that there was no other woman like her in the world. Sabbath had heard him say it from the telephone of the limousine.

“He is very interested in my body,” she reported promptly to Sabbath. “He wants to take photographs and he wants to look at me and he wants to kiss me all the time. He is a big cunt licker— and very tender.” Yet, tender fellow that he was, the second evening she rendezvoused with him at a Boston hotel, a call girl Lewis had ordered came knocking at their door only ten minutes after Drenka’s arrival. “What I didn’t like about it,” Drenka told Sabbath on the phone the next morning, “was that I didn’t have a
say
in it, that it was just put upon me.” “So what did you do about it?” “I just had to make the best of it, Mickey. She comes to the hotel room dressed like an upper-class whore. She pulls open her bag and she has all these things in there. Do you want a little
maid’s uniform? Do you want it Indian style? And then she takes out her dildos and she says, ‘Do you like this or that?’ And then, okay, now you start. But how do you get aroused by that? That was kind of hard even for me. Anyway, I guess we sort of got started. The idea was that the guy was more the voyeur. Interested in seeing how two women do it. He asked her mostly to go down on me. It all seemed to me so technical and cold, but I decided, okay, I’m going to be game for it. So eventually I did some work and I was able to get excited by it. But finally I fucked more Lewis—we two were fucking while she was just sort of in the picture somewhere. After he came, I started kissing her pussy, but it was very dry, though after a while she started moving a little bit and that then became sort of my mission. Could I make a whore hot? I think maybe I did to some extent, but it was hard to know if she wasn’t just playing it. You know what she said to me? To
me?
She says, when we’re all getting dressed, ‘You’re very hard to make come!’ She was
angry
. ‘The husbands want me to do this all the time’—she thought we were husband and wife—‘but you took unusually hard work.’ Husbands and wives are very common, Mickey. The whore said that’s what she does all the time.” “That’s difficult for you to believe?” he asked. “You mean,” she replied, laughing happily, “everybody is crazy like us?” “Crazier,” Sabbath assured her, “much, much crazier.”

Drenka called Lewis’s erection “the rainbow” because, as she liked to explain, “His dick is rather long and sort of curved. And there is a little bend to it, to one side.” On Sabbath’s instruction she had traced its outline on a piece of paper—Sabbath still had the drawing somewhere, probably in among those dirty pictures of her that he had not been able to look at since her death. Lewis was the only one of her men other than Sabbath whom she had allowed to fuck her in the ass. He was that special. When Lewis had wanted to do it to the whore as well, the whore said sorry, that was where she drew the line.

Oh yes, the jolly time Drenka had with this guy’s crooked dick! Infuriating! And yet, back when it was happening, Sabbath frequently had to slow her down while she was telling him her
stories, had to remind her that nothing was too trivial to recount, no detail too minute to bring to his attention. He used to solicit this kind of talk from her, and she obeyed. Exciting to them both. His genital mate. His greatest pupil.

It had, however, taken him years to make Drenka a decent narrator of her adventures, since her inclination, in English at least, was to pile truncated sentences one on the other until he couldn’t understand what she was talking about. But gradually, as she listened to him and talked to him, there was an ever-increasing correlation between all she was thinking and what she said. She certainly became syntactically more urbane than nine-tenths of the locals up on their mountain, even though her accent remained to the end remarkably juicy:
chave
for
have, cheart
for
heart
; at the conclusion of
stranger
and
danger
, a strong rolling
r
; and her
l
’s almost like a Russian’s, emerging from a long way back in the mouth. The effect was of a delightful shadow cast on her words, making just a little mysterious the least mysterious utterance— phonetic seduction enthralling Sabbath all the more.

