The Professor of Desire

~ The Professor of Desire ~

Its joy, its misery, its an ache that you miss when its gone - what is it about desire that has such a hold on us? Patricia Stacey takes a tutorial on the subject as old, knotty, delicious, and confusing as love itself - though love has nothing to do with it - and discovers the real laws of attraction.

From a Health magazine March 2008

Late Spring. I was in my first year of college. Big Sur and Monterey Bay shimmered through the ferny redwood foreground as my boyfriend and I sat in my college library social room watching a play. Daniel, my tall and beautiful admirer, leaned in close beside me, laughing and waiting for me laugh with him. I lifted Daniel's long, expressive fingers off my leg, tilted my head away slightly, and crossed my legs into the aisle. I wish we could be like other couples in the room, fingers entwined, occasionally looking at each other with shared mirth and recognition, but I couldnt do it. Especially not with a professor sitting behind us - watching our every move. And especially not this particular professor.

Bald, intense, white-mustached, and as old as my grandfather, the man I'll call Professor Bellagio taught psychology. He was known for his research on the subject of desire. Charles Bellagio was a legend, a hero. I often saw him strolling with his wife, a retired physicist, a silver-haired beauty. One day I mustered the confidence to visit Bellagio in his office and asked him if he would sponsor me in an independent study.

"What do you want to research?" he asked. I suggested something rather dull. "I have a better idea," Bellagio said. "How about desire? You know its my field. Are you interestedin the topic?"

Interested? The truth was I'd been fascinated by the subject for years. I nodded dumbly.

"We'll meet next quarter, once a week," he said. "Keep a journal until then and bring it the first day. I want you to define desire to me."

Bellagio was sitting in the corner of his large office in an overstuffed chair, smoking a pipe, when I found him that first official day of our independent study. He motioned for me to sit down directly in front of him. He crossed his arms and sat there staring at me. "What is desire?" he finally asked. Shy and panicked, I didnt answer right away. He pulled my journal from my lap and read the only sentence I had written there: "Desire is a joke created by a willful and perverse minor deity with a chip on his shoulder."

Bellagio flattened out the hairs on his snowy mustache and studied me. Then he said, "Where you afraid to be serious?"

"Its not that - its just that I am not sure I'm going to be very good at figuring out what desire is. My relationships always end disastrously."

""We'll just have to go to the experts," said Bellagio quickly. His speech was like lightning, his mind firing fast; his body was slower, an echo of that light. There were rumors he had a stroke. He stood and, walking with a slight limp, made his way to a book-lined wall of his office and plucked out a volume.

"The Golden Bowl?" I asked. "This is fiction. I was expecting something by a psychologist." Bellagio shook his head, "Compared with this writer, most psychologists know nothing about love." He sent me home with a stack of fiction and a philosophy book: 'Lolita - Remembrance of Things Past. Of Human Bondage. Being and Nothingness.'

Each week Bellagio assailed me with questions inspired by the reading. At first I struggled. "When we desire someone, what exactly are we desiring?"

"Someone else who desires us?"

"Yes...that is part of it. So what then are you desiring?"

Under his intimidating gaze, I tended to look away to the sea outside his window. In the foreground stood an elegant arbor. Round about it wound a gnarled a flagrantly full wisteria. That day, searching for the answer to Bellagio’s question, my mind followed the branches that twisted so tightly around each other they seemed almost choked. In those gnarled branches I thought there might be a way of thinking about his query, an image. The branches wrapped around each other, twisted, misshapen, but ending in such exquisite lilac-colored exuberance. Was this desire? A twisted, ugly distortion ending in fruition?

“So what do we desire when we desire a person?” Bellagio repeated. I thought about the book I’d finished two nights earlier, about the sensitive little boy living in the 19th century Paris in ‘Remembrance of Things Past’. Young Marcel lies in bed, awash in delicious anticipation of his mother coming to kiss him goodnight. Yet in a stroke of irony, the moment he hears the rustle of her dress in the corridor near his door, he trades joy for sorrow. Her coming reminds him that she will soon leave, and he knows he will be longing once more. My eye fell again on the gnarled branches. “Pain.” I said finally. Bellagio leaned his head sideways and lit up his pipe as if to say, Think again. “Well okay”, I said, considering the little boy aching for the rustle of the dress that might signal his mother’s arrival. “Are we desiring the person’s desire…I mean desiring the person to want us?” Bellagio’s wrinkled brow unfurled, “So we don’t necessarily desire a person when we desire?” he asked, intrigued.

