The Professor of Desire (12 page)

Frederick Klinger is solid, all right: a hearty, round-faced fellow, full of life, who, with my permission, smokes cigars throughout the sessions. I don't much like the aroma myself, but allow it because smoking seems even further to concentrate the keenness with which Klinger attends to my despair. Not many years older than me, and sporting fewer gray hairs than I have lately begun to show, he exudes the contentment and confidence of a successful man in his middle years. I gather from the phone calls which, to my distress, he takes during my hour, that he is already a key figure in psychoanalytic circles, a member of the governing bodies of schools, publications, and research institutes, not to mention the last source of hope for any number of souls in disrepair. At first I find myself somewhat put off by the sheer relish with which the doctor seems to devour his responsibilities—put off, to be truthful, by nearly everything about him: the double-breasted chalk-stripe suit and the floppy bow tie, the frayed Chesterfield coat growing tight over the plumpening middle, the
two
bursting briefcases at the coat rack, the photos of the smiling healthy children on the book-laden desk, the tennis racket in the umbrella stand—put off even by the gym bag pushed behind the big worn Eames chair from which, cigar in hand, he addresses himself to my confusion. Can this snazzy, energetic conquistador possibly understand that there are mornings when on the way from the bed to the toothbrush I have to struggle to prevent myself from dropping down and curling up on the living-room floor? I don't entirely understand the depth of this plunge myself. Having failed at being a husband to Helen—having failed at figuring out how to make Helen a wife—it seems I would rather sleep through my life now than live it.

