Portnoy's Complaint

THE MOST PREVALENT FORM OF DEGRADATION IN EROTIC LIFE

I don’t think I’ve spoken of the disproportionate effect The Monkey’s handwriting used to have upon my psychic equilibrium. What hopeless calligraphy! It looked like the work of an eight-year-old-it nearly drove me crazy! Nothing capitalized, nothing punctuated—only those oversized irregular letters of hers slanting downward along the page, then dribbling off. And printed, as on the drawings the rest of us used to carry home in our little hands from first grade! And that spelling. A little word like “clean” comes out three different ways on the same sheet of paper. You know, as in “Mr. Clean”?—two out of three times it begins with the letter k. K! As in “Joseph K.” Not to mention “dear” as in the salutation of a letter: d-e-r-e. Or d-e-i-r. And that very first time (this I love) d-i-r. On the evening we are scheduled for dinner at Gracie Mansion—

D! I! R! I mean, I just have to ask myself—what am I doing having an affair with a woman nearly thirty years of age who thinks you spell “dear” with three letters!

Already two months had passed since the pickup on. Lexington Avenue, and still, you see, the same currents of feeling carrying me along: desire, on the one hand, delirious desire ( I’d never known such abandon in a woman in my life!), and something close to contempt on the other. Correction. Only a few days earlier there had been our trip to Vermont, that weekend when it had seemed that my wariness of her—the apprehension aroused by the model-y glamour, the brutish origins, above everything, the sexual recklessness—that all this fear and distrust had been displaced by a wild upward surge of tenderness and affection.

Now, I am under the influence at the moment of an essay entitled “The Most Prevalent Form of Degradation in Erotic Life”; as you may have guessed, I have bought a set of the Collected Papers, and since my return from Europe, have been putting myself to sleep each night in the solitary confinement of my womanless bed with a volume of Freud in my hand. Sometimes Freud in hand, sometimes Alex in hand, frequently both. Yes, there in my unbuttoned pajamas, all alone, I lie, fiddling with it like a little boy-child in a dopey reverie, tugging on it, twisting it, rubbing and kneading it, and meanwhile reading spellbound through “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” ever heedful of the sentence, the phrase, the word that will liberate me from what I understand are called my fantasies and fixations.

In the “Degradation” essay there is that phrase, “currents of feeling.” For “a fully normal attitude in love” (deserving of semantic scrutiny, that “fully normal,” but to go on—) for a fully normal attitude in love, says he, it is necessary that two currents of feeling be united: the tender, affectionate feelings, and the sensuous feelings. And in many instances this just doesn’t happen, sad to say. “Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.”

Question: Am I to consider myself one of the fragmented multitude? In language plain and simple, are Alexander Portnoy’s sensual feelings fixated to his incestuous fantasies? What do you think, Doc? Has a restriction so pathetic been laid upon my object choice? Is it true that only if the sexual object fulfills for me the condition of being degraded, that sensual feeling can have free play? Listen, does that explain the preoccupation with shikses?

Yes, but if so, if so, how then explain that weekend in Vermont? Because down went the dam of the incest—barrier, or so it seemed. And swoosh, there was sensual feeling mingling with the purest, deepest streams of tenderness I’ve ever known! I’m telling you, the confluence of the two currents was terrific! And in her as well! She even said as much!

Or was it only the colorful leaves, do you think, the fire burning in the dining room of the inn at Woodstock, that softened up the two of us? Was it tenderness for one another that we experienced, or just the fall doing its work, swelling the gourd (John Keats) and lathering the tourist trade into ecstasies of nostalgia for the good and simple life? Were we just two more rootless jungle-dwelling erotomaniacs creaming in their pre-faded jeans over Historical dreaming the old agararian dream in their rent-a-car convertible—or is a fully normal attitude in love the possibility that it seemed for me during those few sunny days I spent with The Monkey in Vermont?

What exactly transpired? Well, we drove mostly. And looked: the valleys, the mountains, the light on the fields; and the leaves of course, a lot of ooing and ahhing. Once we stopped to watch somebody in the distance, high up on a ladder, hammering away at the side of a barn—and that was fun, too. Oh, and the rented car. We flew to Rutland and rented a convertible. A convertible, can you imagine? A third of a century as an American boy, and this was the first convertible I had ever driven myself. Know why? Because the son of an insurance man knows better than others the chance you take riding around in such a machine. He knows the awful actuarial details! All you have to do is hit a bump in the road, and that’s it, where a convertible is concerned: up from the seat you go flying (and not to be too graphic), out onto the highway cranium first, and if you’re lucky, it’s a wheelchair for life. And turn over in a convertible—well, you can just kiss your life goodbye. And this is statistics (I am told by my father), not some cockamaimy story he is making up for the fun of it. Insurance companies aren’t in business to lose money—when they say something, Alex, it’s true! And now, on the heels of my wise father, my wise mother: “Please, so I can sleep at night for four years, promise me one thing, grant your mother this one wish and then she’ll never ask anything of you again: when you get to Ohio, promise you won’t ride in an open convertible. So I can shut my eyes in bed at night, Alex, promise you won’t take your life in your hands in any crazy way.” My father again: “Because you’re a plum, Alex!” he says, baffled and tearful over my imminent departure from home. “And we don’t want a plum to fall off the tree before it’s ripe!”

1. Promise, Plum, that you’ll never ride in a convertible. Such a small thing, what will it hurt you to promise?

2. You’ll look up Howard Sugannan, Sylvia’s nephew. A lovely boy—and president of the Hillel. He’ll show you around. Please look him up.

3. Plum, Darling, Light of the World, you remember your cousin Heshie, the torture he gave himself and his family with that girl. What Uncle Hymie had to go through, to save that boy from his craziness. You remember? Please, do we have to say any more? Is my meaning clear, Alex? Don’t give yourself away cheap. Don’t throw a brilliant future away on an absolute nothing. I don’t think we have to say anything more. Do we? You’re a baby yet, sixteen years old and graduating high school. That’s a baby, Alex. You don’t know the hatred there is in the world. So I don’t think we have to say any more, not to a boy as smart as you. ONLY YOU MUST BE CAREFUL WITH YOUR LIFE! YOU MUST NOT PLUNGE YOURSELF INTO A LIVING HELL! YOU MUST LISTEN TO WHAT WE ARE SAYING AND WITHOUT THE SCOWL, THANK YOU, AND THE BRILLIANT BACK TALK! WE KNOW! WE HAVE LIVED! WE HAVE SEEN! IT DOESN’T WORK, MY SON! THEY ARE ANOTHER BREED OF HUMAN BEING ENTIRELY! YOU WILL BE TORN ASUNDER! GO TO HOWARD. HE’LL INTRODUCE YOU AT THE HILLEL! DON’T RUN FIRST THING TO A BLONDIE, PLEASE! BECAUSE SHE’LL TAKE YOU FOR ALL YOU’RE WORTH AND THEN LEAVE YOU BLEEDING IN THE GUTTER! A BRILLIANT INNOCENT BABY BOY LIKE YOU, SHE’LL EAT YOU UP ALIVE!

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!

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 impossible 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!

