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

the town house. “Why?” I ask her—the first of the whys and whens and hows she will be obliged to answer for me—“What’s the year been like for you? What went wrong?” “Well, for one thing, I haven’t been anywhere for six months at a stretch since I did my time as a coed.” “Why did you come back, then?” “Men. Love. It all got out of hand.” Instantly I am ready to attribute her “candor” to a popular-magazine mentality—and a predilection for promiscuity, pure and simple. Oh, God, I think, so beautiful, and so corny. It seems from the stories she goes on to tell me that she has been in fifty passionate affairs already—aboard fifty schooners already, sailing the China Sea with men who ply her with antique jewelry and are married to somebody else. “Look,” she says, having sized up how I seem to have sized up such an existence, “what do you have against passion anyway? Why the studied detachment, Mr. Kepesh? You want to know who I am—well, I’m telling you.” “It’s quite a saga,” I say. She asks, with a smile, “Why shouldn’t it be? Better a ‘saga’ than a lot of other things I can think of. Come now, what do you have against passion anyway? What harm has it ever done you? Or should I ask, what good?” “The question right now is what it has or hasn’t done for you.” “Fine things. Wonderful things. God knows, nothing I’m ashamed of.” “Then why are you here and not there, being impassioned?” “Because,” Helen answers, and without any irony at all for protection—which may be what makes me begin to surrender some of my own, and to see that she is not only stunning-looking, she is also real, and here with me, and maybe even mine if I should want her—“Because,” she tells me, “I’m getting on.”
    At twenty-six, getting on. Whereas the twenty-four-year-old Ph.D. candidate who is my date for the evening—and who eventually leaves the party in a huff, without me—had been saying on the way over that, sorting her index cards in the library just that afternoon, she had been wondering if and when her life would ever get underway.
    I ask Helen what it was like to come back. We have left the party by now and are across from one another in a nearby bar. Less passively than I, she has given the slip to the companion with whom she started the evening. If I want her … but do I? Should I? Let me hear first what it had been like coming back from running away. For me, of course, there had been far more relief than letdown, and I had been adrift for only a year. “Oh, I signed an armistice with my poor mother, and my kid sisters followed me around like a movie star. The rest of the family gaped. Nice Republican girls didn’t do what I did. Except that seems to be all I ever met everywhere I went, from Nepal to Singapore. There’s a small army of us out there, you know. I’d say half the girls who fly out of Rangoon on that crate that goes to Mandalay are generally from Shaker Heights.” “And now what do you do?” “Well, first I have to figure out some way to stop crying. I cried every day I was back for the first few months. Now that seems to be over, but, frankly, from the way I feel when I wake up in the morning I might as well be in tears. It’s that it was all so beautiful. Living in all that loveliness—it was overwhelming. I never stopped being thrilled. I got to Angkor every single spring, and in Thailand we would fly from Bangkok up to Chiengmai with a prince who owned elephants. You should have seen him with all his elephants. A nut-colored little old man moving like a spider in a herd of the most enormous animals. You could have wrapped him twice around in one of their ears. They were all screaming at one another, but he just walked along, unfazed. You