Portnoy's Complaint (17 page)

What caused her finally to run for her life were the little orgies he began to arrange after jerking off into
Garter Belt
(or was it
Spiked Heels?
) became a bore to both of them. A woman, preferably black, would be engaged for a very high sum to squat naked upon a glass coffee table and take a crap while the tycoon lay flat on his back, directly beneath the table, and jerked his dong off. And as the shit splattered on the glass six inches above her beloved’s nose, The Monkey, our poor Monkey, was expected to sit on the red damask sofa, fully clothed, sipping cognac and watching.

It was a couple of years after her return to New York—I suppose she’s about twenty-four or twenty-five by this time—that The Monkey tried to kill herself a little by making a pass at her wrists with a razor, all on account of the way she had been treated at Le Club, or El Morocco, or maybe L’Interdit, by her current boyfriend, one or another of the hundred best-dressed men in the world. Thus she found her way to the illustrious Dr. Morris Frankel, henceforth to be known in these confessions as Harpo. Off and on during these past five years The Monkey has thrashed around on Harpo’s couch, waiting for him to tell her what she must do to become somebody’s wife and somebody’s mother. Why, cries The Monkey to Harpo, why must she always be involved with such hideous and cold-hearted shits, instead of with
men?
Why? Harpo, speak! Say something to me!
Anything!
“Oh, I know he’s alive,” The Monkey used to say, her little features scrunched up in anguish, “I just know it. I mean, who ever heard of a dead man with an answering service?” So, in and out of therapy (if that’s what it is) The Monkey goes—in whenever some new shit has broken her heart, out whenever the next likely knight has made his appearance.

I was “a breakthrough.” Harpo of course didn’t say yes, but then he didn’t say no, either, when she suggested that this was who I might be. He did cough, however, and this The Monkey takes as her confirmation. Sometimes he coughs, sometimes he grunts, sometimes he belches, once in a while he farts, whether voluntarily or not who knows, though I hold that a fart has to be interpreted as a negative transference reaction on his part. “Breakie, you’re so
brilliant!
” “Breakie” when she is being my sex kitten and cat—and when she is fighting for her life: “You big son of a bitch Jew! I want to be married and human!”

So, I was to be her breakthrough … but wasn’t she to be mine? Who like The Monkey had ever happened to me before—or will again? Not that I had not prayed, of course. No, you pray and you pray and you pray, you lift your impassioned prayers to God on the altar of the toilet seat, throughout your adolescence you deliver up to Him the living sacrifice of your spermatazoa by the
gallon—
and then one night, around midnight, on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-second, when you have come really to the point of losing faith in the existence of such a creature as you have been imagining for yourself even unto your thirty-second year, there she is, wearing a tan pants suit, and trying to hail a cab—lanky, with dark and abundant hair, and smallish features that give her face a kind of petulant expression, and an absolutely fantastic ass.

Why not? What’s lost? What’s gained, however? Go ahead, you shackled and fettered son of a bitch,
speak to her
. She has an ass on her with the swell and the cleft of the world’s most perfect nectarine!
Speak!

“Hi”—softly, and with a little surprise, as though I might have met her somewhere before …

“What do
you
want?”

“To buy you a drink,” I said.

“A real swinger,” she said, sneering.

Sneering! Two seconds—and two insults! To the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for this whole city! “To eat your pussy, baby, how’s that?” My God! She’s going to call a cop! Who’ll turn me in to the Mayor!

“That’s better,” she replied.

And so a cab pulled up, and we went to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and said, “Go ahead.”

My incredulity! That such a thing was happening to me! Did I eat! It was suddenly as though my life were taking place in the middle of a wet dream. There I was, going down at last on the star of all those pornographic films that I had been producing in my head since I first laid a hand upon my own joint … “Now me you,” she said, “—one good turn deserves another,” and, Doctor, this stranger then proceeded to suck me off with a mouth that might have gone to a special college to learn all the wonderful things it knew. What a find, I thought, she takes it right down to the root! What a mouth I have fallen into! Talk about opportunities! And simultaneously:
Get out! Go! Who and what can this person be!

