Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  Anyway, Sophie has by this time taken my hand, and with hooded eyes, waits until I sputter out the last accomplishment I can think of, the last virtuous deed I have done, then speaks: “But to us, to us you’re still a baby, darling.” And next comes the whisper, Sophie’s famous whisper that everybody in the room can hear without even straining, she’s so considerate: “Tell him you’re sorry. Give him a kiss. A kiss from you would change the world.”

  A kiss from me would change the world! Doctor! Doctor! Did I say fifteen? Excuse me, I meant ten! I meant five! I meant zero! A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! Listen, come to my aid, will you—and quick! Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it’s beginning to pall a little, at thirty-three! And also it hoits, you know, there is pain involved, a little human suffering is being felt, if I may take it upon myself to say so—only that’s the part Sam Levenson leaves out! Sure, they sit in the casino at the Concord, the women in their minks and the men in their phosphorescent suits, and boy, do they laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh—“Help, help, my son the doctor is drowning!”—ha ha ha, ha ha ha, only what about the pain, Myron Cohen! What about the guy who is actually drowning! Actually sinking beneath an ocean of parental relentlessness! What about him—who happens, Myron Cohen, to be me! Doctor, please, I can’t live any more in a world given its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some—some black humorist! Because that’s who the black humorists are—of course!—the Henny Youngmans and the Milton Berles breaking them up down there in the Fountainebleau, and with what? Stories of murder and mutilation! “Help,” cries the woman running along the sand at Miami Beach, “help, my son the doctor is drowning!” Ha ha ha—only it is my son the patient, lady! And is he drowning! Doctor, get these people off my ass, will you please? The macabre is very funny on the stage—but not to live it, thank you! So just tell me how, and I’ll do it! Just tell me what, and I’ll say it right to their faces! Scat, Sophie! Fuck off, Jack! Go away from me already!

  I mean here’s a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me. It’s this past summer, just before I am to leave on my vacation. We have had our dinner (“You got a piece of fish?” my father asks the waiter in the fancy French restaurant I take them to, to show I am grown-up—“Oui, monsieur, we have—” “All right, give me a piece of fish,” says my father, “and make sure it’s hot”), we have had our dinner, and afterward, chewing on my Titralac (for relief of gastric hyperacidity), I walk a ways with them before putting them in a taxi for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Immediately my father starts in about how I haven’t come to visit in five weeks (ground I thought we two had already covered in the restaurant, while my mother was whispering to the waiter to make sure her “big boy’s” piece of fish—that’s me, folks!—was well-done), and now I am going away for a whole month, and all in all when do they ever see their own son? They see their daughter, and their daughter’s children, and not infrequently, but that is not successful either. “With that son-in-law,” my father says, “if you don’t say the right psychological thing to his kids, if I don’t talk straight psychology to my own granddaughters, he wants to put me in jail! I don’t care what he calls himself, he still thinks like a Communist to me. My own grandchildren, and everything I say has to pass by him, Mr. Censor!” No, their daughter is now Mrs. Feibish, and her little daughters are Feibishes too. Where are the Portnoys he dreamed of? In my nuts. “Look,” I cry in my strangulated way, “you’re seeing me now! You’re with me right this minute!” But he is off and running, and now that he hasn’t fishbones to worry about choking on, there is no reining him in—Mr. and Mrs. Schmuck have Seymour and his beautiful wife and their seven thousand brilliant and beautiful children who come to them every single Friday night—“Look, I am a very busy person! I have a briefcase full of important things to do—!” “Come on,” he replies, “you gotta eat, you can come for a meal once a week, because you gotta eat anyway comes six o’clock—well, don’t you?” Whereupon who pipes up but Sophie, informing him that when she was a little girl her family was always telling her to do this and do that, and how unhappy and resentful it sometimes would cause her to feel, and how my father shouldn’t insist with me because, she concludes, “Alexander is a big boy, Jack, he has a right to make his own decisions, that’s something I always told him.” You always what? What did she say?

  Oh, why go on? Why be so obsessed like this? Why be so petty? Why not be a sport like Sam Levenson and laugh it all off—right?

