The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  Before she met my father on a vacation in these very hills—he was then twenty-one, and without a calling, spending the summer as a short-order cook—she worked for her first three years out of high school as a legal secretary. As legend has it, she had been a meticulous, conscientious young woman of astounding competence, who all but lived to serve the patrician Wall Street lawyers who employed her, men whose stature—moral and physical—she will in fact speak of reverentially until she dies. Her Mr. Clark, a grandson of the firm’s founder, continues sending her birthday greetings by telegram even after he retires to Arizona, and every year, with the telegram in her hand, she says dreamily to my balding father and to little me, “Oh, he was such a tall and handsome man. And so dignified. I can still remember how he stood up at his desk when I came into his office to be interviewed for the job. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that posture of his.” But, as it happened, it was a burly, hirsute man, with a strong prominent cask of a chest, Popeye’s biceps, and no class credentials, who saw her leaning on a piano singing “Amapola” with a group of vacationers up from the city, and promptly said to himself, “I’m going to marry that girl.” Her hair and her eyes were so dark, and her legs and bosom so round and “well developed” that he thought at first she might actually be Spanish. And the besetting passion for impeccability that had endeared her so to the junior Mr. Clark only caused her to be all the more alluring to the energetic young go-getter with not a little of the slave driver in his own driven, slavish soul.

  Unfortunately, once she marries, the qualities that had made her the austere Gentile boss’s treasure bring her very nearly to the brink of nervous collapse by the end of each summer—for even in a small family-run hotel like ours there is always a complaint to be investigated, an employee to be watched, linens to be counted, food to be tasted, accounts to be tallied … on and on and on it goes, and, alas, she can never leave a job to the person supposed to be doing it, not when she discovers that it is not being Done Right. Only in the winter, when my father and I assume the unlikely roles of Clark père and fils, and she sits in perfect typing posture at the big black Remington Noiseless precisely indenting his garrulous replies, do I get a glimpse of the demure and happy little señorita with whom he had fallen in love at first sight.

  Sometimes after dinner she even invites me, a grade-school child, to pretend that I am an executive and to dictate a letter to her so that she can show me the magic of her shorthand. “You own a shipping company,” she tells me, though in fact I have only just been allowed to buy my first penknife, “go ahead.” Regularly enough she reminds me of the distinction between an ordinary office secretary and what she had been, which was a legal secretary. My father proudly confirms that she had indeed been the most flawless legal secretary ever to work for the firm—Mr. Clark had written as much to him in a letter of congratulation on the occasion of their engagement. Then one winter, when apparently I am of age, she teaches me to type. No one, before or since, has ever taught me anything with so much innocence and conviction.

  But that is winter, the secret season. In summer, surrounded, her dark eyes dart frantically, and she yelps and yipes like a sheep dog whose survival depends upon driving his master’s unruly flock to market. A single little lamb drifting a few feet away sends her full-speed down the rugged slope—a baa from elsewhere, and she is off in the opposite direction. And it does not stop until the High Holidays are over, and even then it doesn’t stop. For when the last guest has departed, inventory-taking must begin—must! that minute! What has been broken, torn, stained, chipped, smashed, bent, cracked, pilfered, what is to be repaired, replaced, repainted, thrown out entirely, “a total loss.” To this simple and tidy little woman who loves nothing in the world so much as the sight of a perfect, un-smudged carbon copy falls the job of going from room to room to record in her ledger the extent of the violence that has been wreaked upon our mountain stronghold by the vandal hordes my father persists in maintaining—over her vehement opposition—are only other human beings.

  Just as the raging Catskill winters transform each of us back into a sweeter, saner, innocent, more sentimental sort of Kepesh, so in my room in Syracuse solitude goes to work on me and gradually I feel the lightweight and the show-off blessedly taking his leave. Not that, for all my reading, underlining, and note-taking, I become entirely selfless. A dictum attributed to no less notable an egotist than Lord Byron impresses me with its mellifluous wisdom and resolves in only six words what was beginning to seem a dilemma of insuperable moral proportions. With a certain strategic daring, I begin quoting it aloud to the coeds who resist me by arguing that I’m too smart for such things. “Studious by day,” I inform them, “dissolute by night.” For “dissolute” I soon find it best to substitute “desirous”—I am not in a palazzo in Venice, after all, but in upstate New York, on a college campus, and I can’t afford to unsettle these girls any more than I apparently do already with my “vocabulary” and my growing reputation as a “loner,” Reading Macaulay for English 203, I come upon his description of Addison’s collaborator Steele, and, “Eureka!” I cry, for here is yet another bit of prestigious justification for my high grades and my base desires. “A rake among scholars, a scholar among rakes.” Perfect! I tack it to my bulletin board, along with the line from Byron, and directly above the names of the girls whom I have set my mind to seduce, a word whose deepest resonances come to me. neither from pornography nor pulp magazines, but from my agonized reading in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

