Portnoy's Complaint Read Online Free PDF Page A

me? Earlier it was the piano we battled over. For a man whose house was without a phonograph or a record, he was passionate on the subject of a musical instrument. I don't understand why you won't take a musical instrument, this is beyond comprehension. Your little cousin Toby can sit down at the piano and play whatever song you can name. All she has to do is sit at the piano and play Tea for Two' and everybody in the room is her friend. She'll never lack for companionship, Alex, shell never lack for popularity. Only tell me you'll take up the piano, and I'll have one in here tomorrow morning. Alex, are you listening to me? I am offering you something that could change the rest of your life!
                But what he had to offer I didn't want- and what I wanted he didn't have to offer. Yet how unusual is that? Why must it continue to cause such pain? At this late date! Doctor, what should I rid myself of, tell me, the hatred . . . or the love? Because I haven't even begun to mention everything I remember with pleasure - I mean with a rapturous, biting sense of loss! All those memories that seem somehow to be bound up with the weather and the time of day, and that flash into mind with such poignancy, that momentarily I am not down in the subway, or at my office, or at dinner with a pretty girl, but back in my childhood, with them .   Memories of practically nothing- and yet they seem moments of history as crucial to my being as the moment of my conception; I might be remembering his sperm nosing into her ovum, so piercing is my gratitude- yes, my gratitude!- so sweeping and unqualified is my love. Yes, me, with sweeping and unqualified love! I am standing in the kitchen ( standing maybe for the first time in my life ), my mother points, Look outside, baby, and I look; she says, See? how purple? a real fall sky The first line of poetry I ever hear! And I remember it! A real fall sky . . . It is an iron-cold January day, dusk- oh, these memories of dusk are going to kill me yet, of chicken fat on rye bread to tide me over to dinner, and the moon already outside the kitchen window- I have just come in with hot red cheeks and a dollar I have earned shoveling snow: You know what you're going to have for dinner, my mother coos so lovingly to me, for being such a hard-working boy? Your favorite winter meal. Lamb stew. It is night: after a Sunday in New York City, at Radio City and Chinatown, we are driving home across the George Washington Bridge-the Holland Tunnel is the direct route between Pell Street and Jersey City, but I beg for the bridge, and because my mother says it's educational, my father drives some ten miles out of his way to get us home. Up front my sister counts aloud the number of supports upon which the marvelous educational cables rest, while in the back I fall asleep with my face against my mother's black sealskin coat. At Lakewood, where we go one winter for a weekend vacation with my parents' Sunday night Gin Rummy Club, I sleep in one twin bed with my father, and my mother and Hannah curl up together in the other. At dawn my father awakens me and like convicts escaping, we noiselessly dress and slip out of the room. Come, he whispers, motioning for me to don my earmuffs and coat, I want to show you something. Did you know I was a waiter in Lakewood when I was sixteen years old? Outside the hotel he points across to the beautiful silent woods. How's that? he says. We walk together- at a brisk pace -around a silver lake. 'Take good deep breaths. Take in the piney air all the way. This is the best air in the world, good winter piney air. Good winter piney air - another poet for a parent! I couldn't be more thrilled if I were Wordsworth's kid! . . . In   summer he remains in the city while the three of us go off to live in a furnished room at the seashore for a month. He will join us for the last two weeks, when he gets his vacation . . . there are times, however, when Jersey City is so thick with