The Professor of Desire (11 page)

For some hours my happiness is complete. Have I ever heard or read of something like this happening, of a person being catapulted out of his misery
directly
into bliss? The common wisdom has it that it works the other way around. Well, I am here to say that on rare occasions it seems to work this way too. My God, I do feel good. I will not torture her, or myself, ever again. Fine with me.

Two hundred and forty minutes of this, more or less.

With a loan from Arthur Schonbrunn, a colleague who had been my thesis adviser, I buy a round-trip ticket and fly off to Asia the next day. (At the bank I discover that the entire balance in our savings account had been withdrawn by Helen the week before, for her one-way air ticket, and to start her new life.) On the plane there is time to think—and to think and to think and to think. It must be that I want her back, that I can't give her up, that I am in love with her whether I've known it or not, that she is my destiny—

Not one word of this stuff convinces me. Most are words I despise: Helen's kind of words, Helen's kind of thinking. I can't live without this, he can't live without that, my woman, my man, my destiny … Kid stuff! Movie stuff!
Screen Romance!

Yet if this woman is not
my woman,
what am I doing here? If she is not
my destiny,
why was I on the phone from 2 to 5 a.m.? Is it just that pride won't permit me to abdicate in favor of her homosexual protector? No, that's not what's done it. Nor am I Acting Responsibly, or out of shame, or masochism, or vindictive glee …

Then that leaves love. Love! At this late date! Love! After all that's been done to destroy it! More love, suddenly, than there was anywhere along the way!

I spend the rest of my waking hours on that flight remembering every single charming, sweet, beguiling word she has ever spoken.

Accompanied by Garland—grim, courteous, impeccably now the banker and businessman—a Hong Kong police detective, and the clean-cut young man from the American consulate who is also there to meet my airplane, I am taken to a jail to see my wife. As we leave the terminal for the car, I say to Garland, “I thought she was to be out by now.” “The negotiations,” he says, “seem to involve more interests than we had imagined.” “Hong Kong,” the young consulate officer informs me wryly, “is the birthplace of collective bargaining.” Everybody in the car seems to know the score, except me.

I am searched and then allowed to sit with her in a tiny room whose door is dramatically locked behind us. The sound of the lock catching makes her reach wildly for my hand. Her face is blotchy, her lips are blistered, her eyes … her eyes I cannot look into without my innards crumbling. And Helen smells. And as for all that I felt for her up in the air, well, I simply cannot bring myself to love her like that down here on the ground. I have never loved her quite like that down on the ground before, and I'm not going to start in a jail. I am not that kind of an idiot. Which maybe makes me some other kind of idiot … but that I will have to determine later.

“They planted cocaine on me.” “I know.” “He can't get away with that,” she says. “He won't. Donald is going to get you out of here.”
“He has to!”
“He is, he's doing it. So you don't have to worry. You'll be out very soon now.” “I have to tell you something terrible. All our cash is gone. The police stole it. He told them what to do to me—and they did it. They laughed at me. They touched me.” “Helen, tell me the truth now. I have to know. We all have to know. When you get out of here, do you want to stay on with Donald in his house? He says he will look after you, he—” “But I can't! No! Oh, don't leave me here, please! Jimmy will kill me!”

