Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page B

say-
                Feel.
                What? - even as she takes my hand in hers and draws it toward her body- Mother-
                I haven't gained five pounds, she says, since you were born. Feel, she says, and holds my stiff fingers against the swell of her hips, which aren't bad . . .
                And the stockings. More than twenty-five years have passed (the game is supposed to be over!), but Mommy still hitches up the stockings in front of her little boy. Now, however, he takes it upon himself to look the other way when the flag goes fluttering up the pole-and out of concern not just for his own mental health. That's the truth, I look away   not for me but for the sake of that poor man, my father! Yet what preference does Father really have? If there in the living room their grown-up little boy were to tumble all at once onto the rug with his mommy, what would Daddy do? Pour a bucket of boiling water on the raging, maddened couple? Would he draw his knife- or would he go off to the other room and watch television until they were finished? What are you looking away- ? asks my mother, amused in the midst of straightening her seams. You'd think I was a twenty-one-year-old girl;   you'd think I hadn’t wiped your backside and kissed your little tushy for you all those years. Look at him” -this to my father, in case he hasn't been giving a hundred percent of his attention to the little floor show now being performed- look,   acting like his own mother is some sixty-year-old beauty queen.

                Once a month my father took me with him down to the shvitz bath, there to endeavor to demolish-with the steam, and a rubdown, and a long deep sleep-the pyramid of aggravation he has built himself into during the previous lweeks of work. Our street clothes we lock away in the dormitory on the top floor. On rows of iron cots running perpendicular to the lockers, the men who have already been   through the ringer down below are flung out beneath white sheets like the fatalities of a violent catastrophe.   If it were not for the abrupt thunderclap of a fart, or the snores sporadically shooting up around me like machine-gun fire, I would believe we were in a morgue, and for some strange reason undressing in front of the dead. I do not look at the bodies, but like a mouse hop frantically about on my toes, trying to clear my feet of my undershorts before anybody can peek inside, where, to my chagrin, to my bafflement, to my mortification, I always discover in the bottommost seam a pale and wispy brush-stroke of my shit Oh, Doctor, I wipe and I wipe and I wipe, I spend as much time wiping as I do crapping, maybe even more. I use toilet paper like it grew on trees -so says my envious father-I wipe until that little orifice of mine is red as a raspberry; but still, much as I would like to please my mother by dropping into her laundry hamper at the end of each day jockey shorts such as might have encased the asshole of an angel, I deliver forth instead (deliberately, Herr Doctor?-or just inevitably?) the fetid little drawers   of a boy.
                But here in a Turkish bath, why am I dancing around? There are no women here. No women- and no goyim. Can it be? There is nothing to worry about!
                Following the folds at the base of his white buttocks, I proceed out of the dormitory and down the metal stairs to that purgatory wherein the agonies that come of being an insurance agent, a family man, and a Jew will be steamed and beaten from my father's body. At the bottom landing we sidestep a pile of white sheets and a mound of sopping towels, my father pushes a shoulder against a heavy windowless door, and we enter a dark quiet region redolent of wintergreen. The sounds are of a tiny, unenthusiastic audience applauding the death scene in some tragedy: it is the two masseurs walloping and potching at the flesh of their victims, men half-clad in