The Professor of Desire (8 page)

“Oh, God,” says Helen, stretching languorously when morning comes, “fucking is such a lovely thing to do.”

True, true, true, true, true. The passion is frenzied, inexhaustible, and in my experience, singularly replenishing. Looking back to Birgitta, it seems to me, from my new vantage point, that we were, among other things, helping each other at age twenty-two to turn into something faintly corrupt, each the other's slave and slaveholder, each the arsonist and the inflamed. Exercising such strong sexual power over each other,
and
over total strangers, we had created a richly hypnotic atmosphere, but one which permeated the inexperienced
mind
first of all: I was intrigued and exhilarated at least as much by the idea of what we were engaged in as by the sensations, what I felt and what I saw. Not so with Helen. To be sure, I must first accustom myself to what strikes me at the height of my skepticism as so much theatrical display; but soon, as understanding grows, as familiarity grows, and feeling with it, I begin at last to relinquish some of my suspiciousness, to lay off a little with my interrogations, and to see these passionate performances as arising out of the very fearlessness that so draws me to her, out of that determined abandon with which she will give herself to whatever strongly beckons, and regardless of how likely it is to bring in the end as much pain as pleasure. I have been dead wrong, I tell myself, trying to dismiss hers as a corny and banalized mentality deriving from
Screen Romance
—rather, she is
without
fantasy, there is no
room
for fantasy, so total is her concentration, and the ingenuity with which she sounds her desire. Now, in the aftermath of orgasm, I find myself weak with gratitude and the profoundest feelings of self-surrender. I am the least guarded, if not the simplest, organism on earth. I don't even know what to say at such moments. Helen does, however. Yes, there are the things that this girl knows and knows and knows. “I love you,” she tells me. Well, if something has to be said, what makes more sense? So we begin to tell each other that we are lovers who are in love, even while my conviction that we are on widely divergent paths is revived from one conversation to the next. Convinced as I would like to be that a kinship, rare and valuable, underlies and nourishes our passionate rapport, I still cannot wish away the grand uneasiness Helen continues to arouse. Why else can't we stop—can't
I
stop—the fencing and the parrying?

Finally she agrees to tell me why she gave up all she'd had in the Far East: tells me either to address my suspiciousness directly or to enrich the mystique I cannot seem to resist.

Her lover, the last of her Karenins, had begun to talk about arranging for his wife to be killed in an “accident.” “Who was he?” “A very well-known and important man” is all she is willing to say. I swallow that as best I can and ask: “Where is he now?” “Still there.” “Hasn't he tried to see you?” “He came here for a week.” “And did you sleep with him?” “Of course I slept with him. How could I resist sleeping with him? But in the end I sent him back. It nearly did me in. It was hideous, seeing him go for good.” “Well, maybe he'll go ahead and have his wife killed anyway, as an enticement—” “Why must you make fun of him? Is it so impossible for you to understand that he's as human as you?” “Helen, there are ways of dealing with a mate you want to be rid of, short of homicide. You can just walk out the door, for one thing.” “Can you, ‘just'? Is that the way they do it in the Comparative Literature Department? I wonder what it will be like,” she says, “when you can't have something you want.” “Will I blow somebody's brains out to get it? Will I push somebody down the elevator shaft? What do you think?” “Look,
I'm
the one who gave up everything and nearly died of it—because I couldn't bear to hear the idea even
spoken.
It terrified me to know that he could even
have
such a thought. Or maybe it was so excrutiatingly tempting that
that's
why I went running. Because all I had to say was yes; that's all he was waiting for. He was desperate, David, and he was serious. And do you know how easy it would have been to say what he wanted to hear? It's only a word, it takes just a split second: yes.” “Only maybe he asked because he was so sure you'd say no.” “He couldn't be sure.
I
wasn't sure.” “But such a well-known and important man could certainly have gone ahead then and had the thing done on his own, could he not—and without your knowing he was behind it? Surely such a well-known and important man has all kinds of means at his disposal to get a measly wife out of the way: limousines that crash, boats that sink, airplanes that explode in mid-air. Had he done it on his own to begin with, what
you
thought about it all would never even have come up. If he asked your opinion, maybe it was to
hear
no.” “Oh, this is interesting. Go on. I say no, and what does he gain?” “What he has: the wife
and
you. He gets to keep it all, and to cut a very grand figure into the bargain. That you ran, that the whole idea took on reality for you, had moral consequences for you—well, he probably hadn't figured on getting that kind of rise out of a beautiful, adventurous, American runaway.” “Very clever, indeed. A plus, especially the part about ‘moral consequences.' All that's wrong is that you haven't the faintest understanding of what there was between us. Just because he's someone with power, you think he has no feelings. But there are men, you know, who have both. We met two times a week for two years. Sometimes more—but never less. And it never changed. It was never anything but perfect. You don't believe such things happen, do you? Or even if they do, you don't want to believe they matter. But this happened, and to me and to him it mattered more than anything.” “But so has coming back happened. So did sending him away happen. So did your terror happen and your revulsion. This guy's machinations are beside the point. It mattered to you, Helen, that your limit had been reached.” “Maybe I was mistaken and that was only so much sentimentality about myself. Or some childish kind of hope. Maybe I should have stayed, gone beyond my limit—and learned that it wasn't beyond me at all.” “You couldn't,” I say, “and you didn't.”

