The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  Her husband shakes my hand. I had been expecting someone taller and older—I suppose one usually does. Lowery has a close-cropped black beard, round tortoise-shell glasses, and a compact, powerful, athletic build. Both are dressed in jeans and sandals and colored polo shirts and have their hair cut in the Prince Valiant style. The only jewelry either wears is a wedding ring. All of which tells me practically nothing. Maybe the emeralds are home in the vault.

  We walk around as though they are prospective buyers who have been sent up by the real-estate agent to look at the house; as though they are the new couple from down the road who have stopped by to introduce themselves; as though they are what they are—ex-wife with new husband, someone now meaning nothing, artifact of relatively little remaining historical interest uncovered during an ordinary day’s archaeological excavation. Yes, giving her the directions to our so perfect lair turns out to have been neither a foolish nor, God knows, a dangerous mistake. Otherwise, how would I have known that I have been wholly de-Helenized too, that the woman can neither harm me nor charm me, that I am unbewitchable by all but the most loving and benign of feminine spirits. How right Claire was to caution me against being unduly anxious; before, of course, she went ahead and—doubtless because of my own confusion upon hanging up the phone—became unduly anxious herself.

  Claire is up ahead now with Les Lowery. They are headed toward the blackened, ruined oak tree at the edge of the woods. Early in the summer, during a dramatic daylong storm, the tree was struck by lightning and severed in two. While we all walked together around the house and through the garden, Claire had been talking, just a little feverishly, about the wild thunderstorms of early July; a little feverishly, and a little childishly. I had not imagined beforehand just how ominous Helen would seem to her, given the tales of her troublemaking that I have told; I suppose I had not realized how often I must have told them to her in the first months we were together. No wonder she has latched on to the quiet husband, who does in fact seem closer to her in age and spirit, and who, it turns out, is also a subscriber to Natural History and the Audubon Magazine. Some minutes earlier, on the porch, she had identified for the Lowerys the unusual Cape Cod seashells arranged in a wicker tray in the center of the dining table, between the antique pewter candlesticks that were her grandmother’s gift upon her graduation from college.

  While my mate and her mate are examining the burned-out trunk of the oak tree, Helen and I drift back to the porch. She is telling me all about him, still. He is a lawyer, a mountain climber, a skier, he is divorced, has two adolescent daughters; in partnership with an architect he has already made a small fortune as a housing developer; lately he has been in the news for the work he has been doing as investigating counsel for a California State Legislature committee unraveling connections between organized crime and the Marin County Police … Outside I see that Lowery has moved past the oak tree and onto the path that cuts up through the woods to the steep rock formations that Claire has been photographing all summer. Claire and Dazzle appear to be headed back down to the house.

  I say to Helen, “He looks a bit young to be such a Karenin.”

  “I’m sure I’d be sardonic too,” she replies, “if I were you and thought I was still me. I was surprised you even came to the phone. But that’s because you are a nice man. You always were, actually.”

  “Oh, Helen, what’s going on here? Save the ‘nice man’ stuff for my tombstone. You may have a new life, but this lingo…”

  “I had a lot of time to think when I was sick. I thought about—”

  But I don’t want to know. “Tell me,” I say, interrupting her, “how was your conversation with the Schonbrunns?”

  “I spoke to Arthur. She wasn’t home.”

  “And how did he take hearing from you after all this time?”

  “Oh, he took it quite well.”

  “Frankly I’m surprised he offered assistance. I’m surprised you asked him for it. As I remember, he was never a great fan of yours—nor you of theirs.”

  “Arthur and I have changed our minds about each other.”

  “Since when? You used to be very funny about him.”

  “I’m not any more. I don’t ridicule people who admit what they want. Or at least admit to what they don’t have.”

  “And what does Arthur want? Are you telling me that all along Arthur wanted you?”

  “I don’t know about all along.”

  “Oh, Helen, I find this hard to believe.”

  “I never heard anything easier to believe.”

  “And what exactly is it I’m supposed to be believing, again?”

  “When we two got back from Hong Kong, when you moved out and I was alone, he telephoned one night and asked if he could come over to talk. He was very concerned about you. So he came from his office—it was about nine—and he talked about your unhappiness for nearly an hour. I said finally that I didn’t know what any of it had to do with me any more, and then he asked if he and I might meet in San Francisco for lunch one day. I said I didn’t know, I was feeling pretty miserable myself, and he kissed me. And then he made me sit down and he sat down and he explained to me in detail that he hadn’t expected to do that, and that it didn’t mean what I thought it meant. He was happily married still, and after all these years he still had a strong physical relationship with Debbie, and in fact he owed her his whole life. And then he told me a harrowing story about some crazy girl, some librarian he had almost married in Minnesota, and how she had once gone after him with a fork at breakfast and stabbed his hand. He’d never gotten over what might have happened to him if he had caved in and married her—he thinks it actually might have ended in a murder. He showed me the scar from the fork. He said his salvation was meeting Debbie, and that he owes everything he’s accomplished to her devotion and love. Then he tried to kiss me again, and when I said I didn’t think it was a good idea, he told me I was perfectly right and that he had misjudged me completely and he still wanted to have lunch with me. I really couldn’t take any more confusion, so I said yes. He arranged for us to eat at a place in Chinatown where, I assure you, nobody he knew or I knew or anybody knew could possibly see us together. And that was it. But then that summer, when they moved East, he began writing letters. I still get them, every few months or so.”

