Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  But what he had to offer I didn’t want—and what I wanted he didn’t have to offer. Yet how unusual is that? Why must it continue to cause such pain? At this late date! Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred … or the love? Because I haven’t even begun to mention everything I remember with pleasure—I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss! All those memories that seem somehow to be bound up with the weather and the time of day, and that flash into mind with such poignancy, that momentarily I am not down in the subway, or at my office, or at dinner with a pretty girl, but back in my childhood, with them. Memories of practically nothing—and yet they seem moments of history as crucial to my being as the moment of my conception; I might be remembering his sperm nosing into her ovum, so piercing is my gratitude—yes, my gratitude!—so sweeping and unqualified is my love. Yes, me, with sweeping and unqualified love! I am standing in the kitchen (standing maybe for the first time in my life), my mother points, “Look outside, baby,” and I look; she says, “See? how purple? a real fall sky.” The first line of poetry I ever hear! And I remember it! A real fall sky … It is an iron-cold January day, dusk—oh, these memories of dusk are going to kill me yet, of chicken fat on rye bread to tide me over to dinner, and the moon already outside the kitchen window—I have just come in with hot red cheeks and a dollar I have earned shoveling snow: “You know what you’re going to have for dinner,” my mother coos so lovingly to me, “for being such a hard-working boy? Your favorite winter meal. Lamb stew.” It is night: after a Sunday in New York City, at Radio City and Chinatown, we are driving home across the George Washington Bridge—the Holland Tunnel is the direct route between Pell Street and Jersey City, but I beg for the bridge, and because my mother says it’s “educational,” my father drives some ten miles out of his way to get us home. Up front my sister counts aloud the number of supports upon which the marvelous educational cables rest, while in the back I fall asleep with my face against my mother’s black sealskin coat. At Lakewood, where we go one winter for a weekend vacation with my parents’ Sunday night Gin Rummy Club, I sleep in one twin bed with my father, and my mother and Hannah curl up together in the other. At dawn my father awakens me and like convicts escaping, we noiselessly dress and slip out of the room. “Come,” he whispers, motioning for me to don my earmuffs and coat, “I want to show you something. Did you know I was a waiter in Lakewood when I was sixteen years old?” Outside the hotel he points across to the beautiful silent woods. “How’s that?” he says. We walk together—“at a brisk pace”—around a silver lake. “Take good deep breaths. Take in the piney air all the way. This is the best air in the world, good winter piney air.” Good winter piney air—another poet for a parent! I couldn’t be more thrilled if I were Wordsworth’s kid! … In summer he remains in the city while the three of us go off to live in a furnished room at the seashore for a month. He will join us for the last two weeks, when he gets his vacation … there are times, however, when Jersey City is so thick with humidity, so alive with the mosquitoes that come dive-bombing in from the marshes, that at the end of his day’s work he drives sixty-five miles, taking the old Cheesequake Highway—the Cheesequake! My God! the stuff you uncover here!—drives sixty-five miles to spend the night with us in our breezy room at Bradley Beach.

  He arrives after we have already eaten, but his own dinner waits while he unpeels the soggy city clothes in which he has been making the rounds of his debit all day, and changes into his swimsuit. I carry his towel for him as he clops down the street to the beach in his unlaced shoes. I am dressed in clean short pants and a spotless polo shirt, the salt is showered off me, and my hair—still my little boy’s pre-steel wool hair, soft and combable—is beautifully parted and slicked down. There is a weathered iron rail that runs the length of the boardwalk, and I seat myself upon it; below me, in his shoes, my father crosses the empty beach. I watch him neatly set down his towel near the shore. He places his watch in one shoe, his eyeglasses in the other, and then he is ready to make his entrance into the sea. To this day I go into the water as he advised: plunge the wrists in first, then splash the underarms, then a handful to the temples and the back of the neck … ah, but slowly, always slowly. This way you get to refresh yourself, while avoiding a shock to the system. Refreshed, unshocked, he turns to face me, comically waves farewell up to where he thinks I’m standing, and drops backward to float with his arms outstretched. Oh he floats so still—he works, he works so hard, and for whom if not for me?—and then at last, after turning on his belly and making with a few choppy strokes that carry him nowhere, he comes wading back to shore, his streaming compact torso glowing from the last pure spikes of light driving in, over my shoulder, out of stifling inland New Jersey, from which I am being spared.

