Sabbath’s Theater (22 page)

Hospitalized. Until that word was spoken he had believed that all this crying could easily be spurious, and so it was a considerable disappointment to discover that it did not seem within his power to switch it off.

While Norman coaxed him up out of the kitchen chair and walked him across the dining room, through the living room, and down the corridor to Deborah’s bedroom, then steered him onto the bed, untied the caked laces of his Dogpatch boots and pulled them off his feet, Sabbath shook. If he was not coming apart but only simulating, then this was the greatest performance of his life. Even as his teeth chattered, even as he could feel his jowls tremble beneath his ridiculous beard Sabbath thought, So, something new. And more to come. And perhaps less of it to be chalked up to guile than to the fact that the inner reason for his being—whatever the hell that might be, perhaps guile itself—had ceased to exist.

He managed only three words Norman could fully understand. “Where is everybody?”

“They’re here,” Norman said, to soothe him. “They’re all here.”

“No,” replied Sabbath once he was alone. “They all escaped.”

♦ ♦ ♦

While Sabbath ran a bath in the girlishly pretty pink and white bathroom just off Deborah’s room, he interested himself in the contents, all jumbled together, of the two drawers beneath the sink—the lotions, the ointments, the pills, the powders, the Body Shop jars, the contact lens cleaner, the tampons, the nail polish, the polish remover. . . . Working through the clutter to the bottom of each drawer, he found not a single photograph—let alone
a stash—of the kind Drenka had unearthed from among Silvija’s things during the next-to-last summer of her life. The one item at all beguiling, aside from the tampons, was a tube of vaginal lubricating cream twisted back on itself and nearly empty. He removed the cap to squeeze a speck of the amber grease into the palm of his hand and rubbed it between his thumb and his middle finger, remembering things as he smeared the stuff over his fingertips, all sorts of things about Drenka. He screwed the cap back on and set the tube out on the tiled counter for experimentation later.

After undressing in Deborah’s room, he had looked at all the photographs in their transparent plastic frames on her bureau and desk. He would get to the drawers and closets in time. She was a dark-haired girl with a demure, pleasing smile, an intelligent smile. He couldn’t tell much else because her figure was hidden from view by the other young people in the pictures; yet of all the faces hers alone had about it at least a touch of the enigmatic. Despite the juvenile innocence she so abundantly offered the camera, she looked to have something of a mind, even some wit, and lips whose protuberance was her greatest treasure, a hungry, seductive mouth set in the most undepraved face you could imagine. Or that’s how Sabbath read it at close to two
A.M
. He had been hoping for a girl more tantalizing, but the mouth and the youth would have to do. Before getting into the bath, he trundled in the nude back to her bedroom and took from the desk the largest picture of her he could find, a photograph in which Deborah was nestled up against the muscular shoulder of a burly redhead of about her age. He was beside her in virtually every photograph. The deadly boyfriend.

All Sabbath did for the moment was lie in the wonderful warm bath in the pink-and-white-tiled bathroom and scrutinize the picture, as though in his gaze lay the power to transport Deborah home to her tub. Reaching out with one arm, Sabbath was able to raise the lid to expose the seat of Deborah’s pink toilet. He rubbed his hand round and round the satiny seat and was just beginning to harden when there was a light rap on the bathroom door. “You
all right in there?” Norman asked and pushed the door open a ways to be sure Sabbath wasn’t drowning himself.

“Fine,” said Sabbath. It had taken no time to retract his hand from the toilet seat, but the photograph was in the other hand and the twisted tube of vaginal cream was up on the counter. He held out the picture so that Norman could see which one it was. “Deborah,” Sabbath said.

“Yes. That is Deborah.”

“Sweet,” said Sabbath.

“Why do you have the photograph in the bathtub?”

“To look at it.”

The silence was indecipherable—what it meant or foretold Sabbath could not imagine. All he knew for sure was that Norman was more frightened of him than he was of Norman. Being nude also seemed to bestow an advantage with a conscience as developed as Norman’s, the advantage of seeming defenselessness. Sabbath’s talent for this sort of scene Norman could not hope to equal: the talent of a ruined man for recklessness, of a saboteur for subversion, even the talent of a lunatic—or a simulated lunatic—to overawe and horrify ordinary people. Sabbath had the power, and he knew it, of being no one with anything much to lose.

