The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  And then the summer after I return East I meet a young woman altogether unlike this small band of consolers, counselors, tempters, and provocateurs—the “influences,” as my father would have it—off whom my benumbed and unsexed carcass has been careening since I’ve been a womanless, pleasureless, passionless man on his own.

  I am invited for a weekend on Cape Cod by a faculty couple I have just gotten to know, and there I am introduced to Claire Ovington, their young neighbor, who is renting a tiny shingled bungalow in a wild-rose patch near the Orleans beach for herself and her golden Labrador. Some ten days after the morning we spend talking together on the beach—after I have sent her a painfully charming letter from New York, and consulted for several clammy hours with Klinger—I take the impulse by the horns and return to Orleans, where I move into the local inn. I am drawn at first by the same look of soft voluptuousness that had (against all seemingly reasonable reservations) done so much to draw me to Helen, and which has touched off, for the first time in over a year, a spontaneous surge of warm feeling. Back in New York after my brief weekend visit, I had thought only about her. Do I sense the renewal of desire, of confidence, of capacity? Not quite yet. During my week at the inn, I cannot stop behaving like an overzealous child at dancing class, unable to go through a door or to raise a fork without the starchiest display of good manners. And after the self-display of that letter, that bravura show of wit and self-assurance! Why did I listen to Klinger? “Of course, go—what can you lose?” But what does he have to lose if I fail? Where’s his tragic view of life, damn it? Impotence is no joke—it’s a plague! People kill themselves! And alone in my bed at the inn, after yet another evening of keeping my distance from Claire, I can understand why. In the morning, just before I am to leave for New York once again, I arrive at her bungalow for an early breakfast, and midway through the fresh blueberry pancakes try to redeem myself a little by admitting to my shame. I don’t know how else to get out of this with at least some self-esteem intact, though why I will ever have to care about self-esteem again I cannot imagine. “I seem to have come all the way up here—after writing to you like that, and then arriving out of nowhere—well, after all that fanfare, I seem to have come upon the scene and … disappeared.” And now moving over me—moving right up to the roots of my hair—I feel something very like the shame that I must have imagined I could avoid by disappearing. “I must seem odd to you. At this point I seem odd to myself. I’ve seemed odd to myself for some time now. I’m only trying to say that it’s nothing you’ve done or said that’s made me behave so coldly.” “But,” she says, before I can begin another round of apology about this “oddity” that I am, “it’s been so pleasant. In a way it’s been the sweetest thing.” “It has?” I say, fearful that I am about to be humbled in some unforeseen way. “What has?” “Seeing somebody shy for a change. It’s nice to know it still exists in the Age of Utter Abandon.”

  God, as tender within as without! The tact! The calm! The wisdom! As physically alluring to me as Helen—but there the resemblance ends. Poise and confidence and determination, but, in Claire, all of it marshaled in behalf of something more than high sybaritic adventure. At twenty-four, she has earned a degree from Cornell in experimental psychology, a master’s from Columbia in education, and is on the faculty of a private school in Manhattan, where she teaches eleven- and twelve-year-olds, and, as of the coming semester, will be in charge of the curriculum-review committee. Yet, for someone who, as I come to learn, emanates in her professional role a strong aura of reserve, a placid, coolheaded, and seemingly unassailable presence, she is surprisingly innocent and guileless about the personal side of her life, and, as regards her friends, her plants, her herb garden, her dog, her cooking, her sister Olivia, who summers on Martha’s Vineyard, and Olivia’s three children, she has about as much reserve as a healthy ten-year-old girl. In all, this translucent mix of sober social aplomb and domestic enthusiasms and youthful susceptibility is simply irresistible. What I mean is no resistance is necessary. A tempter of a kind to whom I can at last succumb.

