Sabbath’s Theater (21 page)

Whatever lay behind it, Norman couldn’t have been more solicitous. But then, he and Linc, sons of prosperous fathers and Jersey City friends since childhood, could not have been kinder from the moment they set up their partnership fresh out of Columbia and paid the expenses arising from Sabbath’s obscenity trial. They had extended to Sabbath that respect edged with reverence which was associated in Sabbath’s mind less with the way you deal with an entertainer (the most he’d ever been—Nikki was the artist) than with the manner in which you approach an elderly clergyman. There was something exciting for these two privileged Jewish boys in having, as they liked to say then, “discovered Mick Sabbath.” It kindled their youthful idealism to learn that Sabbath was the son of a poor butter-and-egg man from a tiny working-class Jersey shore town, that instead of attending college he had shipped out as a merchant seaman at seventeen, that he’d lived two years in Rome on the GI Bill after coming out of the Army, that married only a year he was already on the prowl, that the spookily beautiful young wife whom he bossed around off the stage as well as on—an oddball herself but obviously much better born than he and probably, as an actress, a genius, too—couldn’t seem to survive half an hour without him. There was an excitement about the way he affronted people without caring. He was not just a newcomer with a potentially huge theatrical talent but a young adventurer robustly colliding with life, already in his twenties a real-lifer, urged on to excess by a temperament more elemental than either of their own. Back in the fifties there was something thrillingly alien about “Mick.”

Sitting safely in the Manhattan kitchen sipping the last of the beer Norman had poured him, Sabbath was by now certain whose head Officer Balich had meant to split open. Either something incriminating had turned up in Drenka’s belongings or Sabbath had been observed at the cemetery at night. Wifeless, mistressless, penniless, vocationless, homeless . . . and now, to top things off, on the run. If he weren’t too old to go back to sea, if his fingers weren’t crippled, if Morty had lived and Nikki hadn’t been insane, or he hadn’t been—if there weren’t war, lunacy, perversity,
sickness, imbecility, suicide, and death, chances were he’d be in a lot better shape. He’d paid the full price for art, only he hadn’t made any. He’d suffered all the old-fashioned artistic sufferings—isolation, poverty, despair, mental and physical obstruction—and nobody knew or cared. And though nobody knowing or caring was another form of artistic suffering, in his case it had no artistic meaning. He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.

Obeying the laws of disappointment, disobedient Sabbath began to cry, and not even he could tell whether the crying was an act or the measure of his misery. And then his mother spoke up for the second time that evening—in the kitchen now, and trying to comfort her only living son. “This is human life. There is a great hurt that everyone has to endure.”

Sabbath (who liked to think that distrusting the sincerity of everyone armed him a little against betrayal by everything): I’ve even fooled a ghost. But while he thought this—his head a lumpish, sobbing sandbag on the table—he also thought, And yet how I crave to cry!

Crave?
Please. No, Sabbath didn’t believe a word he said and hadn’t for years; the closer he tried to get to describing how he arrived at becoming this failure rather than another, the further he seemed from the truth. True lives belonged to others, or so others believed.

Norman had reached across the table to take one of Sabbath’s hands in his.

Good. They’d let him stay for at least a week.

“You,” he said to Norman, “you understand what matters.”

“Yeah, I’m a master of the art of living. That’s why I’m eight months on Prozac.”

“All I know how to do is antagonize.”

“Well, that and a few other things.”

“A really trivial, really shitty life.”

“The beers went to your head. When someone is exhausted and down like you, everything gets exaggerated. Linc’s suicide has a lot to do with it. We’ve
all
been through it.”

“Repugnant to everyone.”

“Come
on
,” Norman replied, increasing the firmness of his hold on Sabbath’s hand . . . but when was he going to tell him, “I think you had better move in with us”? Because Sabbath could not go back. Roseanna wouldn’t have him in the house, and Matthew Balich had found him out and was furious enough to kill him. He had nowhere to go and nothing to do. Unless Norman said, “Move in,” he was finished.

Suddenly Sabbath raised his head from the table and said, “My mother was in a catatonic depression from the time I was fifteen.”

“You never told me that.”

