Portnoy's Complaint (23 page)

Ten months. Incredible. For in that time not a day—very likely, not an hour—passed that I did not ask myself, “Why continue with this person? This brutalized woman! This coarse, tormented, self-loathing, bewildered, lost, identityless—” and so on. The list was inexhaustible, I reviewed it interminably. And to remember the ease with which I had plucked her off the street (the sexual triumph of my life!), well, that made me groan with disgust. How can I go on and on with someone whose reason and judgment and behavior I can’t possibly respect? Who sets off inside me daily explosions of disapproval, hourly thunderclaps of admonition! And the sermonizing! Oh, what a schoolmaster I became. When she bought me those Italian loafers for my birthday, for instance—such a lecture I gave in return!

“Look,” I said, once we were out of the store, “a little shopping advice: when you go off to do something so very simple as exchanging money for goods, it isn’t necessary to flash your snatch at everyone this side of the horizon.
Okay?
”

“Flash
what?
Who flashed anything?”

“You, Mary Jane! Your supposedly private parts!”

“I did not!”

“Please, every time you stood up, every time you sat down, I thought you were going to get yourself hooked by the pussy on the salesman’s nose.”

“Jee-zuz, I gotta sit, I gotta stand, don’t I?”

“But not like you’re climbing on and off a horse!”

“Well, I don’t know what’s bugging you—he was a faggot anyway.”

“What’s ‘bugging’ me is that the space between your legs has now been seen by more people than watch Huntley and Brinkley! So why not bow out while you’re still champeen,
all right?
” Yet, even as I make my accusation, I am saying to myself, “Oh, lay off, Little Boy Blue—if you want a lady instead of a cunt, then get yourself one. Who’s holding you here?” Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Miss Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women—healthy, in fact, as milkmaids.
I
know, because these were her predecessors—only they didn’t satisfy, either. They were wrong,
too
. Spielvogel, believe me, I’ve been there, I’ve tried: I’ve eaten their casseroles and shaved in their Johns, I’ve been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine chest, I have even befriended those cats of theirs—named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat—yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women—social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn’t work out, either!

Kay Campbell, my girl friend at Antioch—could there have been a more exemplary person? Artless, sweet-tempered, without a trace of morbidity or egoism—a thoroughly commendable and worthy human being. And where is she now, that find! Hello, Pumpkin! Making some lucky
shaygets
a wonderful wife out there in middle America? How could she do otherwise? Edited the literary magazine, walked off with all the honors in English literature, picketed with me and my outraged friends outside of that barbershop in Yellow Springs where they wouldn’t cut Negro hair—a robust, genial, large-hearted, large-assed girl with a sweet baby face, yellow hair, no tits, unfortunately (essentially titless women seem to be my destiny, by the way—now, why
is
that? is there an essay somewhere I can read on that? is it of import? or shall I go on?). Ah, and those peasant legs! And the blouse always hanging loose from her skirt at the back. How moved I was by that blithesome touch! And by the fact that on high heels she looked like a cat stuck up a tree, in trouble, out of her element, all wrong. Always the first of the Antioch nymphs to go barefoot to classes in spring. “The Pumpkin,” is what I called her, in commemoration of her pigmentation and the size of her can. Also her solidity: hard as a gourd on matters of moral principle, beautifully stubborn in a way I couldn’t but envy and adore.

