Sabbath’s Theater (26 page)

“Look,” he said to her sadly. “The room. Chaos.”

She turned her head. “Sí. Caos.” She breathed deeply—resignation? disgust? If he slipped her the third fifty, would she just slide to her knees as easily as when she prayed? Interesting if she prayed and blew him both at once. Happens a lot in Latin countries.

“
I
made this caos,” Sabbath told her, and when he rubbed the tip of a spoon-shaped thumb across the pockmarked cheeks, she offered no objection. “Me. Por qué? Because I lost something. I could not find something I lost. Comprende?”

“Comprendo.”

“I lost my glass eye. Ojo artificial. This one.” He drew her a little closer and pointed to his right eye. He began to smell her, armpits first, then the rest. Something familiar. It is not lavender. Bahia! “This isn’t a real eye. This is a glass eye.”

“Vidrio?”

“Sí! Sí! Este ojo, ojo de vidrio. Glass eye.”

“Glasseye,” she repeated.

“Glasseye. That’s it. I lost it. I took it out last night to go to sleep, just as I usually do. But because I wasn’t at home, a mi casa, I didn’t put it in the usual place. You follow all this? I am a guest here. Amigo de Norman Cowan. Aquí para el funeral de señor Gelman.”

“No!”

“Sí.”

“El señor Gelman está muerto?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Ohhhhh.”

“I know. But that’s how I come to be here. If he hadn’t died, we two would never have met. Anyhow, I took out my glasseye to sleep, and when I woke up I couldn’t remember where I’d put it. I had to get to the funeral. But could I go to a funeral without an eye? Understand me? I was trying to find my eye and so I opened all the drawers, the desk, the closet”—feverishly he pointed around the room as she nodded and nodded, her mouth no longer grimly set but rather innocently ajar—“to find the fucking eye! Where had it gone? Looking everywhere, going crazy. Loco! Demente!”

Now she was beginning to laugh at the scene he was so slap-shtikishly playing out for her. “No,” she said, tapping him disapprovingly on the thigh, “no loco.”

“Sí! And guess where it was, Rosa? Guess. Dónde was the ojo?”

Sure a joke was on the way, she began shaking her head from side to side. “No sé.”

Here he hopped energetically off the bed and, while
she
now sat on the bed to watch him, he began to mime for her how before going to sleep he popped the eye out of his head and, after looking and finding nowhere to put it—and fearful that someone who came in and saw it on Deborah’s desk, say, would be horrified (this too he mimed for her, making her laugh a beguiling ripple of a girlish laugh)—he just dropped it into his trouser pocket. Then he brushed his teeth (showed her this), washed his face (showed her that), and came back into the bedroom to undress and stupidly—“Estúpido! Estúpido!” he cried, knocking his poor fists against the sides of his head and not even stopping to acknowledge the pain—hung his trousers on a pants hanger in Deborah’s closet. He showed her a pants hanger on which were hanging a pair of Deborah’s wide blue silk pants. Then he showed her how he had turned
his
pants upside down to hang them in the closet and how, of course, the
ojo
had fallen out of the pocket and into one of her running shoes on the floor. “Can you beat that? Into the kid’s zapato! My eye!”

She was laughing so hard she had to squeeze herself with her
arms as though to prevent her belly from splitting open. If you’re going to fuck her, just step up to the bed and fuck her now, man. On Deborah’s bed, the fattest woman you will have ever fucked. One last enormous woman, and then with a clear conscience you can hang yourself. Life won’t have been for nothing.

“Here,” he said and, taking one of her hands in his own, drew it toward his right eye. “Did you ever feel a glasseye before? Go ahead,” he said. “Be gentle, Rosa, but go ahead, feel it. You may not have this chance again. Most men are ashamed of their infirmities. Not me; I love ’em. Make me feel alive. Touch it.”

She shrugged uncertainly. “Sí?”

“Don’t be afraid. It’s all part of the deal. Touch it. Touch it gently.”

She gasped, drawing in her breath as she laid the padded tip of her tiny pointing finger lightly on the surface of his right eye.

“Glass,” he said. “Hundred percent glass.”

“Feel real,” she said and, indicating that it wasn’t so spooky as she first had feared, looked eager to take another poke at the thing. Contrary to appearances, she was not a slow learner. And she was game. They’re all game, if you take your time and use your brains—and aren’t sixty-four years old. The girls! All the girls! It was killing to think about.