  Only let me finish. So they get into the taxi. “Kiss him,” my mother whispers, “you’re going all the way to Europe.”

  Of course my father overhears—that’s why she lowers her voice, so we’ll all listen—and panic sweeps over him. Every year, from September on, he is perpetually asking me what my plans are for the following August—now he realizes that he has been outfoxed: bad enough I am leaving on a midnight plane for another continent, but worse, he hasn’t the slightest idea of my itinerary. I did it! I made it!

  “—But where in Europe? Europe is half the whole globe—” he cries, as I begin to close the taxi door from the outside.

  “I told you, I don’t know.”

  “What do you mean? You gotta know! How will you get there yourself, if you ‘don’t know’—”

  “Sorry, sorry—”

  Desperately now his body comes lurching across my mother’s—just as I slam shut the door—oy, not on his fingers, please! Jesus, this father! Whom I have had forever! Whom I used to find in the morning fast asleep on the toilet bowl, his pajamas around his knees and his chin hanging onto his chest. Up at quarter to six in the morning, so as to give himself a full uninterrupted hour on the can, in the fervent hope that if he is so kind and thoughtful as this to his bowels, they will relent, they will give in, they will say finally, “Okay, Jack, you win,” and make a present to the poor bastard of five or six measly lumps of shit. “Jesus Christ!” he groans, when I awaken him so as to wash up for school, and he realizes that it is nearly seven-thirty and down in the bowl over which he has been sleeping for an hour, there is, if he’s lucky, one brown angry little pellet such as you expect from the rectum of a rabbit maybe—but not from the rear-end of a man who now has to go out all clogged up to put in a twelve-hour day. “Seven-thirty? Why didn’t you say something!” Zoom, he’s dressed, and in his hat and coat, and with his big black collection book in one hand he bolts his stewed prunes and his bran flakes standing up, and fills a pocket with a handful of dried fruits that would bring on in an ordinary human being something resembling dysentery. “I ought to stick a hand grenade up my ass, if you want the truth,” he whispers privately to me, while my mother occupies the bathroom and my sister dresses for school in her “room,” the sun parlor—“I got enough All-Bran in me to launch a battleship. It’s backed up to my throat, for Christ’s sake.” Here, because he has got me snickering, and is amusing himself too in his own mordant way, he opens his mouth and points downward inside himself with a thumb. “Take a look. See where it starts to get dark? That ain’t just dark—that’s all those prunes rising up where my tonsils used to be. Thank God I had those things out, otherwise there wouldn’t be room.”

  “Very nice talk,” my mother calls from the bathroom. “Very nice talk to a child.”

  “Talk?” he cries. “It’s the truth” and in the very next instant is thomping angrily around the house hollering, “My hat, I’m late, where’s my hat? who saw my hat?” and my mother comes into the kitchen and gives me her patient, eternal, all-knowing sphinx-look … and waits … and soon he is back in the hallway, apoplectic and moaning, practically in grief, “Where is my hat? Where is that hat!” until softly, from the depths of her omniscient soul, she answers him, “Dummy, it’s on your head.” Momentarily his eyes seem to empty of all signs of human experience and understanding; he stands there, a blank, a thing, a body full of shit and no more. T
hen consciousness returns—yes, he will have to go out into the world after all, for his hat has been found, on his head of all places. “Oh yeah,” he says, reaching up in wonderment—and then out of the house and into the Kaiser, and Superman is gone until dark.

  The Kaiser, time for my story about the Kaiser: how he proudly took me with him when he went after the war to trade in the ’39 Dodge for a new automobile, new make, new model, new everything—what a perfect way for an American dad to impress his American son!—and how the fast-talking salesman acted as though he just couldn’t believe his ears, was simply incredulous, each time my father said “No” to one after another of the thousand little accessories the cock-sucker wanted to sell us to hang on the car. “Well, I’ll tell you my opinion for whatever it’s worth,” says that worthless son of a bitch, “she’d look two hun-erd percent better with the whitewalls—don’t you think so, young fella? Wouldn’t you like your dad to get the whitewalls, at least?” At least. Ah, you slimy prick, you! Turning to me like that, to stick it into my old man—you miserable lowlife thieving son of a bitch! Just who the fuck are you, I wonder, to lord it over us—a God damn Kaiser-Fraser salesman! Where are you now, you intimidating bastard? “No, no whitewalls,” mumbles my humbled father, and I simply shrug my shoulders in embarrassment over his inability to provide me and my family with the beautiful things in life.