Ah, but there is (let us bow our heads), there is “my dignity” to consider, my good name. What people will think. What I will think. Doctor, this girl once did it for money. Money! Yes! I believe they call that “prostitution”! One night, to praise her (I imagined, at any rate, that that was my motive), I said, “You ought to market this, it’s too much for one man,” just being chivalrous, you see . . . or intuitive? Anyway, she answers, “I have.” I wouldn’t let her alone until she explained what she’d meant; at first she claimed she was only being clever, but in the face of my cross-examination she finally came up with this story, which struck me as the truth, or a portion thereof. Just after Paris and her divorce, she had been flown out to Hollywood (she says) to be tested for a part in a movie (which she didn’t get. I pressed for the name of the movie, but she claims to have forgotten, says it was never made ). On the way back to New York from California, she and the girl she was with (“Who’s this other girl?” “A girl. A girl friend.” “Why were you traveling with another girl?” “I just was!”), she and this other girl stopped off to see Las Vegas. There she went to bed with some guy that she met, perfectly innocently she maintains; however, to her complete surprise, in the morning he asked, “How much?” She says it just came out of her mouth—“Whatever it’s worth, Sport.” So he offered her three hundred-dollar bills. “And you took it?” I asked. “I was twenty years old. Sure, I took it. To see what it felt like, that’s all.” “And what did it feel like, Mary Jane?” “I don’t remember. Nothing. It didn’t feel like anything.”

Well, what do you think? She claims it only happened that once, ten years ago, and even then only came about through some “accidental” joining of his misunderstanding with her whimsy. But do you buy that? Should I? Is it impossible to believe that this girl may have put in some time as a high-priced call girl? Oh Jesus! Take her, I think to myself, and I am no higher in the evolutionary scale than the mobsters and millionaires who choose their women from the line at the Copa. This is the kind of girl ordinarily seen hanging from the arm of a Mafiosa or a movie star, not the 1950 valedictorian of Weequahic High! Not the editor of the Columbia Law Review ! Not the high-minded civil-libertarian! Let’s face it, whore or no whore, this is a clear-cut tootsie, right? Who looks at her with me knows precisely what I am after in this life. This is what my father used to call “a chippy.” Of course! And can I bring home a chippy. Doctor? “Momma, Poppa, this is my wife, the chippy. Isn’t she a wild piece of ass?” Take her fully for my own, you see, and the whole neighborhood will know at last the truth about my dirty little mind. The so-called genius will be revealed in all his piggish proclivities and feelthy desires. The bathroom door will swing open (unlocked!), and behold, there sits the savior of mankind, drool running down his chin, absolutely gaa-gaa in the eyes, and his prick firing salvos at the light bulb! A laughingstock, at last! A bad boy! A shande to his family forever! Yes, yes, I see it all: for my abominations I awake one morning to find myself chained to a toilet in Hell, me and the other chippy-mongers of the world—“Shtarkes,” the Devil will say, as we are issued our fresh white-on-white shirts, our Sulka ties, as we are fitted in our nifty new silk suits, “gantze k’nockers, big shots with your long-legged women. Welcome. You really accomplished a lot in life, you fellows. You really distinguished yourselves, all right. And you in particular,” he says, lifting a sardonic eyebrow in my direction, “who entered the high school at the age of twelve, who was an ambassador to the world from the Jewish community of Newark—“Ah-hah, I knew it. It’s no Devil in the proper sense, it’s Fat Warshaw, the Reb. My stout and pompous spiritual leader! He of the sumptuous enunciation and the Pall Mall breath! Rabbi Re-ver-ed! It is the occasion of my bar mitzvah, and I stand shyly at his side, sopping it up like gravy, getting quite a little kick out of being sanctified, I’ll tell you. Alexander Portnoy-this and Alexander Portnoy-that, and to tell you the absolute truth, that he talks in syllables, and turns little words into big ones, and big ones into whole sentences by themselves, to be frank, it doesn’t seem to bother me as much as it would ordinarily. Oh, the sunny Saturday morning meanders slowly along as he lists my virtues and accomplishments to the assembled relatives and friends, syllable by syllable. Lay it on them, Warshaw, blow my horn, don’t hurry yourself on my account, please. I’m young, I can stand here all day, if that’s what has to be. “. . . devoted son, loving brother, fantastic honor student, avid newspaper reader (up on every current event, knows the full names of each and every Supreme Court justice and Cabinet member, also the minority and majority leaders of both Houses of Congress, also the chairmen of the important Congressional committees), entered Weequahic High School this boy at the age of twelve, an I.Q. on him of 158, one hunder-ed and-a fif-a-ty eight-a, and now,” he tells the awed and beaming multitude, whose adoration I feel palpitating upward and enveloping me there on the altar—why, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if when he’s finished they don’t pick me up and carry me around the synagogue like the Torah itself, bear me gravely up and down the aisles while the congregants struggle to touch their lips to some part of my new blue Ohrbach’s suit, while the old men press forward to touch their tallises to my sparkling London Character shoes. “Let me through! Let me touch!” and when I am world-renowned, they will say to their grandchildren, “Yes, I was there, I was in attendance at the bar mitzvah of Chief Justice Portnoy—“an ambassador,” says Rabbi Warshaw, “now our ambassador extraordinary—” Only the tune has changed! And how! “Now,” he says to me, “with the mentality of a pimp! With the human values of a race-horse jockey! What is to him the heights of human experience? Walking into a restaurant with a long-legged kurveh on his arm! An easy lay in a body stocking!” “Oh, please, Re-ver-ed. I’m a big boy now—so you can knock off the rabbinical righteousness. It turns out to be a little laughable at this stage of the game. I happened to prefer beautiful and sexy to ugly and icy, so what’s the tragedy? Why dress me up like a Las Vegas hood? Why chain me to a toilet bowl for eternity? For loving a saucy girl?” “Loving? You? Too-ey on you! Self–loving, boychick, that’s how I spell it! With a capital self! Your heart is an empty refrigerator! Your blood flows in cubes! I’m surprised you don’t clink when you walk! The saucy girl, so-called—I’ll bet saucy!—was a big fat feather in your prick, and that alone is her total meaning, Alexander Portnoy! What you did with your promise! Disgusting! Love? Spelled l-u-s-t! Spelled s-e-l-f!” “But I felt stirrings, in Howard Johnson’s—” “In the prick! Sure!” “No!” “Yes! That’s the only part you ever felt a stirring in your life! You whiner! You big bundle full of resentments! Why, you have been stuck on yourself since the first grade, for Christ’s sake!” “Have not!” “Have! Have! This is the bottom truth, friend! Suffering mankind don’t mean shit to you! That’s a blind, buddy, and don’t you kid yourself otherwise! Look, you call out to your brethren, look what I’m sticking my dicky into—look who I’m fucking: a fifty-foot fashion model! I get free what others pay upwards of three hundred dollars for! Oh boy, ain’t that a human triumph, hub? Don’t think that three hundred bucks don’t titillate you plenty—cause it does! Only how about look what I’m loving, Portnoy!” “Please, don’t you read the New York Times? I have spent my whole life protecting the rights of the defenseless! Five years I was with the ACLU, fighting the good fight for practically nothing. And before that a Congressional committee! I could make twice, three times the money in a practice of my own, but I don’t! I don’t! Now I have been appointed—don’t you read the papers!—I am now Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity! Preparing a special report on bias in the building trades—” “Bullshit. Commissioner of Cunt, that’s who you are! Commissioner of Human Opportunists! Uh, you Jerk-off artist! You case of arrested development! All is vanity, Portnoy, but you really take the cake! A hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q. and all of it right down the drain! A lot of good it did to skip those two grades of grammar school, you dummy!” “What?” “And spending-money your father sent yet to Antioch College—that the man could hardly afford! All the faults come from the parents, right, Alex? What’s wrong, they did—what’s good, you accomplished all on your own! You ignoramus! You icebox heart! Why are you chained to a toilet? Ill tell you why: poetic justice! So you can pull your peter till the end of time! Jerk your precious little dum-dum ad infinitum! Go ahead, pull off, Commissioner, that’s all you ever really gave your heart to anyway—your stinking putz!”

