The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  Soon enough, news reaches me as to what Debbie’s powers of observation have uncovered in our conversation. It is what I should have expected, certainly, and probably what I deserve. The only surprise, really, is my surprise—that, and the vulnerability.

  It seems that at a dinner party at the Schonbrunns’ the hostess had announced to all in attendance that Baumgarten has become David Kepesh’s “alter ego,” “acting out fantasies of aggression against women” David harbors as a consequence of his marriage and its “mortifying” ending. The mortifying ending in Hong Kong—the cocaine, the cops, the works—as well as mortifying tidbits from the beginning and the middle were then narrated for the edification of all. I am given these details by a nice enough man, a guest at the Schonbrunns’, who is no part of this story, and who thought he was doing me a good turn.

  A correspondence ensues. Initiated by me and, alas, perpetuated by me too.

  Dear Debbie:

  Word has reached me that at a dinner party last week you were talking a little freely about my private affairs—namely, my marriage, my “mortifications,” and what you are said to have described as my “aggressive fantasies against women.” How would you know about my fantasies, if I may ask? And why should Helen and I be the subject for dinner conversation among people most of whom I have never even met? For the sake of a friendship with Arthur which goes back some time now, and which we have only just had the chance to rekindle, I hope that you will refrain in the future from discussing with perfect strangers my aggressive fantasies and my mortifying history. Otherwise, it is going to be difficult for me to be myself with Arthur, and, of course, with you.

  Sincerely,

  David

  Dear David:

  I do apologize for blabbing to people who don’t know you, and won’t do it again. Although I would do anything if you’ll tell me the name of the s.o.b. who spilled his and/or her guts. Just so they don’t set their teeth in my rack of lamb again!

  To salve your wounds, I want to add, first, that your name only came up in passing—alas, you weren’t the subject of a whole night’s conversation—and, second, I think you have every justification for resenting Helen as much as you do, and, third, it isn’t really so strange or shameful that your anger with Helen should take the form for now of an association with a young man who punishes women the way that vulture does. But, if you view your friendship with him one way, and I see it another, that’s certainly all right with me—as I think it should be with you.

  Lastly, if I spoke thoughtlessly about Helen to my dinner guests, it is probably because back at Stanford she was, as you well know, rather ostentatious about herself, and consequently a prime topic of conversation among any number of people, including your friends. And you yourself were not averse to talking about her with us, whenever you came home with Arthur.

  But, dear David, enough of this is enough. Will you come to have dinner with us—how is this Friday night? Come, by yourself or with somebody (other than the Visigoth) if you like. If you bring a girl I promise I won’t breathe a word about your misogyny all the time you’re here.

  Love,

  Debbie

  P.S. I’d give anything to know the name of the skunk who turned me in.

  Dear Debbie:

  I can’t say that your reply strikes me as satisfactory. You seem not at all to grasp how indiscreet you were with what you know, and think you know, about me. Surely that I shared certain confidences with Arthur, and he in turn shared them with you, cannot be offered to me as a mitigating factor. Do you understand why? Nor do I see how you can fail to realize that my marriage is still painful to me, and the pain is not lessened when I learn that it is being discussed like so much soap opera by people to whom I once unburdened myself of some of my troubles.

  The spirit in which your letter was written only seems to have worsened the situation for me, and I don’t see any way to accept your invitation.

  David

  Dear David:

  I’m sorry you found my note unsatisfactory. Actually it was purposely superficial in tone—I rather thought it suited what you considered my crime.

  Do you really see me as some harridan hell-bent on sullying your spotless reputation or invading your privacy by vicious, hurtful innuendo? Obviously you do, and that’s monstrous, of course, but simply because you believe it to be so, doesn’t make it so.

  I apologized for speaking carelessly about you to strangers, because I know I do that sometimes. I assumed that what came back to you was just that—foolish and careless. I know I never said anything so awful it would cause you any pain. Remembering back to your own judgments of yourself with the ladies—stories of your student days, remember?—I never dreamt you saw yourself as being beyond reproach. I will admit I never saw you as a perfect angel in relation to women, but neither did I think that summed you up as a person. I did enjoy you and care for you as a friend.

