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

shopping. The place, Flo ’n Bert’s, was dark, with dirty, worn wooden floors, undusted shelves largely empty of goods, and the most wretched potatoes and bananas Sabbath had ever seen for sale anywhere. But Flo ’n Bert’s, grisly mortuarythough it was, smelled exactly like the old grocery in the basement of the LaReine Arms, a block away from their house, where Sabbath used to go first thing every morning to get two fresh rolls for his mother so she could make Morty sandwiches to take to his high school for lunch—cream cheese and olive, peanut butter and jelly, but mainly canned tuna, the sandwiches double-wrapped with wax paper and stuffed in the paper bag from the LaReine Arms. Each week, after Stop & Shop, Sabbath walked around Flo ‘n Bert’s with his coffee container in his hand, trying to figure out what the ingredients were that went into that smell, which was also like something he smelled up at the Grotto in late autumn, after the fallen leaves and the dying underbrush had been dampened down by the rains and begun to rot. Maybe it was that: damp rot. He loved it. The coffee that he had to drink there was undrinkable but he could never resist the pleasure of that smell.
    Sabbath stationed himself outside the door to Stop & Shop and, when Balich emerged carrying a plastic bag in either hand, he said, “Mr. Balich, how about a hot cup of coffee?”
    “Thank you, sir, no.”
    “Come on,” said Sabbath good-naturedly, “why not? It’s ten degrees out here.” Should he convert that into Celsius for him, as he would for Drenka when she telephoned, before going up to the Grotto, to ask what it
really
was outside? “There’s a place down the hill. Follow me. The Chevy. A cup of coffee to warm you up.”
    Leading Balich’s car between the one-story-high snowbanks and across the railroad tracks agleam from the frost, Sabbath had to admit that he had no idea what he was planning to do. All he could think of was this guy daring to lie across his Drenka, moaning with pleasure as though he were crying, penetrating her with a dog-red cock that afterward made her throw up.
    Yes, it was time that he and Balich met—to go through life without meeting him face-to-face would be making life too easy for himself. He would long ago have died of boredom without his extensive difficulties.
    The putrid coffee was poured from the Silex by a sullen, stupidgirl in her late teens who had been a sullen, stupid girl in her late teens ever since Sabbath had begun dropping in to smell Flo ’n Bert’s some fifteen years back. Maybe they were all from the same family, daughters of Flo and Bert who successively grew into the job, or maybe, more likely, there was an inexhaustible supply of these girls turned out by the Cumberland school system. On-the-prowl, insinuating, unselective Sabbath had never been able to get anything more than a grunt out of any of them.
    Involuntarily Balich made a face when he tasted the coffee—which turned out to be about as cold as the day—but politely said, “Oh no, very good, but one is enough,” when Sabbath asked if he’d like a second cup.
    “It has not been easy for you without your wife,” Sabbath said. “You look very thin.”
    “These have been dark days,” Balich replied.
    “Still?”
    He nodded sadly. “It’s awful still. I’m right at the bottom. After thirty-one years, I’m in my third month of a new regime. Somehow in some ways every day it gets worse.”
    That it does. “And your son?”
    “He’s in a bit of a state of shock too. He misses her terribly. But he’s young, he’s strong. Sometimes, his wife tells me, in the dark hours of the night . . . but he seems to be coping.”
    “That’s good,” Sabbath said. “That is about the strongest bond in the world, the mother and the little boy. There couldn’t be anything stronger.”
    “Yes, yes,” said Balich, his soft gray eyes growing teary from talking to somebody so understanding. “Yes, and when I looked at