Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [78]
“That’s not a satisfactory reply,” I answer, and retreat to the living room, trying not to be vexed. I notice the slip of paper on the coffee table. Has a child been here, I wonder. No, no, I am just face to face with my first specimen of The Monkey’s handwriting. A note to the cleaning lady. Though at first glance I imagine it must be a note from the cleaning lady.
Must? Why “must”? Because she’s “mine”?
dir willa polish the flor by bathrum pleze & dont
furget the insies of windose mary jane r
Three times I read the sentence through, and as happens with certain texts, each reading reveals new subtleties of meaning and implication, each reading augurs tribulations yet to be visited upon my ass. Why allow this “affair” to gather any more momentum? What was I thinking about in Vermont! Oh that z, that z between the two e’s of “pleze”—this is a mind with the depths of a movie marquee! And “furget”! Exactly how a prostitute would misspell that word! But it’s something about the mangling of “dear,” that tender syllable of affection now collapsed into three lower-case letters, that strikes me as hopelessly pathetic. How unnatural can a relationship be! This woman is ineducable and beyond reclamation. By contrast to hers, my childhood took place in Brahmin Boston. What kind of business can the two of us have together? Monkey business! No business!
The phone calls, for instance, I cannot tolerate those phone calls! Charmingly girlish she was when she warned me about telephoning all the time—but surprise, she meant it! I am in my office, the indigent parents of a psychotic child are explaining to me that their offspring is being systematically starved to death in a city hospital. They have come to us bearing their complaint, rather than to the Department of Hospitals, because a brilliant lawyer in the Bronx has told them that their child is obviously the victim of discrimination. What I can gather from a call to the chief psychiatrist at the hospital is that the child refuses to ingest any food—takes it and holds it in his mouth for hours, but refuses to swallow. I have then to tell these people that neither their child nor they are being victimized in the way or for the reason they believe. My answer strikes them as duplicitous. It strikes me as duplicitous. I think to myself, “He’d swallow that food if he had my mother,” and meanwhile express sympathy for their predicament. But now they refuse to leave my office until they see “the Mayor,” as earlier they refused to leave the social worker’s office until they had seen “the Commissioner.” The father says that he will have me fired, along with all the others responsible for starving to death a defenseless little child just because he is a Puerto Rican! “Es contrario a la ley discriminar contra cualquier persona—” reading to me out of the bilingual CCHO handbook—that I wrote! At which point the phone rings. The Puerto Rican is shouting at me in Spanish, my mother is waving a knife at me back in my childhood, and my secretary announces that Miss Reed would like to speak to me on the telephone. For the third time that day.
“I miss you, Arnold,” The Monkey whispers.
“I’m afraid I’m busy right now.”
“I do do love you.”
“Yes, fine, may I speak with you later about this?”
“How I want that long sleek cock inside me—”
“Bye now!”
What else is wrong with her, while we’re at it? She moves her lips when she reads. Petty? You think so? Ever sit across the dinner table from a woman with whom you are supposedly having an affair—a twenty-nine-year-old person—and watch her lips move while she looks down the movie page for a picture the two of you can see? I know what’s playing before she even tells me—from reading the lips! And the books I bring her, she carries them around from job to job in her tote bag—to read? No! So as to impress some fairy photographer, to impress passers-by in the