Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [7]
I recover my equilibrium, as is my talent, with a burst of hurt feelings. “I have a terrible case of diarrhea! Doesn’t that mean anything to anyone in this house?”—in the meantime resuming the stroke, indeed quickening the tempo as my cancerous organ miraculously begins to quiver again from the inside out.
Then Hannah’s brassiere begins to move. To swing to and fro! I veil my eyes, and behold!—Lenore Lapidus! who has the biggest pair in my class, running for the bus after school, her great untouchable load shifting weightily inside her blouse, oh I urge them up from their cups, and over, LENORE LAPIDUS’S ACTUAL TITS, and realize in the same split second that my mother is vigorously shaking the doorknob. Of the door I have finally forgotten to lock! I knew it would happen one day! Caught! As good as dead!
“Open up, Alex. I want you to open up this instant.”
It’s locked, I’m not caught! And I see from what’s alive in my hand that I’m not quite dead yet either. Beat on then! beat on! “Lick me, Big Boy—lick me a good hot lick! I’m Lenore Lapidus’s big fat red-hot brassiere!”
“Alex, I want an answer from you. Did you eat French fries after school? Is that why you’re sick like this?”
“Nuhhh, nuhhh.”
“Alex, are you in pain? Do you want me to call the doctor? Are you in pain, or aren’t you? I want to know exactly where it hurts. Answer me.”
“Yuhh, yuhhh—”
“Alex, I don’t want you to flush the toilet,” says my mother sternly. “I want to see what you’ve done in there. I don’t like the sound of this at all.”
“And me,” says my father, touched as he always was by my accomplishments—as much awe as envy—“I haven’t moved my bowels in a week,” just as I lurch from my perch on the toilet seat, and with the whimper of a whipped animal, deliver three drops of something barely viscous into the tiny piece of cloth where my flat-chested eighteen-year-old sister has laid her nipples, such as they are. It is my fourth orgasm of the day. When will I begin to come blood?
“Get in here, please, you,” says my mother. “Why did you flush the toilet when I told you not to?”
“I forgot.”
“What was in there that you were so fast to flush it?”
“Diarrhea.”
“Was it mostly liquid or was it mostly poopie?”
“I don’t look! I didn’t look! Stop saying poopie to me—I’m in high school!”
“Oh, don’t you shout at me, Alex. I’m not the one who gave you diarrhea, I assure you. If all you ate was what you were fed at home, you wouldn’t be running to the bathroom fifty times a day. Hannah tells me what you’re doing, so don’t think I don’t know.”
She’s missed the underpants! I’ve been caught! Oh, let me be dead! I’d just as soon!
“Yeah, what do I do …?”
“You go to Harold’s Hot Dog and Chazerai Palace after school and you eat French fries with Melvin Weiner. Don’t you? Don’t lie to me either. Do you or do you not stuff yourself with French fries and ketchup on Hawthorne Avenue after school? Jack, come in here, I want you to hear this,” she calls to my father, now occupying the bathroom.
“Look, I’m trying to move my bowels,” he replies. “Don’t I have enough trouble as it is without people screaming at me when I’m trying to move my bowels?”
“You know what your son does after school, the A student, who his own mother can’t say poopie to any more, he’s such a grown-up? What do you think your grown-up son does when nobody is watching him?”
“Can I please be left alone, please?” cries my father. “Can I have a little peace, please, so I can get something accomplished in here?”
“Just wait till your father hears what you do, in defiance of every