Kent Shell
Defenestrating Philip Roth
Janice, my first wife, once threw Philip Roth from the window of a moving car—my old Saab—on a summer day in late August, thirty miles east of Richmond. This was in the 80s, when car windows went down with hand cranks. The air-conditioning was broken. The Roth was my paperback copy of Portnoy’s Complaint, its margins spidered with notes for my doctoral thesis from six years earlier. Different colors for different themes. Pages soft as cotton. In Janice’s defense, it had seemed funny at the time—throwing Philip Roth from the window—at first to her alone, and then to me too. We were completely toasted, and still hungover from the night before, and we were newlyweds, bombing down Route 60 toward Virginia Beach.
She had been the smartest student in my graduate seminar the year before. She was a sworn enemy of the patriarchy, and she detested stories where the narrator, always a man, was patently the author in disguise. The entire narrative arc, spent working masculine grievance into the shape of a wounded heart. For Janice, Roth and his ilk—the titans of the mid-century American novel I taught in my seminar, along with their alter egos, Portnoy, Zuckerman, Henderson, Herzog, Rabbit—were the lightning rod. She was the storm. Flagrant narcissism repackaged as rococo gaslighting. Cake-having-and-eating arrogance as art. Another preening white male, splitting the hairs of his existence finer and finer, in ever-more-telling detail (meanwhile the hair of his own dappled head growing thinner, and the long, supple hairs of wives and mistresses and ex-girlfriends multiplying, in delicate arabesques on the tub wall and matted against the shower drain, on the pillow of his bed, on the shoulder of his jacket). Etc., etc., etc., yada yada yada yada.
This is not that.
Nature abhors a vacuum, as the broom seller said.
The day before defenestrating Philip Roth, Janice had married me in Richmond Civil Court. We had toked up during the five-minute drive downtown in the Saab. There was a couple already there when we arrived, so we sat at the back of the courtroom to watch. The elderly judge wore a drooping black robe shiny from too many pressings. A clerk held the Bible. The bride and groom looked so young and so beautiful, like two bright polished apples, solemn and new. They had brought along a best man and a bridesmaid, everyone dressed for the occasion. It was wonderful. I didn’t know whether to cry or to laugh.
The sun fell on us from a high window in the courthouse. I wondered what Janice and I, twenty-six next to forty-eight, looked like to them: a middle-aged man in a corduroy jacket dank with pot smoke, his much younger girlfriend with an umbra of blonde peach fuzz on the curve of her cheek, like an eclipse.
Janice, who swore like a truck driver whenever she was high or angry, said I was stoned and that they weren’t paying any attention to us. “Look at them, they so believe in this fucking moment. Look how in love they are.” She was right about me being stoned, because suddenly I was paranoid. When it was our turn to go in front of the judge, I could tell what he was thinking—that I was old enough to be Janice’s father. I wondered if he smelled the weed.
***
The rabbits were all gone. The slaughter was over. Our father set to work dismantling the pens he had built in the backyard next to the kitchen door, humming: You’re in the army now, you’re not behind the plow. My brothers and I helped, fetching him tools. In the place of the rabbit pens there rose a sturdy barracks with four large cells.
A new zoo was being built for Abilene, and when construction delays caused the grand opening on July 4 to be postponed, temporary housing was required for the monkeys. Our father convinced someone to let him take care of them.
***
The party after the civil ceremony was at the Village, a no-frills shot-and-a-beer bar where faculty and grad students hung out. There had to have been a hundred people there—colleagues, students, former students, the boys Janice was too smart for, too mature for, a number of my old girlfriends. There was a lot of drinking. Many jokes were made about our twenty-two-year age difference. Many toasts were made. I climbed up on the bar and made a drunken toast myself, joking about wanting to impregnate Janice. In retrospect, a poor choice. Everyone laughed at the joke except Janice. I knew what I meant, that our relationship wasn’t something to sneeze at. That I could imagine a real life with her. The aimless past was over, and now I had something I wanted to nurture. We had talked about the baby thing before, so that was definitely on me. I shouldn’t have said I wanted to impregnate her. But I did. Want to have a baby with her.