  Now it is as if a gong has been struck in my stomach when I recall—and I do, daily—that I had written Claire my clever, flirtatious letter, and then had very nearly been content to leave it at that. Had even told Klinger that writing out of the blue to a voluptuous young woman I had spoken with casually on a beach for two hours was a measure of just how hopeless my prospects had become. I had almost decided against showing up for breakfast that last morning on the Cape, so fearful was I of what my convalescent desire might have in store for me were I, with a suitcase in one hand and my plane ticket in the other, to try to put it to a crazy last-minute test. How ever did I manage to make it past my shameful secret? Do I owe it to sheer luck, to ebullient, optimistic Klinger, or do I owe everything I now have to those breasts of hers in that bathing suit? Oh, if so, then bless each breast a thousand times! For now, now I am positively exultant, thrilled, astonished—grateful for everything about her, for the executive dispatch with which she orders her life as for the patience that she brings to our lovemaking, that canniness of hers that seems to sense exactly how much raw carnality and how much tender solicitude it is going to require to subdue my tenacious anxiety and renew my faith in coupling and all that may come in its wake. All the pedagogic expertise bestowed upon those sixth-graders is now bestowed upon me after school—such a gentle, tactful tutor comes to my apartment each day, and yet always the hungry woman with her! And those breasts, those breasts—large and soft and vulnerable, each as heavy as an udder upon my face, as warm and heavy in my hand as some fat little animal fast asleep. Oh, the look of this large girl above me when she is still half stripped! And, mind you, an assiduous keeper of records as well! Yes, the history of each passing day in calendar books going back through college, her life’s history in the photographs she has been taking since childhood, first with a Brownie, now with the best equipment from Japan. And those lists! Those wonderful, orderly lists! I too write out on a yellow pad what I plan to accomplish each day, but by bedtime I seem never to find a soothing little check mark beside each item, confirming that the letter has been dispatched, the money withdrawn, the article xeroxed, the call made. Despite my own strong penchant for orderliness, passed along through the maternal chromosomes, there are still mornings when I can’t even locate the list I drew up the night before, and, usually, what I don’t feel like doing one day, I am able to put off to the next without too many qualms. Not so with Mistress Ovington—to every task that presents itself, regardless of how difficult or dreary, she gives her complete attention, taking each up in its turn and steadfastly following it through to its conclusion. And, to my great good luck, reconstituting my life is apparently just such a task. It is as though at the top of one of her yellow pads she has spelled out my name and then, beneath, in her open spherical hand, written instructions to herself, as follows: “Provide DK with— 1. Loving kindness. 2. Impassioned embraces. 3. Sane surroundings.” For within a year the job is somehow done, a big check mark beside each life-saving item. I give up the anti-depressants, and no abyss opens beneath me. I sublet the sublet apartment, and, without being wracked too much by memories of the handsome rugs, tables, dishes, and chairs once jointly owned by Helen and me and now hers alone, I furnish a new place of my own. I even accept an invitation to a dinner party at the Schonbrunns’, and at the end of the evening politely kiss Debbie’s cheek while Arthur paternally kisses Claire’s. Easy as that. Meaningless as that. At the door, while Arthur and Claire conclude the conversation they’d been having at dinner—about the curriculum that Claire is now devising for the upper grades—Debbie and I have a moment to chat privately. For some reason—alcoholic intake on both sides, I think—we are holding hands! “Another of your tall blondes,” says Debbie, “but this one seems a bit more sympathetic. We both find her very sweet. And very bright. Where did you meet?” “In a brothel in Marrakesh. Look, Debbie, isn’t it about time you got off my ass? What does that mean, my �
��tall blondes’?” “It’s a fact.” “No, it is not even a fact. Helen’s hair was auburn. But suppose it was cut from the same bolt as Claire’s—the fact is that ‘blondes,’ in that context, and that tone, is, as you may even know, a derogatory term used by intellectuals and other serious people to put down pretty women. I also believe it is dense with unsavory implication when addressed to men of my origin and complexion. I remember how fond you used to be at Stanford of pointing out to people the anomaly of a literate chap like myself coming from the ‘Borscht Belt.’ That too used to strike me as a bit reductive.” “Oh, you take yourself too seriously. Why don’t you just admit you have a penchant for these big blondes and leave it at that? It’s nothing to be ashamed of. They do look lovely up on water skis with all that hair streaming. I bet they look lovely everywhere.” “Debbie, I’ll make a deal with you. I’ll admit I know nothing about you, if you’ll admit you know nothing about me. I’m sure you have a whole wondrous being and inner life that I know nothing about.” “Nope,” she says, “this is it. This is the whole thing. Take it or leave it.” Both of us begin to laugh. I say, “Tell me, what does Arthur see in you? It’s really one of the mysteries of life. What do you have that I’m blind to?” “Everything,” she replies. Out in the car, I give Claire an abridged version of the conversation. “The woman is warped,” I say. “Oh, no,” says Claire, “just silly, that’s all.” “She tricked you, Clarissa. Silly is the cover—assassination is the game.” “Ah, sweetie,” says Claire, “it’s you she’s tricked.”

