Sabbath’s Theater (47 page)

Saturday, he decided, we’ll make the quick reassessment. No shortage of sharp objects lying about in her dental tray. He’d swipe a curette, end it that way, if, that is, it all went nowhere. Let the adventure occur, O Lord Dionysus, Noble Bull, Mighty Maker of the Sperm of All Male Creatures. It’s not life repossessed that I expect to encounter. That exaltation is long gone. It’s more what Krupa used to call to Goodman when Benny was ridin’ solo on “China Boy.” “Take one more, Ben! Take one more!”

Providing she doesn’t come to her senses, the last of the collaborators. Take one more.

♦ ♦ ♦

Of the second night that Sabbath spent in Debby’s room, suffice it to say—before moving on to the crisis of the morning—that his thoughts were of both mother and daughter, singly and together. He was under the spell of the tempter whose task it is to pump the hormone preposterone into the male bloodstream.

In the morning, after a leisurely bath in Debby’s tub, he took a wonderful crap in her toilet—satisfying stools easily urged forth, density, real dimension, so unlike the sickbed stuff that, on an ordinary day, streamed intermittently out of him because of the agitating action of Voltaren. He bequeathed unto the bathroom a big, trenchant barnyard bouquet that filled him with enthusiasm. The robust road again! I have a mistress! He felt as overcome and nonsensical as Emma Bovary out riding with Rodolphe. In the masterpieces they’re always killing themselves when they commit adultery. He wanted to kill himself when he couldn’t.

After meticulously returning to the dresser and the closet every stitch of Debby’s he’d venerated during the night, adorned for the first time in decades in all new clothes, he came stomping into the kitchen to find the party was over. Norman had delayed his departure to tell Sabbath that he was to get out after breakfast.
Michelle was off at work but her instructions were that Sabbath be ejected immediately. Norman told him to go ahead and have breakfast but to leave after that. In the jacket Sabbath had given Michelle to send to the cleaners, she’d found a bag of crack, which Norman had in front of him on the table. Sabbath remembered having bought it the morning before on the streets of the Lower East Side, bought it for a joke, for no reason at all, because he was getting a kick out of the dealer.

“And these. In your trousers.”

