The Professor of Desire

by Philip Roth

  At last, at long last, I see Lowery coming out of the woods and descending the hill toward the house. He has removed his shirt and is carrying it in his hand. He is a strong and handsome young man, he is a great success in the world, and his presence in her life has somehow restored her to health … Only it is Helen’s bad luck that she cannot stand him. Still Jimmy—still those dreams of what might and should have been, if only moral repugnance had not intervened.

  “Maybe I’ll love the baby,” she says.

  “Maybe you will,” I say. “That happens sometimes.”

  “Then again, I may despise my baby,” says Helen, sternly rising to greet her husband. “I would imagine that happens sometimes too.”

  After they leave—just like the new couple from down the road, with smiles and good wishes all around—I get into my bathing suit and walk the mile along our road to the pond. I have no thoughts and no feelings, I am numb, like someone at the perimeter of a terrible accident or explosion, who gets a brief, startling glimpse of a pool of blood, and then goes on his way, unharmed, to continue with the ordinary activities of the day.

  Some small children are playing with shovels and pails at the edge of the pond, overseen by Claire’s dog and by a mother’s helper, who looks up and says “Hi.” The girl is reading, of all things, Jane Eyre. Claire’s terry-cloth robe is on the rock where we always put our things, and then I locate Claire, sunning herself out on the raft.

  When I pull myself up beside her I see that she has been crying.

  “I’m sorry I acted like that,” she says.

  “Don’t be, don’t be. We were both thrown way off. I don’t believe those things can ever work out very well.”

  She begins to cry again, as noiselessly as it is possible to cry. The first of her tears that I’ve seen.

  “What is it, lovely, what?”

  “I feel so lucky. I feel so privileged. I love you. You’ve become my whole life.”

  “I have?”

  This makes her laugh. “It frightens you a little to hear it. I guess it wound. I didn’t think it was true, till today. But I’ve never been happy like this before.”

  “Clarissa, why are you still so upset? There’s no reason to be, is there?”

  Turning her face into the raft, she mumbles something about her mother and father.

  “I can’t hear you, Claire.”

  “I wanted them to visit.”

  I’m surprised, but say, “Then invite them.”

  “I did.”

  “When was that?”

  “It doesn’t matter. It’s just that I thought—well, I didn’t think.”

  “You wrote them? Explain yourself, please. I’d like to know what’s wrong.”

  “I don’t want to go into it. It was foolish and dreamy. I lost my head a little.”

  “You telephoned them.”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Before.”

  “You mean after you left the house? Before you came down here?”

  “Down in town, yes.”

  “And?”

  “I should never phone them without warning. I never do. It never works and it never will. But at night when we’re having dinner, when we’re so content and everything is so peaceful and lovely, I always start to think about them. I put on a record, and start cooking dinner, and there they are.”

  I hadn’t known. She never speaks of what she does not have, never lingers for so much as a moment upon loss, misfortune, or disappointment. You’d have to torture her to get her to complain. She is the most extraordinary ordinary person I have ever known.

  “Oh,” she says, pushing up to a sitting position, “oh, this day will be fine when it’s over. Do you have any idea when that will be?”

  “Claire, do you want to stay out here with me, or do you want to be alone, or do you want to swim, or do you want to come home and have some iced tea and a little rest?”

  “They’re gone?”

  “Oh, they’re gone.”

  “And you’re all right?”

  “I’m intact. An hour or so older, but intact.”

  “How was it?”

  “Not all that pleasant. You didn’t take to her, I know, but the woman is in a bad way … Look, we don’t have to talk about this now. We don’t have to talk about it ever. Do you want to go home?”

  “Not just yet,” says Claire. She dives off the edge of the raft, remains out of sight for a long count of ten, and then surfaces by the ladder. When she sits back down beside me, she says, “There’s one thing we’d better talk about now. One more thing I had better say. I was pregnant. I wasn’t going to tell you, but I will.”

  “Pregnant by whom? When?”

  A wan smile. “In Europe, love. By you. I found out for sure when we got home. I had an abortion. Those meetings I went to—well, I went to the hospital for the day.”

  “And the ‘infection’?”

