The Professor of Desire (24 page)

The top sheet of my yellow pad is spattered and crisscrossed with the fragmentary beginnings of a lecture outline—running down one margin is a long list of modern novelists, European as well as American, among whom Colette's decent, robust, bourgeois paganism still seems to me unique—when Claire comes out of the kitchen's screen door, wearing her bathing suit and carrying her white terry-cloth robe over her arm.

The book in her hand is Musil's
Young Törless,
the copy I'd just finished marking up the night before. How delighted I am with her curiosity about these books I will be teaching! And to look up at the swell of her breasts above the bikini's halter, well, that is yet another of this wonderful day's satisfactions.

“Tell me,” I say, taking hold of the calf of her nearest leg, “why is there no American Colette? Or could it be Updike who comes the closest? It's surely not Henry Miller. It's surely not Hawthorne.”

“A phone call for you,” she says. “Helen Kepesh.”

“My God.” I look at my watch, for all the help that will give. “What time would it be in California? What can she want? How did she find me?”

“It's a local call.”

“
Is
it?”

“I think so, yes.”

I haven't yet moved from the chair. “And that's what she said, Helen
Kepesh?
”

“Yes.”

“But I thought she'd taken her own name back.”

Claire shrugs.

“You told her I was here?”

“Do you want me to tell her you aren't?”

“What can she
want?
”

“You'll have to ask her,” says Claire. “Or maybe you won't.”

“Would it be so very wrong of me just to go in there and put the phone back on the hook?”

“Not wrong,” says Claire. “Only unduly anxious.”

“But I
feel
unduly anxious. I feel unduly
happy.
This is all so perfect.” I spread ten fingers across the soft swell of flesh above her halter. “Oh, my dear, dear pal.”

“I'll wait out here,” she says.

“And I
will
go swimming with you.”

“Okay. Good.”

“So wait!”

It would be neither cruel nor cowardly, I tell myself, looking down at the phone on the kitchen table—it would just be the most sensible thing I could do. Except, of the half-dozen people closest to my life, Helen happens still to be one. “Hello,” I say.

“Hello. Oh, hello. Look, I feel odd about phoning you, David. I almost didn't. Except I seem to be in your town. We're at the Texaco station; across from a real-estate office.”

“I see.”

“I'm afraid it was just too hard driving off without even calling. How are you?”

“How did you know I was staying here?”

“I tried you in New York a few days ago. I called the college, and the department secretary said she wasn't authorized to give out your summer address. I said I was a former student and I was sure you wouldn't mind. But she was adamant about Professor Kepesh's privacy. Quite a moat, that lady.”

“So how did you find me?”

“I called the Schonbrunns.”

“My, my.”

“But stopping off here for gas is really just accidental. Strange, I know, but true. And not as strange, after all, as the truly strange things that happen.”

She is lying and I'm not charmed. Through the window I can see Claire holding the unopened book in her hand. We could already be in the car on the way down to the pond.

“What do you want, Helen?”

“You mean from you? Nothing; nothing at all. I'm married now.”

“I didn't know.”

“That's what I was doing in New York. We were visiting my husband's family. We're on our way to Vermont. They have a summer house there.” She laughs; a very appealing laugh. It makes me remember her in bed. “Can you believe I've never been to New England?”

“Well,” I say, “it's not exactly Rangoon.”

“Neither is Rangoon any more.”

“How is your health? I heard that you were pretty sick.”

“I'm better now. I had a hard time for a while. But it's over. How are
you?
”

“My hard time is over too.”

“I'd like to see you, if I could. Are we that far from your house? I'd like to talk to you, just for a little—”

“About what?”

“I owe you some explanations.”

“You don't. No more than I owe you any. I think we'd both be better off at this late date without the explanations.”

“I was mad, David, I was going crazy— David, these are difficult things to say surrounded by cans of motor oil.”

“Then don't say them.”

“I have to.”

Out on my chair, Claire is now leafing through the
Times.

“You better go swimming without me,” I say. “Helen's coming here; with her husband.”

“She's married?”

“So she says.”

“Why
was
it Helen ‘Kepesh' then?”

“Probably to identify herself to you. To me.”

“Or to herself,” says Claire. “Would you rather I weren't here?”

“Of course not. I meant I thought you'd
prefer
going swimming.”

“Only if
you
prefer—”

“No, absolutely not.”

“Where are they now?”

“Down in town.”

“She came all this way—? I don't understand. What if we hadn't been at home?”

“She says they're on their way to his family's house in Vermont.”

“They didn't take the Thruway?”

“Honey, what's happened to you? No, they didn't take the Thruway. Maybe they're taking the back roads for the scenery. What's the difference? They'll come and they'll go. You were the one who told
me
not to be unduly anxious.”

“But I wouldn't want you to be hurt.”

“Don't worry. If that's why you're staying—”

Here suddenly she stands, and at the edge of tears (where I have never before seen her!) she says, “Look, you so
obviously
want me out of the way—” Quickly she starts toward where our car is parked on the other side of the house, in the dust bowl by the old collapsing barn. And I run after her, just behind the dog, who thinks it is all a game.

Consequently we are beside the barn, waiting together, when the Lowerys arrive. As their car makes its way up the long dirt drive to the house, Claire slips her terry-cloth robe on over her bathing suit. I am wearing a pair of corduroy shorts, a faded old T-shirt, battered sneakers, an outfit I've probably had since Syracuse. Helen will have no trouble recognizing me. But will I recognize her? Can I explain to Claire—should I have?—that really, all I want is to
see
 …

I had heard that, on top of all her debilitating ailments, she had gained some twenty pounds. If so, she has by now lost all that weight, and a bit more. She emerges from the car looking exactly like herself. She is paler-complexioned than I remember—or rather, she is not pale in the cleansed, Quakerish way to which I am now accustomed. Helen's pallor is luminous, transparent. Only in the thinness of her arms and neck is there any indication that she has been through a bad time with her health, and, what is more, is now a woman in her mid-thirties. Otherwise, she is the Stunning Creature once again.

