BUT HORRIBLE THINGS are happening to people all the time. The next morning Sabbath learned about Lincoln Gelman’s suicide. Linc had been the producer of Sabbath’s Indecent Theater (and the Bowery Basement Players) during those few years in the fifties and early sixties when Sabbath had amassed his little audience on the Lower East Side. After Nikki’s disappearance, he had stayed a week with the Gelmans in their big Bronxville house.
Norman Cowan, Linc’s partner, called with the news. Norman was the subdued member of the duo, if not the office’s imaginative spearhead then its levelheaded guardian against Linc’s overreaching. He was Linc’s equilibrium. In any discussion, even of the location of the men’s room down the hall, he could come to the point in about one-twentieth of the time that Linc liked to take to explain things to people. The educated son of a venal Jersey City jukebox distributor, Norman had shaped himself into a precise and canny businessman exuding the aura of quiet strength that lean, tall, prematurely balding men often appear to possess, particularly when they come, as Norman did, scrupulously attired in gray pinstripes.
“His death,” Norman confided, “was a relief to many. Most of the people we’re lining up to speak at the funeral haven’t seen him in five years.”
Sabbath hadn’t seen him in thirty.
“These are all current business associates, close Manhattan friends. But they couldn’t see him. Linc was impossible to be with—depressed, obsessive, trembling, frightened.”
“How long was he like that?”
“Seven years ago he fell into a depression. He never again had a painless day. A painless hour. We carried him in the office for five years. He’d just float around with a contract in his hand, saying, ‘Are we sure this is all right? Are we sure this isn’t illegal?’ The last two years he’s been at home. A year and a half ago, Enid couldn’t take it any longer and they found an apartment for Linc around the corner and Enid furnished it and he lived there. A housekeeper came every day to feed him and to clean up. I would try to get over once a week, but I had to force myself. It was awful. He would sit and listen to you and then sigh and shake his head and say, ‘You don’t know, you don’t know. . . .’ For years now that’s all I heard him say.”
“You don’t know what?”
“The dread. The anguish. Unceasing. No medication helped. His bedroom looked like a pharmacy, but not a single drug worked. They all made him sick. He hallucinated on the Prozac. He hallucinated on the Wellbutrin. Then they started giving him amphetamines—Dexedrine. For two days it looked as though something was happening. Then the vomiting began. All he ever got were the side effects. Hospitalization didn’t work, either. He was hospitalized three months, and when they sent him home they said he was no longer suicidal.”
His drive, his gusto, his pep, his speediness, his effectiveness, his diligence, his loquacious joking, someone—Sabbath remembered—wholly at one with his time and place, a highly adapted New Yorker tailor-made for that frenetic reality and oozing with the passion to live, to succeed, to have fun. His sentiments transported tears to his eyes too easily for Sabbath’s taste, he talked rapidly in a flood of words that revealed how strong the compulsions were that fueled his hyperdynamism, but his life was a solid achievement, full of aim and purpose and the delight of being the energizer of others. And then life took a turn and never righted itself. Everything vanished. The irrational overturned everything. “Something specific set it off?” Sabbath asked.
“People come apart. And aging doesn’t help. I know a number of men our age, right here in Manhattan, clients, friends, who’ve been going through crises like this. Some shock just undoes them around sixty—the plates shift and the earth starts shaking and all the pictures fall off the wall. I had my bout last summer.”
“You? Hard to believe about you.”
“I’m still on Prozac. I had the whole thing—fortunately the abridged version. Ask why and I couldn’t tell you. I just stopped sleeping at some point and then, a couple of weeks later, the depression descended—the fear, the trembling, the suicide thoughts. I was going to buy a gun and blow the top of my head off. Six weeks until the Prozac kicked in. On top of that, it happens not to be a dick-friendly drug, at least for me. I’m on it eight months. I don’t remember what a hard-on feels like. But at this age it’s an up-and-down affair anyway. I got out alive. Linc didn’t. He got worse and worse.”
“Could it have been something other than just depression?”
“Just depression’s enough.”
But Sabbath knew as much. His mother had never gone ahead to take her life, but then, for fifty years after losing Morty, she had no life to take. In 1946, at seventeen, when, instead of waiting a year to be drafted, Sabbath went to sea only weeks after graduating high school, he was motivated as much by his need to escape his mother’s tyrannical gloom—and his father’s pathetic brokenness—as by an unsatisfied longing that had been gathering force in him since masturbation had all but taken charge of his life, a dream that overflowed in scenarios of perversity and excess but that he now, in a seaman’s suit, was to encounter thigh-to-thigh, mouth-to-mouth, face-to-face: the worldwide world of whoredom, the tens of thousands of whores who worked the docks and the portside saloons wherever ships made anchor, flesh of every pigmentation to furnish every conceivable pleasure, whores who in their substandard Portuguese, French, and Spanish spoke the scatological vernacular of the gutter.
“They wanted to give Linc electric shock treatment but he was too frightened and he refused. It might have helped, but whenever it was suggested, he curled up in a corner and cried. Whenever he saw Enid he broke down. Called her, ‘Mommy, Mommy, Mommy.’ Sure, Linc was one of the great Jewish criers—they play the national anthem out at Shea and he cries, he sees the Lincoln Memorial and he cries, we take our boys up to Cooperstown and there’s Babe Ruth’s mitt and Linc starts crying. But this was something else. This was not crying, this was bursting. This was bursting under the pressure of unspeakable pain. And in that bursting there wasn’t anything of the man I knew or you knew. By the time he died, the Linc we’d known had been dead for seven years.”
“The funeral?”
“Riverside Chapel, tomorrow. Two P.M. Amsterdam and 76th. You’ll see some old faces.”
“Won’t see Linc’s.”
