The Professor of Desire (9 page)

Soon enough, instead of pointing out her errors and oversights, or retracing her steps, or picking up the pieces, or restraining myself (and then going off to curse her out behind the bathroom door), I make the toast, I make the eggs, I take out the garbage, I pay the bills, and I mail the letters. Even when she says, graciously (trying, at
her
end, to bridge the awful gap), “I'm going out shopping, want me to drop these—” experience, if not wisdom, directs me to say, “No—no, thanks.” The day she loses her wallet after making a withdrawal from the savings account, I take over the transactions at the bank. The day she leaves the fish to rot under the car's front seat after going out in the morning to get the salmon steaks for dinner, I take over the marketing. The day she has the wool shirt that was to have been dry-cleaned laundered by mistake, I take over going to the cleaners. With the result that before a year is out I am occupied—and glad of it—some sixteen hours a day with teaching my classes and rewriting into a book my thesis on romantic disillusionment in the stories of Anton Chekhov (a subject I'd chosen before even meeting my wife), and Helen has taken increasingly to drink and to dope.

Her days begin in jasmine-scented waters. With olive oil in her hair to make it glossy after washing, and her face anointed with vitamin creams, she reclines in the tub for twenty minutes each morning, eyes closed and the precious skull at rest against a small inflated pillow; the woman moves only to rub gently with her pumice stone the rough skin on her feet. Three times a week the bath is followed by her facial sauna: in her midnight-blue silk kimono, embroidered with pink and red poppies and yellow birds never seen on land or sea, she sits at the counter of our tiny kitchenette, her turbaned head tilted over a bowl of steaming water sprinkled with rosemary and camomile and elder flower. Then, steamed and painted and coiffed, she is ready to dress for her exercise class—and wherever else it is she goes while I am at school: a close-fitting Chinese dress of navy-blue silk, high at the collar and slit to the thigh; the diamond-stud earrings; bracelets of jade and of gold; her jade ring; her sandals; her straw bag.

When she returns later in the day—after Yoga, she decided to go into San Francisco “to look around”: she talks (has talked for years) of plans to open a Far East antique shop there—she is already a little high, and by dinnertime she is all smiles: mellow, blotto, wry. “Life is toast,” she observes, sipping four fingers of rum while I season the lamb chops. “Life is leftovers. Life is leather soles and rubber heels. Life is carrying forward the balance into the new checkbook. Life is writing the correct amount to be paid out onto each of the stubs.
And
the correct day, month, and year.” “That is all true,” I say. “Ah,” she says, watching me as I go about setting the table, “if only his wife didn't forget what she puts in to broil and leave everything to burn; if only his wife could remember that when David had dinner in Arcadia, his mother always set the fork on the left and the spoon on the right and never never both on the same side. Oh, if only his wife could bake and butter his potato the way Mamma did in the wintertime.”

By the time we are into our thirties we have so exacerbated our antipathies that each of us has been reduced to precisely what the other had been so leery of at the outset, the professorial “smugness” and “prissiness” for which Helen detests me with all her heart—“You've actually done it, David—you are a full-fledged young fogy”—no less in evidence than her “utter mindlessness,” “idiotic wastefulness,” “adolescent dreaminess,” etc. Yet I can never leave her, nor she me, not, that is, until outright disaster makes it simply ludicrous to go on waiting for the miraculous conversion of the other. As much to our wonderment as to everyone else's, we remain married nearly as long as we had been together as lovers, perhaps because of the opportunity this marriage now provides for each of us to assault head-on what each takes to be his demon (and had seemed at first to be the other's salvation!). The months go by and we remain together, wondering if a child would somehow resolve this crazy deadlock … or an antique shop of her own for Helen … or a jewelry shop … or psychotherapy for us both. Again and again we hear ourselves described as a strikingly “attractive” couple: well dressed, traveled, intelligent, worldly (especially as young academic couples go), a combined income of twelve thousand dollars a year … and life is simply awful.

