The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  Yes, and what “it” lurks in these strong jaws? Freedom also? Or something more like the rapacity of one once very nearly buried alive? Are his the jaws of the noble panther or of the starved rat?

  I ask him, “How come you’ve never written about your family, Ralph?” “Them?” he says, giving me his indulgent look. “Them,” I say, “and you.” “Why? So I can read to a full house at the Y? Oh, Kepesh”—five years my junior, he nonetheless enjoys talking to me as though I am the kid and, too, something of an unredeemable square—“spare me the subject of the Jewish family and its travails. Can you actually get worked up over another son and another daughter and another mother and another father driving each other nuts? All that loving; all that hating; all those meals. And don’t forget the menschlichkeit. And the baffled quest for dignity. Oh, and the goodness. You can’t write that stuff and leave out the goodness. I understand somebody has just published a whole book on our Jewish literature of goodness. I expect any day to read that an Irish critic has come out with a work on conviviality in Joyce, Yeats, and Synge. Or an article by some good old boy from Vanderbilt on hospitality in the Southern novel: ‘Make Yourself at Home: The Theme of Hospitality in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily.”’”

  “I just wondered if it might not give you access to other feelings.”

  He smiles. “Let the other guys have the other feelings, okay? They’re used to having them. They like having them. But virtue isn’t my bag. Too bo-ring.” A favorite word, sung by Baumgarten with the interval of a third between the two syllables. “Look,” he says, “I can’t even take that much of Chekhov, that holy of holies. Why isn’t he ever implicated in the shit? You’re an authority. Why is the brute never Anton but some other slob?”

  “That’s a strange way to go at Chekhov, you know, expecting Céline. Or Genet. Or you. But then maybe the brute isn’t always Baumgarten, either. It doesn’t sound that way when you tell me about those visits to Paramus, or to the old-age home. Sounds more like Chekhov, actually. The family serf.”

  “Don’t be too sure. Besides, besides, why bother to write that kind of stuff down? Has it not been done—and done? Do they need me too to scratch my name on the Wailing Wall? For me the books count—my own included—where the writer incriminates himself. Otherwise, why bother? To incriminate the other guy? Best leave that to our betters, don’t you think, and that cunning Yiddish theater they’ve evolved, called Literary Criticism. Ah, those noble middle-aged Jewish sons, with their rituals of rebellion and atonement! Ever read them on the front of the Sunday Times? All the closet cunt hunters coming on like old man Tolstoy. All that sympathy for the humble of the earth, all that guarding of the sacred flame, which, by the way, don’t cost them a fucking dime. Look, all those deeply suffering Jewish culture-bearers need a fallen Jewish ass to atone for their sins on in public—so why not mine? Keeps their wives in the dark; gives their girl friends someone sensitive to suffering to suck off; and goes a very long way with the Brandeis Kollege of Musical Knowledge. Every year I read in the papers about the powers-that-be up there awarding them merit badges for their neckerchiefs. Virtue, virtue, who’s got the virtue? Biggest Jewish racket since Meyer Lansky in his prime.”

  Yes, he is steamed up now, and with no regard for the loudness of his voice or the windmilling of his arms—and not without pleasure in his broadside biliousness—he goes on about the lasciviousness (well known to all Manhattan, Baumgarten claims) of the “esteemed professor” who demolished his second book of poems in an omnibus review in the Times. “No ‘culture,’ no ‘heart,’ and what is worse, no ‘historical perspective.’ As if the esteemed professor has historical perspective when he is sticking it into some graduate assistant! No, they don’t like it too much when you get down in there and burrow away just for the sake of the fishy little vizzy in your face. No, no, if you’re a real man of letters in the humanist tradition you have historical perspective while you’re doing it.”

