Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth [93]
The elderly couple seated beside me (the Solomons, Edna and Felix), who have told me in an hour’s flight time all about their children and grandchildren in Cincinnati (with, of course, a walletful of visual aids), now nudge each other and nod together in silent satisfaction; they even poke some friends across the aisle, a couple from Mount Vernon they’ve just met (the Perls, Sylvia and Bernie), and these two kvell also to see a tall, good-looking, young Jewish lawyer (and single! a match for somebody’s daughter!) suddenly begin to weep upon making contact with a Jewish airstrip. However, what has produced these tears is not, as the Solomons and Perls would have it, a first glimpse of the national homeland, the ingathering of an exile, but the sound in my ear of my own nine-year-old little boy’s voice—my voice, I mean, at nine. Nine-year-old me! Sure a sourpuss, a face-maker, a little back-talker and kvetch, sure my piping is never without its nice infuriating whiny edge of permanent disgruntlement and grievance (“as though,” my mother says, “the world owes him a living—at nine years old”), but a laugher and ladder too, don’t forget that, an enthusiast! a romantic! a mimic! a nine-year-old lover of life! fiery with such simple, neighborhoody dreams!—“I’m going up the field,” I call into the kitchen, fibers of pink lox lodged like sour dental floss in the gaps between my teeth, “I’m going up the field, Ma,” pounding my mitt with my carpy-smelling little fist, “I’ll be back around one—” “Wait a minute. What time? Where?” “Up the field,” I holler—I’m very high on hollering to be heard, it’s like being angry, except without the consequences, “—to watch the men!”
And that’s the phrase that does me in as we touch down upon Eretz Yisroel: to watch the men.
Because I love those men! I want to grow up to be one of those men! To be going home to Sunday dinner at one o’clock, sweat socks pungent from twenty-one innings of softball, underwear athletically gamy, and in the muscle of my throwing arm, a faint throbbing from the low and beautiful pegs I have been unleashing all morning long to hold down the opposition on the base paths; yes, hair disheveled, teeth gritty, feet beat and kishkas sore from laughing, in other words, feeling great, a robust Jewish man now gloriously pooped—yes, home I head for resuscitation … and to whom? To my wife and my children, to a family of my own, and right there in the Weequahic section! I shave and shower—rivulets of water stream off my scalp a filthy brown, ah, it’s good, ah yes, it’s a regular pleasure standing there nearly scalding myself to death with hot water. It strikes me as so manly, converting pain to pleasure. Then into a pair of snappy slacks and a freshly dry-cleaned “gaucho” shirt—perfecto! I whistle a popular song, I admire my biceps, I shoot a rag across my shoes, making it pop, and meanwhile my kids are riffling through the Sunday papers (reading with eyes the exact color of my own), giggling away on the living-room rug; and my wife, Mrs. Alexander Portnoy, is setting the table in the dining room—we will be having my mother and father as guests, they will be walking over any minute, as they do every Sunday. A future, see! A simple and satisfying future! Exhausting, exhilarating softball in which to spend my body’s force—that for the morning—then in the afternoon, the brimming, hearty stew of family life, and at night three solid hours of the best line-up of radio entertainment in the world: yes, as I delighted in Jack Benny’s trips down to his vault in the company of my father, and Fred Allen’s conversations with Mrs. Nussbaum, and Phil Harris’ with Frankie Remley, also shall my children delight in them with me, and so unto the hundredth generation. And then after Kenny Baker, I double-lock the front and back doors, turn off all the lights (check and—as my father does—double-check the pilot on the gas range so that our lives will not be stolen from us in the night). I kiss good night my pretty sleepy daughter