Sabbath’s Theater (60 page)

Nothing could have been more serious than the attention Rosie gave to Christa’s gorilla coat. It was as though she were not only cleansing her of insects and lice but purifying both of them through this studious contact. All the emotions were invisible, and yet not a lifeless second passed between them. Rosie’s gestures were of such delicacy and precision that they appeared to be in the conscientious service of some pure religious idea. Nothing was going on other than what was going on, but to Sabbath it seemed tremendous. Tremendous. He had arrived at the loneliest moment of his life.

Under his eyes, Christa and Rosie developed complete gorilla personalities—the two of them living in the gorilla dimension, embodying the height of gorilla soulfulness, enacting the highest act of gorilla rationality and love. The whole world was the other one. The great importance of the other body. Their unity: giver the taker, taker the giver, Christa perfectly confident of Rosie’s hands grazing her, a map on which Rosie’s fingers trace a journey of sensual tact. And between them that liquid, intensely wordless gorilla look, the only noises rising from the bed Christa’s chicken-like baby-gorilla clucks of comfort and contentment.

Roseanna Gorilla. I am nature’s tool. I am the fulfiller of every need. If only the two of
them
, husband and wife, had pretended to be gorillas, nothing but gorillas all the time! Instead they had pretended, only too well, to be being human beings.

When the two had had enough, they fell into a laughing embrace, each gave the other a juicy, demonstrably human kiss, and the lights were flicked off at either side of the bed. But before Sabbath could size up the situation and decide what to do next—move on or move in—he heard Rosie and Christa reciting together. A prayer? Of course! “Dear God . . .” Rosie’s nightly AA prayer—he was finally to hear it spoken aloud. “Dear God . . .”

The duet was faultlessly rendered, neither of them groping for either the words or the feeling, two voices, two females, harmoniously interlaced. Young Christa was the ardent one, whereas Roseanna’s recitation was marked by the careful thought that she had clearly given every word. There was in her voice both gravity and mellowness. She had battled her way to that inner peace so
long unattainable; the agony of that childhood—deprivation, humiliation, injustice, abuse—was behind her, and the tribulation of the—for her—inescapable adulthood with a stand-in savage for her father was behind her, and the relief from the pain was audible. Her utterance was quieter and calmer than Christa’s, but the effect was of a communion profoundly absorbed. New beginning, new being, new beloved . . . although, as Sabbath could virtually guarantee her, formed from more or less the same mold as the old beloved. He could envision the letter posted to Hell the day after Christa took off with Roseanna’s mother’s antique silver.
If Mother hadn’t had to run for her life, if I hadn’t had to attend that girls’ school until she returned, if you hadn’t forced me to wear that loden jacket, if you didn’t scream at the housekeepers, if you didn’t
fuck
the housekeepers, if you hadn’t married that monstrous Irene, if you hadn’t written me those crazy letters, if you hadn’t had those disgusting lips and hands that gripped me like a vise . . . Father, you’ve done it
again!
You rob me of a normal relationship with a normal man, you rob me of a normal relationship with a normal woman! You rob me of everything!

“Dear God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following Your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe this. I believe . . .”

In Sabbath their prayer encountered no resistance. If only he could get everything else he detested to leave not so much as a pinhole in his brain. He himself prayed that God was omniscient. Otherwise He wasn’t going to know what the fuck these two were talking about.

“I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. I hope I have that desire in everything I do. I hope I never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this You will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it at the time. Therefore I will trust You always though I may seem to be lost, and in the shadow of death, I will not be afraid because I know You will never leave me to face my troubles alone.”

And here began the bliss. Stirring each other up took no time at
all. These weren’t the cluckings of two contented gorillas Sabbath was overhearing now. The two of them were no longer playing at anything; there was nothing nonsensical any longer about a single sound they made. No need for dear God now. They had taken unto themselves the task of divinity and were laying bare the rapture with their tongues. Amazing organ, the human tongue. Take a good look at it someday. He himself well remembered Christa’s—the muscular, vibrating tongue of the snake—and the awe it inspired in him no less than in Drenka. Amazing all a tongue can say.

