Free Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth Page B

paid twenty-five dollars a week. For two months, on Wednesday nights, Drenka and Sabbath would go, in separate cars, to lie with Christa in the attic. Nothing was open on Town Street after dark, and they could get up unobserved to Christa’s by an outside back staircase. Three times Drenka had been by herself to see Christa there but, fearful that Sabbath would be angry with her if he knew, she did not tell him until a year after Christa had turned against the two of them and moved out to the countryside, into the rented farmhouse of a history instructor on the Athena faculty, a woman of thirty with whom Christa had begun a love affair even before she had undertaken her little caprice with the elderly. Abruptly she stopped answering Sabbath’s phone calls, and when he ran into her one day—while he pretended to be studying the window display of the gourmet shop, a display which hadn’t changed since Tip-Top Grocery Company had evolved in the late sixties into Tip-Top Gourmet Company to accommodate the ardor of the times—she said to him angrily, her mouth so minute it looked like something omitted from her face,“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” “Why? What happened?” “You two exploited me.” “I don’t think that’s true, Christa. To exploit someone means to use someone selfishly for one’s own ends or to utilize them for profit. I don’t think either of us exploited you any more than you exploited either of us.” “You’re an old man! I am twenty years old! I do not want to talk to you!” “Won’t you at least talk to Drenka?” “Leave me alone! You’re nothing but a fat old man!” “So was Falstaff, kiddo. So was that huge hill of flesh Sir John Paunch, sweet creator of bombast! ‘That villainous abominable misleader of youth, Falstaff, that old white-bearded Satan’!—” but she was by this time already into the shop, leaving Sabbath to sadly contemplate—along with a Christaless future—two jars of Mi-Kee Chinese Duck Sauce, two jars of Krinos Grape Leaves in Brine, two cans of La Victoria Refried Beans, and two cans of Baxter’s Cream of Smoked Trout Soup, all of them encircling a bottle fancily wrapped in a sunfaded whitish paper shroud and positioned on a pedestal at the center of the window as if it were the answer to all our cravings, a bottle of Lea & Perrins Worcestershire Sauce. Yes, a relic much like Sabbath himself of what was considered oh-so-spicy in a bygone era less . . . in a bygone era more . . . in a bygone era when . . . in a bygone era whose . . . Idiot! The mistake was never to have given her money. The mistake was to have given Drenka the money instead. All he’d slipped Christa—and this only to get a foot in the door the first time—was thirty-five dollars for a quilt she’d made. He should have been slipping her that much per week. To have imagined that Christa was in it for the fun of making Drenka crazy, that Drenka’s coming was for her remuneration enough—idiot! idiot!
    Sabbath and Christa had met one night in 1989 when he’d given her a lift home. He saw her out on the shoulder of 144, wearing a tuxedo, and he circled back. If she had a knife, she had a knife—did it matter living a few years more or less? It was impossible to leave standing all alone on the side of the road with her thumb lifted a young blond girl in a tuxedo who looked like a young blond boy in a tuxedo.
    She explained her outfit by saying she had been to a dance down in Athena, at the college, where you were to come wearing “something crazy.” She was petite but hardly childlike—more a miniaturized woman, with a very crisp, self-confident air about her and a tightly held little mouth. The German accent was gentle but inflammatory (for Sabbath, any attractive woman’s accent was inflammatory), the haircut was short as a Marine recruit’s, and the tuxedo suggested that she was not without the inclination to play a provocative role in life. Otherwise the kid was all