Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

“She wants to know,” said The Monkey, after Lina had spoken a second time, “where the signore would like her to begin.” “The signore ,” said I, “wishes her to begin at the beginning . . .” Oh, very witty that reply, very nonchalant indeed, only we continue to sit there motionless, me and my hard-on, all undressed and no place to go. Finally it is The Monkey who sets our lust in motion. She moves across to Lina, above whom she towers (oh God, isn’t she enough? isn’t she really sufficient for my needs? how many cocks have I got?), and puts her hand between the whore’s legs. We had imagined it beforehand in all its possibilities, dreamed it all out loud for many many months now, and yet I am dumbstruck at the sight of The Monkey’s middle finger disappearing up into Lina’s cunt.

I can best describe the state I subsequently entered as one of unrelieved busy-ness . Boy, was I busy! I mean there was just so much to do. You go here and I’ll go there—okay, now you go here and I’ll go there—all right, now she goes down that way, while I head up this way, and you sort of half turn around on this . . . and so it went, Doctor, until I came my third and final time. The Monkey was by then the one with her back on the bed, and I the one with my ass to the chandelier (and the cameras, I fleetingly thought)-and in the middle, feeding her tits into my Monkey’s mouth, was our whore. Into whose hole, into what sort of hole, I deposited my final load is entirely a matter for conjecture. It could be that in the end I wound up fucking some dank, odoriferous combination of sopping Italian pubic hair, greasy American buttock, and absolutely rank bedsheet. Then I got up, went into the bathroom, and, you’ll all be happy to know, regurgitated my dinner. My kishkas . Mother—threw them right up into the toilet bowl. Isn’t that a good boy?

When I came out of the bathroom. The Monkey and Lina were lying asleep in one another’s arms.

The Monkey’s pathetic weeping, the recriminations and the accusations, began immediately after Lina had dressed and departed. I bad delivered her into evil. “ Me? You’re the one who stuck your finger up her snatch and got the ball rolling! You kissed her on the fucking lips—!” “Because,” she screamed, “if I’m going to do something, then like I do it! But that doesn’t mean I want to!” And then. Doctor, she began to berate me about Lina’s tits, how I hadn’t played with them enough. “All you ever talk about and think about is tits! Other people’s tits! Mine are so small and everybody else’s in the world you see are so huge—so you finally get a pair that are tremendous , and what do you do? Nothing! ” “Nothing is an exaggeration, Monkey—the fact of the matter is that I couldn’t always fight my way past you—” “I am not a lesbian! Don’t you dare call me a lesbian! Because if I am, you made me one!” “Oh Jesus, no— I” “I did it for you, yes—and now you hate me for it!” “Then we won’t do it again, for me , all right? Not if this is the fucking ridiculous result!”

Except the next night we got each other very steamed up at dinner—as in the early days of our courtship, The Monkey retired at one point to the ladies’ room at Ranieri’s and returned to the table with a finger redolent of pussy, which I held beneath my nose to sniff and kiss at till the main dish arrived—and after a couple of brandies at Doney’s, accosted Lina once again at her station and took her with us to the hotel for round two. Only this time I relieved Lina of her undergarments myself and mounted her even before The Monkey had come back into the bedroom from the john. If I’m going to do it, I thought. I’m going to do it! All the way! Everything! And no vomiting, either! You’re not in Weequahic High School any more! You’re nowhere near New Jersey!

When The Monkey stepped out of the bathroom and saw that the ball game was already under way, she wasn’t entirely pleased. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her little features smaller than I had ever seen them, and declining an invitation to participate, silently watched until I had had my orgasm and Lina had finished faking hers. Obligingly then—sweetly, really—Lina made for between my mistress’ long legs, but The Monkey pushed her away and went off to sit and sulk in a chair by the window. So Lina—not a person overly sensitive to interpersonal struggle—lay back on the pillow beside me and began to tell us all about herself. The bane of existence was the abortions. She was the mother of one child, a boy, with whom she lived on Monte Mario (“in a beautiful new building,” The Monkey translated). Unfortunately she could not manage, in her situation, any more than one—“though she loves children”—and so was always in and out of the abortionist’s office. Her only precautionary device seemed to be a spermicidal douche of no great reliability.

I couldn’t believe that she had never heard of either the diaphragm or the birth-control pill. I told The Monkey to explain to her about modern means of contraception that she could surely avail herself of, probably with only a little ingenuity. I got from my mistress a very wry look. The whore listened but was skeptical. It distressed me considerably that she should be so ignorant about a matter pertaining to her own well-being (there on the bed with her fingers wandering around in my damp pubic hair): That fucking Catholic church, I thought . . .

So, when she left us that night, she had not only fifteen thousand of my lire in her handbag, but a month’s supply of The Monkey’s Enovid—that I had given to her.

“Oh, you are some savior!” The Monkey shouted, after Lina had left.

“What do you want her to do—get knocked up every other week? What sense does that make?”

“What do I care what happens to her! ” said The Monkey, her voice turning rural and mean. “ She’s the whore! And all you really wanted to do was to fuck her! You couldn’t even wait until I was out of the john to do it! And then you gave her my pills!”

“And what’s that mean, hub? What exactly are you trying to say? You know, one of the things you don’t always display, Monkey, is a talent for reason. A talent for frankness, yes—for reason, no!”

“Then leave me! You’ve got what you wanted! Leave!”

“Maybe I will!”

“To you I’m just another her , anyway! You, with all your big words and big shit holy ideals and all I am in your eyes is just a cunt—and a lesbian!—and a whore!”

Skip the fight. It’s boring. Sunday: we emerge from the elevator, and who should be coming through the front door of the hotel but our Lina—and with her a child of about seven or eight, a fat little boy made out of alabaster, dressed all in ruffles and velvet and patent leather. Lina’s hair is down and her dark eyes, fresh from church, have a familiarly Itahan mournful expression. A nice-looking person really. A sweet person (I can’t get over this!). And she has come to show off her bambino ! Or so it looks.

Pointing to the little boy, she whispers to The Monkey, “ Molto elegante, no? ” But then she follows us out to our car, and while the child is preoccupied with the door-man’s uniform, suggests that maybe we would like to come to her apartment on Monte Mario this afternoon and all of us do it with another man. She has a friend, she says—mind you, I get all this through my translator—she has a friend who she is sure, she says, would like to fuck the signorina . I can see the tears sliding out from beneath The Monkey’s dark glasses, even as she says to me, “Well, what do I tell her, yes or no?” “No, of course. Positively not.” The Monkey exchanges some words with Lina and then turns to me once again: “She says it wouldn’t be for money, it would just be for—”