Where to find it? The story of Portnoy’s relationship with The Pilgrim lasts from page 232 to 241 in the original print edition.
Another failed relationship by Alex was with an upper-class, 22-year-old New England girl named Sarah, whom he called The Pilgrim, because she could trace her heritage to the earliest Protestant settlers.
Yes, I was one happy yiddel down there in Washington, a little Stern gang of my own, busily exploding Charlie’s honor and integrity, while simultaneously becoming lover to that aristocratic Yankee beauty whose forebears arrived on these shores in the seventeenth century. Phenomenon known as Hating Your Goy And Eating One Too. 1Philip Roth, Portnoy’s Complaint, (New York: Random House, 1967; Reprint edition, 2002), 233.
Why didn’t I marry the girl? Well, there was her cutesy-wootsy boarding school argot, for one. Couldn’t bear it. “Barf” for vomit, “ticked off” for angry, “a howl” for funny, “crackers” for crazy, “teeny” for tiny. Oh, and “divine” (What Mary Jane Reed means by “groovy”—I’m always telling these girls how to talk right, me with my five-hundred-word New Jersey vocabulary.) Then there were the nicknames of her friends; there were the friends themselves! Poody and Pip and Pebble, Shrimp and Brute and Tug, Squeek, Bumpo, Baba—it sounded, I said, as though she had gone to Vassar with Donald Duck’s nephews… But then my argot caused her some pain too. The first time I said fuck in her presence (and the presence of friend Pebble, in her Peter Pan collar and her cablestitch cardigan, and tanned like an Indian from so much tennis at the Chevy Chase Club), such a look of agony passed over The Pilgrim’s face, you would have thought I had just branded the four letters on her flesh. (Ibid.)
What I’m saying, Doctor, is that I don’t seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds—as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America—maybe that’s more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington—now Portnoy. As though my manifest destiny is to seduce a girl from each of the forty-eight states. As for Alaskan and Hawaiian women, I really have no feelings either way, no scores to settle, no coupons to cash in, no dreams to put to rest-who are they to me, a bunch of Eskimos and Orientals? 2Ibid., 235
The relationship is shadowed by his feelings of insecurity about his Jewish identity and the inferiority of his own father. Compared to him and his smorgasbord of anxieties, she seemed trained and confident at everything.
She could have been a Lindabury, don’t you see? A daughter of my father’s boss! Here was a girl who knew how to sail a boat, knew how to eat her dessert using two pieces of silverware (a piece of cake you could ick up in your hands, and you should have seen her manipulate it with that fork and that spoon-like a Chinese with his chopsticks! What skills she had learned in far-off Connecticut!). Activities that partook of the exotic and even the taboo she performed so simply, as a matter of course: and I was as wowed (though that’s not the whole story) as Desdemona, hearing of the Anthropapagi. I came across a newspaper clipping in her scrapbook, a column entitled “A Deb A Day,” which began, “SARAH ABBOTT MAULSBY—’Ducks and quails and pheasants better scurry’ around New Canaan this fall because Sally, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Edward H. Maulsby of Greenley Road, is getting in practice for small game season. Shooting—” with a gun. Doctor—”shooting is just one of Sally’s outdoor hobbies.
[…]What Sally couldn’t do was eat me. To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her. She was sorry, she said, if I was going to take it so hard, but it was just something she didn’t care to try. I mustn’t act as though it were a personal affront, she said, because it had nothing at all to do with me as an individual… Oh, didn’t it? Bullshit, girlie! Yes, what made me so irate was precisely my belief that I was being discriminated against. My father couldn’t rise at Boston & Northeastern for the very same reason that Sally Maulsby wouldn’t deign to go down on me! Where was the justice in this world? Where was the B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation League—! “I do it to you,” I said. The Pilgrim shrugged; kindly she said, “You don’t have to, though. You know that. If you don’t want to…” “Ah, but I do want to—it isn’t a matter of ‘have’ to. I want to.” “Well,” she answered, “I don’t.” “But why not?” “Because. I don’t.” “Shit, that’s the way a child answers, Sarah—’because’! Give me a reason!” “I—I just don’t do at, that’s all.” “But that brings us back to why. Why?” “Alex, I can’t. I just can’t.” “Give me a single good reason!” “Please,” she replied, knowing her rights, “I don’t think I have to.” 3Ibid., 237-238
[I]f I were some big blond goy in a pink riding suit and hundred-dollar hunting boots, don’t worry, she’d be down there eating me, of that I am sure!
I am wrong. Three months I spent applying pressure to the back of her skull (pressure met by a surprising counterforce, an impressive, even moving display of stubbornness from such a mild and uncontentious person), for three months I assaulted her in argument and tugged her nightly by the ears. Then one night she invited me to hear the Budapest String Quartet playing Mozart at the Library of Congress; during the final movement of the Clarinet Quintet she took hold of my hand, her cheeks began to shine, and when we got back to her apartment and into bed, Sally said, “Alex…I will.” “Will what?” But she was gone, down beneath the covers and out of sight: blowing me! That is to say, she took my prick in her mouth and held it there for a count of sixty, held the surprised little thing there. Doctor, like a thermometer. I threw back the blankets-this I had to see! Feel, there wasn’t very much to feel, but oh the sight of it! Only Sally was already finished. Having moved it by now to the side of her face, as though it were the gear shift on her Hillman-Minx. And there were tears on her face.“I did it,” she announced.
“Sally, oh, Sarah, don’t cry.”
“But I did do it, Alex.”
“… You mean,” I said, “that’s all?”
“You mean,” she gasped, “more?”
“Well, to be frank, a little more—I mean to be truthful with you, it wouldn’t go unappreciated—”
“But it’s getting big. I’ll suffocate.”
JEW SMOTHERS DEB WITH COCK, Vassar Grad Georgetown Strangulation Victim; Mocky Lawyer Held
“Not if you breathe, you won’t.”
“I will I’ll choke—”
“Sarah, the best safeguard against asphyxiation is breathing. Just breathe, and that’s all there is to it. More or less.”
God bless her, she tried. But came up gagging. “I told you,” she moaned.
“But you weren’t breathing.”
“I can’t with that in my mouth.”
“Through your nose. Pretend you’re swimming.”
“But I’m not.”
“PRETEND!” I suggested, and though she gave another gallant try, surfaced only seconds later in an agony of coughing and tears. I gathered her then in my arms (that lovely willing girl! convinced by Mozart to go down on Alex! oh, sweet as Natasha in War and Peace! a tender young countess! ). I rocked her, I teased her, I made her laugh, for the first time I said, “I love you too, my baby,” but of course it couldn’t have been clearer to me that despite all her many qualities and charms—her devotion, her beauty, her deerlike grace, her place in American history—there could never be any “love” in me for The Pilgrim. Intolerant of her frailties. Jealous of her accomplishments. Resentful of her family. No, not much room there for love.
No, Sally Maulsby was just something nice a son once did for his dad. A little vengeance on Mr. Lindabury [his father’s boss] for all those nights and Sundays Jack Portnoy [his father] spent collecting down [insurance] in the colored district. A little bonus extracted from Boston & Northeastern [where his father worked], for all those years of service, and exploitation. 4Ibid., 239-241
Note: This page is one of several pages on Portnoy’s Complaint. View the list.
Endnotes