  Anyway, anyway—off to work in the radio-less white-wall-less Kaiser, there to be let into the office by the cleaning lady. Now, I ask you, why must he be the one to raise the shades in that office in the morning? Why must he work the longest day of any insurance agent in history? For whom? Me? Oh, if so, if so, if that is his reason, then it is all really too fucking tragic to bear. The misunderstanding is too great! For me? Do me a favor and don’t do it for me! Don’t please look around for a reason for your life being what it is and come up with Alex! Because I am not the be-all and end-all of everybody’s existence! I refuse to shlep those bags around for the rest of my life! Do you hear me? I refuse! Stop finding it incomprehensible that I should be flying to Europe, thousands and thousands of miles away, just when you have turned sixty-six and are all ready to keel over at any minute, like you read about first thing every morning in the Times. Men his age and younger, they die—one minute they’re alive, and the next dead, and apparently what he thinks is that if I am only across the Hudson instead of the Atlantic … Listen, what does he think? That with me around it simply won’t happen? That I’ll race to his side, take hold of his hand, and thereby restore him to life? Does he actually believe that I somehow have the power to destroy death? That I am the resurrection and the life? My dad, a real believing Christer! And doesn’t even know it!

  His death. His death and his bowels: the truth is I am hardly less preoccupied with either than he is himself. I never get a telegram, never get a phone call after midnight, that I do not feel my own stomach empty out like a washbasin, and say aloud—aloud!—“He’s dead.” Because apparently I believe it too, believe that I can somehow save him from annihilation—can, and must! But where did we all get this ridiculous and absurd idea that I am so—powerful, so precious, so necessary to everybody’s survival! What was it with these Jewish parents—because I am not in this boat alone, oh no, I am on the biggest troop ship afloat … only look in through the portholes and see us there, stacked to the bulkheads in our bunks, moaning and groaning with such pity for ourselves, the sad and watery-eyed sons of Jewish parents, sick to the gills from rolling through these heavy seas of guilt—so I sometimes envision us, me and my fellow wailers, melancholies, and wise guys, still in steerage, like our forebears—and oh sick, sick as dogs, we cry out intermittently, one of us or another, “Poppa, how could you?” “Momma, why did you?” and the stories we tell, as the big ship pitches and rolls, the vying we do—who had the most castrating mother, who the most benighted father, I can match you, you bastard, humiliation for humiliation, shame for shame … the retching in the toilets after meals, the hysterical deathbed laughter from the bunks, and the tears—here a puddle wept in contrition, here a puddle from indignation—in the blinking of an eye, the body of a man (with the brain of a boy) rises in impotent rage to flail at the mattress above, only to fall instantly back, lashing itself with reproaches. Oh, my Jewish men friends! My dirty-mouthed guilt-ridden brethren! My sweethearts! My mates! Will this fucking ship ever stop pitching? When? When, so that we can leave off complaining how sick we are—and go out into the air, and live!

  Doctor Spielvogel, it alleviates nothing fixing the blame—blaming is still ailing, of course, of course—but nonetheless, what was it with these Jewish parents, what, that they were able to make us little Jewish boys believe ourselves to be princes on the one hand, unique as unicorns on the one hand, geniuses and brilliant like nobody has ever been brilliant and beautiful before in the history of childhood—saviors and sheer perfection on the one hand, and such bumbling, incompetent, thoughtless, helpless, selfish, evil little shits, little ingrates, on the other!

  “But in Europe where—?” he calls after me, as the taxi pulls away from the curb.

  “I don’t know where,” I call after him, gleefully waving farewell. I am thirty-three, and free at last of my mother and father! For a month.

  “But how will we know your address?”

  Joy! Sheer joy! “You won’t!”

