She laughed for the first time, and instead of that finally putting me at my ease, suddenly I knew- some big spade was going to leap out of the bedroom closet and spring for my heart with his knife- or she herself was going to go berserk, the laughter would erupt into wild hysterics- and God only knew what catastrophe would follow. Eddie
Waitkus!
Was she a call girl? A maniac? Was she in cahoots with some Puerto Rican pusher who was about to make his entrance into my life? Enter it-and end it, for the forty dollars in my wallet and a watch from Korvette's?
"Look," I said, in my clever way, "do you do this, more or less, all the time…?"
“What kind of question is that! What kind of shit-eating remark is that supposed to be! Are you another heartless bastard too? Don't you think I have feelings too!"
"I'm sorry. Excuse me."
But suddenly, where there had been fury and outrage, there were only tears. Did I need any more evidence that this girl was, to say the least, a little erratic psychologically? Any man in his right mind would surely then have gotten up, gotten dressed, and gotten the hell out in one piece. And counting his blessings. But don't you see- my right mind is just another name for my fears! My right mind is simply that inheritance of terror that I bring with he should be strung up, that son of a bitch, hung by his fucking storm-trooper's boots till he's dead! In the street, who had been trembling, me or the girl? Me! Who had the boldness, the daring, the guts, me or the girl? The girl! The fucking girl!
"Look," she said, wiping away the tears with the pillowcase, "look, I lied to you before, in case you're interested, in case you're writing this down or something."
"Yeah? About what?" And here he comes, I thought, my shvartze, out of the closet,- eyes, teeth, and razor blade flashing! Here comes the headline: ASST HUMAN OPP’Y COMMISH FOUND HEADLESS IN GO-GO GIRL'S APT!
“I mean like what the fuck did I lie for, to you?”
"I don't know what you're talking about, so I can't tell you."
"I mean they didn't want me to eat the banana. My friends didn't want me to eat any banana. I wanted to."
Thus: The Monkey.
As for why she did lie, to me? I think it was her way of informing herself right off- semiconsciously, I suppose- that she had somehow fallen upon a higher-type person: that pickup on the street notwithstanding, and the whole-hearted suck in her bed notwithstanding- followed by that heart-stirring swallow- and the discussion of perversions that followed that… still, she really hadn't wanted me to think of her as given over wholly to sexual excess and adventurism… Because a glimpse of me was apparently all it took for her to leap imaginatively ahead into playboys in their Cardin suits; no more married, desperate advertising executives in overnight from Connecticut; no more faggots in British warmers for lunch at Serendipity, or aging lechers from the cosmetics industry drooling into their hundred-dollar dinners at Le Pavilion at night… No, at long last the figure who had dwelled these many years at the heart of her dreams (so it turned out), a man who would be good to a wife and to children… a Jew. And what a Jew! First he eats her, and then, immediately after, comes slithering on up and begins talking and explaining things, making judgments left and right, advising her what books to read and how to vote, telling her how life should and should not be lived. "How do you know that?" she used to ask warily. "I mean that's just your opinion." "What do you mean opinion- it's not my opinion, girlie, it's the truth." "I mean, is that like something everybody knows… or just you?" A Jewish man, who cared about the welfare of the poor of the City of New York, was eating her pussy! Someone who had appeared on educational TV was shooting off into her mouth! In a flash, Doctor, she must have seen it all- can that be? Are women that calculating? Am I actually a naif about cunt? Saw and planned it all, did she, right out there on Lexington Avenue?… The gentle fire burning in the book-lined living room of our country home, the Irish nanny bathing the children before Mother puts them to bed, and the willowy ex-model, jet-setter, and sex deviant, daughter of the mines and mills of West Virginia, self-styled victim of a dozen real bastards, seen here in her Saint Laurent pajamas and her crushed-kid boots, dipping thoughtfully into a novel by Samuel Beckett… seen here on a fur rug with her husband, whom People Are Talking About, The Saintliest Commissioner of the City of New York… seen here with his pipe and his thinning kinky black Hebe hair, in all his Jewish messianic fervor and charm…
What happened finally at lrvington Park: late on a Saturday afternoon I found myself virtually alone on the frozen lake with a darling fourteen-year-old shikseleh whom I had been watching practicing her figure eights since after lunch, a girl who seemed to me to possess the middle-class charms of Margaret O'Brien-that quickness and cuteness around the sparkling eyes and the freckled nose- and the simplicity and plainness, the lower-class availability, the lank blond hair of Peggy Ann Garner. You see, what looked like movie stars to everyone else were just different kinds of shikses to me. Often I came out of the movies trying to figure out what high school in Newark Jeanne Grain (and her cleavage) or Kathryn Grayson (and her cleavage) would be going to if they were my age. And where would I find a shikse like Gene Tiemey, who I used to think might even be a Jew, if she wasn't actually part Chinese. Meanwhile Peggy Ann O'Brien has made her last figure eight and is coasting lazily off for the boathouse, and I have done nothing about her, or about any of them, nothing all winter long, and now March is almost upon us-the red skating flag will come down over the park and once again we will be into polio season. I may not even live into the following winter, so what am I waiting for? "Now! Or never!" So after her-when she is safely out of sight- I madly begin to skate. "Excuse me," I will say, "but would you mind if I walk you home?" If I walked, or if I walk- which is more correct? Because I have to speak absolutely perfect English. Not a word of Jew in it. "Would you care perhaps to have a hot chocolate? May I have your phone number and come to call some evening? My name? I am Alton Peterson"- a name I had picked for myself out of the Montclair section of the Essex County phone book- totally goy I was sure, and sounds like Hans Christian Andersen into the bargain. What a coup! Secretly I have been practicing writing "Alton Peterson" all winter long, practicing on sheets of paper that I subsequently tear from my notebook after school and burn so that they won't have to be explained to anybody in my house. I am Alton Peterson, I am Alton Peterson- Alton Christian Peterson? Or is that going a little too far? Alton C. Peterson? And so preoccupied am I with not forgetting whom I would now like to be, so anxious to make it to the boathouse while she is still changing out of her skates- and wondering, too, what I'll say when she asks about the middle of my face and what happened to it (old hockey injury? Fell off my horse while playing polo after church one Sunday morning- too many sausages for breakfast, ha ha ha!)- I reach the edge of the lake with the tip of one skate a little sooner than I had planned- and so go hurtling forward onto the frostbitten ground, chipping one front tooth and smashing the bony protrusion at the top of my tibia.
My right leg is in a cast, from ankle to hip, for six weeks. I have something that the doctor calls Osgood Shlatterer's Disease. After the cast comes off, I drag the leg along behind me like a war injury- while my father cries, "Bend it! Do you want to go through life like that? Bend it! Walk natural, will you! Stop favoring that Oscar Shattered leg, Alex, or you are going to wind up a cripple for the rest of your days!"