Sabbath’s Theater (39 page)

“Come. We’ll find you a Lipton’s tea bag to suck on.”

“I can’t. I have program tonight. I think I have to go to Relapse Prevention.”

“Aren’t you a bit ahead of yourself?”

“Actually, no. I’ve been planning my relapse.”

“Come with me.”

“I really should go and work on my relapse.”

“Come on.”

She hurried down the steps and started with him along the dark drive to Roderick House. He had to move fast.

“How old are you?” Sabbath asked.

“Twenty-nine.”

“You look ten.”

“And I tried not to look too young tonight. Didn’t it work? I get carded all the time. They’re always asking for my ID. Whenever I have to wait in a doctor’s office, the receptionist gives me a copy of
Seventeen
. Aside from how I look, I act younger than I am, too.”

“That you can expect to get worse.”

“Whatever. The harsh reality.”

“Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“I don’t know. The only thing that doesn’t bore me. The only thing worth thinking about. Besides, by the middle of the day I think the day has just gone on long enough and there’s only one way to make the day go away, and that is either booze or bed.”

“And that does it?”

“No.”

“So next you try suicide.
The
taboo.”

“I try it because I’m confronting my own mortality
ahead
of my time. Because I realize it’s the critical question, you see. The messiness of marriage and children and career and all that—I’ve already realized the futility of it all without having had to go through it all. Why can’t I just be fast-forwarded?”

“You’ve got a mind, don’t you? I like the mosaic it makes.”

“I’m wise and mature beyond my years.”

“Mature beyond your years and immature beyond your years.”

“What a paradox. Well, you can only be young once, but you can be immature forever.”

“The too-wise child who doesn’t want to live. You’re an actress?

“Of course not. Donald’s humor—Madeline’s life is soap opera. I think he anticipated something of a romantic nature between us. There was an element of seduction, which was sort of touching in its own little way. He said lots of glowing and flattering things about me. Intelligent. Attractive. He told me I should stand up straight. To do something about my shoulders. ‘Elongate, honey.’”

“What happens when you stand up straight?”

Her voice was soft and the answer that she muttered now he couldn’t even hear. “You must speak up, dear.”

“I’m sorry. I said nothing happens.”

“Why do you speak so quietly?”

“Why? That’s a good question.”

“You don’t stand up straight and you don’t speak loud enough.”

“Oh, just like my father. My high, squeaky voice.”

“Is that what he tells you?”

“All my life.”

“Another one with a father.”

“Yes indeed.”

“How tall
are
you when you stand up straight?”

“Just under five ten. But it’s hard to stand up straight when you’re at the lowest point of your life.”

“Also hard when you went through high school not only five ten, not only with a conspicuously active mind, but flat-chested to boot.”

“Golly, a man understands me.”

“Not you. Tits. I understand tits. I have been studying tits since I was thirteen years old. I don’t think there’s any other organ or body part that evidences so much variation in size as women’s tits.”

“I
know
,” replied Madeline, openly enjoying herself suddenly and beginning to laugh. “And why is that? Why did God allow this enormous variation in breast size? Isn’t it amazing? There are women with breasts ten times the size of mine. Or even more. True?”

“That is true.”

“People have big noses,” she said. “I have a small nose. But are there people with noses ten times the size of mine? Four or five, max. I don’t know why God did this to women.”

“The variation,” Sabbath offered, “accommodates a wide variety of desires, perhaps. But then,” he added, thinking again, “breasts, as you call them, are not there primarily to entice men—they’re there to feed children.”

“But I don’t think size has to do with milk production,” said Madeline. “No, that doesn’t solve the problem of what this enormous variation is
for
.”

“Maybe it’s that God hasn’t made up his mind. That’s often the case.”

“Wouldn’t it be more interesting,” asked Madeline, “if there were different
numbers
of breasts? Mightn’t that be more interesting? You know—some women with two, some with six . . .”

“How many times have you tried to commit suicide?”

“Only twice. How many times has your wife tried?”

“Only once. So far.”

“Why?”

“Forced to sleep with her old man. As a kid, her father’s girl.”

