Where to find it? The story of Portnoy’s relationship with The Monkey covers the pages 100-107, 134-142 and 191-215 in the original print edition.
The relationship Alexander Portnoy speaks about the most is with a woman (Mary Jane) whom he calls The Monkey as a reference to one of her “perverse” sexual stories.
Yes, shame, shame, on Alex P., the only member of his graduating class who hasn’t made grandparents of his Mommy and his Daddy. While everybody else has been marrying nice Jewish girls, and having children, and buying houses, and (my father’s phrase) putting down roots, while all the other sons have been carrying forward the family name, what he has been doing is—chasing cunt. And shikse cunt, to boot! Chasing it, sniffing it, lapping it, shtupping it, but above all, thinking about it. Day and night, at work and on the street-thirty-three years old and still he is roaming the streets with his eyes popping. 1Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 100-101.
Speaking of himself in the third person…
Where cunt is concerned he lives in a condition that has neither diminished nor in any significant way been refined from what it was when he was fifteen years old and could not get up from his seat in the classroom without hiding a hard-on beneath his three-ring notebook. Every girl he sees turns out (hold your hats) to be carrying around between her legs—a real cunt. Amazing! Astonishing! Still can’t get over the fantastic idea that when you are looking at a girl, you are looking at somebody who is guaranteed to have on her—a cunt! They all have cunts! Right under their dresses! Cunts—for fucking! And, Doctor, Your Honor, whatever your name is—it seems to make no difference how much the poor bastard actually gets, for he is dreaming about tomorrow’s pussy even while pumping away at today’s! 2Ibid., 101-102
So what’s the crime? Sexual freedom? In this day and age? Why should I bend to the bourgeoisie? Do I ask them to bend to me? Maybe I’ve been touched by the tarbrush of Bohemia a little—is that so awful? Whom am I banning with my lusts? I don’t blackjack the ladies, I don’t twist arms to get them into bed with me. I am, if I may say so, an honest and compassionate man; let me tell you, as men go I am… But why must I explain myself! Excuse myself! Why must I justify with my Honesty and Compassion my desires! So I have desires-only they’re endless. Endless! And that, that may not be such a blessing, taking for the moment a psychoanalytic point of view… But then all the unconscious can do anyway, so Freud tells us, is want. And want! And WANT! Oh, Freud, do I know! This one has a nice ass, but she talks too much. On the other hand, this one here doesn’t talk at all, at least not so that she makes any sense—but, boy, can she suck! What cock know-how! While here is a honey of a girl, with the softest, pinkest, most touching nipples I have ever drawn between my lips, only she won’t go down on me. Isn’t that odd? And yet—go understand people—it is her pleasure while being boffed to have one or the other of my forefingers lodged snugly up her anus. What a mysterious business it is! The endless fascination of these apertures and openings! You see, I just can’t stop! Or tie myself to any one. I have affairs that last as long as a year, a year and a half, months and months of love, both tender and voluptuous, but in the end—it is as inevitable as death-time marches on and lust peters out. In the end, I just cannot take that step into marriage. But why should I? Why? Is there a law saying Alex Portnoy has to be somebody’s husband and father? Doctor, they can stand on the window ledge and threaten to splatter themselves on the pavement below, they can pile the Seconal to the ceiling—I may have to live for weeks and weeks on end in terror of these marriage-bent girls throwing themselves beneath the subway train, but I simply cannot, I simply will not, enter into a contract to sleep with just one woman for the rest of my days. Imagine it: suppose I were to go ahead and marry A, with her sweet tits and so on, what will happen when B appears, whose are even sweeter—or, at any rate, newer? Or C, who knows how to move her ass in some special way I have never experienced; or D, or E, or F. I’m trying to be honest with you, Doctor—because with sex the human imagination runs to Z, and then beyond! Tits and cunts and legs and lips and mouths and tongues and assholes! How can I give up what I have never even had, for a girl, who delicious and provocative as once she may have been, will inevitably grow as familiar to me as a loaf of bread? For love? What love? Is that what binds all these couples we know together—the ones who even bother to let themselves be bound? Isn’t it something more like weakness? Isn’t it rather convenience and apathy and guilt? Isn’t it rather fear and exhaustion and inertia, gutlessness plain and simple, far far more than that “love” that the marriage counselors and the songwriters and the psychotherapists are forever dreaming about? Please, let us not bullshit one another about “love” and its duration. Which is why I ask: how can I marry someone I “love” knowing full well that five, six, seven years hence I am going to be out on the streets hunting down the fresh new pussy—all the while my devoted wife, who has made me such a lovely home, et cetera, bravely suffers her loneliness and rejection? How could I face her terrible tears? I couldn’t. How could I face my adoring children? And then the divorce, right? The child support. The alimony. The visitation rights. Wonderful prospect, just wonderful. 3Ibid., 103-105
