Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  “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 Aimée?—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 me
ant; 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, huh? 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 adult 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! Oh, 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? I’ll 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 th
e 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.