  I must say I would be very sorry to hear that you had flailed out at any of those others who were your friends in California just because they were “indiscreet” enough to mention you in conversation. And to mention you not out of unkindness, or viciousness or malice, but only because they happen to know all you have been through.

  I am afraid that your letter tells me more about you than I care to know.

  Debbie

  Dear David:

  Debbie is replying to your last letter, but now I feel compelled to mix in too.

  It seems to me that Debbie made an effort, stopping short of abject prostration before you, to apologize for what she considered a just complaint. At the same time she tried to indicate by her joking tone that what she did was not as serious as you seem to feel. I agree with her from what I know about the situation, and it strikes me that your last letter, with its aggressive, exasperated, self-righteous tone, is more seriously hurtful than anything Deborah may have been guilty of. I have no idea, by the way, what you think Deborah may have said about you (a little documentation would have helped here), but I can assure you that it was little more than dinner-table conversation that lasted a few minutes and maligned you in no way. I suspect that you may have said a lot worse about her in passing conversations (though presumably not before strangers). It seems to me that friends ought to be more willing to forgive each other their occasional frailties.

  Sincerely,

  Arthur

  Dear Arthur:

  You can’t have it both ways: that Debbie took “a joking tone” or, as she put it, a “purposely superficial … tone” because that best expressed her attitude toward what was bothering me, and that simultaneously she “made an effort short of abject prostration” before me. Debbie’s indiscretion was of course forgivable, and I indicated as much in my first letter. But that she should continue, not only to be so obtuse, but to be so casual about all this, leads me to view her lapse as something other than an example of “occasional frailty” displayed by a friend.

  David

  Dear David:

  I have hesitated about replying to your last letter because it left me with very little to say. I find it incredible you could even imagine Deborah ever meant you any harm. It is also somewhat incredible that you fail to see that in blowing up this situation as you have, you are arguing only too well for the truth of Deborah’s observation about the aggressive nature of your attitude toward women these days. Rather than pressing on with the attack, why don’t you stop and think for a moment why it was you refused to accept the apology she made for her tactlessness at the outset—why did you prefer instead to jeopardize our friendship in order to beat her over the head with her alleged misconduct?

  Short of divorcing Debbie and sending her out in the street in rags, I don’t know what I can do that would prove sufficient to restore friendly relations between you. I’d be grateful to hear any suggestions.

  Sincerely,

  Arthur

  It is Klinger who mercifully utters the magic formula that puts an end to all this. I tell him what I intend t
o say in my next message to Arthur—already half typed in a second draft—about the Freudian noose that he would now like to tighten around my neck. And I am still a little wild about his request, two letters back (and tucked between parentheses), for “a little documentation.” What does he think we are, student and teacher, still Ph.D. candidate and dissertation adviser? Those letters weren’t sent him for a grade! I don’t care how beholden I am supposed to be—I won’t have them saying I am something I am not! I will not be maligned and belittled by her reckless neurotic slander! Nor will I let Helen be slandered either! “Aggressive fantasies”! All that means is I can’t stand her! And why the hell doesn’t he throw her out into the street in rags? It’s a marvelous idea! I’d respect him for it! The whole community would!

  When my day’s tirade has run its course, Klinger says. “So she gossips about you—who the hell pays any attention?”

  Eleven words, but all at once I am, yes, mortified, and see myself for the neurotic fool. So peevish! So purposeless still! Without focus, without meaning—without a single friend! And making only enemies! My angry letters to the Devoted Couple constitute the whole of my critical writing since my return to the East, all I have been able to marshal sufficient concentration, stamina, and wisdom to get down on paper. Why, I spend entire evenings rewriting them for brevity and tone … while my Chekhov book has all but been abandoned. Imagine—drafts and drafts, and of what? Nothing! Oh, something about the drift of things doesn’t look right to me, Doctor. Fending off Wally, fighting with Debbie, hanging on for dear life to your apron strings—oh, where is the way of living that will make all this nothingness truly nothing, instead of being all I have and all I do?

