Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

watching them jerk off! And the pleasure she then took in telling all she’d learned about lust and what it is for men . . . and the torment all this was to him now. He’d not had the faintest idea that he could feel such distress. “What I enjoyed was to see how they were by themselves. That I could be the observer there, and to see how they played with their dick and how it was formed, the shape of it, and when it became hard, and also the way they held their hand—it turned me on. Everybody jerks their dick differently. And when they abandon themselves into it, when theyallow themselves to abandon themselves, this is very exciting. And to see them come that way. This Lewis guy, he was in his sixties and he’d never jerked off, he said, in front of a woman. And he was sort of holding his hand this way”—she turned her wrist so that the little finger was at the top of her fist and the second knuckle of her thumb at the bottom—“well, to see that particularity of it and, as I say, to see when they get so hot they can’t stop themselves in spite of being shy, that’s very exciting. That’s what I like best—watching them lose control.” The shy ones she would softly suck for a few minutes and then place their hands for them on themselves and help them along until they were safely into it and on their own. Then, beginning lightly to finger herself, she would lean back and look on. When she next saw Sabbath she would demonstrate on him the peculiar “particularity” of each man’s technique. He was tremendously stirred by this . . . and now it made him jealous, maddeningly jealous—now that she was dead he wanted to shake her and shout at her and tell her to stop. “Only me! Fuck your husband when you have to, but otherwise, no one but me!”
    In fact, he didn’t want her to fuck Matija either. Him least of all. On the rare occasions when she used to report those details to Sabbath, too, they had hardly engrossed him, provoked not the slightest erotic interest. Yet now there was barely a night when he was free of the mortifying memory of Drenka allowing her husband to take her like a wife. “Checking Matija in bed, I saw his erection. I was certain he would not act on it without my taking first initiative, so quickly I undressed. I could not get aroused even if I had strong, tender feelings for my husband. Seeing his hard cock, smaller than yours, Mickey, and with a foreskin, which when the skin is pulled down is much redder than yours . . . thinking about the way we had just fucked . . . well, longing for your big, hard dick, it was almost painful. How could I abandon myself to this man who loves me? When he penetrated me, lying on top of me, Matija was moaning louder than I ever recollect. It was almost as if he was crying. Since it never takes him long to come, the whole thing was over soon. After sleeping one or twohours I woke up sick to my stomach. I had to throw up and take some Mylanta.”
    How dare he! What
chutzpah!
Sabbath wanted to murder Matija. And why didn’t I? Why didn’t
we?
Uncircumcised dog! Smite him
thus!
    . . . One brilliantly sunny day back in February, Sabbath had come upon Drenka’s widowered husband up at the Stop & Shop in Cumberland. For the first time that winter it hadn’t snowed in four consecutive days and so, after donning an old knit seaman’s cap in which to swab down the bathroom and kitchen floors and give the house a vacuuming, Sabbath had driven up to Cumberland—blinded much of the way by the light off the gargantuan drifts banked at the side of the road—to do the grocery shopping, one of his weekly household chores. And there was Matija, almost unrecognizable since he’d seen him silent and stone-faced at the funeral. His black hair had gone white, completely white in just the three months. He looked so weak, so slight, his face emaciated—and all of this in just three months! He could have passed for a senior citizen, older even than Sabbath, and he was