Roth recall: Mickey Sabbath visits the treatment center

Mickey Sabbath visits the treatment center to see to his wife Roseanna two weeks after he had her committed. Roseanna is an alcoholic of some long standing, but what pushed her latest, most strident episode of the suicidal variety, was the tape recording of 64 year old Mickey phone fucking a 20 year old college student of his, Kathy. The tape wound up in the dean’s office, and then found its way to a local phone bank where anyone calling could listen to the half hour aural grindfest.

Our hero, Mickey Sabbath, finds a radiant Roseanna, healthy and bright two weeks clean. She shows him around the hospital and grounds, has lunch with him in the cafeteria, and then he waits in Roseanna’s room while she gives her first “I’m an alcoholic” speech. In her room he finds her journal, where she has been recording memories of her drunken father. She writes vague notes and then more descriptive notes, and then finally a letter to the long dead (by suicide) father. Sabbath, in his own hand, in the same notebook, composes a note from Roseanna’s father to her, complaining of her truculence and distance, and signs off as “Your father in Hell, Dad.”

Out and about he stumbles across nurses taking nightly blood pressure of the interned, and with an outbound patient he starts to bet on the spread of the results. At one point a 29 year old fox, Madeline, a patient, engages him in a discussion on the merits of the hospital, life, and mental health. Sabbath is asked to leave, and he waits for Madeline. He asks for her help in finding his wife, flirts with her, hits on her, asks her to his car, and she assents provided he secures a quart of vodka.