The next morning was the beginning of our honeymoon, and we said honeymoon in quotes because we couldn’t quite believe we’d actually gone and gotten married. The day was already hot, and we were hungover. It was the kind of hazy, heavy, steamy day when the heat-shimmer rising from the pavement hurt to look at, and all you could think of was a bag of ice, a six-pack, and a sweaty beach to take the edge off. We stopped at 7-Eleven for ice and beer and peeled away. The drive to Virginia Beach was three hours long. Hot air banged in the Saab’s open windows. I could tell Janice was still sore about the toast.
We made a stop at Maury’s, out past Bottoms Bridge, down a long dirt road, to pick up an ounce. Maury was a toothless hillbilly-slash-hippie-slash-pot farmer who studied yellowed copies of the Whole Earth Catalog for inspiration. He’d propagated his field of marijuana from the original strain of Acapulco Gold, smuggled in from Mexico back in the sixties. Maury had been my dealer for years. He wouldn’t sell to you unless he decided you were “good folks,” as in, he’s good folks. A dirt cloud followed the Saab all the way from the highway and caught up to us when we pulled to a stop.
***
In Texas when it rained the earth sucked up the water and then the water was gone. There was a mesquite tree in front of our house, and a small peach tree out back.
Our mother was always busy putting out the laundry on the line, bringing in the laundry from the line, thawing the laundry when it froze on the line in January and February. She was always reaching into the pockets of her apron for clothespins, or running the back of a hand across her forehead, smoothing her hair, always sitting on the couch after supper watching television, lined up with my brothers and me like the original see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil, while our father occupied his own chair. She smoothed lotion into her hands, and the characters in the television box did things to make us laugh. It was a private act, the caressing of her own hands, and only I noticed. Every year I asked her for a baby sister for my birthday.
***
We shared our stories early, the way you do when you fall in love—over beers in bars and joints shared in the backyards of house parties, or passing a pipe and laying naked on flatiron boulders mid-stream after skinny-dipping in the James River. Janice told me about her dream of writing a feminist treatise that would advance the cause, and I described how I’d ended up an English major by default, like every other bright and uncertain high school graduate of my generation, and how I’d become a professor out of desperation, more or less by accident.
One night we split a tab of acid in Hollywood Cemetery, at the end of my street, among Confederate grave markers and other sins of mankind. As everything softened and began to get wavy around the edges, Janice kissed me, laughing, and then ran away, calling out in a thin falsetto, “Find me, find me, find me.”
At first I played along. She melted into the shadows as the shadows themselves melted back into the trees and grave markers that had cast them, and I chased her. For a few minutes she cut wildly between the markers, outrunning me, before disappearing behind a row of crypts. I stopped and called her name. I heard my own ragged breathing, my own voice echoing, and wasn’t sure if it was real or not. I called her name again, louder, and each time before the reverberations stopped I shouted again, louder and then softer, until a kind of inertia overtook me and I stopped. For a long time there was silence. Eventually, I heard her laughter coming from the opposite direction. I heard her crashing through the woods, and then she screamed, and then I heard nothing. I pretended I hadn’t heard the scream, convinced it was a trick. I lay down on the ground to see if she could find me.
I could see through my eyelids. The sky was structured with stars and the stars rotated. It got cold and I shivered. I didn’t know how much time had passed, and when I opened my eyes, I saw two huge eyes right in front of mine. Janice’s eyes, open and wide. Hovering. Her face filled the sky.
“You cheated,” she said. “You were supposed to find me.”
“You weren’t supposed to run away.”
“Didn’t you hear me? I cut my leg. I got hurt. Look.”
She rolled up her jeans and revealed a gash on her ankle. The blood had mostly dried. It occurred to me that I had been lying there all night. The sky framing Janice’s head was getting light. We weren’t tripping any more.
“I cut my leg and called, but you didn’t come. You made me come back. I learned something about you—you pussied out.”
***
Our father had a mania for hobbies, always dropping the old ones and forgetting about them just as quickly as he picked a new one up. He captured armadillos and skunks in the alley behind the tall back fence, where trash trucks roamed on bright mornings pulverizing the neighborhood’s garbage, and placed them in cages. Some of the skunks died under the knife on a plywood operating table in the yard, overdosed on ether, as our father taught himself surgery in order to remove their stink glands. My brothers and I were his assistants. We fed the animals, changed their stale water for fresh, cleaned their cages.
