Except the next night we got each other very steamed up at dinner—as in the early days of our courtship, The Monkey retired at one point to the ladies’ room at Ranieri’s and returned to the table with a finger redolent of pussy, which I held beneath my nose to sniff and kiss at till the main dish arrived—and after a couple of brandies at Doney’s, accosted Lina once again at her station and took her with us to the hotel for round two. Only this time I relieved Lina of her undergarments myself and mounted her even before The Monkey had come back into the bedroom from the john. If I’m going to do it, I thought. I’m going to do it! All the way! Everything! And no vomiting, either! You’re not in Weequahic High School any more! You’re nowherenear New Jersey!

When The Monkey stepped out of the bathroom and saw that the ball game was already under way, she wasn’t entirely pleased. She sat down on the edge of the bed, her little features smaller than I had ever seen them, and declining an invitation to participate, silently watched until I had had my orgasm and Lina had finished faking hers. Obligingly then—sweetly, really—Lina made for between my mistress’ long legs, but The Monkey pushed her away and went off to sit and sulk in a chair by the window. So Lina—not a person overly sensitive to interpersonal struggle—lay back on the pillow beside me and began to tell us all about herself. The bane of existence was the abortions. She was the mother of one child, a boy, with whom she lived on Monte Mario (“in a beautiful new building,” The Monkey translated). Unfortunately she could not manage, in her situation, any more than one—“though she loves children”—and so was always in and out of the abortionist’s office. Her only precautionary device seemed to be a spermicidal douche of no great reliability.

I couldn’t believe that she had never heard of either the diaphragm or the birth-control pill. I told The Monkey to explain to her about modern means of contraception that she could surely avail herself of, probably with only a little ingenuity. I got from my mistress a very wry look. The whore listened but was skeptical. It distressed me considerably that she should be so ignorant about a matter pertaining to her own well-being (there on the bed with her fingers wandering around in my damp pubic hair): That fucking Catholic church, I thought . . .

So, when she left us that night, she had not only fifteen thousand of my lire in her handbag, but a month’s supply of The Monkey’s Enovid—that I had given to her.

“Oh, you are some savior!” The Monkey shouted, after Lina had left.

“What do you want her to do—get knocked up every other week? What sense does that make?”

“What do I care what happens to her!” said The Monkey, her voice turning rural and mean. “She’s the whore! And all you really wanted to do was to fuck her! You couldn’t even wait until I was out of the john to do it! And then you gave her my pills!”

“And what’s that mean, hub? What exactly are you trying to say? You know, one of the things you don’t always display, Monkey, is a talent for reason. A talent for frankness, yes—for reason, no!”

“Then leave me! You’ve got what you wanted! Leave!”

“Maybe I will!”

“To you I’m just another her, anyway! You, with all your big words and big shit holy ideals and all I am in your eyes is just a cunt—and a lesbian!—and a whore!”

Skip the fight. It’s boring. Sunday: we emerge from the elevator, and who should be coming through the front door of the hotel but our Lina—and with her a child of about seven or eight, a fat little boy made out of alabaster, dressed all in ruffles and velvet and patent leather. Lina’s hair is down and her dark eyes, fresh from church, have a familiarly Itahan mournful expression. A nice-looking person really. A sweet person (I can’t get over this!). And she has come to show off her bambino ! Or so it looks.

Pointing to the little boy, she whispers to The Monkey, “Molto elegante, no?” But then she follows us out to our car, and while the child is preoccupied with the door-man’s uniform, suggests that maybe we would like to come to her apartment on Monte Mario this afternoon and all of us do it with another man. She has a friend, she says—mind you, I get all this through my translator—she has a friend who she is sure, she says, would like to fuck the signorina. I can see the tears sliding out from beneath The Monkey’s dark glasses, even as she says to me, “Well, what do I tell her, yes or no?” “No, of course. Positively not.” The Monkey exchanges some words with Lina and then turns to me once again: “She says it wouldn’t be for money, it would just be for—”

“No! No!”

