Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

She’ll eat me up alive?

Ah, but we have our revenge, we brilliant baby boys, us plums. You know the joke, of course—Milty, the G.I., telephones from Japan. “Momma,” he says, “it’s Milton, I have good news! I found a wonderful Japanese girl and we were married today. As soon as I get my discharge I want to bring her home, Momma, for you to meet each other.” “So,” says the mother, “bring her, of course.” “Oh, wonderful, Momma,” says Milty, “wonderful—only I was wondering, in your little apartment, where will me and Ming Toy sleep?” “Where?” says the mother. “Why, in the bed? Where else should you sleep with your bride?” “But then where will you sleep, if we sleep in the bed? Momma,, are you sure there’s room?” “Milty darling, please,” says the mother, “everything is fine, don’t you worry, there’ll be all the room you want: as soon as I hang up. I’m killing myself.”

What an innocent, our Milty! How stunned he must be over there in Yokohama to hear his mother come up with such a statement! Sweet, passive Milton, you wouldn’t hurt a fly, would you, tateleh? You hate bloodshed, you wouldn’t dream of striking another person, let alone committing a murder on him. So you let the geisha girl do it for you! Smart, Milty, smart! From the geisha girl, believe me, she won’t recover so fast. From the geisha girl, Milty, she’ll plotz! Ha ha! You did it, Miltaleh, and without even lifting a finger! Of course! Let the shikse do the killing for you! You, you’re just an innocent bystander! Caught in the crossfire! A victim, right, Milt?

Lovely, isn’t it, the business of the bed?

When we arrive at the inn in Dorset, I remind her to slip one of her half-dozen rings onto the appropriate finger. “In public life one must be discreet,” I say, and tell her that I have reserved a room in the name of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Mandel. “A hero out of Newark’s past,” I explain.

While I register, The Monkey (looking in New England erotic in the extreme) roams around the lobby examining the little Vermont gifties for sale. “Arnold,” she calls. I turn: “Yes, dear.” “We simply must take back with us some maple syrup for Mother Mandel. She loves it so,” and smiles her mysteriously enticing Sunday Times underwear-ad smile at the suspicious clerk.

What a night! I don’t mean there was more than the usual body—thrashing and hair-tossing and empassioned vocalizing from The Monkey—no, the drama was at the same Wagnerian pitch I was beginning to become accustomed to: it was the flow of feeling that was new and terrific. “Oh, I can’t get enough of you!” she cried. “Am I a nymphomaniac, or is it the wedding ring?” “I was thinking maybe it was the illicitness of an ‘inn.’” “Oh, it’s something! I feel, I feel so crazy . . . and so tender—so wildly tender with you! Oh baby. I keep thinking I’m going to cry. and I’m so happy !”

Saturday we drove up to Lake Champlain, stopping along the way for The Monkey to take pictures with her Minox; late in the day we cut across and down to Woodstock, gaping, exclaiming, sighing. The Monkey snuggling. Once in the morning (in an overgrown field near the lake shore) we had sexual congress, and then that afternoon, on a dirt road somewhere in the mountains of central Vermont, she said, “Oh, Alex, pull over, now—I want you to come in my mouth,” and so she blew me, and with the top down!

What am I trying to communicate? Just that we began to feel something. Feel feeling! And without any diminishing of sexual appetite!

“I know a poem,” I said, speaking somewhat as though I were drunk, as though I could lick any man in the house, “and I’m going to recite it.”

She was nestled down in my lap, eyes still closed, my softening member up against her cheek like a little chick. “Ah come on,” she groaned, “not now, I don’t understand poems.”

“You’ll understand this one. It’s about fucking. A swan fucks a beautiful girl.”

She looked up, batting her false eyelashes. “Oh, goody.”

“But it’s a serious poem.”

“Well,” she said, licking my prick, “it’s a serious offense.”

“Oh, irresistible, witty Southern belles—especially when they’re long the way you are.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Portnoy. Recite the dirty poem.”

“Porte-noir,” I said, and began:

“Where,” she asked, “did you learn something like that ?”

“Shhh. There’s more:

“Hey!” she cried. “Thighs!”

“That’s it,” I said.

Pause. “Who wrote it?” Snide. “You?”

“William Butler Yeats wrote it,” I said, realizing how tactless I had been, with what insensitivity I had drawn attention to the chasm: I am smart and you are dumb, that’s what it had meant to recite to this woman one of the three poems I happen to have learned by heart in my thirty-three years. “An Irish poet,” I said lamely.

“Yeah?” she said. “And where did you learn it, at his knee? I didn’t know you was Irish.”

“In college, baby.” From a girl I knew in college. Also taught me “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” But enough—why compare her to another? Why not let her be what she is? What an idea! Love her as she is! In all her imperfection—which is, after all, maybe only human!

“Well,” said The Monkey, still playing Truck Driver, “I never been to college myself.” Then, Dopey Southern, “And down home in Moundsville, honey, the only poem we had was ‘I see London, I see France, I see Mary Jane’s underpants.’ ’Cept I didn’t wear no underpants . . . Know what I did when I was fifteen? Sent a lock of my snatch-hair off in an envelope to Marion Brando. Prick didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge receipt.”

Silence. While we try to figure out what two such unlikely people are doing together—in Vermont yet.

Then she says, “Okay, what’s Agamemnon?”

So I explain, to the best of my ability. Zeus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Helen, Paris, Troy . . . Oh, I feel like a shit—and a fake. Half of it I know I’m getting wrong.

But she’s marvelous. “Okay—now say it all again.”

“You serious?”

“I’m serious! Again! But, for Christ’s sake, slow .”

So I recite again, and all this time my trousers are still down around the floorboard, and it’s growing darker on the path where I have parked out of sight of the road, beneath the dramatic foliage. The leaves, in fact, are falling into the car. The Monkey looks like a child trying to master a multiplication problem, but not a dumb child—no, a quick and clever little girl! Not stupid at all! This girl is really very special. Even if I did pick her up in the street!