Portnoy's Complaint (28 page)

Her plan for herself was to camp out at night in a sleeping bag. She was on her week’s vacation away from the settlement, traveling on the few pounds that her family had been able to give her for a birthday present. The more fanatical of her fellows, she told me, would never have accepted such a gift, and would probably disapprove of her for failing to do so. She re-created for me a discussion that had raged in her parents’ kibbutz when she was still a little girl, over the fact that some people owned watches and others didn’t. It was settled, after several impassioned meetings of the kibbutz membership, by deciding to rotate the watches every three months.

During the day, at dinner, then as we walked along the romantic harbor wall at Akko that night, I told her about my life. I asked if she would come back with me and have a drink at my hotel in Haifa. She said she would, she had much to say about my story. I wanted to kiss her then, but thought, “What if I
do
have some kind of venereal infection?” I still hadn’t been to see a doctor, partly because of a reluctance to tell some stranger that I had had contact with a whore, but largely because I had no symptoms of any kind. Clearly nothing was wrong with me, and I didn’t
need
a doctor. Nevertheless, when I turned to ask her back to the hotel, I resisted an impulse to press my lips against her pure socialistical mouth.

“American society,” she said, dropping her knapsack and bedroll on the floor, and continuing the lecture she had begun as we drove around the bay to Haifa, “not only sanctions gross and unfair relations among men, but it encourages them. Now, can that be denied? No. Rivalry, competition, envy, jealousy, all that is malignant in human character is nourished by the system. Possessions, money, property—on such corrupt standards as these do you people measure happiness and success. Meanwhile,” she said, perching herself cross-legged upon the bed, “great segments of your population are deprived of the minimal prerequisites for a decent life. Is that not true, too? Because your system is basically exploitive, inherently debasing and unjust. Consequently, Alex”—she used my name as a stern teacher would, there was the thrust of admonition in it—“there can never be anything resembling genuine equality in such an environment. And that is indisputable, you cannot help but agree, if you are at all honest.

“For instance, what did you accomplish with your quiz-scandal hearings? Anything? Nothing, if I may say so. You exposed the corruption of certain weak individuals. But as for the system that trained them in corruption, on that you had not the slightest effect. The system was unshaken. The system was untouched. And why? Because, Alex”—uh-oh, here it comes—“you are yourself as corrupted by the system as Mr. Charles Van Horn.” (By gum, still imperfect! Dang!) “You are not the enemy of the system. You are not even a challenge to the system, as you seem to think. You are only one of its policemen, a paid employee, an accomplice. Pardon me, but I must speak the truth: you think you serve justice, but you are only a lackey of the bourgeoisie. You have a system inherently exploitive and unjust, inherently cruel and inhumane, heedless of human values, and your job is to make such a system appear legitimate and moral by acting as though justice, as though human rights and human dignity could actually exist in that society—when obviously no such thing is possible.

“You know, Alex”—what now?—“you know why I don’t worry about who wears a watch, or about accepting five pounds as a gift from my ‘prosperous’ parents? You know why such arguments are silly and I have no patience with them? Because I know that inherently—do you understand, inherently!”—yes, I understand! English happens, oddly enough, to be
my
mother tongue!—“inherently the system in which I participate (and voluntarily, that is crucial too—voluntarily!), that that system is humane and just. As long as the community owns the means of production, as long as all needs are provided by the community, as long as no man has the opportunity to accumulate wealth or to live off the surplus value of another man’s labor, then the essential character of the kibbutz is being maintained. No man is without dignity. In the broadest sense, there is equality. And that is what matters most.”

“Naomi, I love you.”

She narrowed those wide idealistic brown eyes. “How can you ‘love’ me? What are you saying?”

“I want to marry you.”

Boom
, she jumped to her feet. Pity the Syrian terrorist who tried to take her by surprise! “What is the
matter
with you? Is this supposed to be humorous?”

“Be my wife. Mother my children. Every
shtunk
with a picture window has children.
Why not me?
I carry the family name!”