She never raised her voice in an argument
. Can you imagine the impression this made on me at seventeen, fresh from my engagement with The Jack and Sophie Portnoy Debating Society? Who had ever heard of such an approach to controversy? Never ridiculed her opponent! Or seemed to hate him for his ideas! Ah-hah, so
this
is what it means to be a child of
goyim
, valedictorian of a high school in Iowa instead of New Jersey; yes, this is what the
goyim
who have got something have got! Authority without the temper. Virtue without the self-congratulation. Confidence sans swagger or condescension. Come on, let’s be fair and give the
goyim
their due, Doctor: when they are impressive, they are very impressive. So
sound!
Yes, that’s what hypnotized—the heartiness, the sturdiness; in a word, her pumpkinness. My wholesome, big-bottomed, lipstickless, barefooted
shikse
, where are you now, Kay-Kay? Mother to how many? Did you wind up really fat? Ah, so what! Suppose you’re big as a house—you
need
a showcase for that character of yours! The very best of the Middle West,
so why did I let her go?
Oh, I’ll get to that, no worry, self-laceration is never more than a memory away, we know that by now. In the meantime, let me miss her substantiality a little. That buttery skin! That unattended streaming hair! And this is back in the early fifties, before streaming hair became the style! This was just
naturalness
, Doctor. Round and ample, sun-colored Kay! I’ll bet that half a dozen kiddies are clinging to that girl’s abundant behind (so unlike The Monkey’s hard little handful of a model’s ass!). I’ll bet you bake your own bread, right? (The way you did that hot spring night in my Yellow Springs apartment, in your half slip and brassiere, with flour in your ears and your hairline damp with perspiration—remember? showing me, despite the temperature, how real bread should taste? You could have used my heart for batter, that’s how soft it felt!) I’ll bet you live where the air is still unpoisoned and nobody locks his door—and still don’t give two shits about money or possessions. Hey, I don’t either, Pumpkin, still unbesmirched myself on those and related middle-class issues! Oh, perfectly ill-proportioned girl! No mile-long mannequin you! So she had no tits, so what? Slight as a butterfly through the rib cage and neck, but planted like a bear beneath!
Rooted
, that’s what I’m getting at! Joined by those lineman’s legs to this American ground!

You should have heard Kay Campbell when we went around Greene County ringing doorbells for Stevenson in our sophomore year. Confronted with the most awesome Republican small-mindedness, a stinginess and bleakness of spirit that could absolutely bend the mind, The Pumpkin never was anything but ladylike. I was a barbarian. No matter how dispassionately I began (or condescendingly, because that’s how it came out), I invariably wound up in a sweat and a rage, sneering, insulting, condemning, toe-to-toe with these terrible pinched people, calling their beloved Ike an illiterate, a political and moral moron—probably I am as responsible as anyone for Adlai losing as badly as he did in Ohio. The Pumpkin, however, gave such unflawed and kindly attention to the opposition point of view that I expected sometimes for her to turn and say to me, “Why, Alex, I think Mr. Yokel is right—I think maybe he
is
too soft on communism.” But no, when the last idiocy had been uttered about our candidate’s “socialistical” and/or “pinko” ideas, the final condemnation made of his sense of humor, The Pumpkin proceeded, ceremoniously and (awesome feat!) without a hint of sarcasm—she might have been the judge at a pie-baking contest, such a perfect blend was she of sobriety and good humor—proceeded to correct Mr. Yokel’s errors of fact and logic, even to draw attention to his niggardly morality. Unencumbered by the garbled syntax of the apocalypse or the ill-mannered vocabulary of desperation, without the perspiring upper lip, the constricted and air-hungry throat, the flush of loathing on the forehead, she may even have swayed half a dozen people in the county. Christ, yes, this was one of the great
shikses
. I might have learned something spending the rest of my life with such a person. Yes, I might—if I could learn something! If I could be somehow sprung from this obsession with fellatio and fornication, from romance and fantasy and revenge—from the settling of scores! the pursuit of dreams! from this hopeless, senseless loyalty to the long ago!

In 1950, just seventeen, and Newark two and a half months behind me (well, not exactly “behind”: in the mornings I awake in the dormitory baffled by the unfamiliar blanket in my hand, and the disappearance of one of “my” windows; oppressed and distraught for minutes on end by this unanticipated transformation given my bedroom by my mother)—I perform the most openly defiant act of my life: instead of going home for my first college vacation, I travel by train to Iowa, to spend Thanksgiving with The Pumpkin and her parents. Till September I had never been farther west than Lake Hopatcong in New Jersey—now I am off to Ioway! And with a blondie! Of the Christian religion! Who is more stunned by this desertion, my family or me? What daring! Or was I no more daring than a sleepwalker?

The white clapboard house in which The Pumpkin had grown up might have been the Taj Mahal for the emotions it released in me. Balboa, maybe, knows what I felt upon first glimpsing the swing tied up to the ceiling of the front porch.
She was raised in this house. The girl who has let me undo her brassiere and dry-hump her at the dormitory door, grew up in this white house. Behind those
goyische
curtains! Look, shutters!