“Can, actually, if you want to. Somebody has to identify the body before the cremation. The law in New York. I’m doing it. Come along when they open the coffin. You’ll see what happened to our friend. He looked a hundred years old. His hair completely white and his face just a terrified, tiny thing. One of those skulls the savages shrink.”
“I don’t know,” Sabbath replied, “that I can make it tomorrow.”
“If you can’t, you can’t. I thought you should know before you read about it in the papers. In the papers the cause of death will be a heart attack—that’s the cause the family prefers. Enid wouldn’t have an autopsy. Linc was dead some thirteen or fourteen hours before he was found. Dead in his bed, the story goes. But the housekeeper tells a different story. I think by now Enid has come to believe her own. All along she honestly expected him to get better. She was sure of it down to the end, even though he had already slashed his wrists ten months ago.”
“Look, thanks for remembering me—thanks for calling.”
“People remember you, Mickey. A lot of people remember you with great admiration. One of the people Linc got teary about was you. I mean back when he was still himself. He never thought it was a great idea to take a talent like yours out to the boondocks. He loved your theater—he thought you were a magician. ‘Why did Mickey do it?’ He thought you never should have left to live up there. He talked about that often.”
“Well, that’s all long ago.”
“You should know that Linc never for a moment considered you responsible in any way for Nikki’s disappearance. I certainly didn’t—and don’t. The fucking well poisoners—”
“Well, the well poisoners were right and you boys were wrong.”
“Standard Sabbath perversity. You can’t believe that. Nikki was doomed. Tremendously gifted, extremely pretty, but so frail, so needy, so neurotic and fucked-up. No way that girl would ever hold together, none.”
“Sorry, can’t make it tomorrow,” and Sabbath hung up.
♦ ♦ ♦
Roseanna’s uniform these days was a Levi’s jacket and washed-out jeans as narrow as her cranelike legs, and recently Hal in Athena had cut her hair so short that at breakfast that morning Sabbath intermittently kept imagining his be-denimed wife as one of Hal’s pretty young homosexual friends from the college. But then, even with shoulder-length hair she’d emanated the tomboyish aura; ever since adolescence she’d had it—flat-chested and tall, with a striding gait and a way of cocking her chin when she spoke that had its appeal for Sabbath well before the disappearance of his fragile Ophelia. Roseanna looked to belong to another group of Shakespearean heroines entirely—to the saucy, robust, realistic circle of girls like Miranda and Rosalind. And she wore no more makeup than Rosalind did attired like a boy in the Forest of Arden. Her hair was still its engaging golden brown and, even clipped short, had a soft, feathery sheen that invited touching. The face was an oval, a wide oval, and there was a carved configuration to her small upturned nose and her wide, full, unboyishly seductive mouth, a hammered-and-chiseled look that, when she was younger, gave the fairy-tale illusion of a puppet infused with life. Now that she was no longer drinking, Sabbath saw traces in the modeling of Roseanna’s face of the lovely child she must have been before her mother left and the father all but destroyed her. She was not only thinner by far than her husband but a head taller, and what with daily jogging and the hormone replacement therapy, she looked—on those rare occasions when the two of them were out together—less a fifty-six-year-old wife than an anorexic daughter.
What did Roseanna hate most about Sabbath? What did Sabbath hate most about her? Well, the provocations changed with the years. For a long time she hated him for refusing even to consider having a child, and he hated her for incessantly yammering on the phone to her sister, Ella, about her “biological clock.” Finally he had grabbed the phone away from her to communicate directly to Ella the degree to which he found their conversation offensive. “Surely,” he told her, “Yahweh did not go to the trouble of giving me this big dick to assuage a concern as petty as your sister’s!” Once her childbearing years were behind her, Roseanna was able better to pinpoint her hatred and to despise him for the simple fact that he existed, more or less in the same way that he despised her for existing. In addition was the predictable bread-and-butter stuff: she hated the unthinking way he brushed the crumbs onto the floor after cleaning the kitchen table, and he hated her unamusing goy humor. She hated the conglomeration of army-navy surplus he had been wearing for clothing ever since high school, and he hated that, for as long as he’d known her, she would never, even during the adulterous phase of glorious abandon, graciously swallow his come. She hated that he hadn’t touched her in bed for ten years and he hated the unruffled monotone in which she spoke to her local friends on the phone—and he hated the friends, do-gooders gaga over the environment or ex-drunks in AA. Each winter the town road crew went around cutting down 150-year-old maple trees that lined the dirt roads, and each year the maple-tree lovers of Madamaska Falls lodged a petition of protest with the first selectman, and then the next year the road crew, claiming the maples were dead or diseased, would clear another sylvan lane of ancient trees and thereby pick up enough dough—by selling the logs for firewood—to keep themselves in cigarettes, porn videos, and booze. She despised his inexhaustible bitterness about his career the way he had despised her drinking—how she would be drunk and argumentative in public places and, whether at home or out, speak in an aggressively loud and insulting voice. And now that she was sober he hated her AA slogans and the way of talking she had picked up from AA meetings or from her abused women’s group, where poor Roseanna was the only one who’d never been battered by a husband. Sometimes when they argued and she felt swamped Roseanna claimed Sabbath was “verbally” abusing her, but that didn’t count for much with her group of predominantly uneducated rural women, who’d had their teeth knocked out or chairs broken over their heads or cigarettes held to their buttocks and breasts. And those words she used! “And afterward there was a discussion and we shared about that particular step. . . .” “I haven’t shared that many times yet. . . .” “Many people shared last night. . . .” What he loathed the way good people loathe fuck was sharing. He didn’t own a gun, even out on the lonely hill where they lived, because he didn’t want a gun in a house with a wife who spoke daily of “sharing.” She hated that he was always bolting out the door without explanation, always leaving at all hours of the day and night, and he hated that artificial laugh of hers that hid both so much and so little, that laugh that was sometimes a bray, sometimes a howl, sometimes a cackle but that never rang with genuine pleasure. She hated his self-absorption and the outbursts about the arthritic joints that had ruined his career, and she hated him, of course, for the Kathy Goolsbee scandal, though had it not been for the breakdown brought on by the disgrace of it she would never have been hospitalized and begun her recovery. And she hated that, because of the arthritis, because of the scandal, because of his being the superior, impossible failure that he was, he earned not a penny and she alone was the breadwinner, but then Sabbath hated that too—that was one of their few points of agreement. They each found it repellent to catch even a glimpse of the other unclothed: she hated his increasing girth, his drooping scrotum, his apish hairy shoulders, his white, stupid biblical beard, and he hated the jogger’s skinny titlessness—ribs, pelvis, sternum, everything that in Drenka was so softly upholstered, skeletonized as on a famine victim. They had remained in the house together all these years because she was so busy drinking that she didn’t know what was going on and because he had found Drenka. That had made for a very solid union.
