Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [52]
The Monkey came out of the bathroom in her short chemise (ordinarily a sight that made me very hot, that cream-colored silk chemise with a beautiful Monkey in it), and I meanwhile took off all my clothes and sat naked at the foot of the bed. That Lina spoke not a word of English only intensified the feeling that began to ebb and flow between The Monkey and myself, a kind of restrained sadism: we could speak to one another, exchange secrets and plans without the whore’s understanding—as she and The Monkey could whisper in Italian without my knowledge of what they might be saying, or plotting … Lina spoke first and The Monkey turned to translate. “She says you have a big one.” “I’ll bet she says that to all the boys.” Then they stood there in their underwear looking my way—waiting. But so was I waiting too. And was my heart pounding. It had to come to pass, two women and me … so now what happens? Still, you see, I’m saying to myself No!
“She wants to know,” said The Monkey, after Lina had spoken a second time, “where the signore would like her to begin.” “The signore,” said I, “wishes her to begin at the beginning …” Oh, very witty that reply, very nonchalant indeed, only we continue to sit there motionless, me and my hard-on, all undressed and no place to go. Finally it is The Monkey who sets our lust in motion. She moves across to Lina, above whom she towers (oh God, isn’t she enough? isn’t she really sufficient for my needs? how many cocks have I got?), and puts her hand between the whore’s legs. We had imagined it beforehand in all its possibilities, dreamed it all out loud for many many months now, and yet I am dumbstruck at the sight of The Monkey’s middle finger disappearing up into Lina’s cunt.
I can best describe the state I subsequently entered as one of unrelieved busy-ness. Boy, was I busy! I mean there was just so much to do. You go here and I’ll go there—okay, now you go here and I’ll go there—all right, now she goes down that way, while I head up this way, and you sort of half turn around on this … and so it went, Doctor, until I came my third and final time. The Monkey was by then the one with her back on the bed, and I the one with my ass to the chandelier (and the cameras, I fleetingly thought)—and in the middle, feeding her tits into my Monkey’s mouth, was our whore. Into whose hole, into what sort of hole, I deposited my final load is entirely a matter for conjecture. It could be that in the end I wound up fucking some dank, odoriferous combination of sopping Italian pubic hair, greasy American buttock, and absolutely rank bedsheet. Then I got up, went into the bathroom, and, you’ll all be happy to know, regurgitated my dinner. My kishkas, Mother—threw them right up into the toilet bowl. Isn’t that a good boy?
When I came out of the bathroom, The Monkey and Lina were lying asleep in one another’s arms.
The Monkey’s pathetic weeping, the recriminations and the accusations, began immediately after Lina had dressed and departed. I had delivered her into evil. “Me? You’re the one who stuck your finger up her snatch and got the ball rolling! You kissed her on the fucking lips—!” “Because,” she screamed, “if I’m going to do something, then like I do it! But that doesn’t mean I want to!” And then, Doctor, she began to berate me about Lina’s tits, how I hadn’t played with them enough. “All you ever talk about and think about is tits! Other people’s tits! Mine are so small and everybody else’s in the world you see are so huge—so you finally get a pair that are tremendous, and what do you do? Nothing!” “Nothing is an exaggeration, Monkey—the fact of the matter is that I couldn’t always fight my way past you—” “I am not a lesbian! Don’t you dare call me a lesbian! Because if I am, you made me one!” “Oh Jesus, no—!” “I did it for you, yes—and now you hate me for it!” “Then we won’t do it again, for me, all right? Not if this is the fucking ridiculous result!”
Except the next night