“Of course it feels real,” he replied. “That’s because it’s a good one. The best. Mucho dinero.”

Life’s last fuck. Working since she was nine. No school. No plumbing. No money. A pregnant, illiterate Mexican out of some slum somewhere or up from peasant poverty, and weighing about the same as yourself. It couldn’t have ended otherwise. Final proof that life is perfect. Knows where it’s going every inch of the way. No, human life must not be extinguished. No one could come up with anything like it again.

“Rosa, will you be a good soul and clean the room? You
are
a good soul. You weren’t trying to fool me down there praying to Jesus. You were just asking his forgiveness for your leading me into temptation. You just swung right into it the way you were taught. I admire that. I wouldn’t mind somebody like Jesus to
turn to. Maybe he could get me some Voltaren without a prescription. Isn’t that one of his specialties?” He didn’t know precisely what he was saying, because his blood began draining into his boots.

“No comprendo.” But she wasn’t frightened, for while smiling at her, he was barely speaking above a whisper and had weakly settled back down onto the bed.

“Make order, Rosa. Make regularidad.”

“Okay,” she said and began zealously to pick Deborah’s things up off the floor instead of having to do what this madman with the white beard and the crazy fingers and the glass eye—and more than likely a loaded pistol—expected for two lousy fifties.

“Thank you, dear,” said Sabbath woozily. “You’ve saved my life.”

And then, while he was fortunately anchored to the edge of the bed, the vertigo took him by the ears, a shot of bile surged into his throat, and he felt as he had felt riding the waves as a kid after catching a big one too late and it broke over him like the chandelier at Asbury’s palatial Mayfair, the great chandelier that, in dreams he’d been having for half a century, ever since Morty was killed in the war, was tearing loose from its moorings and falling on top of his brother and him as they sat there innocently, side by side, watching
The Wizard of Oz
.

He was dying, had given himself a heart attack by going all out for Rosa’s amusement. Final performance. Will not be held over. Puppet master and prick conclude career.

Rosa was kneeling next to the bed now, stroking his scalp with one of her warm little hands. “Sick?” she asked.

“Low self-esteem.”

“Want doctor here?”

“No, ma’am. Hands hurt, that’s all.” Did they! He assumed at first the pain-riddled fingers were causing him to shake. Then the teeth began to chatter as they had the evening before and he had suddenly to fight with all his fortitude to prevent himself from throwing up. “Mother?” No answer. Her silent act again. Or was she not there? “Mama!”

“Su madre? Dónde, señor?”

“Muerto.”

“Hoy?”

“Sí. This morning. Questo auroro. Aurora?” Italian again. Italy again, the Via Veneto, the peaches, the girls!

“Ah, señor, no, no.”