Driving home from her job at the high school, Roseanna used to think about nothing but the first glass of Chardonnay when she hit the kitchen, a second and third glass while she prepared dinner, a fourth with him when he came in from the studio, a fifth with dinner, a sixth when he went back to his studio with his dessert, and then, the rest of the evening, another bottle all for herself. As often as not, she woke up in the morning as her father used to—still dressed—and in the living room, where the night before she had stretched out on the sofa, glass in hand, the bottle beside her on the floor, to watch the flames in the fireplace. In the mornings, dreadfully hung over, feeling bloated, sweating, full of shame and self-loathing, she never exchanged a word with him, and rarely did they have their coffee together. He took his to the studio and they did not see each other again until dinnertime, when the ritual began anew. At night, though, everybody was happy, Roseanna with her chardonnay and Sabbath off in the car somewhere, going down on Drenka.
Since her “coming into recovery,” all had changed. Now seven nights a week, directly after dinner, she drove off to an AA meeting from which she returned around ten with her clothes stinking of cigarette smoke and her mood decisively serene. Monday evenings there was an open discussion meeting in Athena. Tuesday evenings there was a step meeting in Cumberland, her home group, where she had recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of her sobriety. Wednesday evenings there was a step meeting in Blackwall. She didn’t like that meeting much—tough-guy workers and mental hospital attendants from Blackwall who were so aggressive, angry, and obscene that it made Roseanna, who’d lived until she was thirteen in academic Cambridge, very nervous; but, despite all the angry guys screaming at one another, she went because it was the only Wednesday meeting within fifty miles of Madamaska Falls. Thursdays she went to a closed speaker meeting in Cumberland. Fridays to another step meeting, this one in Mount Kendall. And Saturdays and Sundays there were meetings in both the afternoon—in Athena—and the evening—in Cumberland—and she went to all four. Generally an alcoholic would tell his or her story and then they would choose a discussion topic such as “Honesty” or “Humility” or “Sobriety.” “Part of the recovery principle,” she told him, whether he wished to listen or not, “is that you try to become honest with yourself. We talked a lot about that tonight. To find out what feels comfortable within yourself.” He also didn’t own a gun because of the word comfortable. “Isn’t it tedious feeling so ‘comfortable’? Don’t you miss all the discomforts of home?” “I haven’t found it so yet. Sure, there are drunkalogs where you fall asleep when you listen to them. But what happens with the story format,” she went on, oblivious not merely to his sarcasm but to the look in his eyes of someone who had taken too many sedative pills, “is that you can identify. ‘I can identify with that.’ I can identify with the woman who didn’t drink in bars but sat secretly drinking at home at night and had similar sorts of suffering, and that’s a very comfortable sort of feeling for me. I’m not unique, and somebody else can understand where I’m coming from. People that have long sobriety, that have this aura of inner peace and spirituality—that makes them appealing. Just to sit with them is something. They seem to be at peace with life. That’s inspiring. You can get hope from that.” “Sorry,” mumbled Sabbath, hoping himself to deal her soberalog a deathblow, “can’t identify.” “That we know,” said Roseanna, undaunted, and continued speaking her mind now that she was no longer his drunk. “You hear people at meetings say over and over that their family is what exacerbates everything. At AA you have a more neutral family that is, paradoxically, more loving, more understanding, less judgmental than your own family. And we don’t interrupt each other, which is also different from at home. We call that cross-talk. We don’t use cross-talk. And we don’t tune out. One person talks and everybody listens until he or she is finished. We have to learn not just about our problems but how to listen and to be attentive.” “And is the only way to get off the booze to learn to talk like a second grader?” “As an active alcoholic I compromised myself so horribly hiding alcohol, hiding the disease, hiding the behavior. You have to start all over, yes. If I sound like a second grader, that’s fine with me. You’re as sick as your secrets.” It was not for the first time that he was hearing this pointless, shallow, idiotic maxim. “Wrong,” he told her—as if it really mattered to him what she said or he said or anyone said, as if with their mouthings any of them approached even the borderline of truth—“you’re as adventurous as your secrets, as abhorrent as your secrets, as lonely as your secrets, as alluring as your secrets, as courageous as your secrets, as vacuous as your secrets, as lost as your secrets; you are as human as—” “No. You’re as unhuman, inhuman, and sick. It’s the secrets that prevent you from sitting right with your internal being. You can’t have secrets,” she told Sabbath firmly, “and achieve internal peace.” “Well, since manufacturing secrets is mankind’s leading industry, that takes care of internal peace.” No longer so serene as she would have liked to be, glaring at her beast with the old engulfing hatred, she went off to immerse herself in one of her AA pamphlets while he returned to his studio to read yet another book about death. That’s all he did there now, read book after book about death, graves, burial, cremation, funerals, funerary architecture, funeral inscriptions, about attitudes toward death over the centuries, and how-to books dating back to Marcus Aurelius about the art of dying. That very evening he read about la mort de toi, something with which he had already a share of familiarity and with which he was destined to have more. “Thus far,” he read, “we have illustrated two attitudes toward death. The first, the oldest, the longest held, and the most common one, is the familiar resignation to the collective destiny of the species and can be summarized by the phrase, Et moriemur, and we shall all die. The second, which appeared in the twelfth century, reveals the importance given throughout the entire modern period to the self, to one’s own existence, and can be expressed by another phrase, la mort de soi, one’s own death. Beginning with the eighteenth century, man in western societies tended to give death a new meaning. He exalted it, dramatized it, and thought of it as disquieting and greedy. But he already was less concerned with his own death than with la mort de toi, the death of the other person. . . .”
