Sabbath’s Theater (6 page)

The boldness with which she went after them! The ardor and skill with which she aroused them! The delight she found in watching them jerk off! And the pleasure she then took in telling all she’d learned about lust and what it is for men . . . and the torment all this was to him now. He’d not had the faintest idea that he could feel such distress. “What I enjoyed was to see how they were by themselves. That I could be the observer there, and to see how they played with their dick and how it was formed, the shape of it, and when it became hard, and also the way they held their hand—it turned me on. Everybody jerks their dick differently. And when they abandon themselves into it, when they
allow themselves to abandon themselves, this is very exciting. And to see them come that way. This Lewis guy, he was in his sixties and he’d never jerked off, he said, in front of a woman. And he was sort of holding his hand this way”—she turned her wrist so that the little finger was at the top of her fist and the second knuckle of her thumb at the bottom—“well, to see that particularity of it and, as I say, to see when they get so hot they can’t stop themselves in spite of being shy, that’s very exciting. That’s what I like best—watching them lose control.” The shy ones she would softly suck for a few minutes and then place their hands for them on themselves and help them along until they were safely into it and on their own. Then, beginning lightly to finger herself, she would lean back and look on. When she next saw Sabbath she would demonstrate on him the peculiar “particularity” of each man’s technique. He was tremendously stirred by this . . . and now it made him jealous, maddeningly jealous—now that she was dead he wanted to shake her and shout at her and tell her to stop. “Only me! Fuck your husband when you have to, but otherwise, no one but me!”

In fact, he didn’t want her to fuck Matija either. Him least of all. On the rare occasions when she used to report those details to Sabbath, too, they had hardly engrossed him, provoked not the slightest erotic interest. Yet now there was barely a night when he was free of the mortifying memory of Drenka allowing her husband to take her like a wife. “Checking Matija in bed, I saw his erection. I was certain he would not act on it without my taking first initiative, so quickly I undressed. I could not get aroused even if I had strong, tender feelings for my husband. Seeing his hard cock, smaller than yours, Mickey, and with a foreskin, which when the skin is pulled down is much redder than yours . . . thinking about the way we had just fucked . . . well, longing for your big, hard dick, it was almost painful. How could I abandon myself to this man who loves me? When he penetrated me, lying on top of me, Matija was moaning louder than I ever recollect. It was almost as if he was crying. Since it never takes him long to come, the whole thing was over soon. After sleeping one or two
hours I woke up sick to my stomach. I had to throw up and take some Mylanta.”

How dare he! What
chutzpah!
Sabbath wanted to murder Matija. And why didn’t I? Why didn’t
we?
Uncircumcised dog! Smite him
thus!

. . . One brilliantly sunny day back in February, Sabbath had come upon Drenka’s widowered husband up at the Stop & Shop in Cumberland. For the first time that winter it hadn’t snowed in four consecutive days and so, after donning an old knit seaman’s cap in which to swab down the bathroom and kitchen floors and give the house a vacuuming, Sabbath had driven up to Cumberland—blinded much of the way by the light off the gargantuan drifts banked at the side of the road—to do the grocery shopping, one of his weekly household chores. And there was Matija, almost unrecognizable since he’d seen him silent and stone-faced at the funeral. His black hair had gone white, completely white in just the three months. He looked so weak, so slight, his face emaciated—and all of this in just three months! He could have passed for a senior citizen, older even than Sabbath, and he was only in his mid-fifties. The inn was closed every year from New Year’s Day to April 1, and so Matija was out shopping for the few things he needed living alone in the Baliches’ big new house up from the lake and the inn.

Balich was directly behind him in the checkout line and, though he nodded when Sabbath looked his way, registered no recognition.

“Mr. Balich, my name is Mickey Sabbath.”

“Yes? How do you do?”

“Does ‘Mickey Sabbath’ mean anything to you?”

“Yes,” said Balich kindly after feigning a moment’s thought, “I believe you have been a patron of mine. I recognize you from the inn.”

“No,” said Sabbath, “I live in Madamaska Falls but we don’t eat out much.”

“I see,” replied Balich and, after smiling for a few seconds more, somberly returned to his thoughts.

“I’ll tell you how we know each other,” said Sabbath.

“Yes?”

“My wife was your son’s art teacher at the high school. Roseanna Sabbath. She and your Matthew became great friends.”

“Ahhh.” Again he smiled courteously.

Sabbath had never realized before how much there was in Drenka’s husband of the subdued and courtly European gentleman. Maybe it was the white hair, the grief, the accent, but he had about him the magisterial air of a senior diplomat from a small country. No, Sabbath hadn’t known this about him, the dignified composure came as a surprise, but then the other guy is often just a blur. Even if he’s your best friend or the fellow across the street who more than once has jump-started your car, he
becomes
a blur. He becomes
the husband
, and sympathetic imagination dwindles away, right along with conscience.