“Was she really? They all say that. The simplest story about yourself that explains everything—it’s the house specialty. These people read more complicated stories in the newspaper every day, and then they’re handed this version of their lives. In Courage to Heal they’ve been trying for three weeks to get me to turn in my dad. The answer to every question is either Prozac or incest. Talk about boring. All the false introspection. It’s enough in itself to make you suicidal. Your wife is one of the two or three I can even stand to listen to. She’s elegant-minded by comparison with the others. Her desire is passionate to face the losses. She doesn’t back
away from the excavation. But you, of course, find nothing redeeming in these reflections back on origins.”

“Don’t I? I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, they’re trying to confront this awful stuff with their raw souls, and it’s way, way beyond them, and so they say all those stupid things that don’t sound much like ‘reflections.’ Still, there’s something about your wife that, in its own way, has a certain heroism. The way she stood up to an excruciating detox. There’s a kind of deliberateness to her that I sure don’t have: running around here collecting the shards of her past, struggling with her father’s letters. . . .”

“Don’t stop.
You
get more and more elegant-minded by the moment.”

“Look, she’s a drunk, drunks drive people nuts, and to the husband that’s the crux. Fair enough. She’s putting up a struggle that you disdain for its lack of genius. She doesn’t have your wit and so forth and so she can’t have the penetrating cynicism. But she has as much nobility as someone can within the limits of her imagination.”

“How do you know she does?”

“I don’t. I just made it up. I make it up as I go along. Doesn’t everyone?”

“Roseanna’s heroism and nobility.”

“I mean it’s clear to me that she did suffer a great blow and that she earned her pain, that’s all. She came by her pain honestly.”

“How?”

“Her father’s suicide. The awful way in which he suffocated her. Her father’s effort to become the great man in her life. And then the suicide. Wreaking that vengeance on her just for saving her own life. That was a huge blow for a young girl. You couldn’t really ask for a bigger one.”

“So you believe he fucked her or you don’t?”

“I don’t. I don’t believe it, because it’s not necessary. She had enough without it. You’re talking about a little girl and her father. Little girls love their fathers. There’s enough going on there. The courting is all you need. It doesn’t require a seduction. Could be
he killed himself not because they had consummated it but so that they wouldn’t. A lot of suicides, gloomy people with guilty ruminations, think their families would be better off without them.”

“And did you think like that, Madeline?”

“Nope. I thought I might be better off without my family.”

“If you know all this,” said Sabbath, “or know enough to make it up, how come I’m meeting you here?”

“You’re meeting me here
because
I know all this. Guess who I’m reading in the library? Erik Erikson. I’m in the intimacy-versus-isolation stage, if I understand him correctly, and I think really not coming out ahead. You are in the generativity-versus-stagnation stage, but you are very quickly approaching the integrity-versus-despair stage.”

“I have no children. I haven’t generated shit.”

“You’ll be relieved to learn that the childless can generate through acts of altruism.”

“Unlikely in my case. What is it, again, I have to look forward to?”

“Integrity versus despair.”

“And how do things look for me, from what you’ve read?”

“Well, it depends whether life is basically meaningful and purposeful,” she said, bursting out laughing.

Sabbath laughed too. “What’s so funny about ‘purposeful,’ Madeline?”

“You do ask tough questions.”

“Yeah, well, it’s amazing what you find out when you ask.”

“Anyway, I don’t have to worry yet about generativity. I told you: I’m in intimacy versus isolation.”

“And how are you doing?”

“I think it’s questionable how I’m doing on the intimacy question.”

“And on the isolation one?”

“I get the feeling they’re somewhat meant by Dr. Erikson to be polar opposites. If you’re not doing well in one, you must be scoring fairly high in the other.”

“And you are?”

“Well, I guess mainly in the romantic arena. I didn’t realize, until I read Dr. Erikson, that this was my ‘developmental goal,’” she said, starting to laugh again. “I guess I haven’t achieved it.”

“What’s your developmental goal?”

“I suppose a stable little relationship with a man and all his fucking complex needs.”

“When was the last time you had that?”

“Seven years ago. It hasn’t been an
abysmal
failure. I can’t really tell objectively how sorry I should feel for myself. I don’t give the same credibility to my being that other people give to theirs. Everything feels acted.”