  “Go on. What do they say?”

  “Oh, they’re awfully well-written,” she says, smiling. “He must write some of those sentences ten times over before he’s completely satisfied. I think they may be the kind of letters the poetry editor of the college magazine writes late at night to his girl friend at Smith. ‘The weather, as clear and as sharp as a fish spine,’ and so on. And sometimes he includes lines from great poems about Venus, Cleopatra, and Helen of Troy.”

  “‘Lo, this is she that was the world’s desire.’”

  “That’s right—that’s one of them. I thought it was a bit insulting, actually. Except I suppose it can’t be because it’s so ‘great.’ Anyway, he always somehow or other lets me know that I don’t have to answer; so I don’t. Why are you smiling? It’s really rather sweet. Well, it’s something. Who’da thunk it?”

  “I smile,” I say, “because I’ve had my own Schonbrunn letters—from her.”

  “Now, that’s hard to believe.”

  “No, not if you saw them. No great lines of poetry for me.”

  Claire is still some fifty or so feet away, yet both of us stop speaking as she makes her way back to the house. Why? Who knows why!

  And if only we hadn’t! Why didn’t I just talk nonsense, tell a joke, recite a poem, anything so that Claire hadn’t to come through the screen door into this conspiratorial silence. Hadn’t to come in to see me sitting across from Helen, charmed in spite of myself.

  Immediately she becomes stony—and reaches a decision. “I’m going swimming.”

  “What’s happened to Les?” asks Helen.

  “Took a walk.”

  “You sure you don’t want some iced tea?” I ask C
laire. “Why don’t we all have some iced tea?”

  “No. Bye.” That single adolescent syllable of farewell for the guest, then she’s gone.

  From where I am sitting I am able to watch our car pass down the hill to the road. What does Claire think we are plotting? What are we plotting?

  Says Helen, when the car is out of sight, “She’s terribly sweet.”

  “And I’m a ‘nice man,’” I say.

  “I’m sorry if I upset your friend by coming here. I didn’t mean to.”

  “She’ll be all right. She’s a strong girl.”

  “And I mean you no harm. That isn’t why I wanted to see you.”

  I am silent.

  “I did mean you harm once, that’s true,” she says.

  “You weren’t solely responsible for the misery.”

  “What you did to me you did without wanting to; you did because you were provoked. But I think now that I actually set out to torture you.”

  “You’re rewriting history, Helen. It’s not necessary. We tormented each other, all right, but it wasn’t out of malice. It was confusion, and it was ignorance, and it was other things too, but had it been malice, we wouldn’t have been together for very long.”

  “I used to burn that fucking toast on purpose.”

  “As I remember, it was the fucking eggs that were burned. The fucking toast never got put in.”

  “I used to not mail your letters on purpose.”

  “Why are you saying these things? To castigate yourself, to somehow absolve yourself, or just to try to get a rise out of me? Even if it’s true, I don’t want to know it. That’s all dead.”

  “I just always hated so the ways that people killed their time. I had this grand life all planned out, you see.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, that’s all dead too. Now I take what I can get, and I’m grateful to have it.”

  “Oh, don’t overdo the ‘chastened’ bit, if that’s what this is. Mr. Lowery doesn’t sound like the scrapings to me. He doesn’t look it, either. He looks like a very forceful person who knows what he’s about. He sounds like somebody to conjure with, taking on the Mafia and the police. He sounds like a rather courageous man of the world. Just right for you. It certainly looks like he agrees with you.”

  “Does it?”

  “You look terrific,” I say—and am sorry I said it. So why then do I add, “You look marvelous.”

  For the first time since Claire came onto the porch, we fall silent again. We look unflinchingly at one another, as though we are strangers who dare, finally, to stare openly and unambiguously—the prelude to leaping precipitously into the most shameless and exciting copulation. I suppose there is no way we can avoid a little—if not a little more than a little—flirtation. Maybe I ought to say that. And then again, maybe I ought not. Maybe I ought just to look away.

  “What were you sick with?” I ask.

  “Sick with? It seemed like everything. I must have seen fifty doctors. All I did was sit in waiting rooms and have X-rays taken and blood taken and have cortisone injections and wait around drugstores to have prescriptions filled, and then bolt down the pills, hoping they’d save me on the spot. You should have seen my medicine chest. Instead of Countess Olga’s lovely creams and lotions, vials and vials of hideous little pills—and none of them did a thing, except to ruin my stomach. My nose wouldn’t stop running for over a year. I sneezed for hours on end, I couldn’t breathe, my face puffed up, my eyes itched all the time, and then I began breaking out in horrible rashes. I’d pray when I went to sleep that they’d just go away the way they came, that they’d be gone for good in the morning. One allergist told me to move to Arizona, another told me it wouldn’t help because it was all in my head, and another explained in great detail to me how I was allergic to myself, or something very like that, and so I went home and got into bed and pulled the covers over my face and daydreamed about having all the blood drawn out of me and replaced by somebody else’s blood, blood I could get through the rest of my life with. I nearly went crazy. Some mornings I wanted to throw myself out the window.”