What little spirit smolders on in me during the last months of the marriage is visible only in class; otherwise, I am so affectless and withdrawn that a rumor among the junior faculty members has me “under sedation.” Ever since the approval of my dissertation I have been teaching, along with the freshman course “Introduction to Fiction,” two sections of the sophomore survey in “general” literature. During the weeks near the end of the term when we study Chekhov's stories, I find, while reading aloud to my students passages which I particularly want them to take note of, that each and every sentence seems to me to allude to my own plight above all, as though by now every single syllable I think or utter must first trickle down through my troubles. And then there are my classroom daydreams, as plentiful suddenly as they are irrepressible, and so obviously inspired by longings for miraculous salvation—reentry into lives I lost long ago, reincarnation as a being wholly unlike myself—that I am even somewhat grateful to be depressed and without anything like the will power to set even the mildest fantasy in motion.

“I realized that when you love you must either, in your reasoning about that love, start from what is higher, more important than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning, or you must not reason at all.” I ask my students what's meant by these lines, and while they tell me, notice that in a far corner of the room the poised, soft-spoken girl who is my most intelligent, my prettiest—and my most bored and arrogant—student is finishing off a candy bar and a Coke for lunch. “Oh, don't eat junk,” I say to her, silently, and see the two of us on the terrace of the Gritti, squinting through the shimmer over the Grand Canal across to the ocher façade of the perfect little palazzo where we have taken a shuttered room … we are having our midday meal, creamy pasta followed by tender bits of lemoned veal … and at the very table where Birgitta and I, arrogant, nervy youngsters not much older than these boys and girls, sat down to eat on the afternoon we pooled much of our wealth to celebrate our arrival in Byron's Italy …

Meanwhile, my other bright student is explaining what the landowner Alyohin means at the conclusion of “About Love” when he speaks of “what is higher … than happiness or unhappiness, sin or virtue in their usual meaning.” The boy says, “He regrets that he didn't yield to his feeling and run off with the woman he fell in love with. Now that she's going away, he's miserable for having allowed conscience and scruples, and his own timidity, to forbid him confessing his love to her just because she is already married and a mother.” I nod, but clearly without comprehension, and the clever boy looks dismayed. “Am I wrong?” he asks, turning scarlet. “No,
no
” I say, but all the while I am thinking, “What are you doing, Miss Rodgers, dining on Peanut Chews? We should be sipping white wine…” And then it occurs to me that, as an undergraduate at U.S.C., Helen probably looked rather like my bored Miss Rodgers in the months before that older man—a man of about my age!—plucked her out of the classroom and into a life of romantic adventure …

Later in the hour, I look up from reading aloud out of “Lady with a Lapdog” directly into the innocent and uncorrupted gaze of the plump, earnest, tenderhearted Jewish girl from Beverly Hills who has sat in the front row all year long writing down everything I say. I read to the class the story's final paragraph, in which the adulterous couple, shaken to find how deeply they love one another, try vainly “to understand why he should have a wife and she a husband.” “And it seemed to them that in only a few more minutes a solution would be found and a new, beautiful life would begin; but both of them knew very well that the end was still a long, long way away and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning.” I hear myself speaking of the moving transparency of the ending—no false mysteries, only the harsh facts directly stated. I speak of the amount of human history that Chekhov can incorporate in fifteen pages, of how ridicule and irony gradually give way, even within so short a space, to sorrow and pathos, of his feel for the disillusioning moment and for those processes wherein actuality seemingly pounces upon even our most harmless illusions, not to mention the grand dreams of fulfillment and adventure. I speak of his pessimism about what he calls “this business of personal happiness,” and all the while I want to ask the chubby girl in the front row, who is rapidly recording my words in her notebook, to become my daughter. I want to look after her and see that she is safe and happy. I want to pay for her clothes and her doctor bills and for her to come and put her arms around me when she is feeling lonely or sad. If only it were Helen and I who had raised her to be so sweet! But how could we two raise anything?

