Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [71]
What a night! I don’t mean there was more than the usual body-thrashing and hair-tossing and empassioned vocalizing from The Monkey—no, the drama was at the same Wagnerian pitch I was beginning to become accustomed to: it was the flow of feeling that was new and terrific. “Oh, I can’t get enough of you!” she cried. “Am I a nymphomaniac, or is it the wedding ring?” “I was thinking maybe it was the illicitness of an ‘inn.’” “Oh, it’s something! I feel, I feel so crazy … and so tender—so wildly tender with you! Oh baby. I keep thinking I’m going to cry, and I’m so happy!”
Saturday we drove up to Lake Champlain, stopping along the way for The Monkey to take pictures with her Minox; late in the day we cut across and down to Woodstock, gaping, exclaiming, sighing, The Monkey snuggling. Once in the morning (in an overgrown field near the lake shore) we had sexual congress, and then that afternoon, on a dirt road somewhere in the mountains of central Vermont, she said, “Oh, Alex, pull over, now—I want you to come in my mouth,” and so she blew me, and with the top down!
What am I trying to communicate? Just that we began to feel something. Feel feeling! And without any diminishing of sexual appetite!
“I know a poem,” I said, speaking somewhat as though I were drunk, as though I could lick any man in the house, “and I’m going to recite it.”
She was nestled down in my lap, eyes still closed, my softening member up against her cheek like a little chick. “Ah come on,” she groaned, “not now, I don’t understand poems.”
“You’ll understand this one. It’s about fucking. A swan fucks a beautiful girl.”
She looked up, batting her false eyelashes. “Oh, goody.”
“But it’s a serious poem.”
“Well,” she said, licking my prick, “it’s a serious offense.”
“Oh, irresistible, witty Southern belles—especially when they’re long the way you are.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Portnoy. Recite the dirty poem.”
“Porte-noir,” I said, and began:
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.”
“Where,” she asked, “did you learn something like that?”
“Shhh. There’s more:
“How can those terrified vague fingers push.
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”
“Hey!” she cried. “Thighs!”
“And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
“That’s it,” I said.
Pause. “Who wrote it?” Snide. “You?”
“William Butler Yeats wrote it,” I said, realizing how tactless I had been, with what insensitivity I had drawn attention to the chasm: I am smart and you are dumb, that’s what it had meant to recite to this woman one of the three poems I happen to have learned by heart in my thirty-three years. “An Irish poet,” I said lamely.
“Yeah?” she said. “And where did you learn it, at his knee? I didn’t know you was Irish.”
“In college, baby.” From a girl I knew in college. Also taught me “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” But enough—why compare her to another? Why not let her be what she is? What an idea! Love her as she is! In all her imperfection—which is, after all, maybe only human!
“Well,” said The Monkey, still playing Truck Driver, “I never been to college myself.” Then, Dopey Southern, “And down home in Moundsville, honey, the only poem we had was ‘I see London, I see France, I see Mary Jane’s underpants.’ ’Cept I didn’t wear no underpants … Know what I did when I was fifteen? Sent a lock of my snatch-hair off in an envelope to Marlon Brando. Prick didn