Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [67]
“You still see any of the guys?” Ba-ba-lu asked. “You married?”
“No, no.”
Inside the new jowls, the old furtive Latin-American greaser comes to life. “So, uh, what do you do for pussy?”
“I have affairs, Arn, and I beat my meat.”
Mistake, I think instantly. Mistake! What if he blabs to the Daily News? ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH FLOGS DUMMY, Also Lives in Sin, Reports Old School Chum.
The headlines. Always the headlines revealing my filthy secrets to a shocked and disapproving world.
“Hey,” said Ba-ba-lu, “remember Rita Girardi? Bubbles? Who used to suck us all off?”
“… What about her?” Lower your voice, Ba-ba-lu!
“What about her?”
“Didn’t you read in the News?”
“—What News?”
“The Newark News.”
“I don’t see the Newark papers any more. What happened to her?”
“She got murdered. In a bar on Hawthorne Avenue, right down from The Annex. She was with some boogey and then some other boogey came in and shot them both in the head. How do you like that? Fucking for boogies.”
“Wow,” I said, and meant it. Then suddenly—“Listen, Ba-ba-lu, whatever happened to Smolka?”
“Don’t know,” says Ba-ba-lu. “Ain’t he a professor? I think I heard he was a professor.”
“A professor? Smolka?”
“I think he is some kind of college teacher.”
“Oh, can’t be,” I say with my superior sneer.
“Yeah. That’s what somebody said. Down at Princeton.”
“Princeton?”
But can’t be! Without hot tomato soup for lunch on freezing afternoons? Who slept in those putrid pajamas? The owner of all those red rubber thimbles with the angry little spiky projections that he told us drove the girls up the walls of Paris? Smolka, who swam in the pool at Olympic Park, he’s alive too? And a professor at Princeton noch? In what department, classical languages or astrophysics? Ba-ba-lu, you sound like my mother. You must mean plumber, or electrician. Because I will not believe it! I mean down in my kishkas, in my deep emotions and my old beliefs, down beneath the me who knows very well that of course Smolka and Mandel continue to enjoy the ranch houses and the professional opportunities available to men on this planet, I simply cannot believe in the survival, let alone the middle-class success, of these two bad boys. Why, they’re supposed to be in jail—or the gutter. They didn’t do their homework, damn it! Smolka used to cheat off me in Spanish, and Mandel didn’t even give enough of a shit to bother to do that, and as for washing their hands before eating … Don’t you understand, these two boys are supposed to be dead! Like Bubbles. Now there at least is a career that makes some sense. There’s a case of cause and effect that confirms my ideas about human consequence! Bad enough, rotten enough, and you get your cock-sucking head blown off by boogies. Now that’s the way the world’s supposed to be run!
Smolka comes back into the kitchen and tells us she doesn’t want to do it.
“But you said we were going to get laid!” cries Mandel. “You said we were going to get blowed! Reamed, steamed, and dry-cleaned, that’s what you said!”
“Fuck it,” I say, “if she doesn’t want to do it, who needs her, let’s go—”
“But I’ve been pounding off over this for a week! I ain’t going anywhere! What kind of shit is this, Smolka? Won’t she even beat my meat?”
Me, with my refrain: “Ah, look, if she doesn’t want to do it, let’s go—”
Mandel: “Who the fuck is she that she won’t even give a guy a hand-job? A measly hand-job. Is that the world to ask of her? I ain’t leaving till she either sucks it or pulls it—one or the other! It’s up to her, the fucking whore!”
So Smolka goes back in for a second conference, and returns nearly half an hour later with the news that the girl has changed her mind: she will jerk off one guy, but only with his pants on, and that’s all. We flip a coin—and I win the right to get the syph! Mandel claims the coin grazed the ceiling, and is ready to murder me—he is still screaming foul play when I enter the living room to reap my reward.
She sits in her slip on