The Professor of Desire (15 page)

Near the end of his vigil—and for the first time ever—Arthur spoke about his own personal life almost as though we were men of the same age and rank. In his twenties, when he was an instructor at Minnesota, he too had been involved with “a wildly neurotic and destructive woman.” Scandalous public quarrels, two harrowing abortions, despair so enormous that he had actually come to think that suicide was the only way he might ever be able to extricate himself from his confusion and pain. He showed me a small scar on his hand, where this mad, pathetic little librarian, whom he could not stand and yet could not leave, had once stabbed him with a table fork at breakfast … And while Arthur tried to give me hope (and guidance) by associating his own early misfortune—and subsequent recovery—with what I was going through, I only wanted to say, “But how dare you? What do you call what you have now? Debbie is so
common;
her spontaneity so much guile-filled playacting; her candor so much tactless showing-off; capricious for the company; devilish for Daddy—Arthur, none of it means a thing, audacious behavior with nothing at stake! While Helen—my God, Helen is a hundred times, Helen is a thousand times…” But of course I rose to no such heights of virtuous indignation, uttered no words so foolish as these about the falsity and shallowness of his wife as against the integrity, intelligence, charm, beauty, and bravery of mine—uxoriousness, after all, being his line, and certainly that night, dreams of uxoricide being somewhat more like mine.

Is this chivalry of Arthur's to be pitied or envied? Is my former mentor and current benefactor a little bit of a liar, a little bit of a masochist, or is he just in love? Or is it that Debbie, with her slightly shrill kittenishness and vaguely slatternly good looks, is the touch of the disreputable that makes bearable an otherwise stiflingly decorous life?

“Vizzied” is the diagnosis rendered by our resident poet, Ralph Baumgarten: “vizzied” or “vizzified”—both adjectives deriving from “vizzy,” an uncommon noun of Baumgarten's strewn throughout his verse, rhyming with “fizzy” and “tizzy,” closely related to “fuzzy” and “buzz,” and referring, of course, to the pudenda. The vizz-ridden—to this class of husbands is Arthur Schonbrunn consigned by the unmarried poet—are those who slavishly conform to standards of propriety and respectability which, as Baumgarten sees it, have been laid down by generations of women to disarm and domesticate men. Of which domestication the poet himself is clearly having none. I tend to agree with Baumgarten that it is in part because of his own decidedly undeferential attitude toward the other gender—and his sexual predilections generally—that the young literary roughneck is not to be reappointed when his contract here runs out. However, if he has, by his manner, earned the disdain of certain of our colleagues and their wives, it has not caused him to be any less flagrant about what he likes and how he likes it. For him flagrancy appears to be much of the fun. “Picked up a girl at the Modern Museum, and on our way out we ran into your pals, Kepesh. Debbie hustled the girl off to the ladies' room to get the latest lowdown on me, and Arthur, in the course of his pleasantries, asked how long Rita and I had been friends. I told him about an hour and a half. I said we were leaving because the museum seemed to afford no comfortable corner where we might go down on each other. But what, I wondered, did Arthur make of her plump little behind? Well, he wouldn't tell me. Gave me a lecture on compassion, instead.”

No arguing that Baumgarten throws a rather large net out to catch his little minnows in. When the two of us are walking on the streets of Manhattan, hardly a woman under fifty or a girl over fifteen passes by from whom he does not attempt to extract information that he manages to intimate is absolutely vital to his survival. “Gee, what a nice coat!” he says, flashing his grin at a young woman in a ratty fur pushing a baby carriage. “Oh, thanks.” “May I ask what it's made of? What kind of an animal was that? I never saw a coat quite like that before.” “This? It's a fake.”
“Really?”
Within minutes he is barely this side of stupefaction (not all of it feigned, either) at learning that this young woman in the fake fur is already divorced, the mother of three small children, and a dropout from the University of Two Thousand Miles Away. To me, standing self-consciously off to the side, he calls, “Did you hear that, Dave? This is Alice. Alice was born in Montana—yet here she is wheeling a baby carriage in New York.” And no less than Baumgarten, the young mother herself now seems a little wonderstruck to have been transported such a distance in a mere twenty-four years.

Success with strangers, Baumgarten informs me, resides in never asking a question of them that can't be answered without thinking, and then being wholly attentive to the reply, no matter how pedestrian. “You remember your James, Kepesh—‘Dramatize, dramatize.' Get these people to understand that who they are and where they're from and what they wear is
interesting.
In a manner of speaking,
momentous. That's
compassion. And, please, display no irony, will you? Your problem is you scare 'em off with your wonderful feel for the complexity of things. My experience is that the ordinary woman in the streets doesn't cotton to irony, really. It's irony, really, that pisses her off. She wants attention. She wants appreciation. She surely doesn't want to match wits with you, boy. Save all that subtlety for your critical articles. When you get out there on the street,
open up.
That's what streets are
for.
”

During my first months at the university I discover that when Baumgarten's name comes up at faculty gatherings there is always someone around who cannot stand the sight of him, and is more than willing to say why. Debbie Schonbrunn holds that the “abomination-in-residence” would be comical were he not so—the word is a favorite of hers and Arthur's—“destructive.” Of course in response I need say nothing: just drink my drink and start back to New York. “Oh, he's not so bad,” I tell her. “In fact,” I add, “I sort of like him.” “And what is there to ‘like' so?” Go home, Kepesh. That empty apartment is where you belong; between this predictable discussion and that faggy apartment, there is no doubt where you will be better off. “What is there to
dislike
so?” I reply. “Where do I begin?” asks Deborah; “his contempt for women, for one thing. He is a murderous, conscienceless womanizer. He hates women.” “Looks to me as though he rather likes them.” “David, you are being contrary and disingenuous, and just a little hostile, and I'm really not sure why. Ralph Baumgarten is an abomination and so is his poetry. I have never read anything so dehumanized in my life. Read that first book of his and see for yourself just how much he likes girls.” “Well, I haven't read him yet”—a lie—“but we've had lunch a few times. He isn't so reprehensible, as far as I can see. Could be, Deborah, that the poetry isn't exactly the man.” “Ah, but it
is:
mean and smug and overbearing and actually quite stupid. And what
about
‘the man'? That walk of his, that
glide;
those army clothes; that face—well, actually he hasn't got a face, has he? Just mean, flat eyes and that surly grin. The mystery is how any girl can even go near him.” “Well, he must have something.” “Or
they
lack something. Really, you have such innate elegance and he is a carrion vulture right down to his claws, and why you would want even to associate with him…” “I get along with him,” I say, shrugging my shoulders, and
now
put down my drink and go on home.

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.