Sabbath’s Theater (12 page)

When Sabbath reached his car, he walked beyond it some twenty feet along the hiking trail into the woods and there he hurled the bouquet into the dark mass of the trees. Then he did something strange, strange even for a strange man like him, who believed himself inured to the limitless contradictions that enshroud us in life. Because of his strangeness most people couldn’t stand him. Imagine then if someone had happened upon him that night, in the woods a quarter mile down from the cemetery, licking from his fingers Lewis’s sperm and, beneath the full moon, chanting aloud, “I am Drenka! I am Drenka!”

Something horrible is happening to Sabbath.

B
UT HORRIBLE THINGS
are happening to people all the time. The next morning Sabbath learned about Lincoln Gelman’s suicide. Linc had been the producer of Sabbath’s Indecent Theater (and the Bowery Basement Players) during those few years in the fifties and early sixties when Sabbath had amassed his little audience on the Lower East Side. After Nikki’s disappearance, he had stayed a week with the Gelmans in their big Bronxville house.

Norman Cowan, Linc’s partner, called with the news. Norman was the subdued member of the duo, if not the office’s imaginative spearhead then its levelheaded guardian against Linc’s overreaching. He was Linc’s equilibrium. In any discussion, even of the location of the men’s room down the hall, he could come to the point in about one-twentieth of the time that Linc liked to take to explain things to people. The educated son of a venal Jersey City jukebox distributor, Norman had shaped himself into a precise and canny businessman exuding the aura of quiet strength that lean, tall, prematurely balding men often appear to possess, particularly when they come, as Norman did, scrupulously attired in gray pinstripes.

“His death,” Norman confided, “was a relief to many. Most of the people we’re lining up to speak at the funeral haven’t seen him in five years.”

Sabbath hadn’t seen him in thirty.

“These are all current business associates, close Manhattan
friends. But they couldn’t see him. Linc was impossible to be with—depressed, obsessive, trembling, frightened.”

“How long was he like that?”

“Seven years ago he fell into a depression. He never again had a painless day. A painless
hour
. We carried him in the office for five years. He’d just float around with a contract in his hand, saying, ‘Are we sure this is all right? Are we sure this isn’t illegal?’ The last two years he’s been at home. A year and a half ago, Enid couldn’t take it any longer and they found an apartment for Linc around the corner and Enid furnished it and he lived there. A housekeeper came every day to feed him and to clean up. I would try to get over once a week, but I had to force myself. It was awful. He would sit and listen to you and then sigh and shake his head and say, ‘You don’t know, you don’t know. . . .’ For years now that’s all I heard him say.”

“You don’t know what?”

“The dread. The anguish. Unceasing. No medication helped. His bedroom looked like a pharmacy, but not a single drug worked. They all made him sick. He hallucinated on the Prozac. He hallucinated on the Wellbutrin. Then they started giving him amphetamines—Dexedrine. For two days it looked as though something was happening. Then the vomiting began. All he ever got were the side effects. Hospitalization didn’t work, either. He was hospitalized three months, and when they sent him home they said he was no longer suicidal.”

His drive, his gusto, his pep, his speediness, his effectiveness, his diligence, his loquacious joking, someone—Sabbath remembered—wholly at one with his time and place, a highly adapted New Yorker tailor-made for that frenetic reality and oozing with the passion to live, to succeed, to have fun. His sentiments transported tears to his eyes too easily for Sabbath’s taste, he talked rapidly in a flood of words that revealed how strong the compulsions were that fueled his hyperdynamism, but his life
was
a solid achievement, full of aim and purpose and the delight of being the energizer of others.
And then life took a turn and never righted itself. Everything vanished. The irrational overturned everything
. “Something specific set it off?” Sabbath asked.

“People come apart. And aging doesn’t help. I know a number of men our age, right here in Manhattan, clients, friends, who’ve been going through crises like this. Some shock just undoes them around sixty—the plates shift and the earth starts shaking and all the pictures fall off the wall. I had my bout last summer.”

“You? Hard to believe about you.”

“I’m still on Prozac. I had the whole thing—fortunately the abridged version. Ask why and I couldn’t tell you. I just stopped sleeping at some point and then, a couple of weeks later, the depression descended—the fear, the trembling, the suicide thoughts. I was going to buy a gun and blow the top of my head off. Six weeks until the Prozac kicked in. On top of that, it happens not to be a dick-friendly drug, at least for me. I’m on it eight months. I don’t remember what a hard-on feels like. But at this age it’s an up-and-down affair anyway. I got out alive. Linc didn’t. He got worse and worse.”