  And there are more memories like this one, Doctor. A lot more. This is my mother and father I’m talking about.

  But—but—but—let me pull myself together—there is also this vision of him emerging from the bathroom, savagely kneading the back of his neck and sourly swallowing a belch. “All right, what is it that was so urgent you couldn’t wait till I came out to tell me?”

  “Nothing,” says my mother. “It’s settled.”

  He looks at me, so disappointed. I’m what he lives for, and I know it. “What did he do?”

  “What he did is over and done with, God willing. You, did you move your bowels?” she asks him.

  “Of course I didn’t move my bowels.”

  “Jack, what is it going to be with you, with those bowels?”

  “They’re turning into concrete, that’s what it’s going to be.”

  “Because you eat too fast.”

  “I don’t eat too fast.”

  “How then, slow?”

  “I eat regular.”

  “You eat like a pig, and somebody should tell you.”

  “Oh, you got a wonderful way of expressing yourself sometimes, do you know that?”

  “I’m only speaking the truth,” she says. “I stand on my feet all day in this kitchen, and you eat like there’s a fire somewhere, and this one—this one has decided that the food I cook isn’t good enough for him. He’d rather be sick and scare the living daylights out of me.”

  “What did he do?”

  “I don’t want to upset you,” she says. “Let’s just forget the whole thing.” But she can’t, so now she begins to cry. Look, she is probably not the happiest person in the world either. She was once a tall stringbean of a girl whom the boys called “Red” in high school. When I was nine and ten years old I had an absolute passion for her high school yearbook. For a while I kept it in the same drawer with that other volume of exotica, my stamp collection.

  Sophie Ginsky the boys call “Red,”

  She’ll go far with her big brown eyes and her clever head.

  And that was my mother!

  Also, she had been secretary to the soccer coach, an office pretty much without laurels in our own time, but apparently the post for a young girl to hold in Jersey City during the First World War. So I thought, at any rate, when I turned the pages of her yearbook, and she pointed out to me her dark-haired beau, who had been captain of the team, and today, to quote Sophie, “the biggest manufacturer of mustard in New York,” “And I could have married him instead of your father,” she confided in me, and more than once. I used to wonder sometimes what that would have been like for my momma and me, invariably on the occasions when my father took us to dine out at the corner delicatessen. I look around the place and think, “We would have manufactured all this mustard.” I suppose she must have had thoughts like that herself.

  “He eats French fries,” she says, and sinks into a kitchen chair to Weep Her Heart Out once and for all. “He goes after school with Melvin Weiner and stuffs himself with French-fried potatoes. Jack, you tell him, I’m only his mother. Tell him what the end is going to be. Alex,” she says passionately, looking to where I am edging out of the room, “tateleh, it begins with diarrhea, but do you know how it ends
? With a sensitive stomach like yours, do you know how it finally ends? Wearing a plastic bag to do your business in!”

  Who in the history of the world has been least able to deal with a woman’s tears? My father. I am second. He says to me, “You heard your mother. Don’t eat French fries with Melvin Weiner after school.”

  “Or ever,” she pleads.

  “Or ever,” my father says.

  “Or hamburgers out,” she pleads.

  “Or hamburgers out,” he says.

  “Hamburgers,” she says bitterly, just as she might say Hitler, “where they can put anything in the world in that they want—and he eats them. Jack, make him promise, before he gives himself a terrible tsura, and it’s too late.”

  “I promise!” I scream. “I promise!” and race from the kitchen—to where? Where else.

  I tear off my pants, furiously I grab that battered battering ram to freedom, my adolescent cock, even as my mother begins to call from the other side of the bathroom door. “Now this time don’t flush. Do you hear me, Alex? I have to see what’s in that bowl!”

