The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  * * *

  Each winter my parents come down to New York City to spend three or four days visiting family, friends, and favorite guests. In times gone by, we all used to stay on West End Avenue with my father’s younger brother, Larry, a successful kosher caterer, and his wife, Sylvia, the Benvenuto Cellini of strudel, and, in childhood, my favorite aunt. Until I was fourteen, I would, to my astonished delight, be put to bed there in the same room with my cousin Lorraine. Sleeping beside a bed with a live girl in it—a “developing” girl, at that—going out to dine at Moskowitz and Lupowitz (on food described by my father as nearly as good as what is prepared in the kitchen of the Hungarian Royale), waiting in subfreezing temperatures to get in to see the Rockettes, sipping cocoa amid the thick draperies and the imposing furniture sets of haberdashery wholesalers and produce merchants whom I have known only in their voluminous half-sleeve shirts and their drooping swim trunks, and who are called by my father the Apple King and the Herring King and the Pajama King—everything about these New York visits hold a secret thrill for me, and invariably from “overexcitement” I develop a “strep throat” on the drive home, and back on our mountaintop have to spend at least two or three days in bed recovering. “We didn’t visit Herbie,” I say sullenly, only seconds before our departure—to which my mother invariably responds, “A summer isn’t enough with him? We have to travel to Brooklyn to make a special trip?” “Belle, he’s teasing you,” my father says, but on the sly shakes a fist in my direction, as though for mentioning the Fart King to my mother I deserve no less than a blow to the head.

  Now that I am back East and my uncle and aunt live in Cedarhurst, Long Island, I respond by phone to a letter from my father and invite my parents to stay in my apartment rather than at a hotel when they come down for their annual winter visit. The two rooms on West Seventy-fifth Street are not actually mine but, through an ad in the Times, have been sublet, furnished, from a young actor who has gone to try his luck in Hollywood. There is a crimson damask on the bedroom walls, perfumes lined up on a bathroom shelf, and, in boxes that I discover at the rear of the linen closet, a half-dozen wigs. The night I find them I indulge my curiosity and try a couple on. I look like my mother’s sister.

  Near the beginning of my occupancy, the phone rings one night and a man asks, “Where’s Mark?” “He’s in California. He’ll be there for two years.” “Yeah, sure. Look, you just tell him Wally’s in town.” “But he’s not here. I have an address for him out there.” I begin to recite it, but the voice, grown gruff and agitated now, interrupts: “Then who are you?” “His tenant.” “Is that what they call it in the thee-yater? What do you look like, sweetpants? You got big blue eyes too?” When the calls persist, I have the telephone number changed, but then it is through the intercom that connects my apartment to the downstairs hallway of the brownstone that the repartee continues. “You just tell your little pal—” “Mark is in California, you can reach him out there.” “Ha ha—that’s a good one. What’s your name, honey? Come to the doorway and we’ll see whether I can reach you.” “Come on, Wally, leave me alone. He’s gone. Go away.” “You like the rough stuff too?” “Oh, take off, will you?” “Take what off, sweet-pants? What do you want me to take off?” So the flirtation goes.

  Nights when I am at my loneliest, nights when I start talking to myself and to people who are not present, I sometimes have to suppress a powerful urge to call for help into the intercom. What holds me back isn’t that it makes no sense but, rather, the fear that one of my neighbors or, what is worse, Patient Wally will be standing in the entryway just as my strident cry comes through; what I fear is the kind of help I might get—if not my homosexual suitor, the Bellevue emergency squad. So I go into the bathroom instead, close the door behind me, and leaning over the mirror to look at my own drawn face, I let it out. “I want somebody! I want somebody! I want somebody!” Sometimes I can go on like this for minutes at a time in an attempt to bring on a fit of weeping that will leave me limp and, for a while at least, empty of longing for another. I of course am not so far gone as to believe that screaming aloud in a closed-off room will make the somebody I want appear. Besides, who is it? If I knew I wouldn’t have to holler into the mirror—I could write or phone. I want somebody, I cry—and it is my parents who arrive.

