Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth Page A

conclusion of the service he was in danger of being lynched. Barrett was Drenka’s latest catch from among the workers making repairs around the inn. Last catch. A year younger than her son. He rarely spoke except when the bath was over, and then, with his hick enthusiasm, he would delight Drenka by telling her, “You are somethin’, you are really somethin’ else.” Aside from the youth and the youthful body, what excited Drenka was that he was “a physical man.” “He is not unhandsome,” she told Sabbath. “He has this animal thing that I like. He is like I have a twenty-four-hour fucking service if I want it. His muscles are strong and his stomach is completely flat, and then he has this big dick, and he sweats a lot, there is all this sweat coming out of him, he is all red in his face, and he is like you, he is also, ‘I don’t want to come yet, Drenka, I don’t want to come yet.’ And then he says, ‘Oh my God, I’m coming, I’m coming,’ and then ‘Ohhh. Ohhh,’ those big sounds he makes. And the relief, it’s like they collapse almost. And that he lives in a working-class environment and that I go there—all that adds to the excitement. A little apartment building with horrible horses on the walls. They have two rooms, and the taste is horrible. The other people there are attendants from the insane asylum. The bathroom has one of those old bathtubs that stand on the floor. And I say to him, ‘Turn the bathtub on so I can take a bath.’ I remember one time I came there at noon and I was very hungry and we weregoing to have a pizza. I undressed right away and I run to the bathtub. Yes, I think we get very hot in the bathtub, jerking him a little, you know. You can fuck in the bathtub, and we did, but then the water runs over. What I like is the
way
we are fucking, which is specific to him. He will sort of sit up and, because his prick is big, we sort of sit and fuck that way. We work very hard and there is a lot of sweating, a lot of physical movement, much more than I can think of with anyone else. I love to take baths
and
showers. Part of the excitement is the lathering. The soap. 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. And then you start to fuck. If you’re standing in the shower, you stand up and fuck. Sometimes he will lift my legs up and he carries me like that in the shower. If it’s in the bathtub, then I will tend to sit on top of him and fuck that way. Or I can bend over and he will fuck me. I love the bathtub, to fuck my stupid electrician there. I love it.”
    Her mistake was to take to Barrett the bad news. “You told me,” he said, “you promised me—you weren’t going to complicate everything, and here you go. I’ve got a baby to support, I’ve got a pregnant wife to look after. I got a new business to worry about, and one thing I don’t need right now, from you, me, or anybody, is cancer.”
    Drenka phoned Sabbath and drove immediately to meet him at the Grotto. “You should never have told him,” Sabbath said, seated on the granite outcropping and rocking her in his lap. “But,” she said, crying pitifully, “we’re lovers—I wanted him to know. I didn’t know he was this
shit
.” “Well, if you’d looked at it from the point of view of the pregnant wife, that might have occurred to you. You knew he was stupid. You liked that he was stupid. ‘My stupid electrician.’ It turned you on that he had this animal thing, lived in a horrible place, was stupid.” “But I was talking to him about
cancer
. Even a
stupid
person—” “Shhh. Shhh. Not one, apparently, as stupid as Barrett.”
    Sabbath was completing his mourning—by scattering his seed across Drenka’s oblong patch of Mother Earth—when theheadlights of a car turned off the blacktop and into the wide gravel drive where the hearses ordinarily entered the cemetery. The headlights advanced waveringly and