“Daddy, Mother,” says The Pumpkin, when we disembark at the Davenport train station, “this is the weekend guest, this is the friend from school whom I wrote you about—”

I am something called “a weekend guest”? I am something called “a friend from school”? What tongue is she speaking? I am “the
bonditt
,” “the
vantz
,” I am the insurance man’s son. I am Warshaw’s ambassador! “How do you do, Alex?” To which of course I reply, “Thank you.” Whatever anybody says to me during my first twenty-four hours in Iowa, I answer, “Thank you.” Even to inanimate objects. I walk into a chair, promptly I say to it, “Excuse me, thank you.” I drop my napkin on the floor, lean down, flushing, to pick it up, “Thank you,” I hear myself saying to the napkin—or is it the floor I’m addressing? Would my mother be proud of her little gentleman! Polite even to the furniture!

Then there’s an expression in English, “Good morning,” or so I have been told; the phrase has never been of any particular use to me. Why should it have been? At breakfast at home I am in fact known to the other boarders as “Mr. Sourball,” and “The Crab.” But suddenly, here in Iowa, in imitation of the local inhabitants, I am transformed into a veritable geyser of good mornings. That’s all anybody around that place knows how to say—they feel the sunshine on their faces, and it just sets off some sort of chemical reaction: Good
morning! Good
morning! Good
morning!
sung to half a dozen different tunes! Next they all start asking each other if they had “a good night’s sleep.” And asking me! Did I have a good night’s sleep? I don’t really know, I have to think—the question comes as something of a surprise. Did I Have A Good Night’s Sleep? Why, yes! I think I did! Hey—did you? “Like a log,” replies Mr. Campbell. And for the first time in my life I experience the full force of a simile. This man, who is a real estate broker and an alderman of the Davenport town council, says that he slept like a log, and I actually
see
a log.
I
get it! Motionless, heavy,
like a log!
“Good
morning
” he says, and now it occurs to me that the word “morning,” as he uses it, refers specifically to the hours between eight A.M. and twelve noon. I’d never thought of it that way before. He wants the hours between eight and twelve to be
good
, which is to say, enjoyable, pleasurable, beneficial! We are all of us wishing each other four hours of pleasure and accomplishment. Why, that’s terrific! Hey, that’s very nice! Good morning! And the same applies to “Good afternoon”! And “Good evening”! And “Good night”! My God! The English language is
a form of communication!
Conversation isn’t just crossfire where you shoot and get shot at! Where you’ve got to duck for your life and aim to kill! Words aren’t only bombs and bullets—no, they’re little gifts, containing
meanings!

Wait, I’m not finished—as if the experience of being on the inside rather than the outside of these
goyische
curtains isn’t overwhelming enough, as if the incredible experience of my wishing hour upon hour of pleasure to a houseful of
goyim
isn’t sufficient source for bewilderment, there is, to compound the ecstasy of disorientation, the name of the street upon which the Campbell house stands, the street where
my
girl friend grew up! skipped! skated! hop-scotched! sledded! all the while I dreamed of her existence some fifteen hundred miles away, in what they tell me is the same country. The street name? Not Xanadu, no, better even than that, oh, more preposterous by far:
Elm
. Elm! It is, you see, as though I have walked right through the orange celluloid station band of our old Zenith, directly into “One Man’s Family.” Elm. Where trees grow—which must be elms!

To be truthful, I must admit that I am not able to draw such a conclusion first thing upon alighting from the Campbell car on Wednesday night: after all, it has taken me seventeen years to recognize an oak, and even there I am lost without the acorns. What I see first in a landscape isn’t the flora, believe me—it’s the fauna, the human opposition, who is screwing and who is getting screwed. Greenery I leave to the birds and the bees, they have their worries, I have mine. At home who knows the name of what grows from the pavement at the front of our house? It’s a tree—and that’s it. The kind is of no consequence, who cares what kind, just as long as it doesn’t fall down on your head. In the autumn (or is it the spring? Do you know this stuff? I’m pretty sure it’s not the winter) there drop from its branches long crescent-shaped pods containing hard little pellets. Okay. Here’s a scientific fact about our tree, comes by way of my mother, Sophie Linnaeus: If you shoot those pellets through a straw, you can take somebody’s eye out and make him blind for life. (SO NEVER DO IT! NOT EVEN IN JEST! AND IF ANYBODY DOES IT TO YOU, YOU TELL ME INSTANTLY!) And this, more or less, is the sort of botanical knowledge I am equipped with, until that Sunday afternoon when we are leaving the Campbell house for the train station, and I have my Archimedean experience: Elm Street …. then …. elm
trees!
How simple! I mean, you don’t
need
158 points of I.Q., you don’t
have
to be a genius to make sense of this world. It’s really all so very simple!