“You drank too much beer at dinner. Yes, I think I should go.”

“Don’t!” And again told this girl I hardly knew, and didn’t even like, how deeply in love with her I was. “Love”—oh, it makes me shudder!—“loooove,” as though I could summon forth the feeling with the word.

And when she tried to leave I blocked the door. I pleaded with her not go out and lie down on a clammy beach somewhere, when there was this big comfortable Hilton bed for the two of us to share. “I’m not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.”

“Sexual intercourse?” she replied. “With
you?
”

“Yes! With me! Fresh from my inherently unjust system! Me, the accomplice! Yes! Imperfect Portnoy!”

“Mr. Portnoy, excuse me, but between your silly jokes, if that is even what they are—”

Here a little struggle took place as I rushed her at the side of the bed. I reached for a breast, and with a sharp upward snap of the skull, she butted me on the underside of the jaw.

“Where the hell did you learn that,” I cried out, “in the Army?”

“Yes.”

I collapsed into my chair. ‘That’s some training to give to girls.”

“Do you know,” she said, and without a trace of charity, “there is something very wrong with you.”

“My tongue is bleeding, for one—!”

“You are the most unhappy person I have ever known. You are like a baby.”

“No! Not so,” but she waved aside any explanation I may have had to offer, and began to lecture me on my shortcomings as she had observed them that day.

“The way you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do. You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘funny.’ All day long the same thing. In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. Self-depreciating?”

“Self-deprecating. Self-mocking.”

“Exactly! And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable. The contribution you could make! Such stupid self-deprecation! How disagreeable!”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”

“Not Jewish humor! No!
Ghetto
humor.”

Not much love in that remark, I’ll tell you. By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.” Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious.

When she finished I said, “Wonderful. Now let’s fuck.”

“You
are
disgusting!”

“Right! You begin to get the point, gallant Sabra!
You
go be righteous in the mountains, okay?
You
go be a model for mankind! Fucking Hebrew saint!”

“Mr. Portnoy,” she said, raising her knapsack from the floor, “you are nothing but a self-hating Jew.”

“Ah, but Naomi, maybe that’s the best kind.”

“Coward!”

“Tomboy.”

“
Shlemiel!
”

And made for the door. Only I leaped from behind, and with a flying tackle brought this big red-headed didactic dish down with me onto the floor. I’ll show her who’s a
shlemiel!
And baby! And if I have VD? Fine! Terrific! All the better! Let her carry it secretly back in her bloodstream to the mountains! Let it spread forth from her unto all those brave and virtuous Jewish boys and girls! A dose of clap will do them all good! This is what it’s like in the Diaspora, you saintly kiddies, this is what it’s like in the exile! Temptation and disgrace! Corruption and self-mockery! Self-deprecation—and self-defecation too! Whining, hysteria, compromise, confusion, disease! Yes, Naomi, I am soiled, oh, I am impure—and also pretty fucking tired, my dear, of never being quite good enough for The Chosen People!

But what a battle she gave me, this big farm cunt! this ex-G.L! This mother-substitute! Look, can that be so? Oh please, it can’t be as simplistic as that! Not
me!
Or with a case like mine, is it actually that you can’t be simplistic
enough!
Because she wore red hair and freckles, this makes her, according to my unconscious one-track mind, my mother? Just because she and the lady of my past are offspring of the same pale Polish strain of Jews? This then is the culmination of the Oedipal drama, Doctor? More farce, my friend! Too much to swallow, I’m afraid!
Oedipus Rex
is a famous tragedy, schmuck, not another joke! You’re a sadist, you’re a quack and a lousy comedian! I mean this is maybe going too far for a laugh, Doctor Spielvogel, Doctor Freud, Doctor Kronkite! How about a little homage, you bastards, to The Dignity of Man!
Oedipus Rex
is the most horrendous and
serious
play in the history of literature—it is not a gag!