And who, oh, who is being the sentimentalist now?

It appears then that the capacity for pain-filled renunciation joined to the gift for sensual abandon is what makes her appeal inescapable. That we never entirely get along, that I am never entirely
sure,
that she somehow lacks depth, that her vanity is so enormous, well, all that is nothing—isn't it?—beside the esteem that I come to have for this beautiful and dramatic young heroine, who has risked and won and lost so much already, squarely facing up to appetite. And then there is the beauty itself. Is she not the single most desirable creature I have ever known? With a woman so physically captivating, a woman whom I cannot take my eyes from even if she is only drinking her coffee or dialing the phone, surely with someone whose smallest bodily movement has such a powerful sensuous hold upon me, I need hardly worry ever again about imagination tempting me to renewed adventures in the base and the bewildering. Is not Helen the enchantress whom I had already begun searching for in college, when Silky Walsh's lower lip stirred me to pursue her from the university cafeteria to the university gymnasium and on to the dormitory laundry room—that creature to me
so
beautiful that upon her, and her alone, I can focus all my yearning, all my adoration, all my curiosity, all my lust? If not Helen, who then? Who ever will intrigue me more? And, alas, I still so need to be intrigued.

Only if we marry … well, the contentious side of the affair will simply dwindle away of itself, will it not, an ever-deepening intimacy, the assurance of permanence, dissolving whatever impulse remains, on either side, for smugness and self-defense? Of course it would not be quite such a gamble if Helen were just a little more like this and a little less like that; but, as I am quick to remind myself—imagining that I am taking the
mature
position—that is not how we are bestowed upon each other in the world this side of dreams. Besides, what I call her “vanity” and her “lack of depth” is just what makes her so interesting! So then, I can only hope that mere differences of “opinion” (which, I readily admit—if that will help—I am often the first to point up and to dramatize) will come to be altogether beside the point of the passionate attachment that has, so far, remained undiminished in spite of our abrasive, rather evangelical dialogues. I can only hope that just as I have been mistaken about her motives before, I am wrong again when I suspect that what she secretly hopes to gain by marriage is an end to her love affair with that unpathetic Karenin in Hong Kong. I can only hope that it is in fact I whom she will marry and not the barrier I may seem to be against the past whose loss had very nearly killed her. I can only hope (for I can never know) that it is I with whom she goes to bed, and not with memories of the mouth and the hands and the member of that most perfect of all lovers, he who would murder his wife in order to make his mistress his own.

