Sabbath’s Theater (13 page)

Driving home from her job at the high school, Roseanna used to think about nothing but the first glass of Chardonnay when she hit the kitchen, a second and third glass while she prepared dinner, a fourth with him when he came in from the studio, a fifth with dinner, a sixth when he went back to his studio with his dessert, and then, the rest of the evening, another bottle all for herself. As often as not, she woke up in the morning as her father used to—still dressed—and in the living room, where the night before she had stretched out on the sofa, glass in hand, the bottle beside her on the floor, to watch the flames in the fireplace. In the mornings, dreadfully hung over, feeling bloated, sweating, full of shame and self-loathing, she never exchanged a word with him, and rarely did they have their coffee together. He took his to the studio and they did not see each other again until dinnertime, when the ritual began anew. At night, though, everybody was happy, Roseanna with her chardonnay and Sabbath off in the car somewhere, going down on Drenka.

Since her “coming into recovery,” all had changed. Now seven nights a week, directly after dinner, she drove off to an AA meeting from which she returned around ten with her clothes stinking of cigarette smoke and her mood decisively serene. Monday evenings there was an open discussion meeting in Athena. Tuesday evenings there was a step meeting in Cumberland, her home group, where she had recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of her sobriety. Wednesday evenings there was a step meeting in Blackwall. She didn’t like that meeting much—tough-guy workers and mental hospital attendants from Blackwall who were so aggressive, angry, and obscene that it made Roseanna, who’d lived until she was thirteen in academic Cambridge, very nervous;
but, despite all the angry guys screaming at one another, she went because it was the only Wednesday meeting within fifty miles of Madamaska Falls. Thursdays she went to a closed speaker meeting in Cumberland. Fridays to another step meeting, this one in Mount Kendall. And Saturdays and Sundays there were meetings in both the afternoon—in Athena—and the evening—in Cumberland—and she went to all four. Generally an alcoholic would tell his or her story and then they would choose a discussion topic such as “Honesty” or “Humility” or “Sobriety.” “Part of the recovery principle,” she told him, whether he wished to listen or not, “is that you try to become honest with yourself. We talked a lot about that tonight. To find out what feels comfortable within yourself.” He also didn’t own a gun because of the word
comfortable
. “Isn’t it tedious feeling so ‘comfortable’? Don’t you miss all the discomforts of home?” “I haven’t found it so yet. Sure, there are drunkalogs where you fall asleep when you listen to them. But what happens with the story format,” she went on, oblivious not merely to his sarcasm but to the look in his eyes of someone who had taken too many sedative pills, “is that you can identify. ‘I can identify with that.’ I can identify with the woman who didn’t drink in bars but sat secretly drinking at home at night and had similar sorts of suffering, and that’s a very comfortable sort of feeling for me. I’m not unique, and somebody else can understand where I’m coming from. People that have long sobriety, that have this aura of inner peace and spirituality—that makes them appealing. Just to sit with them is something. They seem to be at peace with life. That’s inspiring. You can get hope from that.” “Sorry,” mumbled Sabbath, hoping himself to deal her soberalog a deathblow, “can’t identify.” “That we know,” said Roseanna, undaunted, and continued speaking her mind now that she was no longer his drunk. “You hear people at meetings say over and over that their family is what exacerbates everything. At AA you have a more neutral family that is, paradoxically, more loving, more understanding, less judgmental than your own family. And we don’t interrupt each other, which is also different from at home. We call that cross-talk. We don’t use cross-talk.
And
we
don’t tune out. One person talks and everybody listens until he or she is finished. We have to learn not just about our problems but how to listen and to be attentive.” “And is the only way to get off the booze to learn to talk like a second grader?” “As an active alcoholic I compromised myself so horribly hiding alcohol, hiding the disease, hiding the behavior. You
have
to start all over, yes. If I sound like a second grader, that’s fine with me. You’re as sick as your secrets.” It was not for the first time that he was hearing this pointless, shallow, idiotic maxim. “Wrong,” he told her—as if it really mattered to him what she said or he said or anyone said, as if with their mouthings any of them approached even the borderline of truth—“you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets; you are as human as—” “No. You’re as unhuman, inhuman, and sick. It’s the secrets that prevent you from sitting right with your internal being. You can’t have secrets,” she told Sabbath firmly, “and achieve internal peace.” “Well, since manufacturing secrets is mankind’s leading industry, that takes care of internal peace.” No longer so serene as she would have liked to be, glaring at her beast with the old engulfing hatred, she went off to immerse herself in one of her AA pamphlets while he returned to his studio to read yet another book about death. That’s all he did there now, read book after book about death, graves, burial, cremation, funerals, funerary architecture, funeral inscriptions, about attitudes toward death over the centuries, and how-to books dating back to Marcus Aurelius about the art of dying. That very evening he read about
la mort de toi
, something with which he had already a share of familiarity and with which he was destined to have more. “Thus far,” he read, “we have illustrated two attitudes toward death. The first, the oldest, the longest held, and the most common one, is the familiar resignation to the collective destiny of the species and can be summarized by the phrase,
Et moriemur
, and we shall all die. The second, which appeared in the twelfth century, reveals the importance given throughout the entire modern period to the self,
to one’s own existence, and can be expressed by another phrase,
la mort de soi
, one’s own death. Beginning with the eighteenth century, man in western societies tended to give death a new meaning. He exalted it, dramatized it, and thought of it as disquieting and greedy. But he already was less concerned with his own death than with
la mort de toi
, the death of the other person. . . .”