She was weakest at retaining idiomatic English but managed, right up to her death, to display a knack for turning the clichéd phrase, proverb, or platitude into an objet trouvé so entirely her own that Sabbath wouldn’t have dreamed of intervening—indeed, some (such as “it takes two to tangle”) he wound up adopting. Remembering the confidence with which she believed herself to be smoothly idiomatic, lovingly recalling from over all the years as many as he could of Drenka’s malapropisms stripped him now of every defense, and once again he descended to the very pit of his sorrow: bear and grin it . . . his days are counted . . . a roof under my head . . . when the shithouse hit the fan . . . you can’t compare apples and apples . . . the boy who cried “Woof!” . . . easy as a log . . . alive and cooking . . . you’re pulling my leg out . . . I’ve got to get quacking . . . talk for yourself, Johnny . . . a closed and shut case . . . don’t keep me in suspension . . . beating a dead whore . . . a little salt goes a long way . . . he thinks I’m a bottomless piss . . . let him eat his own medicine . . . the early bird is never late . . . his bark is worse than your cry . . . it took me for
a loop . . . it’s like bringing coals to the fireplace . . . I feel as though I’ve been run over by a ringer . . . I have a bone to grind with you . . . crime doesn’t pay off . . . you can’t teach an old dog to sit. . . . When she wanted Matija’s dog to stop and wait at her side, instead of saying “Heel!” Drenka called out, “Foot!” And once when Drenka came up to Brick Furnace Road to spend an afternoon in the Sabbaths’ bedroom—Roseanna was visiting her sister in Cambridge—though it was raining only lightly when she arrived, by the time they had eaten the sandwiches Sabbath had prepared and had smoked a joint and gotten into bed, the day had all but turned into a moonless night. An eerie black hour of silence passed and then the storm broke over their mountain—on the radio Sabbath later learned that a tornado had torn apart a trailer park only fifteen miles west of Madamaska Falls. When the turbulence overhead was most noisily dramatic, hammering down like artillery that had found its target in Sabbath’s property, Drenka, clinging to him beneath the sheet, said to Sabbath in a woozy voice, “I hope there is a thunder catcher on this house.” “I am the thunder catcher on this house,” he assured her.

When Sabbath saw Lewis bending over the grave to place a bouquet on the plot, he thought, But she’s mine! She belongs to me!

What Lewis did next was such an abomination that Sabbath reached crazily about in the dark for a rock or a stick with which to rush forth and beat the son of a bitch over the head. Lewis unzipped his fly and from his shorts extracted the erection whose outlined drawing Sabbath had retained in his files, he now remembered, under “Misc.” He was a long time rocking back and forth, rocking and moaning, until at last he turned his face upward to the starry sky and a full, fervent basso profundo echoed across the hills. “Suck it, Drenka, suck me dry!”

Though it was not phosphorescent, enabling Sabbath visually to chart its course, though it was not sufficiently clotted or dense for him to hear it splatter to the ground even in that mountaintop silence, simply from the stillness of Lewis’s silhouette and from the fact that his breathing was audible thirty feet away, Sabbath
knew that the tall lover had just commingled his wad with the short one’s. In the next moment Lewis had fallen to his knees and, before her grave, in a low tearful voice he was lovingly reciting, “. . . tits . . . tits . . . tits . . . tits. . . .”

Sabbath could endure only so much. A rock he’d kicked out from between the large, protuberant roots of the maple, a rock as big around as a bar of soap, he picked up and hurled in the direction of Drenka’s grave. It clanged against a tombstone nearby, causing Lewis to leap to his feet and look frantically about. Then he ran down the hill to the waiting limo, whose engine immediately started up. The car backed out of the drive and into the road, and only then did the headlights come on and the limousine whiz away.

When he rushed across to Drenka’s grave, Sabbath saw that Lewis’s bouquet was huge, containing perhaps as many as four dozen flowers. The only ones he could recognize, with the aid of his flashlight, were the roses and the carnations. He didn’t know any of the others by name, despite all those summers of Drenka’s tutoring. Kneeling down, he gathered up the bouquet by its bulky bundle of stems and clutched it to his chest as he started along the dirt path toward the highway and his car. At first he imagined that the bouquet was wet from the shop, where the flowers would have been kept fresh in vases of water, but then the texture made him understand what, of course, the wet substance was. The flowers were drenched with it. His hands were covered with it. So was the chest of the dirty old hunting jacket with the enormous pockets in which he used to carry puppets down to the college before the scandal with Kathy Goolsbee.

