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

give her flesh a hue of stirring dimensions. I sidle close enough to smell the bath powder on her throat—also to appreciate better the elastic intricacies of the dangling straps to which the stockings will presently be hooked (undoubtedly with a flourish of trumpets). I smell the oil with which she has polished the four gleaming posts of the mahogany bedstead, where she sleeps with a man who lives with us at night and on Sunday afternoons. My father they say he is. On my fingertips, even though she has washed each one of those little piggies with a warm wet cloth, I smell my lunch, my tuna fish salad. Ah, it might be cunt I’m sniffing. Maybe it is! Oh, I want to growl with pleasure. Four years old, and yet I sense in my blood—uh-huh, again with the blood—how rich with passion is the moment, how dense with possibility. This fat person with the long hair whom they call my sister is away at school. This man, my father, is off somewhere making money, as best he is able. These two are gone, and who knows, maybe I’ll be lucky, maybe they’ll never come back … In the meantime, it is afternoon, it is spring, and for me and me alone a woman is rolling on her stockings and singing a song of love. Who is going to stay with Mommy forever and ever?
Me
. Who is it who goes with Mommy wherever in the whole wide world Mommy goes?
Why me, of course. What a silly question—but don’t get me wrong, I’ll play the game!
Who had a nice lunch with Mommy, who goes downtown like a good boy on the bus with Mommy, who goes into the big store with Mommy … and on and on and on … so that only a week or so ago, upon my safe return from Europe, Mommy had this to 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 weeks 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