Her husband shakes my hand. I had been expecting someone taller and older—I suppose one usually does. Lowery has a close-cropped black beard, round tortoise-shell glasses, and a compact, powerful, athletic build. Both are dressed in jeans and sandals and colored polo shirts and have their hair cut in the Prince Valiant style. The only jewelry either wears is a wedding ring. All of which tells me practically nothing. Maybe the emeralds are home in the vault.

We walk around as though they are prospective buyers who have been sent up by the real-estate agent to look at the house; as though they are the new couple from down the road who have stopped by to introduce themselves; as though they are what they are—ex-wife with new husband, someone now meaning nothing, artifact of relatively little remaining historical interest uncovered during an ordinary day's archaeological excavation. Yes, giving her the directions to our so perfect lair turns out to have been neither a foolish nor, God knows, a
dangerous
mistake. Otherwise, how would I have known that I have been wholly de-Helenized too, that the woman can neither harm me nor charm me, that I am unbewitchable by all but the most loving and benign of feminine spirits. How right Claire was to caution me against being unduly anxious; before, of course, she went ahead and—doubtless because of my own confusion upon hanging up the phone—became unduly anxious herself.

Claire is up ahead now with Les Lowery. They are headed toward the blackened, ruined oak tree at the edge of the woods. Early in the summer, during a dramatic daylong storm, the tree was struck by lightning and severed in two. While we all walked together around the house and through the garden, Claire had been talking, just a little feverishly, about the wild thunderstorms of early July; a little feverishly, and a little childishly. I had not imagined beforehand just how ominous Helen would seem to her, given the tales of her troublemaking that I have told; I suppose I had not realized how often I must have told them to her in the first months we were together. No wonder she has latched on to the quiet husband, who does in fact seem closer to her in age and spirit, and who, it turns out, is also a subscriber to
Natural History
and the
Audubon Magazine.
Some minutes earlier, on the porch, she had identified for the Lowerys the unusual Cape Cod seashells arranged in a wicker tray in the center of the dining table, between the antique pewter candlesticks that were her grandmother's gift upon her graduation from college.

While my mate and her mate are examining the burned-out trunk of the oak tree, Helen and I drift back to the porch. She is telling me all about him, still. He is a lawyer, a mountain climber, a skier, he is divorced, has two adolescent daughters; in partnership with an architect he has already made a small fortune as a housing developer; lately he has been in the news for the work he has been doing as investigating counsel for a California State Legislature committee unraveling connections between organized crime and the Marin County Police … Outside I see that Lowery has moved past the oak tree and onto the path that cuts up through the woods to the steep rock formations that Claire has been photographing all summer. Claire and Dazzle appear to be headed back down to the house.

I say to Helen, “He looks a bit young to be
such
a Karenin.”

“I'm sure I'd be sardonic too,” she replies, “if I were you and thought I was still me. I was surprised you even came to the phone. But that's because you are a nice man. You always were, actually.”

“Oh, Helen, what's going on here? Save the ‘nice man' stuff for my tombstone. You may have a new life, but this lingo…”

“I had a lot of time to think when I was sick. I thought about—”

But I don't want to know. “Tell me,” I say, interrupting her, “how was your conversation with the Schonbrunns?”

“I spoke to Arthur. She wasn't home.”

“And how did he take hearing from you after all this time?”

“Oh, he took it quite well.”

“Frankly I'm surprised he offered assistance. I'm surprised you asked him for it. As I remember, he was never a great fan of yours—nor you of theirs.”

“Arthur and I have changed our minds about each other.”

“Since when? You used to be very funny about him.”

“I'm not any more. I don't ridicule people who admit what they want. Or at least admit to what they don't have.”

“And what does Arthur want? Are you telling me that all along Arthur wanted
you?
”

“I don't know about all along.”

“Oh, Helen, I find this hard to believe.”

“I never heard anything easier to believe.”

“And what exactly is it I'm supposed to be believing, again?”

“When we two got back from Hong Kong, when you moved out and I was alone, he telephoned one night and asked if he could come over to talk. He was very concerned about you. So he came from his office—it was about nine—and he talked about your unhappiness for nearly an hour. I said finally that I didn't know what any of it had to do with me any more, and then he asked if he and I might meet in San Francisco for lunch one day. I said I didn't know, I was feeling pretty miserable myself, and he kissed me. And then he made me sit down and he sat down and he explained to me in detail that he hadn't expected to do that, and that it didn't mean what I thought it meant. He was happily married still, and after all these years he still had a strong physical relationship with Debbie, and in fact he owed her his whole life. And then he told me a harrowing story about some crazy girl, some librarian he had almost married in Minnesota, and how she had once gone after him with a fork at breakfast and stabbed his hand. He'd never gotten over what might have happened to him if he had caved in and married her—he thinks it actually might have ended in a murder. He showed me the scar from the fork. He said his salvation was meeting Debbie, and that he owes everything he's accomplished to her devotion and love. Then he tried to kiss me again, and when I said I didn't think it was a good idea, he told me I was perfectly right and that he had misjudged me completely and he still wanted to have lunch with me. I really couldn't take any more confusion, so I said yes. He arranged for us to eat at a place in Chinatown where, I assure you, nobody he knew or I knew or
anybody
knew could possibly see us together. And that was it. But then that summer, when they moved East, he began writing letters. I still get them, every few months or so.”