Sabbath’s Theater (48 page)

Leaning back in his chair at the breakfast table, Norman crossed an arm over his chest and, with the other arm resting on it, let his forehead drop forward onto his fingertips. Exactly how Michelle’s forehead dropped onto mine. I can’t believe the panties did it. I can’t believe this truly superior aging woman could have been daunted by that. This isn’t happening! This is a fairy tale! This is
true
depravity, this genteel shit!

“What the hell has become of your mind?” Norman said.

“This is awful.”

“What is awful?” Sabbath asked. “The kid’s underpants wrapped around my dick to help me through the night after the day that I’d been through? That’s so awful? Come off it, Norm. Panties in my pocket at a funeral? That’s
hope
.”

“Mickey, where are you going to go after you leave here? Are you going to drive home?”

“It’s always been hard for you, Norman, hasn’t it, to imagine me? How does he do it without protection? How do any of them do it without protection? Baby, there
is
no protection. It’s all wallpaper, Norman. Look at Linc. Look at Sabbath. Look at Morty. Look at Nikki.
Look
, tiresome and frightening as looking may be. What we are in the hands of
is not protection
. When I was on the ships, when we got to port, I always liked to visit the Catholic churches. I always went by myself, sometimes every day we were in port. You know why? Because I found something terrifically erotic about watching kneeling maidens at prayer, asking forgiveness for the wrong things altogether. Watching them seeking protection. It made me very hot. Seeking protection against the other. Seeking protection against themselves. Seeking protection against everything.
But there isn’t any
. Not even for you. Even you are exposed—what do you make of that? Exposed! Fucking naked, even in that suit! The suit is futile, the monogram is futile—nothing will do it.
We have no idea how it’s going to turn out
. Christ, man,
you
can’t even protect a pair of your daughter’s—”

“Mickey,” he said softly, “I take your point. I get the philosophy. It’s a fierce one. You’re a fierce man. You’ve let the whole creature out, haven’t you? The deeper reasonability of seeking danger is that there is, in any event, no escaping it. Pursue it or be pursued by it. Mickey’s view, and, in theory, I agree: there
is
no escaping it. But in practice I proceed differently: if danger’s going to find me anyway, I needn’t pursue it. That the extraordinary is assured Linc has convinced me. It’s the ordinary that escapes us. I do know that. But that doesn’t mean I care to abandon the portion of the ordinary I’ve been lucky enough to corral and hold on
to. I want you to go. It’s time for you to go. I’m getting your things out of Debby’s room and then you’re to go.”

“With or without breakfast?”

“I want you
out
of here!”

“But what’s eating you? It can’t just be the underwear. We go too far back for that. Is it that I showed my dick to Michelle? Is that the reason I can’t have my breakfast?”

Norman had risen from the table—he was not as yet shaking like Linc (or Sabbath with Rosa), though there
was
a seizure of sorts in his jaw.

“Didn’t you know? I can’t believe she didn’t tell you. ‘There’s a bull in Sabbath. He goes all out.’ The underpants are nothing. I just thought the only fair thing was to take it out. Before we met on Saturday. In case it wasn’t to her taste. She invited me Saturday for a periodontal probe. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that either. Her office. Saturday.” When Norman remained, without moving, on his side of the table, Sabbath added, “Just ask her. That was the plan. We had it all set up. That’s why, when you said I couldn’t stay to have breakfast, I figured it was because I was going to her office on Saturday to fuck her.
Plus
my taking out my dick. That it’s only the panties . . . no, I don’t buy that.”

And this Sabbath meant. The husband understood the wife better than he let on.

Norman reached up to one of the cabinets above the serving counter and took down a package of plastic garbage sacks. “I’m going to get your things.”

“Whatever you say.
May
I eat the grapefruit?”

Without again bothering to respond, Norman left Sabbath alone in the kitchen.

