Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [73]
“I know a poem,” I said, speaking somewhat as though I were drunk, as though I could lick any man in the house, “and I’m going to recite it.”
She was nestled down in my lap, eyes still closed, my softening member up against her cheek like a little chick. “Ah come on,” she groaned, “not now, I don’t understand poems.”
“You’ll understand this one. It’s about fucking. A swan fucks a beautiful girl.”
She looked up, batting her false eyelashes. “Oh, goody.”
“But it’s a serious poem.”
“Well,” she said, licking my prick, “it’s a serious offense.”
“Oh, irresistible, witty Southern belles—especially when they’re long the way you are.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Portnoy. Recite the dirty poem.”
“Porte-noir,” I said, and began:
“A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.”
“Where,” she asked, “did you learn something like that?”
“Shhh. There’s more:
“How can those terrified vague fingers push.
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?”
“Hey!” she cried. “Thighs!”
“And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
“That’s it,” I said.
Pause. “Who wrote it?” Snide. “You?”
“William Butler Yeats wrote it,” I said, realizing how tactless I had been, with what insensitivity I had drawn attention to the chasm: I am smart and you are dumb, that’s what it had meant to recite to this woman one of the three poems I happen to have learned by heart in my thirty-three years. “An Irish poet,” I said lamely.
“Yeah?” she said. “And where did you learn it, at his knee? I didn’t know you was Irish.”
“In college, baby.” From a girl I knew in college. Also taught me “The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower.” But enough—why compare her to another? Why not let her be what she is? What an idea! Love her as she is! In all her imperfection—which is, after all, maybe only human!
“Well,” said The Monkey, still playing Truck Driver, “I never been to college myself.” Then, Dopey Southern, “And down home in Moundsville, honey, the only poem we had was ‘I see London, I see France, I see Mary Jane’s underpants.’ ’Cept I didn’t wear no underpants … Know what I did when I was fifteen? Sent a lock of my snatch-hair off in an envelope to Marlon Brando. Prick didn’t even have the courtesy to acknowledge receipt.”
Silence. While we try to figure out what two such unlikely people are doing together—in Vermont yet.
Then she says, “Okay, what’s Agamemnon?”
So I explain, to the best of my ability. Zeus, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Helen, Paris, Troy … Oh, I feel like a shit—and a fake. Half of it I know I’m getting wrong.
But she’s marvelous. “Okay—now say it all again.”
“You serious?”
“I’m serious! Again! But, for Christ’s sake, slow”
So I recite again, and all this time my trousers are still down around the floorboard, and it’s growing darker on the path where I have parked out of sight of the road, beneath the dramatic foliage. The leaves, in fact, are falling into the car. The Monkey looks like a child trying to master a multiplication problem, but not a dumb child—no, a quick and clever little girl! Not stupid at all! This girl is really very special. Even if I did pick her up in the street!
When I finish, you know what she does? Takes hold of my hand, draws my fingers up between her legs. Where Mary Jane still wears no underpants. “Feel. It made my pussy all wet.”
“Sweetheart! You understood the poem!”
“I s’pose I deed!” cries Scarlett O’Hara. Then, “Hey, I did! I understood a poem!”
“And with your cunt, no less.”
“My Breakthrough-baby! You’re turning this twat into a genius!