You see, for all her preening and perfumes, she has a very low opinion of herself, and simultaneously—and here is the source of much of our trouble—a ridiculously high opinion of me. And simultaneously, a very low opinion of me! She is one confused Monkey, and, I’m afraid, not too very bright. “An intellectual!” she screams. “An educated, spiritual person! You mean, miserable hard-on you, you care more about the niggers in Harlem that you don’t even know, than you do about me, who’s been sucking you off for a solid year!” Confused, heartbroken, and also out of her mind. For all this comes to me from the balcony of our hotel room in Athens, as I stand in the doorway, suitcases in hand, begging her to please come back inside so that I can catch a plane out of that place. Then the angry little manager, all olive oil, mustache, and outraged respectability, is running up the stairway waving his arms in the air—and so, taking a deep breath, I say, “Look, you want to jump, jump!” and out I go—and the last words I hear have to do with the fact that it was only out of love for me (“Love!” she screams) that she allowed herself to do the degrading things I forced quote unquote upon her.
Which is not the case, Doctor! Not the case at all! Which is an attempt on this sly bitch’s part to break me on the rack of guilt—and thus get herself a husband. Because at twenty-nine that’s what she wants, you see—but that does not mean, you see, that I have to oblige. “In September, you son of a bitch, I am going to be thirty years old!” Correct, Monkey, correct! Which is precisely why it is you and not me who is responsible for your expectations and your dreams! Is that clear? You! “I’ll tell the world about you, you cold-hearted prick! I’ll tell them what a filthy pervert you are, and the dirty things you made me do!”
The cunt! I’m lucky really that I came out of that affair alive. If I have! 4Ibid., 106-107
[T]his hopelessly neurotic woman, this pathetic screwy hillbilly cunt, is hardly what could be called my victim. I simply will not bend to that victim shit! Now she’s thirty, wants to be married and a mother, wants to be respectable and live in a house with a husband (particularly as the high-paying years of her glamorous career appear to be just about over), but it does not follow that just because she imagines herself victimized and deprived and exploited (and may even be, taking a long view of her life), that I am the one upon whom they are going to pin the rap. I didn’t make her thirty years old and single. I didn’t take her from the coal fields of West Virginia and make her my personal charge—and I didn’t put her in bed with that streetwalker either! The fact is that it was The Monkey herself, speaking her high-fashion Italian, who leaned out of our rented car and explained to the whore what it was we wanted and how much we were willing to pay. I simply sat there behind the wheel, one foot on the gas pedal, like the get-away driver that I am… And, believe me, when that whore climbed into the back seat, I thought no; and at the hotel, where we managed to send her up alone to our room, by way of the bar, I thought no again. No! No! No!
She wasn’t bad-looking, this whore, sort of round and dumpy, but in her early twenties and with a big pleasant open face—and just stupendous tits. Those were what we’d picked her out for, after driving slowly up and down the Via Veneto examining the merchandise on parade. The whore, whose name was Lina, took her dress off standing in the middle of the room; underneath she wore a “merry widow” corset, from which the breasts bubbled up at one end, and the more than ample thighs rippled out at the other. I was astonished by the garment and its theatricality—but then I was astonished by everything, above all, that we had gone ahead after all these months of talking, and finally done it.
The Monkey came out of the bathroom in her short chemise (ordinarily a sight that made me very hot, that cream-colored silk chemise with a beautiful Monkey in it), and I meanwhile took off all my clothes and sat naked at the foot of the bed. That Lina spoke not a word of English only intensified the feeling that began to ebb and flow between The Monkey and myself, a kind of restrained sadism: we could speak to one another, exchange secrets and plans without the whore’s understanding—as she and The Monkey could whisper in Italian without my knowledge of what they might be saying, or plotting… Lina spoke first and The Monkey turned to translate. “She says you have a big one.” “Ill bet she says that to all the boys.” Then they stood there in their underwear looking my way—waiting. But so was I waiting too. And was my heart pounding. It had to come to pass, two women and me… so now what happens? Still, you see, I’m saying to myself No!
