The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth

no.” “Oh, this is interesting. Go on. I say no, and what does he gain?” “What he has: the wife and you. He gets to keep it all, and to cut a very grand figure into the bargain. That you ran, that the whole idea took on reality for you, had moral consequences for you—well, he probably hadn’t figured on getting that kind of rise out of a beautiful, adventurous, American runaway.” “Very clever, indeed. A plus, especially the part about ‘moral consequences.’ All that’s wrong is that you haven’t the faintest understanding of what there was between us. Just because he’s someone with power, you think he has no feelings. But there are men, you know, who have both. We met two times a week for two years. Sometimes more—but never less. And it never changed. It was never anything but perfect. You don’t believe such things happen, do you? Or even if they do, you don’t want to believe they matter. But this happened, and to me and to him it mattered more than anything.” “But so has coming back happened. So did sending him away happen. So did your terror happen and your revulsion. This guy’s machinations are beside the point. It mattered to you, Helen, that your limit had been reached.” “Maybe I was mistaken and that was only so much sentimentality about myself. Or some childish kind of hope. Maybe I should have stayed, gone beyond my limit—and learned that it wasn’t beyond me at all.” “You couldn’t,” I say, “and you didn’t.”
    And who, oh, who is being the sentimentalist now?
    It appears then that the capacity for pain-filled renunciation joined to the gift for sensual abandon is what makes her appeal inescapable. That we never entirely get along, that I am never entirely sure, that she somehow lacks depth, that her vanity is so enormous, well, all that is nothing—isn’t it?—beside the esteem that I come to have for this beautiful and dramatic young heroine, who has risked and won and lost so much already, squarely facing up to appetite. And then there is the beauty itself. Is she not the single most desirable creature I have ever known? With a woman so physically captivating, a woman whom I cannot take my eyes from even if she is only drinking her coffee or dialing the phone, surely with someone whose smallest bodily movement has such a powerful sensuous hold upon me, I need hardly worry ever again about imagination tempting me to renewed adventures in the base and the bewildering. Is not Helen the enchantress whom I had already begun searching for in college, when Silky Walsh’s lower lip stirred me to pursue her from the university cafeteria to the university gymnasium and on to the dormitory laundry room—that creature to me so beautiful that upon her, and her alone, I can focus all my yearning, all my adoration, all my curiosity, all my lust? If not Helen, who then? Who ever will intrigue me more? And, alas, I still so need to be intrigued.
    Only if we marry … well, the contentious side of the affair will simply dwindle away of itself, will it not, an ever-deepening intimacy, the assurance of permanence, dissolving whatever impulse remains, on either side, for smugness and self-defense? Of course it would not be quite such a gamble if Helen were just a little more like this and a little less like that; but, as I am quick to remind myself—imagining that I am taking the mature position—that is not how we are bestowed upon each other in the world this side of dreams. Besides, what I call her “vanity” and her “lack of depth” is just what makes her so interesting! So then, I can only hope that mere differences of “opinion” (which, I readily admit—if that will help—I am often the first to point up and to dramatize) will come to be altogether beside the point of the passionate attachment that has, so far, remained