Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [51]
So. Now you know the worst thing I have ever done. I fucked my own family’s dinner.
Unless you share with The Monkey her contention that the most heinous crime of my career was abandoning her in Greece. Second most heinous: leading her into that triumvirate in Rome. In her estimation—some estimation, that!—I am solely responsible for making that ménage, because mine is the stronger and more moral nature. “The Great Humanitarian!” she cries. “The one whose job it is to protect the poor poor people against their landlords! You, who gave me that U.S.A. to read! You’re why I got that application blank to Hunter! You’re why I’m killing myself to be something more than just somebody’s dumb and stupid piece of ass! And now you want to treat me like I’m nothing but just some hump, to use—use for every kinky weirdo thing you want to do—and like you’re supposed to be the superior intellectual! Who goes on educational fucking television!”
You see, in this Monkey’s estimation it was my mission to pull her up from those very abysses of frivolity and waste, of perversity and wildness and lust, into which I myself have been so vainly trying all my life successfully to sink—I am supposed to rescue her from those very temptations I have been struggling all these years to yield to! And it is of no consequence to her whatsoever that in bed she herself has been fantasying about this arrangement no less feverishly than I have. Doctor, I ask you, who was it that made the suggestion in the first place? Since the night we met, just who has been tempting whom with the prospect of yet another woman in our bed? Believe me, I’m not trying to slither out of my slime—I am trying to slither into it!—but it must be made absolutely clear, to you and me if not to her, that this hopelessly neurotic woman, this pathetic screwy hillbilly cunt, is hardly what could be called my victim. I simply will not bend to that victim shit! Now she’s thirty, wants to be married and a mother, wants to be respectable and live in a house with a husband (particularly as the high-paying years of her glamorous career appear to be just about over), but it does not follow that just because she imagines herself victimized and deprived and exploited (and may even be, taking a long view of her life), that I am the one upon whom they are going to pin the rap. I didn’t make her thirty years old and single. I didn’t take her from the coal fields of West Virginia and make her my personal charge—and I didn’t put her in bed with that streetwalker either! The fact is that it was The Monkey herself, speaking her high-fashion Italian, who leaned out of our rented car and explained to the whore what it was we wanted and how much we were willing to pay. I simply sat there behind the wheel, one foot on the gas pedal, like the getaway driver that I am … And, believe me, when that whore climbed into the back seat, I thought no; and at the hotel, where we managed to send her up alone to our room, by way of the bar, I thought no again. No! No! No!
She wasn’t bad-looking, this whore, sort of round and dumpy, but in her early twenties and with a big pleasant open face—and just stupendous tits. Those were what we’d picked her out for, after driving slowly up and down the Via Veneto examining the merchandise on parade. The whore, whose name was Lina, took her dress off standing in the middle of the room; underneath she wore a “merry widow” corset, from which the breasts bubbled up at one end, and the more than ample thighs rippled out at the other. I was astonished by the garment and its theatricality