The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  I can’t, for the sake of us all, fall out of a chair at dinner. Yet once again I am overcome by a terrible physical weakness. I am afraid to reach for my wineglass for fear that I will not have sufficient strength to carry it the distance to my mouth.

  “How about a record?” I say to Claire.

  “That new Bach?”

  A record of trio sonatas. We have been listening to it all week. The week before, it had been a Mozart quartet; the week before that, the Elgar cello concerto. We just keep turning over one record again and again and again until finally we have had enough. It is all one hears coming and going through the house, music that almost seems by now to be the by-product of our comings and goings, compositions exuded by our sense of well-being. All we ever hear is the most exquisite music.

  Seemingly with a good reason, I manage to leave the table before something frightening happens.

  The phonograph and speakers in the living room are Claire’s, carried up from the city in the back seat of the car. So are most of the records hers. So are the curtains sewed together for the windows, and the corduroy spread she made to cover the battered daybed, and the two china dogs by the fireplace, which once belonged to her grandmother and became hers on her twenty-fifth birthday. As a child on her way home from school she used to stop and have tea and toast with her grandmother, and practice on the piano there; then, armed at least with that, she could continue to the battlefield of her house. On her own she decided to have that abortion. So I would not be burdened by a duty? So I could choose her just for herself? But is the notion of duty so utterly horrendous? Why didn’t she tell me she was pregnant? Is there not a point on life’s way when one yields to duty, welcomes duty as once one yielded to pleasure, to passion, to adventure—a time when duty is the pleasure, rather than pleasure the duty …

  The exquisite music begins. I return to the porch, not quite so pale as when I left. I sit back down at the table and sip my wine. Yes, I can raise and lower a glass. I can focus my thoughts on another subject. I had better.

  “Mr. Barbatnik,” I say, “my father told us you survived the concentration camps. How did you do it? Do you mind my asking?”

  “Professor, please let me say first how much I appreciate your hospitality to a total stranger. This is the happiest day for me in a very long time. I thought maybe I even forgot how to be happy with people. I thank you all. I thank my new and dear friend, your wonderful father. It was a beautiful day, and, Miss Ovington—”

  “Please call me Claire,” she says.

  “Claire, you are beyond your years and young and adorable as well. And—and all day I have wanted to give you my deep gratitude. For all the lovely things you think to do for people.”

  The two elders have been seated to either side of her, the lover directly across: with all the love he can muster, he looks upon the fullness of her saucy body and the smallness of her face above the little vase of asters he plucked for her on his morning walk; with all the love at his command, he watches this munificent female creature, now in the moment of her fullest bloom, offer a hand to their shy guest, who takes it, grasps and squeezes it, and without relinquishing it begins to speak for the first time with ease and self-assurance, at last at home (just as she had planned it, just as she has made it come to pass). And amid all this, the lover does, in fact, feel more deeply implicated in his own life than at any moment in memory—the true self at its truest, moored by every feeling to its own true home! And yet he continues to imagine that he is being drawn away by a force as incontrovertible as gravity, which is no lie either. As though he is a falling body, helpless as any little apple in the orchard which has broken free and is descending toward the alluring earth.

  But instead of crying, either in his mother tongue or with some rudimentary animalish howl, “Don’t leave me! Don’t go! I’ll miss you bitterly! This moment, and we four together—this is what should be!” he spoons out the last of his custard and attends to the survival story that he has asked to hear.

  “There was a beginning,” Mr. Barbatnik is saying, “there has to be an ending. I am going to live to see this monstrosity come to an end. This is what I told myself every single morning and night.”

  “But how was it they didn’t send you to the ovens?”

  How do you come to be here, with us? Why is Claire here? Why not Helen and our child? Why not my mother? And in ten years’ time … who then? To build an intimate life anew, out of nothing, when I am forty-five? To start over again with everything at fifty? To be forever a beweeper of my outcast state? I can’t! I won’t!

  “They couldn’t kill everybody,” says Mr. Barbatnik. “This I knew. Somebody has to be left, if only one person. And so I would tell myself, this one person will be me. I worked for them in the coal mines where they sent me. With the Poles. I was a young man then, and strong. I worked like it was my own coal mine inherited from my father. I told myself that this was what I wanted to do. I told myself that this work I was doing was for my child. I told myself different things every single day to make it just that I could last till that night. And that’s how I lasted. Only when the Russians started coming so quick all of a sudden, the Germans took us and at three in the morning started us off on a march. Days and days and days, until I stopped keeping track. It went on and on, and people dropping every place you looked, and sure, I told myself again that if one is left it is going to be me. But by then I knew somehow that even if I made it to the destination where we were going, when I got there they would shoot whoever of us was left. So this is how come I ran away after weeks and weeks of marching without a stop to wherever in God’s name it was. I hid in the woods and at night I came out and the German farmers fed me. Yes, that’s true,” he says, as he stares down at his large hand, in the candlelight looking very nearly as wide as a spade and as heavy as a crowbar, and enfolding within it Claire’s thin, fine fingers with their delicate bones and knuckles. “The individual German, he isn’t so bad, you know. But put three Germans together in a room and you can kiss the good world goodbye.”