I arrive in my tuxedo while she is still in the shower. The door has been left unlocked, apparently so that I can come right in without disturbing her. She lives on the top floor of a big modern building in the East Eighties, and it irritates me to think that anybody who happened through the corridor could walk in just as I have. I warn her of this through the shower curtain. She touches my cheek with her small wet face. “Why would anyone want to do that?” she says. “All my money’s in the bank.”

“That’s not a satisfactory reply,” I answer, and retreat to the living room, trying not to be vexed. I notice the slip of paper on the coffee table. Has a child been here, I wonder. No, no, I am just face to face with my first specimen of The Monkey’s handwriting. A note to the cleaning lady. Though at first glance I imagine it must be a note from the cleaning lady.

Must? Why “must”? Because she’s “mine”?

dir willa polish the flor by bathrum pleze & dont furget the insies of windose mary jane r

Three times I read the sentence through, and as happens with certain texts, each reading reveals new subtleties of meaning and implication, each reading augurs tribulations yet to be visited upon my ass. Why allow this “affair” to gather any more momentum? What was I thinking about in Vermont! Oh that z, that z between the two e’s of ‘pleze’—this is a mind with the depths of a movie marquee! And “furget”! Exactly how a prostitute would misspell that word! But it’s something about the mangling of “dear,” that tender syllable of affection now collapsed into three lower-case letters, that strikes me as hopelessly pathetic. How unnatural can a relationship be! This woman is ineducable and beyond reclamation. By contrast to hers, my childhood took place in Brahmin Boston. What kind of business can the two of us have together? Monkey business! No business!

The phone calls, for instance, I cannot tolerate those phone calls! Charmingly girlish she was when she warned me about telephoning all the time—but surprise, she meant it! I am in my office, the indigent parents of a psychotic child are explaining to me that their offspring is being systematically starved to death in a city hospital. They have come to us bearing their complaint, rather than to the Department of Hospitals, because a brilliant lawyer in the Bronx has told them that their child is obviously the victim of discrimination. What I can gather from a call to the chief psychiatrist at the hospital is that the child refuses to ingest any food—takes it and holds it in his mouth for hours, but refuses to swallow. I have then to tell these people that neither their child nor they are being victimized in the way or for the reason they believe. My answer strikes them as duplicitous. It strikes me as duplicitous. I think to myself, “He’d swallow that food if he had my mother,” and meanwhile express sympathy for their predicament. But now they refuse to leave my office until they see “the Mayor,” as earlier they refused to leave the social worker’s office until they had seen “the Commissioner.” The father says that he will have me fired, along with all the others responsible for starving to death a defenseless little child just because he is a Puerto Rican! “Es contrario a la ley discriminar contra cualquier persona—” reading to me out of the bilingual CCHO handbook—that I wrote! At which point the phone rings. The Puerto Rican is shouting at me in Spanish, my mother is waving a knife at me back in my childhood, and my secretary announces that Miss Reed would like to speak to me on the telephone. For the third time that day.

“I miss you, Arnold,” The Monkey whispers.

“I’m afraid I’m busy right now.”

“I do do love you.”

“Yes, fine, may I speak with you later about this?”

“How I want that long sleek cock inside me—”

“Bye now!”

What else is wrong with her, while we’re at it? She moves her lips when she reads. Petty? You think so? Ever sit across the dinner table from a woman with whom you are supposedly having an affair—a twenty-nine-year-old person—and watch her lips move while she looks down the movie page for a picture the two of you can see? I know what’s playing before she even tells me—from reading the lips! And the books I bring her, she carries them around from job to job in her tote bag—to read? No! So as to impress some fairy photographer, to impress passers-by in the street, strangers, with her many-sided character! Look at that girl with that smashing ass—carrying a book! With real words in it! The day after our return from Vermont, I bought a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—wrote on a card, “To the staggering girl,” and had it gift-wrapped for presentation that night. “Tell me books to read, okay?”—this the touching plea she made the night we returned to the city: “Because why should I be dumb, if like you say, I’m so smart?” So, here was Agee to begin with, and with the Walker Evans’ photographs to help her along: a book to speak to her of her own early life, to enlarge her perspective on her origins ( origins, of course, holding far more fascination for the nice left-wing Jewish boy than for the proletarian girl herself). How earnest I was compiling that reading list! Boy, was I going to improve her mind! After Agee, Adamic’s Dynamite!, my own yellowing copy from college; I imagined her benefiting from my undergraduate underlinings, coming to understand the distinction between the relevant and the trivial, a generalization and an illustration, and so on. Furthermore, it was a book so simply written, that hopefully, without my pushing her, she might be encouraged to read not just the chapters I had suggested, those touching directly upon her own past (as I imagined it)—violence in the coal fields, beginning with the Molly Maguires; the chapter on the Wobblies—but the entire history of brutality and terror practiced by and upon the American laboring class, from which she was descended. Had she never read a book called U.S.A.? Mortimer Snerd: “Duh, I never read nothing, Mr. Bergen.” So I bought her the Modern Library DOS Passes, a book with a hard cover. Simple, I thought, keep it simple, but educational, elevating. Ah, you get the dreamy point, I’m sure. The texts? W. E. B. Du Bois The Souls of Black Folk. The Grapes of Wrath. An American Tragedy. A book of Sherwood Anderson’s I like, called Poor White (the title, I thought, might stir her interest). Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. The name of the course? Oh, I don’t know—Professor Portnoy’s “Humiliated Minorities, an Introduction.” “The History and Function of Hatred in America.” The purpose? To save the stupid shikse ; to rid her of her race’s ignorance; to make this daughter of the heartless oppressor a student of suffering and oppression; to teach her to be compassionate, to bleed a little for the world’s sorrows. Get it now? The perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy.