One day he came home from work and set the skunks and armadillos free. He had bought a pair of breeding rabbits with the intention of selling the offspring as pets, and needed the cages. My brothers and I went door to door, selling bunnies. We couldn’t keep up. Soon there were scores of rabbits. One weekend our father butchered them all, and we sold rabbit meat until it was gone.
***
Before meeting Janice I had spent years in an all-but-dissertation haze. Student girlfriends had come and gone in clouds of smoke and loud nights at The Village. In the beginning I wasn’t that much older than them. I taught a unit of Intro to Western Lit every semester and lived in a run-down little house I’d rented, and over time I collected a menagerie—a cat and a dog, both strays, a turtle I found in the backyard and put in a pen made of two-by-fours, a pair of finches and six neon tetras in an algae-slicked aquarium. The pet store clerk, an earnest and acned teenager, had said tetras were a shoaling fish, meaning they were social, and that if I didn’t buy at least six, they would become depressed. I used to get stoned and watch the fish for hours. The cat watched me watching the fish, and the dog watched the cat.
My most recent girlfriend had broken up with me, saying I was depressing, obsessed with my animals, and old. She stopped by to pick up the last of her things, a diaphragm in a pink plastic snap-case and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, while a boy in sunglasses waited outside in a car. After they drove off, I lowered the blinds and got ripped.
For a week I opened the door only for the delivery guy from Szechuan Pagoda. I took stock of what I liked about my life (the university ecosystem, the slow pace of Richmond), and what I didn’t (a TA’s salary, my own lack of focus, and surprisingly, the carousel of girlfriends, who all stayed the same age while I got older), and gave myself an ultimatum: dissertation and professorship, or quit drugs and get serious about life (that is, get a real job). I chose dissertation. I gave myself two months.
Working around the clock, I fortified myself steadily with copious amounts of psilocybin and speed. I left the house only under cover of darkness: I crossed the James River in the Saab, and in anonymous houses on the Southside I replenished my supplies of mushrooms and black beauties. At the Gulf station I bought gonzo-sized bags of barbecue potato chips along with eight-packs of Dr. Pepper, and every few nights at Taco Charlie’s I picked up a mega-pack—thirty-six beef tacos—to go.
Once I got back home, I calculated my intake of mushrooms and diet pills with the precision of a mad scientist, aiming for optimum word production, often working for twenty-four hours or more at a stretch. Some nights I could be found at the campus bookstore just before closing, pacing the Structuralism section like a jittery ghost, trolling alphabetically through Barthes, Derrida, Kristeva, Levi-Strauss, for inspiration.
I finished my thesis in seven nauseated, sleepless weeks, riding waves of hallucination and mania in a rollercoaster of dread and obsession, ahead of schedule. Then I slept for a week, and when I woke up alone in the empty house, I cried, even before I saw what I looked like in the mirror. I’d given the animals away before I started, in case I forgot to feed them. The house was silent. I bathed and shaved. I was ready to enter the legitimate world.
I thought I’d created a masterpiece: Liver Let Live; A Structuralist Interrogation of Alexander Portnoy. I sat down with the manuscript one last time before sliding it into a fat manila envelope and sending it to the committee. I lit a joint and got comfortable, and read it through in one sitting. It was utterly incomprehensible—impervious to logic, dense with misapplied theory and elaborately woven cross-references. From Roth to Barthes to Lacan and Freud and Marx (both of them, Groucho and Karl), the borscht belt, Elie Weisel, post-war prosperity, and back to Roth again along with his puppet Portnoy, Portnoy’s blonde girlfriends and the infamous slab of liver wrapped in fresh butcher paper, molested behind a billboard in New Jersey.
In its way, though, it was a thing of beauty. The footnotes alone were their own architecture. Not knowing what else to do, I submitted it, and delivered the defense totally baked. The reviewing committee was baffled. It was the 80s, and liberal arts programs were exploding, and somehow, probably because it was easier than trying to pinpoint all the ways in which it was wrong, after a split vote I was made a doctor of philosophy.
Five years later, when I met Janice, my having managed to obtain an advanced degree impressed her in spite of who I was—a partying, ad hoc, accidental academic—not because of who it made me, and it confirmed in her the idea that she might be able to do the same.
