The Professor of Desire Read Free Page A

twenty-one, and without a calling, spending the summer as a short-order cook—she worked for her first three years out of high school as a legal secretary. As legend has it, she had been a meticulous, conscientious young woman of astounding competence, who all but lived to serve the patrician Wall Street lawyers who employed her, men whose stature—moral and physical—she will in fact speak of reverentially until she dies. Her Mr. Clark, a grandson of the firm’s founder, continues sending her birthday greetings by telegram even after he retires to Arizona, and every year, with the telegram in her hand, she says dreamily to my balding father and to little me, “Oh, he was such a tall and handsome man. And so dignified. I can still remember how he stood up at his desk when I came into his office to be interviewed for the job. I don’t think I’ll ever forget that posture of his.” But, as it happened, it was a burly, hirsute man, with a strong prominent cask of a chest, Popeye’s biceps, and no class credentials, who saw her leaning on a piano singing “Amapola” with a group of vacationers up from the city, and promptly said to himself, “I’m going to marry that girl.” Her hair and her eyes were so dark, and her legs and bosom so round and “well developed” that he thought at first she might actually be Spanish. And the besetting passion for impeccability that had endeared her so to the junior Mr. Clark only caused her to be all the more alluring to the energetic young go-getter with not a little of the slave driver in his own driven, slavish soul.
    Unfortunately, once she marries, the qualities that had made her the austere Gentile boss’s treasure bring her very nearly to the brink of nervous collapse by the end of each summer—for even in a small family-run hotel like ours there is always a complaint to be investigated, an employee to be watched, linens to be counted, food to be tasted, accounts to be tallied … on and on and on it goes, and, alas, she can never leave a job to the person supposed to be doing it, not when she discovers that it is not being Done Right. Only in the winter, when my father and I assume the unlikely roles of Clark père and fils, and she sits in perfect typing posture at the big black Remington Noiseless precisely indenting his garrulous replies, do I get a glimpse of the demure and happy little señorita with whom he had fallen in love at first sight.
    Sometimes after dinner she even invites me, a grade-school child, to pretend that I am an executive and to dictate a letter to her so that she can show me the magic of her shorthand. “You own a shipping company,” she tells me, though in fact I have only just been allowed to buy my first penknife, “go ahead.” Regularly enough she reminds me of the distinction between an ordinary office secretary and what she had been, which was a legal secretary. My father proudly confirms that she had indeed been the most flawless legal secretary ever to work for the firm—Mr. Clark had written as much to him in a letter of congratulation on the occasion of their engagement. Then one winter, when apparently I am of age, she teaches me to type. No one, before or since, has ever taught me anything with so much innocence and conviction.
    But that is winter, the secret season. In summer, surrounded, her dark eyes dart frantically, and she yelps and yipes like a sheep dog whose survival depends upon driving his master’s unruly flock to market. A single little lamb drifting a few feet away sends her full-speed down the rugged slope—a baa from elsewhere, and she is off in the opposite direction. And it does not stop until the High Holidays are over, and even then it doesn’t stop. For when the last guest has departed, inventory-taking must begin—must! that minute! What has been broken, torn, stained, chipped, smashed, bent, cracked, pilfered,