  Doctor, do you understand what I was up against? My wang was all I really had that I could call my own. You should have watched her at work during polio season! She should have gotten medals from the March of Dimes! Open your mouth. Why is your throat red? Do you have a headache you’re not telling me about? You’re not going to any baseball game, Alex, until I see you move your neck. Is your neck stiff? Then why are you moving it that way? You ate like you were nauseous, are you nauseous? Well, you ate like you were nauseous. I don’t want you drinking from the drinking fountain in that playground. If you’re thirsty wait until you’re home. Your throat is sore, isn’t it? I can tell how you’re swallowing. I think maybe what you are going to do, Mr. Joe Di Maggio, is put that glove away and lie down. I am not going to allow you to go outside in this heat and run around, not with that sore throat, I’m not. I want to take your temperature. I don’t like the sound of this throat business one bit. To be very frank, I am actually beside myself that you have been walking around all day with a sore throat and not telling your mother. Why did you keep this a secret? Alex, polio doesn’t know from baseball games. It only knows from iron lungs and crippled forever! I don’t want you running around, and that’s final. Or eating hamburgers out. Or mayonnaise. Or chopped liver. Or tuna. Not everybody is careful the way your mother is about spoilage. You’re used to a spotless house, you don’t begin to know what goes on in restaurants. Do you know why your mother when we go to the Chink’s will never sit facing the kitchen? Because I don’t want to see what goes on back there. Alex, you must wash everything, is that clear? Everything! God only knows who touched it before you did.

  Look, am I exaggerating to think it’s practically miraculous that I’m ambulatory? The hysteria and the superstition! The watch-its and the be-carefuls! You mustn’t do this, you can’t do that—hold it! don’t! you’re breaking an important law! What law? Whose law? They might as well have had plates in their lips and rings through their noses and painted themselves blue for all the human sense they made! Oh, and the milchiks and flaishiks besides, all those meshuggeneh rules and regulations on top of their own private craziness! It’s a family joke that when I was a tiny child I turned from the window out of which I was watching a snowstorm, and hopefully asked, “Momma, do we believe in winter?” Do you get what I’m saying? I was raised by Hottentots and Zulus! I couldn’t even contemplate drinking a glass of milk with my salami sandwich without giving serious offense to God Almighty. Imagine then what my conscience gave me for all that jerking off! The guilt, the fears—the terror bred into my bones! What in their world was not charged with danger, dripping with germs, fraught with peril? Oh, where was the gusto, where was the boldness and courage? Who filled these parents of mine with such a fearful sense of life? My father, in his retirement now, has really only one subject into which he can sink his teeth, the New Jersey Turnpike. “I wouldn’t go on that thing if you paid me. You have to be out of your mind to travel on that thing—it’s Murder Incorporated, it’s a legalized way for people to go out and get themselves killed—” Listen, you know what he says to me three times a week on the telephone—and I’m only counting when I pick it up, not the total number of rings I get between six and ten every night. “Sell that car, will you? Will you do me a favor and sell that car so I can get a good night’s sleep? Why you have to have a car in that city is beyond my comprehension. Why you want to pay for insurance and garage and upkeep, I don’t even begin to understand. But then I don’t understand yet why you even want to live by yourself over in that jungle. What do you pay those robbers again for that two-by-four apartment? A penny over fifty dollars a month and you’re out of your mind. Why you don’t move back to North Jersey is a mystery to me—why you prefer the noise and the crime and the fumes—”

  And my mother, she just keeps whispering. Sophie whispers on! I go for dinner once a month, it is a struggle requiring all my guile and cunning and strength, but I have been able over all these years, and against imponderable odds, to hold it down to once a month: I ring the bell, she opens the door, the whispering promptly begins! “Don’t ask what kind of day I had with him yesterday,” So I don’t. “Alex,” sotto voce still, “when he has a day like that you don’t know what a difference a call from you would make.” I nod. “And, Alex”—and I’m nodding away, you know—it doesn’t cost anything, and it may even get me through—“next week is his birthday. That Mother’s Day came and went without a card, plus my birthday, those things don’t bother me. But he’ll be sixty-six, Alex. That’s not a baby, Alex—that’s a landmark in a life. So you’ll send a card. It wouldn’t kill you.”