  “But what if in the meantime—?”

  “What if what?” I laugh. “What if what are you worried about now?”

  “What if—?” And my God, does he really actually shout it out the taxi window? Is his fear, his greed, his need and belief in me so great that he actually shouts these words out into the streets of New York? “What if I die?”

  Because that is what I hear, Doctor. The last words I hear before flying off to Europe—and with The Monkey, somebody whom I have kept a total secret from them. “What if I die?” and then off I go for my orgiastic holiday abroad.

  … Now, whether the words I hear are the words spoken is something else again. And whether what I hear I hear out of compassion for him, out of my agony over the inevitability of this horrific occurrence, his death, or out of my eager anticipation of that event, is also something else again. But this of course you understand, this of course is your bread and your butter.

  I was saying that the detail of Ronald Nimkin’s suicide that most appeals to me is the note to his mother found pinned to that roomy straitjacket, his nice stiffly laundered sports shirt. Know what it said? Guess. The last message from Ronald to his momma? Guess.

  Mrs. Blumenthal called. Please bring your mah-jongg rules to the game tonight.

  Ronald

  Now, how’s that for good to the last drop? How’s that for a good boy, a thoughtful boy, a kind and courteous and well-behaved boy, a nice Jewish boy such as no one will ever have cause to be ashamed of? Say thank you, darling. Say you’re welcome, darling. Say you’re sorry, Alex. Say you’re sorry! Apologize! Yeah, for what? What have I done now? Hey, I’m hiding under my bed, my back to the wall, refusing to say I’m sorry, refusing, too, to come out and take the consequences. Refusing! And she is after me with a broom, trying to sweep my rotten carcass into the open. Why, shades of Gregor Samsa! Hello Alex, goodbye Franz! “You better tell me you’re sorry, you, or else! And I don’t mean maybe either!” I am five, maybe six, and she is or-elsing me and not-meaning-maybe as though the firing squad is already outside, lining the street with newspaper preparatory to my execution.

  And now comes the father: after a pleasant day of trying to sell life insurance to black people who aren’t even exactly sure they’re alive, home to a hysterical wife and a metamorphosed child—because what did I do, me, the soul of goodness? Incredible, beyond belief, but either I kicked her in the shins, or I bit her. I don’t want to sound like I’m boasting, but I do believe it was both.

  “Why?” she demands to know, kneeling on the floor to shine a flashlight in my eyes, “why do you do such a thing?” Oh, simple, why did Ronald Nimkin
give up his ghost and the piano? BECAUSE WE CAN’T TAKE ANY MORE! BECAUSE YOU FUCKING JEWISH MOTHERS ARE JUST TOO FUCKING MUCH TO BEAR! I have read Freud on Leonardo, Doctor, and pardon the hubris, but my fantasies exactly: this big smothering bird beating frantic wings about my face and mouth so that I cannot even get my breath. What do we want, me and Ronald and Leonardo? To be left alone! If only for half an hour at a time! Stop already hocking us to be good! hocking us to be nice! Just leave us alone, God damn it, to pull our little dongs in peace and think our little selfish thoughts—stop already with the respectabilizing of our hands and our tushies and our mouths! Fuck the vitamins and the cod liver oil! Just give us each day our daily flesh! And forgive us our trespasses—which aren’t even trespasses to begin with!

  “—a little boy you want to be who kicks his own mother in the shins—?” My father speaking … and look at his arms, will you? I have never really noticed before the size of the forearms the man has got on him. He may not have whitewall tires or a high school education, but he has arms on him that are no joke. And, Jesus, is he angry. But why? In part, you schmuck, I kicked her for you!

  “—a human bite is worse than a dog bite, do you know that, you? Get out from under that bed! Do you hear me, what you did to your mother is worse than a dog could do!” And so loud is his roar, and so convincing, that my normally placid sister runs to the kitchen, great gruntfuls of fear erupting from her mouth, and in what we now call the fetal position crouches down between the refrigerator and the wall. Or so I seem to remember it—though it would make sense, I think, to ask how I know what is going on in the kitchen if I am still hiding beneath my bed.