Read Online The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth - Free Book Online

awake all night wondering what he will do if Birgitta should steal back into the room before dawn; he wonders if he oughtn’t to get up and lock the door. Then when dawn arrives, when noon arrives, and she is nowhere to be found, neither in the town of Les Andelys nor in Rouen—not at the Grosse Horloge; not at the Cathedral; not at the birthplace of Flaubert or the spot where Joan of Arc went up in flames—he wonders if he will ever see the likes of her and their adventure again.
    *   *   *
    Helen Baird appears some years later, when I am in the final stretch of graduate studies in comparative literature and feeling triumphant about the determination I have mustered to complete the job. Out of boredom, restlessness, impatience, and a growing embarrassment that naggingly informs me I am too old to be sitting at a desk still being tested on what I know, I have come near to quitting the program just about every semester along the way. But now, with the end in sight, I utter my praises aloud while showering at the end of the day, thrilling myself with simple statements like “I did it” and “I stuck it out,” as though it is the Matterhorn I have had to climb in order to qualify for my orals. Following the year with Birgitta, I have come to realize that in order to achieve anything lasting, I am going to have to restrain a side of myself strongly susceptible to the most bewildering and debilitating sort of temptations, temptations that as long ago as that night outside Rouen I already recognized as inimical to my overall interests. For, far as I had gone with Birgitta, I knew how very easy it would have been for me to have gone further still—more than once, I remember the thrill it had given me imagining her with men other than myself, imagining her taking money to bring home in her pocket … But could I have gone on to that so easily? Actually have become Birgitta’s pimp? Well, whatever my talent may have been for that profession, graduate school has not exactly encouraged its development … Yes, when the battle appears to have been won, I am truly relieved by my ability to harness my good sense in behalf of a serious vocation—and not a little touched by my virtue. Then Helen appears to tell me, by example and in so many words, that I am sadly deluded and mistaken. Is it so as never to forget the charge that I marry her?
    Hers is a different brand of heroism from what, at that time, I take mine to be—indeed, it strikes me as its antithesis. A year of U.S.C. at eighteen, and then she had run off with a journalist twice her age to Hong Kong, where he was already living with a wife and three children. Armed with startling good looks, a brave front, and a strongly romantic temperament, she had walked away from her homework and her boy friend and her weekly allowance and, without a word of apology or explanation to her stunned and mortified family (who thought for a week she had been kidnapped or killed), taken off after a destiny more exhilarating than sophomore year in the sorority house. A destiny that she had found—and only recently abandoned.
    Just six months earlier, I learn, she had given up everyone and everything that she had gone in search of eight years before—all the pleasure and excitement of roaming among the antiquities and imbibing the exotica of gorgeous places alluringly unknown—to come back to California and begin life anew. “I hope I never again have to live through a year like this last one” is nearly the first thing she says to me the night we meet at a party given by the wealthy young sponsors of a new San Francisco magazine “of the arts.” I find Helen ready to tell her story without a trace of shyness; but then I had not been shy myself, once we’d been introduced, about meandering away from the girl I’d arrived with, and hunting her down through the hundreds of people milling around in