Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

When I finish, you know what she does? Takes hold of my hand, draws my fingers up between her legs. Where Mary Jane still wears no underpants. “Feel. It made my pussy all wet.”

“Sweetheart! You understood the poem!”

“I spose I deed!” cries Scarlett O’Hara. Then, “Hey, I did! I understood a poem!”

“And with your cunt, no less.”

“My Breakthrough-baby! You’re turning this twat into a genius! Oh, Breakie, darling, eat me,” she cries, thrusting a handful of fingers into my mouth—and she pulls me down upon her by my lower jaw, crying, “Oh, eat my educated cunt!”

Idyllic, no? Under the red and yellow leaves like that?

In the room at Woodstock, while I shave for dinner, she soaks herself in hot water and Sardo. What strength she has stored in that slender frame—the glorious acrobatics she can perform while dangling from the end of my dork! You’d think she’d snap a vertebra, hanging half her torso backward over the side of the bed—in ecstasy! Yi! Thank God for that gym class she goes to! What screwing I am getting! What a deal! And yet it turns out that she is also a human being—yes, she gives every indication that this may be so! A human being! Who can be loved!

But by me?

Why not?

Really?

Why not!

“You know something,” she says to me from the tub, “my little hole’s so sore it can hardly breathe.”

“Poor hole.”

“Hey, let’s eat a big dinner, a lot of wine and chocolate mousse, and then come up here, and get into our two-hundred-year-old bed—and not screw!”

“How you doin’. Arn?” she asked later, when the lights were out. “This is fun, isn’t it? It’s like being eighty.”

“Or eight,” I said. “I got something I want to show you.”

“No. Arnold, no .”

During the night I awakened, and drew her toward me.

“Please,” she moaned, “I’m saving myself for my husband.”

“That doesn’t mean shit to a swan, lady.”

“Oh please, please, do fuck off—”

“Feel my feather.”

“Ahhh,” she gasped, as I stuffed it in her hand. “A Jew –swan! Hey!” she cried, and grabbed at my nose with the other hand. “The indifferent beak! I just understood more poem! . . . Didn’t I ?”

“Christ, you are a marvelous girl!”

That took her breath away. “Oh, am I?”

“Yes!”

“ Am I?”

“Yes! Yes! Yes! Now can I fuck you?”

“Oh, sweetheart, darling,” cried The Monkey, “pick a hole, any hole. I’m yours!”

After breakfast we walked around Woodstock with The Monkey’s painted cheek glued to the arm of my jacket. “You know something,” she said, “I don’t think I hate you any more.”

We started for home late in the afternoon, driving all the way to New York so that the weekend would last longer. Only an hour into the trip, she found WABC and began to move in her seat to the rock music. Then all at once she said, “Ah, fuck that noise,” and switched the radio off.

Wouldn’t it be nice, she said, not to have to go back?

Wouldn’t it be nice someday to live in the country with somebody you really liked?

Wouldn’t it be nice just to get up all full of energy when it got light and go to sleep dog-tired when it got dark?

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a lot of responsibilities and just go around doing them all day and not even realize they were responsibilities?

Wouldn’t it be nice to just not think about yourself for whole days, whole weeks, whole months at a stretch? To wear old clothes and no make-up and not have to come on tough all the time?

Time passed. She whistled. “Wouldn’t that be something?”

“What now?”

“To be grown-up. You know?”

“Amazing,” I said.

“What is?”

“Almost three days, and I haven’t heard the hillbilly routine, the Betty-Boop-dumb-cunt routine, the teeny-bopper bit—”

I was extending a compliment, she got insulted. “They’re not ‘bits,’ man, they’re not routines—they’re me! And if how I act isn’t good enough for you, then tough tittie. Commissioner. Don’t put me down, okay, just because we’re nearing that fucking city where you’re so important .”

“I was only saying you’re smarter than you let on when you act like a broad, that’s all.”

“ Bullshit . It’s just practically humanly im possible for anybody to be as stupid as you think I am!” Here she leaned forward to flip on “The Good Guys.” And the weekend might as well not have happened. She knew all the words to all the songs. She was sure to let me know that. “Yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah.” A remarkable performance, a tribute to the cerebellum.

At dark I pulled into a Howard Johnson’s. “Like let’s eat,” I said. “Like food. Like nourishment, man.”

“Look,” she said, “maybe I don’t know what I am, but you don’t know what you want me to be, either! And don’t forget that!”

“Groovy, man.”

“Prick! Don’t you see what my life is? You think I like being nobody? You think I’m crazy about my hollow life? I hate it! I hate New York! I don’t ever want to go back to that sewer! I want to live in Vermont, Commissioner! I want to live in Vermont with you—and be an adult, whatever the hell that is! I want to be Mrs. Somebody-I-Can-Look-Up-To. And Admire! And Listen To!” She was crying. “Someone who won’t try to fuck-up my head! Oh, I think I love you, Alex. I really think I do. Oh, but a lot of good that’s going to do me!”

In other words: Did I think maybe I loved her? Answer: No. What I thought (this’ll amuse you), what I thought wasn’t Do I love her? or even Could I love her? Rather: Should I love her?

Inside the restaurant the best I could do was say that I wanted her to come with me to the Mayor’s formal dinner party.

“Arnold, let’s have an affair, okay?”

“—Meaning?”

“Oh, don’t be cautious . Meaning what do you think? An affair . You bang just me and I bang just you.”

“And that’s it?”

“Well, sure, mostly. And also I telephone a lot during the day. It’s a hang-up—can’t I say ‘hang-up’ either? Okay—it’s a compulsion . Okay? All I mean is like I can’t help it. I mean I’m going to call your office a lot . Because I like everybody to know I belong to somebody. That’s what I’ve learned from the fifty thousand dollars I’ve handed over to that shrink. All I mean is whenever I get to a job, I like call you up—and say I love you. Is this coherent?”

“Sure.”

“Because that’s what I really want to be: so coherent.

Oh, Breakie, I adore you. Now, anyway. Hey,” she whispered, “want to smell something—something staggering?” She checked to see if the waitress was in the vicinity, then leaned forward, as though to reach beneath the table to straighten a stocking. A moment later she passed her fingertips over to me. I pressed them to my mouth. “My Sin, baby,” said The Monkey, “straight from the pickle barrel . . . and for you! Only you!”

So go ahead, love her! Be brave! Here is fantasy begging you to make it real! So erotic! So wanton! So gorgeous! Glittery perhaps, but a beauty nonetheless! Where we walk together, people stare, men covet and women whisper. In a restaurant in town one night, I overhear someone say, “Isn’t that what’s-her-name? Who was in La Dolce Vita? ” And when I turn to look—for whom, Anouk Aimee?—I find they are looking at us: at her who is with me! Vanity? Why not! Leave off with the blushing, bury the shame, you are no longer your mother’s naughty little boy! Where appetite is concerned, a man in his thirties is responsible to no one but himself! That’s what’s so nice about growing up! You want to take? You take! Debauch a little bit, for Christ’s sake! STOP DENYING YOURSELF! STOP DENYING THE TRUTH!