If they ever happened to be together on a weekend, walking along the half mile of Town Street, Roseanna had a hello for just about everybody passing or driving by—old ladies, delivery boys, farmers, everyone. One day she even waved to Christa, of all people, who was standing in the window of the gourmet shop sipping a cup of coffee. Drenka and his Christa! The same happened when they went to see a doctor or the dentist down in the valley—she knew everybody there, too, from the meetings. “Was the whole county drunk?” Sabbath asked. “Whole country’s more like it,” Roseanna replied. One day in Cumberland she confided that the elderly man who’d just nodded at her when he passed by had been a deputy secretary of state under Reagan—he always came early to meetings so as to make the coffee and put out the cookies for the snack. And whenever she went up to Cambridge to visit Ella overnight—great days, those, for Sabbath and Drenka—she’d return ecstatic about the meeting there, a women’s meeting. “They fascinate me. I’m amazed how competent they seem to be, how accomplished, how self-assured, how well they look. Adjusted. They’re really an inspiration. I go in there and I don’t know anybody and they ask, ‘Anybody from outside?’ and I raise my hand and I say, ‘I’m Roseanna from Madamaska Falls.’ Everybody claps and then if I have a chance to talk, I talk about whatever is on my mind. I tell them about my childhood in Cambridge. About my mother and father and what happened. And they listen. These terrific women listen. The sense of love that I experience, the sense of understanding of my suffering, the sense of great sympathy and empathy. And accepting.” “I understand your suffering. I have sympathy. I have empathy. I’m accepting.” “Oh, yeah, sometimes you ask how did your meeting go, that’s true. I can’t talk to you, Mickey. You wouldn’t understand—you couldn’t understand. You can’t begin to understand it innately, and so it becomes boring and silly to you. Something more to satirize.” “My satire is my sickness.” “I think you liked it better when I was an active drunk,” she said. “You enjoyed the superiority. As if you’re not superior enough, you could look down on me for that, too. I could be responsible for all your disappointments. Your life had been ruined by this fucking disgusting falling-down drunk. One guy the other night was talking about how degraded he became as an alcoholic. He was living then in Troy, New York. On the streets. They, the other drunks, just stuck him in a garbage pail and he couldn’t get out of the garbage pail. He sat there for hours and people would walk by on the streets and wouldn’t care about this human being who was sitting there with his legs scrunched up, in a garbage pail, and who couldn’t get out. And that’s what I was for you when I was drinking. In a garbage pail.” “I can identify with that,” Sabbath said.
Now that she was four years out of the garbage pail, why did she go on with him? Sabbath was surprised by how long it was taking Barbara, the therapist in the valley, to get Roseanna to find the strength to strike out on her own like the competent, accomplished, self-assured women in Cambridge who showered her with so much sympathy for her suffering. But then her problem with Sabbath, the “enslavement,” stemmed, according to Barbara, from her disastrous history with an emotionally irresponsible mother and a violent alcoholic father for both of whom Sabbath was the sadistic doppelgänger. Her father, Cavanaugh, a geology professor at Harvard, had raised Roseanna and Ella after their mother could stand his drinking and his bullying no longer and, in terror of him, abandoned the family to run off to Paris with a visiting professor of Romance languages to whom she remained quite miserably bandaged for five long years before returning alone to Boston, her own birthplace, when Roseanna was thirteen and Ella eleven. She wanted the girls to come live on Bay State Road with her, and shortly after they decided that they would and left their father—of whom they, too, were terrified—and his new second wife, who couldn’t stand Roseanna, he hanged himself in the attic of their Cambridge house. And this explained to Roseanna what she was doing all these years with Sabbath, to whose “domineering narcissism” she had been no less addicted than to alcohol.
These connections—between the mother, the father, and him—were far clearer to Barbara than they were to Sabbath; if there was, as she liked to put it, a “pattern” in it all, the pattern eluded him.
“And the pattern in your life,” Roseanna asked, angrily, “that eludes you, too? Deny till you’re red in the face, but it’s there, it’s there.”
“Deny it. The verb is transitive, or used to be before the eloquence of the blockheads was loosed upon the land. As for the ‘pattern’ governing a life, tell Barbara it’s commonly called chaos.”
“Nikki was a helpless child you could dominate and I was a drunk looking for a savior, who thrived on degradation. Is that not a pattern?”
“A pattern is what is printed on a piece of cloth. We are not cloth.”
“But I was looking for a savior, and I did thrive on degradation. I thought I had it coming to me. Everything in my life was frenzy and noise and mess. Three girls from Bennington living together in New York, with black underwear hanging up and drying everywhere. Boyfriends calling everybody all the time. Men calling. Older men. Some married poet naked in somebody’s room. The place a mess. Never any meals. A perpetual soap opera of angry lovers and outraged parents. And then one day in the street I saw your screwy finger show and we met and you invited me to your workshop for a drink. Avenue B and 9th Street, just by the park. Five flights up and this perfectly still, tiny white room with everything in place and dormer windows. I thought I was in Europe. All the puppets in a row. Your workbench—every tool hanging in place, everything tidy, clean, orderly, in place. Your file cabinet. I couldn’t believe it. How calm and rational and steady-seeming, and yet on the street, performing, it could have been a madman behind that screen. Your sobriety. You didn’t even offer me a drink.”