  I have only one male friend I see regularly, a nervous, awkward, and homely philosophy major named Louis Jelinek, who in fact is my Kierkegaard mentor. Like me, Louis rents a room in a private house in town rather than live in the college dormitory with boys whose rituals of camaraderie he too considers contemptible. He is working his way through school at a hamburger joint (rather than accept money from the Scarsdale parents he despises) and carries its perfume wherever he goes. When I happen to touch him, either accidentally or simply out of high spirits or fellow feeling, he leaps away as though in fear of having his stinking rags contaminated. “Hands off,” he snarls. “What are you, Kepesh, still running for some fucking office?” Am I? It hadn’t occurred to me. Which one?

  Oddly, whatever Louis says of me, even in pique or in a tirade, seems significant for the solemn undertaking I call “understanding myself.” Because he is not interested, as far as I can see, in pleasing anyone—family, faculty, landlady, shopkeepers, and certainly least of all, those “bourgeois barbarians,” our fellow students—I imagine him to be more profoundly in touch with “reality” than I am. I am one of those tall, wavy-haired boys with a cleft in his chin who has developed winning ways in high school, and now I cannot seem to shake them, hard as I try. Especially alongside Louis do I feel pitifully banal: so neat, so clean, so charming when the need arises, and despite all my disclaimers to the contrary, not quite unconcerned as yet with appearances and reputation. Why can’t I be more of a Jelinek, reeking of fried onions and looking down on the entire world? Behold the refuse bin wherein he dwells! Crusts and cores and peelings and wrappings—the perfect mess! Just look upon the clotted Kleenex beside his ravaged bed, Kleenex clinging to his tattered carpet slippers. Only seconds after orgasm, and even in the privacy of my locked room, I automatically toss into a waste-basket the telltale evidence of self-abuse, whereas Jelinek—eccentric, contemptuous, unaffiliated, and unassailable Jelinek—seems not to care at all what the world knows or thinks of his copious ejaculations.

  I am stunned, can’t grasp it, for weeks afterward won’t believe it when a student in the philosophy program says in passing one day that “of course” my friend is a “practicing” homosexual. My friend? It cannot be, “Sissies,” of course, I am familiar with. Each summer we would have a few famous ones at the hotel, little Jewish pashas on holiday, first brought to my attention by Herbie B. With fascination I used to watch them being carried out of the sunlight and into the shade, even as they dizzily imbibed sweet
chocolate drinks through a pair of straws, and their brows and cheeks were cleansed and dried by the handkerchiefs of galley slaves called Grandma, Mamma, and Auntie. And then there were the few unfortunates at school, boys born with their arms screwed on like girls, who couldn’t throw a ball right no matter how many private hours of patient instruction you gave them. But as for a practicing homosexual? Never, never, in all my nineteen years. Except, of course, that time right after my bar mitzvah, when I took a bus by myself to a stamp collectors’ fair in Albany, and in the Greyhound terminal there was approached at the urinal by a middle-aged man in a business suit who whispered to me over my shoulder, “Hey, kid, want me to blow you?” “No, no, thank you,” I replied, and quickly as I could (though without giving offense, I hoped) moved out of the men’s room, out of the terminal, and made for a nearby department store, where I could be gathered up in the crowd of heterosexual shoppers. In the intervening years, however, no homosexual had ever spoken to me again, at least none that I knew of.

  Till Louis.