A digital clock face, aglow, green, was the sole object Sabbath could discern in the room. It was on the unseen table at the side of the unseen bed that previously had been his side. He believed he still had some of his death books piled there, unless they were in among the clothes dumped in the corner. He felt as though he had been expelled from an enormous cunt whose insides he’d been roaming freely all his life. The very house where he had lived had become a cunt into which he could never insert himself again. This observation, arrived at independently of the intellect, only intensified as the odors that exist only within women wafted out of them and through the opening of the window, where they enveloped the flag-draped Sabbath in the violent misery of everything lost. If irrationality smelled, it would smell like this; if delirium smelled, it would smell like this; if anger, impulse, appetite, antagonism, ego . . . Yes, this sublime stink of spoilage was the smell of everything that converges to become the human soul. Whatever the witches were cooking up for Macbeth must have smelled just like this. No wonder Duncan doesn’t make it through the night.

It seemed for a long while as though they would never be finished and that, consequently, on this hillside, at this window, hidden behind this night, he was to be chained to his ridiculousness forever. They could not seem to find what they needed. A piece or a fragment of something was missing, and they were speaking fluently together, purportedly about the missing piece, in a language consisting entirely of gasps and moans and exhalations and shrieks, a musical miscellany of explosive shrieks.

First one of them seemed to imagine she had found it and the other seemed to imagine
she
had found it, and then, in the voluminous blackness of their house of cunt, in the same immense instant, they landed on it together, and never before had Sabbath heard in any language anything like the speech pouring out of Rosie and Christa upon discovering the whereabouts of that little piece that made the whole picture complete.

In the end, she had been satisfying herself in a way that, were she Drenka, he might have enjoyed. It wasn’t that he felt shut out and tragically abandoned because Roseanna was doing anything that, from another tangent, might not actually have stirred him to fellow feeling. Why should he regard as other than resonant with his own greatest creations her creation of an orgasmic haven apart from him? Roseanna’s roundabout journey had, from all appearances, carried her back to where they’d begun as insatiable lovers hiding from Nikki in his puppet studio. In fact, his entire fantasy of her masturbating was precisely what he’d been conning himself with as a part of his getting ready to go back and try to . . . try to what? To reassert what? To recover what? To reach back into the past for what? For the residue of what?

And that’s when he erupted. When male gorillas get angry, it’s terrifying. The largest and heaviest of the primates, they get angry on a very grand scale. He had not known that he could open his mouth so wide, nor had he ever before realized, even as a puppet performer, what a rich repertoire of frightening noises he was able to produce. The hoots, the barks, the roars—ferocious, deafening—and all the while jumping up and down and pounding his chest and tearing out by the roots the plants growing at the foot of the window, and then dashing to and fro, and at last hammering his crippled fists on the window until the frame gave way and went crashing into the room, where Rosie and Christa were screaming hysterically.

Beating a tattoo on his chest he enjoyed the most. All these years he’d had the chest for it, and all these years he had let it go to waste. The pain in his hands was excruciating but he did not desist. He was the wildest of the wild gorillas. Don’t you dare to
threaten me! Thumping and thumping his large chest. Breaking apart the house.

In the car, he flipped on the headlights and saw that he had frightened the raccoons off as well. They had been out working the garbage cans back of the kitchen. Rosie must have forgotten to latch shut the slatted wooden cover to the rack where the four cans were stored, and though the raccoons were now gone, there was garbage strewn everywhere. That explained the smell of spoilage that, standing outside the window, he had attributed to the women on the bed. He should have known they didn’t have it in ’em.

♦ ♦ ♦

He parked at the entrance to the cemetery, not thirty yards from Drenka’s grave. On the back of a garage repair bill that he dug out of the glove compartment, he composed his will. He worked by the gleam from the dashboard and the overhead lamp. His flashlight batteries had petered out—juice enough for just a pinprick of light, but then, he’d been going on these batteries since she died.

Outside the car the blackness was immense, shocking, a night as challenging to the mind as any he had ever known at sea.