She wants to know, said The Monkey, after Lina had spoken a second time, where the signore would like her to begin. The signore, said I, wishes her to begin at the beginning . . . Oh, very witty that reply, very nonchalant indeed, only we continue to sit there motionless, me and my hard-on, all undressed and no place to go. Finally it is The Monkey who sets our lust in motion. She moves across to Lina, above whom she towers (oh God, isn’t she enough? isn’t she really sufficient for my needs? how many cocks have I got?), and puts her hand between the whore’s legs. We had imagined it beforehand in all its possibilities, dreamed it all out loud for many many months now, and yet I am dumbstruck at the sight of The Monkey’s middle finger disappearing up into Lina’s cunt.
I can best describe the state I subsequently entered as one of unrelieved busy-ness. Boy, was I busy! I mean there was just so much to do. You go here and I’ll go there—okay, now you go here and I’ll go there—all right, now she goes down that way, while I head up this way, and you sort of half turn around on this… and so it went, Doctor, until I came my third and final time. The Monkey was by then the one with her back on the bed, and I the one with my ass to the chandelier (and the cameras, I fleetingly thought)—and in the middle, feeding her tits into my Monkey’s mouth, was our whore. Into whose hole, into what sort of hole, I deposited my final load is entirely a matter for conjecture. It could be that in the end I wound up fucking some dank, odoriferous combination of sopping Italian pubic hair, greasy American buttock, and absolutely rank bedsheet. Then I got up, went into the bathroom, and, you’ll all be happy to know, regurgitated my dinner. My kishkas. Mother—threw them right up into the toilet bowl. Isn’t that a good boy? When I came out of the bathroom. The Monkey and Lina were lying asleep in one another’s arms.
The Monkey’s pathetic weeping, the recriminations and the accusations, began immediately after Lina had dressed and departed. I had delivered her into evil.
“Me? You’re the one who stuck your finger up her snatch and got the ball rolling! You kissed her on the fucking lips—!”
“Because, she screamed, if I’m going to do something, then like I do it! But that doesn’t mean I want to!”
And then, Doctor, she began to berate me about Lina’s tits, how I hadn’t played with them enough. “All you ever talk about and think about is tits! Other people’s tits! Mine are so small and everybody else’s in the world you see are so huge—so you finally get a pair that are tremendous, and what do you do? Nothing!”
“Nothing is an exaggeration, Monkey—the fact of the matter is that I couldn’t always fight my way past you—”
“I am not a lesbian! Don’t you dare call me a lesbian! Because if I am, you made me one! Oh Jesus, no—!” I did it for you, yes—and now you hate me for it!”
“Then we won’t do it again, for me, all right? Not if this is the fucking ridiculous result!”
Except the next night we got each other very steamed up at dinner—as in the early days of our courtship, The Monkey retired at one point to the ladies’ room at Ranieri’s and returned to the table with a finger redolent of pussy, which I held beneath my nose to sniff and kiss at till the main dish arrived—and after a couple of brandies at Doney’s, accosted Lina once again at her station and took her with us to the hotel for round two. Only this time I relieved Lina of her undergarments myself and mounted her even before The Monkey had come back into the bedroom from the john. If I’m going to do it, I thought. I’m going to do it! All the way! Everything! And no vomiting, either! You’re not in Weequahic High School any more! You’re nowhere near New Jersey!
When The Monkey stepped out of the bathroom and saw that the ball game was already under way, she wasn’t entirely pleased. 5Ibid., 135-139
The bane of existence [the whore whom Portnoy picked up] was the abortions. She was the mother of one child, a boy, with whom she lived on Monte Mario (“in a beautiful new building,” The Monkey translated). Unfortunately she could not manage, in her situation, any more than one—”though she loves children”—and so was always in and out of the abortionist’s office. Her only precautionary device seemed to be a spermicidal douche of no great reliability.
