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

probably think seeing that is, well, seeing only that. Well, that isn’t what I thought. I thought, ‘This is what it is.’ I used to go down in the sailboat—this is in Hong Kong—to get my friend from work at the end of the day. He sailed with the boat boy to work in the morning and then at night we sailed home together, right down between the junks and the U.S. destroyers.” “The good colonial life. It isn’t for nothing they hate giving up those empires. But I still don’t understand precisely why you gave up yours.”
    And in the weeks that follow I continue to find it hard to believe—despite the tiny ivory Buddhas, the jade carvings, and the row of rooster-shaped opium weights that are arranged by her bedside table—that this way of life ever really was hers. Chiengmai, Rangoon, Singapore, Mandalay … why not Jupiter, why not Mars? To be sure, I know these places exist beyond the Rand McNally map on which I trace the course of her adventures (as once I traced down an adventure of Birgitta’s in the London phone directory), and the novels of Conrad where I first encountered them—and so, of course, do I know that “characters” live and breathe who choose to make their destiny in the stranger cities of the world … What then fails to persuade me completely that living, breathing Helen is one of them? My being with her? Is the unbelievable character Helen in her diamond-stud earrings or is it the dutiful graduate teaching assistant in his wash-and-dry seersucker suit?
    I even become somewhat suspicious and critical of her serene, womanly beauty, or rather, of the regard in which she seems to hold her eyes, her nose, her throat, her breasts, her hips, her legs—why, even her feet would seem to her to have charming little glories to be extolled. How does she come by this regal bearing anyway, this aristocratic sense of herself that seems to derive almost entirely from the smoothness of skin, the length of limb, the breadth of mouth and span of eyes, and the fluting at the very tip of what she describes, without batting an eyelid (shadowed in the subtlest green), as her “Flemish” nose? I am not at all accustomed to someone who bears her beauty with such a sense of attainment and self-worth. My experience—running from the Syracuse undergraduates who did not want to “relate” to me “on that level,” to Birgitta Svanström, for whom flesh was very much there to be investigated for every last thrill—has been of young women who make no great fuss about their looks, or believe at least that it is not seemly to show that they do. True, Birgitta knew well enough that her hair cut short and carelessly nicely enhanced her charming furtiveness, but otherwise how she framed her unpainted face was not a subject to which she appeared to give much thought from one morning to the next. And Elisabeth, with an abundance of hair no less praiseworthy than Helen’s, simply brushed it straight down her back, letting it hang there as it had since she was six. To Helen, however, all that marvelous hair—closest in shading to the Irish setter—seems to be in the nature of a crown, or a spire, or a halo, there not simply to adorn or embellish but to express, to symbolize. Perhaps it is only a measure of how narrow and cloistered my life has become—or perhaps it is in fact the true measure of a courtesanlike power that emanates from Helen’s sense of herself as an idolized object that might just as well have been carved of one hundred pounds of jade—but when she twists her hair up into a soft knot at the back of her head, and draws a black line above her lashes—above eyes in themselves no larger and no bluer than Elisabeth’s—when she dons a dozen bracelets and ties a fringed silk scarf around her hips like Carmen to go out to buy some oranges for breakfast, the effect is not lost upon me.