Norman hadn’t seemed to notice the vaginal cream tube.

Which of us is lonelier at this moment, Sabbath wondered. And what is he thinking? “Enter our terrorist.
I
should drown him.” But Norman needed admiration in the ways that Sabbath never had, and more than likely he wouldn’t do it.

“It would be a shame,” Norman finally said, “if it got wet.”

Sabbath didn’t believe he had an erection, but an ambiguity in Norman’s words caused him to wonder. He didn’t look to see but instead asked a perfectly innocent question. “Who’s the lucky boy?”

“Freshman-year sweetheart. Robert.” Norman spoke with his hand extended toward the photograph. “Only recently replaced by Will.” Sabbath leaned forward in the tub and handed the photograph over, noting, alas, as he moved, his dick angled upward in the water.

“You’re feeling like yourself again,” Norman said, staring Sabbath in the eyes.

“I am, thank you. Much better.”

“It’s never been easy to say what you really are, Mickey.”

“Oh, failure will do.”

“But at what?”

“Failure at failing, for one.”

“You always fought being a human being, right from the beginning.”

“To the contrary,” said Sabbath. “To being a human being I’ve always said, ‘Let it come.’”

Here Norman picked up the vaginal cream from the tile counter, opened the bottom drawer beneath the sink, and tossed in the tube. He seemed to have surprised himself more than Sabbath by the force with which he slammed the drawer shut.

“I’ve left a glass of milk on the nightstand,” Norman said. “You may need it. Warm milk sometimes helps sedate me.”

“Great,” Sabbath said. “Good night. Sleep tight.”

As Norman was about to leave, he took a look over at the toilet. He would never guess why the cover was up. And yet the final glance he turned on Sabbath suggested otherwise.

After Norman’s departure, Sabbath lifted himself out of the tub and, dripping water as he moved, went to get the photograph from where Norman had returned it to Deborah’s desk.

In the bathroom again, Sabbath opened the drawer, withdrew the vaginal cream, and held the tube to his lips. He squirted a pea-size gob on his tongue and rolled it across his palate and up against his teeth. A vaguely Vaseline-like aftertaste. That was all. But then, what was he hoping for? The tang of Deborah herself?

Back in the tub with the photograph, he resumed at the point where he had been interrupted.

♦ ♦ ♦

Up not once to use the john. First time in years. The father’s milk pacifying the prostate, or was it the daughter’s bed? First he’d removed the fresh pillowcase and, scavenging with his nose, hunted
down the odor of her hair clinging to the pillow itself. Then, by a process of trial and error, he’d detected a barely perceptible furrow just to the right of the mattress’s vertical midpoint, a minuscule groove cast by the mold of her body, and between her sheets, on her caseless pillow, in that groove, he had
slept
. In this Laura Ashley’d room of pink and yellow, a computer comatose on the desk, a Dalton School decal decorating the mirror, teddy bears tumbled together in a wicker basket, Metropolitan Museum posters up on the walls, K. Chopin, T. Morrison, A. Tan, V. Woolf in the bookcase, along with childhood favorites—
The Yearling
, Andersen’s
Fairy Tales
—and on the desk and the dresser framed photos in abundance of the gang, wearing swimsuits, skiing gear, formal attire . . . in this candy-striped room with the flowery border, where she’d first fallen upon her clitoral entitlements, Sabbath was himself seventeen again, aboard a tramp steamer full of drunken Norwegians docking at one of the great Brazilian ports—Bahia, at the entrance of Todos os Santos Bay, the Amazon, the great Amazon, unwinding not far away. There was that smell. Unbelievable. Cheap perfume, coffee, and pussy. His head wrapped round with Deborah’s pillow, a full body press on her groove, he was remembering Bahia, where there was a church and a whorehouse for every day of the year. So said the Norwegian seamen, and at seventeen he had no reason not to believe them. Be nice to go back and check it out. If she were mine, I’d send Deborah there for her junior year. Free play for the imagination in Bahia. With the American sailors alone she’d have the time of her life—Hispanic, black, even Finns, Finnish Americans, every type of redneck, old men, young boys. . . . Learn more about creative writing in one month in Bahia than in four years at Brown. Let her do something unreasonable, Norman. Look what it did for me.

