Free The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth Page B

that determined abandon with which she will give herself to whatever strongly beckons, and regardless of how likely it is to bring in the end as much pain as pleasure. I have been dead wrong, I tell myself, trying to dismiss hers as a corny and banalized mentality deriving from Screen Romance —rather, she is without fantasy, there is no room for fantasy, so total is her concentration, and the ingenuity with which she sounds her desire. Now, in the aftermath of orgasm, I find myself weak with gratitude and the profoundest feelings of self-surrender. I am the least guarded, if not the simplest, organism on earth. I don’t even know what to say at such moments. Helen does, however. Yes, there are the things that this girl knows and knows and knows. “I love you,” she tells me. Well, if something has to be said, what makes more sense? So we begin to tell each other that we are lovers who are in love, even while my conviction that we are on widely divergent paths is revived from one conversation to the next. Convinced as I would like to be that a kinship, rare and valuable, underlies and nourishes our passionate rapport, I still cannot wish away the grand uneasiness Helen continues to arouse. Why else can’t we stop—can’t I stop—the fencing and the parrying?
    Finally she agrees to tell me why she gave up all she’d had in the Far East: tells me either to address my suspiciousness directly or to enrich the mystique I cannot seem to resist.
    Her lover, the last of her Karenins, had begun to talk about arranging for his wife to be killed in an “accident.” “Who was he?” “A very well-known and important man” is all she is willing to say. I swallow that as best I can and ask: “Where is he now?” “Still there.” “Hasn’t he tried to see you?” “He came here for a week.” “And did you sleep with him?” “Of course I slept with him. How could I resist sleeping with him? But in the end I sent him back. It nearly did me in. It was hideous, seeing him go for good.” “Well, maybe he’ll go ahead and have his wife killed anyway, as an enticement—” “Why must you make fun of him? Is it so impossible for you to understand that he’s as human as you?” “Helen, there are ways of dealing with a mate you want to be rid of, short of homicide. You can just walk out the door, for one thing.” “Can you, ‘just’? Is that the way they do it in the Comparative Literature Department? I wonder what it will be like,” she says, “when you can’t have something you want.” “Will I blow somebody’s brains out to get it? Will I push somebody down the elevator shaft? What do you think?” “Look, I’m the one who gave up everything and nearly died of it—because I couldn’t bear to hear the idea even spoken. It terrified me to know that he could even have such a thought. Or maybe it was so excrutiatingly tempting that that’s why I went running. Because all I had to say was yes; that’s all he was waiting for. He was desperate, David, and he was serious. And do you know how easy it would have been to say what he wanted to hear? It’s only a word, it takes just a split second: yes.” “Only maybe he asked because he was so sure you’d say no.” “He couldn’t be sure. I wasn’t sure.” “But such a well-known and important man could certainly have gone ahead then and had the thing done on his own, could he not—and without your knowing he was behind it? Surely such a well-known and important man has all kinds of means at his disposal to get a measly wife out of the way: limousines that crash, boats that sink, airplanes that explode in mid-air. Had he done it on his own to begin with, what you thought about it all would never even have come up. If he asked your opinion, maybe it was to hear