Portnoy's Complaint

by Philip Roth

  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-goy! Go talk to your dog, ask him. Ask Spot what he thinks, that four-legged genius. “Want Kay-Kay to be a Jew, Spottie—huh, big fella, huh?” 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, baby, 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 was 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 Sea-bees. 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 g
ive 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 the 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 Willkie at Hobe Sound, Florida, in 1942 (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—I just don’t do that, 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.

  IN EXILE

  On Sunday mornings, when the weather is warm enough, twenty of the neighborhood men (this in the days of short center f
ield) play a round of seven-inning softball games, starting at nine in the morning and ending about one in the afternoon, the stakes for each game a dollar a head. The umpire is our dentist, old Dr. Wolfenberg, the neighborhood college graduate—night school on High Street, but as good as Oxford to us. Among the players is our butcher, his twin brother our plumber, the grocer, the owner of the service station where my father buys his gasoline—all of them ranging in age from thirty to fifty, though I think of them not in terms of their years, but only as “the men.” In the on-deck circle, even at the plate, they roll their jaws on the stumps of soggy cigars. Not boys, you see, but men. Belly! Muscle! Forearms black with hair! Bald domes! And then the voices they have on them—cannons you can hear go off from as far as our front stoop a block away. I imagine vocal cords inside them thick as clotheslines! lungs the size of zeppelins! Nobody has to tell them to stop mumbling and speak up, never! And the outrageous things they say! The chatter in the infield isn’t chatter, it’s kibbitzing, and (to this small boy, just beginning to learn the art of ridicule) hilarious, particularly the insults that emanate from the man my father has labeled “The Mad Russian,” Biderman, owner of the corner candy store (and bookie joint) who has a “hesitation” side-arm delivery, not only very funny but very effective. “Abracadabra,” he says, and pitches his backbreaking drop. And he is always giving it to Dr. Wolfenberg: “A blind ump, okay, but a blind dentist?” The idea causes him to smote his forehead with his glove. “Play ball, comedian,” calls Dr. Wolfenberg, very Connie Mack in his perforated two-tone shoes and Panama hat, “start up the game, Biderman, unless you want to get thrown out of here for insults—!” “But how do they teach you in that dental school, Doc, by Braille?”