  I carry their suitcases upstairs while my father lugs the Scotch cooler in which are packed some two-dozen round plastic containers of cabbage soup, matzoh-ball soup, kugel, and flanken, all frozen and neatly labeled. Inside the apartment my mother takes an envelope from her purse—“DAVID” is typed exactly at the center and underlined in red. The envelope contains instructions for me typewritten on hotel stationery: time required for the defrosting and heating of each dish, details as to seasoning. “Read it,” she says, “and see if you have any questions.” My father says, “How about if he reads it after you get out of your coat and sit down?” “I’m fine,” she says. “You’re tired,” he tells her. “David, you have enough room in your freezer? I didn’t know how big a freezer you had here.” “Mamma, room to spare,” I say lightly. But when I open the refrigerator she groans as though her throat has just been slit. “One this and one that, and that’s it?” she cries. “Look at that lemon, it looks older than I do. How do you eat?” “Out, mostly.” “And your father told me I was overdoing it.” “You’ve been tired,” he says to her, “and you were overdoing.” “I knew he wasn’t taking care of himself,” she says. “You’re the one who has to take care of herself,” he says. “What is it?” I ask, “what’s the matter with you, Ma?” “I had a little pleurisy, and your father is making it into a production. I get a little pain when I knit for too long. That’s the whole outcome of all the money thrown away on doctors and tests.”

  She does not know—nor do I, until my father comes with me the next morning to buy a paper and some things for breakfast and then to walk me gravely up toward where Larry and Sylvia used to put us all up on West End Avenue—that she is dying of cancer that has spread from the pancreas. This then explains his letter saying, “Maybe if we could stay with you this one time…” Does it also explain her request to visit landmarks she has not been to in decades? I almost believe she knows just what is happening and this display of exuberance is to spare him from knowing she knows. Each protecting the other from the horrible truth—my parents like two brave and helpless children … And what can I do about it? “But dying—when?” I ask him as we turn back, the two of us in tears, to my apartment. For several moments he cannot answer. “That’s the worst of it,” he manages finally to say. “Five weeks, five months, five years—five minutes. Every doctor tells me something different!”

  And back at the apartment she asks me again, “Will you take us to Greenwich Village? Will you take us to the Metropolitan Museum of Art? When I worked for Mr. Clark one of the girls used to eat the most delicious green noodles at an Italian restaurant in Greenwich Village. I wish I could remember the name. It couldn’t be Tony’s, could it, Abe?” “Honeybunch,” my father says, his voice already tinged with grief, “it wouldn’t even be there after all this time.” “We could look—and what if it was!” she says, turning with excitement to me. “Oh, David, how Mr. Clark loved the Museum of Art! Every Sunday when his sons were growing up he took them there to see the paintings.”

  I accompany them everywhere, to see the famous Rembrandts at the Metropolitan, to look for a Tony’s that serves green noodles, to visit their oldest and dearest friends, some of whom I haven’t seen in over fifteen years but who kiss and embrace me as though I were still a child, and then, because I am a professor, ask me serious questions about the world situation; we go, as of old, to the zoo and to the planetarium, and finally on a pilgrimage to the building where she was once a legal secretary. Following lunch in Chinatown, we stand at the corner of Broad and Wall Streets on a chilly Sunday afternoon, and, as always, with perfect innocence, she reminisces about her days with the firm. And how different for her it would have been, I think, had
she stayed on to be one of Mr. Clark’s girls for life, one of those virgin spinsters who adore the fatherly boss and play auntie on holidays to the boss’s children. Without the interminable demands of a family-run resort hotel, she might actually have known some serenity, have lived in accordance with her simple gifts for tidiness and order rather than at their mercy. On the other hand, she would never have known my father and me—we would never have been. If only, if only … If only what? She has cancer.