“Could it have been something other than just depression?”

“Just depression’s enough.”

But Sabbath knew as much. His mother had never gone ahead to take her life, but then, for fifty years after losing Morty, she had no life to take. In 1946, at seventeen, when, instead of waiting a year to be drafted, Sabbath went to sea only weeks after graduating high school, he was motivated as much by his need to escape his mother’s tyrannical gloom—and his father’s pathetic brokenness—as by an unsatisfied longing that had been gathering force in him since masturbation had all but taken charge of his life, a dream that overflowed in scenarios of perversity and excess but that he now, in a seaman’s suit, was to encounter thigh-to-thigh, mouth-to-mouth, face-to-face: the worldwide world of whoredom, the tens of thousands of whores who worked the docks and the portside saloons wherever ships made anchor, flesh of every pigmentation to furnish every conceivable pleasure, whores who in their substandard Portuguese, French, and Spanish spoke the scatological vernacular of the gutter.

“They wanted to give Linc electric shock treatment but he was too frightened and he refused. It might have helped, but whenever it was suggested, he curled up in a corner and cried. Whenever he
saw Enid he broke down. Called her, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.’ Sure, Linc was one of the great Jewish criers—they play the national anthem out at Shea and he cries, he sees the Lincoln Memorial and he cries, we take our boys up to Cooperstown and there’s Babe Ruth’s mitt and Linc starts crying. But this was something else. This was not crying, this was bursting. This was bursting under the pressure of unspeakable pain. And in that bursting there wasn’t anything of the man I knew or you knew. By the time he died, the Linc we’d known had been dead for seven years.”

“The funeral?”

“Riverside Chapel, tomorrow. Two
P.M.
Amsterdam and 76th. You’ll see some old faces.”

“Won’t see Linc’s.”

“Can, actually, if you want to. Somebody has to identify the body before the cremation. The law in New York. I’m doing it. Come along when they open the coffin. You’ll see what happened to our friend. He looked a hundred years old. His hair completely white and his face just a terrified, tiny thing. One of those skulls the savages shrink.”

“I don’t know,” Sabbath replied, “that I can make it tomorrow.”

“If you can’t, you can’t. I thought you should know before you read about it in the papers. In the papers the cause of death will be a heart attack—that’s the cause the family prefers. Enid wouldn’t have an autopsy. Linc was dead some thirteen or fourteen hours before he was found. Dead in his bed, the story goes. But the housekeeper tells a different story. I think by now Enid has come to believe her own. All along she honestly expected him to get better. She was sure of it down to the end, even though he had already slashed his wrists ten months ago.”

“Look, thanks for remembering me—thanks for calling.”

“People remember you, Mickey. A lot of people remember you with great admiration. One of the people Linc got teary about was you. I mean back when he was still himself. He never thought it was a great idea to take a talent like yours out to the boondocks.
He loved your theater—he thought you were a magician. ‘Why did Mickey do it?’ He thought you never should have left to live up there. He talked about that often.”

“Well, that’s all long ago.”

“You should know that Linc never for a moment considered you responsible in any way for Nikki’s disappearance. I certainly didn’t—and don’t. The fucking well poisoners—”

“Well, the well poisoners were right and you boys were wrong.”

“Standard Sabbath perversity. You can’t believe that. Nikki was doomed. Tremendously gifted, extremely pretty, but so frail, so needy, so neurotic and fucked-up. No
way
that girl would ever hold together, none.”

“Sorry, can’t make it tomorrow,” and Sabbath hung up.

♦ ♦ ♦

Roseanna’s uniform these days was a Levi’s jacket and washed-out jeans as narrow as her cranelike legs, and recently Hal in Athena had cut her hair so short that at breakfast that morning Sabbath intermittently kept imagining his be-denimed wife as one of Hal’s pretty young homosexual friends from the college. But then, even with shoulder-length hair she’d emanated the tomboyish aura; ever since adolescence she’d had it—flat-chested and tall, with a striding gait and a way of cocking her chin when she spoke that had its appeal for Sabbath well before the disappearance of his fragile Ophelia. Roseanna looked to belong to another group of Shakespearean heroines entirely—to the saucy, robust, realistic circle of girls like Miranda and Rosalind. And she wore no more makeup than Rosalind did attired like a boy in the Forest of Arden. Her hair was still its engaging golden brown and, even clipped short, had a soft, feathery sheen that invited touching. The face was an oval, a wide oval, and there was a carved configuration to her small upturned nose and her wide, full, unboyishly seductive mouth, a hammered-and-chiseled look that, when she was younger, gave the fairy-tale illusion of a puppet infused with life. Now that she was no longer drinking, Sabbath saw traces in
the modeling of Roseanna’s face of the lovely child she must have been before her mother left and the father all but destroyed her. She was not only thinner by far than her husband but a head taller, and what with daily jogging and the hormone replacement therapy, she looked—on those rare occasions when the two of them were out together—less a fifty-six-year-old wife than an anorexic daughter.

