The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth

from sight just in order to survive. “Don’t talk to me like that. Don’t take that terrible tone. He was my dearest friend. He saved my life a hundred times.” And why did you risk it a hundred times? But the interrogatory accusation, and the terrible tone that goes with it, I manage to squelch, for by now even I know that I am being diminished far more by my anger at everything she does and did than by those ways of hers I ought to have learned to disregard, or to have accepted with a certain grace, long, long ago … Only as the evening wears on, and Garland becomes increasingly spirited in his reminiscences, do I wonder if she has invited him to the apartment so that I might learn at first hand just how very far from the apex she has fallen by insanely joining her fate to this fogy’s. Whether or not that is her intention, it is something like the result. In their company I am no easygoing, good-natured Chips, but entirely the Victorian schoolmaster whose heart stirs only to the crack of the whip and the swish of the cane. In a vain attempt to force this pious, sour, censorious little prig out of my skin, I try hard to believe that Helen is simply showing this man who has meant so much to her and been so kind to her, and who has himself just suffered a terrible blow, that all is well in her life, that she and her husband live comfortably and amicably, and that her protector hasn’t to worry about her any longer. Yes, Helen is only acting as would any devoted daughter who wished to spare a doting father some harsh truth … In short: simple as the explanation for Garland’s presence might have seemed to someone else, it is wholly beyond my grasp, as though now that living with Helen has ceased to make the least bit of sense, I cannot discover the truth about anything.
    At seventy, delicate, small-boned Garland still does have a youthful sort of charm, and a way about him at once worldly and boyish. His forehead is so fragile-looking it seems it could be cracked with the tap of a spoon, and his cheeks are the small, round, glazed cheeks of an alabaster Cupid. Above the open shirt a pale silk scarf is tied around his neck, almost completely hiding from view the throat whose creases are the only sign of his age. In that strangely youthful face all there is to speak of sorrow are the eyes, soft, brown, and awash with feeling even while his crisp accent refuses to betray the faintest hint of grief.
    â€œPoor Derek was killed, you know.” Helen did not know. She puts her hand to her mouth. “But how? Derek,” she says, turning to me, “was an associate in Donald’s firm. A very silly man sometimes, very muddled and so on, but such a good heart, really—” My dead expression sends her quickly back to Garland. “Yes,” he says, “he was a very kind person, and I was devoted to him. Oh, he could talk and go on, but then you just had to tell him, ‘Derek, that’s enough now,’ and he’d shut up. Well, two Chinese boys thought that he hadn’t given them enough money, so they kicked him down a flight of stairs. Broke Derek’s neck.” “How terrible. How awful. Poor, poor man. And what,” asks Helen, “has happened to all his animals?” “The birds are gone. Some sort of virus wiped them out the week after he was killed. The rest Madge adopted. Madge adopted them and Patricia looks after them. Otherwise, those two won’t have anything to do with each other.” “Again?” “Oh yes. She can be a good bitch, that Madge, when she wants to be. Chips did her house over for her a year ago. She nearly drove the poor boy crazy with her upstairs bath.” Helen tries yet again to bring me into the company of the living: she explains that Madge and Patricia, who own houses down along the bay from Donald, were stars of the British cinema in the forties. Donald rattles off the names of the movies