Where am I? Tuxedoed. All civilized-up in my evening clothes, and “dir willa” still sizzling in my hand, as The Monkey emerges wearing the frock she has bought specifically for the occasion. What occasion? Where does she think we’re going, to shoot a dirty movie? Doctor, it barely reaches her ass! It is crocheted of some kind of gold metallic yarn and covers nothing but a body stocking the color of her skin! And to top this modest outfit off, over her real head of hair she wears a wig inspired by Little Orphan Annie, an oversized aureole of black corkscrew curls, out of whose center pokes this dumb painted face. What a mean little mouth it gives her! She really is from West Virginia! The miner’s daughter in the neon city! “And this,” I think, “is how she is going with me to the Mayor’s? Looking like a stripper? ‘Dear,’ and she spells it with three letters! And hasn’t read two pages of the Agee book in an entire week! Has she even looked at the pictures? Duh, I doubt it! Oh, wrong,” I think, jamming her note into my pocket for a keepsake—I can have it laminated for a quarter the next day—“wrong! This is somebody whom I picked up off the street! Who sucked me off before she even knew my name! Who once peddled her ass in Las Vegas, if not elsewhere! Just look at her—a moll! The Assistant Human Opportunity Commissioner’s moll! What kind of dream am I living in? Being with such a person is for me all wrong! Mean-ing-less! A waste of everybody’s energy and character and time!”

“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!

Kay Campbell, my girl friend at Antioch—could there have been a more exemplary person? Artless, sweet-tempered, without a trace of morbidity or egoism—a thoroughly commendable and worthy human being. And where is she now, that find! Hello, Pumpkin! Making some lucky shaygets a wonderful wife out there in middle America? How could she do otherwise? Edited the literary magazine, walked off with all the honors in English literature, picketed with me and my outraged friends outside of that barbershop in Yellow Springs where they wouldn’t cut Negro hair—a robust, genial, large-hearted, large-assed girl with a sweet baby face, yellow hair, no tits, unfortunately (essentially titless women seem to be my destiny, by the way—now, why is that? is there an essay somewhere I can read on that? is it of import? or shall I go on?). Ah, and those peasant legs! And the blouse always hanging loose from her skirt at the back. How moved I was by that blithesome touch! And by the fact that on high heels she looked like a cat stuck up a tree, in trouble, out of her element, all wrong. Always the first of the Antioch nymphs to go barefoot to classes in spring. “The Pumpkin,” is what I called her, in commemoration of her pigmentation and the size of her can. Also her solidity: hard as a gourd on matters of moral principle, beautifully stubborn in a way I couldn’t but envy and adore.

She never raised her voice in an argument. Can you imagine the impression this made on me at seventeen, fresh from my engagement with The Jack and Sophie Portnoy Debating Society? Who had ever heard of such an approach to controversy? Never ridiculed her opponent! Or seemed to hate him for his ideas! Ah-hah, so this is what it means to be a child of goyim, valedictorian of a high school in Iowa instead of New Jersey; yes, this is what the goyim who have got something have got! Authority without the temper. Virtue without the self-congratulation. Confidence sans swagger or condescension. Come on, let’s be fair and give thegoyim their due. Doctor: when they are impressive, they are very impressive. So sound! Yes, that’s what hypnotized—the heartiness, the sturdiness; in a word, her pumpkinness. My wholesome, big-bottomed, lipstickless, barefooted shikse, where are you now, Kay-Kay? Mother to how many? Did you wind up really fat? Ah, so what! Suppose you’re big as a house—you need a showcase for that character of yours! The very best of the Middle West, so why did I let her go? Oh, I’ll get to that, no worry, self-laceration is never more than a memory away, we know that by now. In the meantime, let me miss her substantiality a little. That buttery skin! That unattended streaming hair! And this is back in the early fifties, before streaming hair became the style! This was just naturalness. Doctor. Round and ample, sun-colored Kay! I’ll bet that half a dozen kiddies are clinging to that girl’s abundant behind (so unlike The Monkey’s hard little handful of a model’s ass!). I’ll bet you bake your own bread, right? (The way you did that hot spring night in my Yellow Springs apartment, in your halfslip and brassiere, with flour in your ears and your hairline damp with perspiration—remember? showing me, despite the temperature, how real bread should taste? You could have used my heart for batter, that’s how soft it felt! ) I’ll bet you live where the air is still unpoisoned and nobody locks his door—and still don’t give two shits about money or possessions. Hey, I don’t either. Pumpkin, still unbesmirched myself on those and related middle-class issues! Oh, perfectly ill-proportioned girl! No mile-long mannequin you! So she had no tits, so what? Slight as a butterfly through the rib cage and neck, but planted like a bear beneath! Rooted, that’s what I’m getting at! Joined by those lineman’s legs to this American ground!

You should have heard Kay Campbell when we went around Greene County ringing doorbells for Stevenson in our sophomore year. Confronted with the most awesome Republican small-mindedness, a stinginess and bleakness of spirit that could absolutely bend the mind. The Pumpkin never was anything but ladylike. I was a barbarian. No matter how dispassionately I began (or condescendingly, because that’s how it came out), I invariably wound up in a sweat and a rage, sneering, insulting, condemning, toe-to-toe with these terrible pinched people, calling their beloved Ike an illiterate, a political and moral moron—probably I am as responsible as anyone for Adlai losing as badly as he did in Ohio. The Pumpkin, however, gave such unflawed and kindly attention to the opposition point of view that I expected sometimes for her to turn and say to me, “Why, Alex, I think Mr. Yokel is right—I think maybe he is too soft on communism.” But no, when the last idiocy had been uttered about our candidate’s “socialistical” and/or “pinko” ideas, the final condemnation made of his sense of humor. The Pumpkin proceeded, ceremoniously and ( awesome feat! ) without a hint of sarcasm—she might have been the judge at a pie-baking contest, such a perfect blend was she of sobriety and good humor—proceeded to correct Mr. Yokel’s errors of fact and logic, even to draw attention to his niggardly morality. Unencumbered by the garbled syntax of the apocalypse or the ill-mannered vocabulary of desperation, without the perspiring upper lip, the constricted and air-hungry throat, the flush of loathing on the forehead, she may even have swayed half a dozen people in the county. Christ, yes, this was one of the great shikses. I might have learned something spending the rest of my life with such a person. Yes, I might—if I could learn something! If I could be somehow sprung from this obsession with fellatio and fornication, from romance and fantasy and revenge—from the settling of scores! the pursuit of dreams! from this hopeless, senseless loyalty to the long ago!

In 1950, just seventeen, and Newark two and a half months behind me (well, not exactly “behind”: in the mornings I awake in the dormitory baffled by the unfamiliar blanket in my hand, and the disappearance of one of “my” windows; oppressed and distraught for minutes on end by this unanticipated transformation given my bedroom by my mother)—I perform the most openly defiant act of my life: instead of going home for my first college vacation, I travel by train to Iowa, to spend Thanksgiving with The Pumpkin and her parents. Till September I had never been farther west than Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey—now I am off to Iowa! And with a blondie! Of the Christian religion! Who is more stunned by this desertion, my family or me? What daring! Or was I no more daring than a sleepwalker?

The white clapboard house in which The Pumpkin had grown up might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me. Balboa, maybe, knows what I felt upon first glimpsing the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch. She was raised in this house. The girl who has let me undo her brassiere and dry-hump her at the dormitory door, grew up in this white house. Behind those goyische curtains! Look, shutters!

