The Professor of Desire (30 page)

“And then what happened?” I ask, but he continues looking down, as though to contemplate the riddle of this one hand in the other. “How were you saved, Mr. Barbatnik?”

“One night a German farm woman said to me that the Americans are here. I thought she must be lying. I figured, don't come back here to her, she's up to something no good. But the next day I saw a tank through the trees, rolling down the road, with a white star, and I ran out, screaming at the top of my lungs.”

Claire says, “You must have looked so strange by then. How did they know who you were?”

“They knew. I wasn't the first one. We were all coming out of our holes. What was left of us. I lost a wife and two parents, my brother, two sisters, and a three-year-old daughter.”

Claire groans,
“Oh,”
as though she has just been pierced by a needle. “Mr. Barbatnik, we are asking you too many questions, we shouldn't…”

He shakes his head. “Darling, you live, you ask questions. Maybe it's why we live. It seems that way.”

“I tell him,” says my father, “that he should make a book out of all he went through. I can think of some people I'd like to give it to read. If they could read it, maybe they would shake their heads that they can be the way they are, and this man can be so kind and good.”

“And before the war started?” I ask him. “You were a young man then. What did you want to be?”

Probably because of the strength of his arms and the size of his hands I expect to hear him say a carpenter or a mason. In America he drove a taxi for over twenty years.

“A human being,” he answers, “someone that could see and understand how we lived, and what was real, and not to flatter myself with lies. This was always my ambition from when I was a small child. In the beginning I was like everybody, a good cheder boy. But I personally, with my own hands, liberated myself from all that at sixteen years. My father could have killed me, but I absolutely did not want to be a fanatic. To believe in what doesn't exist, no, that wasn't for me. These are just the people who hate the Jews, these fanatics. And there are Jews who are fanatics too,” he tells Claire, “and also walk around in a dream. But not me. Not for a second since I was sixteen years old and told my father what I refuse to pretend.”

“If he wrote a book,” says my father, “it should be called ‘The Man Who Never Said Die.'”

“And here you married again?” I ask.

“Yes. She had been in a concentration camp also. Three years ago next month she passed away—like your own mother, from cancer. She wasn't even sick. One night after dinner she is washing the dishes. I go in to turn on the TV, and suddenly I hear a crash from the kitchen. ‘Help me, I'm in trouble.' When I run into the kitchen she is on the floor. ‘I couldn't hold on to the ditch,' she says. She says ‘ditch' instead of ‘dish.' The word alone gave me the willies. And her eyes. It was awful. I knew then and there that she was done for. Two days later they tell us that cancer is already in her brain. And it happened out of nowhere.” Without a trace of animus—just to keep the record straight—he adds, “How else?”

“Too terrible,” Claire says.

After my father has gone around to each candle to snuff out the flame—blowing even at those already expired, just to be sure—we step into the garden for Claire to show them the other planets visible from the earth tonight. Talking toward their upturned eyeglasses she explains about the Milky Way, answers questions about shooting stars, points out, as she does to her sixth-graders—as she did with me on our first night here—that mere speck of a star adjacent to the handle of the Little Dipper which the Greek soldiers had to discern to qualify for battle. Then she accompanies them back into the house; if they should awaken in the morning before we do, she wants them to know where there is coffee and juice. I remain in the garden with Dazzle. I don't know what to think. I don't want to know. I want only to climb by myself to the top of the hill. I remember our gondola rides in Venice. “Are you sure we didn't die and go to heaven?” “You'll have to ask the gondolier.”

Through the living-room window I see the three of them standing around the coffee table. Claire has turned the record over and put it back on the turntable to play. My father is holding the album of Shakespeare medals in his hands. It appears that he is reading aloud from the backs of the medallions.

Some minutes later she joins me on the weathered wooden bench at the top of the hill. Side by side, without speaking, we look up again at the familiar stars. We do this nearly every night. Everything we have done this summer we have done nearly every night, afternoon, and morning. Every day calling out from the kitchen to the porch, from the bedroom to the bath, “Clarissa, come see, the sun is setting,” “Claire, there's a hummingbird,” “Sweetheart, what's the name of that star?”

For the first time all day she gives in to exhaustion. “Oh, my,” she says, and lays her head on my shoulder. I can feel the air she breathes slowly filling, then slowly leaving her body.

After inventing a constellation of my own of the sky's brightest lights, I say to her, “It's a simple Chekhov story, isn't it?”

“Isn't what?”

“This. Today. The summer. Some nine or ten pages, that's all. Called ‘The Life I Formerly Led.' Two old men come to the country to visit a healthy, handsome young couple, brimming over with contentment. The young man is in his middle thirties, having recovered finally from the mistakes of his twenties. The young woman is in her twenties, the survivor of a painful youth and adolescence. They have every reason to believe they have come through. It looks and feels to both of them as though they have been saved, and in large part by one another. They are in love. But after dinner by candlelight, one of the old men tells of his life, about the utter ruination of a world, and about the blows that keep on coming. And that's it. The story ends just like this: her pretty head on his shoulder; his hand stroking her hair; their owl hooting; their constellations all in order—their medallions all in order; their guests in their freshly made beds; and their summer cottage, so cozy and inviting, just down the hill from where they sit together wondering about what they have to fear. Music is playing in the house. The most lovely music there is. ‘And both of them knew that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.' That's the last line of ‘Lady with a Lapdog.'”