  “But you did get better.”

  “I began seeing Les,” Helen says. “That’s how it seems to have happened. The ailments all began to subside, one by one. I didn’t know how he could bear me. I was hideous.”

  “Probably not so hideous as you thought. It sounds as though he fell in love with you.”

  “After I got well I got frightened. I thought that without him I’d start getting sick again. And start drinking again—because somehow he even got me to stop that. I said to him the night he first came to pick me up, looking so strong and cocky and butch, I said, ‘Look, Mr. Lowery, I’m thirty-four years old, and I’m sick as a dog, and I don’t like to be buggered.’ And he said, ‘I know how old you are, and everybody gets sick some time, and buggering doesn’t interest me.’ And so we went out, and he was so marvelously sure of himself, and he fell in love with me—and of course in love with rescuing me. But I didn’t love him. And I wanted time and again to be finished with him. Only when it was over, when it should have been over, I got so frightened … So we were married.”

  I don’t reply. I look away.

  “I’m going to have a baby,” she says.

  “Congratulations. When?”

  “Soon as I can. You see, I don’t care any more about being happy. I’ve given that up. All I care about is not being tortured. I’ll do anything. I’ll have ten babies, I’ll have twenty if he wants them. And he might. There is a man, David, who has no doubts about himself at all. He had a wife and two children even while he was in law school—he was already in the housing business in law school—and now he wants a second family, with me. And I’ll do it. What else can she do, who was once the world’s desire? Own a smart little antique shop? Be one of those fading beauties? Take a degree and go out and run something? Be one of those fading beauties?”

  “If you can’t be twenty years old and sailing past the junks at sunset … But we have had that discussion. It’s no longer my business.”

  “What about your business? Will you marry Miss Ovington?”

  “I might.”

  “What holds you back?”

  I don’t answer.

  “She’s young, she’s pretty, she’s intelligent, she’s educated, and under that robe she seemed quite lovely. And as a bonus there’s something childlike and innocent that I certainly never had. Something that knows how to be content, I would think. How do they get that way, do you know? How do they get so good? I wondered if she wouldn’t be like that. Bright and pretty and good. Leslie is bright and pretty and good. Oh, David, how do you stand it?”

  “Because I’m bright and pretty and good myself.”

  “No, my dear old comrade, not the way they are. They come by it naturally, naïvely. Resist as you will, it’s not quite the same, not even for a master repressive like yourself. You’re not one of them, and you’re not poor Arthur Schonbrunn, either.”

  I don’t reply.

  “Doesn’t she drive you even a little crazy being so bright and pretty and good?” asks Helen. “With her seashells and her flower bed and her doggie, and her recipes tacked up over the sink?”

  “Is this what you came here to tell me, Helen?”

  “No. It isn’t. Of course it isn’t. I didn’t come here to say any of these things. You’re a bright fellow—you know very well why I came. To show you my husband. To show you how I’ve changed, for the better, of course; and … and other assorted lies. I thought I might even fool myself. David, I came here because I wanted to talk to a friend, strange as that may sound right now. I sometimes think of you as the only friend I’ve got left. I did when I was sick. Isn’t that odd? I almost called you one night—but I knew I was none of your business now. You see, I’m pregnant. I want you to tell me something. Tell me what you think I should do. Somebody has to. I’m two months pregnant, and if I wait any longer, well, then I’ll have to go ahead and have it. And
I can’t stand him any more. But then I can’t stand anyone. Everything everyone says is somehow wrong and drives me crazy. I don’t mean I argue with people. I wouldn’t dare. I listen and I nod and I smile. You should see how I please people these days. I listen to Les, and I nod and I smile, and I think I’ll die of boredom. There’s nothing he does now that doesn’t irritate me nearly to death. But I can’t be sick alone like that ever again. I couldn’t take it. I can take loneliness, and I can take physical misery too, but I can’t take them together like that ever again. It was too horrid and too relentless, and I haven’t courage any more. I seem to have used it all up; inside me I feel there’s no courage left. I have to have this baby. I have to tell him I’m pregnant—and have it. Because if I don’t, I don’t know what will happen to me. I can’t leave him. I’m too terrified to be sick again like that, itching to death, unable to breathe—and it doesn’t help to be told it’s all in one’s head, because that doesn’t make it go away. Only he does. Yes, he made it all go away! Oh, this is all so crazy. None of this had to be! Because if that wife of Jimmy’s had been run down when he had it all arranged, that would have been it. I would have had what I wanted. And I wouldn’t have thought twice about her, either. Like it or not, that’s the truth about me. I wouldn’t have had a moment’s stinking guilt. I would have been happy. And she would have gotten what she deserved. But instead I was good—and she’s made them both miserable. I refused to be terrible, and the result is this terrible unhappiness. Each night I toss in my bed with the nightmare of how much I don’t love anybody.”