  They sleep in the double bed in the bedroom while I lie awake under a blanket on the living-room sofa. My mother is about to vanish—that’s what it comes down to. And her last memory of her only child will be of his meager, rootless existence—her last memory will be of this lemon I live with! Oh, with what disgust and remorse do I recall the series of mistakes—no, the one habitual and recurrent mistake—that has made these two rooms my home. Instead of being enemies, of providing one another with the ideal enemy, why couldn’t Helen and I have put that effort into satisfying each other, into steady, dedicated living? Would that have been so hard for two such strong-willed people? Should I have said at the very outset, “Look, we’re having a child”? Lying there listening to my mother breathing her last, I try to infuse myself with new resolve: I must, I will, end this purposeless, pointless … and into my thoughts comes Elisabeth, of all people, with the locket around her neck and her broken arm healed. How sweet, how welcoming she would be to my widowed father! But without an Elisabeth, what can I do for him? How ever will he survive up there on his own? Oh, why must it be Helen and Birgitta at one extreme or life with a lemon at the other?

  As the sleepless minutes pass—or, rather, do not seem to pass at all—all the thoughts that can possibly distress me seem to coalesce into an unidentifiable nonsense word that will not let me be. To free myself from its insipid thralldom, I begin to toss angrily from one side of the couch to the other. I feel half in, half out of deep anesthesia—immersed back in the claustrophobic agonies of the recovery room, which I last saw at the age of twelve, following my appendectomy—until the word resolves itself at last into nothing other than the line of keys, read from left to right, on which my mother taught me to rest the tips of my fingers when I learned typing from her on the hotel’s Remington Noiseless. But now that I know the origin of this commonplace alphabetical scrambling, it is worse even than before. As though it is a word after all, and the one that holds within its unutterable syllables all the pain of her baffled energies and her frenetic life. And the pain of my own. I suddenly see myself struggling with my father over her epitaph, the two of us are hurling each other against enormous pieces of rock, while I insist to the stonecutter that ASDFGHJKL be carved beneath her name on the tombstone.

  I cannot sleep. I wonder if it is possible that I will never be able to sleep again. All my thoughts are either simple or crazy, and after a while I cannot distinguish which is which. I want to go into the bedroom and get into their bed. I rehearse in my mind how I will do it. To ease them out of their initial timidity, I will just sit first at the edge of the bed and quietly talk to them about the best of the past. Looking down at their familiar faces side by side on the fresh pillowcases, at their two faces peering out at me from above the sheet drawn up to their chins, I will remind them of how very long it’s been since last we all snuggled up together under a single blanket. Wasn’t it in a tourist cabin just outside Lake Placid? Remember that little box of a room? Was it 1940 or ’41? And, am I right, didn’t it cost Dad just one dollar for the night? Mother thought that it would be good for me to see the Thousand Islands and Niagara Falls during my Easter vacation. That’s where we were headed, in the Dodge. Remember, you told us how Mr. Clark took his little boys each summer to see the sights of Europe; remember all those things you told me that I had never heard before; God, remember me and the two of you and the little Dodge back before the war … and then, when they are smiling, I will take off my robe and crawl into the bed between them. And before she dies, we will all hold each other through one last night and morning. Who will ever know, aside from Klinger, and why should I care what he or anyone makes of it?

  Near midnight the doorbell rings. At the intercom in the kitchenette I depress the lever and ask, “Who is it?”

  “The plumber, sweetpants. Last time you were out. How’s your leak, fixed yet?”

  I don’t respond. My father has come into the living room in his robe. “Somebody you know? At this hour?”

  “Just some clown,” I say, as the bell rings now to the rhythm of “Shave and a Haircut.”

  “What is it?” my mother calls from the bedroom.

  “Nothing, Ma. Go to sleep.”

  I decide to speak into the intercom one more time. “Cut it out or I’m going to call the cops.”

  “Call ’em. Nothing I’m doing is actionable, kiddo. Why don’t you just let me up? I’m not half bad, you know. I’m all bad.”

