out of being sanctified, I'll tell you. Alexander Portnoy-this and Alexander Portnoy-that, and to tell you the absolute truth, that he talks in syllables, and turns little words into big ones, and big ones into whole sentences by themselves, to be frank, it doesn't seem to bother me as much as it would ordinarily. Oh, the sunny Saturday morning meanders slowly along as he lists my virtues and accomplishments to the assembled relatives and friends, syllable by syllable. Lay it on them, Warshaw, blow my horn, don't hurry yourself on my account, please. I'm young, I can stand here all day, if that's what has to be. '… devoted son, loving brother, fantastic honor student, avid newspaper reader (up on every current event, knows the full names of each and every Supreme Court justice and Cabinet member, also the minority and majority leaders of both Houses of Congress, also the chairmen of the important Congressional committees), entered Weequahic High School this boy at the age of twelve, an I.Q. on him of 158, one hunder-ed and-a fif-a-ty eight-a, and now,' he tells the awed and beaming multitude, whose adoration I feel palpitating upward and enveloping me there on the altar-why, I wouldn't be at all surprised if when he's finished they don't pick me up and carry me around the synagogue like the Torah itself, bear me gravely up and down the aisles while the congregants struggle to touch their lips to some part of my new blue Ohrbach's suit, while the old men press forward to touch their tallises to my sparkling London Character shoes. 'Let me through! Let me touch!' and when I am world-renowned, they will say to their grandchildren, 'Yes, I was there, I was in attendance at the bar mitzvah of Chief Justice Portnoy-'an ambassador,' says Rabbi Warshaw, 'now our ambassador extraordinary-' Only the tune has changed! And how! 'Now,' he says to me, 'with the mentality of a pimp! With the human values of a race-horse jockey! What is to him the heights of human experience? Walking into a restaurant with a long-legged kurveh on his arm! An easy lay in a body stocking!' 'Oh, please, Re- ver-ed. I'm a big boy now-so you can knock off the rabbinical righteousness. It turns out to be a little laughable at this stage of the game. I happened to prefer beautiful and sexy to ugly and icy, so what's the tragedy? Why dress me up like a Las Vegas hood? Why chain me to a toilet bowl for eternity? For loving a saucy girl?' 'Loving? You? Too-ey on you! Self-loving, boychick, that's how I spell it! With a capital self! Your heart is an empty refrigerator! Your blood flows in cubes! I'm surprised you don't clink when you walk! The saucy girl, so-called-I'll bet saucy!-was a big fat feather in your prick, and that alone is her total meaning, Alexander Portnoy! What you did with your promise! Disgusting! Love? Spelled l-u-s-t! Spelled s-e-l-f!' 'But I felt stirrings, in Howard Johnson's-' 'In the prick! Sure!' 'No!' 'Yes! That's the only part you ever felt a stirring in your life! You whiner! You big bundle full of resentments! Why, you have been stuck on yourself since the first grade, for Christ's sake!' 'Have not!' 'Have! Have! This is the bottom truth, friend! Suffering mankind don't mean shit to you! That's a blind, buddy, and don't you kid yourself otherwise! Look, you call out to your brethren, look what I'm sticking my dicky into-look who I'm fucking: a fifty-foot fashion model! I get free what others pay upwards of three hundred dollars for! Oh boy, ain't that a human triumph, hub? Don't think that three hundred bucks don't titillate you plenty-cause it does! Only how about look what I'm loving, Portnoy!' 'Please, don't you read the New York Times? I have spent my whole life protecting the rights of the defenseless! Five years I was with the ACLU, fighting the good fight for practically nothing. And before that a Congressional committee! I could make twice, three times the money in a practice of my own, but I don't! I don't! Now I have been appointed-don't you read the papers!- I am now Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity! Preparing a special report on bias in the building trades-' 'Bullshit. Commissioner of Cunt, that's who you are! Commissioner of Human Opportunists! Uh, you Jerk-off artist! You case of arrested development! All is vanity, Portnoy, but you really take the cake! A hundred and fifty-eight points of I.Q. and all of it right down the drain! A lot of good it did to skip those two grades of grammar school, you dummy!' 'What?' 'And spending-money your father sent yet to Antioch College -that the man could hardly afford! All the faults come from the parents, right, Alex? What's wrong, they did-what’s good, you accomplished all on your own! You ignoramus! You icebox heart! Why are you chained to a toilet? Ill tell you why: poetic justice! So you can pull your peter till the end of time! Jerk your precious little dum-dum ad infinitum! Go ahead, pull off, Commissioner, that's all you ever really gave your heart to anyway -your stinking putz!'
I arrive in my tuxedo while she is still in the shower. The door has been left unlocked, apparently so that I can come right in without disturbing her. She lives on the top floor of a big modern building in the East Eighties, and it irritates me to think that anybody who happened through the corridor could walk in just as I have. I warn her of this through the shower curtain. She touches my cheek with her small wet face. 'Why would anyone want to do that?' she says. 'All my money's in the bank.'
'That's not a satisfactory reply,' I answer, and retreat to the living room, trying not to be vexed. I notice the slip of paper 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 amp; dont
furget the insies of windose mary jane r
Three 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!
The phone calls, for instance, I cannot tolerate those phone calls! Charmingly girlish she was when she warned me about telephoning all the time-but surprise, she meant it! I am in my office, the indigent parents of a psychotic child are explaining to me that their offspring is being systematically starved to death in a city hospital. They have come to us bearing their complaint, rather than to the Department of Hospitals, because a brilliant lawyer in the Bronx has told them that their child is obviously the victim of discrimination. What I can gather from a call to the chief psychiatrist at the hospital is that the child refuses to ingest any food-takes it and holds it in his mouth for hours, but refuses to swallow. I have then to tell these people that neither their child nor they are being victimized in the way or for the reason they believe. My answer strikes them as duplicitous. It strikes me as duplicitous. I think to myself, 'He'd swallow that food if he had my mother,' and meanwhile express sympathy for their predicament. But now they refuse to leave my office until they see 'the Mayor,' as earlier they refused to leave the social worker's office until they had seen 'the Commissioner.' The father says that he will have me fired, along with all the others responsible for starving to death a defenseless little child just because he is a Puerto Rican! 'Es contrario a la ley discriminar contra cualquier persona-' reading to me out of the bilingual CCHO handbook-that I wrote! At which point the phone rings. The Puerto Rican is shouting at me in Spanish, my mother is waving a knife at me back in my childhood, and my secretary announces that Miss Reed would like to speak to me on the telephone. For the third time that day.
'I miss you, Arnold,' The Monkey whispers.
'I'm afraid I'm busy right now.'
'I do do love you.'
'Yes, fine, may I speak with you later about this?'
'How I want that long sleek cock inside me-'
'Bye now!'
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
