which she never filled out, of course-except for her age: 2.9.
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!
Kay Campbell, my girl friend at Antioch -could there have been a more exemplary person? Artless, sweet- tempered, without a trace of morbidity or egoism-a thoroughly commendable and worthy human being. And where is she now, that find! Hello, Pumpkin! Making some lucky shaygets a wonderful wife out there in middle America? How could she do otherwise? Edited the literary magazine, walked off with all the honors in English literature, picketed with me and my outraged friends outside of that barbershop in Yellow Springs where they wouldn't cut Negro hair-a robust, genial, large-hearted, large-assed girl with a sweet baby face, yellow hair, no tits, unfortunately (essentially titless women seem to be my destiny, by the way-now, why is that? is there an essay somewhere I can read on that? is it of import? or shall I go on?). Ah, and those peasant legs! And the blouse always hanging loose from her skirt at the back. How moved I was by that blithesome touch! And by the fact that on high heels she looked like a cat stuck up a tree, in trouble, out of her element, all wrong. Always the first of the Antioch nymphs to go barefoot to classes in spring. 'The Pumpkin,' is what I called her, in commemoration of her pigmentation and the size of her can. Also her solidity: hard as a gourd on matters of moral principle, beautifully stubborn in a way I couldn't but envy and adore.
She never raised her voice in an argument. Can you imagine the impression this made on me at seventeen, fresh from my engagement with The Jack and Sophie Portnoy Debating Society? Who had ever heard of such an approach to controversy? Never ridiculed her opponent! Or seemed to hate him for his ideas! Ah-hah, so this is what it means to be a child of goyim, valedictorian of a high school in Iowa instead of New Jersey; yes, this is what the goyim who have got something have got! Authority without the temper. Virtue without the self-congratulation. Confidence sans swagger or condescension. Come on, let's be fair and give the goyim their due. Doctor: when they are impressive, they are very impressive. So sound! Yes, that's what hypnotized-the heartiness, the sturdiness; in a word, her pumpkinness. My wholesome, big-bottomed, lipstickless, barefooted shikse, where are you now, Kay-Kay? Mother to how many? Did you wind up really fat? Ah, so what! Suppose you're big as a house -you need a showcase for that character of yours! The very best of the Middle West , so why did I let her go? Oh, I'll get to that, no worry, self-laceration is never more than a memory away, we know that by now. In the meantime, let me miss her substantiality a little. That buttery skin! That unattended streaming hair! And this is back in the early fifties, before streaming hair became the style! This was just naturalness. Doctor. Round and ample, sun-colored Kay! I'll bet that half a dozen kiddies are clinging to that girl's abundant behind (so unlike The Monkey's hard little handful of a model's ass!). I'll bet you bake your own bread, right? (The way you did that hot spring night in my Yellow Springs apartment, in your halfslip and brassiere, with flour in your ears and your hairline damp with perspiration-remember? showing me, despite the temperature, how real bread should taste? You could have used my heart for batter, that's how soft it felt!) I'll bet you live where the air is still unpoisoned and nobody locks his door-and still don't give two shits about money or possessions. Hey, I don't either. Pumpkin, still unbesmirched myself on those and related middle-class issues! Oh, perfectly ill-proportioned girl! No mile-long mannequin you! So she had no tits, so what? Slight as a butterfly through the rib cage and neck, but planted like a bear beneath! Rooted, that's what I'm getting at! Joined by those lineman's legs to this American ground!
You should have heard Kay Campbell when we went around Greene County ringing doorbells for Stevenson in our sophomore year. Confronted with the most awesome Republican small-mindedness, a stinginess and bleakness of spirit that could absolutely bend the mind. The Pumpkin never was anything but ladylike. I was a barbarian. No matter how dispassionately I began (or condescendingly, because that's how it came out), I invariably wound up in a sweat and a rage, sneering, insulting, condemning, toe-to-toe with these terrible pinched people, calling their beloved Ike an illiterate, a political and moral moron-probably I am as responsible as anyone for Adlai losing as badly as he did in Ohio. The Pumpkin, however, gave such unflawed and kindly attention to the opposition point of view that I expected sometimes for her to turn and say to me, 'Why, Alex, I think Mr. Yokel is right-I think maybe he is too soft on communism.' But no, when the last idiocy had been uttered about our candidate's 'socialistical' and/or 'pinko' ideas, the final condemnation made of his sense of humor. The Pumpkin proceeded, ceremoniously and (awesome feat!) without a hint of sarcasm-she might have been the judge at a pie-baking contest, such a perfect blend was she of sobriety and good humor-proceeded to correct Mr. Yokel's errors of fact and logic, even to draw attention to his niggardly morality. Unencumbered by the garbled syntax of the apocalypse or the ill-mannered vocabulary of desperation, without the perspiring upper lip, the constricted and air-hungry throat, the flush of loathing on the forehead, she may even have swayed half a dozen people in the county. Christ, yes, this was one of the great shikses. I might have learned something spending the rest of my life with such a person. Yes, I might-if I could learn something! If I could be somehow