  “I didn’t have an infection.”

  Helen is two months pregnant, and I am the only person who knows. Claire has been pregnant, by me, and I’ve known nothing. I sense something very sad, all right, at the bottom of this day’s confidences and secrets, but what it is I am too weak right now to fathom. Indeed, worn down more than I had thought from all that has surrounded Helen’s visit, I am ready to think it is something about me that makes for the sadness; about how I have always failed to be what people want or expect; how I have never quite pleased anyone, including myself; how, hard as I have tried, I have seemed never quite able to be one thing or the other, and probably never will be … “Why did you do this alone?” I ask her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Well, it was just at the moment you were letting yourself go, and I thought that had to happen by itself. You were surrendering to something, and it always had to be clear to both of us exactly what it was. Is that clear?”

  “But you did want to have it.”

  “The abortion?”

  “No, the child.”

  “I want to have a child, of course. I want to have one with you—I can’t imagine having anyone else’s. But not until you’re ready to with me.”

  “And when did you do all this, Claire? How could I not know it?”

  “Oh, I managed,” she says. “David, the point is that I wouldn’t even want you to want it until you know for certain that it’s me and my ways and this life that you can be content with. I don’t want to make anybody unhappy. I don’t want to cause anyone pain. I never want to be anyone’s prison. That is the worst fate I can imagine. Please, let me just say what I have to—you don’t have to say anything about what you would have said or wouldn’t have said had I told you what I was doing. I didn’t want any of the responsibility to be yours; and it isn’t; it can’t be. If a mistake was made, then I made it. Right now I just want to say certain things to you, and I want you to hear them, and then we’ll go home and I’ll start supper.”

  “I’m listening to you.”

  “Sweetheart, I wasn’t jealous of her; far from it. I’m pretty enough, and I’m young, and thank God, I’m not ‘tough’ or ‘worldly,’ if that’s what that’s called. Truly, I wasn’t afraid of anything she could do. If I were that uncertain I wouldn’t be living here. I did get confused a little when you wanted to shoo me out of the way, but I came back to the house only to get my camera. I was going to take some pictures of the two of them together. All in all, I thought it was as good a way to get through that visit as any. But when I saw you sitting alone with her, I suddenly thought, ‘I can’t make him happy, I won’t be able to.’ And I wondered suddenly if anyone could. And that stunned me so, I just had to go. I don’t know if what I thought was true or not. Maybe you don’t either. But maybe you do. It would be agony leaving you right now, but I’m prepared to do it, if it makes sense. And better now than three or four years down the line, when you’re absolutely in every breath I draw. It’s not what I want, David; it’s not anything I am even remotely proposing. Saying these kinds of thi
ngs you take a terrible risk of being misunderstood, and, please, please, don’t misunderstand me. I’m proposing nothing. But if you do think you know the answer to my question, I’d like to be told sometime soon, because if you can’t be truly content with me, then let me just go to the Vineyard. I know I could get through up there with Olivia until school begins. And after that I can manage on my own. But I don’t want to give myself any further to something that isn’t going to evolve someday into a family. I never had one that made the least bit of sense, and I want one that does. I have to have that. I’m not saying tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow. But in time that’s what I want. Otherwise, I’d just as soon tear the roots up now, before the job requires a hacksaw. I’d like us both to get away, if we can, without a bloody amputation.”

  Here, though the bright sun has baked her body dry, she shudders from head to foot. “I think that’s everything I have the energy left to say. And you don’t have to say a word. I wish you wouldn’t, not just now. Otherwise, this will sound like an ultimatum, and it isn’t. It’s a clarification, that’s all. I didn’t even want to make it, I thought time would make it. But then it’s time that just might do me in. But, please, it doesn’t require reassuring sounds to be made in response. It’s just that suddenly everything seemed as though it might be a terrible delusion. It was so frightening. Please, don’t speak—unless there’s something you know that I should know.”

  “No, there isn’t.”

  “Then let’s go home.”

  * * *

  And last, my father’s visit.