  So much for my rehabilitation back into society. As for my father and his awesome loneliness, well, now he takes the train from Cedarhurst to have dinner in Manhattan once a month; he can’t be coaxed in any more often, but in truth, before there was the new apartment, and Claire to help with the conversation and the cooking, I didn’t work at coaxing him that hard, no, not so each of us could sit and peer sadly at the other picking at his spareribs, two orphans in Chinatown … not so I could wait to hear him ask over the lichee nuts, “And that guy, he hasn’t come back to bother you, has he?”

  And, to be sure, from the maw of that maelstrom called Baumgarten I withdraw my toes a little. We still have lunch together from time to time, but the grander feasts I leave him to partake of on his own. And I do not introduce him to Claire.

  My, how easy life is when it’s easy, and how hard when it’s hard!

  One night, after dinner at my apartment, while Claire is preparing her next day’s lessons at the cleared dining table, I finally get up the nerve, or no longer seem to need “nerve,” to reread what there is of my Chekhov book, shelved now for more than two years. In the midst of the laborious and deadly competence of those fragmentary chapters intended to focus upon the subject of romantic disillusionment, I find five pages that are somewhat readable—reflections growing out of Chekhov’s comic little story, “Man in a Shell,” about the tyrannical rise and celebrated fall—“I confess,” says the goodhearted narrator after the tyrant’s funeral, “it is a great pleasure to bury people like Belikov”—the rise and fall of a provincial high school official whose love of prohibitions and hatred of all deviations from the rules manages to hold a whole town of “thoughtful, decent people” under his thumb for fifteen years. I go back to reread the story, then to reread “Gooseberries” and “About Love,” written in sequence with it and forming a series of anecdotal ruminations upon the varieties of pain engendered by spiritual imprisonment—by petty despotism, by ordinary human complacency, and finally, even by the inhibitions upon feeling necessary to support a scrupulous man’s sense of decency. For the next month, with a notebook on my lap, and some tentative observations in mind, I return to Chekhov’s fiction nightly, listening for the anguished cry of the trapped and miserable socialized being, the well-bred wives who during dinner with the guests wonder “Why do I smile and lie?”, and the husbands, seemingly settled and secure, who are “full of conventional truth and conventional deception.” Simultaneously I am watching how Chekhov, simply and clearly, though not quite so pitilessly as Flaubert, reveals the humiliations and failures—worst of all, the destructive power—of those who seek a way out of the shell of restrictions and convention, out of the pervasive boredom and the stifling despair, out of the painful marital situations and the endemic social falsity, into what they take to be a vibrant and desirable life. There is the agitated young wife in “Misfortune” who looks for “a bit of excitement” against the grain of her own offended respectability; there is the lovesick landowner in “Ariadne,” confessing with Herzogian helplessness to a romantic misadventure with a vulgar trampy tigress who gradually transforms him into a hopeless misogynist, but whom he nonetheless waits on hand and foot; there is the young actress in “A Boring Story,” whose bright, hopeful enthusiasm for a life on the stage, and a life with men, turns bitter with her first experiences of the stage and of men, and of her own lack of talent—“Ι have no talent, you see, I have no talent and … and lots of vanity.” And there is “The Duel.” Every night for a week (with Claire only footsteps away) I reread Chekhov’s masterpiece about the weaseling, slovenly, intelligent, literary-minded seducer Layevsky, immersed in his lies and his self-pity, and Layevsky’s antagonist, the ruthless punitive conscience who all but murders him, the voluble scientist Von Koren. Or so it is that I come to view the story: with Von Koren as the ferociously rational and merciless prosecutor called forth to challenge the sense of shame and sinfulness that is nearly all that Layevsky has become, and from which, alas, he no longer can flee. It is this immersion in “The Duel” that finally gets me writing, and within four months the five pages extracted from the old unfinished rehash of my thesis on romantic disillusionment are transformed into some forty thousand words entitled Man in a Shell, an essay on license and restraint in Chekhov’s world—longings fulfilled, pleasures denied, and the pain occasioned by both; a study, at bottom, of what makes for Chekhov’s pervasive pessimism about the methods—scrupulous, odious, noble, dubious—by which the men and women of his time try in vain to achieve “that sense of personal freedom” to which Chekhov himself is so devoted. My first book! With a dedication page that reads “To C.O.”

