Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth Page B

then they were out and the quiet engine went dead. Zipping up his trousers, Sabbath scurried, bent over, toward the nearest maple tree. There, on his knees, he hid his white beard between the massive tree trunk and the old stone wall. He could discern from the silhouette of the car—more or less the shape and the size of a hearse—that it was a limousine. And a figure was marching steadily up in the direction of Drenka’s grave, tall, in a large overcoat, and wearing what looked to be high boots. He was guiding himself by the beam of a flashlight that he kept switching on and off. In the hazy half-dark of the moonlit cemetery he looked gigantic bounding forward on those boots. He must have been expecting cold weather up here. He must be from—it was the credit-card magnate! It was Scott!
    Six feet five inches tall. Scott Lewis. Five-foot two-inch Drenka had smiled up at him in an elevator in Boston and asked if he knew the correct time. It took only that. She used to sit on his dick in the backseat of the limo while the driver took a slow tour of the suburbs, driving sometimes past Lewis’s own house. Scott Lewis was one of those men who told Drenka that there was no other woman like her in the world. Sabbath had heard him say it from the telephone of the limousine.
    “He is very interested in my body,” she reported promptly to Sabbath. “He wants to take photographs and he wants to look at me and he wants to kiss me all the time. He is a big cunt licker— and very tender.” Yet, tender fellow that he was, the second evening she rendezvoused with him at a Boston hotel, a call girl Lewis had ordered came knocking at their door only ten minutes after Drenka’s arrival. “What I didn’t like about it,” Drenka told Sabbath on the phone the next morning, “was that I didn’t have a
say
in it, that it was just put upon me.” “So what did you do about it?” “I just had to make the best of it, Mickey. She comes to the hotel room dressed like an upper-class whore. She pulls open her bag and she has all these things in there. Do you want a littlemaid’s uniform? Do you want it Indian style? And then she takes out her dildos and she says, ‘Do you like this or that?’ And then, okay, now you start. But how do you get aroused by that? That was kind of hard even for me. Anyway, I guess we sort of got started. The idea was that the guy was more the voyeur. Interested in seeing how two women do it. He asked her mostly to go down on me. It all seemed to me so technical and cold, but I decided, okay, I’m going to be game for it. So eventually I did some work and I was able to get excited by it. But finally I fucked more Lewis—we two were fucking while she was just sort of in the picture somewhere. After he came, I started kissing her pussy, but it was very dry, though after a while she started moving a little bit and that then became sort of my mission. Could I make a whore hot? I think maybe I did to some extent, but it was hard to know if she wasn’t just playing it. You know what she said to me? To
me?
She says, when we’re all getting dressed, ‘You’re very hard to make come!’ She was
angry
. ‘The husbands want me to do this all the time’—she thought we were husband and wife—‘but you took unusually hard work.’ Husbands and wives are very common, Mickey. The whore said that’s what she does all the time.” “That’s difficult for you to believe?” he asked. “You mean,” she replied, laughing happily, “everybody is crazy like us?” “Crazier,” Sabbath assured her, “much, much crazier.”
    Drenka called Lewis’s erection “the rainbow” because, as she liked to explain, “His dick is rather long and sort of curved. And there is a little bend to it, to one side.” On Sabbath’s instruction she had traced its outline on a piece of paper—Sabbath still had the drawing somewhere, probably in among those dirty pictures of her that he had not been able to look at since her