I couldn’t believe that she had never heard of either the diaphragm or the birth-control pill. I told The Monkey to explain to her about modern means of contraception that she could surely avail herself of, probably with only a little ingenuity. I got from my mistress a very wry look. The whore listened but was skeptical. It distressed me considerably that she should be so ignorant about a matter pertaining to her own well-being (there on the bed with her fingers wandering around in my damp pubic hair): That fucking Catholic church, I thought…
So, when she left us that night, she had not only fifteen thousand of my lire in her handbag, but a month’s supply of The Monkey’s Enovid—that I had given to her.
“Oh, you are some savior!” The Monkey shouted, after Lina had left.
“What do you want her to do—get knocked up every other week? What sense does that make?”
“What do I care what happens to her!” said The Monkey, her voice turning rural and mean. “She’s the whore! And all you really wanted to do was to fuck her! You couldn’t even wait until I was out of the john to do it! And then you gave her my pills!”
“And what’s that mean, hub? What exactly are you trying to say? You know, one of the things you don’t always display, Monkey, is a talent for reason. A talent for frankness, yes—for reason, no!”
“Then leave me! You’ve got what you wanted! Leave!”
“Maybe I will!”
“To you I’m just another her, anyway! You, with all your big words and big shit holy ideals and all I am in your eyes is just a cunt—and a lesbian!—and a whore!” (p. 139-142)
When we two met, nearly a year ago now, The Monkey had already been through her marriage and her divorce. Her husband had been a fifty-year-old French industrialist, who had courted and married her one week in Florence, where she was modeling in a show at the Pitti Palace. Subsequent to the marriage, his sex life consisted of getting into bed with his young and beautiful bride and jerking off into a copy of a magazine called Garter Belt, which he had flown over to him from Forty-second Street.
[…]What caused her finally to run for her life were the little orgies he began to arrange after jerking off into Garter Belt (or was it Spiked Heels?) became a bore to both of them. A woman, preferably black, would be engaged for a very high sum to squat naked upon a glass coffee table and take a crap while the tycoon lay flat on his back, directly beneath the table, and jerked his dong off. And as the shit splattered on the glass six inches above her beloved’s nose, The Monkey, our poor Monkey, was expected to sit on the red damask sofa, fully clothed, sipping cognac and watching. 6Ibid., 154-156
He speaks of the first time he saw her: she was hailing a cab. He walked over to her and offered her to have a drink with him which she sneered at. She asked him again about what exactly he wanted:
“To eat your pussy, baby, how’s that?” My God! She’s going to call a cop! Who’ll turn me in to the Mayor!
“That’s better,” she replied.
And so a cab pulled up, and we went to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and said, “Go ahead.”
My incredulity! That such a thing was happening to me! Did I eat! It was suddenly as though my life were taking place in the middle of a wet dream. There I was, going down at last on the star of all those pornographic films that I had been producing in my head since I first laid a hand upon my own joint… “Now me you,” she said, “—one good turn deserves another,” and. Doctor, this stranger then proceeded to suck me off with a mouth that might have gone to a special college to learn all the wonderful things it knew. What a find, I thought, she takes it right down to the root! What a mouth I have fallen into! Talk about opportunities! And simultaneously: Get out! Go! Who and what can this person be! 7Ibid., 158
She told me then that only a month before, when she had been ill with a virus, a couple she knew had come by to make dinner for her. After the meal they said they wanted her to watch them screw. So she did. She sat up on the bed with a temperature of 102, and they took off their clothes and went at it on the bedroom rug—”And you know what they wanted me to do, while they were making it?”
“No.”
“I had some bananas on the counter in the kitchen, and they wanted me to eat one. While I watched.”
“For the arcane symbolism, no doubt.”
“The what?”
“Why did they want you to eat the banana?”
“Man, I don’t know. I guess they wanted to know I was really there. They wanted to like hear me. Chewing. Look, do you just suck, or do you fuck, too?”
The real McCoy! My slut from the Empire Burlesque—without the tits, but so beautiful!
“I fuck too.”
“Well, so do I.”
“Isn’t that a coincidence,” I said, “us running into each other.” 8Ibid., 159-160
Later on, she returned to the story and said apologetically that she lied about its details.
“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 whole-hearted 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 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 naif 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… 9Ibid., 161-163
One time he offers to recite a poem for her.