“I didn’t know. All I knew was that you had your crazy art and that all that mattered to you in the world was your crazy art, that why I had come to New York was for my art, to try to paint and to sculpt, and instead all I had was a crazy life. You were so focused. So intense. The green eyes. You were very handsome.”
“In his thirties, everyone is handsome. What are you doing with me now, Roseanna?”
“Why did you stay with me when I was a drunk?”
Had the moment come to tell her about Drenka? Some moment had come. Some moment had been coming for months now, since the morning he learned that Drenka was dead. For years he had been drifting without any sense of anything being imminent and now not only was the moment galloping toward him but he was rushing into the moment and away from all he’d lived through.
“Why?” Roseanna repeated.
They’d just had dinner and she was off to a meeting, and he was off, after she’d gone, to the cemetery. She was already in her denim jacket, but because she no longer feared the “confrontations” she formerly evaded via the chardonnay, she was not leaving the house until she had forced him, this once, to take seriously their miserable history.
“I am sick of the humorous superiority. I am sick of the sarcasm and the perpetual joke. Answer me. Why did you stay with me?”
“Your paycheck. I stayed,” he said, “to be supported.”
She seemed about to cry, and bit her lip rather than try to speak.
“Come off it, Rosie. Barbara didn’t break the news today.”
“It’s just hard to believe.”
“Doubt Barbara? Next thing you know you’ll be doubting God. How many people are there left in the world, let alone here in Madamaska Falls, with a full understanding of what is going on? It has always been a premise of my life that there are no such people left, and that I am their leader. But to find someone, like Barbara, with a full grasp of what is happening, to discover, out in the sticks, someone with a fairly complete idea of everything, a human being in the largest sense of the word, whose judgment is grounded in the knowledge of life she acquired at college studying psychology . . . what other dark mystery has Barbara helped you to penetrate?”
“Oh, not such a mystery.”
“Tell me anyway.”
“That there may have been real pleasure for you in watching me destroy myself. As you watched Nikki destroy herself. That could have been another inducement to stay.”
“Two wives whose destruction I have had the pleasure of watching. The pattern! But doesn’t the pattern now call for me to enjoy your disappearance as much as I enjoyed Nikki’s? Doesn’t the pattern now call for you to disappear, too?”
“It does; it did. It’s precisely where I was headed four years ago. I was as close to death as I could come. I couldn’t wait for winter. I wanted only to be under the ice of the pond. You were hoping Kathy Goolsbee would put me there. Instead she saved me. Your masochistic student-slut saved my life.”
“And why do I so much enjoy the misery of my wives? I’ll bet it’s because I hate them.”
“You hate all women.”
“Can’t hide a thing from Barbara.”
“Your mother, Mickey, your mother.”
“To blame? My little mother, who went to her death half out of her mind?”
“She’s not ‘to blame.’ She was what she was. She was the first to disappear. When your brother was killed, she disappeared from your life. She deserted you.”
“And that, if I follow Barbara’s logic, that is why I find you so fucking boring?”
“Sooner or later you’d find any woman boring.”
Not Drenka. Never Drenka.
“So when is Barbara planning to have you throw me out?”
This was further along in the confrontation than Roseanna had planned to go just yet. He knew this because she looked suddenly as she had the previous April on Patriots’ Day, when she’d taken her first crack at the Boston Marathon and fainted just beyond the finish line. Yes, the subject of getting rid of Sabbath wasn’t to have come up until she was just a little better prepared to be on her own.
“So for when,” he repeated, “is the date set to throw me out?”
Sabbath watched her come to the decision to abandon the old schedule and tell him “Now.” This necessitated her sitting down and putting her face in her hands, the keys to the car still dangling from one finger. When she looked up again there were tears running down her face—and only that morning he had overheard her telling someone on the phone, maybe even Barbara herself, “I want to live. I’ll do anything it takes to get well, anything. I’m feeling strong and able to give everything to my work. I go off to work and I love every minute of it.” And now she was in tears. “This isn’t the way I wanted it to happen,” she said.
“When is Barbara planning for you to throw me out?”
“Please. Please. You’re talking about thirty-two years of my life! This is not easy at all.”
“Suppose I make it easy. Throw me out tonight,” Sabbath said. “Let’s see if you have the sobriety for it. Throw me out, Roseanna. Tell me to go and never come back.”
“This is not fair of you,” she said, weeping more hysterically than he had seen her weep in years. “After my father, after all that, please don’t say ‘throw me out.’ I cannot hear that.”
“Tell me that if I don’t go you’re calling the cops. They’re probably all pals from AA. Call the state trooper, the innkeeper’s kid, the Balich boy; tell him that you have a family at AA that is more loving, more understanding, less judgmental than your husband and you want him to be thrown out. Who wrote the Twelve Steps? Thomas Jefferson? Well, call him, share with him, tell him that your husband hates women and must be thrown outtt! Call Barbara, my Barbara. I’ll call her. I want to ask her how long you two blameless women have been planning my eviction. You’re as sick as your secrets? Well, for just how long has off-loading Morris been your little secret, dear?”
“I cannot take this! I don’t deserve this! You have no anxiety about relapse—you live in a permanent relapse!—but I do! With great effort and enormous suffering I have reclaimed myself, Mickey. Reclaimed myself from a horrendously devastating and potentially deadly disease. And don’t make a face! If I didn’t tell you my difficulties, you would never know. I say this without self-pity or sentimentality. To get well has taken all my energy and commitment. But I am still in a great state of change. It is still often painful and frightening. And this shouting I cannot stand. I will not stand! Stop it! You are shouting at me like my father.”
“The fuck that’s who I’m shouting at you like! I’m shouting at you like myself!”