If they ever happened to be together on a weekend, walking along the half mile of Town Street, Roseanna had a hello for just about everybody passing or driving by—old ladies, delivery boys, farmers,
everyone
. One day she even waved to Christa, of all people, who was standing in the window of the gourmet shop sipping a cup of coffee. Drenka and his Christa! The same happened when they went to see a doctor or the dentist down in the valley—she knew everybody there, too, from the meetings. “Was the whole county drunk?” Sabbath asked. “Whole country’s more like it,” Roseanna replied. One day in Cumberland she confided that the elderly man who’d just nodded at her when he passed by had been a deputy secretary of state under Reagan—he always came early to meetings so as to make the coffee and put out the cookies for the snack. And whenever she went up to Cambridge to visit Ella overnight—great days, those, for Sabbath and Drenka—she’d return ecstatic about the meeting there, a women’s meeting. “They fascinate me. I’m amazed how competent they seem to be, how accomplished, how self-assured, how well they look. Adjusted. They’re really an inspiration. I go in there and I don’t know anybody and they ask, ‘Anybody from outside?’ and I raise my hand and I say, ‘I’m Roseanna from Madamaska Falls.’ Everybody claps and then if I have a chance to talk, I talk about whatever is on my mind. I tell them about my childhood in Cambridge. About my mother and father and what happened. And they listen. These terrific women listen. The sense of love that I experience, the sense of understanding of my suffering, the sense of great sympathy and empathy. And
accepting
.” “
I
understand your suffering.
I
have sympathy.
I
have empathy.
I’m
accepting.” “Oh, yeah, sometimes you ask how did your meeting go, that’s true. I can’t talk to
you
, Mickey. You wouldn’t understand
—you
couldn’t
understand. You can’t begin to understand it innately, and so it becomes boring and silly to you. Something more to satirize.” “My satire is my sickness.” “I think you liked it better when I was an active drunk,” she said. “You enjoyed the superiority. As if you’re not superior enough, you could look down on me for that, too. I could be responsible for all your disappointments. Your life had been ruined by this fucking disgusting falling-down drunk. One guy the other night was talking about how degraded he became as an alcoholic. He was living then in Troy, New York. On the streets. They, the other drunks, just stuck him in a garbage pail and he couldn’t get out of the garbage pail. He sat there for hours and people would walk by on the streets and wouldn’t care about this human being who was sitting there with his legs scrunched up, in a garbage pail, and who couldn’t get out. And that’s what I was for you when I was drinking. In a garbage pail.” “I can identify with that,” Sabbath said.

