Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint

“Naomi, I love you.”

She narrowed those wide idealistic brown eyes. “How can you love me? What are you saying?”

“I want to marry you.”

Boom , she jumped to her feet. Pity the Syrian terrorist who tried to take her by surprise! “What is the matter with you? Is this supposed to be humorous?”

“Be my wife. Mother my children. Every shtunk with a picture window has children. Why not me? I carry the family name!”

“You drank too much beer at dinner. Yes, I think I should go.”

“Don’t!” And again told this girl I hardly knew, and didn’t even like, how deeply in love with her I was. “Love”—oh, it makes me shudder!—“loooove,” as though I could summon forth the feeling with the word.

And when she tried to leave I blocked the door. I pleaded with her not go out and lie down on a clammy beach somewhere, when there was this big comfortable Hilton bed for the two of us to share. “I’m not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.”

“Sexual intercourse?” she replied. “With you ?”

“Yes! With me! Fresh from my inherently unjust system! Me, the accomplice! Yes! Imperfect Portnoy!”

“Mr. Portnoy, excuse me, but between your silly jokes, if that is even what they are—”

Here a little struggle took place as I rushed her at the side of the bed. I reached for a breast, and with a sharp upward snap of the skull, she butted me on the underside of the jaw.

“Where the hell did you learn that,” I cried out, “in the Army?”

“Yes.”

I collapsed into my chair. “That’s some training to give to girls.”

“Do you know,” she said, and without a trace of charity, “there is something very wrong with you.”

“My tongue is bleeding, for one—!”

“You are the most unhappy person I have ever known. You are like a baby.”

“No! Not so,” but she waved aside any explanation I may have had to offer, and began to lecture me on my shortcomings as she had observed them that day.

“The way you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do. You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘funny.’ All day long the same thing. In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. Self-depreciating?”

“Self-deprecating. Self-mocking.”

“Exactly! And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable. The contribution you could make! Such stupid self-deprecation! How disagreeable!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”

“Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor.”

Not much love in that remark. I’ll tell you. By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.”

Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating,” unmanned and corrupted by life in the entire world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious.

When she finished I said, “Wonderful. Now let’s fuck.”

“You are disgusting!”

“Right! You begin to get the point, gallant Sabra! You go be righteous in the mountains, okay? You go be a model for mankind! Fucking Hebrew saint!”

“Mr. Portnoy,” she said, raising her knapsack from the floor, “you are nothing but a self-hating Jew.”

“Ah, but Naomi, maybe that’s the best kind.”

“Coward!”

“Tomboy.”

“ Shlemiel !”

And made for the door. Only I leaped from behind, and with a flying tackle brought this big red-headed didactic dish down with me onto the floor. I’ll show her who’s a shlemiel! And baby! And if I have VD? Fine! Terrific! All the better! Let her carry it secretly back in her bloodstream to the mountains! Let it spread forth from her unto all those brave and virtuous Jewish boys and girls! A dose of clap will do them all good! This is what it’s like in the Diaspora, you saintly kiddies, this is what it’s like in the exile! Temptation and disgrace! Corruption and self-mockery! Self-deprecation—and self-defecation too! Whining, hysteria, compromise, confusion, disease! Yes, Naomi, I am soiled, oh, I am impure—and also pretty fucking tired, my dear, of never being quite good enough for The Chosen People!

But what a battle she gave me, this big farm cunt! this ex-G.I.! This mother-substitute! Look, can that be so? Oh please, it can’t be as simplistic as that! Not me! Or with a case like mine, is it actually that you can’t be simplistic enough! Because she wore red hair and freckles, this makes her, according to my unconscious one-track mind, my mother? Just because she and the lady of my past are off-spring of the same pale Polish strain of Jews? This then is the culmination of the Oedipal drama. Doctor? More farce, my friend! Too much to swallow. I’m afraid! Oedipus Rex is a famous tragedy, schmuck, not another joke! You’re a sadist, you’re a quack and a lousy comedian! I mean this is maybe going too far for a laugh, Doctor Spielvogel, Doctor Freud, Doctor Kronkite! How about a little homage, you bastards, to The Dignity of Man! Oedipus Rex is the most horrendous and serious play in the history of literature—it is not a gag!

Thank God, at any rate, for Heshie’s weights. They became mine after he died. I would carry them into the backyard, and out in the sunshine I would lift and lift and lift, back when I was fourteen and fifteen years old. “You’re going to give yourself a tsura yet with those things,” my mother would warn me from her bedroom window. “You’re going to get a cold out there in that bathing suit.” I sent away for booklets from Charles Atlas and Joe Bonomo. I lived for the sight of my torso swelling up in my bedroom mirror. I flexed under my clothes in school. I examined my forearms on the street corner for bulge. I admired my veins on the bus. Somebody someday would take a swing at me and my deltoids, and they would live to regret it! But nobody swung, thank God.

Till Naomi! For her, then, I had done all that puffing and quivering under the disapproving gaze of my mother. That isn’t to say that she still didn’t have it over me in the calves and the thighs—but in the shoulders and chest I had the edge, and forced her body down beneath me—and shot my tongue into her ear, tasting there the grit of our day’s journey, all that holy soil. “Oh, I am going to fuck you, Jew girl,” I whispered evilly.

“You are crazy!” and heaved up against me with all her considerable strength. “You are a lunatic on the loose!”

“No, oh no,” I told her, growling from my throat, “oh no, you have got a lesson to learn, Naomi,” and pressed, pressed hard, to teach my lesson: O you virtuous Jewess, the tables are turned, tsatskeleh! You on the defensive now, Naomi—explaining your vaginal discharge to the entire kibbutz! You think they got worked up over those watches! Wait’ll they get a whiff of this! What I wouldn’t give to be at that meeting when you get arraigned on the charge of contaminating the pride and future of Zion! Then perhaps youll come to have the proper awe for us fallen psychoneurotic Jewish men! Socialism exists, but so too do spirochetes, my love! So here’s your introduction, dear, to the slimier side of things. Down, down with these patriotic khaki shorts, spread your chops, blood of my blood, unlock your fortressy thighs, open wide that messianic Jewish hole! Make ready, Naomi, I am about to poison your organs of reproduction! I am about to change the future of the race!