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! The day after our return from Vermont, I bought a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men -wrote on a card, 'To the staggering girl,' and had it gift-wrapped for presentation that night. 'Tell me books to read, okay?'-this the touching plea she made the night we returned to the city: 'Because why should I be dumb, if like you say, I’m so smart?' So, here was Agee to begin with, and with the Walker Evans' photographs to help her along: a book to speak to her of her own early life, to enlarge her perspective on her origins (origins, of course, holding far more fascination for the nice left-wing Jewish boy than for the proletarian girl herself). How earnest I was compiling that reading list! Boy, was I going to improve her mind! After Agee, Adamic's Dynamite!, my own yellowing copy from college; I imagined her benefiting from my undergraduate underlinings, coming to understand the distinction between the relevant and the trivial, a generalization and an illustration, and so on. Furthermore, it was a book so simply written, that hopefully, without my pushing her, she might be encouraged to read not just the chapters I had suggested, those touching directly upon her own past (as I imagined it)- violence in the coal fields, beginning with the Molly Maguires; the chapter on the Wobblies-but the entire history of brutality and terror practiced by and upon the American laboring class, from which she was descended. Had she never read a book called U.S.A.? Mortimer Snerd: 'Duh, I never read nothing, Mr. Bergen.' So I bought her the Modern Library DOS Passes, a book with a hard cover. Simple, I thought, keep it simple, but educational, elevating. Ah, you get the dreamy point, I'm sure. The texts? W. E. B. Du Bois' The Souls f Black Folk. The Grapes of Wrath. An American Tragedy. A book of Sherwood Anderson's I like, called Poor White (the title, I thought, might stir her interest). Baldwin 's Notes of a Native Son. The name of the course? Oh, I don't know- Professor Portnoy's 'Humiliated Minorities, an Introduction.' 'The History and Function of Hatred in America.' 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.
Where am I? Tuxedoed. All civilized-up in my evening clothes, and 'dir willa' still sizzling in my hand, as The Monkey emerges wearing the frock she has bought specifically for the occasion. What occasion? 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? 'Dear,' and she spells it with three letters! And hasn't read two pages of the Agee book in an entire week! Has she even looked at the pictures? Duh, I doubt it! Oh, wrong,' I think, jamming her note into my pocket for a keepsake-I can have it laminated for a quarter the next day-'wrong! This is somebody whom I picked up off the street! Who sucked me off before she even knew my name! Who once peddled her ass in Las Vegas, if not elsewhere! Just look at her-a moll! The Assistant Human Opportunity Commissioner's moll! What kind of dream am I living in? Being with such a person is for me all wrong! Mean-ing-less! A waste of everybody's energy and character and time!'
“Okay,' says The Monkey in the taxi, 'what's bugging you, Max?'
'Nothing.'
'You hate the way I look.'
'Ridiculous.'
'Driver-Peck and Peck!'
'Shut up. Gracie Mansion, driver.'
'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?'
'You heard right. When we get there don't start talking about your wet pussy to whoever opens the door! Don't make a grab for Big John's shlong until we've been there at least half an hour, okay?'
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!'
You should have seen the look given us upon disembarking by Mr. Manny Schapiro, our driver. 'Rich joik-offs!' he yells. 'Nazi bitch!' and burns rubber pulling away.
From where we sit on a bench in Carl Schurz Park, we can see the lights in Gracie Mansion; I watch the other members of the new administration arriving, as I stroke her arm, kiss her forehead, tell her there is no reason to cry, the fault is mine, yes, yes, I am an uptight Jewish prick, and apologize, apologize, apologize.
'-picking on me all the time-in just the way you look at me you pick on me, Alex! I open the door at night, I'm so dying to see you, thinking all day long about nothing but you, and there are those fucking orbs already picking out every single thing that's wrong with me! As if I'm not insecure enough, as if insecurity isn't my whole hang-up, you get that expression all over your face the minute I open my mouth- I mean I can't even give you the time of the day without the look: oh shit, here comes another dumb and stupid remark out of that brainless twat. I say, 'It's five to seven,' and you think, 'How fucking dumb can she be!' Well, I'm not brainless, and I'm not a twat either, just because I didn't go to fucking Harvard! And don't give me any more of your shit about behaving in front of The Lindsays. Just who the fuck are The Lindsays? A God damn mayor, and his wife! A fucking mayor! In case you forget, I was married to one of the richest men in France when I was still eighteen years old-I was a guest at Aly Khan's for dinner, when you were still back in Newark, New Jersey, finger-fucking your little Jewish girl friends!'
Was this my idea of a love affair, she asked, sobbing miserably. To treat a woman like a leper?
I wanted to say, 'Maybe then this isn't a love affair. Maybe it's what's called a mistake. Maybe we should just go our different ways, with no hard feelings.' But I didn't! For fear she might commit suicide! Hadn't she five minutes earlier tried to throw herself out the rear door of the taxi? So suppose I had said, 'Look, Monkey, this is it'-what was to stop her from rushing across the park, and leaping to her death in the East River? 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