What did Roseanna hate most about Sabbath? What did Sabbath hate most about her? Well, the provocations changed with the years. For a long time she hated him for refusing even to consider having a child, and he hated her for incessantly yammering on the phone to her sister, Ella, about her “biological clock.” Finally he had grabbed the phone away from her to communicate directly to Ella the degree to which he found their conversation offensive. “Surely,” he told her, “Yahweh did not go to the trouble of giving me this big dick to assuage a concern as petty as your sister’s!” Once her childbearing years were behind her, Roseanna was able better to pinpoint her hatred and to despise him for the simple fact that he existed, more or less in the same way that he despised
her
for existing. In addition was the predictable bread-and-butter stuff: she hated the unthinking way he brushed the crumbs onto the floor after cleaning the kitchen table, and he hated her unamusing goy humor. She hated the conglomeration of army-navy surplus he had been wearing for clothing ever since high school, and he hated that, for as long as he’d known her, she would never, even during the adulterous phase of glorious abandon, graciously swallow his come. She hated that he hadn’t touched her in bed for ten years and he hated the unruffled monotone in which she spoke to her local friends on the phone—and he hated the friends, do-gooders gaga over the environment or ex-drunks in AA. Each winter the town road crew went around cutting down 150-year-old maple trees that lined the dirt roads, and each year the maple-tree lovers of Madamaska Falls lodged a petition of protest with the first selectman, and then the next year the road crew, claiming the maples were dead or diseased, would clear another sylvan lane of ancient trees and thereby pick up
enough dough—by selling the logs for firewood—to keep themselves in cigarettes, porn videos, and booze. She despised his inexhaustible bitterness about his career the way he had despised her drinking—how she would be drunk and argumentative in public places and, whether at home or out, speak in an aggressively loud and insulting voice. And now that she was sober he hated her AA slogans and the way of talking she had picked up from AA meetings or from her abused women’s group, where poor Roseanna was the only one who’d never been battered by a husband. Sometimes when they argued and she felt swamped Roseanna claimed Sabbath was “verbally” abusing her, but that didn’t count for much with her group of predominantly uneducated rural women, who’d had their teeth knocked out or chairs broken over their heads or cigarettes held to their buttocks and breasts. And those words she used! “And afterward there was a discussion and we shared about that particular step. . . .” “I haven’t shared that many times yet. . . .” “Many people shared last night. . . .” What he loathed the way good people loathe
fuck
was
sharing
. He didn’t own a gun, even out on the lonely hill where they lived, because he didn’t want a gun in a house with a wife who spoke daily of “sharing.” She hated that he was always bolting out the door without explanation, always leaving at all hours of the day and night, and he hated that artificial laugh of hers that hid both so much and so little, that laugh that was sometimes a bray, sometimes a howl, sometimes a cackle but that never rang with genuine pleasure. She hated his self-absorption and the outbursts about the arthritic joints that had ruined his career, and she hated him, of course, for the Kathy Goolsbee scandal, though had it not been for the breakdown brought on by the disgrace of it she would never have been hospitalized and begun her recovery. And she hated that, because of the arthritis, because of the scandal, because of his being the superior, impossible failure that he was, he earned not a penny and she alone was the breadwinner, but then Sabbath hated that too—that was one of their few points of agreement. They each found it repellent to catch even a glimpse of the other unclothed: she hated his increasing girth, his drooping
scrotum, his apish hairy shoulders, his white, stupid biblical beard, and he hated the jogger’s skinny titlessness—ribs, pelvis, sternum, everything that in Drenka was so softly upholstered, skeletonized as on a famine victim. They had remained in the house together all these years because she was so busy drinking that she didn’t know what was going on and because he had found Drenka. That had made for a very solid union.