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 Marion Brando. Prick didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge receipt.”
Silence. While we try to figure out what two such unlikely people are doing together-in Vermont yet.
Then she says, “Okay, what’s Agamemnon?”
So I explain, to the best of my ability. Zeus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Helen, Paris, Troy… Oh, I feel like a shit-and a fake. Half of it I know I’m getting wrong.
But she’s marvelous. “Okay-now say it all again.”
“You serious?”
“I’m serious! Again! But, for Christ’s sake, slow.”
So I recite again, and all this time my trousers are still down around the floorboard, and it’s growing darker on the path where I have parked out of sight of the road, beneath the dramatic foliage. The leaves, in fact, are falling into the car. The Monkey looks like a child trying to master a multiplication problem, but not a dumb child—no, a quick and clever little girl! Not stupid at all! This girl is really very special. Even if I did pick her up in the street!
When I finish, you know what she does? Takes hold of my hand, draws my fingers up between her legs. Where Mary Jane still wears no underpants. “Feel. It made my pussy all wet.”
“Sweetheart! You understood the poem!”
“I spose I deed!” cries Scarlett O’Hara. Then, “Hey, I did! I understood a poem!”
“And with your cunt, no less.”
“My Breakthrough-baby! You’re turning this twat into a genius! Oh, Breakie, darling, eat me,” she cries, thrusting a handful of fingers into my mouth—and she pulls me down upon her by my lower jaw, crying, “Oh, eat my educated cunt!”
[…]
What strength she has stored in that slender frame—the glorious acrobatics she can perform while dangling from the end of my dork! You’d think she’d snap a vertebra, hanging half her torso backward over the side of the bed—in ecstasy! Yi! Thank God for that gym class she goes to! What screwing I am getting! What a deal! And yet it turns out that she is also a human being—yes, she gives every indication that this may be so! A human being! Who can be loved!But by me?
Why not?
Really?
Why not!
“You know something,” she says to me from the tub, “my little hole’s so sore it can hardly breathe.”
“Poor hole.”
“Hey, let’s eat a big dinner, a lot of wine and chocolate mousse, and then come up here, and get into our two-hundred-year-old bed-and not screw!”
“How you doin’. Arn?” she asked later, when the lights were out. “This is fun, isn’t it? It’s like being eighty.”
“Or eight,” I said. “I got something I want to show you.”
“No. Arnold, no.”
During the night I awakened, and drew her toward me.
“Please,” she moaned, “I’m saving myself for my husband.”
“That doesn’t mean shit to a swan, lady.”
“Oh please, please, do fuck off-”
“Feel my feather.”
“Ahhh,” she gasped, as I stuffed it in her hand. “A Jew-swan! Hey!” she cried, and grabbed at my nose with the other hand. “The indifferent beak! I just understood more poem!… Didn’t I?”
“Christ, you are a marvelous girl!”
That took her breath away. “Oh, am I?”
“Yes!”
“Am I?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Now can I fuck you?”
“Oh, sweetheart, darling,” cried The Monkey, “pick a hole, any hole. I’m yours!” 10Ibid., 191-196
Doctor, this girl once did it for money. Money! Yes! I believe they call that “prostitution”! One night, to praise her (I imagined, at any rate, that that was my motive), I said, “You ought to market this, it’s too much for one man,” just being chivalrous, you see… or intuitive? Anyway, she answers, “I have.” I wouldn’t let her alone until she explained what she’d meant; at first she claimed she was only being clever, but in the face of my cross-examination she finally came up with this story, which struck me as the truth, or a portion thereof. Just after Paris and her divorce, she had been flown out to Hollywood (she says) to be tested for a part in a movie (which she didn’t get. I pressed for the name of the movie, but she claims to have forgotten, says it was never made). On the way back to New York from California, she and the girl she was with (“Who’s this other girl?” “A girl. A girl friend.” “Why were you traveling with another girl?” “I just was!”), she and this other girl stopped off to see Las Vegas. There she went to bed with some guy that she met, perfectly innocently she maintains; however, to her complete surprise, in the morning he asked, “How much?” She says it just came out of her mouth-“Whatever it’s worth, Sport.” So he offered her three hundred-dollar bills. “And you took it?” I asked. “I was twenty years old. Sure, I took it. To see what it felt like, that’s all.” “And what did it feel like, Mary Jane?” “I don’t remember. Nothing. It didn’t feel like anything.”