The father was holding in his hand the daughter’s floral underpants. During all of the day’s excitements and difficulties, when exactly had Sabbath forgotten that the panties were in his pocket? He could clearly remember, at the funeral, rolling them around in his pocket through the two-hour amusement of the eulogies. Who wouldn’t have? Overflow crowd. Broadway and Hollywood people—Linc’s most famous friends—each in turn recollecting the corpse. The predictable torrent of claptrap. The two sons spoke and the daughter—the architect, the lawyer, the psychiatric social worker. I knew nobody and nobody knew me. Except Enid, heavyset, white-haired, dowagerly, as unrecognizable to him at first as he was to her. “It’s Mickey Sabbath,” Norm had said to her. He and Sabbath, after identifying Linc’s body, had come back to the anteroom where Enid sat alone with the family. “He drove down from New England.” “My God,” said Enid, and clutching Sabbath’s hand she began to cry. “And I haven’t shed a tear all day,” she told Sabbath with a helpless laugh. “Oh, Mickey, Mickey, I did a terrible thing just three weeks ago.” Hadn’t seen Sabbath in over thirty years, and yet to him she confessed the terrible thing she had done. Because he knew what it was to do terrible things? Or because terrible things had been done to him? Most likely the former. Reaching into my pocket, knowing they were there, silk putty to knead painfully while each of the eulogists stood across from the coffin and described the suicide’s comic antics, how he loved to play with children, how everybody’s kids loved him, how endearingly, wonderfully eccentric he was. . . . Then the young rabbi. Take the beauty out of the tragedy.
Half an hour to explain to us how that’s done. Lincoln isn’t really dead, in our hearts this love lives on. True, true. Yet at the open coffin, when I asked, “Linc, what would you like for dinner tonight?” I got no answer. That proves something, too. Guy next to me, without a pocketful of panties to ease the pain, couldn’t resist the anti-clerical aperçu. “He plays it a little girlish for my taste.” “I think he’s auditioning,” I replied. He liked that. “I’m not going to mind never seeing him again,” the guy whispered. I thought he meant the rabbi, only out on the street realized that he’d meant the deceased. A young TV star gets up, sleek in a black sheath dress, smiling to beat the band, and she tells everybody to hold hands with everybody else and observe a minute of silence remembering Linc. I held the hand of the nasty guy next to me. Had to take a hand out of my pocket to do it—and
that’s
when I forget the underpants! Then Linc: green. The man was green. Then my hideous fingers clasped in Enid’s while she confessed the terrible thing she’d done. “I couldn’t take the tremor any longer and I hit him. I hit him, with a book, and I shouted, ‘Stop shaking! Stop shaking!’ There were some times when he
could
stop—he would bring all his strength to bear on it and the shaking would stop. He’d hold out his hands for me to see. But if he succeeded in doing that, he couldn’t do anything else. All his systems had to be recruited to stop shaking. The result was he couldn’t talk, he couldn’t walk, he couldn’t answer the simplest question.” “Why was he shaking?” I asked her, because just that morning, in Rosa’s embrace, I’d been shaking myself. “Either the medication,” she said, “or the fear. They released him from the hospital when he could eat again and sleep again, and they said he was no longer suicidal. But he was still depressed and frightened and crazy. And he had the tremor. I couldn’t live with him any longer. I moved him to an apartment around the corner a year and a half ago. I phoned him every day, but this last winter three months went by when I didn’t see him. He phoned me. Sometimes ten times a day he phoned me. To see if I was all right. He was terrified that I was going to get sick and disappear. When he saw me he’d burst into tears. He was always the crier in the family, but this was something
else. This was ultrahelplessness. He cried from the pain—from the terror. It never let up. But still I thought he was going to get better. I thought, Someday it’s going to be the way it used to be. He’ll make us all laugh.” “Enid, do you know who I am,” asked Sabbath, “who you are telling all this to?” But she did not even hear his words, and Sabbath understood that she was telling this to everyone. He was just the last one to hit the anteroom. “Three months in the hospital with a lot of crazy people,” she said. “But after the first week he felt safe there. The first night they put him in bed next to a man who was dying—it terrorized him. Then in a room with three others, truly screwy people. Near the end of his stay I took him out to lunch twice, but apart from that he never left the hospital. Bars on the windows. The suicide watch. Seeing his face behind the barred windows, waiting for us to come—” She told him so much, she held him to her so long, that in the end he forgot what in his pocket he had been clinging to. Then at dinner he started telling
his
story. . . .

So, during the night, lust and treachery gunned down by her prudence, by foresight—by her brains.
That’s
what happened. Don’t blame Enid. Nor was it jealousy of the kid. If she’d wanted to probe his papilla on Saturday, the kid’s stolen panties would only have turned her on more. She would have worn them for him. She would have got herself up in Debby’s stuff for him. She’s done it before, along with everything else. But she was using the underpants to get him out before he ruined everything she had going for her. The underpants to inform him that there would be no wavering, that should he try to bring pressure there’d be an even more resourceful authority than Officer Abramowitz to crush him. It wasn’t the underpants, the crack, even the Green Torpedo—it was
Sabbath
. Maybe he could still tell a story, but otherwise nothing remotely alluring left, not even the hard-on he’d showed her. All that remained of his
going all out
was repellent to her. Crude she was herself, besmirched, wily, connubially half-crazed, but not yet uncontrollably desperate. Hers was the ordinary automatic dishonesty. She was a betrayer with a small
b
, and small-
b
betrayals are happening all the time—by now
Sabbath could pull them off in his sleep. That wasn’t what was at the center for him: this guy is
spinning;
he wants
to die
. Michelle had enough equilibrium to reach a sensible decision. The maniacal intoxicant to put the enchantment back in life is not me. She will be better off shopping around, scenting out somebody less clamorously kaput. And he’d thought he was going to gorge himself. It was bursting time again. You great big infant. That you could still believe that it could go on forever. Maybe now you’ve got a better picture of what’s up. Well, let it come. I know what’s up. Let it come.

Eat breakfast and go. This is an amazing moment.
It’s over
.

“How could you take Debby’s underwear?” Norman asked.

“How could I not is the question.”

“It was irresistible to you.”

“What a strange way to put it. Where does resistance even enter in? We’re talking about thermodynamics. Heat as a form of energy and its effect on the molecules of matter. I am sixty-four, she is nineteen. It’s only natural.”