  “And then what happened?” I ask, but he continues looking down, as though to contemplate the riddle of this one hand in the other. “How were you saved, Mr. Barbatnik?”

  “One night a German farm woman said to me that the Americans are here. I thought she must be lying. I figured, don’t come back here to her, she’s up to something no good. But the next day I saw a tank through the trees, rolling down the road, with a white star, and I ran out, screaming at the top of my lungs.”

  Claire says, “You must have looked so strange by then. How did they know who you were?”

  “They knew. I wasn’t the first one. We were all coming out of our holes. What was left of us. I lost a wife and two parents, my brother, two sisters, and a three-year-old daughter.”

  Claire groans, “Oh,” as though she has just been pierced by a needle. “Mr. Barbatnik, we are asking you too many questions, we shouldn’t…”

  He shakes his head. “Darling, you live, you ask questions. Maybe it’s why we live. It seems that way.”

  “I tell him,” says my father, “that he should make a book out of all he went through. I can think of some people I’d like to give it to read. If they could read it, maybe they would shake their heads that they can be the way they are, and this man can be so kind and good.”

  “And before the war started?” I ask him. “You were a young man then. What did you want to be?”

  Probably because of the strength of his arms and the size of his hands I expect to hear him say a carpenter or a mason. In America he drove a taxi for over twenty years.

  “A human being,” he answers, “someone that could see and understand how we lived, and what was real, and not to flatter myself with lies. This was always my ambition from when I was a small child. In the beginning I was like everybody, a good cheder boy. But I personally, with my own hands, liberated myself from all that at sixteen years. My father could have killed me, but I absolutely did not want to be
a fanatic. To believe in what doesn’t exist, no, that wasn’t for me. These are just the people who hate the Jews, these fanatics. And there are Jews who are fanatics too,” he tells Claire, “and also walk around in a dream. But not me. Not for a second since I was sixteen years old and told my father what I refuse to pretend.”

  “If he wrote a book,” says my father, “it should be called ‘The Man Who Never Said Die.’”

  “And here you married again?” I ask.

  “Yes. She had been in a concentration camp also. Three years ago next month she passed away—like your own mother, from cancer. She wasn’t even sick. One night after dinner she is washing the dishes. I go in to turn on the TV, and suddenly I hear a crash from the kitchen. ‘Help me, I’m in trouble.’ When I run into the kitchen she is on the floor. ‘I couldn’t hold on to the ditch,’ she says. She says ‘ditch’ instead of ‘dish.’ The word alone gave me the willies. And her eyes. It was awful. I knew then and there that she was done for. Two days later they tell us that cancer is already in her brain. And it happened out of nowhere.” Without a trace of animus—just to keep the record straight—he adds, “How else?”

  “Too terrible,” Claire says.

  After my father has gone around to each candle to snuff out the flame—blowing even at those already expired, just to be sure—we step into the garden for Claire to show them the other planets visible from the earth tonight. Talking toward their upturned eyeglasses she explains about the Milky Way, answers questions about shooting stars, points out, as she does to her sixth-graders—as she did with me on our first night here—that mere speck of a star adjacent to the handle of the Little Dipper which the Greek soldiers had to discern to qualify for battle. Then she accompanies them back into the house; if they should awaken in the morning before we do, she wants them to know where there is coffee and juice. I remain in the garden with Dazzle. I don’t know what to think. I don’t want to know. I want only to climb by myself to the top of the hill. I remember our gondola rides in Venice. “Are you sure we didn’t die and go to heaven?” “You’ll have to ask the gondolier.”

  Through the living-room window I see the three of them standing around the coffee table. Claire has turned the record over and put it back on the turntable to play. My father is holding the album of Shakespeare medals in his hands. It appears that he is reading aloud from the backs of the medallions.

  Some minutes later she joins me on the weathered wooden bench at the top of the hill. Side by side, without speaking, we look up again at the familiar stars. We do this nearly every night. Everything we have done this summer we have done nearly every night, afternoon, and morning. Every day calling out from the kitchen to the porch, from the bedroom to the bath, “Clarissa, come see, the sun is setting,” “Claire, there’s a hummingbird,” “Sweetheart, what’s the name of that star?”

  For the first time all day she gives in to exhaustion. “Oh, my,” she says, and lays her head on my shoulder. I can feel the air she breathes slowly filling, then slowly leaving her body.

  After inventing a constellation of my own of the sky’s brightest lights, I say to her, “It’s a simple Chekhov story, isn’t it?”

  “Isn’t what?”