“Shouting is irrational,” she cried despairingly. “You cannot think straight if you’re shouting! Nor can I!”
“Wrong! It’s only when I’m shouting that I begin to think straight! It’s my rationality that makes me shout! Shouting is how a Jew thinks things through!”
“What does ‘Jew’ have to do with it? You’re saying ‘Jew’ deliberately to intimidate me!”
“I do everything deliberately to intimidate you, Rosie!”
“But where will you go, if you g You are not thinking. How can you live? You’re sixty-four years old. You don’t have a penny. You cannot go away,” she wailed, “to kill yourself!”
It did not pain him to say “No, you couldn’t endure that, could you?”
And that’s how it happened. Five months after Drenka’s death, that was all it took for him to disappear, to leave Roseanna, to pick up finally and leave their home, such as it was—to get into his car and drive to New York to see what Linc Gelman looked like.
♦ ♦ ♦
Sabbath took the long way to Amsterdam and 76th. He had eighteen hours for a three-and-a-half-hour trip, so instead of driving east for twelve miles to hook up with the turnpike, he decided to cross over Battle Mountain to 92 and then take the back roads and catch the turnpike some forty miles south. That way he could pay a last visit to Drenka. He had no idea where he was going or what he was doing and he did not know if he would visit that cemetery ever again.
And what the hell was he doing? Get off her ass about AA. Ask her about the kids at school. Give her a hug. Take her on a trip. Eat her pussy. It’s no big deal and might turn things around. When she was a rangy aspiring artist fresh out of college living in that flat full of sex-crazed girls, you did it all the time, couldn’t get enough of those long bones of hers encircling your ears. Spirited, open, independent—someone he’d thought not in need of round-the-clock protection, the wonderful new antithesis of Nikki. . . .
She’d been his puppet partner for years. When they met she had sculpted nude figures for six months and painted abstractions for six months and then started doing ceramics and making necklaces, and then, even though people liked them and began buying them, after a year she’d lost interest in the necklaces and begun doing photography. Then through Sabbath she discovered puppets and a use for all her skills, for drawing, sculpting, painting, tinkering, even for collecting bits and pieces of things, squirreling all sorts of things away, which she had always done before but to no purpose. Her first puppet was a bird, a hand puppet with feathers and sequins, nothing like Sabbath’s idea of a puppet. He explained that puppets were not for children; puppets did not say, “I am innocent and good.” They said the opposite. “I will play with you,” they said, “however I like.” She stood corrected, but that didn’t mean that, as a puppetmaker, she ever really stopped looking for the happiness that she’d known at seven, when she still had a Mom and a Dad and a childhood. Soon she was sculpting puppets’ heads for Sabbath, sculpting them out of wood like the old European puppets. Sculpted them, sanded them, painted them beautifully in oil paint, taught herself how to make the eyes blink and the mouths move, sculpted the hands. In her excitement at the beginning she naively told people, “I start with one thing and something else happens. A good puppet makes itself. I just go with it.” Then she went out and bought a machine, the cheapest Singer, read the instructions, and started to design and sew the costumes. Her mother had sewed and Roseanna hadn’t had the slightest interest. Now she was at the machine half the day. All the things people discarded, Roseanna collected. “Whatever you don’t want,” she began telling her friends, “give to me.” Old clothes, stuff off the street, the stuff people cleaned out of closets, it was amazing how she could use everything—Roseanna, recycler of the world. She designed the sets on a big pad, made them, painted them—sets that rolled up, sets that turned like pages—and always fastidiously, for ten and twelve hours a day the most fastidious worker. For her a puppet was a little work of art, but even more, it was a charm, magical in the way it could get people to give themselves to it, even at Sabbath’s theater, where the atmosphere was insinuatingly anti-moral, vaguely menacing, and at the same time, rascally fun. Sabbath’s hands, she said, gave her puppets life. “Your hand is right where the puppet’s heart is. I am the carpenter and you are the soul.” Though she was softly romantic about “art,” high-flown and a bit superficial where he was remorselessly mischievous, they were a team nonetheless, and if never quite aglow with happiness and unity, a team that worked for a long time. A fatherless daughter, she encountered her man so soon, at a time when she was not yet fully exposed to the spikes of the world, that she was never fully exposed to her own mind, and for years and years she did not know what to think without Sabbath to tell her. There was something exotic to her about the amount of life to which he had opened himself while still so young, and that included the loss of Nikki. If she was sometimes the victim of his withering presence, she was too enamored of the withering presence to dare to be a young woman without it. He had been an avid pupil early of the hard lessons, and she innocently saw, no less in his seafaring than in his cleverness and cynicism, a crash course in survival. True, she was always in danger around him, on edge, afraid of the satire, but it was even worse if she wasn’t around him. It wasn’t until she went down in a vomiting stupor in her early fifties and got to AA that she located there, in that language they spoke, in those words she embraced without a shadow of irony, criticism, or even, perhaps, full understanding, a wisdom for herself that wasn’t Sabbath’s skepticism and sardonic wit.
Drenka. One of them is driven to drink and one of them is driven to Drenka. But then, ever since he’d been seventeen he couldn’t resist an enticing whore. He should have married that one in the Yucatán when he was eighteen years old. Instead of becoming a puppet artist he should have become a pimp. At least pimps have a public and make a living and don’t have to go crazy every time they turn on TV and catch sight of the Muppets’ fucking mouths. Nobody thinks of whores as entertainment for kiddies—like puppetry that means anything, whores are meant to delight adults.