“Daddy, Mother,” says The Pumpkin, when we disembark at the Davenport train station, “this is the weekend guest, this is the friend from school whom I wrote you about—”

I am something called “a weekend guest”? I am something called “a friend from school”? What tongue is she speaking? I am “the bonditt,” “the vantz,” I am the insurance man’s son. I am Warshaw’s ambassador! “How do you do, Alex?” To which of course I reply, “Thank you.” Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer, “Thank you.” Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, “Excuse me, thank you.” I drop my napkin on the floor, lean down, flushing, to pick it up, “Thank you,” I hear myself saying to the napkin—or is it the floor I’m addressing? Would my mother be proud of her little gentleman! Polite even to the furniture!

Then there’s an expression in English, “Good morning,” or so I have been told; the phrase has never been of any particular use to me. Why should it have been? At breakfast at home I am in fact known to the other boarders as “Mr. Sourball,” and “The Crab.” But suddenly, here in Iowa, in imitation of the local inhabitants, I am transformed into a veritable geyser of good mornings. That’s all anybody around that place knows how to say—they feel the sunshine on their faces, and it just sets off some sort of chemical reaction: Good morning! Good morning! Good mor ning! sung to half a dozen different tunes! Next they all start asking each other if they had “a good night’s sleep.” And asking me! Did I have a good night’s sleep? I don’t really know, I have to think—the question comes as something of a surprise. Did I Have A Good Night’s Sleep? Why, yes! I think I did! Hey—did you? “Like a log,” replies Mr. Campbell. And for the first time in my life I experience the full force of a simile. This man, who is a real estate broker and an alderman of the Davenport town council, says that he slept like a log, and I actually see a log. I get it! Motionless, heavy, like a log! “Good morning,” he says, and now it occurs to me that the word “morning,” as he uses it, refers specifically to the hours between eight A.M. and twelve noon. I’d never thought of it that way before. He wants the hours between eight and twelve to be good, which is to say, enjoyable, pleasurable, beneficial! We are all of us wishing each other four hours of pleasure and accomplishment. Why, that’s terrific! Hey, that’s very nice! Good morning! And the same applies to “Good afternoon”! And “Good evening”! And “Good night”! My God! The English language is a form of communication! Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing meanings!

Wait, I’m not finished—as if the experience of being on the inside rather than the outside of these goyische curtains isn’t overwhelming enough, as if the incredible experience of my wishing hour upon hour of pleasure to a houseful of goyim isn’t sufficient source for bewilderment, there is, to compound the ecstasy of disorientation, the name of the street upon which the Campbell house stands, the street where my girl friend grew up! skipped! skated! hop-scotched! sledded! all the while I dreamed of her existence some fifteen hundred miles away, in what they tell me is the same country. The street name? Not Xanadu, no, better even than that, oh, more preposterous by far: Elm. Elm! It is, you see, as though I have walked right through the orange celluloid station band of our old Zenith, directly into “One Man’s Family.” Elm. Where trees grow—which must be elms!

To be truthful, I must admit that I am not able to draw such a conclusion first thing upon alighting from the Campbell car on Wednesday night: after all, it has taken me seventeen years to recognize an oak, and even there I am lost without the acorns. What I see first in a landscape isn’t the flora, believe me—it’s the fauna, the human opposition, who is screwing and who is getting screwed. Greenery I leave to the birds and the bees, they have their worries, I have mine. At home who knows the name of what grows from the pavement at the front of our house? It’s a tree—and that’s it. The kind is of no consequence, who cares what kind, just as long as it doesn’t fall down on your head. In the autumn (or is it the spring? Do you know this stuff? I’m pretty sure it’s not the winter) there drop from its branches long crescent-shaped pods containing hard little pellets. Okay. Here’s a scientific fact about our tree, comes by way of my mother, Sophie Linnaeus: If you shoot those pellets through a straw, you can take somebody’s eye out and make him blind for life. (SO NEVER DO IT! NOT EVEN IN JEST! AND IF ANYBODY DOES IT TO YOU, YOU TELL ME INSTANTLY! ) And this, more or less, is the sort of botanical knowledge I am equipped with, until that Sunday afternoon when we are leaving the Campbell house for the train station, and I have my Archimedean experience: Elm Street . . . then . . . elm trees! How simple! I mean, you don’t need 158 points of I.Q., you don’t have to be a genius to make sense of this world. It’s really all so very simple!

A memorable weekend in my lifetime, equivalent in human history, I would say, to mankind’s passage through the entire Stone Age. Every time Mr. Campbell called his wife “Mary,” my body temperature shot into the hundreds. There I was, eating off dishes that had been touched by the hands of a woman named Mary. (Is there a clue here as to why I so resisted calling The Monkey by her name, except to chastise her? No?) Please, I pray on the train heading west, let there be no pictures of Jesus Christ in the Campbell house. Let me get through this weekend without having to see his pathetic punim—or deal with anyone wearing a cross! When the aunts and uncles come for the Thanksgiving dinner, please, let there be no anti-Semite among them! Because if someone starts in with “the pushy Jews,” or says “kike” or “jewed him down”—Well, I’ll Jew them down all right, I’ll Jew their fucking teeth down their throat! No, no violence (as if I even had it in me), let them be violent, that’s their way. No, I’ll rise from my seat—and (vuh den?) make a speech! I will shame and humiliate them in their bigoted hearts! Quote the Declaration of Independence over their candied yams! Who the fuck are they, I’ll ask, to think they own Thanksgiving!

Then at the railroad station her father says, “How do you do, young man?” and I of course answer, “Thank you.” Why ishe acting so nice? Because he has been forewarned (which I don’t know whether to take as an insult or a blessing), or because he doesn’t know yet? Shall I say it then, before we even get into the car? Yes, I must! I can’t go on living a lie! “Well, it sure is nice being here in Davenport, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, what with my being Jewish and all.” Not quite ringing enough perhaps. “Well, as a friend of Kay’s, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, and a Jew, I do want to thank you for inviting me—” Stop pussyfooting! What then? Talk Yiddish? How? I’ve got twenty-five words to my name—half of them dirty, and the rest mispronounced! Shit, just shut up and get in the car. “Thank you, thank you,” I say, picking up my own bag, and we all head for the station wagon.

Kay and I climb into the back seat, with the dog. Kay’s dog! To whom she talks as though he’s human! Wow, she really is a goy. What a stupid thing, to talk to a dog—except Kay isn’t stupid! In fact, I think she’s smarter really than I am. And yet talks to a dog? “As far as dogs are concerned, Mr. and Mrs. Campbell, we Jews by and large—” Oh, forget it. Not necessary. You are ignoring anyway (or trying awfully hard to) that eloquent appendage called your nose. Not to mention the Afro-Jewish hairpiece. Of course they know. Sorry, but there’s no escaping destiny, bubi, a man’s cartilage is his fate. But I don’t want to escape! Well, that’s nice too—because you can’t. Oh, but yes I can—if I should want to! But you said you don’t want to. But if I did!

As soon as I enter the house I begin (on the sly, and somewhat to my own surprise) to sniff: what will the odor be like? Mashed potatoes? An old lady’s dress? Fresh cement? I sniff and I sniff, trying to catch the scent. There! is that it, is that Christianity I smell, or just the dog? Everything I see, taste, touch, I think, “Goyish!” My first morning I squeeze half an inch of Pepsodent down the drain rather than put my brush where Kay’s mother or father may have touched the bristles with which they cleanse their owngoyische molars. True! The soap on the sink is bubbly with foam from somebody’s hands. Whose? Mary’s? Should I just take hold of it and begin to wash, or should I maybe run a little water over it first, just to be safe. But safe fromwhat? Schmuck, maybe you want to get a piece of soap to wash the soap with! I tiptoe to the toilet, I peer over into the bowl: “Well, there it is, boy, a real goyisch e toilet bowl. The genuine article. Where your girl friend’s father drops his gentile turds. What do you think, hub? Pretty impressive.” Obsessed? Spellbound!