  My father, standing now at my elbow and listening, has gone a little white.

  “Dad,” I say, “go back to bed. It’s just one of those things that happen in New York. It’s nothing.”

  “He knows you?”

  “No.”

  “Then how does he know to come here? Why does he talk like that?”

  A pause, and the bell is ringing again.

  Thoroughly irritated now, I say, “Because the fellow I sublet from is a homosexual—and, as best I can gather, this was a friend of his.”

  “A Jewish fellow?”

  “Who I rented from? Yes.”

  “Jesus,” snaps my father, “what the hell is the matter with a guy like that?”

  “I think I’m going to have to go downstairs.”

  “By yourself?”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “Don’t be crazy—two is better than one. I’ll come with you.”

  “Dad, that’s not necessary.”

  From the bedroom my mother calls, “Now what?”

  “Nothing,” my father says. “The bell is stuck. We’re going downstairs to fix it.”

  “At this hour?” she calls.

  “We’ll be right back,” my father says to her. “Stay in bed.” To me he whispers, “You got some kind of stick, a bat or something?”

  “No, no—”

  “What if he’s armed? You got an umbrella, at least?”

  In the meantime, the ringing has stopped. “Maybe he’s gone,” I say.

  My father listens.

  “He’s gone,” I say. “He left.”

  My father, however, has no intention of going back to bed now. Closing the door to the bedroom—“Shhhh,” he whispers to my mother, “everything’s fine, go to sleep”—he comes to sit across from the sofa. I can hear how heavily he is breathing as he prepares himself to speak. I am not all that relaxed myself. Propped stiffly up against the pillow, I wait for the bell to start ringing again.

  “You’re not involved”—he clears his throat—“with something you want to tell me about…”

  “Don’t be silly.”

  “Because you left us, Davey, when you were seventeen years old and since then there has been no interfering with the kind of influences you let yourself under.”

  “Dad, I’m not under any ‘influences.’”

  “I want to ask you a question. Outright.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “It’s not about Helen. I never asked you about that, and I don’t want to start now. I always treated her like a daughter-in-law. Didn’t I, didn’t your mother, always with respect—?”

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “I held my tongue. We didn’t want her to turn against us. She can have nothing against us to this day. All things considered, I think we did excellent. I am a liberal person, son—and in my politics even more than liberal. Do you know that in 1924 I voted for Norman Thomas for the governor of New York with the first vote I ever cast? And in ’48 I voted for Henry Wallace—which maybe was meaningless and a mistake, but the point is that I was probably the on
ly hotel owner in the whole country who voted for somebody that everybody was calling a Communist. Which he wasn’t—but the point is, I have never been a narrow man, never. You know—and if you don’t, you should—it was never that the woman was a shiksa that bothered me. Shiksas are a fact of life, and they are not going to go away just because Jewish parents might like it better that way. And why should they? I am a believer in all the races and religions living together in harmony, and that you married a Gentile girl was never the point to your mother and me. I think we did excellent on that score. But that doesn’t mean I could stomach the rest of her and her attitudes. The truth of the matter, if you want to know, is that I didn’t have a good night’s sleep in the three years you were married.”

  “Well, neither did I.”

  “Is that true? Then why the hell didn’t you get out right off the bat? Why did you get in that damn mess to begin with?”

  “You want me to go over that territory, do you?”

  “No, no—you’re right—the hell with it. As far as I’m concerned, if I never hear her name again, that won’t be too soon. You are all I care about.”

  “What do you want to ask?”

  “David, what is Tofrinal, that I see it in the medicine chest, a big bottle full? What are you taking this drug for?”

  “It’s an anti-depressant. Tofranil.”

  He hisses. Disgust, frustration, disbelief, contempt. I must first have heard that sound out of him a hundred years ago, when he had to fire a waiter who wet his bed and stank up the attic where the help slept. “And why do you need that? Who told you to take a thing like that and put it in your bloodstream?”

  “A psychiatrist.”

  “You go to a psychiatrist?”