The Professor of Desire Read Free

stop impersonating others and Become Myself, or at least begin to impersonate the self I believe I ought now to be.
    He—the next me—turns out to be a sober, solitary, rather refined young man devoted to European literature and languages. My fellow actors are amused by the way in which I abandon the stage and retreat into a rooming house, taking with me as companions those great writers whom I choose to call, as an undergraduate, “the architects of my mind.” “Yes, David has left the world,” my drama society rival is reported to be saying, “to become a man of the cloth.” Well, I have my airs, and the power, apparently, to dramatize myself and my choices, but above all it is that I am an absolutist—a young absolutist—and know no way to shed a skin other than by inserting the scalpel and lacerating myself from end to end. I am one thing or I am the other. Thus, at twenty, do I set out to undo the contradictions and overleap the uncertainties.
    During my remaining years at college I live somewhat as I had during my boyhood winters, when the hotel was shut down and I read hundreds of library books through hundreds of snowstorms. The work of repairing and refurbishing goes on daily throughout the Arctic months—I hear the sound of the tire chains nicking at the plowed roadways, I hear planks dropping off the pickup truck into the snow, and the simple inspiring noises of the hammer and the saw. Beyond the snow-caked sill I see George driving down with Big Bud to fix the cabanas by the covered pool. I wave my arm, George blows the horn … and to me it is as though the Kepeshes are now three animals in cozy, fortified hibernation, Mamma, Papa, and Baby safely tucked away in Family Paradise.
    Instead of the vivid guests themselves, we have with us in winter their letters, read aloud and with no deficiency of vividness or volume by my father at the dinner table. Selling himself is the man’s specialty, as he sees it; likewise, showing people a good time, and, no matter how ill-mannered they themselves may be, treating them like human beings. In the off-season, however, the balance of power shifts a little, and it is the clientele, nostalgic for the stuffed cabbage and the sunshine and the laughs, who divest themselves of their exacting imperiousness—“They sign the register,” says my mother, “and every ballagula and his shtunk of a wife is suddenly the Duke and the Duchess of Windsor”—and begin to treat my father as though he too were a paid-up member of the species, rather than the target for their discontent, and straight man for their ridiculous royal routines. When the snow is deepest, there are sometimes as many as four and five newsy letters a week—an engagement in Jackson Heights, moving to Miami because of health, opening a second store in White Plains … Oh, how he loves getting news of the best and the worst that is happening to them. That proves something to him about what the Hungarian Royale means to people—that proves everything, in fact, and not only about the meaning of his hotel.
    After reading the letters, he clears a place at the end of the table, and beside a plate full of my mother’s rugalech, and in his sprawling longhand, composes his replies. I correct the spelling and insert punctuation where he has drawn the dashes that separate his single run-on paragraph into irregular chunks of philosophizing, reminiscence, prophecy, sagacity, political analysis, condolence, and congratulation. Then my mother types each letter on Hungarian Royale stationery—below the inscription that reads, “Old Country Hospitality In A Beautiful Mountain Setting. Dietary Laws Strictly Observed. Your Proprietors, Abe and Belle Kepesh” —and adds the P.S. confirming reservations for the summer ahead and requesting a small deposit.
    Before she met my father on a vacation in these very hills—he was then