Delightful whores. When Sabbath and his best friend, Ron Metzner, hitchhiked up to New York a month after high school graduation and someone in New York told them they could get out of the country without a passport by going down to the Norwegian Seamen’s Center in Brooklyn, young Sabbath had no idea that at the other end there was all that pussy. His sexual experience till then had been feeling up the Italian girls from Asbury and, at every opportunity, masturbating. The way he remembered it now, as a ship approached harbor in Latin America, you got this unbelievable smell of cheap perfume, coffee, and pussy. Whether it was Rio, or Santos, or Bahia, or any of the other South American ports, there was that delicious smell.
The motive, to begin with, was simply to run away to sea. He’d been looking at the Atlantic every morning of his life and thinking, “One day, one day. . . .” It was very insistent, that feeling, and he did not then wholly attach it to a desire to escape his mother’s gloom. He had been looking at the sea and fishing in the sea and swimming in the sea all his life. It seemed to him—if not to his bereft parents a mere nineteen months after Morty’s death—only natural that he should go to sea to get a real education now that obligatory schooling had taught him to read and write. He learned about the pussy the moment he got aboard the Norwegian tramp steamer to Havana and he saw that everybody was talking about it. To the old hands on board the fact that when you got off the ship you would head for the whores was in no way extraordinary, but to Sabbath, at seventeen—well, you can imagine.
As if it weren’t sufficiently exciting to slip by moonlight past the Morro Castle in Havana harbor, as memorable an entrance to a port as any in the world, once they’d tied up he was off the ship and heading straight for the one thing he had never done before. This was in Batista’s Cuba, which was one big American whorehouse and gambling casino. In thirteen years, Castro was going to come down out of the hills and put an end to all the fun, but ordinary seaman Sabbath was lucky enough to get his licks in just in the nick of time.
When he got his merchant mariner documents and joined the union, he could choose his ships. He hung around the union hall and—since he had tasted paradise—waited for the “Romance Run”: Santos, Monte, Rio, and B.A. There were guys who spent their whole lives doing the Romance Run. And the reason, for them as for Sabbath, was whores. Whores, brothels, every kind of sex known to man.
Driving slowly up toward the cemetery, he calculated that he had seventeen dollars in his pocket and three hundred in the joint checking account. At a New York bank he’d have to write a check first thing in the morning. Get the dough out before Rosie did. Had to. She was pulling down a salary check twice a month and it would be a year before he qualified for Social Security and Medicare. His only talent was this idiotic talent with his hands, and his hands were no damn good anymore. Where could he live, how would he eat, suppose he got sick? . . . If she divorced him for desertion, what would he do for medical insurance, where would he get money for his anti-inflammatory pills and for the pills he took to keep the anti-inflammatory pills from burning out his stomach, and if he couldn’t afford the pills, if his hands were in pain all the time, if there was never again to be any relief . . .
He had caused his heart to begin palpitating. The car was nosed into the usual hideaway, a quarter of a mile from Drenka’s grave. All he had to do was to calm down and back out and head home. He wouldn’t have to explain himself. He never did. He could sleep on the sofa and tomorrow resume reveling in his old nonexistence. Roseanna could never throw him out—her father’s suicide wouldn’t permit it, no matter what rewards Barbara promised in the way of inner peace and comfort. As for himself, however hateful life was, it was hateful in a home and not in the gutter. Many Americans hated their homes. The number of homeless in America couldn’t touch the number of Americans who had homes and families and hated the whole thing. Eat her pussy. At night, when she gets in from the meeting. It’ll astonish her. You become the whore. Not as good as having married one, but you’re six years from seventy so do it—eat her for money.
By this time, Sabbath was out of the car and prowling with his flashlight along the road to the cemetery. He had to find out if there was somebody there.
No limousine. Tonight a pickup truck. He was afraid to cross over to look at the plates, in case somebody was at the wheel. Could be just the local boys holding a moonlight circle-jerk up on the hill or sitting around on the tombstones smoking grass. Mostly he’d run into them over in Cumberland, on the checkout line at the supermarket, each with two or three little kids and a little underage wife—who already looks as though life has passed her by—with poor coloring and a pregnant belly pushing a cart piled with popcorn, cheese bugles, sausage rolls, dog food, potato chips, baby wipes, and twelve-inch-round pepperoni pizzas stacked up like money in a dream. Could tell them by the bumper stickers. Some had bumper stickers that read, “Our God Reigns,” some had bumper stickers that read, “If You Don’t Like The Way I Drive Dial 1-800-EAT-SHIT,” some had both. A psychiatrist from the state hospital in Blackwall who ran a private practice a couple of days a week once told Sabbath, who’d asked what it was he treated people for up here in the mountains, “Incest, wife beating, drunkenness—in that order.” And this was where Sabbath had lived for thirty years. Linc had it right: he should never have left after Nikki’s disappearance. Norman Cowan had it right: nobody could blame him for her disappearance. Who remembered it, other than him? Maybe he was headed for New York to confirm, after all this time, that he had no more destroyed Nikki than he had killed Morty.
Nikki—all talent, enchanting talent, and absolutely nothing else. She couldn’t tell her left from her right, let alone add, subtract, multiply, or divide. She could not tell north from south or east from west, even in New York, where she had lived much of her life. She couldn’t bear the sight of ugly people or old people or disabled people. She was afraid of insects. She was afraid to be alone in the dark. If something made her nervous—a yellow-jacket, a Parkinson’s victim, a drooling child in a wheelchair—she’d pop a Miltown, and the Miltown made her a madwoman with a wide, vacant stare and trembling hands. She jumped and cried out whenever a car backfired or someone nearby slammed a door. She knew best how to yield. When she tried to be defiant it was only minutes before she was in tears and saying, “I’ll do anything you want—just don’t go at me like this!” She did not know what reason was; either she was childishly obstinate or childishly submissive. She would startle him by wrapping herself in a towel when she came out of the shower and, if he was in her path, rushing past him for the bedroom. “Why do you do that?” “Do what?” “What you did—hide your body from me.” “I didn’t do any such thing.” “You did, under the towel.” “I was keeping warm.” “Why did you run, as though you didn’t want me to see?” “You’re mad, Mickey, you’re making this up. Why do you have to go at me all the time?” “Why do you act as though your body is ugly?” “I don’t like my body. I hate my body! I hate my breasts! Women shouldn’t have to have breasts!” Yet she could not walk by any kind of reflecting surface without taking a quick look to see if she was as fresh and lovely as in the photos displayed outside the theater. And once she was on the stage the million phobias vanished, all the peculiarities simply ceased to exist. The things that frightened her most about life she could pretend to face in a play with no difficulty at all. She did not know which was stronger, her love of Sabbath or her hatred of him—all she knew for sure was that she could not have survived without his protection. He was her armature, her coat of mail.