  Oh, God, does this explain why I am told to keep my hands to myself when our shirtsleeves so much as brush against each other? Is it because for him being touched by a boy carries with it the most serious implications? But, if so, wouldn’t a person as forthright and unconventional as Jelinek come right out and say so? Or could it be that while my shameful secret with Louis is that under it all I am altogether ordinary and respectable, a closet Joe College, his with me is that he’s queer? As though to prove how very ordinary and respectable I really am, I never ask. Instead, I wait in fear for the day when something Jelinek says or does will reveal the truth about him. Or has his truth been with me all along? Of course! Those globs of Kleenex tossed about his room like so many little posies … are they not intended to divulge? to invite? … is it so unlikely that some night soon this brainy hawk-nosed creature, who disdains, on principle, the use of underarm deodorant and is already losing his hair, will jump forth in his ungainly way from behind the desk where he is lecturing on Dostoevsky and try to catch me in an embrace? Will he tell me he loves me and stick his tongue in my mouth? And what will I say in response, exactly what the innocent, tempting girls say to me? “No, no, please don’t! Oh, Louis, you’re too smart for this! Why can’t we just talk about books?”

  But precisely because the idea frightens me so—because I am afraid that I may well be the “hillbilly” and “hayseed” that he delights in calling me when we disagree about the deep meaning of some masterpiece—I continue to visit him in his odoriferous room and sit across the litter from him there talking loudly for hours about the most maddening and vexatious ideas, and praying that he will not make a pass.

  Before he can, Louis is dismissed from the university, first for failing to show up at a single class during an entire semester, and then for not even deigning to acknowledge the notes from his adviser asking him to come talk over the problem. Snaps Louis indignantly, sardonically, disgustedly, “What problem?” and darts and cranes his head as though the “problem,” for all he knows, might be somewhere in the air above us. Though all agree that Louis’s is an extraordinary mind, he is refused enrollment for the second semester of his junior year. Overnight he disappears from Syracuse (no goodbyes, needless to say) and almost immediately is drafted. So I learn when an F.B.I. agent with an undeflectable gaze comes around to question me after Louis deserts basic training and (as I picture it) goes to hide out from the Korean War in a slum somewhere with his Kierkegaard and his Kleenex.

  Agent McCormack asks, “What about his homosexual record, Dave?” Flushing, I reply, “I don’t know about that.” McCormack says, “But they tell me you were his closest buddy.” “They? I don’t know who you mean.” “The kids over on the campus.” “That’s a vicious rumor about him—it’s totally untrue.” “That you were his buddy?” “No, sir,” I say, heat again rising unbidden to my forehead, “that he had a ‘homosexual record.’ They say those things because he was difficult to get along with. He was an unusual person, particularly for around here.” “But you got along with him, didn’t you?” “Yes. Why shouldn’t I?” “No one said you shouldn’t. Listen, they tell me you’re quite the Casanova.” “Oh, yes?” “Yeah. That you really go after the girls. Is that so?” “I suppose,” turning from his gaze, and from the implication I sense in his remark that the girls are only a front. “That wasn’t the case with Louis, though,” says the agent ambiguously. “What do you mean?” “Dave, tell me something. Level with me. Where do you think he is?” “I don’t know.” “But you’d let me in on it, if you did, I’m sure.” “Yes, sir.” “Good. Here’s my card, if you should happen to find out.” “Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” And after he leaves I am appalled by the way I have conducted myself: my terror of prison, my Lord Fauntleroy manners, my collaborationist instincts—and my shame over just about everything.

  The girls that I go after.

  Usually I pick them up (or at least out) in the reading room of the library, a place comparable to the runway of a burlesque house in its power to stimulate and focus my desire. Whatever is imperfectly suppressed in these neatly dressed, properly bred middle-class American girls is immediately apparent (or more often than not, immediately imagined) in this all-pervasive atmosphere of academic propriety. I watch transfixed the girl who plays with the ends of her hair while ostensibly she is studying her History—while I am ostensibly studying mine. Another girl, wholly bland tucked in her classroom chair just the day before, will begin to swing her leg beneath the library table where she idly leafs through a Look magazine, and my craving knows no bounds. A third girl leans forward over her notebook, and with a muffled groan, as though I am being impaled, I observe the breasts beneath her blouse push softly into her folded arms. How I wish I were those arms! Yes, almost nothing is necessary to set me in pursuit of a perfect stranger, nothing, say, but the knowledge that while taking notes from the encyclopedia with her right hand, she cannot keep the index finger of her left hand from tracing circles on her lips. I refuse—out of an incapacity that I elevate to a principle—to resist whatever I find irresistible, regardless of how unsubstantial and quirky, or childish and perverse, the source of the appeal might strike anyone else. Of course this leads me to seek out girls I might otherwise find commonplace or silly or dull, but I for one am convinced that dullness isn’t their whole story, and that because my desire is desire, it is not to be belittled or despised.