On the return flight Helen drinks until the stewardess says she cannot serve her another. “I'll bet you were even faithful to me,” she says, oddly “chatty” suddenly. “Yes, I'll bet you were,” she says, serene in a dopey sort of way now that the whiskey has somewhat dimmed the horrors of incarceration and she is beyond the nightmare of Jimmy Metcalf's revenge. I don't bother to answer one way or the other. Of the two meaningless copulations of the last year there is nothing to say; she would only laugh if I were to tell her who her rivals had been. Nor could I expect much sympathy were I to try to explain to her how unsatisfying it had been to deceive her with women who hadn't a hundredth of her appeal to me—who hadn't a hundredth of her character, let alone her loveliness—and whose faces I could have spit into when I realized how much of
their
satisfaction derived from putting Helen Kepesh in her place. Quickly enough—
almost
quickly enough—I had seen that deceiving a wife as disliked as Helen was by other women just wasn't going to be possible without humiliating myself in the process. I hadn't a Jimmy Metcalf's gift for coldly rearing back and delivering the grand and fatal blow to my opponent; no, vengeance was his style and contentious melancholia was mine … Helen's speech is badly slurred by liquor and fatigue, but now that she has had a bath, and a meal, and a change of clothes, and a chance to make up her face, she intends to have a conversation, her first in days and days. She intends now to resume her place in the world, and not as the vanquished, but as herself. “Well,” she says, “you didn't have to be
such
a good boy, you know. You could have had your affairs, if that would have made you any happier. I could have taken it.” “Good to know that,” I say. “It's you, David, who wouldn't have survived in one piece. You see, I've been faithful to you, whether you believe it or not. The only man I've been faithful to in my life.” Do I believe that? Can I? And if I should? Where does
that
leave me? I say nothing. “You don't know yet where I used to go sometimes after my exercise class.” “No, I don't.” “You don't know why I went out in the morning wearing my favorite dress.” “I had my ideas.” “Well, they were wrong. I had no lover. Never, never with you. Because it would have been too hideous. You couldn't have taken it—and so I didn't do it. You would have been crushed, you would have forgiven me, and you would never have been yourself again. You would have gone around bleeding forever.” “I went around bleeding anyway. We both went around bleeding. Where did you go all dressed up?” “I went out to the airport.” “And?” “And I sat in the Pan Am waiting room. I had my passport in my handbag. And my jewelry. I sat there reading the paper until somebody asked if I wanted to have a drink in the first-class lounge.” “And I'll bet somebody always did.” “Always—that's right. And I'd go there and have a drink. We would talk … and then they would ask me to go away with them. To South America, to Africa, everywhere. A man even asked me to come with him on a business trip to Hong Kong. But I never did it. Never. Instead, I came back home and you started in on me about the checkbook stubs.” “You did this how often?” “Often enough,” she replies. “Enough for what—to see if you still had the power?” “No, you idiot, to see if
you
still had the power.” She begins to sob. “Will it startle you,” she asks, “to hear that I think we should have had that baby?” “I wouldn't have risked it, not with you.” My words knock the wind out of her, what wind is left. “Oh, you shit, that was unnecessary, there are less cruel ways…” she says. “Oh, why didn't I let Jimmy kill her when he wanted to!” she cries. “Quiet down. Helen.” “You should see her now—she stood there, ten feet inside the hallway, glaring out at me. You should see her—she looks like a whale! That beautiful man goes to bed with a whale.” “I said quiet down.” “He told them to plant cocaine on me—on me, the person he loves! He let them take my purse and steal my money! And how I loved that man! I only left him to save him from committing a murder! And now he hates me for being too decent, and you despise me for being indecent, and the truth of it is that I'm better and stronger and braver than both of you. At least I was—and I was when I was only twenty years old!
You
wouldn't risk a baby with
me?
What about someone like
you?
Did it ever occur to you that about a baby it may have been the other way around? No? Yes? Answer me! Oh, I can't wait to see the little sparrow you do take the risk with. If only you had taken it into your hands long ago, years ago—at the beginning! I should have had nothing to say about it!” “Helen, you're exhausted and you're loaded and you don't know what you're saying. A lot you cared about having a baby.” “A lot I did, you fool, you dope! Oh, why did I come on this airplane with you! I could have stayed with Donald! He needs someone as much as I do. I should have stayed with him in his house, and told
you
to go on home. Oh, why did I lose my nerve in that jail!” “You lost it because of your Jimmy. You thought when you got out he'd kill you.” “But he wouldn't—that was crazy! He only did what he did because he loves me so, and I loved him! Oh, I waited and I waited and I waited—I've waited for you for six years! Why didn't you take me into your world like a man!” “Maybe you mean why didn't I take you out of yours. I couldn't. The only kind to take
you
out is the kind who took you in. Sure, I know about my terrible tone, and the scornful looks I can give, but I never went and got a hit-man in about the toast, you know. Next time you want to be saved from a tyrant, find another tyrant to do the job. I admit defeat.” “Oh, God, oh, Jesus God, why must they be either brutes or choirboys? Stewardess,” she says, grabbing the girl's arm as she passes in the aisle, “I don't want a drink, I've had enough. I only want to ask a question of you. Don't be frightened. Why are they either brutes or choirboys, do you know?” “Who, madam?” “Don't you find that in your travels from one continent to the other? They're even afraid, you know, of a sweet little thing like you. That's why you have to go around grinning like that. Just look the bastards right in the eye and they're either at your knees or at your throat.”