I leave $7,450 plus change (see envelope in jacket pocket) to establish a prize of $500 to be awarded annually to a female member of the graduating class of any of the colleges in the four-college program—500 bucks to whoever’s fucked more male faculty members than any other graduating senior during her undergraduate years. I leave the clothes on my back and in the brown paper bag to my friends at the Astor Place subway station. I leave my tape recorder to Kathy Goolsbee. I leave twenty dirty pictures of Dr. Michelle Cowan to the State of Israel. Mickey Sabbath, April 13,1944.

Ninety-four. He crossed out 44.1929–1994.

On the back of another repair bill he wrote, “My brother’s things are to be buried with me—the flag, the yarmulke, the letters, everything in the carton. Lay me unclothed in the coffin,
surrounded by his things.” He slipped this in with Mr. Crawford’s receipts and marked the envelope “Additional Instructions.”

Now, the note. Coherent or incoherent? Angry or forgiving? Malevolent or loving? High-flown or colloquial? With or without quotations from Shakespeare, Martin Bubet, and Montaigne? Hallmark should sell a card. All the great thoughts he had not reached were beyond enumeration; there was no bottom to what he did not have to say about the meaning of his life. And something funny is superfluous—suicide
is
funny. Not enough people realize that. It’s not driven by despair or revenge, it’s not born of madness or bitterness or humiliation, it’s not a camouflaged homicide or a grandiose display of self-loathing—it’s the finishing touch to the running gag. He would count himself an even bigger washout to be snuffed out any other way. For anybody who loves a joke, suicide is indispensable. For a puppeteer particularly there is nothing more natural: disappear behind the screen, insert the hand, and instead of performing as yourself, take the finale as the puppet. Think about it. There is no more thoroughly amusing way to go. A man who wants to die. A living being choosing death. That’s entertainment.

No note. The notes are a sham, whatever you write.

And so now for the last of last things.

He stepped out of the car into the black granite world of the blind. Unlike suicide, seeing nothing was not amusing, and, proceeding with his arms before him, he felt as old a wreck as his Tiresias, Fish. He tried to picture the cemetery, but his five-month-long familiarity with it did not prevent him from wandering off almost immediately in among the graves. Soon he was breathless from stumbling and falling and getting back to his feet, despite the cautious tiny steps he was taking. The ground was drenched from the day’s heavy rain and her grave was up the hill, and it would be a shame, having come this far, if a coronary beat him to the punch. To die of natural causes would be the unsurpassable insult. But his heart had had enough and would haul the load no more. His heart was not a horse, and it informed him of this, malevolently enough, by kicking him in the chest with its hooves.

So Sabbath ascended unassisted. Imagine a stone carrying itself, and that should give you some idea of how he struggled to reach Drenka’s grave, where, in what was to be his grand farewell to the farfetched, he proceeded to urinate on it. The stream was painfully slow to start, and he was fearful at first that he was asking of himself the impossible and that there was, in him, nothing left of him. He imagined himself—a man who did not get through a night without three trips to the toilet—standing there into the next century, unable to draw a drop of water with which to anoint this sacred ground. Could what was impeding the urine flow be that wall of conscience that deprives a person of what is most himself? What had happened to his entire conception of life? It had cost him dearly to clear a space where he could exist in the world as antagonistically as he liked. Where was the contempt with which he had overridden their hatred; where were the laws, the code of conduct, by which he had labored to be free from their stupidly harmonious expectations? Yes, the strictures that had inspired his buffoonery were taking their vengeance at last. All the taboos that seek to abate our monstrosity had shut his water down.

Perfect metaphor: empty vessel.

And then the stream began . . . a trickle at first, just some feeble dribbling, as when your knife slices open an onion and the weeping consists of a tear or two sliding down either cheek. But then a spurt followed that, and a second spurt, and then a flow, and then a gush, and then a surge, and then Sabbath was peeing with a power that surprised even him, the way strangers to grief can be astounded by the unstoppable copiousness of their river of tears. He could not remember when he had peed like this last. Maybe fifty years ago. To drill a hole in her grave! To drive through the coffin’s lid to Drenka’s mouth! But he might as well try, by peeing, to activate a turbine—he could never again reach her in any way. “I did it!” she cried, “I did it!” And never had he adored anyone more.