“My brother was killed in the war.”

“I didn’t know that either.”

“We were one of those families with a gold star in the window. It meant that not only was my brother dead, my mother was dead. All day at school I thought, ‘If only when I get home, he’s there; if only when the war is over, he’s there.’ What a frightening thing that gold star was to see when I came home from school. Some days I’d actually manage to forget about him, but then I’d walk home and see the gold star. Maybe that’s why I went to sea, to get the fuck away from the gold star. The gold star said, ‘People have suffered something terrible in this house.’ The house with the gold star was a blighted house.”

“Then you get married and your wife disappears.”

“Yes, but that left me all the wiser. I could never again think about the future. What did the future hold for me? I never think in terms of expectations. My expectation is how to deal with bad news.”

Trying to talk sensibly and reasonably about his life seemed even more false to him than the tears—every word, every
syllable
, another moth nibbling a hole in the truth.

“And it still throws you to think about Nikki?”

“No,” said Sabbath, “not at all. Thirty years later all I think is, ‘What the fuck was that?’ It becomes more unreal the older I get. Because the things I told myself when I was young—maybe she went here, maybe she went there—those things don’t apply any
longer. She was struggling always for something only her mother seemed able to give—maybe she’s out there looking for it still. That’s what I thought then. At this distance, it’s just, ‘Did all that really happen?’”

“And the ramifications?” Norman asked. He was relieved to see Sabbath back under control but continued nonetheless to hold on to him. And Sabbath allowed him to, however annoying that had become. “Its effect on you. How did it injure you?”

Sabbath took time to think—and this is more or less what he was thinking: These questions are futile to answer. Behind the answer there is another answer, and an answer behind that answer, and on and on. And all Sabbath is doing, to satisfy Norman, is to pretend to be someone who does not understand this.

“I seem injured?”

They laughed together, and Norman only then let go of his hand. Another sentimental Jew. You could fry the sentimental Jews in their own grease. Something was always
moving
them. Sabbath could never really stand either of these morally earnest, supercoddled successes, Cowan
or
Gelman.

“That’s like asking how much did it injure me to be born. How can I know? What can I know about it? I can only tell you that the idea of controlling anything is out of my mind. And that’s how I choose to move along in life.”

“Pain, pain, so much pain,” said Norman. “How can you possibly get over minding it?”

“What difference would it make if I minded? It wouldn’t change anything. Do I mind? It never occurs to me to mind. Okay, I got overemotional. But
minding?
What’s the point of minding? What was the point of trying to find reason or meaning in any of these things? By the time I was twenty-five I already knew there wasn’t any.”

“And isn’t there any?”

“Ask Linc tomorrow, when they open the coffin. He’ll tell you. He was antic and funny and full of energy. I remember Lincoln very well. He didn’t want to know anything ugly. He wanted it to be nice. He loved his parents. I remember when his old man came
backstage. A carbonated-drink manufacturer. A tycoon in seltzer if I remember correctly.”

“No. Quench.”

“Quench. That was the stuff.”

“Quench Wild Cherry sent Linc to Taft. Linc called it Kvetch.”

“A suntanned little endurer with steel-gray hair, the old man. Started out with just the crap he bottled and a truck he drove himself. In his undershirt. Crude. Ungrammatical. Built like something that had been baled. Linc was sitting on a chair in Nikki’s dressing room and just took his father and pulled him onto his lap and held him there while we were all talking after the show, and neither of them thought anything of it. He adored his old man. He adored his wife. He adored his kids. At least when I knew him he did.”

“He always did.”

“So where’s the meaning?”

“I have some ideas.”

“You don’t know anything, Norman—you don’t know anything about anyone. Did I know Nikki? Nikki had another life. Everybody has another life. I knew she was eccentric. But so was I. I understood I wasn’t living with Doris Day. A little irrational, out of touch, prone to crazy outbursts, but irrational enough and crazy enough for what happened to happen? Did I know my mother? Sure. She went around whistling all day long. Nothing was too much for her. Look what became of her. Did I know my brother? The discus, the swimming team, the clarinet. Killed at twenty.”

“Disappear. Even the word is strange.”

