Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [60]
I was “a breakthrough.” Harpo of course didn’t say yes, but then he didn’t say no, either, when she suggested that this was who I might be. He did cough, however, and this The Monkey takes as her confirmation. Sometimes he coughs, sometimes he grunts, sometimes he belches, once in a while he farts, whether voluntarily or not who knows, though I hold that a fart has to be interpreted as a negative transference reaction on his part. “Breakie, you’re so brilliant!” “Breakie” when she is being my sex kitten and cat—and when she is fighting for her life: “You big son of a bitch Jew! I want to be married and human!”
So, I was to be her breakthrough … but wasn’t she to be mine? Who like The Monkey had ever happened to me before—or will again? Not that I had not prayed, of course. No, you pray and you pray and you pray, you lift your impassioned prayers to God on the altar of the toilet seat, throughout your adolescence you deliver up to Him the living sacrifice of your spermatazoa by the gallon—and then one night, around midnight, on the corner of Lexington and Fifty-second, when you have come really to the point of losing faith in the existence of such a creature as you have been imagining for yourself even unto your thirty-second year, there she is, wearing a tan pants suit, and trying to hail a cab—lanky, with dark and abundant hair, and smallish features that give her face a kind of petulant expression, and an absolutely fantastic ass.
Why not? What’s lost? What’s gained, however? Go ahead, you shackled and fettered son of a bitch, speak to her. She has an ass on her with the swell and the cleft of the world’s most perfect nectarine! Speak!
“Hi”—softly, and with a little surprise, as though I might have met her somewhere before …
“What do you want?”
“To buy you a drink,” I said.
“A real swinger,” she said, sneering.
Sneering! Two seconds—and two insults! To the Assistant Commissioner of Human Opportunity for this whole city! “To eat your pussy, baby, how’s that?” My God! She’s going to call a cop! Who’ll turn me in to the Mayor!
“That’s better,” she replied.
And so a cab pulled up, and we went to her apartment, where she took off her clothes and said, “Go ahead.”
My incredulity! That such a thing was happening to me! Did I eat! It was suddenly as though my life were taking place in the middle of a wet dream. There I was, going down at last on the star of all those pornographic films that I had been producing in my head since I first laid a hand upon my own joint … “Now me you,” she said, “—one good turn deserves another,” and, Doctor, this stranger then proceeded to suck me off with a mouth that might have gone to a special college to learn all the wonderful things it knew. What a find, I thought, she takes it right down to the root! What a mouth I have fallen into! Talk about opportunities! And simultaneously: Get out! Go! Who and what can this person be!
Later we had a long, serious, very stirring conversation about perversions. She began by asking if I had ever done it with a man. I said no. I asked (as I gathered she wanted me to) if she had ever done it with another woman.
“… Nope.”
“… Would you like to?”
“… Would you like me to?”
“… Why not, sure.”
“… Would you like to watch?”
“… I suppose so.”
“… Then maybe it could be arranged.”
“… Yes?”
“… Yes.”
“… Well, I might like that.”