Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [60]
“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