Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

“Okay,” says The Monkey in the taxi, “what’s bugging you, Max?”

“Nothing.”

“You hate the way I look.”

“Ridiculous.”

“Driver—Peck and Peck!”

“Shut up. Gracie Mansion, driver.”

“I’m getting radiation poisoning, Alex, from what you’re giving off.”

“I’m not giving off shit! I’ve said nothing .”

“You’ve got those black Hebe eyes, man, they say it for you. Tutti !”

“Relax, Monkey.”

“ You relax!”

“I am!” But my manly resolve lasts about a minute more. “Only for Christ’s sake,” I tell her, “don’t say cunt to Mary Lindsay!”

“ What ?”

“You heard right. When we get there don’t start talking about your wet pussy to whoever opens the door! Don’t make a grab for Big John’s shlong until we’ve been there at least half an hour, okay?”

With this, a hiss like the sound of air brakes rises from the driver—and The Monkey heaves herself in a rage against the rear door. “I’ll say and do and wear anything I want! This is a free country, you uptight Jewish prick!”

You should have seen the look given us upon disembarking by Mr. Manny Schapiro, our driver. “Rich joik-offs!” he yells. “Nazi bitch!” and burns rubber pulling away.

From where we sit on a bench in Carl Schurz Park, we can see the lights in Gracie Mansion; I watch the other members of the new administration arriving, as I stroke her arm, kiss her forehead, tell her there is no reason to cry, the fault is mine, yes, yes, I am an uptight Jewish prick, and apologize, apologize, apologize.

“—picking on me all the time—in just the way you look at me you pick on me, Alex! I open the door at night, I’m so dying to see you, thinking all day long about nothing but you, and there are those fucking orbs already picking out every single thing that’s wrong with me! As if I’m not insecure enough, as if insecurity isn’t my whole hang-up, you get that expression all over your face the minute I open my mouth—I mean I can’t even give you the time of the day without the look : oh shit, here comes another dumb and stupid remark out of that brainless twat. I say, ‘It’s five to seven,’ and you think, ‘How fucking dumb can she be!’ Well, I’m not brainless, and I’m not a twat either, just because I didn’t go to fucking Harvard! And don’t give me any more of your shit about behaving in front of The Lindsays . Just who the fuck are The Lindsays? A God damn mayor, and his wife! A fucking mayor! In case you forget, I was married to one of the richest men in France when I was still eighteen years old —I was a guest at Aly Khan’s for dinner, when you were still back in Newark, New Jersey, finger-fucking your little Jewish girl friends!”

Was this my idea of a love affair, she asked, sobbing miserably. To treat a woman like a leper?

I wanted to say, “Maybe then this isn’t a love affair. Maybe it’s what’s called a mistake. Maybe we should just go our different ways, with no hard feelings.” But I didn’t! For fear she might commit suicide! Hadn’t she five minutes earlier tried to throw herself out the rear door of the taxi? So suppose I had said, “Look, Monkey, this is it”—what was to stop her from rushing across the park, and leaping to her death in the East River? Doctor, you must believe me, this was a real possibility—this is why I said nothing; but then her arms were around my neck, and oh, she said plenty. “I love you, Alex! I worship and adore you! So don’t put me down, please! Because I couldn’t take it! Because you’re the very best man, woman, or child I’ve ever known! In the whole animal kingdom! Oh, Breakie, you have a big brain and a big cock and I love you!”

And then on a bench no more than two hundred feet from The Lindsays mansion, she buried her wig in my lap and proceeded to suck me off. “Monkey, no ,” I pleaded, “ no ,” as she passionately zipped open my black trousers, “there are plainclothesmen everywhere!”—referring to the policing of Gracie Mansion and its environs. “They’ll haul us in, creating a public nuisance—Monkey, the cops—” but turning her ambitious lips up from my open fly, she whispered, “Only in your imagination” (a not unsubtle retort, if meant subtly), and then down she burrowed, some furry little animal in search of a home. And mastered me with her mouth.

At dinner I overheard her telling the Mayor that she modeled during the day and took courses at Hunter at night. Not a word about her cunt, as far as I could tell. The next day she went off to Hunter, and that night, for a surprise, showed me the application blank she had gotten from the admissions office. Which I praised her for. And which she never filled out, of course—except for her age: 2.9.

A fantasy of The Monkey’s, dating from her high school years in Moundsville. The reverie she lived in, while others learned to read and write:

Around a big conference table, at rigid attention, sit all the boys in West Virginia who are seeking admission to West Point. Underneath the table, crawling on her hands and knees, and nude, is our gawky teen-age illiterate, Mary Jane Reed. A West Point colonel with a swagger stick tap-tapping behind his back, circles and circles the perimeter of the table, scrutinizing the faces of the young men, as out of sight Mary Jane proceeds to undo their trousers and to blow each of the candidates in his turn. The boy selected for admission to the military academy will be he who is most able to maintain a stern and dignified soldierly bearing while shooting off into Mary Jane’s savage and knowing little weapon of a mouth.

Ten months. Incredible. For in that time not a day—very likely, not an hour—passed that I did not ask myself, “Why continue with this person? This brutalized woman! This coarse, tormented, self-loathing, bewildered, lost, identityless—” and so on. The list was inexhaustible, I reviewed it interminably. And to remember the ease with which I had plucked her off the street (the sexual triumph of my life!), well, that made me groan with disgust. How can I go on and on with someone whose reason and judgment and behavior I can’t possibly respect? Who sets off inside me daily explosions of disapproval, hourly thunderclaps of admonition! And the sermonizing! Oh, what a schoolmaster I became. When she bought me those Italian loafers for my birthday, for instance—such a lecture I gave in return!

“Look,” I said, once we were out of the store, “a little shopping advice: when you go off to do something so very simple as exchanging money for goods, it isn’t necessary to flash your snatch at everyone this side of the horizon. Okay ?”

“Flash what? Who flashed anything?”

“You, Mary Jane! Your supposedly private parts!”

“I did not!”

“Please, every time you stood up, every time you sat down, I thought you were going to get yourself hooked by the pussy on the salesman’s nose.”

“Jee-zuz, I gotta sit, I gotta stand, don’t I?”

“But not like you’re climbing on and off a horse!”

“Well, I don’t know what’s bugging you—he was a faggot anyway.”

“What’s ‘bugging’ me is that the space between your legs has now been seen by more people than watch Huntley and Brinkley! So why not bow out while you’re still champeen, all right? ” Yet, even as I make my accusation, I am saying to myself, “Oh, lay off, Little Boy Blue—if you want a lady instead of a cunt, then get yourself one. Who’s holding you here?” Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Miss Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women—healthy, in fact, as milkmaids. I know, because these were her predecessors—only they didn’t satisfy, either. They were wrong, too. Spielvogel, believe me, I’ve been there, I’ve tried: I’ve eaten their casseroles and shaved in their johns, I’ve been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine chest, I have even befriended those cats of theirs—named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat—yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women—social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn’t work out, either!