  “She is to steadiness,” I tell Klinger (and Kepesh, who must never, never, never forget), “what Helen was to impetuosity. She is to common sense what Birgitta was to indiscretion. I have never seen such devotion to the ordinary business of daily life. It’s awesome, really, the way she deals with each day as it comes, the attention she pays minute by minute. There’s no dreaming going on there—just steady, dedicated living. I trust her, that’s the point I’m making. That’s what’s done it,” I announce triumphantly, “trust.”

  To all of which Klinger eventually replies goodbye then and good luck. At the door of his office on the spring afternoon of our parting, I have to wonder if it can really be that I no longer need bucking up and holding down and hearing out, warning, encouragement, consent, consolation, applause, and opposition—in short, professional doses of mothering and fathering and simple friendship three times a week for an hour. Can it be that I’ve come through? Just like that? Just because of Claire? What if I awaken tomorrow morning once again a man with a crater instead of a heart, once again without a man’s capacity and appetite and strength and judgment, without the least bit of mastery over my flesh or my intelligence or my feelings …

  “Stay in touch,” says Klinger, shaking my hand. Just as I could not look squarely at him the day I neglected to mention the impact on my conscience of his daughter’s snapshot—as though suppressing that fact I might be spared his unuttered judgment, or my own—so I cannot let his eyes engage mine when we say farewell. But now it is because I would prefer not to give vent to my feelings of elation and indebtedness in an outburst of tears. Sniffing all sentiment back up my nose—and firmly, for the moment, suppressing all doubt—I say, “Let’s hope I don’t have to,” but once out on the street by myself, I repeat the incredible words aloud, only now to the accompaniment of t
he appropriate emotions: “I’ve come through!”

  * * *

  The following June, when the teaching year is over for the two of us, Claire and I fly to the north of Italy, my first time back in Europe since I’d gone prowling there with Birgitta a decade earlier. In Venice we spend five days at a quiet pensione near the Accademia. Each morning we eat breakfast in the pensione’s aromatic garden and then, in our walking shoes, weave back and forth across the bridges and alleyways that lead to the landmarks Claire has marked on the map for us to visit that day. Whenever she takes her pictures of these palazzos and piazzas and churches and fountains I wander off aways, but always looking back to get a picture of her and her unadorned beauty.

  Each evening after dinner under the arbor in the garden, we treat ourselves to a little gondola ride. With Claire beside me in the armchair that Mann describes as “the softest, most luxurious, most relaxing seat in the world,” I ask myself yet again if this serenity truly exists, if this contentment, this wonderful accord is real. Is the worst over? Have I no more terrible mistakes to make? And no more to pay on those behind me? Was all that only so much Getting Started, a longish and misguided youth out of which I have finally aged? “Are you sure we didn’t die,” I say, “and go to heaven?” “I wouldn’t know,” she replies; “you’ll have to ask the gondolier.”

  Our last afternoon I blow us to lunch at the Gritti. On the terrace I tip the headwaiter and point to the very table where I had imagined myself sitting with the pretty student who used to lunch on Peanut Chews in my classroom; I order exactly what I ate that day back in Palo Alto when we were studying Chekhov’s stories about love and I felt myself on the edge of a nervous collapse—only this time I am not imagining the delicious meal with the fresh, untainted mate, this time both are real and I am well. Settling back—I with a cold glass of wine; Claire, the tee-totaling daughter of parents who overimbibed, with her acqua minerale—I look out across the gleaming waters of this indescribably beautiful toy town and I say to her, “Do you think Venice is really sinking? The place seems in vaguely the same position as last time I was here.”