Portnoy’s Complaint

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!'

Idyllic, no? Under the red and yellow leaves like that?

In the room at Woodstock, while I shave for dinner, she soaks herself in hot water and Sardo. 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!'

After breakfast we walked around Woodstock with The Monkey's painted cheek glued to the arm of my jacket. 'You know something,' she said, 'I don't think I hate you any more.'

We started for home late in the afternoon, driving all the way to New York so that the weekend would last longer. Only an hour into the trip, she found WABC and began to move in her seat to the rock music. Then all at once she said, 'Ah, fuck that noise,' and switched the radio off.

Wouldn't it be nice, she said, not to have to go back?