In other words, she already saw through me. And this seemed to me like insurance against the future.
***
Our father warned us that the monkeys were temporary. They would go to the zoo when it opened in the fall.
The first monkey that arrived slept most of the time, an immobile hump of greasy black-and-gray curls. It even smelled sick. Occasionally it lifted itself on an elbow to survey its surroundings. Some mornings when my brothers and I opened the wire mesh door to change its water and replace the soiled, sour newspaper that lined the bottom of the cage, the monkey would drag itself to the far corner. Other times it wouldn’t stir. Some days it couldn’t lift its head to receive the medicine our father squirted into its mouth from the plastic syringe provided by the zoo people, and eventually it died.
Other monkeys arrived sick and lethargic too, or were unable to adapt to the dry heat. Our father nursed them with the plastic syringe. My brothers and I assisted, coaxing them to play if they got better, and cleaning their cages.
The dead monkeys were taken away in canvas sacks slung across the backs of workers and tossed into the beds of pickup trucks. The trucks rolled away slowly down the street and turned the corner, following the path that the ice cream truck took.
***
Maury lived in a camper in the middle of nowhere, twelve miles off Route 60. There was an outhouse and a gas-powered generator, and a white plastic cistern to collect rainwater. He had a long gray ponytail and tiny eyes in a craggy Appalachian face. We climbed out of the Saab and said hello.
We sat on folding lawn chairs looking out over the patch of shoulder-high marijuana, drinking warm beers in the noonday sun. Bugs traced patterns in the air over the tops of the plants: bumblebees and dragonflies, thick wads of gnats. “Good crop this year,” Maury said. His epically minimal utterances were held in place by equally epic pauses. A minute later he said, “Secret is, I only water at night.” He rolled a fat joint and offered it around. We smoked, passing it from hand to hand. “Yes sir. That’s all natural right there. That’s the whole circle of life.” I tried to figure out why Maury looked different. He pinched out the roach and put it in the chest pocket of his overalls. He smiled shyly, revealing a set of bright white dentures. “I got new teeth.” We were all stoned. “You did,” was all I could think to say. As we got in the car to leave, he said, “You two be good to each other, now. Y’all are good folks.”
***
Procedures were revamped. New arrivals were to be quarantined. There was a routine. The monkeys first had to learn to digest the monkey chow. In the mornings we refreshed their water and changed the newspapers. Our father examined the stains like he was reading the news. He took each monkey’s temperature and recorded the numbers in a notebook. All of the medicines smelled bad, and he had to force the syringe into their mouths.
When a monkey began to exhibit curiosity, and when our father deemed it well enough, my brothers and I were allowed to take it from its cage. Our father had made a tetherball set the summer before from a length of scrap pipe and a tire rim filled with cement. The ball hung like a heavy fruit. The monkeys that liked to ride it around the pole were considered rehabilitated, and given more freedom. The monkeys were always dying, or getting better, or just living. The monkeys that lived got names—Coco, Spiderman, Cousin Itt—and those that died were quickly forgotten.
***
A half hour later the wind was in our ears and Maury’s joint was still coming on strong. I was listening to the way the sound changed every time we passed a telephone pole and trying to count the dashed yellow lines that flew under the hood of the Saab. Janice had her feet up against the dash and was studying the ink-covered pages of Portnoy.
“They’re like fucking art. They’re beautiful,” she said. I started to explain to her what the different colors of the notes meant: blue for worship of literature, red for the objectification and diminishment of women, green for inflated self-regard, purple for comedy, pink for—
“You’ve told me twenty times,” she said, laughing, “and you had an epiphany about Portnoy too. And the epiphany was…?”
I tried to take the book from her and the car lurched left. She moved it out of my reach, laughing. I lunged again, and the car swerved again and crossed the dashed yellow line and then swerved back, and kept going.
Janice went back to the book, and I tried to find my place again in the rhythm of the dashed yellow lines flying past. “I do like all your colored notes, though.” She nudged me with her foot. “I really do, babe.”
A bug splattered against the windshield. I had had an epiphany about Portnoy, somewhere in those eighty thousand words of sludge, but I had never managed to remember what it was, and now it was gone forever. I pulled the windshield wiper lever and water fanned out over the glass. The bug flew over the roof of the car, piece by piece.