  “Please,” they plead, “why don’t you just talk and be nice? You can be so nice, if you want to be.” “Yes, so they tell me.” “But don’t you see, this is only my body. I don’t want to relate to you on that level.” “You’re out of luck. Nothing can be done about it. Your body is sensational.” “Oh, don’t start saying that again.” “Your ass is sensational.” “Please don’t be crude. You don’t talk that way in class, I love listening to you, but not when you insult me like this.” “Insult? It’s high praise. Your ass is marvelous. It’s perfect. You should be thrilled to have it.” “It’s only what I sit on, David.” “The hell it is. Ask a girl who doesn’t own one quite that shape if she’d like to swap. That should bring you to your senses.” “Please stop making fun of me and being sarcastic. Please.” “I’m not making fun of you. I’m taking you as seriously as anybody has ever taken you in your life. Your ass is a masterpiece.”

  No wonder that by my senior year I have acquired a “terrible” reputation among the sorority girls whose sisters I have attempted to seduce with my brand of aggressive candor. Given the reputation, you would think that I had already reduced a hundred coeds to whoredom, when in fact in four years’ time I actually succeed in achieving full penetration on but two occasions, and something vaguely resembling penetration on two more. More often than not, where physical rapture should be, there logical (and illogical) discourse is instead: I argue, if I must, that I have never tried to mislead anyone about my desire or her desirability, that far from being “exploitive,” I am just one of the few honest people around.
In a burst of calculated sincerity—miscalculated sincerity, it turns out—I tell one of the girls how the sight of her breasts pressing against her arms had led me to wish I were those arms. And is this so different, I ask, pushing on with the charm, from Romeo, beneath Juliet’s balcony, whispering, “See! how she leans her cheek upon her hand: / O! that I were a glove upon that hand,/ That I might touch that cheek.” Apparently it is quite different. During my last year at college there are times when the phone actually goes dead at the other end after I announce who is calling, and the few nice girls who are still willing to take their chances and go out alone with me are, I am told (by the nice girls themselves), considered nearly suicidal.

  I also continue to earn the amused disdain of my high-minded friends in the drama society. Now the satirists among them have it that I have given up holy orders to take on our cheerleading squad; and a far cry, that, from enacting the sexual angst of Strindberg and O’Neill. Well, so they think.

  In fact, there is only one cheerleader in my life to bring to me the unadulterated agonies of a supreme frustration and render ridiculous my rakish dreams, a certain Marcella “Silky” Walsh, from Plattsburg, New York. Doomed longing begins when I attend a basketball game one night to watch her perform, having met her in the university cafeteria line that afternoon and gotten a glimpse up close of that bounteous cushion, that most irresistible of bonbons, her lower lip. There is a cheer wherein each of the girls on the squad places one fist on her hip and with the other rhythmically pumps away at the air, all the while arching farther and farther back from the waist. To the seven other girls in brief, white, pleated skirts and bulky white sweaters the sequence of movements seems only so much peppy gymnastic display, to be executed with unsparing energy and at the edge of hilarity. Only in the slowly upturning belly of Marcella Walsh is there the smoldering suggestion (inescapable to me) of an offering, of an invitation, of a lust that is eager and unconscious and so clearly (to my eyes) begging to be satisfied. Yes, she alone seems (to me, to me) to sense that the tame and harnessed vehemence of this insipid cheer is but the thinnest disguise for the raw chant to be uttered while a penis propels into ecstasy that rising pelvis of hers. Oh, God, how can my coveting that pelvis thrust so provocatively toward the mouth of the howling mob, how can coveting those hard and tiny fists which speak to me of the pleasantest of all struggles, how can coveting those long and strong tomboyish legs that quiver ever so slightly as the arc is made and her silky hair (from which derives her pet name) sweeps back against the gymnasium floor—how can coveting the minutest pulsations of her being be “meaningless” or “trivial,” “beneath” either me or her, while passionately rooting for Syracuse to win the NCAA basketball championship makes sense?