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« THURSDAY MARGINALIA | Main | A PHILIP ROTH MONDAY »

July 07, 2008

NOTA BENE: PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT

"He arrives after we have already eaten, but his own dinner waits while he unpeels the soggy city clothes in which he has been making the rounds of his debit all day, and changes into his swimsuit.  I carry his towel for him as he clops down the street to the beach in his unlaced shoes.  I am dressed in clean short pants and a spotless polo shirt, the salt is showered off me, and my hair - still my little boy's pre-steel wool hair, soft and combable - is beautifully parted and slicked down.  There is a weathered iron rail that runs the length of the boardwalk, and I seat myself upon it; below me, in his shoes, my father crosses the empty beach.  I watch him neatly set down his towel near the shore.  He places his watch in one shoe, his eyeglasses in the other, and then he is ready to make his entrance into the sea.  To this day I go into the water as he advised: plunge the wrists in first, then splash the underarms, then a handful to the temples and the back of the neck ... ah, but slowly, always slowly.  This way you get to refresh yourself, while avoiding a shock to the system.  Refreshed, unshocked, he turns to face me, comically waves farewell up to where he thinks I'm standing, and drops backward to float with his arms outstretched.  Oh he floats so still -- he works so hard, and for whom if not for me? -- and then at last, after turning on his belly and making with a few choppy strokes that carry him nowhere, he comes wading back to shore, his streaming compact torso glowing from the last pure spikes of light driving in, over my shoulder, out of stifling inland New Jersey, from which I am being spared."

- Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth.  (From The Summer TEV Reading Project, about which more anon.)

Posted by TEV at 08:35 AM in Nota Bene |

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