“Stranger is the word
reappear
.”

“How is Roseanna?”

Sabbath looked at his watch, a round stainless steel watch half a century old this year. Black face, white luminous dial and hands. Morty’s Army Benrus, with twelve-and twenty-four-hour numbers and a second hand you could stop by pulling on the crown. For synchronization when you flew a mission. A lot of good the synchronization did Morty. Once a year Sabbath sent the watch
to a place in Boston where they cleaned and oiled it and replaced worn-out parts. He had been winding the watch every morning since it became his in 1945. His grandfathers had laid tefillin every morning and thought of God; he wound Morty’s watch every morning and thought of Morty. The watch had been returned by the government with Morty’s things in 1945. The body came back two years later.

“Well,” said Sabbath, “Roseanna . . . Just about seven hours ago, Roseanna and I split up. Now
she’s
disappeared. That’s what it comes down to, Mort: folks disappearin’ left and right.”

“Where is she? Do you know?”

“Oh, at home.”

“Then it’s you who have disappeared.”

“Trying,” said Sabbath, and again, suddenly, a great onslaught of tears, anguish so engulfing that in the first moment he could no longer even ask himself whether or not this second collapse of the evening was any more or less honestly manufactured than the first. He was drained of skepticism, cynicism, sarcasm, bitterness, mockery, self-mockery, and such lucidity, coherence, and objectivity as he possessed—had run out of everything that marked him as Sabbath except desperation; of that he had a superabundance. He had called Norman Mort. He was crying now the way anyone cries who has had it. There was passion in his crying—terror, great sadness, and defeat.

Or was there? Despite the arthritis that disfigured his fingers, in his heart he was the puppeteer still, a lover and master of guile, artifice, and the unreal—this he hadn’t yet torn out of himself. When that went, he
would
be dead.

“Are you all right, Mick?” Norman had come around the table to place his hands on Sabbath’s shoulders. “
Did
you leave your wife?”

Sabbath reached up to cover Norman’s hands with his own. “I have amnesia suddenly about the circumstances, but . . . yes, it appears that way. She’s no longer enslaved by alcohol or me. Both demons driven out by AA. What it probably comes down to is she wants to keep the paycheck for herself.”

“She was supporting you.”

“I had to live.”

“Where will you go after the funeral?”

He looked at Norman, smiling broadly. “Why not with Linc?”

“What are you telling me? You’re going to kill yourself? I want to know if that’s what you’re thinking. Are you thinking about suicide?”

“No, no, I’ll go on to the end.”

“Is that the truth?”

“I’m inclined to think so. I’m a suicide like I’m everything: a pseudosuicide.”

“Look, this is serious business,” Norman told him. “We’re now in this together.”

“Norman, I haven’t seen you in a hundred years. We’re not in anything together.”

“We are in
this
together! If you’re going to kill yourself, you’re going to do it in front of me. When you’re ready you have to wait for me to get there and then do it in front of me.”

Sabbath did not reply.

“You have to see a doctor,” Norman told him. “You have to see a doctor tomorrow. Do you need money?”

From his wallet, full of illegible notes and telephone numbers scribbled on paper scraps and matchbook covers—fat with everything but credit cards and cash—Sabbath fished out a blank check for his and Roseanna’s account. He made it out for three hundred dollars. When he realized that Norman, watching him write, saw printed on the check the names of husband and wife both, Sabbath explained, “I’m cleaning it out. If she’s beaten me to it and it bounces, I’ll send you back the cash.”

“Forget that. Where’s three hundred dollars going to get you? You’re in a bad way, boy.”

“I have no expectations.”

“You tried that on me. Why don’t you sleep here tomorrow night too? Stay as long as you need us. All the children are gone. The baby, Deborah, is away at Brown. The house is empty. You can’t rush off after the funeral not knowing where you’re going, and feeling the way you do. You have got to see a doctor.”

“No,” said Sabbath, “no. I can’t stay here.”

“Then you have to be hospitalized.”

And this brought forth Sabbath’s third round of tears. He had cried like this only once before in his life, over Nikki’s disappearance. And when Morty died he had watched his mother cry worse than this.