“Everything
is
acted.”

“Whatever. With me there’s some glue missing, something fundamental to everyone else that I don’t have. My life never seems real to me.”

“I have to see you again,” Sabbath said.

“So. This
is
a flirtation. I wondered but couldn’t believe it. Are you always attracted to damaged women?”

“I didn’t know there were any other kind.”

“Being called damaged is a lot worse than being called cuckoo, isn’t it?”

“I believe you were called damaged by yourself.”

“Whatever. That’s the risk you take talking. In high school I was called ditsy.”

“What’s ‘ditsy’ mean?”

“Kind of an airhead. Call Mr. Kasterman, my math teacher. He’ll tell you. I’d always be coming in from cooking class with flour all over me.”

“I never slept with a girl who tried to commit suicide.”

“Sleep with your wife.”

“
That
is ditsy.”

Her laugh was very sly now, a delightful surprise. A delightful person, suffused by a light soulfulness that wasn’t at all juvenile, however juvenile she happened to look. An adventurous mind with an intuitive treasure that her suffering hadn’t shut down, Madeline displayed the bright sadder-but-wiser outlook of an
alert first grader who’d discovered the alphabet in a school where Ecclesiastes is the primer—life is futility, a deeply terrible experience, but the really serious thing is
reading
. The sliding about of her self-possession was practically visible as she spoke. Self-possession was not her center of gravity, nor was anything else of hers that was on display, other perhaps than a way of saying things that was appealing to him for being just a little impersonal. Whatever had denied her a woman’s breasts and a woman’s face had made compensation of sorts by charging her mind with erotic significance—or so at least its influence swept over Sabbath, ever vigilant to all stimuli. A sensual promise that permeated her intelligence disarranged pleasantly his hard-on’s time-worn hopes.

“What would it be like for you,” she asked him, “sleeping with me? Like sleeping with a corpse? A ghost? A corpse resurrected?”

“No. Sleeping with somebody who took the thing to the final step.”

“The adolescent romanticism makes you look like an asshole,” said Madeline.

“I’ve looked like an asshole before. So what? What are you so bitter about at your age?”

“Yes, my retrospective bitterness.”

“What’s it about?”

“
I
don’t know.”

“But you do.”

“You just like to dig right on in there, don’t you, Mr. Sabbath? What am I bitter about? All those years I worked and planned for things. It all seems . . . I’m not sure.”

“Come down to my car.”

She gave the suggestion serious consideration before she replied, “For a quart of vodka?”

“A pint,” he said.

“In return for sexual favors? A quart.”

“A fifth.”

“A quart.”

“I’ll get it,” he said.

“You do that.”

Sabbath ran to the parking lot, in a frenzy drove the three miles to Usher, found a liquor store, bought
two
quarts of Stolichnaya, and drove back to the parking lot, where Madeline was to be waiting. He’d done the whole thing in twelve minutes but she wasn’t there. She wasn’t among the smokers outside the Mansion, she wasn’t in the Mansion lounge playing cards with the two old ladies or in the parlor, where the battered Wellesley girl was now doggedly trying her luck with “When the Saints Go Marching In,” and, when he retraced their steps, she was not anywhere along the route to Roderick House. So there he was, alone in the shadows on a beautiful fall night, two quarts of the best hundred-proof Russian vodka in a brown paper bag beneath his arm, stood up by someone whom he’d had every reason to trust, when a guard appeared behind him—a very large black man in a blue security officer’s uniform and carrying a walkie-talkie—and asked him politely what his business was. The explanation having proved inadequate, two more guards appeared, and though no one assaulted him physically, there were insults to be endured from the youngest and most vigilant of the guards while Sabbath voluntarily allowed himself to be escorted to his car. There the three examined his license and registration by flashlight, wrote down his name and his out-of-state license number, and then took the car keys and got in the car, two in the back with Sabbath and the Stolichnaya and one up front to drive the car off the grounds. Mrs. Sabbath would be questioned before she went to bed and a report filed with the chief doctor (who happened to be Roseanna’s doctor) first thing in the morning. If the patient had arranged for her visitor to bring her the alcohol, his wife would be ejected on the spot.