In her early twenties, Nikki was already as malleable an actress as a willful director like Sabbath could want. On stage, even just in rehearsal, even standing around and waiting to be given notes, there was not a sign of her jitteriness, all that fidgeting with her ring, the tracing of the fingers around the collar, the tapping on a table with whatever was at hand. She was calm, attentive, tireless, uncomplaining, clear-minded, intelligent. Whatever Sabbath asked of her, minutely pedantic or over the top, she could reproduce on the spot, exactly as he’d imagined it for himself. She was patient with the bad actors and inspired with the good ones. At work she was never discourteous toward anyone, whereas at a department store Sabbath had seen her display a snobbish superiority toward the salesgirl that made him want to slap her face. “Who do you think you are?” he asked her once they were back out on the street. “Why are you going for me now?” “Why treat that girl like shit?” “Oh, she was just a little tramp.” “And who the fuck are you? Your father owned a lumberyard in Cleveland. Mine sold butter and eggs from a truck.” “Why do you dwell on my father? I hated my father. How can you dare bring up my father!” Another of the women in Sabbath’s life who reckoned her father a flop. Drenka’s was a stupid party member whom she scorned for his gullible fidelity. “I can understand if you’re an opportunist—but to be a believer.” Rosie’s was an alcoholic suicide who terrified her, and Nikki’s was a bullying, vulgar businessman to whom cards, taverns, and girls meant rather more than his responsibility to a wife and child. Her father had met her mother when he was in Greece with his parents for the funeral of his grandmother and afterward went traveling around the country by himself, primarily to see what the pussy was like. There he courted his wife-to-be, a bourgeois girl from Salonika, and a few months later he brought her back to Cleveland, where his own father, an even more bullying and vulgar businessman, owned the lumberyard. The old man’s people had been country people, and when he spoke in Greek it was with a terrible village dialect. And the cursing over the phone! “Gamóto! Gamó ti mána sou! Gamó ti panaghía sou!” Fuck it! Fuck your mother! Fuck your Holy Mother! . . . And pinching her behind, his own daughter-in-law! Nikki’s mother fancied herself a poetic young woman, and her philandering husband, the coarse in-laws, provincial Cleveland, the bouzouki music these people loved—all of it drove her mad. She couldn’t have made a bigger mistake than marrying Kantarakis and his horrible family, but at nineteen she was of course in flight from a domineering, old-fashioned father she loathed, and the high-spirited American who made her blush so easily—and, for the first time in her life, come so easily—seemed to her at the time a man called to great things.
Her salvation was the beautiful little Nikoleta. She doted on her. She took her everywhere. They were inseparable. She began to teach Nikki, who was musical, to sing in Greek and English. She read to her aloud and taught her to recite. But still the mother wept every night, and finally she moved with Nikki to New York. To support them, she worked in a laundry, then as a mailroom sorter, and eventually for Saks, first selling hats and, a few years later, as head of the millinery department. Nikki went to the High School of Performing Arts—it was she and her mother against the world until, in 1959, an obscure blood disease abruptly ended her mother’s struggle. . . .
Sabbath made his way parallel to the cemetery’s long stone wall, low to the ground and moving as quietly as he could over the soft earth at the margin of the road. There was somebody in the cemetery. At Drenka’s grave! In jeans—lanky, pigeon-toed, his hair in a ponytail. . . . It was the electrician’s pickup. It was Barrett, whom she’d loved to fuck in the bathtub and lather in the shower. You start at the face and then the chest and the stomach and then you come down to the dick, and that gets big, or it is big already. Yes, it was Barrett’s night to pay his respects to the dead, and he was indeed big already. Sometimes he will lift my legs up and he carries me like that in the shower. Once again Sabbath was searching for a rock. Since he was a good fifteen feet farther from Barrett than he’d been from Lewis, he looked for a light rock that he might have a chance of pitching somewhere near the strike zone. It took time in the dark to locate something the right weight and size, and all the while Barrett stood at the foot of her grave silently beating off. To bean him one right on the cock just as he started to come. Sabbath was trying to gauge the advent of the orgasm by the speed of Barrett’s stroke when he saw a second figure in the cemetery, slowly ascending the hill. In a uniform. The sexton? The uniformed figure moved stealthily, unnoticed and unseen, until he was just about three feet behind Barrett, who was oblivious by now to everything except the impending surge.
Deliberately, almost languidly, the uniformed figure raised his right arm, degree by degree. In the hand he was holding a long object that culminated in a bulge. A flashlight. A drone arose from Barrett, a steady monotonous drone that suddenly terminated in a fanfare of incoherent babble. Sabbath held his fire, but the ecstatic climax turned out to be the cue as well for the man with the flashlight, who brought it down like an ax on Barrett’s skull. There was a muted thud when Barrett hit the ground, then two swift thumps—the young electrician . . . you are somethin’, you are really somethin’ else . . . getting it twice in the balls.
Only when the assailant hopped into his own car—he had slipped it in just behind the pickup—and turned on the engine did Sabbath realize who it was. Out of arrogant, open defiance or plain unquenchable rage, the state trooper’s cruiser pulled away, all lights flashing.