Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [93]
Running away! In flight, escaping again—and from what? From someone else who would have me a saint! Which I ain’t! And do not want or intend to be! No, any guilt on my part is comical! I will not hear of it! If she kills herself—But that’s not what she’s about to do. No, it’ll be more ghastly than that: she’s going to telephone the Mayor! And that’s why I’m running! But she wouldn’t. But she would. She will! More than likely already has. Remember? I’ll expose you, Alex. I’ll call long-distance to John Lindsay. I’ll telephone Jimmy Breslin. And she is crazy enough to do it! Breslin, that cop! That precinct station genius! Oh Jesus, let her be dead then! Jump, you ignorant destructive bitch—better you than me! Sure, all I need is she should start telephoning around to the wire services: I can see my father going out to the corner after dinner, picking up the Newark News—and at long last, the word SCANDAL printed in bold type above a picture of his darling son! Or turning on the seven o’clock news to watch the CBS correspondent in Athens interviewing The Monkey from her hospital bed. “Portnoy, that’s right. Capital P. Then O. Then I think R. Oh, I can’t remember the rest, but I swear on my wet pussy, Mr. Rudd, he made me sleep with a whore!” No, no, I am not exaggerating: think a moment about the character, or absence of same. Remember Las Vegas? Remember her desperation? Then you see that this wasn’t just my conscience punishing me; no, whatever revenge I might imagine, she could imagine too. And will yet! Believe me, we have not heard the last of Mary Jane Reed. I was supposed to save her life—and didn’t. Made her sleep with whores instead! So don’t think we have heard the last word from her!
And there, to cause me to kick my ass even more, there all blue below me, the Aegean Sea. The Pumpkin’s Aegean! My poetic American girl! Sophocles! Long ago! Oh, Pumpkin—baby, say it again, Why would I want to do a thing like that? Someone who knew who she was! Psychologically so intact as not to be in need of salvation or redemption by me! Not in need of conversion to my glorious faith! The poetry she used to read to me at Antioch, the education she was giving me in literature, a whole new perspective, an understanding of art and the artistic way … oh, why did I ever let her go! I can’t believe it—because she wouldn’t be Jewish? “The eternal note of sadness—” “The turbid ebb and flow of human misery—”
Only, is this human misery? I thought it was going to be loftier! Dignified suffering! Meaningful suffering—something perhaps along the line of Abraham Lincoln. Tragedy, not farce! Something a little more Sophoclean was what I had in mind. The Great Emancipator, and so on. It surely never crossed my mind that I would wind up trying to free from bondage nothing more than my own prick. LET MY PETER GO! There, that’s Portnoy’s slogan. That’s the story of my life, all summed up in four heroic dirty words. A travesty! My politics, descended entirely to my putz! JERK-OFF ARTISTS OF THE WORLD UNITE! YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR BRAINS! The freak I am! Lover of no one and nothing! Unloved and unloving! And on the brink of becoming John Lindsay’s Profumo!
So it seemed, an hour out of Athens.
Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Beer-She’va, the Dead Sea, Sedom, ‘Ein Gedi, then north to Caesarea, Haifa, Akko, Tiberias, Safed, the upper Galilee … and always it is more dreamy than real. Not that I courted the sensation either. I’d had enough of the improbable with my companion in Greece and Rome. No, to make some sense out of the impulse that had sent me running aboard the El Al flight to begin with, to convert myself from this bewildered runaway into a man once again—in control of my will, conscious of my intentions, doing as I wished, not as I must—I set off traveling about the country as though the trip had been undertaken deliberately, with forethought, desire, and for praiseworthy, if conventional, reasons. Yes, I would have (now that I was unaccountably here) what is called an educational experience. I would improve myself, which is my way, after all. Or was, wasn