  Not till we down our tea and strudel does he finish (for the night) with his investigation into the hypocrisies, pieties, and bo-ring-ness generally of the literary world and the humanist tradition (largely as it is embodied in the reviewers of his books and the members of his department), and begin to speak, with a different sort of relish, of his other chosen arena of assertion. Like so many of his stories of the pleasant surprises that the hunt turns up, what he narrates over the dregs of dessert touches upon certain old but vivid recollections of my own. Indeed, there are times when, listening to him speak with such shamelessness of the wide range of his satisfactions, I feel that I am in the presence of a parodied projection of myself. A parody—a possibility. Maybe Baumgarten feels somewhat the same about me, and this explains the curiosity at either end. I am a Baumgarten locked in the Big House, caged in the kennels, a Baumgarten Klingered and Schonbrunned into submission—while he is a Kepesh, oh, what a Kepesh! with his mouth frothing and his long tongue lolling, leash slipped and running wild.

  Why am I here with him? Passing time, sure, sure—and meanwhile, what is passing in and out of me? In the presence of the appetitious Baumgarten, am I looking to be exposed ever so mildly to the virulent strain, and thereby immunized for good? Or am I half hoping to be reinfected? Have I taken the healing of myself into my own hands at last, or is it rather that the convalescence is over, and I am just about ready to begin to conspire against the doctor and his bo-ring admonitions?

  “One night last winter,” he says, eyeing the round rear end of the largish Hungarian waitress who is trundling in carpet slippers back to the kitchen to make us some more tea, “I was browsing in Marboro’s—” And I can see him browsing already; I have seen it, a dozen times at least. BAUMGARTEN: Hardy? GIRL: Why—yes. BAUMGARTEN: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, is that what you’ve got there? GIRL (looking at the book jacket): That’s right, it is—“—and I started talking to this nice red-cheeked girl who told me she had just come down on the train from visiting her family in Westchester. Sitting a couple of seats in front of her there’d been a fellow in a suit and tie and an overcoat who kept looking back at her over his shoulder and jacking off under the coat. I asked her what she did about it. ‘What do you think I did?’ she said. ‘I looked him right in the eye, and when we got into Grand Central, I went up to him, and I said, “Hey, I think we should meet, I’d like to meet you.”’ Well, he took off, started running out of the station, but the girl kept right on him, trying to explain to him that she was serious—she liked the way he looked, she admired his courage, she was terrifically flattered by what he had done, but the guy disappeared into a taxi before she could convince him that he was in for a good time. Anyway, we struck it off, you might say, and went back to her apartment. It was over on the East River, in one of those hi-rise villages. When we got there she showed me the view up the river, and the kitchen with all the cookbooks, and then she wanted me to take off her clothes and tie her to the bed. Well, I haven’t played with a rope since Troop 35, but I managed. Did it with dental floss, Kepesh, twelve yards of it—got her spread-eagled, arms and legs, just the way she wanted. Took me forty-five minutes. And you should have heard the sounds coming out of that girl. You should have seen what she looked like, excited like that. Very stirring image. Makes you understand the creeps more. Anyway, she told me to go and get the poppers out of the medicine chest. Well, there weren’t any, they were all gone. It seems one of her friends had stolen them. So I told her I had some coke at home, and I’d get it if she wanted me to. ‘Go, get it, get it,’ she said. So I went. But when I came downstairs from my place and got a taxi to start back to hers, I realized that I didn’t know her name—and for the life of me I couldn’t remember which of those fucking buildings she lived in. Kepesh, I was stymied,” he says, and reaching across the table with a thumb and forefinger to get the strudel crumbs off my plate, manages to sweep my water glass into my lap with the cuff of his army coat. For some reason Baumgarten always eats in his coat. Maybe Jesse James did, too. “Oops,” he cries, seeing
the glass go down, but of course this isn’t the first time; indeed, “oops” may be the four-letter word that most frequently falls from Baumgarten’s lips, certainly while he is turning the table into his trough. “Sorry,” he says; “you all right?” “It’ll dry,” I say, “it always does. Go on. What did you do?” “What could I do? Nothing. I started wandering from one building to the next, looking at the names on the directories. Jane was her first name, or so she said, so whenever I saw a ‘J,’ like a schmuck I rang the buzzer. Couldn’t find her, of course, though I had several promising conversations. Anyway, a guard came up and asked me what I was looking for. I told him I must be in the wrong building, but when I went out he followed me into the portico area there, and so I hung around for about a minute or two, looking up and admiring the moon. And then I went home. And after that I bought the Daily News on the way to school every day. I looked in there for weeks to see if the cops had found a skeleton tied to a bed with dental floss over on the decadent East Side. Finally I just gave up. Then this summer I was coming out of a movie down on Eighth Street, and there standing in line to get in for the next show is the same girl. Plain Jane. And you know what she says? She spots me, and a smile spreads across her face, and she says, ‘Far out, man.’”