When at last Helen has fallen asleep—her face rolling familiarly on my shoulder—I take the final exams out of my briefcase and begin where I had had to leave off a hundred or so hours ago. Yes, I have taken my schoolwork with me—and a good thing too. I cannot imagine how I could get through the million remaining hours of the flight without these examination papers to hang on to. “Without this…” and see myself strangling Helen with the coil of her waist-long hair. Who strangles his lover with her hair? Isn't it somebody somewhere in Browning? Oh, who cares!

“The search for intimacy, not because it necessarily makes for happiness, but because it is necessary, is one of Chekhov's recurrent themes.”

The paper I have chosen to begin with—to begin again with—is by Kathie Steiner, the girl I had dreamed of adopting. “Good,” I write in the margin alongside her opening sentence; then I reread it and after “necessary” make an insertion mark and write, “for survival(?).” And all the while I am thinking, “And miles below are the beaches of Polynesia. Well, dear, dazzling creature, a lot of good that does us! Hong Kong! The whole damn thing could have taken place in Cincinnati! A hotel room, a police station, an airport. A vengeful megalomaniac and some crooked cops! And a would-be Cleopatra! Our savings gone on this trashy Grade-B thriller! Oh, this voyage is the marriage itself—traversing four thousand miles of the exotic globe twice over, and for no good reason at all!”

Struggling to fix my attention once again on the task at hand—and not on whether Helen and I should have had a child, or who is to blame because we didn't; refusing to charge myself yet again with all I could have done that I didn't do, and all I did that I shouldn't have—I return to Kathie Steiner's final exam. Jimmy Metcalf instructs the police: “Kick her ass a little, gentlemen, it'll do the whore some good,” while I subdue my emotions by reading carefully through each of Kathie's pages, correcting every last comma fault, reminding her about her dangling-modifier problem, and dutifully filling the margin with my commentary and questions. Me and my “finals”; my marking pen and my paper clips. How the Emperor Metcalf would enjoy the spectacle—likewise Donald Garland and his uncharitable chief of police. I suppose I ought to laugh a little myself; but as I am a literature professor and not a policeman, as I am someone who long ago squeezed out what little of the tyrant was ever in him—from the look of things, maybe squeezed out just a bit too much—instead of laughing it all off, I come to Kathie's concluding sentence, and am undone. The hold I have had on myself since Helen's disappearance dissolves like that, and I must turn my face and press it into the darkened window of the humming airship that is carrying us back home to complete, in orderly and legal fashion, the disentanglement of our two wrecked lives. I cry for myself, I cry for Helen, and finally I seem to cry hardest of all with the realization that somehow not every last thing
has
been destroyed, that despite my consuming obsession with my marital unhappiness and my dreamy desire to call out to my young students for their help, I have somehow gotten a sweet, chubby, unharmed and as yet unhorrified daughter of Beverly Hills to end her sophomore year of college by composing this grim and beautiful lament summarizing what she calls “Anton Chekhov's overall philosophy of life.” But can Professor Kepesh have taught her this? How?
How?
I am only just beginning to learn it on this flight! “We are born innocent,” the girl has written, “we suffer terrible disillusionment before we can gain knowledge, and then we fear death—and we are granted only fragmentary happiness to offset the pain.”

 

I am finally extracted from the rubble of my divorce by a job offer from Arthur Schonbrunn, who has left Stanford to become chairman of the comparative literature program at the State University of New York on Long Island. I have already begun seeing a psychoanalyst in San Francisco—only shortly after I began seeing the lawyer—and it is he who recommends that when I return East to teach I continue therapy with a Dr. Frederick Klinger, whom he knows and can recommend as someone who is not afraid to speak up with his patients, “a solid, reasonable man,” as he is described to me, “a specialist,” I am told, “in common sense.” But are reason and common sense what I need? Some would say that I have ruined things by far too narrow a devotion to exactly these attributes.