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Why didn't I marry that beautiful and adoring girl? I remember her in the gallery, pale and enchanting in a navy blue suit with gold buttons, watching with such pride, with such love, as I took on one afternoon, in my first public cross-examination, a very slippery network P.R. man… and I was impressive too, for my first time out: cool, lucid, persistent, just the faintest hammering of the heart-and only twenty-six years old. Oh yeah, when I am holding all the moral cards, watch out, you crooks you! I am nobody to futz around with when I know myself to be four hundred per cent in the right.
Why didn't I marry the girl? Well, there was her cutesy-wootsy boarding school argot, for one. Couldn't bear it. "Barf" for vomit, "ticked off" for angry, "a howl" for fu
In bed? Nothing fancy, no acrobatics or feats of daring and skill; as we screwed our first time, so we continued-I assaulted and she surrendered, and the heat generated on her mahogany fourposter (a Maulsby family heirloom) was considerable. Our one peripheral delight s the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. There, standing thigh to thigh, I would whisper, "Look, Sarah, look." At first she was shy, left the looking to me, at first she was modest and submitted only because I wished her to, but in time she developed something of a passion for the looking glass, too, and followed the reflection of our joining with a certain startled intensity in her gaze. Did she see what I saw? In the black pubic hair, ladies and gentlemen, weighing one hundred and seventy pounds, at least half of which is still undigested halvah and hot pastrami, from Newark, NJ, The Shnoz, Alexander Portnoy! And his opponent, in the fair fuzz, with her elegant polished limbs and the gentle maidenly face of a Botticelli, that ever-popular purveyor of the social amenities here in the Garden, one hundred and fourteen pounds of Republican refinement, and the pertest pair of nipples in all New England, from New Canaan, Co
What I'm saying. Doctor, is that I don't seem to stick my dick up these girls, as much as I stick it up their backgrounds-as though through fucking I will discover America. Conquer America -maybe that's more like it. Columbus, Captain Smith, Governor Winthrop, General Washington-now Portnoy. As though my manifest destiny is to seduce a girl from each of the forty-eight states. As for Alaskan and Hawaiian women, I really have no feelings either way, no scores to settle, no coupons to cash in, no dreams to put to rest-who are they to me, a bunch of Eskimos and Orientals? No, I am a child of the forties, of network radio and World War Two, of eight teams to a league and forty-eight states to a country. I know all the words to "The Marine Hymn," and to "The Caissons Go Rolling Along"-and to "The Song of the Army Air Corps." I know the song of the Navy Air Corps: "Sky anchors aweigh/ We're sailors of the air/ We're sailing everywhere-" I can even sing you the song of the Seabees. Go ahead, name your branch of service, Spielvogel, I'll sing you your song! Please, allow me-it's my money. We used to sit on our coats, I remember, on the concrete floor, our backs against the sturdy walls of the basement corridors of my grade school, singing in unison to keep up our morale until the all-clear signal sounded-"Joh
From the mountains,
To the prairies,
To he oceans, white-with-my-fooaahhh-mmm!
God bless A-me-ri-cuuuuhhhh!
My home, SWEET HOOOOOHHHH-M!
Imagine what it meant to me to know that generations of Maulsbys were buried in the graveyard at Newburyport, Massachusetts, and generations of Abbotts in Salem. Land where my fathers died, land of the Pilgrims pride … Exactly. Oh, and more. Here was a girl whose mother's flesh crawled at the sound of the words "Eleanor Roosevelt." Who herself had been dandled on the knee of Wendell Wilikie at Hobe Sound, Florida, in 1042 (while my father was saying prayers for F.D.R. on the High Holidays, and my mother blessing him over the Friday night candles). The Senator from Co
What Sally couldn't do was eat me. To shoot a gun at a little quack-quack is fine, to suck my cock is beyond her. She was sorry, she said, if I was going to take it so hard, but it was just something she didn't care to try. I mustn't act as though it were a personal affront, she said, because it had nothing at all to do with me as an individual… Oh, didn't it? Bullshit, girlie! Yes, what made me so irate was precisely my belief that I was being discriminated against. My father couldn't rise at Boston amp; Northeastern for the very same reason that Sally Maulsby wouldn't deign to go down on me! Where was the justice in this world? Where was the B'nai B'rith Anti-Defamation League-! "I do it to you," I said. The Pilgrim shrugged; kindly she said, "You don't have to, though. You know that. If you don't want to…" "Ah, but I do want to-it isn't a matter of ‘have’ to. I want to ." "Well," she answered, "I don't." "But why not? " "Because. I don't." "Shit, that's the way a child answers, Sarah-'because'! Give me a reason!" "I-just don't do at, that's all." "But that brings us back to why. Why? " "Alex, I can't. I just can't." "Give me a single good reason!" "Please," she replied, knowing her rights, "I don't think I have to."
No, she didn't have to-because to me the answer was clear enough anyway: Because you don't know how to hike out to windward or what a jib is, because you have never owned evening clothes or been to a cotillion … Yes sir, if I were some big blond goy in a pink riding suit and hundred-dollar hunting boots, don't worry, she'd be down there eating me, of that I am sure!
I am wrong. Three months I spent applying pressure to the back of her skull (pressure met by a surprising counterforce, an impressive, even moving display of stubbor
"I did it," she a