How, for instance, have I come to be on such terrible terms with sensuality? “You,” he replies, “who married a
femme fatale?
” “But only to de-fatalize her, to de-fang her, along the way. All that nagging at her, at Helen, about the garbage and the laundry and the toast. My mother couldn't have done a better job. About every last detail!” “Too divine for details, was she? Look, she isn't the Helen born of Leda and Zeus, you know. She's of the earth, Mr. Kepesh—a middle-class Gentile girl from Pasadena, California, pretty enough to get herself a free trip to Angkor Wat every year, but that's about it, in the way of supernatural achievement. And cold toast is cold toast, no matter how much jewelry the cook may have accumulated over the years from rich married men with a taste for young girls.” “I was frightened of her.” “Sure you were.” His phone rings. No, he cannot possibly be at the hospital before noon. Yes, he has seen the husband. No, the gentleman does not seem willing to cooperate. Yes, that is most unfortunate. Now back to this uncooperative gentleman. “Sure you were frightened,” he says, “you couldn't trust her.” “I
wouldn't
trust her. And she
was
faithful to me. I believe that.” “Neither here nor there. Some game she was playing with herself, that's all. What value did it have when the fact is that the two of you had no real business together ever? From the sound of it the only thing each of you did
totally
out of character was to marry the other.” “I was frightened of Birgitta, too.” “My God,” he exclaims, “who wouldn't have been?” “Look, either I'm not making myself clear or you don't even want to begin to understand me. I'm saying that these were special creatures, full of daring and curiosity—and freedom. They were not ordinary young women.” “Oh, I understand that.” “Do you? I think sometimes that you'd prefer to assign them both to some very tawdry category of humankind. But what made them special is that they weren't tawdry, not to me, neither one of them. They were exceptional.” “Granted.” The phone rings. Yes, what is it? I am in session, yes. No, no, go ahead. Yes. Yes. Of course he understands. No, no, he's pretending, pay no attention. All right, increase the dosage to four a day. But no more. And call me if he continues crying. Call me anyway. Goodbye. “Granted,” he says, “but what were you supposed to do, having
married
one of these ‘special creatures'? Spend days as well as nights fondling her perfect breasts? Join her opium den? The other day you said the only thing you learned from six years with Helen was how to roll a joint.” “I think saying that is what is known as courting the analyst's favor. I learned plenty.” “The fact remains—you had your work to do.” “The work is just a habit,” I say, without disguising my irritation with his dogged “demythologizing.” “Perhaps,” I wearily suggest, “reading books is the opiate of the educated classes.” “Is it? Are you thinking of becoming a flower child?” he says, lighting up a new cigar. “Once Helen and I were sunbathing in the nude on a beach in Oregon. We were on a vacation, driving north. After a while we spotted a guy watching us from off in some brush. We started to cover up, but he came toward us anyway and asked if we were nudists. When I said no he gave us a copy of his nudist newspaper in case we wanted to subscribe.” Klinger laughs loudly. “Helen said to me that God Himself must have sent him because it had been, by that time, fully ninety minutes since I'd read anything.” Again Klinger laughs with genuine amusement. “Look,” I tell him, “you just don't know what it was like when I first met her. It's not to be so easily disparaged. You don't know what I was like, nor can you—nor can I, any more—seeing me in this shape. But I was a fearless sort of boy back in my early twenties. More daring than most, especially for that woebegone era in the history of pleasure. I actually did what the jerk-off artists dreamed about. Back when I started out on my own in the world, I was, if I may say so, something of a sexual prodigy.” “And you want to be one again, in your thirties?” I don't even bother to answer, so narrow and wrongheaded does the common sense he's mastered strike me. “Why allow Helen,” Klinger continues, “who has disfigured herself so in the frantic effort to be the high priestess of Eros—who very nearly destroyed you with her pronouncements and insinuations—why allow her judgment power over you still? How long do you intend to let her go on rebuking you where you feel weakest? How long do you intend to go on
feeling
weak over such utter foolishness? What was this ‘daring' search of hers—?” The telephone. “Excuse me,” he says. Yes, this is he. Yes, go ahead. Hello—yes, I can hear you very well. How is Madrid? What? Well, of course he's suspicious, what did you expect? But you just tell him that he is behaving stupidly and then forget it. No, of course you don't want to get into a fight. I understand. Just say it, and then try to have some courage. You can stand up to him. Go back up to the room and tell him. Come on now, you know very well you can. All right. Good luck. Have a good time. I said, then go out and have a good time. Goodbye. “What was this search of hers,” he says, “but so much evasion, a childish flight from the real attainable projects of a life?” “Then, on the other hand,” I say, “maybe the ‘projects' are so much evasion of the search.” “Please, you like to read and write about books. That, by your own testimony, gives you enormous satisfaction—did, at any rate, and will again, I assure you. Right now you're fed up with everything. But you like being a teacher, correct? And from what I gather you are not uninspired at it. I still don't know what alternative you have in mind. You want to move to the South Seas and teach great books to the girls in sarongs at the University of Tahiti? You want to have a go at a harem again? To be a fearless prodigy again, playing at Jack and Jill with your little Swedish daredevil in the working-class bars of Paris? You want a hammer over your head again—though maybe this time one that finds the mark?” “Burlesquing what I'm talking about doesn't do me any good, you know. It's obviously not going back to Birgitta that's on my mind. It's going ahead. I can't go
ahead.
” “Perhaps going ahead, on that road anyway, is a delusion.” “Dr. Klinger, I assure you that I am sufficiently imbued by now with the Chekhovian bias to suspect as much myself. I know what there is to know from ‘The Duel' and other stories about those committed to the libidinous fallacy. I too have read and studied the great Western wisdom on the subject. I have even taught it. I have even practiced it. But, if I may, as Chekhov also had the ordinary good sense to write: in psychological matters, ‘God preserve us from generalizations.'” “Thank you for the literature lesson. Tell me this, Mr. Kepesh: can you really be in the doldrums about what has befallen her—over what you seem to think you have ‘done' to her—or are you just trying to prove to us that you are a man of feeling and conscience? If so, don't overdo it. Because
this
Helen was bound to spend a night in jail, sooner or later. Destined for it long before she met you. From the sound of it, it's how she landed on you—in the hope of being saved from the hoosegow, and the other inevitable humiliations. And that you know, as well as I do.”