And later that day, when I happen to run into her walking toward me on the campus, I feel impelled yet again to say to someone who is probably no more than ten or twelve years my junior that I want to adopt her, want her to forget her own parents, about whom I know nothing, and let me father and protect her. “Hi, Mr. Kepesh,” she says, with a little wave of the hand, and that affectionate gesture does it, apparently. I feel as though I am growing lighter and lighter, I sense an emotion coming my way that will pick me up and turn me over and deposit me I know not where. Am I going to have my nervous collapse right here on the walk in front of the library? I take one of her hands in mine—I am saying, through a throat clogged with feeling, “You're a good girl, Kathie.” She ducks her head, her forehead colors. “Well,” she says, “I'm glad somebody around here likes me.” “You're a good girl,” I repeat, and release the soft hand I am holding and go home to see if childless Helen is sober enough to prepare dinner for two.

About this time we are visited by an English investment banker named Donald Garland, the first of Helen's Hong Kong friends ever to be invited to dine with us in our apartment. To be sure, she has on occasion made herself spectacularly beautiful so as to go into San Francisco to have lunch with somebody or other out of paradise lost, but never before have I seen her approach such a meeting in this mood of happy, almost childlike anticipation. Indeed, in the past there have been times when, having spent hours getting made up for the luncheon engagement, she would emerge from the bathroom in her drabbest robe, announcing herself unable to leave the house to see anyone. “I look hideous.” “You don't at all.” “I do,” and with that she returns to bed for the day.

Donald Garland, she tells me now, is “the kindest man” she has ever known. “I was taken to lunch at his house my first week in Hong Kong, and we were the best of friends from then on. We just adored each other. The center of the table was strewn with orchids he'd picked from his garden—in my honor, he said—and the patio where we ate looked out over the crescent of Repulse Bay. I was eighteen years old. He must have been about fifty-five. My God. Donald is probably seventy! I could never believe he was over forty; he was always so happy, so youthful, so thrilled with everything. He lived with the most easygoing and good-natured American boy. Chips must have been about twenty-six or -seven then. On the phone this afternoon Donald told the most terrible news—one morning two months ago Chips died of an aneurysm at breakfast; just keeled over dead. Donald took the body back to Wilmington, Delaware, and buried it, and then he couldn't leave. He kept booking plane tickets and canceling. Now, finally, he's on his way home.”

Chips, Donald, Edgar, Brian, Colin … I have no response to make, no interrogations or cross-examination, nothing faintly resembling sympathy, curiosity, or interest. Or patience. I had long ago heard all I could stand about the doings of the wealthy Hong Kong circle of English homosexuals who had “adored” her. I exhibit only a churlish sort of surprise to find that I am to be a party to this very special reunion. She shuts her eyes tightly, as though she must obliterate me momentarily from sight just in order to survive. “Don't talk to me like that. Don't take that terrible tone. He was my dearest friend. He saved my life a hundred times.”
And why did you risk it a hundred times?
But the interrogatory accusation, and the terrible tone that goes with it, I manage to squelch, for by now even I know that I am being diminished far more by my anger at everything she does and did than by those ways of hers I ought to have learned to disregard, or to have accepted with a certain grace, long, long ago … Only as the evening wears on, and Garland becomes increasingly spirited in his reminiscences, do I wonder if she has invited him to the apartment so that I might learn at first hand just how very far from the apex she has fallen by insanely joining her fate to this fogy's. Whether or not that is her intention, it is something like the result. In their company I am no easygoing, good-natured Chips, but entirely the Victorian schoolmaster whose heart stirs only to the crack of the whip and the swish of the cane. In a vain attempt to force this pious, sour, censorious little prig out of my skin, I try hard to believe that Helen is simply showing this man who has meant so much to her and been so kind to her, and who has himself just suffered a terrible blow, that all is well in her life, that she and her husband live comfortably and amicably, and that her protector hasn't to worry about her any longer. Yes, Helen is only acting as would any devoted daughter who wished to spare a doting father some harsh truth … In short: simple as the explanation for Garland's presence might have seemed to someone else, it is wholly beyond my grasp, as though now that living with Helen has ceased to make the least bit of sense, I cannot discover the truth about anything.