  “This. Today. The summer. Some nine or ten pages, that’s all. Called ‘The Life I Formerly Led.’ Two old men come to the country to visit a healthy, handsome young couple, brimming over with contentment. The young man is in his middle thirties, having recovered finally from the mistakes of his twenties. The young woman is in her twenties, the survivor of a painful youth and adolescence. They have every reason to believe they have come through. It looks and feels to both of them as though they have been saved, and in large part by one another. They are in love. But after dinner by candlelight, one of the old men tells of his life, about the utter ruination of a world, and about the blows that keep on coming. And that’s it. The story ends just like this: her pretty head on his shoulder; his hand stroking her hair; their owl hooting; their constellations all in order—their medallions all in order; their guests in their freshly made beds; and their summer cottage, so cozy and inviting, just down the hill from where they sit together wondering about what they have to fear. Music is playing in the house. The most lovely music there is. ‘And both of them knew that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.’ That’s the last line of ‘Lady with a Lapdog.’”

  “Are you really frightened of something?”

  “I seem to be saying I am, don’t I?”

  “But of what?”

  Her soft, clever, trusting, green eyes are on me now. All that conscientious, schoolroom attention of hers is focused upon me—and what I will answer. After a moment I tell her, “I don’t know really. Yesterday at the drugstore I saw that they had portable oxygen units up on the shelf. The kid there showed me how they work, and I bought one. I put it in the bathroom closet. It’s back of the beach towels. In case anything should happen to anyone tonight.”

  “Oh, but nothing is going to happen. Why should it?”

  “No reason. Only when he was going on like that about the past with that couple who own the hotel, I wished I had brought it along in the car.”

  “David, he isn’t going to die just from getting heated up about the past. Oh, sweetheart,” she says, kissing my hand and holding it to her cheek, “you’re worn down, that’s all. He gets so worked up, he can wear you to a frazzle—but he means so well. And he’s obviously still in the best of health. He’s fine. You’re just exhausted. It’s time for bed, that’s all.”

  It’s time for bed, that’s all. Oh, innocent beloved, you fail to understand and I can’t tell you. I can’t say it, not tonight, but within a year my passion will be dead. Already it is dying and I am afraid that there is nothing I can do to save it. And nothing that you can do. Intimately bound—bound to you as to no one else!—and I will not be able to raise a hand to so much as touch you … unless first I remind myself that I must. Toward the flesh upon which I have been grafted and nurtured back toward something like mastery over my life, I will be without desire. Oh, it’s stupid! Idiotic! Unfair! To be robbed like this of you! And of this life I love and have hardly gotten to know! And robbed by whom? It always comes down to myself!

  And so it is I see myself back in Klinger’s waiting room; and despite the presence there of all those Newsweeks and New Yorkers, I am no sympathetic, unspectacular sufferer out of a muted Chekhov tale of ordinary human affliction. No, more hideous by far, more like Gogol’s berserk and mortified amputee, who rushes to the newspaper office to place a maniacal classified ad seeking the return of the nose that has decided to take leave of his face. Yes, the butt of a ridiculous, vicious, inexplicable joke! Here, you therapeutic con man, I’m back, and even worse than before! Did all you said, followed every instruction, unswervingly pursued the healthiest of regimens—even took it on myself to study the passions in my classroom, to submit to scrutiny those who have scrutinized the subject most pitilessly … and here is the result! I know and I know and I know, I imagine and I imagine and I imagine, and when the worst happens, I might as well know nothing! You might as well know nothing! And feed me not the consolations of the reality principle! Just find it for me before it’s too late! The perfect young woman is waiting! That dream of a girl and the most livable of lives! And here I hand to the dapper, portly, clever physician the advertisement headed “LOST,” describing what it looked like when last seen, its real and sentimental worth, and the reward that I will offer anyone giving information leading to its recovery: “My desire for Miss Claire Ovington—a Manhattan private-school teacher, five feet ten inches tall, one hundred and thirty-eight pounds, fair hair, silvery-green eyes, the kindest, most loving, and loyal nature—has mysteriously vanished…”

  And the doctor’s reply? That perhaps it was never in my possession to begin with? Or that, obviously, what has disappeared I must learn to live without …

  All night long, bad dreams sweep through me like water through a
fish’s gills. Near dawn I awaken to discover that the house is not in ashes nor have I been abandoned in my bed as an incurable. My willing Clarissa is with me still! I raise her nightgown up along the length of her unconscious body, and with my lips begin to press and tug her nipples until the pale, velvety, childlike areolae erupt in tiny granules and her moan begins. But even while I suck in a desperate frenzy at the choicest morsel of her flesh, even as I pit all my accumulated happiness, and all my hope, against my fear of transformations yet to come, I wait to hear the most dreadful sound imaginable emerge from the room where Mr. Barbatnik and my father lie alone and insensate, each in his freshly made bed.

  BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH

  Goodbye, Columbus

  Letting Go

  When She Was Good

  Portnoy’s Complaint

  Our Gang

  The Breast

  The Great American Novel

  My Life as a Man

  Reading Myself and Others

  The Professor of Desire

  Copyright © 1977 by Philip Roth

  All rights reserved

  Published simultaneously in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto

  Sections of this book appeared, in somewhat different form, in American Poetry Review, Harper’s, Penthouse, and The New York Times Book Review

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Roth, Philip. The professor of desire. I. Title.

  PZ4.R8454Pr [PS3568.0855] 813' 5'4 77-24032

  eISBN 9781466846463

  First eBook edition: May 2013