Portnoy's Complaint (22 page)

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”?

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 Passos, 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: 29.

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.