Drenka had once told Sabbath that after her marriage, when, within their first year as émigrés, Matija grew depressed and lost all interest in fucking her, she was so desolated that she went to a doctor in Toronto, where they lived briefly after fleeing Yugoslavia, and asked him how many times a husband was supposed to do it with a wife. The doctor asked her what she thought a reasonable expectation might be. Without even stopping to think, the young bride replied, “Oh, about four times a day.” The doctor
asked where a working couple was to find the time that would take, other perhaps than on the weekend. She explained, her fingers doing the calculating, “You do it once about three in the morning when sometimes you hardly know you do it. You do it at seven when you wake up. You do it when you come home from work and before you sleep. You can even do it two times before you go to sleep.”

Why this story had come to him as he cautiously descended the dark cemetery hill—the bespattered flowers still clutched in his hands—was because of that triumphant Friday, only seventy-two hours after Matija’s Rotary speech, when she had ended the day—not the week, the day—awash with the sperm of four men. “Nobody can accuse you, Drenka, of being timid in the face of your fantasies. Four,” he said. “Well, I’d be honored to be numbered among them should there ever be a next time.” He found, on hearing this story, not merely his desire inflamed but his veneration, too—there
was
something great about it: something heroic. This shortish woman a little on the plump side, darkly pretty but with an oddly damaged-looking nose, this refugee who knew hardly anything of the world beyond her schoolgirl Split (pop. 99,462) and the picturesque New England village of Madamaska Falls (pop. 1,109), seemed to Sabbath
a woman of serious importance
.