She kindly supported his hairy cheeks with her hands, and when she pulled him to her mountainous bosom, he let her; he’d let her take the pistol out of his pocket, if he had one, and shoot him right between the eyes. She could plead self-defense. Rape. He had a harassment record a mile long already. They’d string him up by his feet outside NOW. Roseanna would see they did it to him the way they’d done it to Mussolini. And cut off his prick, for good measure, like that woman who’d used a kitchen knife twelve inches long to slice the cock off her sleeping husband, an ex-Marine and a violent bastard, for fucking her up the ass down in Virginia. “You wouldn’t do that to me, darling, would you?” “I would,” said R. obligingly, “if you had one.” She and all her progressive friends in the valley couldn’t stop talking about this case. Roseanna didn’t seem anything like so upset by it as she was by circumcision. “Jewish barbarism,” she told him after attending the
bris
of a friend’s grandson in Boston. “Indefensible. Disgusting. I wanted to walk out.” Yet the woman who’d cut off her husband’s cock seemed, from the excitement with which Roseanna spoke of her, to have become a heroine. “Surely,” Sabbath suggested, “she could have registered her protest another way.” “How? Dial 911? Try it and see where it gets you.” “No, no, not 911. That’s not justice. No, stick something unpleasant up
his
ass. One of his pipes, say, if he happens to be a smoker. Maybe even one that was lit. If he is not a smoker, then she could shove a frying pan up his ass. A rectum for a rectum. Exodus 21:24. But cutting his dick off—really, Rosie, life isn’t just a series of pranks. We are no longer schoolgirls. Life is not just giggling and passing notes. We are women now. It’s a serious business. Remember how Nora does it in
A Doll’s House
? She doesn’t cut off Torvald’s dick—she walks out the fucking door. I don’t believe you necessarily
have to be a nineteenth-century Norwegian to walk out a door. Doors continue to exist. Even in America they are still more plentiful than knives. Only doors take guts to walk out of. Tell me, have you ever wanted to cut my dick off in the middle of the night as an amusing way of settling scores?” “Yes. Often.” “But why? What did I ever do, or fail to do, to give you an idea like that? I don’t believe I ever once entered your anus without a prescription from the doctor and written permission from you.” “Forget it,” she said. “I don’t know that it’s a good idea for me to forget it now that I know it. You have really had thoughts about taking a knife—” “A scissors.” “A scissors and cutting off my cock.” “I was drunk. I was angry.” “Oh, that was just Chardonnay talking tough back in the bad old days. So what about today? What would you like to cut off now that you’re ‘in sobriety’? What does Bill W. suggest? I offer my hands. They’re no fucking good anyway. I offer my throat. What is the overpowering symbolism of the penis for you people? Keep this up and you’ll make Freud look good. I don’t understand you and your friends. You stage a sit-down strike in the middle of Town Street every time the road crew goes near the limb of a sacred maple tree, you throw your bodies in front of every twig, but when it comes to this unfortunate incident, you’re all gung ho. If the woman had gone outside and sawed down his favorite elm for revenge, this guy might have had a chance with you all. Too bad he wasn’t a tree. One of those irreplaceable redwoods. The Sierra Club would have been out in force. She would have had her head handed to her by Joan Baez. A redwood? You mutilated a redwood? You’re as bad as Spiro Agnew! You’re all so merciful and tender, against the death penalty even for serial killers, judging poetry contests for degenerate cannibals in maximum-security prisons. How could you be so horrified about napalming the Communist enemy in Southeast Asia and so happy about this ex-Marine having his dick cut off right here in the USA? Cut mine off, Roseanna Cavanaugh, and I bet you ten to one, a hundred to one, you’re back on the booze tomorrow. Cutting off a dick isn’t as easy as you think. It isn’t just snip, snip, snip, like you’re
darning a sock. It isn’t just chop, chop, chop, like you’re mincing an onion. It isn’t an onion. It’s a human dick. It’s full of blood. Remember Lady Macbeth? They didn’t have AA in Scotland, and so the poor woman went off her rocker. ‘Who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?’ ‘Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’ She flips out—Lady Powerhouse Macbeth! So what’s going to happen to you? That woman in Virginia
is
a heroine—as well as a despicable human being. But you don’t have the guts, darling. You’re just a schoolteacher in the sticks. We’re talking about evil, Rosie. The worst you could do in life was become a wino. What the fuck’s a wino? A dime a dozen. Any drunk can become a drunk. But not everybody can cut off a dick. I don’t doubt that this splendid woman has given encouragement to dozens of other splendid women all around the country, but personally I don’t think you’ve got anything like what it takes to get down there and do it. You’d vomit if you had to swallow my come. You told me that long ago. Well, how do you think you’d like to perform surgery on your loving husband without an anesthetic?” “Why not wait and see?” said Roseanna with a smile. “No. No. Let’s not wait. I’m not going to live forever. I’ll be seventy the day after tomorrow. And then you’ll have missed your big chance to prove how courageous you are. Cut it off, Roseanna. Pick a night, any night. Cut it off. I dare you.”

And wasn’t that what he had run from and why he was here? There was a mammoth scissors in the utility closet. There was a much smaller scissors, shaped like a heron, in her sewing kit and an ordinary-size one with orange plastic handles in her middle desk drawer. There was a hedge clipper out in her potting shed. For weeks, ever since this case had begun to obsess her, he had been thinking of throwing them all in the woods up at Battle Mountain when he went at night to visit Drenka’s grave. Then he remembered that her art classes were full of scissors; every kid had a pair, for cutting and pasting. And then the jury in Virginia declares this woman innocent on grounds of temporary insanity.
She went crazy for two minutes. Just about how long it took Louis to knock out Schmeling in that second fight. Barely enough time to cut it off and throw it away, but she managed, she did it—shortest insanity in world history. A record. The old one-two, and that’s it. Roseanna and the peaceniks were on the phone all morning. They thought it was a great decision. That was enough warning for him. Great day for women’s liberation but a black day for the Marine Corps and Sabbath. He would never sleep in that house of scissors again.