Well, what do you think? She claims it only happened that once, ten years ago, and even then only came about through some “accidental” joining of his misunderstanding with her whimsy. But do you buy that? Should I? Is it impossible to believe that this girl may have put in some time as a high-priced call girl? Oh Jesus! Take her, I think to myself, and I am no higher in the evolutionary scale than the mobsters and millionaires who choose their women from the line at the Copa. This is the kind of girl ordinarily seen hanging from the arm of a Mafiosa or a movie star, not the 1950 valedictorian of Weequahic High! Not the editor of the Columbia Law Review! Not the high-minded civil-libertarian! Let’s face it, whore or no whore, this is a clear-cut tootsie, right? Who looks at her with me knows precisely what I am after in this life. This is what my father used to call “a chippy.” Of course! And can I bring home a chippy. Doctor? “Momma, Poppa, this is my wife, the chippy. Isn’t she a wild piece of ass?” Take her fully for my own, you see, and the whole neighborhood will know at last the truth about my dirty little mind. The so-called genius will be revealed in all his piggish proclivities and feelthy desires. The bathroom door will swing open (unlocked!), and behold, there sits the savior of mankind, drool running down his chin, absolutely gaa-gaa in the eyes, and his prick firing salvos at the light bulb! A laughingstock, at last! A bad boy! A shande to his family forever! 11Ibid., 199-200
He’s vexed by her mannerisms…
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! 12Ibid., 207
He starts bringing her heavily intellectual books to read.
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. 13Ibid., 209
He walks into the apartment in a tuxedo, ready to take her to a formal dinner party with with the mayor and his wife (The Lindsays). While she’s still in the shower, he sees a note on the coffee table.
Has a child been here, I wonder. No, no, I am just face to face with my first specimen of The Monkey’s handwriting. A note to the cleaning lady. Though at first glance I imagine it must be a note from the cleaning lady.
Must? Why “must”? Because she’s “mine”?
dir willa polish the flor by bathrum pleze & dont
furget the insies of windose mary jane rThree times I read the sentence through, and as happens with certain texts, each reading reveals new subtleties of meaning and implication, each reading augurs tribulations yet to be visited upon my ass. Why allow this “affair” to gather any more momentum? What was I thinking about in Vermont! Oh that z, that z between the two e’s of ‘pleze”-this is a mind with the depths of a movie marquee! And “furget”! Exactly how a prostitute would misspell that word! But it’s something about the mangling of “dear,” that tender syllable of affection now collapsed into three lower-case letters, that strikes me as hopelessly pathetic. How unnatural can a relationship be! This woman is ineducable and beyond reclamation. By contrast to hers, my childhood took place in Brahmin Boston. What kind of business can the two of us have together? Monkey business! No business! 14Ibid., 205-206
She just got ready for the evening but he’s in disbelief at what she’s wearing.
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’s daughter in the neon city! “And this,” I think, “is how she is going with me to the Mayor’s? Looking like a stripper?
[…]
“I’m getting radiation poisoning, Alex, from what you’re giving off.”
“I’m not giving off shit! I’ve said nothing.”
“You’ve got those black Hebe eyes, man, they say it for you. Tutti!”
“Relax, Monkey.”
“You relax!”
“I am!” But my manly resolve lasts about a minute more. “Only for Christ’s sake,” I tell her, “don’t say cunt to Mary Lindsay!”
“What?”
With this, a hiss like the sound of air brakes rises from the driver-and The Monkey heaves herself in a rage against the rear door. “I’ll say and do and wear anything I want! This is a free country, you uptight Jewish prick!” 15Ibid., 209-211
She continue arguing and he says he considered breaking up with her. He dismisses the idea out of fear that she might kill herself.
Doctor, you must believe me, this was a real possibility—this is why I said nothing; but then her arms were around my neck, and oh, she said plenty. “I love you, Alex! I worship and adore you! So don’t put me down, please! Because I couldn’t take it! Because you’re the very best man, woman, or child I’ve ever known! In the whole animal kingdom! Oh, Breakie, you have a big brain and a big cock and I love you!”