All the way to the Villa Adriana she weeps: “I want a child too! And a home! And a husband! I am not a lesbian! I am not a whore!” She reminds me of the evening the previous spring when I took her up to the Bronx with me, to what we at the H. O. commission call “Equal Opportunity Night.” “All those poor Puerto Rican people being overcharged in the supermarket! In Spanish you spoke, and oh I was so impressed! Tell me about your bad sanitation, tell me about your rats and vermin, tell me about your police protection! Because discrimination is against the law! A year in prison or a five-hundred-dollar fine! And that poor Puerto Rican man stood up and shouted, ‘Both!’ Oh, you fake, Alex! You hypocrite and phony! Big shit to a bunch of stupid spies, but I know the truth, Alex! You make women sleep with whores!”

“I don’t make anybody do anything they don’t want to do.”

“Human opportunities! Human! How you love that word! But do you know what it means, you son of a bitch pimp! I’ll teach you what it means! Pull this car over, Alex!”

“Sorry, no.”

“Yes! Yes! Because I’m getting out! I’m finding a phone! I’m going to call long-distance to John Lindsay and tell him what you made me do.”

“The fuck you will.”

“I’ll expose you, Alex—I’ll call Jimmy Breslin!”

Then in Athens she threatens to jump from the balcony unless I marry her. So I leave.

Shikses! In winter, when the polio germs are hibernating and I can bank upon surviving outside of an iron lung until the end of the school year, I ice-skate on the lake in Irvington Park. In the last light of the weekday afternoons, then all day long on crisply shining Saturdays and Sundays, I skate round and round in circles behind the shikses who live in Irvington, the town across the city line from the streets and houses of my safe and friendly Jewish quarter. I know where the shikses live from the kinds of curtains their mothers hang in the windows. Also, the goyim hang a little white cloth with a star in the front window, in honor of themselves and their boys away in the service—a blue star if the son is living, a gold star if he is dead. “A Gold Star Morn,” says Ralph Edwards, solemnly introducing a contestant on “Truth or Consequences,” who in just two minutes is going to get a bottle of seltzer squirted at her snatch, followed by a brand-new refrigerator for her kitchen . . . A Gold Star Morn is what my Aunt Clara upstairs is too, except here is the difference—she has no gold star in her window, for a dead son doesn’t leave her feeling proud or noble, or feeling anything, for that matter. It seems instead to have turned her, in my father’s words, into “a nervous case” for life. Not a day has passed since Heshie was killed in the Normandy invasion that Aunt Clara has not spent most of it in bed, and sobbing so badly that Doctor Izzie has sometimes to come and give her a shot to calm her hysteria down . . . But the curtains—the curtains are embroidered with lace, or “fancy” in some other way that my mother describes derisively as “goyisch e taste.” At Christmastime, when I have no school and can go off to ice-skate at night under the lights, I see the trees blinking on and off behind the gentile curtains. Not on our block—God forbid!—or on Leslie Street, or Schley Street, or even Fabian Place, but as I approach the Irvington line, here is a goy, and there is a goy, and there still another—and then I am into Irvington and it is simply awful: not only is there a tree conspicuously ablaze in every parlor, but the houses themselves are outlined with colored bulbs advertising Christianity, and phonographs are pumping “Silent Night” out into the street as though—as though?—it were the national anthem, and on the snowy lawns are set up little cut-out models of the scene in the manger—really, it’s enough to make you sick. How can they possibly believe this shit? Not just children but grownups, too, stand around on the snowy lawns smiling down at pieces of wood six inches high that are called Mary and Joseph and little Jesus—and the little cut-out cows and horses are smiling too! God! The idiocy of the Jews all year long, and then the idiocy of the goyim on these holidays! What a country! Is it any wonder we’re all of us half nuts?