Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [42]
Anyway, Sophie has by this time taken my hand, and with hooded eyes, waits until I sputter out the last accomplishment I can think of, the last virtuous deed I have done, then speaks: “But to us, to us you’re still a baby, darling.” And next comes the whisper, Sophie’s famous whisper that everybody in the room can hear without even straining, she’s so considerate: “Tell him you’re sorry. Give him a kiss. A kiss from you would change the world.”
A kiss from me would change the world! Doctor! Doctor! Did I say fifteen? Excuse me, I meant ten! I meant five! I meant zero! A Jewish man with his parents alive is half the time a helpless infant! Listen, come to my aid, will you—and quick! Spring me from this role I play of the smothered son in the Jewish joke! Because it’s beginning to pall a little, at thirty-three! And also it hoits, you know, there is pain involved, a little human suffering is being felt, if I may take it upon myself to say so—only that’s the part Sam Levenson leaves out! Sure, they sit in the casino at the Concord, the women in their minks and the men in their phosphorescent suits, and boy, do they laugh, laugh and laugh and laugh—“Help, help, my son the doctor is drowning!”—ha ha ha, ha ha ha, only what about the pain, Myron Cohen! What about the guy who is actually drowning! Actually sinking beneath an ocean of parental relentlessness! What about him—who happens, Myron Cohen, to be me! Doctor, please, I can’t live any more in a world given its meaning and dimension by some vulgar nightclub clown. By some—some black humorist! Because that’s who the black humorists are—of course!—the Henny Youngmans and the Milton Berles breaking them up down there in the Fountainebleau, and with what? Stories of murder and mutilation! “Help,” cries the woman running along the sand at Miami Beach, “help, my son the doctor is drowning!” Ha ha ha—only it is my son the patient, lady! And is he drowning! Doctor, get these people off my ass, will you please? The macabre is very funny on the stage—but not to live it, thank you! So just tell me how, and I’ll do it! Just tell me what, and I’ll say it right to their faces! Scat, Sophie! Fuck off, Jack! Go away from me already!
I mean here’s a joke for you, for instance. Three Jews are walking down the street, my mother, my father, and me. It’s this past summer, just before I am to leave on my vacation. We have had our dinner (“You got a piece of fish?” my father asks the waiter in the fancy French restaurant I take them to, to show I am grown-up—“Oui, monsieur, we have—” “All right, give me a piece of fish,” says my father, “and make sure it’s hot”), we have had our dinner, and afterward, chewing on my Titralac (for relief of gastric hyperacidity), I walk a ways with them before putting them in a taxi for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Immediately my father starts in about how I haven’t come to visit in five weeks (ground I thought we two had already covered in the restaurant, while my mother was whispering to the waiter to make sure her “big boy’s” piece of fish—that’s me, folks!—was well-done), and now I am going away for a whole month, and all in all when do they ever see their own son? They see their daughter, and their daughter’s children, and not infrequently, but that is not successful either. “With that son-in-law,” my father says, “if you don’t say the right psychological thing to his kids, if I don’t talk straight psychology to my own granddaughters, he wants to put me in jail! I don’t care what he calls himself, he still thinks like a Communist to me. My own grandchildren, and everything I say has to pass by him, Mr. Censor!” No, their daughter is now Mrs. Feibish, and her little daughters are Feibishes too. Where are the Portnoys he dreamed of? In my nuts. “Look,” I cry in my strangulated way, “you’re seeing me now! You’re with me right this minute!” But he is off and running, and now that he hasn’t fishbones to worry about choking on, there is no reining him in—Mr. and Mrs. Schmuck have