Next I have to decide whether or not to line the seat. It isn’t a matter of hygiene, I’m sure the place is clean, spotless in its own particular antiseptic goy way: the question is, what if it’s warm yet from a Campbell behind—from her mother! Mary! Mother also of Jesus Christ! If only for the sake of my family, maybe I should put a little paper around the rim; it doesn’t cost anything, and who will ever know?

I will! I will! So down I go—and it is warm! Yi, seventeen years old and I am rubbing asses with the enemy! How far I have traveled since September! By the waters of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion! And yea is right! On the can I am besieged by doubt and regret, I am suddenly languishing with all my heart for home . . . When my father drives out to buy “real apple cider” at the roadside farmer’s market off in Union, I won’t be with him! And how can Hannah and Morty go to the Weequahic-Hillside game Thanks–giving morning without me along to make them laugh? Jesus, I hope we win (which is to say, lose by less than 21 points). Beat Hillside, you bastards! Double U, Double E, Q U A, H I C! Bernie, Sidney, Leon, “Ushie,” come on, backfield, FIGHT!

Aye-aye ki-ike-us,

Nobody likes us,

We are the boys of Weequahic High—

Aye-aye ki-ucch-us,

Kish mir in tuchis,

We are the boys of Weequahic High!

Come on—hold that line, make that point, kick ’em in the kishkas, go team go!

See, I’m missing my chance to be clever and quick-witted in the stands! To show off my sarcastic and mocking tongue! And after the game, missing the historical Thanksgiving meal prepared by my mother, that freckled and red-headed descendant of Polish Jews! Oh, how the blood will flow out of their faces, what a deathly silence will prevail, when she holds up the huge drumstick, and cries, “Here! For guess who!” and Guess-who is found to be AWOL! Why have I deserted my family? Maybe around the table we don’t look like a painting by Norman Rockwell, but we have a good time, too, don’t you worry! We don’t go back to the Plymouth Rock) no Indian ever brought maize to any member of our family as far as we know—but just smell that stuffing! And look, cylinders of cranberry sauce at either end of the table! And the turkey’s name, “Tom”! Why then can’t I believe I am eating my dinner in America, that America is where I am, instead of some other place to which I will one day travel, as my father and I must travel every November out to that hayseed and his wife in Union, New Jersey (the two of them in overalls), for real Thanksgiving apple cider.

“I’m going to Iowa,” I tell them from the phone booth on my floor. “To where?” “To Davenport, Iowa.” “On your first college vacation?!” “—I know, but it’s a great opportunity, and I can’t turn it down—” “Opportunity? To do what?” “Yes, to spend Thanksgiving with this boy named Bill Campbell’s family—” “Who?” “Campbell. Like the soup. He lives in my dorm—” But they are expecting me. Everybody is expecting me. Morty has the tickets to the game. What am I talking opportunity? “And who is this boy all of a sudden, Campbell?” “My friend! Bill!” “But;” says my father, “the cider” Oh my God, it’s happened, what I swore I wouldn’t permit!—I am in tears, and “cider” is the little word that does it. The man is a natural—he could go on Groucho Marx and win a fortune guessing the secret-woid. He guesses mine, every single time! And wins my jackpot of contrition! “I can’t back out, I’m sorry, I’ve accepted—we’re going!” “Going? And how, Alex—I don’t understand this plan at all,” interrupts my mother—“how are you going, if I may be so bold, and where? and in a convertible too, that too—” “NO!” “And if the highways are icy, Alex—” “We’re going. Mother, in a Sherman tank! Okay? Okay?” “Alex,” she says sternly, “I hear it in your voice, I know you’re not telling me the whole truth, you’re going to hitchhike in a convertible or some other crazy thing—two months away from home, seventeen years old, and he’s going wild!”

Sixteen years ago I made that phone call. A little more than half the age I am now. November 1950—here, it’s tattooed on my wrist, the date of my Emancipation Proclamation. Children unborn when I first telephoned my parents to say I wasn’t coming home from college are just entering college, I suppose—only I’m still telephoning my parents to say I’m not coming home! Fighting off my family, still! What use to skip those two grades in grammar school and get such a jump on everybody else, when the result is to wind up so far behind? My early promise is legend: starring in all those grade-school plays! taking on at the age of twelve the entire DAR! Why then do I live by myself and have no children of my own? It’s no non sequitur, that question! Professionally I’m going somewhere, granted, but privately—what have I got to show for myself? Children should be playing on this earth who look like me! Why not? Why should every shtunk with a picture window and a carport have offspring, and not me? It don’t make sense! Think of it, half the race is over, and I still stand here at the starting line—me, the first one out of his swaddling clothes and into his track suit! a hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q., and still arguing with the authorities about the rules and regulations! disputing the course to be run! calling into question the legitimacy of the track commission! Yes, “crab” is correct, Mother!”Sourball” is perfect, right on The Nose’s nose! “Mr. Conniption-Fit”—cest moi!

Another of these words I went through childhood thinking of as “Jewish.” Conniption. “Go ahead, have a conniption-fit,” my mother would advise. “See if it changes anything, my brilliant son.” And how I tried! How I used to hurl myself against the walls of her kitchen! Mr. Hot-Under-The Collar! Mr. Hit-The-Ceiling! Mr. Fly-Off-The-Handle! The names I earn for myself! God forbid somebody should look at you cockeyed, Alex, their life isn’t worth two cents! Mr. Always-Right-And-Never-Wrong! Grumpy From The Seven Dwarfs Is Visiting Us, Daddy. Ah, Hannah, Your Brother Surly Has Honored Us With His Presence This Evening, It’s A Pleasure To Have You, Surly. “Hi Ho Silver,” she sighs, as I rush into my bedroom to sink my fangs into the bedspread, “The Temper Tantrum Kid Rides Again.”

Near the end of our junior year Kay missed a period, and so we began, and with a certain eager delight—and wholly without panic, interestingly—to make plans to be married. We would offer ourselves as resident baby-sitters to a young faculty couple who were fond of us; in return they would give us their roomy attic to live in, and a shelf to use in their refrigerator. We would wear old clothes and eat spaghetti. Kay would write poetry about having a baby, and, she said, type term papers for extra money. We had our scholarships, what more did we need? ( besides a mattress, some bricks and boards for bookshelves, Kay’s Dylan Thomas record, and in time, a crib). We thought of ourselves as adventurers.

I said, “And you’ll convert, right?”

I intended the question to be received as ironic, or thought I had. But Kay took it seriously. Not solemnly, mind you, just seriously.

Kay Campbell, Davenport, Iowa: “Why would I want to do a thing like that?”