But whatever he may say, however he may bully, burlesque, or even try a smidgen of charm in order to get me to put the marriage and divorce behind me, I am, whether he believes it or not, never altogether immune from self-recrimination when stories reach me of the ailments that are said to be transforming the one-time Occidental princess of the Orient into a bitter hag. I learn of a debilitating case of rhinitis that cannot seem to be checked by drugs and necessitates that she live with a tissue continuously rubbing away at her nose—at the fluted nostrils that flare as though catching the wind when she achieves her pleasure. I hear tell of extensive skin eruptions, on the cunning fingers (“You like this?… this?… oh, you do like it, my darling!”), and on her wide, lovely lips (“What do you see first in a face? The eyes or the mouth? I like that you discovered my mouth first”). But then Helen's is not the only flesh slowly taking its revenge, or doing penance, or losing heart, or removing itself from the fray. Eating hardly anything, I have dropped since the divorce to scarecrow weight, and for the second time in my life I am bereft of my potency, even for an entertainment as unambitious as self-love. “I should never have come home from Europe,” I tell Klinger, who has at my request put me on an anti-depressant drug, which pries me out of bed in the morning but then leaves me for the rest of the day with vague, otherworldly feelings of encapsulation, of vast unpassable reaches between myself and the flourishing hordes. “I should have gone all the way and become Birgitta's pimp. I'd be a happier, healthier member of society. Somebody else could teach the great masterworks of disillusionment and renunciation.” “Yes? You would rather be a pimp than an associate professor?” “That's one way of putting it.” “Put it your own way.” “This something in me that I turned against,” I say in a fit of hopelessness, “before I even understood it, or let it have a life … I throttled it to death … killed it, practically overnight. And why? Why on earth was
murder
required?”

In the weeks that follow I attempt, between phone calls, to describe and chronicle the history of this something that, in my hopeless and de-energized state, I continue to think of as “murdered.” I speak at length now not just of Helen but of Birgitta as well. I go back to Louis Jelinek, even to Herbie Bratasky, speak of all that each meant to me, what each excited and alarmed, and of how each was dealt with, in my way. “Your rogues' gallery,” Klinger calls them one day in the twentieth or thirtieth week of our debate. “Moral delinquency,” he observes, “has its fascination for you.” “Also,” I say, “for the authors of
Macbeth
and
Crime and Punishment.
Sorry to have mentioned the names of two works of art, Doctor.” “Quite all right. I hear all sorts of things here. I'm used to it.” “I do seem to get the feeling that it's somehow against house rules for me to call upon my literary reserves in these skirmishes of ours, but the only point I'm trying to make is that ‘moral delinquency' has been on the minds of serious people for a long time now. And why ‘delinquents,' anyway? Won't ‘independent spirits' do? It's no
less
accurate.” “I only mean to suggest that they aren't wholly harmless types.” “Wholly harmless types probably lead rather constricted lives, don't you think?” “On the other hand, one oughtn't to underestimate the pain, the isolation, the uncertainty, and everything else unpleasant that may accompany ‘independence' of this kind. Look at Helen now.” “Please, look at me now.” “I am. I do. I suspect that she is worse off. You at least haven't put
all
your eggs in that basket.” “I cannot maintain an erection, Dr. Klinger. I cannot maintain a smile, for that matter.” Whereupon his phone rings.

Fastened to no one and to nothing, drifting, drifting, sometimes, frighteningly, sinking; and, with the relentlessly clever and commonsensical doctor, quarreling, bickering, and debating, arguing yet again the subject which had been the source of so much marital bitterness—only when I am supine it is generally I who wind up taking Helen's part, while he who sits up takes mine.

*   *   *

Each winter my parents come down to New York City to spend three or four days visiting family, friends, and favorite guests. In times gone by, we all used to stay on West End Avenue with my father's younger brother, Larry, a successful kosher caterer, and his wife, Sylvia, the Benvenuto Cellini of strudel, and, in childhood, my favorite aunt. Until I was fourteen, I would, to my astonished delight, be put to bed there in the same room with my cousin Lorraine. Sleeping beside a bed with a live girl in it—a “developing” girl, at that—going out to dine at Moskowitz and Lupowitz (on food described by my father as
nearly
as good as what is prepared in the kitchen of the Hungarian Royale), waiting in subfreezing temperatures to get in to see the Rockettes, sipping cocoa amid the thick draperies and the imposing furniture sets of haberdashery wholesalers and produce merchants whom I have known only in their voluminous half-sleeve shirts and their drooping swim trunks, and who are called by my father the Apple King and the Herring King and the Pajama King—everything about these New York visits hold a secret thrill for me, and invariably from “overexcitement” I develop a “strep throat” on the drive home, and back on our mountaintop have to spend at least two or three days in bed recovering. “We didn't visit Herbie,” I say sullenly, only seconds before our departure—to which my mother invariably responds, “A summer isn't enough with him? We have to travel to Brooklyn to make a special trip?” “Belle, he's teasing you,” my father says, but on the sly shakes a fist in my direction, as though for mentioning the Fart King to my mother I deserve no less than a blow to the head.