Norman was dressed like the connoisseur of fine living that he was: double-breasted chalk-stripe suit, maroon silk tie with matching breast-pocket handkerchief, pale blue shirt monogrammed at the pocket NIC. All of his considerable dignity was on display, not simply in his clothing, but in his distinctive face, a lean, long, intelligent face with gentle dark eyes and a becoming kind of baldness. That he had less hair even than Sabbath made him a thousand times more attractive. Without the hair you saw unveiled all the mind in that skull, the introspection, the tolerance, the acuity, the reason. And a manly skull it was, finely made yet almost ostentatiously determined—none of its delicacy suggested weakness of will. Yes, the whole figure emanated the ideals and scruples of humanity’s better self and it wouldn’t have been hard for Sabbath to believe that the office for which Norman shortly would be leaving in a limo had spiritual aims loftier even than those of a theatrical producer. Secular spirituality, that’s what he exuded—maybe they all did, the producers, the agents, the mega-deal lawyers. With the aid of their tailors, Jewish cardinals
of commerce. Yeah, now that I think of it, very much like them sharpies surrounding the pope. You’d never guess that the jukebox distributor who paid for it all dealt at the edges of the Mob. You’re not supposed to guess. He’d made himself into that impressive American thing, a nice guy. It all but says he’s one on his shirt. A nice rich guy with some depth, and dynamite on the phone at the office. What more can America ask of its Jews?

“And at dinner last night,” Norman said, “was it only natural to want to play with Michelle’s foot under the table?”

“I didn’t want to play with Michelle’s foot under the table. I wanted to play with your foot under the table.
Wasn’t
that your foot?”

He registers neither antipathy nor amusement. Is it because he knows where we’re headed or because he doesn’t know? I surely don’t know. Could be anywhere. I’m beginning to smell Sophocles in this kitchen.

“Why did you tell Michelle you killed Nikki?”

“Should I try to hide it from her instead? Am I supposed to be ashamed of that too? What is this shame kick you’re on?”

“Tell me something. Tell me the truth—tell me if you believe that you murdered Nikki. Is this something you
believe?
”

“I see no reason why I shouldn’t.”

“I do. I was there. I do because I was with you when she disappeared. I saw what you went through.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not saying it was easy. Going to sea doesn’t prepare you for everything. The color she turned. That came as a surprise. Green, like Linc. With strangulation the primitive satisfactions are all built in, of course, but if I had it to do over again I’d opt for one of the more expeditious modes. I’d have to. My hands. How do you plan to kill Michelle?”

Some emotion stirred up by Sabbath’s question made Norman look to Sabbath as though he were afloat or flying, drifting away from the entire orientation of his life. An exciting silence ensued. But in the end Norman did no more than to put Debby’s underpants into the pocket of his own pants. The words he next spoke were not without a tinge of menace.

“I love my wife and children more than anything in this world.”

“I take that for granted. But how do you plan to kill her? When you find out she is fucking your best friend.”

“Don’t. Please. We all know how you are a man on the superhuman scale, who has no fear of verbal exaggeration, but not everything is worth saying, even to a successful person like me. Don’t. Not necessary. My wife found our daughter’s underpants in your pocket. What do you expect her to do? How do you expect her to respond? Don’t degrade yourself further by defiling my wife.”

“I wasn’t degrading myself. I wasn’t defiling your wife. Norman, aren’t the stakes too high for us to bow to convention? I was just wondering how you think about killing her when you think about killing her. Okay, let’s change the subject. How do you think she thinks about killing you? Do you imagine her content, when you fly off to L.A., just to kind of hope American Airlines will take care of it for her? Too mundane for a Michelle. The plane will crash and I’ll be free? No, that’s how the secretaries solve their problems on the subway. Michelle’s a doer, her father’s daughter. If I know anything about periodontists, she’s thought of strangling you more than once. In your sleep. And she could do it. Got the grip for it. So did I once upon a time. Remember my hands? My old hands? All day you work as a seaman on deck, chipping, chipping, chipping—the constant work of the ship. A metal drill, a hammer, a chisel. And then the puppets. The
strength
in those hands! Nikki never knew what hit her. She was a long time looking up at me with those imploring eyes, but actually I would think a coroner would have said that she was brain-dead in sixty seconds.”