The half grapefruit had been segmented for Sabbath. The segmented grapefruit. Fundamental to their way of life—as fundamental as the Polaroids and the ten thousand bucks. Do I have to tell him about the money, too? No, he knows. Bet he knows everything. I do like this couple. I think the more I come to understand the chaos churning about here, the more I admire how he holds it together. The soldierly way he stood there while I
briefed him on last night. He knows. He’s got his hands full. There is something in her that is always threatening to undo it all, the warmth, the comfort, the whole wonderful eiderdown that is their privileged position. Having to deal with all that she is while holding to his civilized ideals. Why does he bother? Why does he keep her? The past, for one thing. So much of it. The present—so much of
it
. The machine that it all is. The house on Nantucket. The weekends at Brown as Debby’s parents. Debby’s grades would tailspin if they split up. Call Michelle a whore, throw her the hell out, and Debby would never make it to med school. And there’s the
fun
besides: the skiing, the tennis, Europe, the small hotel they love in Paris, the Université. The repose when all is well. Somebody there while you wait for the biopsy report to come back from the lab. No time left for settlements and lawyers and starting again. The courage of putting up with it instead—the “realism.” And the dread of no one at home. All these rooms at night and no one else home. He’s fixed in this life. His
talent
is for this life. You can’t start dating at the twilight of life. And then menopause is on his side. If he continues to let her get away with it, if he never goes the distance with being fed up, it’s because soon enough menopause will do her in anyway. But neither does Michelle go the distance—because she’s not just one thing, either. Norman understands (if menopause doesn’t do it, that understanding of his will)—minimize, minimize. I never learned that: work it out, ride it out, cool it down. She is as indispensable to the way of life as the segmented grapefruit. She
is
the segmented grapefruit: the partitioned body and the piquant blood. The unholy Hostess. The holy Hotness. This is as close to eating Michelle as I will come. It’s over. I am a
meshuggeneh
cast-off shoe.

“You live in the world of real love,” he said when Norman came back into the kitchen holding in one hand the sack stuffed with everything except for Sabbath’s jacket. The Green Torpedo Norman handed to him at the table.

“And what do you live in?” Norman inquired. “You live in the failure of this civilization. The investment of everything in eroticism.
The final investment of everything in sex. And now you reap the lonely harvest. Erotic drunkenness, the only passionate life you can have.”

“And is it even that passionate?” asked Sabbath. “You know what Michelle would have told her therapist had we gone ahead and got it off? She would have said, ‘A nice enough man, I suppose, but he has to be kept fresh by ice.’”

“No, kept fresh by provoking. Kept fresh by means of anarchic provocation. We are determined by our society to such an extent that we can only live as human beings if we turn anarchic. Isn’t that the pitch? Hasn’t that always been the pitch?”

“You’re going to feel dashed by this, Norman, but on top of everything else I don’t have, I don’t have a pitch. You have kind-hearted liberal comprehension but I am flowing swiftly along the curbs of life, I am merely debris, in possession of nothing to interfere with an objective reading of the shit.”

“The walking panegyric for obscenity,” Norman said. “The inverted saint whose message is desecration. Isn’t it tiresome in 1994, this role of rebel-hero? What an odd time to be thinking of sex as rebellion. Are we back to Lawrence’s gamekeeper? At this late hour? To be out with that beard of yours, upholding the virtues of fetishism and voyeurism. To be out with that belly of yours, championing pornography and flying the flag of your prick. What a pathetic, outmoded old crank you are, Mickey Sabbath. The discredited male polemic’s last gasp. Even as the bloodiest of all centuries comes to an end, you’re out working day and night to create an erotic scandal. You fucking relic, Mickey! You fifties antique! Linda Lovelace is already light-years behind us, but you persist in quarreling with society as though Eisenhower is president!” But then, almost apologetically, he added, “The immensity of your isolation is horrifying. That’s all I really mean to say.”

“And there you’d be surprised,” Sabbath replied. “I don’t think you ever gave isolation a real shot. It’s the best preparation I know of for death.”

“Get out,” Norman said.

Deep in the corner of one of his front pockets, those huge pockets in which you could carry a couple of dead ducks, Sabbath came upon the cup that he’d pushed in there before entering the funeral home, the beggar’s cardboard coffee cup, still containing the quarters, nickels, and dimes that he’d managed to panhandle down in the subway and on the street. When he’d given his stuff over to Michelle to send out with the dry cleaning, he’d forgotten the cup, too.