Later we had a long, serious, very stirring conversation about perversions. She began by asking if I had ever done it with a man. I said no. I asked (as I gathered she wanted me to) if she had ever done it with another woman.

“… Nope.”

“… Would you like to?”

“… Would you like me to?”

“… Why not, sure.”

“… Would you like to watch?”

“… I suppose so.”

“… Then maybe it could be arranged.”

“… Yes?”

“… Yes.”

“… Well, I might like that.”

“Oh,” she said, with a nice sarcastic edge, “I think you might.”

She told me then that only a month before, when she had been ill with a virus, a couple she knew had come by to make dinner for her. After the meal they said they wanted her to watch them screw. So she did. She sat up on the bed with a temperature of 102, and they took off their clothes and went at it on the bedroom rug—“And you know what they wanted me to do, while they were making it?”

“No.”

“I had some bananas on the counter in the kitchen, and they wanted me to eat one. While I watched.”

“For the arcane symbolism, no doubt.”

“The
what?
”

“Why did they want you to eat the banana?”

“Man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to know I was really
there
. They wanted to like
hear
me. Chewing. Look, do you just suck, or do you fuck, too?”

The real McCoy! My slut from the Empire Burlesque—without the tits, but so beautiful!

“I fuck too.”

“Well, so do I.”

“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said, “us running into each other.”

She laughed for the first time, and instead of that finally putting me at my ease, suddenly I
knew
—some big spade was going to leap out of the bedroom closet and spring for my heart with his knife—or she herself was going to go berserk, the laughter would erupt into wild hysterics—and God only knew what catastrophe would follow. Eddie Waitkus!

Was she a call girl? A maniac? Was she in cahoots with some Puerto Rican pusher who was about to make his entrance into my life? Enter it—and end it, for the forty dollars in my wallet and a watch from Korvette’s?

“Look,” I said, in my clever way, “do you do this, more or less, all the time …?”

“What kind of question is that! What kind of shit-eating remark is that supposed to be! Are you another heartless bastard too? Don’t you think I have feelings
too!
”

“I’m sorry. Excuse me.”

But suddenly, where there had been fury and outrage, there were only tears. Did I need any more evidence that this girl was, to say the least, a little erratic psychologically? Any man in his right mind would surely then have gotten up, gotten dressed, and gotten the hell out in one piece. And counting his blessings. But don’t you see—my right mind is just another name for my fears! My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with me out of my ridiculous past! That tyrant, my superego, he should be strung up, that son of a bitch, hung by his fucking storm-trooper’s boots till he’s dead! In the street, who had been trembling, me or the girl? Me! Who had the boldness, the daring, the guts, me or the girl? The girl! The fucking
girl!

“Look,” she said, wiping away the tears with the pillowcase, “look, I lied to you before, in case you’re interested, in case you’re writing this down or something.”

“Yeah? About what?” And here he comes, I thought, my
shvartze
, out of the closet,—eyes, teeth, and razor blade flashing! Here comes the headline: ASST HUMAN OPPY COMMISH FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL’S APT!

“I mean like what the fuck did I lie for, to
you?
”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, so I can’t tell you.”

“I mean
they
didn’t want me to eat the banana. My friends didn’t want me to eat any banana.
I
wanted to.”

Thus: The Monkey.