Great girl! Marvelous, ingenuous, candid girl! Content, you see, as she was! What one dies for in a woman—I now realize! Why would I want to do a thing like that? And nothing blunt or defensive or arch or superior in her tone. Just common sense, plainly spoken.

Only it put our Portnoy into a rage, incensed The Temper Tantrum Kid. What do you mean why would you want to do a thing like that? Why do you think, you simpleton-goi! Go talk to your dog, ask him. Ask Spot what he thinks, that four-legged genius. “Want Kay-Kay to be a Jew, Spottie—hub, big fella, hub?” Just what the fuck makes you so self-satisfied, anyway? That you carry on conversations with dogs? that you know an elm when you see one? that your father drives a station wagon made out of wood? What’s your hotsy-totsy accomplishment in life, aby, that Doris Day snout?

I was, fortunately, so astonished by my indignation that I couldn’t begin to voice it. How could I be feeling a wound in a place where I was not even vulnerable? What did Kay and I care less about than one, money, and two, religion? Our favorite philosopher was Bertrand Russell. Our religion was Dylan Thomas’ religion. Truth and Joy! Our children would be atheists. I had only been making a joke!

Nonetheless, it would seem that I never forgave her: in the weeks following our false alarm, she came to seem to me boringly predictable in conversation, and about as desirable as blubber in bed. And it surprised me that she should take it so badly when I finally had to tell her that I didn’t seem to care for her any more. I was very honest, you see, as Bertrand Russell said I should be. “I just don’t want to see you any more, Kay. I can’t hide my feelings, I’m sorry.” She wept pitifully: she carried around the campus terrible little pouches underneath her bloodshot blue eyes, she didn’t show up for meals, she missed classes. And I was astonished. Because all along I’d thought it was I who had loved her, not she who had loved me. What a surprise to discover just the opposite to have been the case.

Ah, twenty and spurning one’s mistress—that first unsullied thrill of sadism with a woman! And the dream of the women to come. I returned to New Jersey that June, buoyant with my own “strength,” wondering how I could ever have been so captivated by someone so ordinary and so fat.

Another gentile heart broken by me belonged to The Pilgrim, Sarah Abbott Maulsby—New Canaan, Foxcroft, and Vassar (where she had as companion, stabled in Poughkeepsie, that other flaxen beauty, her palomino ). A tall, gentle, decorous twenty-two-year-old, fresh from college, and working as a receptionist in the office of the Senator from Connecticut when we two met and coupled in the fall of 1959.

I was on the staff of the House subcommittee investigating the television quiz scandals. Perfect for a closet socialist like myself: commercial deceit on a national scale, exploitation of the innocent public, elaborate corporate chicanery—in short, good old capitalist greed. And then of course that extra bonus. Charlatan Van Doren. Such character, such brains and breeding, that candor and schoolboyish charm—the ur-WASP, wouldn’t you say? And turns out he’s a fake. Well, what do you know about that. Gentile America? Supergoy, a gonif! Steals money. Covets money. Wants money, will do anything for it. Goodness gracious me, almost as bad as Jews—you sanctimonious WASPs!

Yes, I was one happy yiddel down there in Washington, a little Stern gang of my own, busily exploding Charlie’s honor and integrity, while simultaneously becoming lover to that aristocratic Yankee beauty whose forebears arrived on these shores in the seventeenth century. Phenomenon known as Hating Your Goy And Eating One Too.

Why didn’t I marry that beautiful and adoring girl? I remember her in the gallery, pale and enchanting in a navy blue suit with gold buttons, watching with such pride, with such love, as I took on one afternoon, in my first public cross-examination, a very slippery network P.R. man . . . and I was impressive too, for my first time out: cool, lucid, persistent, just the faintest hammering of the heart—and only twenty-six years old. Oh yeah, when I am holding all the moral cards, watch out, you crooks you! I am nobody to futz around with when I know myself to be four hundred per cent in the right.

Why didn’t I marry the girl? Well, there was her cutesy-wootsy boarding school argot, for one. Couldn’t bear it. “Barf” for vomit, “ticked off” for angry, “a howl” for funny, “crackers” for crazy, “teeny” for tiny. Oh, and “divine” (What Mary Jane Reed means by “groovy”—I’m always telling these girls how to talk right, me with my five-hundred-word New Jersey vocabulary. ) Then there were the nicknames of her friends; there were the friends themselves! Poody and Pip and Pebble, Shrimp and Brute and Tug, Squeek, Bumpo, Baba—it sounded, I said, as though she had gone to Vassar with Donald Duck’s nephews . . . But then my argot caused her some pain too. The first time I said fuck in her presence (and the presence of friend Pebble, in her Peter Pan collar and her cablestitch cardigan, and tanned like an Indian from so much tennis at the Chevy Chase Club), such a look of agony passed over The Pilgrim’s face, you would have thought I had just branded the four letters on her flesh. Why, she asked so plaintively once we were alone, why had I to be so “unattractive”? What possible pleasure had it given me to be so “ill-mannered”? What on earth had I “proved”? “Why did you have to be so pus-y like that? It was so uncalled–for.” Pus-y being Debutante for disagreeable.

In bed? Nothing fancy, no acrobatics or feats of daring and skill; as we screwed our first time, so we continued—I assaulted and she surrendered, and the heat generated on her mahogany fourposter (a Maulsby family heirloom) was considerable. Our one peripheral delight s the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. There, standing thigh to thigh, I would whisper, “Look, Sarah, look.” At first she was shy, left the looking to me, at first she was modest and submitted only because I wished her to, but in time she developed something of a passion for the looking glass, too, and followed the reflection of our joining with a certain startled intensity in her gaze. Did she see what I saw? In the black pubic hair, ladies and gentlemen, weighing one hundred and seventy pounds, at least half of which is still undigested halvah and hot pastrami, from Newark, NJ, The Shnoz, Alexander Portnoy! And his opponent, in the fair fuzz, with her elegant polished limbs and the gentle maidenly face of a Botticelli, that ever-popular purveyor of the social amenities here in the Garden, one hundred and fourteen pounds of Republican refinement, and the pertest pair of nipples in all New England, from New Canaan, Connecticut, Sarah Abbott Maulsby!

What I’m saying. Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America—maybe that’s more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington—now Portnoy. As though my manifest destiny is to seduce a girl from each of the forty-eight states. As for Alaskan and Hawaiian women, I really have no feelings either way, no scores to settle, no coupons to cash in, no dreams to put to rest—who are they to me, a bunch of Eskimos and Orientals? No, I am a child of the forties, of network radio and World War Two, of eight teams to a league and forty-eight states to a country. I know all the words to “The Marine Hymn,” and to “The Caissons Go Rolling Along”—and to “The Song of the Army Air Corps.” I know the song of the Navy Air Corps: “Sky anchors aweigh/ We’re sailors of the air/ We’re sailing everywhere—” I can even sing you the song of the Seabees. Go ahead, name your branch of service, Spielvogel, I’ll sing you your song! Please, allow me—it’s my money. We used to sit on our coats, I remember, on the concrete floor, our backs against the sturdy walls of the basement corridors of my grade school, singing in unison to keep up our morale until the all-clear signal sounded—“Johnny Zero.” “Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.” “The sky-pilot said it/ You’ve got to give him credit/ For a son of a gun of a gunner was he-e-e-e!” You name it, and if it was in praise of the Stars and Stripes, I know it word for word! Yes, I am a child of air raid drills, Doctor, I remember Corregidor and “The Cavalcade of America,” and that flag, fluttering on its pole, being raised at that heartbreaking angle over bloody Iwo Jima. Colin Kelly went down in flames when I was eight, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki went up in a puff, one week when I was twelve, and that was the heart of my boyhood, four years of hating Tojo, Hitler, and Mussolini, and loving this brave determined republic! Rooting my little Jewish heart out for our American democracy! Well, we won, the enemy is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse, and dead because I prayed him dead—and now I want what’s coming to me. My G.I. bill—real American ass! The cunt in country-’tis-of-thee! I pledge allegiance to the twat of the United States of America—and to the republic for which it stands: Davenport, Iowa! Dayton, Ohio! Schenectady, New York, and neighboring Troy! Fort Myers, Florida! New Canaan, Connecticut! Chicago, Illinois! Albert Lea, Minnesota! Portland, Maine! Moundsville, West Virginia! Sweet land of skikse–tail, of thee I sing!