  * * *

  Strangely, my run-in with the Schonbrunns serves to enliven a friendship with Baumgarten that hadn’t really amounted to much before—or, not so strangely at all, given those old vested interests contending for a say in my new and barely lived-in life. Following what I take to be doctor’s orders, I abandon the Schonbrunn correspondence—though indignant rejoinders, clinching rejoinders, continue to provide lively company as I drive along the Expressway to school each morning—and then late one afternoon, acting on what I assume at the time to be a harmless impulse, I stop at Baumgarten’s office and ask him to join me for coffee. And the following Sunday evening, when I return from a visit to my father and find that back in my apartment I am, on the scale of loneliness, hovering near a hundred—right up there with my own dad—I turn down the flame under the soup I am warming in my little spinster’s saucepan, and telephone Baumgarten to invite him to come share the very last container of food prepared and frozen by my mother.

  Soon we are meeting once a week for dinner at a small Hungarian restaurant on upper Broadway, not far from where each of us lives. No more than Wally is Baumgarten the someone for whom I used to cry out before the bathroom mirror during my first months of mourning in New York (the mourning that preceded the mourning for the only one of us who actually died). But then that longed-for someone may very likely never turn up—because in fact she already did: was here, was mine, and has been lost, destroyed because of some terrible mechanism that causes me to challenge and challenge—finally to challenge to the death—what once I thought I wanted most. Yes, I miss Helen! Suddenly I want Helen! How meaningless and ridiculous all those arguments seem now! What a gorgeous, lively, passionate creature! Bright, funny, mysterious—and gone! Oh, why on earth did I do what I did? It all should have been so different! And when, if ever, will there be another?

  So—little more than a decade of adult life behind me, and already I have the sense that all my chances have been used up; indeed, pondering my past over that pathetic little enameled saucepan, I invariably feel as though I have not simply been through a bad marriage but in fact through all the female sex, and that I am so constructed as to live harmoniously with no one.

  Over cucumber salad and stuffed cabbage (not bad, but nothing to compare, I inform Baumgarten—and sounding not so unlike my father—to the Hungarian Royale in its heyday), I show him an old picture of Helen, as inviting and seductive a passport photo as may ever have passed through customs. I have unstapled it from her International Driver’s License, which turned up only recently—to each his own discordances and incongruities—in a carton of Stanford papers, among my lecture notes on François Mauriac. I bring Helen’s photograph to dinner with me, then wonder for half the meal whether to take it out of my wallet or, rather, wonder why I would. Some ten days earlier I had brought the picture to his office to show to Klinger, intending to prove to him that, blind as I may have been to certain dire consequences, I was by no means blind to everything.

  “A real beauty,” says Baumgarten when, with some of the anxiety of a student handing in a plagiarized paper, I pass the picture across the table. And then I am hanging on to his every word! “A queen bee, all right,” he says. “Yes, sir, and followed aloft by the drones.” He is a long time savoring it. Too long. “Makes me jealous,” he informs me, and not to be polite either. He is reporting a genuine emotion.

  Well, I think, at least he won’t disparage her, or me … yet I am reluctant to go ahead now and try to puzzle out anything truly personal in Baumgarten’s presence, as though any challenge he might offer to Klinger’s perspective—and the willingness with which I now try to yield to it—might actually send me reeling, perhaps even all the way back to where I was when I would start off the day on my knees. It hardly pleases me, of course, to feel so susceptible still to this sort of confusion, or to feel so very thinly protected from the elements by my therapy, or to find that, at this moment, I seem to share Debbie Schonbrunn’s sense of Baumgarten as a source of contamination. The fact is that I do look forward to our evening out together, that I am interested in listening to the stories he tells, stories, as with Helen, of someone on the friendliest of terms with the sources of his excitement, and confidently opposed to—in fact, rather amused by—all that stands in opposition. Yet it is also a fact that my attachment to Baumgarten is increasingly marked by uncertainty, by what amount at times almost to seizures of doubt, the stronger our friendship grows.

