Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [77]
“I miss you, Arnold,” The Monkey whispers.
“I’m afraid I’m busy right now.”
“I do do love you.”
“Yes, fine, may I speak with you later about this?”
“How I want that long sleek cock inside me—”
“Bye now!”
What else is wrong with her, while we’re at it? She moves her lips when she reads. Petty? You think so? Ever sit across the dinner table from a woman with whom you are supposedly having an affair—a twenty-nine-year-old person—and watch her lips move while she looks down the movie page for a picture the two of you can see? I know what’s playing before she even tells me—from reading the lips! And the books I bring her, she carries them around from job to job in her tote bag—to read? No! So as to impress some fairy photographer, to impress passers-by in the street, strangers, with her many-sided character! Look at that girl with that smashing ass—carrying a book! With real words in it! The day after our return from Vermont, I bought a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—wrote on a card, “To the staggering girl,” and had it gift-wrapped for presentation that night. “Tell me books to read, okay?”—this the touching plea she made the night we returned to the city: “Because why should I be dumb, if like you say, I’m so smart?” So, here was Agee to begin with, and with the Walker Evans’ photographs to help her along: a book to speak to her of her own early life, to enlarge her perspective on her origins (origins, of course, holding far more fascination for the nice left-wing Jewish boy than for the proletarian girl herself). How earnest I was compiling that reading list! Boy, was I going to improve her mind! After Agee, Adamic’s Dynamite!, my own yellowing copy from college; I imagined her benefiting from my undergraduate underlinings, coming to understand the distinction between the relevant and the trivial, a generalization and an illustration, and so on. Furthermore, it was a book so simply written, that hopefully, without my pushing her, she might be encouraged to read not just the chapters I had suggested, those touching directly upon her own past (as I imagined it)—violence in the coal fields, beginning with the Molly Maguires; the chapter on the Wobblies—but the entire history of brutality and terror practiced by and upon the American laboring class, from which she was descended. Had she never read a book called U.S.A.? Mortimer Snerd: “Duh, I never read nothing, Mr. Bergen.” So I bought her the Modern Library Dos Passos, a book with a hard cover. Simple, I thought, keep it simple, but educational, elevating. Ah, you get the dreamy point, I’m sure. The texts? W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. The Grapes of Wrath. An American Tragedy. A book of Sherwood Anderson’s I like, called Poor White (the title, I thought, might stir her interest). Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son. The name of the course? Oh, I don’t know—Professor Portnoy’s “Humiliated Minorities, an Introduction.” “The History and Function of Hatred in America.” The purpose? To save the stupid shikse; to rid her of her race’s ignorance; to make this daughter of the heartless oppressor a student of suffering and oppression; to teach her to be compassionate, to bleed a little for the world’s sorrows. Get it now? The perfect couple: she puts the id back in Yid, I put the oy back in goy.
Where am I? Tuxedoed. All civilized-up in my evening clothes, and “dir willa” still sizzling in my hand, as The Monkey emerges wearing the frock she has bought specifically for the occasion. What occasion? Where does she think we’re going, to shoot a dirty movie? Doctor, it barely reaches her ass! It is crocheted of some kind of gold metallic yarn and covers nothing but a body stocking the color of her skin! And to top this modest outfit off, over her real head of hair she wears a wig inspired by Little Orphan Annie, an oversized aureole of black corkscrew curls, out of whose center pokes this dumb painted face. What a mean little mouth it gives her! She really is from West Virginia! The miner