  Doctor, these people are incredible! These people are unbelievable! These two are the outstanding producers and packagers of guilt in our time! They render it from me like fat from a chicken! “Call, Alex. Visit, Alex. Alex, keep us informed. Don’t go away without telling us, please, not again. Last time you went away you didn’t tell us, your father was ready to phone the police. You know how many times a day he called and got no answer? Take a guess, how many?” “Mother,” I inform her, from between my teeth, “if I’m dead they’ll smell the body in seventy-two hours, I assure you!” “Don’t talk like that! God forbid!” she cries. Oh, and now she’s got the beauty, the one guaranteed to do the job. Yet how could I expect otherwise? Can I ask the impossible of my own mother? “Alex, to pick up a phone is such a simple thing—how much longer will we be around to bother you anyway?”

  Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I’m living it in the middle of a Jewish joke! I am the son in the Jewish joke—only it ain’t no joke! Please, who crippled us like this? Who made us so morbid and hysterical and weak? Why, why are they screaming still, “Watch out! Don’t do it! Alex—no!” and why, alone on my bed in New York, why am I still hopelessly beating my meat? Doctor, what do you call this sickness I have? Is this the Jewish suffering I used to hear so much about? Is this what has come down to me from the pogroms and the persecution? from the mockery and abuse bestowed by the goyim over these two thousand lovely years? Oh my secrets, my shame, my palpitations, my flushes, my sweats! The way I respond to the simple vicissitudes of human life! Doctor, I can’t stand any more being frightened like this over nothing! Bless me with manhood! Make me brave! Make me strong! Make me whole! Enough being a nice Jewish boy, publicly pleasing my parents while privately pulling my putz! Enough!

  THE JEWISH BLUES

  Sometime during my ninth year one of my testicles apparently decided it had had enough of life down in the scrotum and began to make its way north. At the beginning I could feel it bobbing uncertainly just at the rim of the pelvis—and then, as though its moment of indecision had passed, entering the cavity of my body, like a survivor being dragged up out of the sea and over the hull of a lifeboat. And there it nestled, secure at last behind the fortress of my bones, leaving its foolhardy mate to chance it alone in that boy’s world of footb
all cleats and picket fences, sticks and stones and pocketknives, all those dangers that drove my mother wild with foreboding, and about which I was warned and warned and warned. And warned again. And again.

  And again.

  So my left testicle took up residence in the vicinity of the inguinal canal. By pressing a finger in the crease between my groin and my thigh, I could still, in the early weeks of its disappearance, feel the curve of its jellied roundness; but then came nights of terror, when I searched my guts in vain, searched all the way up to my rib cage—alas, the voyager had struck off for regions uncharted and unknown. Where was it gone to! How high and how far before the journey would come to an end! Would I one day open my mouth to speak in class, only to discover my left nut out on the end of my tongue? In school we chanted, along with our teacher, I am the Captain of my fate, I am the Master of my soul, and meanwhile, within my own body, an anarchic insurrection had been launched by one of my privates—which I was helpless to put down!

  For some six months, until its absence was observed by the family doctor during my annual physical examination, I pondered my mystery, more than once wondering—for there was no possibility that did not enter my head, none—if the testicle could have taken a dive backwards toward the bowel and there begun to convert itself into just such an egg as I had observed my mother yank in a moist yellow cluster from the dark interior of a chicken whose guts she was emptying into the garbage. What if breasts began to grow on me, too? What if my penis went dry and brittle, and one day, while I was urinating, snapped off in my hand? Was I being transformed into a girl? Or worse, into a boy such as I understood (from the playground grapevine) that Robert Ripley of Believe It or Not would pay “a reward” of a hundred thousand dollars for? Believe it or not, there is a nine-year-old boy in New Jersey who is a boy in every way, except he can have babies.