Thank God, at any rate, for Heshie’s weights. They became mine after he died. I would carry them into the backyard, and out in the sunshine I would lift and lift and lift, back when I was fourteen and fifteen years old. “You’re going to give yourself a
tsura
yet with those things,” my mother would warn me from her bedroom window. “You’re going to get a cold out there in that bathing suit.” I sent away for booklets from Charles Atlas and Joe Bonomo. I lived for the sight of my torso swelling up in my bedroom mirror. I flexed under my clothes in school. I examined my forearms on the street corner for bulge. I admired my veins on the bus. Somebody someday would take a swing at me and my deltoids, and they would live to regret it! But nobody swung, thank God.

Till Naomi! For her, then, I had done all that puffing and quivering under the disapproving gaze of my mother. That isn’t to say that she still didn’t have it over me in the calves and the thighs—but in the shoulders and chest I had the edge, and forced her body down beneath me—and shot my tongue into her ear, tasting there the grit of our day’s journey, all that holy soil. “Oh, I am going to fuck you, Jew girl,” I whispered evilly.

“You are crazy!” and heaved up against me with all her considerable strength. “You are a lunatic on the loose!”

“No, oh no,” I told her, growling from my throat, “oh no, you have got a lesson to learn, Naomi,” and pressed, pressed hard, to teach my lesson: O you virtuous Jewess, the tables are turned,
tsatskeleh! You
on the defensive now, Naomi—explaining your vaginal discharge to the entire kibbutz! You think they got worked up over those watches! Wait’ll they get a whiff of this! What I wouldn’t give to be at that meeting when you get arraigned on the charge of contaminating the pride and future of Zion! Then perhaps you’ll come to have the proper awe for us fallen psychoneurotic Jewish men! Socialism exists, but so too do spirochetes, my love! So here’s your introduction, dear, to the slimier side of things. Down, down with these patriotic khaki shorts, spread your chops, blood of my blood, unlock your fortressy thighs, open wide that messianic Jewish hole! Make ready, Naomi, I am about to poison your organs of reproduction! I am about to change the future of the race!

But of course I couldn’t. Licked her earholes, sucked at her unwashed neck, sank my teeth into the coiled braids of hair … and then, even as resistance may actually have begun to recede under my assault, I rolled off of her and came to rest, defeated, against the wall—on my back. “It’s no good,” I said, “I can’t get a hard-on in this place.”

She stood up. Stood over me. Got her wind. Looked
down
. It occurred to me that she was going to plant the sole of her sandal on my chest. Or maybe proceed to kick the shit out of me. I remembered myself as a little schoolboy pasting all those reinforcements into my notebook. How has it come to this?

“’Im-po-tent in Is-rael, da da daaah,’” to the tune of “Lullaby in Birdland.”

“Another joke?” she asked.

“And another. And another. Why disclaim my life?”

Then she said a kind thing. She could afford to, of course, way up there. “You should go home.”

“Sure, that’s what I need, back into the exile.”

And way way up there, she grinned. That healthy, monumental Sabra! The work-molded legs, the utilitarian shorts, the battle-scarred buttonless blouse—the beneficent, victorious smile! And at her crusty, sandaled feet, this … this what? This
son!
This
boy!
This
baby!
Alexander Portnoise! Portnose! Portnoy-oy-oy-oy-oy!

“Look at you,” I said, “way up there. How big big women are! Look at you—how patriotic! You really
like
victory, don’t you, honey? Know how to take it in your stride! Wow, are you guiltless! Terrific, really—an honor to have met you. Look, take me with you, Heroine! Up to the mountain. I’ll clear boulders till I drop, if that’s what it takes to be good. Because why not be good, and good and good and good—right? Live only according to principle! Without compromise! Let the other guy be the villain, right? Let the
goyim
make a shambles, let the blame fall solely on them. If I was born to be austere about myself, so be it! A grueling and gratifying ethical life, opulent with self-sacrifice, voluptuous with restraint! Ah, sounds good. Ah, I can just taste those rocks! What do you say, take me back with you—into the pure Portnovian existence!”