“Are you really frightened of something?”

“I seem to be saying I am, don't I?”

“But of what?”

Her soft, clever, trusting, green eyes are on me now. All that conscientious, schoolroom attention of hers is focused upon me—and what I will answer. After a moment I tell her, “I don't know really. Yesterday at the drugstore I saw that they had portable oxygen units up on the shelf. The kid there showed me how they work, and I bought one. I put it in the bathroom closet. It's back of the beach towels. In case anything should happen to anyone tonight.”

“Oh, but nothing is going to happen. Why should it?”

“No reason. Only when he was going on like that about the past with that couple who own the hotel, I wished I had brought it along in the car.”

“David, he isn't going to die just from getting heated up about the past. Oh, sweetheart,” she says, kissing my hand and holding it to her cheek, “you're worn down, that's all. He gets so worked up, he
can
wear you to a frazzle—but he means so well. And he's obviously still in the best of health. He's fine. You're just exhausted. It's time for bed, that's all.”

It's time for bed, that's all.
Oh, innocent beloved, you fail to understand and I can't tell you. I can't say it, not tonight, but within a year my passion will be dead. Already it is dying and I am afraid that there is nothing I can do to save it. And nothing that you can do. Intimately bound—bound to you as to no one else!—and I will not be able to raise a hand to so much as touch you … unless first I remind myself that I must. Toward the flesh upon which I have been grafted and nurtured back toward something like mastery over my life, I will be without desire. Oh, it's stupid! Idiotic! Unfair! To be robbed like this of you! And of this life I love and have hardly gotten to know! And robbed by whom? It always comes down to myself!

And so it is I see myself back in Klinger's waiting room; and despite the presence there of all those
Newsweeks
and
New Yorkers,
I am no sympathetic, unspectacular sufferer out of a muted Chekhov tale of ordinary human affliction. No, more hideous by far, more like Gogol's berserk and mortified amputee, who rushes to the newspaper office to place a maniacal classified ad seeking the return of the nose that has decided to take leave of his face. Yes, the butt of a ridiculous, vicious, inexplicable joke! Here, you therapeutic con man, I'm back, and even worse than before! Did all you said, followed every instruction, unswervingly pursued the healthiest of regimens—even took it on myself to study the passions in my classroom, to submit to scrutiny those who have scrutinized the subject most pitilessly … and here is the result! I know and I know and I know, I imagine and I imagine and I imagine, and when the worst happens, I might as well know nothing! You might as well know nothing! And feed me not the consolations of the reality principle! Just find it for me before it's too late! The perfect young woman is waiting! That dream of a girl and the most livable of lives! And here I hand to the dapper, portly, clever physician the advertisement headed “
LOST
,” describing what it looked like when last seen, its real and sentimental worth, and the reward that I will offer anyone giving information leading to its recovery: “My desire for Miss Claire Ovington—a Manhattan private-school teacher, five feet ten inches tall, one hundred and thirty-eight pounds, fair hair, silvery-green eyes, the kindest, most loving, and loyal nature—has mysteriously vanished…”

And the doctor's reply? That perhaps it was never in my possession to begin with? Or that, obviously, what has disappeared I must learn to live without …

All night long, bad dreams sweep through me like water through a fish's gills. Near dawn I awaken to discover that the house is not in ashes nor have I been abandoned in my bed as an incurable. My willing Clarissa is with me still! I raise her nightgown up along the length of her unconscious body, and with my lips begin to press and tug her nipples until the pale, velvety, childlike areolae erupt in tiny granules and her moan begins. But even while I suck in a desperate frenzy at the choicest morsel of her flesh, even as I pit all my accumulated happiness, and all my hope, against my fear of transformations yet to come, I wait to hear the most dreadful sound imaginable emerge from the room where Mr. Barbatnik and my father lie alone and insensate, each in his freshly made bed.

BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH

Goodbye, Columbus

Letting Go

When She Was Good

Portnoy's Complaint

Our Gang

The Breast

The Great American Novel

My Life as a Man

Reading Myself and Others

The Professor of Desire

 

Copyright © 1977 by Philip Roth

All rights reserved

Published simultaneously in Canada by McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd., Toronto

Sections of this book appeared, in somewhat different form, in
American Poetry Review, Harper's, Penthouse,
and
The New York Times Book Review

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Roth, Philip. The professor of desire. I. Title.

PZ4.R8454Pr    [PS3568.0855]    813' 5'4    77-24032

eISBN 9781466846463

First eBook edition: May 2013