  In the letter profusely thanking us for the Labor Day weekend invitation extended to him on the phone, my father asks if he may bring a friend along, another widower whom he has grown close to in recent months and whom he says he wants me in particular to meet. He must by now have discarded or used up the paper and envelopes bearing the name of the hotel, for the request is written on the back of stationery imprinted at the top with the words JEWISH FEDERATION OF NASSAU COUNTY. Imprinted beneath is a brief, pointed epistle to the Jews whose style is as easily recognizable to me as Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s.

  Dear

  I am enclosing your pledge card from the Jewish Federation of Nassau County. I, as a Jew, am making a personal appeal. There is no need to recite our commitment to maintain a Jewish homeland. We need the financial aid of every Jew.

  Never again must we allow a holocaust! No Jew can be apathetic!

  I beg of you, please help. Give before it hurts.

  Sincerely,

  Abe Kepesh

  Garfield Garden Apartments

  Co-Chairman

  On the reverse side is his letter to Claire and myself, written with a ball-point pen and in his oversized scrawl, though no less revealing than the printed message calling for Jewish solidarity (in those childlike hieroglyphics, all the more revealing) of the fanatically lavish loyalties that, now, in his old age, cause him to be afflicted throughout the waking day with the dull ache and shooting pain of wild sentiment ensnared.

  The morning we get his letter I telephone him at my Uncle Larry’s office to tell him that if he does not mind sharing our smallish guest room with his friend Mr. Barbatnik, he is of course welcome to bring him along.

  “I hate like hell to leave him here alone on a holiday, Davey, that’s the only thing. Otherwise I wouldn’t bother you. See, I just didn’t think it through,” he explains, “when I rushed to say yes so quick like that. Only it’s got to be no inconvenience for Claire, if he comes. I don’t want to burden her, not with school starting up, not with all the work she must have to do to get ready.”

  “Oh, she’s ready, don’t worry about that,” and I hand the phone over to Claire, who assures him that her school preparations were finished long ago and that it will be a pleasure to entertain the two of them for the weekend.

  “He’s a wonderful, wonderful man,” my father quickly assures her, as though we actually have reason to suspect that a friend of his might turn out to be a rummy or a bum, “somebody who has been through things you wouldn’t believe. He works with me when I go collecting for the UJA. And, I tell you, I need him. I need a hand grenade. Try to get money out of people. Try to get feelings out of people and see where you wind up. You tell them that what happened to the Jews must never happen again, and they look at you like they never heard of it. Like Hitler and pogroms are something I am making up in order to fleece them out of their municipal bonds. We got one guy in the building across the way, a brand-new widower three years older than me, who already made himself his bundle years ago in the bootleg business and God only knows what else, and you should get a load of him since his wife passed away—a new chippie on his arm every month. Dresses them up in expensive clothes, takes them in to see Broadway shows, wouldn’t be caught dead driving them to the beauty parlor in anything but a Fleetwood Caddie, but just try to ask him for a hundred dollars for the UJA and he is practically in tears telling you how bad he has been hit on the market. It’s a good thing I can control my temper. And between you and me, half the time I can’t, and it is Mr. Barbatnik who has to call me off before I tell this s.o.b. just what I think of him. Oh, this one guy, he really gets my goat. Every time I leave him I have to go get a phenobarb from my sister-in-law. And I’m somebody who don’t even believe in an aspirin.”

  “Mr. Kepesh,” Claire says, “please feel free to bring Mr. Barbatnik with you.”

  But he will not say yes until he has extracted a promise that if they both come she will not think that she has to cook them three meals a day. “I want a guarantee that you are going to pretend that we’re not even there.”

  “But what fun would that be? Suppose instead I take the easy way out and just pretend that you are.”

  “Hey, listen,” he says to her, “you sound like a happy girl.”

  “I am. My cup runneth over.”

  Even though Claire is holding the phone to her ear across the kitchen table from me, I clearly hear what comes next. This results from the fact that my father approaches long-distance communication in much the way that he approaches so many of the riddles that elude his understanding—with the belief that the electrical waves transmitting his voice may not make it without his wholehearted and unstinting support. Without hard work.

  “God bless you,” he calls out to her, “for what you are doing for my son!”