  Skeptical, but laughing, I say, “That all happened, huh?”

  “Dave, just walk the streets and say hello to the folks. Everything happens.”

  And then, after Baumgarten has asked the waitress—new to our restaurant, and whose aging, peasanty overflow he had decided he must get to know—whether she can recommend someone to give him Hungarian lessons; after he has taken her name and number—“Live alone there, do you, Eva?”— he excuses himself and goes to the back of the restaurant, where there is a pay phone. In order to write down Eva’s telephone number, he has emptied his coat pocket of a handful of papers and envelopes, on which, I see, he already has recorded the names and whereabouts of those others of her sex who have crossed his path during the day. The number of whomever he is calling now he has carried off with him to the phone, leaving the little mess of personal papers for me to contemplate at my leisure, the papers and the life that goes with them.

  With a fingernail, I am able to flick into view the last paragraph of a letter neatly typewritten on heavy cream-colored stationery.

  … I’ve gotten you your fifteen-year-old (eighteen, actually, but fleshwise I’ll swear you’d never know the difference, and anyway, fifteen is jail)—a succulent sophomore, and not just young but a real beauty besides, a sweet girl and worldly both, and altogether I can’t see how you could improve on her. I found her for you all by myself, her name is Rona and we are having lunch next week, so if you meant it (assuming you do remember mentioning this fancy). I will open negotiations at this time. I feel reasonably confident of success. Kindly semaphore your intentions next time you’re in the office, one blink for yes, two for no, if I should go ahead. So there’s my half of the bargain—I’m procuring for you, as desired and with my heart somewhere up near my mouth—now please put me in touch with the orgiasts. The only good reasons for no that I can think of are (a) you are involved there yourself—and in that case I would simply abstain from those soirees, if you prefer—or (b) you’re afraid of being compromised by somebody at the heart of the Kremlin—then just give me the name and I’ll say I heard about it elsewhere than you. Otherwise, why not give your (slightly atrophied) faculty of human sympathy a little workout (I’ve read somewhere it was once believed to be an essential quality for a poet) as long as it won’t cost you anything, and bring a little ray of sunshine into the dim life of a (rapidly) fading spinster.

  Your chum,

  T.

  And who is “T,” I wonder, in the “Kremlin”? The assistant to the provost or the director of student health? And who—on another piece of paper—is “L”? Her words crossed out and rewritten on every line; her felt-tipped pen on the brink of anemia—what does she want of the poet with the slightly atrophied heart? Is “L” ’s the pleading voice Baumgarten is so patiently listening to in the telephone booth? Or is that “M,” or “N” or “O” or “P”—?