  Baumgarten’s family story is pretty much a story of pain and little else. The father, a baker, died only recently, destitute and alone on the ward of a V.A. hospital—he had deserted his family sometime during Baumgarten’s adolescence (“later rather than sooner”), and only after years of horrific depressions that had all but turned family life into one long tearful wake. Baumgarten’s mother had worked for thirty years stitching gloves in a loft near Penn Station, fearful of the boss, of the shop steward, of the subway platform and the third rail, then at home afraid of the cellar stairs, the gas oven, the fuse box, even of a hammer and a nail. She had suffered a disabling stroke when Ralph was at college, and since has been staring at the wall in a Jewish home for the aged and infirm in Woodside. Every Sunday morning when her youngest child pays his visit—wearing that cocky grin on his face, bearing the Sunday News under his arm, and in his hand carrying a little paper bag from the delicatessen with her bagel in it—the nurse precedes him into the room with a perky introduction intended to give a lift to the frail little woman sitting like a sack in her chair, safe at last from all the world’s weaponry: “Guess who’s here with the goodies, Mildred. Your professor!”

  Aside from those expenses of the mother’s care which are not covered by the government and which Baumgarten pays out of his university salary, there has also fallen to him a father’s responsibilities to his older sister, who lives in New Jersey with three children and a husband who haplessly runs a dry-cleaning store there. The three kids Uncle Baumgarten describes as “dummies”; the sister he describes as “lost,” raised from infancy on the mother’s terrors and the father’s gloom, and now, at about my age, alive to nothing but a welter of superstitions which, says Baumgarten, have come through untouched from the shtetl. Because of her looks, and her clothes, and the odd things she says to her children’s schoolmates, she
is known as the “gypsy lady” in the Paramus housing development where the family lives.

  It surprises me, hearing tales of this mercilessly beaten-down clan from its inextinguishable survivor, that Baumgarten has never, to my knowledge, written a single line about the way in which his unhappy family is unlike any other, or about why he cannot turn his back on the wreckage, despite the disgust aroused in him by memories of his upbringing in this household of the dead. No, not a single word on that subject in his two books of verse, the first impudently titled, at twenty-four, Baumgarten’s Anatomy, and the most recent, called after a line from an erotic poem of Donne’s, Behind, Before, Above, Between, Below. I must admit to myself—if not to a Schonbrunn—that after a week of Baumgarten as bedtime reading, the interest I have long had in the fittings and fixtures of the other sex seems to me just about sated. Yet, narrow as his subject strikes me—or, rather, his means of exploration—I find in the blend of shameless erotomania, microscopic fetishism, and rather dazzling imperiousness a character at work whose unswerving sense of his own imperatives cannot but arouse my curiosity. But then at first even watching him eat his dinner arouses my curiosity—it is as hard at times for me to watch as it is to look away. Is it really the untamed animal in him that causes this carnivore to tear at the meat between his teeth with such stupendous muscle power, or does he not masticate his food genteelly simply because the rest of us agree to do it that way? Where did he first eat flesh, in Queens or in a cave? One night the sight of Baumgarten’s incisors severing the meat from the bone of his breaded veal chop sends me home later to my bookshelves to take down the collection of Kafka’s stories and to reread the final paragraph of “A Hunger Artist,” the description of the young panther who is put into the sideshow cage to replace the professional abstinent after he expires of starvation. “The food he liked was brought without hesitation by the attendants, he seemed not even to miss his freedom; his noble body, furnished almost to the bursting point with all that it needed, seemed to carry freedom around with it too; somewhere in its jaws it seemed to lurk…”