  “Well—” beneath her tan, she has reddened—“well, he’s doing some nice things for me.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt that,” my father says. “I’m delighted to hear it. But still and all he has practically gone out of his way to bring trouble into his life. Tell me, does he realize how good he has got it with you? He is thirty-four years old, a grown man already, he can’t afford any longer to go around wet behind his ears. Claire, does he know enough by now to appreciate what he’s got?”

  She tries laughing the question off, but he insists on an answer, even if finally he must give it himself. “Losing your bearings no one needs—life is confusing enough. You don’t stick a knife in your own gut. But that is just what he did to himself with marrying that glamour girl, all dressed up like Suzie Wong. Oh, about her and those outfits of hers the less said the better. And those French perfumes. Pardon my language, but she smelled like a God damn barber shop. And what was he up to living in that sublet apartment with red walls made out of cloth, and with whatever else went on there, that I will never be able to fathom. I don’t even want to think about it. Claire dear, listen to me, you at last are somebody worthwhile. If only you can get him to settle into a real life.”

  “Oh, my,” she says, not a little flustered by all the emotion that is flowing her way, “if it were any more settled around here…”

  Before she can quite figure out, at the age of twenty-five, how to conclude that sentence, my father is roaring, “Wonderful, wonderful, that is the most wonderful news about him since he finished that fellowship to be a gypsy in Europe and came back on that boat in one piece!”

>   In the lot behind the general store in town, he steps cautiously down from the high front step of the New York bus, but then, despite the scalding heat—despite his advanced age—surges forward, and not toward me, but on the wings of impulse, to the person who is no relation of his quite yet. There were those few evenings when she served him a meal in my new apartment, and then, when I gave my public lecture from Man in a Shell in the Scholar Series at the university, it was Claire who escorted him and my aunt and uncle into the library and sat beside him in the little auditorium there, identifying at his request which gentleman was the department chairman and which the dean. Nonetheless, now when he reaches out to embrace her, it is as though she is already pregnant with the first of his grandchildren, as though she is in fact the genetrix of all that is most estimable in that elite breed of creatures to which he is joined by blood and for which his admiration is overbrimming … if and when, that is, the membership does not go around shamelessly showing its fangs and its claws and leaving my father fit to be tied.

  Seeing Claire swallowed up by this stranger, Dazzle begins leaping crazily around in the dust at his mistress’s sandals—and, though my father has never had all that much trust, or found much to admire, in members of the animal kingdom who breed out of wedlock and defecate on the ground, I am surprised to see that Dazzle’s display of unabashed dogginess in no way seems to deflect his attention from the girl he is holding in his arms.

  At first I do have to wonder if what we are witnessing is not designed in part at least to put Mr. Barbatnik at ease about visiting a human couple who are not legally wed—if perhaps my father intends, by the very intensity with which he squeezes her body to his, to put his own not entirely unexpected misgivings on that score to rest. I cannot remember seeing him so forceful and so animated since before my mother’s illness. In fact, he strikes me as a little nuts today. But that is still better than what I expected. Usually when I call each week there is, in just about every upbeat thing he says, a melancholy strain so transparent that I wonder how he finds the wherewithal to keep going on, as he will, about how all is well, wonderful, couldn’t be better. The somber “Yeah, hello?” with which he answers the phone is quite enough to inform me of what underlies his “active” days—the mornings helping my uncle in his office where my uncle needs no help; the afternoons at the Jewish Center arguing politics with the “fascists” in the steam room, men whom he refers to as Von Epstein, and Von Haberman, and Von Lipschitz—the local Goering, Goebbels, and Streicher, apparently, who give him palpitations of the heart; and then those interminable evenings soliciting at his neighbors’ doors for his various philanthropies and causes, reading again column by column through Newsday, the Post, and the Times, watching the CBS News for the second time in four hours, and finally, in bed and unable to sleep, spreading the letters from his cardboard file box over the blanket and reviewing his correspondence with his vanished, cherished guests. In some cases more cherished, it seems to me, now that they have vanished, than when they were around and there was too little barley in the soup, too much chlorine in the pool, and never enough waiters in the dining room.