From the mountains,

To the prairies,

To he oceans, white-with-my-fooaahhh-mmm!

God bless A-me-ri-cuuuuhhhh!

My home, SWEET HOOOOOHHHH-M!

Imagine what it meant to me to know that generations of Maulsbys were buried in the graveyard at Newburyport, Massachusetts, and generations of Abbotts in Salem. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims pride . . . Exactly. Oh, and more. Here was a girl whose mother’s flesh crawled at the sound of the words “Eleanor Roosevelt.” Who herself had been dandled on the knee of Wendell Wilikie at Hobe Sound, Florida, in 1042 (while my father was saying prayers for F.D.R. on the High Holidays, and my mother blessing him over the Friday night candles). The Senator from Connecticut had been a roommate of her Daddy’s at Harvard, and her brother, “Paunch,” a graduate of Yale, held a seat on the New York Stock Exchange and ( how lucky could I be? ) played polo (yes, games from on top of a horse!) on Sunday afternoons someplace in Westchester County, as he had throughout college. She could have been a Lindabury, don’t you see? A daughter of my father’s boss! Here was a girl who knew how to sail a boat, knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could pick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon—like a Chinese with his chopsticks! What skills she had learned in far-off Connecticut!). Activities that partook of the exotic and even the taboo she performed so simply, as a matter of course: and I was as wowed (though that’s not the whole story) as Desdemona, hearing of the Anthropapagi. I came across a newspaper clipping in her scrapbook, a column entitled “A Deb A Day,” which began, “SARAH ABBOTT MAULSBY—‘Ducks and quails and pheasants better scurry’ around New Canaan this fall because Sally, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Maulsby of Greenley Road, is getting in practice for small game season. Shooting—” with a gun. Doctor—“shooting is just one of Sally’s outdoor hobbies. She loves riding too, and this summer hopes to try a rod and reel—” and get this; I think this tale would win my son too—“hopes to try a rod and reel on some of those trout that swim by ‘Wind-view’ her family’s summer home.”

What Sally couldn’t do was eat me. To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her. She was sorry, she said, if I was going to take it so hard, but it was just something she didn’t care to try. I mustn’t act as though it were a personal affront, she said, because it had nothing at all to do with me as an individual . . . Oh, didn’t it? Bullshit, girlie! Yes, what made me so irate was precisely my belief that I was being discriminated against. My father couldn’t rise at Boston & Northeastern for the very same reason that Sally Maulsby wouldn’t deign to go down on me! Where was the justice in this world? Where was the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League—! “I do it to you,” I said. The Pilgrim shrugged; kindly she said, “You don’t have to, though. You know that. If you don’t want to . . .” “Ah, but I do want to—it isn’t a matter of ‘have’ to. I want to.” “Well,” she answered, “I don’t.” “But why not?” “Because. I don’t.” “Shit, that’s the way a child answers, Sarah—‘because’! Give me a reason!” “I—just don’t do at, that’s all.” “But that brings us back to why. Why?” “Alex, I can’t. I just can’t.” “Give me a single good reason!” “Please,” she replied, knowing her rights, “I don’t think I have to.”

No, she didn’t have to—because to me the answer was clear enough anyway: Because you don’t know how to hike out to windward or what a jib is, because you have never owned evening clothes or been to a cotillion . . . Yes sir, if I were some big blond goy in a pink riding suit and hundred-dollar hunting boots, don’t worry, she’d be down there eating me, of that I am sure!

I am wrong. Three months I spent applying pressure to the back of her skull (pressure met by a surprising counterforce, an impressive, even moving display of stubbornness from such a mild and uncontentious person), for three months I assaulted her in argument and tugged her nightly by the ears. Then one night she invited me to hear the Budapest String Quartet playing Mozart at the Library of Congress; during the final movement of the Clarinet Quintet she took hold of my hand, her cheeks began to shine, and when we got back to her apartment and into bed, Sally said, “Alex . . . I will.” “Will what?” But she was gone, down beneath the covers and out of sight: blowing me! That is to say, she took my prick in her mouth and held it there for a count of sixty, held the surprised little thing there. Doctor, like a thermometer. I threw back the blankets—this I had to see! Feel, there wasn’t very much to feel, but oh the sight of it! Only Sally was already finished. Having moved it by now to the side of her face, as though it were the gear shift on her Hillman-Minx. And there were tears on her face.

“I did it,” she announced.

“Sally, oh, Sarah, don’t cry.”

“But I did do it, Alex.”

“. . . You mean,” I said, “that’s all?”

“You mean,” she gasped, “more?”

“Well, to be frank, a little more—I mean to be truthful with you, it wouldn’t go unappreciated—”

“But it’s getting big. I’ll suffocate.”

JEW SMOTHERS DEB WITH COCK, Vassar Grad Georgetown Strangulation Victim; Mocky Lawyer Held

“Not if you breathe, you won’t.”

“I will I’ll choke—”

“Sarah, the best safeguard against asphyxiation is breathing. Just breathe, and that’s all there is to it. More or less.”

God bless her, she tried. But came up gagging. “I told you,” she moaned.

“But you weren’t breathing.”

“I can’t with that in my mouth.”

“Through your nose. Pretend you’re swimming.”

“But I’m not.”

“PRETEND!” I suggested, and though she gave another gallant try, surfaced only seconds later in an agony of coughing and tears. I gathered her then in my arms (that lovely willing girl! convinced by Mozart to go down on Alex! oh, sweet as Natasha in War and Peace! a tender young countess!). I rocked her, I teased her, I made her laugh, for the first time I said, “I love you too, my baby,” but of course it couldn’t have been clearer to me that despite all her many qualities and charms—her devotion, her beauty, her deerlike grace, her place in American history—there could never be any “love” in me for The Pilgrim. Intolerant of her frailties. Jealous of her accomplishments. Resentful of her family. No, not much room there for love.

No, Sally Maulsby was just something nice a son once did for his dad. A little vengeance on Mr. Lindabury for all those nights and Sundays Jack Portnoy spent collecting down in the colored district. A little bonus extracted from Boston & Northeastern, for all those years of service, and exploitation.