And then on a bench no more than two hundred feet from The Lindsays’ mansion, she buried her wig in my lap and proceeded to suck me off. “Monkey, no,” I pleaded, “no,” as she passionately zipped open my black trousers, “there are plainclothesmen everywhere!”—referring to the policing of Gracie Mansion and its environs. “They’ll haul us in, creating a public nuisance—Monkey, the cops—” but turning her ambitious lips up from my open fly, she whispered, “Only in your imagination” (a not unsubtle retort, if meant subtly), and then down she burrowed, some furry little animal in search of a home. And mastered me with her mouth.
At dinner I overheard her telling the Mayor that she modeled during the day and took courses at Hunter at night. Not a word about her cunt, as far as I could tell. The next day she went off to Hunter, and that night, for a surprise, showed me the application blank she had gotten from the admissions office. Which I praised her for. And which she never filled out, of course—except for her age: 29.
A fantasy of The Monkey’s, dating from her high school years in Moundsville. The reverie she lived in, while others learned to read and write:
Around a big conference table, at rigid attention, sit all the boys in West Virginia who are seeking admission to West Point. Underneath the table, crawling on her hands and knees, and nude, is our gawky teen-age illiterate, Mary Jane Reed. A West Point colonel with a swagger stick tap-tapping behind his back, circles and circles the perimeter of the table, scrutinizing the faces of the young men, as out of sight Mary Jane proceeds to undo their trousers and to blow each of the candidates in his turn. The boy selected for admission to the military academy will be he who is most able to maintain a stern and dignified soldierly bearing while shooting off into Mary Jane’s savage and knowing little weapon of a mouth.
Ten months. Incredible. For in that time not a day—very likely, not an hour—passed that I did not ask myself, “Why continue with this person? This brutalized woman! This coarse, tormented, self-loathing, bewildered, lost, identityless—” and so on. The list was inexhaustible, I reviewed it interminably. And to remember the ease with which I had plucked her off the street (the sexual triumph of my life!), well, that made me groan with disgust. How can I go on and on with someone whose reason and judgment and behavior I can’t possibly respect? Who sets off inside me daily explosions of disapproval, hourly thunderclaps of admonition! And the sermonizing! Oh, what a schoolmaster I became. When she bought me those Italian loafers for my birthday, for instance—such a lecture I gave in return!
“Look,” I said, once we were out of the store, “a little shopping advice: when you go off to do something so very simple as exchanging money for goods, it isn’t necessary to flash your snatch at everyone this side of the horizon. Okay?”
“Flash what? Who flashed anything?”
“You, Mary Jane! Your supposedly private parts!”
“I did not!”
“Please, every time you stood up, every time you sat down, I thought you were going to get yourself hooked by the pussy on the salesman’s nose.”
“Jee-zuz, I gotta sit, I gotta stand, don’t I?”“But not like you’re climbing on and off a horse!”
“Well, I don’t know what’s bugging you—he was a faggot anyway.”
“What’s ‘bugging’ me is that the space between your legs has now been seen by more people than watch Huntley and Brinkley! So why not bow out while you’re still champeen, all right?“ Yet, even as I make my accusation, I am saying to myself, “Oh, lay off, Little Boy Blue—if you want a lady instead of a cunt, then get yourself one. Who’s holding you here?” Because this city, as we know, is alive with girls wholly unlike Miss Mary Jane Reed, promising, unbroken, uncontaminated young women—healthy, in fact, as milkmaids. I know, because these were her predecessors-only they didn’t satisfy, either. They were wrong, too. Spielvogel, believe me, I’ve been there, I’ve tried: I’ve eaten their casseroles and shaved in their johns, I’ve been given duplicate keys to their police locks and shelves of my own in the medicine chest, I have even befriended those cats of theirs-named Spinoza and Clytemnestra and Candide and Cat—yes, yes, clever and erudite girls, fresh from successful adventures in sex and scholarship at wholesome Ivy League colleges, lively, intelligent, self-respecting, self-assured, and well-behaved young women-social workers and research assistants, schoolteachers and copy readers, girls in whose company I did not feel abject or ashamed, girls I did not have to father or mother or educate or redeem. And they didn’t work out, either! 16Ibid., 212-215
So, he eventually breaks up with her as she become more suicidal. He feels guilty about it but he just can’t stand being with her.
Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.
Endnotes