The cup did it. Of course. The beggar’s cup. That’s what terrified her—the begging. Ten to one the panties took her to a new edge of excitement. It’s the cup that she shrank from; the social odium of the cup went beyond even her impudence. Better a man who didn’t wash than a man who begged with a cup. That was farther out than even she wished to go. There was stimulation for her in many things that were scandalous, indecent, unfamiliar, strange, things bordering on the dangerous, but there was only steep effrontery in the cup. Here at last was degradation without a single redeeming thrill. At the beggar’s cup Michelle’s daring drew the line. The cup had betrayed their secret hallway pact, igniting in her a panicked fury that made her physically ill. She pictured in the cup all the lowly evils leading to destruction, the unleashed force that could wreck everything. And probably she wasn’t wrong. Stupid little jokes can be of great moment in the struggle not to lose. Was how far he had fallen with that cup entirely clear to
him?
The unknown about any excess is how excessive it’s been. He really couldn’t detest her as much for throwing him out because of the cup as he had when he’d thought that to her the treacherous villainy was jacking off in the panties, a natural enough human amusement and surely, for a houseguest, a minor misdemeanor.

At the thought that he had lost his last mistress before he’d even had the chance of wholeheartedly appropriating her secrets—and all because of the magical lure of begging, not just the seductiveness of a self-mocking joke and the irresistible theatrical fun in that but the loathsome rightness of its exalted wrongness, the grand
vocation
of it, the opportunity its encounters offered his
despair to work through to the unequivocal end—Sabbath fell faint to the floor.

The fainting was a little like the begging, however, neither wholly rooted in necessity nor entirely unentertaining. At the thought of all that the cup had destroyed, two broad black strokes did indeed crisscross his mind from one edge of the canvas to the other—yet there was also in him the
wish
to faint. There was craft in Sabbath’s passing out. The tyranny of fainting did not escape him. That was the last observation integrated into his cynicism before he hit the floor.

Things wouldn’t have worked better had he planned them down to the smallest detail—a “plan” wouldn’t have worked at all. He found himself laid out, still living, amid the pale plaids of the Cowans’ room. It was criminal for his un-dry-cleaned beggar’s jacket to be flush with their bedcover, but then, it was Norman who had put him there. Drizzle beading the big windows and a mist whose milkiness obliterated everything above the treetops of the park: a rumble not quite so low as the rumble in Michelle’s laugh rolled in from beyond the windows, thunder summoning up for Sabbath his years and years of exile beside the Madamaskas’ sacred falls. The haven of the Cowans’ bed made him feel oddly lonely for Debby’s and the barely discernible (perhaps even imaginary) impress of her torso along the mattress’s spine. Only a day, and Debby’s bed had become a home away from home. But her room was shut down like La Guardia. No more flying in and out.

Sabbath could hear Norman on the phone with Dr. Graves, talking about getting him into the hospital, and it did not sound as though he was encountering opposition. Norman couldn’t bear to see what he was seeing, this guy now on the heels of Linc. . . . Sounded as though he’d set his mind to taking charge of Sabbath’s deformities and restoring to him a harmonious being such as Sabbath had last known in third grade. Forgiving, compassionate, determined, indefatigable, almost irrationally humane—every person should have a friend like Norman. Every wife should have a husband like Norman, revere a husband like Norman
instead of battering on his decency with her low-minded delights. Marriage is not an ecstatic union. She must be taught to renounce the great narcissistic illusion of rapture. Her lease on rapture is hereby revoked. She must be taught, before it’s too late, to renounce this callow quarrel with life’s limits. Sabbath owed Norman no less than that for sullying the Cowan home with his piddling vices. He must think selflessly only of Norman now. Any attempt to save Sabbath would plunge Norman into an experience he hardly deserved. The man to save was Norman—he was the indispensable one. And the power to save him is mine. The deed will crown my visit here, repaying as straightforwardly as I know how my debt for all the unwise ardor with which he invited me in. I am called to enter the realm of virtue.

Nothing was clearer to Sabbath than that Norman must never lay eyes on those Polaroids. And if ever he were to come upon the cash! On the heels of this friend’s suicide and that friend’s collapse, finding the pictures or the money or both would turn the last of his illusions to ashes, smash his orderly existence to bits. Ten thousand in cash. For buying what? For selling what? Who and what is she working for? Her pussy photographed for posterity by whom? Where? Why? To commemorate what? No, Norman must never know the answers, let alone get round to the questions.