Free The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth

Far from it. I have from the start been overcome by physical beauty in women, but by Helen I am not just intrigued and aroused, I am also alarmed, and made deeply, deeply uncertain—utterly subjugated by the authority with which she claims and confirms and makes singular her loveliness, yet as suspicious as I can be of the prerogatives, of the place, thereby bestowed upon her in her own imagination. Hers seems to me sometimes such a banalized conception of self and experience, and yet, all the same, enthralling and full of fascination. For all I know, maybe she is right.
    â€œHow come,” I ask—still asking, still apparently very much hoping to expose what is fiction in this fabulous character she calls herself and in the Asiatic romance she claims for a past—“how come you gave up the good colonial life, Helen?” “I had to.” “Because the inheritance money had made you independent?” “It’s six thousand lousy dollars a year, David. Why, I believe even ascetic college teachers make that much.” “I only meant that you might have decided youth and beauty weren’t going to get you through indefinitely.” “Look, I was a kid, and school meant nothing to me, and my family was just like everyone else’s—sweet and boring and proper, and living lo these many years under a sheet of ice at 18 Fern Hill Manor Road. The only excitement came at mealtime. Every night when we got to dessert my father said, ‘Is that it?’ and my mother burst into tears. And so at the age of eighteen I met a grown man, and he was marvelous-looking, and he knew how to talk, and he could teach me plenty, and he knew what I was all about, which nobody else seemed to know at all, and he had wonderful elegant ways, and wasn’t really a brutal tyrant, as tyrants go; and I fell in love with him—yes, in two weeks; it happens and not just to schoolgirls, either—and he said, ‘Why don’t you come back with me?’ and I said yes—and I went.” “In a ‘crate’?” “Not that time. Paté over the Pacific and fellatio in the first-class john. Let me tell you, the first six months weren’t a picnic. I’m not in mourning over that. You see, I was just a nicely brought-up kid from Pasadena, that’s all, really, in her tartan skirt and her loafers—my friends children were nearly as old as I was. Oh, splendidly neurotic, but practically my age. I couldn’t even learn to eat with chopsticks, I was so scared. I remember one night, my first big opium party, I somehow wound up in a limousine with four of the wildest pansies—four Englishmen, dressed in gowns and gold slippers. I couldn’t stop laughing. ‘It’s surreal,’ I kept saying, ‘it’s surreal,’ until the plumpest of them looked down his lorgnette at me and said, ‘Of course it’s surreal, dear, you’re nineteen.’” “But you came back. Why?” “I can’t go into that.” “Who was the man?” “Oh, you are becoming a cum laude student of real life, David.” “Wrong. Learned it all at Tolstoy’s feet.”
    I give her Anna Karenina to read. She says, “Not bad—only it wasn’t a Vronsky, thank God. Vronskys are a dime a dozen, friend, and bore you to tears. It was a man—very much a Karenin, in fact. Though not at all pathetic, I hasten to add.” That stops me for a moment: what an original way to see the famous triangle! “Another husband,” I say. “Only the half of it.” “Sounds mysterious; sounds like high drama. Maybe you ought to write it all down.” “And perhaps you ought to lay off reading what all has been written down.” “And do what instead with my spare time?” “Dip a foot back into the stuff itself.” “And there’s a book about that, you know. Called The Ambassadors.