As for why she did lie, to
me?
I think it was her way of informing herself right off—semiconsciously, I suppose—that she had somehow fallen upon a higher-type person: that pickup on the street notwithstanding, and the wholehearted suck in her bed notwithstanding—followed by that heart-stirring swallow—and the discussion of perversions that followed that … still, she really hadn’t wanted me to think of her as given over
wholly
to sexual excess and adventurism … Because a glimpse of me was apparently all it took for her to leap imaginatively ahead into the life that might now be hers … No more narcissistic playboys in their Cardin suits; no more married, desperate advertising executives in overnight from Connecticut; no more faggots in British warmers for lunch at Serendipity, or aging lechers from the cosmetics industry drooling into their hundred-dollar dinners at Le Pavilion at night … No, at long last the figure who had dwelled these many years at the heart of
her
dreams (so it turned out), a man who would be good to a wife and to children … a Jew. And what a Jew! First he eats her, and then, immediately after, comes slithering on up and begins talking and explaining things, making judgments left and right, advising her what books to read and how to vote, telling her how life should and should not be lived. “How do you know that?” she used to ask warily. “I mean that’s just your
opinion
.” “What do you mean
opinion
—it’s not my opinion, girlie, it’s the truth.” “I mean, is that like something everybody knows … or just you?” A Jewish man, who cared about the welfare of the poor of the City of New York, was eating her pussy! Someone who had appeared on educational TV was shooting off into her mouth! In a flash, Doctor, she must have seen it all—can that be? Are women
that
calculating? Am I actually a naïf about cunt? Saw and planned it all, did she, right out there on Lexington Avenue? … The gentle fire burning in the book-lined living room of our country home, the Irish nanny bathing the children before Mother puts them to bed, and the willowy ex-model, jet-setter, and sex deviant, daughter of the mines and mills of West Virginia, self-styled victim of a dozen real bastards, seen here in her Saint Laurent pajamas and her crushed-kid boots, dipping thoughtfully into a novel by Samuel Beckett … seen here on a fur rug with her husband, whom People Are Talking About, The Saintliest Commissioner of the City of New York … seen here with his pipe and his thinning kinky black Hebe hair, in all his Jewish messianic fervor and charm …

What happened finally at Irvington Park: late on a Saturday afternoon I found myself virtually alone on the frozen lake with a darling fourteen-year-old
shikseleh
whom I had been watching practicing her figure eights since after lunch, a girl who seemed to me to possess the middle-class charms of Margaret O’Brien—that quickness and cuteness around the sparkling eyes and the freckled nose—
and
the simplicity and plainness, the lower-class availability, the lank blond hair of Peggy Ann Garner. You see, what looked like movie stars to everyone else were just different kinds of
shikses
to me. Often I came out of the movies trying to figure out what high school in Newark Jeanne Crain (and her cleavage) or Kathryn Grayson (and her cleavage) would be going to if they were my age. And where would I find a
shikse
like Gene Tierney, who I used to think might even be a Jew, if she wasn’t actually part Chinese. Meanwhile Peggy Ann O’Brien has made her last figure eight and is coasting lazily off for the boathouse, and I have done nothing about her, or about any of them, nothing all winter long, and now March is almost upon us—the red skating flag will come down over the park and once again we will be into polio season. I may not even live into the following winter,
so what am I waiting for?
“Now! Or never!” So after her—when she is safely out of sight—I madly begin to skate. “Excuse me,” I will say, “but would you mind if I walk you home?” If I
walked
, or if I
walk
—which is more correct? Because I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it. “Would you care perhaps to have a hot chocolate? May I have your phone number and come to call some evening? My name? I am Alton Peterson”—a name I had picked for myself out of the Montclair section of the Essex County phone book—totally
goy
I was sure, and sounds like Hans Christian Andersen into the bargain. What a coup! Secretly I have been practicing writing “Alton Peterson” all winter long, practicing on sheets of paper that I subsequently tear from my notebook after school and burn so that they won’t have to be explained to anybody in my house. I am Alton Peterson, I am Alton Peterson—Alton Christian Peterson? Or is that going a little too far? Alton
C
. Peterson? And so preoccupied am I with not forgetting whom I would now like to be, so anxious to make it to the boathouse while she is still changing out of her skates—and wondering, too, what I’ll say when she asks about the middle of my face and what happened to it (old hockey injury? Fell off my horse while playing polo after church one Sunday morning—too many sausages for breakfast, ha ha ha!)—I reach the edge of the lake with the tip of one skate a little sooner than I had planned—and so go hurtling forward onto the frostbitten ground, chipping one front tooth and smashing the bony protrusion at the top of my tibia.

My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer’s Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury—while my father cries, “Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!”