The only time Sabbath ever before had occasion to observe Matija in public was the April preceding the Kathy Goolsbee scandal, when he went over to the inn on the third Tuesday of the month—with the thirty or so Rotarians who gathered there for their luncheon meeting the third Tuesday of every month—as a guest of Gus Kroll, the service station owner, who never failed to pass on to Sabbath the jokes he heard from the truckers who stopped to gas up and use the facilities. Gus had a great audience in Sabbath, because even when the jokes were not uniformly of the first rank, the fact that Gus rarely bothered to wear his dentures while he was telling them furnished Sabbath with sufficient delight. Gus’s impassioned commitment to repeating the jokes had long ago led the puppeteer to understand that they were what gave unity to Gus’s vision of life, that they alone answered the need of his spiritual being for a clarifying narrative with which to face day after day at the pump. With every joke that poured forth from Gus’s toothless mouth, Sabbath was reassured that not even a simple guy like Gus was free of the human need to find a strand of significance that will hold together everything that isn’t on TV.

Sabbath had asked Gus if he would be kind enough to invite him to the meeting to hear Matija Balich address the Rotary Club
on the topic “Innkeeping Today.” By then Sabbath already knew that Matija had been agonizingly preparing the speech for weeks—Sabbath had even read the speech, or the first short version of it, when Drenka had brought it to him to look at. She had typed the six pages for her husband, done her best to catch the errors, but she wanted Sabbath to double-check the English and amiably he agreed to help. “It’s fascinating,” he said after twice reading it through. “It is?” “It moves along the track like a goddamn train. Really, it’s wonderful. Two problems, however. It’s too short. He’s not thorough enough. It’s got to be three times as long. And this expression, this idiom here, is wrong. It isn’t ‘nuts and bolts.’ You don’t say in English, ‘If you watch the nuts and bolts. . . .’” “No?” “Who told him it was ‘nuts and bolts,’ Drenka?” “Stupid Drenka did,” she replied. “Nuts and
bulbs
,” said Sabbath. “Nuts and bulbs,” she repeated and wrote on the back of the last page. “And write down there that he stops too soon,” said Sabbath. “Three times as long, at least. They’ll listen,” he told her. “This is stuff nobody knows.”

Gus came by Brick Furnace Road to pick up Sabbath in the tow truck, and no sooner were they off than Gus started in entertaining him with what he knew to be taboo for what Gus called the “churchy guys” in town.

“Can you take a joke that’s not too appreciative of women?” Gus asked him.

“The only kind I
can
take.”

“Well, this truck driver, whenever he goes away, his wife, she gets cold and lonely. So when he comes back from a trip he brings her a skunk, a big, furry live skunk, and he tells her that next time he goes away she should take it to bed with her and when she goes to sleep she should put it between her legs. So she says to him, ‘What about the smell?’ And he says, ‘He’ll get used to it. I did.’

“Well, if you like that one,” said Gus when he heard Sabbath’s laughter, “I got another one along the same lines,” and so in no time they arrived for the meeting.

The Rotarians were already milling around in the rustic barroom with the exposed beams across the low ceiling and the
cheerful white tile hearth, all of them packed closely together in the one smallish room, perhaps because of the cozy fire burning there on a cold, gusty spring day or perhaps because of the platters, on the bar; of
evap
i
i
, a Yugoslav national specialty that was also a specialty of the inn. “I have to feed you with
evap
i
i
,” Drenka had told Sabbath when they were still newly lovers, playing post-coital pranks in bed. “Feed me anything you want.” “Three types of meat,” she told him, “one is beef, one is pork, then is lamb. All is ground. Then some onions are added to it and some pepper. It is like a meatball but a different shape. Very small. It is obligatory to eat
evap
i
i
with onion. An onion cut into small pieces. You can have little peppers, too. Red. Very hot.” “It doesn’t sound bad at all,” said Sabbath, full of pleasure with her, smiling away. “Yes, I am going to feed you
evap
i
i
,” she said adoringly. “And I, in turn, will fuck your brains out.” “Oh, my American boyfriend—that means you will fuck me seriously?” “Quite seriously.” “It means hard?” “Very hard.” “And it means what else? I have learned to do it in Croatian, to say all the words and not be shy, but never anyone has taught me to do it in American. Tell me! Teach me! Teach me what all the things mean in American!” “It means every which way.” And then, as conscientiously as she had explained to him how to make
evap
i
i