Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [54]
“No! No!”
All the way to the Villa Adriana she weeps: “I want a child too! And a home! And a husband! I am not a lesbian! I am not a whore!” She reminds me of the evening the previous spring when I took her up to the Bronx with me, to what we at the H. O. commission call “Equal Opportunity Night.” “All those poor Puerto Rican people being overcharged in the supermarket! In Spanish you spoke, and oh I was so impressed! Tell me about your bad sanitation, tell me about your rats and vermin, tell me about your police protection! Because discrimination is against the law! A year in prison or a five-hundred-dollar fine! And that poor Puerto Rican man stood up and shouted, ‘Both!’ Oh, you fake, Alex! You hypocrite and phony! Big shit to a bunch of stupid spies, but I know the truth, Alex! You make women sleep with whores!”
“I don’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do.”
“Human opportunities! Human! How you love that word! But do you know what it means, you son of a bitch pimp! I’ll teach you what it means! Pull this car over, Alex!”
“Sorry, no.”
“Yes! Yes! Because I’m getting out! I’m finding a phone! I’m going to call long-distance to John Lindsay and tell him what you made me do.”
“The fuck you will.”
“I’ll expose you, Alex—I’ll call Jimmy Breslin!”
Then in Athens she threatens to jump from the balcony unless I marry her. So I leave.
Shikses! In winter, when the polio germs are hibernating and I can bank upon surviving outside of an iron lung until the end of the school year, I ice-skate on the lake in Irvington Park. In the last light of the weekday afternoons, then all day long on crisply shining Saturdays and Sundays, I skate round and round in circles behind the shikses who live in Irvington, the town across the city line from the streets and houses of my safe and friendly Jewish quarter. I know where the shikses live from the kinds of curtains their mothers hang in the windows. Also, the goyim hang a little white cloth with a star in the front window, in honor of themselves and their boys away in the service—a blue star if the son is living, a gold star if he is dead. “A Gold Star Mom,” says Ralph Edwards, solemnly introducing a contestant on “Truth or Consequences,” who in just two minutes is going to get a bottle of seltzer squirted at her snatch, followed by a brand-new refrigerator for her kitchen … A Gold Star Mom is what my Aunt Clara upstairs is too, except here is the difference—she has no gold star in her window, for a dead son doesn’t leave her feeling proud or noble, or feeling anything, for that matter. It seems instead to have turned her, in my father’s words, into “a nervous case” for life. Not a day has passed since Heshie was killed in the Normandy invasion that Aunt Clara has not spent most of it in bed, and sobbing so badly that Doctor Izzie has sometimes to come and give her a shot to calm her hysteria down … But the curtains—the curtains are embroidered with lace, or “fancy” in some other way that my mother describes derisively as “goyische taste.” At Christmastime, when I have no school and can go off to ice-skate at night under the lights, I see the trees blinking on and off behind the gentile curtains. Not on our block—God forbid!—or on Leslie Street, or Schley Street, or even Fabian Place, but as I approach the Irvington line, here is a goy, and there is a goy, and there still another—and then I am into Irvington and it is simply awful: not only is there a tree conspicuously ablaze in every parlor, but the houses themselves are outlined with colored