A few minutes later Janice said, brightly, “I’m going to do you a big fucking favor.” She downed the rest of her beer and flipped the book out the window. “Take that, male menopause bullshit.” The book disappeared noisily.
I tried to be mad, but she started laughing, and then I started laughing too. Everything just seemed funny. There was the comedy of me flailing at empty air as she whisked the book away, the comedy of the tires squealing against the steady rhythm of the telephone poles, the comedy of being alive, of being in love, of being upset over something as stupid as a book, of being stoned on a hot summer day speeding down the highway. I laughed at the absurdity of my being a professor, and now a husband, a future father. I jerked the wheel and swerved into the oncoming traffic lane again for no reason, but in rural Virginia there is never oncoming traffic, so the Saab righted itself and swerved harmlessly back into the lane headed toward Virginia Beach. Janice reached into the cooler in the back seat and popped open two more beers, and handed me one.
The weekend at Virginia Beach was short and hot, filled with drinking and arguments and honeymoon sex and Maury’s Acapulco Gold, along with the evergreen smell of crabs boiled in Old Bay.
***
When Sissy came, she was never sick, not even for a day. Her darting red eyes were set deep in the flat plane of her bright-red face. Her ears were red, her bald dome was red, and red fur ran down her back in a short, stiff cape. Her perfectly formed fingers had the tiniest of nails. When we held hands, her red hand was swallowed by my large pink one. When I went to bed at night, I thought about Sissy.
We sat in the grass together under the sun. Grasshoppers flicked themselves away in high arcs with dry, audible kicks. Sissy liked to catch them and eat them, pulling them slowly limb from limb, dropping each kicking piece into her mouth while keeping her small fist clutched firmly around the frantic, dismembered grasshopper within. She always saved the head for last, its antennae still twitching feebly, its giant eyes watching.
I’ve tried to remember who gave Sissy her name. It could have been our father. That’s the kind of thing he would have done. “Are you a girl? Are you a girl?” he had asked me when I cried about the dead rabbits. Or it could have been my brothers; they also thought I was a sissy. Or maybe it was me who named her—to me, she was like a sister.
Sissy followed me everywhere. She swung on the clothes line, she rode the tether ball, she balanced on the top rail of the tall fence that surrounded the yard, looking over her shoulder at me and pretending she would jump over the fence and run away, but she never did. From wherever we sat in the grass she shot across the yard chasing grasshoppers. She put her fingers in my nose, in my mouth, in my ears. We played tag. She minutely examined my scalp. She placed her hands on the side of my face and looked deep in my ears. Satisfied, she draped her red arm casually on my shoulder with a familiarity that I took for love. When I had to put her back in her cage and go inside, she understood.
***
Janice believed that if she learned to cook, it would signal her capitulation to the patriarchy. I supported her in this, so I did the cooking. We bought a house in a part of Richmond that wasn’t yet gentrified; we gave it a new roof and a new boiler. We screened the back porch with the help of some undergrads from the job placement office. Janice got accepted into the PhD program in Feminist Studies. I lobbied for a dog, which we didn’t get.
In spring I seeded the lawn. From the screened-in porch I smoked pot and watched for birds so I could chase them off the newborn grass. Janice worked inside, at the kitchen table. Sometimes we still hung out at the Village. There was a boy there named Trent, whom Janice knew from school. Trent was beautiful, in a young James Taylor way. The two of them would hole up in a booth and talk intently about the things people in their twenties talk about.
When we decided to repaint the upstairs, Janice insisted on hiring Trent. Maybe I was too trusting, I don’t know. The truth is, I was happy offloading all of that earnestness onto Trent. In my office upstairs I kicked around some ideas for a novel while I waited for Janice to warm to the idea of kids. I tried not to pressure her.
Every few weeks I drove the Saab out to Bottoms Bridge to see Maury.
One day I came downstairs to smoke a joint in the back yard. Janice was at the table. The Crock-Pot was on the counter, slow-cooking a pot roast.
“What are you reading?”