Doubting and hoping then, wanting and fearing (anticipating the pleasantest sort of lively future one moment, the worst in the next), I marry Helen Baird—after, that is, nearly three full years devoted to doubting-hoping-wanting-and-fearing. There are some, like my own father, who have only to see a woman standing over a piano singing “Amapola” to decide in a flash, “There—there is my wife,” and there are others who sigh, “Yes, it is she,” only after an interminable drama of vacillation that has led them to the ineluctable conclusion that they ought never to see the woman again. I marry Helen when the weight of experience required to reach the monumental decision to give her up for good turns out to be so enormous and so moving that I cannot possibly imagine life without her. Only when I finally know
for sure
that
this must end now,
do I discover how deeply wed I already am by my thousand days of indecision, by all the scrutinizing appraisal of possibilities that has somehow made an affair of three years' duration seem as dense with human event as a marriage half a century long. I marry Helen then—and she marries me—at the moment of impasse and exhaustion that must finally come to all those who spend years and years and years in these clearly demarcated and maze-like arrangements that involve separate apartments and joint vacations, assumptions of devotion and designated nights apart, affairs terminated with relief every five or six months, and happily forgotten for seventy-two hours, and then resumed, oftentimes with a delicious, if effervescent, sexual frenzy, following a half-fortuitous meeting at the local supermarket; or begun anew after an evening phone call intended solely to apprise the relinquished companion of a noteworthy documentary to be rerun on television at ten; or following attendance at a dinner party to which the couple had committed themselves so long ago it would have been unseemly not to go ahead and, together, meet this last mutual social obligation. To be sure, one or the other might have answered the obligation by going off to the party alone, but alone there would have been no accomplice across the table with whom to exchange signs of boredom and amusement, nor afterward, driving home, would there have been anyone of like mind with whom to review the charms and deficiencies of the other guests; nor, undressing for bed, would there have been an eager, smiling friend lying unclothed atop the bed sheet to whom one allows that the only truly engaging person present at the table happened to have been one's own previously underrated mate manqué.

We marry, and, as I should have known and couldn't have known and probably always knew, mutual criticism and disapproval continue to poison our lives, evidence not only of the deep temperamental divide that has been there from the start, but also of the sense I continue to have that another man still holds the claim upon her deepest feelings, and that, however she may attempt to hide this sad fact and to attend to me and our life, she knows as well as I do that she is my wife only because there was no way short of homicide (or so they say) for her to be the wife of that very important and well-known lover of hers. At our best, at our bravest and most sensible and most devoted, we do try very hard to hate what divides us rather than each other. If only that past of hers weren't so vivid, so grandiose, so operatic—if somehow one or the other of us could forget it! If I could close this absurd gap of trust that exists between us still! Or ignore it! Live
beyond
it! At our best we make resolutions, we make apologies, we make amends, we make love. But at our worst … well, our worst is just about as bad as anybody's, I would think.

What do we struggle over mostly? In the beginning—as anyone will have guessed who, after three years of procrastination, has thrown himself headlong and half convinced into the matrimonial flames—in the beginning we struggle over the toast. Why, I wonder, can't the toast go in while the eggs are cooking, rather than before? This way we can get to eat our bread warm rather than cold. “I don't believe I am having this discussion,” she says. “Life isn't toast!” she finally screams. “It is!” I hear myself maintaining. “When you sit down to eat toast, life is toast. And when you take out the garbage, life is garbage. You can't leave the garbage halfway down the stairs, Helen. It belongs in the can in the yard. Covered.” “I forgot it.” “How can you forget it when it's already in your hand?” “Perhaps, dear, because it's garbage—and what difference does it make anyway!” She forgets to affix her signature to the checks she writes and to stamp the letters she mails, while the letters I give her to mail for me and the household turn up with a certain regularity in the pockets of raincoats and slacks months after she has gone off to deposit them in the mailbox. “What do you think about between Here and There? What makes you so forgetful, Helen? Yearnings for old Mandalay? Memories of the ‘crate' and the lagoons and the elephants, of the dawn coming up like thunder—” “I can't think about your letters, damn it, every inch of the way.” “But why is it you think you've gone outside with the letter in your hand to
begin
with?” “For some air, that's why! To see some sky! To breathe!”