Now that she was four years out of the garbage pail, why did she go on with him? Sabbath was surprised by how long it was taking Barbara, the therapist in the valley, to get Roseanna to find the strength to strike out on her own like the competent, accomplished, self-assured women in Cambridge who showered her with so much sympathy for her suffering. But then her problem with Sabbath, the “enslavement,” stemmed, according to Barbara, from her disastrous history with an emotionally irresponsible mother and a violent alcoholic father for
both
of whom Sabbath was the sadistic doppelgänger. Her father, Cavanaugh, a geology professor at Harvard, had raised Roseanna and Ella after their mother could stand his drinking and his bullying no longer and, in terror of him, abandoned the family to run off to Paris with a visiting professor of Romance languages to whom she remained quite miserably bandaged for five long years before returning alone to Boston, her own birthplace, when Roseanna was thirteen and Ella eleven. She wanted the girls to come live on Bay State Road with her, and shortly after they decided that they would and left their father—of whom they, too, were terrified—and his new second wife, who couldn’t stand Roseanna, he hanged himself in the attic of their Cambridge house. And this
explained to Roseanna what she was doing all these years with Sabbath, to whose “domineering narcissism” she had been no less addicted than to alcohol.

These connections—between the mother, the father, and him—were far clearer to Barbara than they were to Sabbath; if there was, as she liked to put it, a “pattern” in it all, the pattern eluded him.

“And the pattern in
your
life,” Roseanna asked, angrily, “that eludes you, too? Deny till you’re red in the face, but it’s there, it’s
there
.”

“Deny
it
. The verb is transitive, or used to be before the eloquence of the blockheads was loosed upon the land. As for the ‘pattern’ governing a life, tell Barbara it’s commonly called chaos.”

“Nikki was a helpless child you could dominate and I was a drunk looking for a savior, who thrived on degradation. Is that not a pattern?”

“A pattern is what is printed on a piece of cloth. We are not cloth.”

“But I
was
looking for a savior, and I
did
thrive on degradation. I thought I had it coming to me. Everything in my life was frenzy and noise and mess. Three girls from Bennington living together in New York, with black underwear hanging up and drying everywhere. Boyfriends calling everybody all the time. Men calling. Older men. Some married poet naked in somebody’s room. The place a mess. Never any meals. A perpetual soap opera of angry lovers and outraged parents. And then one day in the street I saw your screwy finger show and we met and you invited me to your workshop for a drink. Avenue B and 9th Street, just by the park. Five flights up and this perfectly still, tiny white room with everything in place and dormer windows. I thought I was in Europe. All the puppets in a row. Your workbench—every tool hanging in place, everything tidy, clean, orderly, in place. Your file cabinet. I couldn’t believe it. How calm and rational and steady-seeming, and yet on the street, performing, it could have been a madman behind that screen. Your sobriety. You didn’t even offer me a drink.”

“Jews never do.”

“I didn’t know. All I knew was that you had your crazy art and that all that mattered to you in the world was your crazy art, that why I had come to New York was for
my
art, to try to paint and to sculpt, and instead all I had was a crazy
life
. You were so
focused
. So
intense
. The green eyes. You were very handsome.”

“In his thirties, everyone is handsome. What are you doing with me now, Roseanna?”

“Why did you stay with me when I was a drunk?”

Had the moment come to tell her about Drenka?
Some
moment had come. Some moment had been coming for months now, since the morning he learned that Drenka was dead. For years he had been drifting without any sense of anything being imminent and now not only was the moment galloping toward him but he was rushing into the moment and away from all he’d lived through.

“Why?” Roseanna repeated.

They’d just had dinner and she was off to a meeting, and he was off, after she’d gone, to the cemetery. She was already in her denim jacket, but because she no longer feared the “confrontations” she formerly evaded via the chardonnay, she was not leaving the house until she had forced him, this once, to take
seriously
their miserable history.

“I am sick of the humorous superiority. I am sick of the sarcasm and the perpetual joke. Answer me. Why did you stay with me?”