Whores. Played a leading role in my life. Always felt at home with whores. Particularly fond of whores. The stewlike stink of those oniony parts. What has ever meant more to me? Real reasons for existence then. But now, preposterously, the morning hard-on was gone. The things one has to put up with in life. The
morning hard-on—like a crowbar in your hand, like something growing out of an ogre. Does any other species wake up with a hard-on? Do whales? Do bats? Evolution’s daily reminder to male
Homo sapiens
in case, overnight, they forget why they’re here. If a woman didn’t know what it was, it might well scare her to death. Couldn’t piss in the bowl because of that thing. Had to force it downward with your hand—had to train it as you would a dog to the leash—so that the stream struck the water and not the upturned seat. When you sat to shit, there it was, loyally looking up at its master. There eagerly waiting while you brush your teeth—“What are we going to do today?” Nothing more faithful in all of life than the lurid cravings of the morning hard-on. No deceit in it. No simulation. No insincerity. All hail to that driving force! Human living with a capital
L!
It takes a lifetime to determine what matters, and by then it’s not there anymore. Well, one must learn to adapt. How is the only problem.

He tried to think of a reason to get up, let alone to go on living. Deborah’s toilet seat? A glimpse of Linc’s corpse? Her
things
— and remembering delving into
the things
, he was out of the bed and across to the dresser beside the Bang & Olufsen music system.

Brimming! A treasure trove! Brilliant hues of silk and satin. Childish cotton underpants with red circus stripes. String bikinis with satin behinds. Stretch satin thong bikinis. Floss your teeth with those thongs. Garter belts in purple, black, and white. Renoir’s palette! Rose. Pale pink. Navy. White. Purple. Gold. Red. Peach. Underwired black embroidered bras. Lace push-up bras with little bows. Scalloped lace half-bras. Satin half-bras. C cup. A vipers’ nest of multicolored pantyhose. In white, black, and a chocolatey brown, sheer silk-lace
panty
pantyhose of the kind that Drenka wore to drive him nuts. A delicious butterscotch-color silk camisole. Leopard-print panties with matching bra. Lace body stockings,
three
, and all black. A strapless black satin bodysuit with padded push-up cups, edged with lace and hooks and straps. Straps. Bra straps, garter straps, Victorian corset straps. Who in his right mind doesn’t adore straps, all the
abracadabra of holding and lifting? And what about strap
less?
A strapless bra. Christ, everything works. That thing they call a teddy (Roosevelt? Kennedy? Herzl?), all in one a chemise up top and, down below, loose-fitting panties with leg holes that you slip right into without removing a thing. Silk floral bikini underpants. Half-slips. Loved the outmoded half-slip. A woman in a half-slip and a bra standing and ironing a shirt while seriously smoking a cigarette. Sentimental old Sabbath.

He sniffed the pantyhose to find a pair that hadn’t been washed, then headed with it for the bathroom. Sat to piss the way D. did. D.’s seat. D.’s pantyhose. But the morning hard-on was of the past. . . . Drenka! It
was
a crowbar with you! Fifty-two years old, a source of life to a hundred men, and dead! It isn’t fair! The urge, the urge! You’ve seen it over and over again, done it over and over again, and five minutes later it fascinates you
again
. What every man knows: the urge to indulge
again
. I should never have given it up, thought Sabbath—the life of the sensual port like Bahia, even of the shitty little ports around the Amazon, literally jungle ports, where one could mix with the crews of all kinds of ships, sailors of as many colors as Debby’s underthings, from all kinds of countries, and they were all going to the same place, all ended up in the whorehouse. Everywhere, as in a lurid dream, sailors and women, women and sailors, and I was learning my trade. The eight-to-twelve watch and then working all day as a seaman on deck, chipping and painting, chipping and painting, and then the watch, the sea watch in the bow of the ship. And sometimes it was gorgeous. I had been reading O’Neill. I was reading Conrad. A guy on board had given me books. I was reading all that stuff and jerking myself off over it. Dostoyevsky—everybody going around with grudges and immense fury, rage like it was all put to music, rage like it was two hundred pounds to lose. Rascal Knockoff. I thought: Dostoyevsky fell in love with him. Yes, I would stand in the bow on those starry nights in the tropical sea and promise myself that I would stick at it and go through all the shit and become a ship’s officer. I would urge myself to do all those exams and become a ship’s officer and
live like that for the rest of my life. Seventeen, a strong young kid . . . and like a kid I didn’t do it.