She held up Desire in Language by Julia Kristeva. Semiotics, the theory that no one understood. I had struggled, and failed, during my drug-addled late night prowls at the bookstore, to make any sense of the dense text within, but the cover had seduced me. A grainy black-and-white snapshot of the beautiful French-Bulgarian intellectual in a peasant blouse, her small hand closed and grazing her cheek. Jet eyes coolly surveying the semiotic landscape from under exquisitely arched eyebrows. The book was a bulletin from the intellectual front lines, brainy and sexy and unattainable, a place to which I would never be privy. Seeing it now, in Janice’s earnest fingers as she sat at the kitchen table, I felt again the competing strains of desire and inadequacy.
I lifted the lid of the Crock-Pot and looked at the roast. “You want to smoke a little before dinner?”
Janice never seemed to want to get high any more, and lately whenever we went to the Village, she either sat in the corner of the booth with her nose in a book or went off to talk with Trent and his friends.
She raised the book and pretended to read.
“Do you understand any of that?”
She put the book down. “You do know that just because you cook dinner it doesn’t mean you’re not oppressing me, right? Do you understand Desire in Language?”
At first I thought she had said “desire and language,” and I didn’t understand what she meant.
“Don’t you think it’s interesting that you have an office and I don’t?”
We hadn’t specifically agreed that the second bedroom would be for a baby, but we had kind of agreed.
“You like working in the kitchen.”
“I hate working in the kitchen. I hate smelling this fucking pot roast.”
The whole thing went sideways. She said I was being an asshole. I said I thought she loved me. She said she didn’t want a baby. I said, “You love pot roast.” She said, “I hate the way you look at me, like you’re a dumb damn dog who wants to stick his dick in a god damn bitch and give her a litter of god damn puppies.”
I looked at her, stunned by her anger.
“You’re so literal! You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? Pump and dump, that’s what men do. God! I’m smarter than you are, I just didn’t luck into a god damn PhD. But what fucking difference does it make!”
Janice was crying now. “I’m pregnant! And it’s not yours. And I’m not keeping it!”
***
On Zoo Day, the day of the grand opening, there were free balloons and cotton candy in the parking lot. Families streamed toward the entrance like they were going to a parade. Fathers wore short-sleeved sport shirts and sunglasses, and mothers walked in halos of hairspray. Past the ticket windows and beyond the turnstiles, people milled on broad promenades connecting the exhibits. Children swarmed everywhere, trying to see everything at once.
The monkey exhibit rose from the concrete pavilion like a small silo made of wire fencing. Within the silo a large tree stood at the center in a circle of dirt, pruned of all but its most substantial limbs. It was grander than anything in our yard—the peach tree, the clothesline, the tetherball. There were ropes for the monkeys to swing on, and platforms with small thatched roofs where they could congregate out of the sun. The monkeys competed for places in the shade.
A handrail of metal piping ringed the silo, and children leaned in all around and pointed and shouted. As soon as Sissy saw us she peeled away from the other monkeys and ran to where we stood with our chests against the rail, and flung herself against the fence. She reached through the diamond-shaped openings for my brothers and me. We petted her through the fence with our fingertips and called her name. She recognized us. Children looked at us with envy. Eventually our father became impatient to see the other animals, and our mother hurried us along after him.
For a time we returned to the zoo every weekend. Sissy became less excited at our arrival. She began to forget. When she looked at me, she no longer held me in her gaze. Sometimes she didn’t notice us calling her from the curved rail. “She’s a wild animal,” our father said. “She doesn’t remember you.” By December, we stopped going.
All winter long our father worked in the backyard, wearing his army jacket to stay warm, humming to himself, measuring and sawing wood to build a series of beehives, and when it got warm enough so the laundry stopped coming in frozen on the line, he painted the hives white and populated them with bees he’d bought by mail order. Later we went door to door selling honey.
At the end of the school year there was a field trip to the zoo. The tree in the monkey enclosure had been removed, replaced by a jungle gym made of pipe. Sissy was perched at the top, pulling at her fur, looking everywhere and nowhere. Small groups of monkeys bickered lethargically. Some of them spat and hissed. Sissy looked lost and frightened. Not wild.
We all laughed at the monkeys. Some of the boys sneakily threw rocks. I was too embarrassed to call Sissy’s name, so I laughed too, and looked for a rock to throw, and after a while it was time to go.
Kent Shell was a finalist for the 2025 Iowa Review Award in fiction, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grist, McSweeney’s, Pangyrus, and elsewhere.