  Ralph, I refuse to be sorry about last night unless you can point out in a believable way there was something twisted or mean about my wanting to see you. I had thought that if I could only sit in the same room with a man who wasn’t trying to push me or convince me or confuse me, someone whom I liked and respected, that I might get closer to something in myself that matters and is real. I was under the impression that you didn’t live in a dream world, and have sometimes wondered since the baby whether I do. I didn’t want to make love. Sometimes you act like someone who is adept at removing a lady’s drawers and that’s all. I certainly won’t make any more spontaneous visits after 10 p.m. It is just that wanting and needing to talk to someone with whom I am not involved, I chose you, when, I admit, in some way I want to be involved, some part wanting to be in your arms, when the other part insists that what I really need is your friendship, your advice—and distance. I guess I don’t quite want to admit that you move me. But that doesn’t mean I don’t think there is something crazy about you—

  Inside the booth, Baumgarten hangs up the phone and so I stop reading his fan mail. We pay Eva, Baumgarten collects his property, and together—his “pal” on the phone is best left to herself this evening, he informs me—we head toward the nearest Bookmasters, where, as usual, one or the other of us will lay out five dollars for five remaindered books he most likely will never get around to reading. “Inebriate of cunt and print!” as my secret sharer exclaims somewhere in the song of himself behind, before, above, between, below.

  * * *

  It takes two full weeks, six whole sessions, before I am able to tell the psychoanalyst to whom I am supposed to tell everything that only a little later that evening we had met a high school girl shopping for a paperback for her English class. (BAUMGARTEN: Emily or Charlotte? GIRL: Charlotte. BAUMGARTEN: Villette or Jane Eyre? GIRL: I never heard of the first one. Jane Eyre.) Breezy, streetwise, and just a little terrified, she had accompanied us back to Baumgarten’s one room, and there, on his Mexican rug, amid several piles of his own two erotic books of verse, she had auditioned for a modeling job for the new erotic picture magazine being started on the West Coast by our bosses, the Schonbrunns. Magazine to be called Cunt. “The Schonbrunns,” he explains, “are sick and tired of pulling their punches.”

  A lanky strawberry blonde in fringed leather jacket and jeans, the girl had told us straight out, while being interviewed in the bookstore, that she would not be at all shy about taking off her clothes for a photographer—so, at Baumgarten’s, she is given one of his Danish magazines to look at, for the inspiration in it.

  “Could you do this, Wendy?” he asks her earnestly as she sits on the sofa leafing through the magazines with one hand and, with the other, holding the Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone that Baumgarten (the impeccable scenarist) couldn’t resist buying for her on the way home. (“What’s your favorite flavor, Wendy? Go ahead, please, have a double dip, have sprinkles, have everything. How about you, Dave? Want some Chocolate Ribbon, too?”) Clearing her throat, she closes the magazine in her lap, bites into what remains of the cone, and casually as she can manage, says, “That’s a little far for me.” “What isn’t?” he asks her; “just tell me what isn’t.” “Maybe something more along the lines of Playboy,” she says.

  Working together then, something like teammates moving the ball across the midcourt line against a tight defense, something like two methodical day laborers driving a post into the ground with alternating blows of their mallets—something like Birgitta and myself back on the continent of Europe during the Age of Exploration—we manage, by bringing her through a series of provocative postures in progressive stages of undress, to get her flat on her back in her bikini underpants and her boots. And that, says the seventeen-year-old senior from Washington Irving High—trembling ever so slightly as she gazes up at our four eyes looking d
own—that is as far as she will go.

  What next? That her limit is to be the limit is understood by Baumgarten and myself without any consultation. I make that clear to Klinger—also point out that no tears were shed, no force used, not so much as a fingertip touched her flesh.

  “And this happened when?” Klinger asks me.

  “Two weeks ago,” I say, and rise from the couch to get my coat.

  And leave. I have withheld my confession for two full weeks, and even now, until the end of the hour. Consequently, I am able just to walk out the door, and do not have to add—and never will—that it was not a recidivist’s shame that deterred me from narrating the incident earlier, but rather the small color snapshot of Klinger’s teenage daughter, in faded dungarees and school T-shirt, taken on a beach somewhere and displayed in a triptych frame on his desk between photographs of his two sons.