“It was the time I went to Boston,” she told him, “to see my dermatologist. That was very exciting. You sit in the doctor’s office and you know you’re his mistress and he’s turned on and he shows you he has a big hard-on right in the examination room, and he takes it out and he fucked me right there. During the appointment. I used to go years ago to fuck him in his office on Saturdays. And he was a good fuck. And anyway from there I went to the credit-card magnate, the Lewis guy. And it was exciting that another man was waiting, that I could turn another guy on. Maybe I felt strong about that, to be able to seduce more than one man. Lewis fucked me and came inside me. That made me feel good. Nobody knows it but I. I am a woman walking around who has this sperm from two guys. The third guy was the dean,
that college guy who stayed at the inn with his wife. His wife was in Europe so I was having dinner with him. I didn’t know him— that was the first time. You want me to be really blunt about the whole thing? I discovered that I had got my period. I’d met him when we have our cocktail party for the guests. He stood next to me and he had pushed his arms onto my nipples. And he told me that he had a big hard-on, and I could almost see it. A dean at a college—this is the way we were talking at the cocktail party. Those kind of settings are what turn me on, when you do it in public, but secretly in public. So he had prepared this elaborate dinner. We were both very passionate but very shy at the same time or nervous about it. We ate in their dining room and I was answering his questions about my childhood under Communism and eventually we went upstairs, and he was sort of a strong guy and he held me and he really almost crushed my ribs. He had unbelievable manners. Maybe he was shy and frightened. He said, ‘Well, we don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.’ I was a little hesitant because by now I had my period but I wanted to fuck him, so I went into the bathroom and took out my tampon. We started undressing and it was all very hot and very exciting. A tall guy, very strong, and he said many beautiful words. I was very excited and wanted to know the size his dick was. So when we finally undressed I was disappointed that he seemed to have a very small dick. I don’t know if he was frightened of me so he couldn’t really get it up. Then I said, ‘Well, I have my period,’ and he said, ‘That doesn’t matter.’ I said, ‘Let me go and get a towel.’ So we put a towel down on the bed and we really went into it. He was doing everything with me. He couldn’t really get a very good hard-on. I worked hard on getting him to have a hard-on but I think he was scared. He was frightened about me, that I was so free. That’s what I sensed—that he was a bit overwhelmed. Though he did actually come three times.” “Without a hard-on.
And
overwhelmed. Quite a feat,” noted Sabbath. “It was a small hard-on,” she explained. “How did he come? You sucked him?” “No, no, he came inside me, actually. And he sucked me even though I was bleeding all over the place. So that was a big mess, a
lot of fucking and a lot of blood coming out. The fact that there was the blood—there was an added drama to it. A lot of juice and grease—it’s not grease; how do I describe it? It’s thick liquid, body fluids that were mixed in together. And after it’s all finished and we get up—you get up, and what do you do, you don’t know this person, and you’re a little embarrassed, and we’re stuck with this towel.” “Describe the towel.” “It was a white towel. And it was not completely red. The size of a bath towel. There were enormous spots. If I would wring it, it would come out, blood from it. It was like juice, a juicy liquid. But it wasn’t that the whole thing was completely red, by any means. There were big, big spots on it, and it was very heavy. It’s a definite—not an alibi; how do you say it in English? The opposite of that?” “Evidence?” “Yes, it’s evidence of the crime. So we were discussing it and he said, ‘Well, what can I do with this?’ And he stood there, this tall man, this strong man, holding this towel like a child. A little embarrassed, but not wanting to show that to me. And I didn’t want to be crimelike, I didn’t want to pretend, ‘Oh, this is a bad thing.’ This was natural to me to do it, so I wanted to be cool about it. He said, ‘I can’t let the maid wash it and I can’t throw it in the hamper. I guess I have to throw it out. But where can I throw it?’ and I said, ‘I’ll take it.’ And the relief on his face was enormous. And I put it in a plastic bag and I took it with me, this wet bundle, in a shopping bag. So he was very happy and then I drove home, and I put it into the washing. And it came out clean. And then of course he called me the next day and he said, ‘Dear Drenka, this was certainly very dramatic,’ and I said, ‘Well, I have the towel and it’s clean. Do you want it back?’ and he said, ‘No, thank you.’ He didn’t want the towel back and I guess his wife never found out about it.” “And so who is the fourth you fucked that day?” “Well, I came home and I went down to the basement and threw the towel into the machine and then I came upstairs and Matija wants me to perform my marital duty at midnight. He sees me going naked into the shower and it excites him. This is something I have to do, so I do it. Thank God it’s not often.” “And so how does it feel after four men?” “Well, Matija fell asleep. I guess I felt
very chaotic, if you really want to know. I think it is very taxing to do that. I had done three before, a number of times, but never four. Sexually it was very—very defiant and somehow exciting, even if the fourth was Maté. And maybe slightly perverse in a way. Part of me enormously enjoyed that. But in terms of what I really felt—I couldn’t sleep, Mickey; it made me feel unsettled, restless, and it made me feel I did not know to whom I belong. I kept thinking of you, and that helped, but that was a high price to pay for it, all that confusion. If I could take the confusion away, how do you say—extrapolate it?—and make it just a sexual thing, I think that it’s an exciting thing to do.” “The most exciting ever, Donna Giovanna?” “Oh, my God,” she said, laughing heartily, “I don’t know about that. Let me think.” “Yes, think. Il catalogo.” “Oh, in the past, maybe thirty years ago, maybe more, I would go on a train, for example, through Europe, and do it with the train conductor. You know, it was pre-AIDS time. Yes, the Italian train conductor.” “Where do you do it with a train conductor?” She shrugged. “You find a compartment that isn’t busy.” “Is that true?” Laughing again, she said, “Yes. True.” “Were you married?” “No, no, this is when I worked a year in Zagreb. I guess he would come in the train car, a little good-looking Italian guy who speaks Italian, and you know, they’re sexy, and maybe my friends, we’re having a party or something like that—I can’t remember who initiates what. No, I did it. I sold him cigarettes. It was expensive to travel in Italy and so you take with you something to sell. You buy it cheaply in Yugoslavia. Cigarettes were inexpensive. And Italians would buy out these cigarettes. They had the names of rivers, the Yugoslav cigarettes. Drina. Morava. Ibar. Yes, they were then all words of rivers. You make twice as much, maybe three times as much as you paid, so I sold him cigarettes. That’s how it started. When I was working in Zagreb that year after high school, I loved to be fucked. It made me feel very, very good to have my cunt full of sperm, of come, it was a wonderful, maybe a powerful feeling. Whoever was the boyfriend, you would go to work that next day knowing you had been well fucked and you’re all wet and the pants were wet and you walked around
wet—I enjoyed that. And I remember I knew this older guy. He was a retired gynecologist and somehow we were talking about this and he thought it was very healthy to keep the come in the cunt after you had fucked, and I agreed with him. This turned him on. But it was no use. He was too old. I was curious to do it with a very old man, but he was already seventy and it was a closed and shut case.”