Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [98]
“Naomi, I love you.”
She narrowed those wide idealistic brown eyes. “How can you ‘love’ me? What are you saying?”
“I want to marry you.”
Boom, she jumped to her feet. Pity the Syrian terrorist who tried to take her by surprise! “What is the matter with you? Is this supposed to be humorous?”
“Be my wife. Mother my children. Every shtunk with a picture window has children. Why not me? I carry the family name!”
“You drank too much beer at dinner. Yes, I think I should go.”
“Don’t!” And again told this girl I hardly knew, and didn’t even like, how deeply in love with her I was. “Love”—oh, it makes me shudder!—“loooove,” as though I could summon forth the feeling with the word.
And when she tried to leave I blocked the door. I pleaded with her not go out and lie down on a clammy beach somewhere, when there was this big comfortable Hilton bed for the two of us to share. “I’m not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor.”
“Sexual intercourse?” she replied. “With you?”
“Yes! With me! Fresh from my inherently unjust system! Me, the accomplice! Yes! Imperfect Portnoy!”
“Mr. Portnoy, excuse me, but between your silly jokes, if that is even what they are—”
Here a little struggle took place as I rushed her at the side of the bed. I reached for a breast, and with a sharp upward snap of the skull, she butted me on the underside of the jaw.
“Where the hell did you learn that,” I cried out, “in the Army?”
“Yes.”
I collapsed into my chair. ‘That’s some training to give to girls.”
“Do you know,” she said, and without a trace of charity, “there is something very wrong with you.”
“My tongue is bleeding, for one—!”
“You are the most unhappy person I have ever known. You are like a baby.”
“No! Not so,” but she waved aside any explanation I may have had to offer, and began to lecture me on my shortcomings as she had observed them that day.
“The way you disapprove of your life! Why do you do that? It is of no value for a man to disapprove of his life the way that you do. You seem to take some special pleasure, some pride, in making yourself the butt of your own peculiar sense of humor. I don’t believe you actually want to improve your life. Everything you say is somehow always twisted, some way or another, to come out ‘funny.’ All day long the same thing. In some little way or other, everything is ironical, or self-depreciating. Self-depreciating?”
“Self-deprecating. Self-mocking.”
“Exactly! And you are a highly intelligent man—that is what makes it even more disagreeable. The contribution you could make! Such stupid self-deprecation! How disagreeable!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said, “self-deprecation is, after all, a classic form of Jewish humor.”
“Not Jewish humor! No! Ghetto humor.”
Not much love in that remark, I’ll tell you. By dawn I had been made to understand that I was the epitome of what was most shameful in “the culture of the Diaspora.” Those centuries and centuries of homelessness had produced just such disagreeable men as myself—frightened, defensive, self-deprecating, unmanned and corrupted by life in the gentile world. It was Diaspora Jews just like myself who had gone by the millions to the gas chambers without ever raising a hand against their persecutors, who did not know enough to defend their lives with their blood. The Diaspora! The very word made her furious.
When she finished I said, “Wonderful. Now let’s fuck.”
“You are disgusting!