I was confused then. I remembered that later in the book the aristocrat Swann, pursued by a woman not of his class, is indifferent to her until one day he realizes she is with someone else, and a panic jealousy engulfs him. “When Odette was after Swann, he didn’t notice her. And when he grew interested, she stopped caring about him,” I said.
Bellagio looked up at me, his face shining, eyes flickering with fire. Emboldened I went on. “It seems that another person’s interest in us can often make our desire flee.” Bellagio leaned way back in his chair, kicked his foot up onto his desk, and smiled .

I don’t know what gave me the courage to tell him what was on my mind, but I did. I was standing at the door, and instead of leaving I risked a confession. “Not wanting someone who wants you. It feels kind of…familiar right now.”

“What? Are you living out your own Swann in Love?” he asked. I knew he wasn’t going to let it go. “Actually, its my boyfriend. You met him two weeks ago at the play.” I blushed fiercely. I knew I want being clear. “Its just that he keep leaning against me…he’s..”

“Always around? Too attentive?” said Bellagio . He’d nailed it. “How did you guess”

“Law of Nature, of desire, if you will.” said Bellagio. “He wants you, so you don’t want him.”

“But why?!” I protested. “It seems like such a cynical interpretation of human nature – that we can only feel desire when we’re with someone who doesn’t reciprocate! Are you saying its always going to be this way?”

Bellagio sighed, looked off into the distance, then at me with something like compassion and sadness. I imagined I could see a thousand failed love affairs pass before his old eyes. “Maybe with this young man, it will always be this way,” he said, “but at sometime in life we all play our parts in love. Its inevitable.” He flashed me an impish smile and lifted his two index fingers, parallel, not touching.

“Lets say that when you sat at the play with your young man, you were leaning this way”. Slowly he tilted his right finger to the left. “He was leaning this way”. Bellagios left finger followed the other, tilting so that the fingers were once again parallel. “Maybe someday, if he leans this way, Bellagio pulled the original finger back, “Then you can begin to lean towards him.” The other finger rushed to rejoin its partner.

“I don’t like being the one running away, “ I said. I felt regret, especially remembering my first month with Daniel” perfect. But I confess to feeling along with guilt, a perverse pride in my growing indifference. Bellagio quickly put me in my place. “One day you will play the other role. You will be the one wanting more from someone and he will be the one leaning away.”

Dread rushed into replace my egotism. As much as I hated being responsible for Daniels anxiety that he wasn’t getting enough from me, I felt a sense of relief that I wasn’t the one lacking, out of control. “But real love isn’t like that. It should be fair! It should be balanced!”

Bellagio smiled, “Love? Were we talking about love?”

Bellagios words consumed me over the next few days. That weekend, my roommate and some friends from the dorm planned a trip to the Grateful Dead concert in San Francisco. Daniel wanted us to drive separately. On the way home, his car broke down on the coast route north of Half Moon Bay. We spent the ride home in the open bed of a truck, huddled against the dampest cold I have ever known. Daniel, sensitive, generous, aware of what I’d given up by not being with my friends, wrapped his fingers in mine, and kissed my knuckles in apology. There was nothing wrong with what he was doing, nothing at all, I told myself.. But the more insecure he grew about our relationship, the less I could reassure him. I felt like heel – numb and powerless, longing for the old ardor to come back.

After that night, thinking about Bellagio’s theory, I began fantasizing about leaving secret notes under Daniel’s door. Hold back. Don’t give so much. I had a gnawing sense that all Daniel needed to do was pull a stunt or two, something calculated to make me jealous, and feelings for him would awaken. At our next meeting, I told Bellagio my idea.

“There is one problem with that scheme,” he said. “Another law of nature. We love what is scarce, but you can’t make yourself scarce when you don’t want to be. It’s a psychological contortion. Like trying not to blush, or suppressing a sneeze. Desire, like truth, wills itself out.”

Two weeks later, Bellagio dropped a book in my lap. “We’re going to be looking at the greatest psychologists of all.” I looked down at the title. “Economists?” I was perplexed.

“Of course, economists. They study what people value. So tell me what people value. What do we value?”

“Gold.”

Bellagio lit up his pipe. “Why do we value gold?”
“It’s beautiful? Useful?”
“What else? Why is so gold expensive?”

I said the first obvious thing that came to mind: ”Because there isn’t much of it?” Bellagio brought his hands to his lips as if in a prayer. “Exactly.”

“So what you’re saying is that it is those things that are scarce in this world that are most valuable.”

“Yes!” he said, his calm, equanimous smile crackling into a childlike grin. “That’s what makes the stock market go up and down. The stock market, like the market of love, is driven by an illusion.”

I was only 20, still believing that money, symbolic as it may be, was inextricably attached to the real – labor, sweat, goods. I said something embarrassingly naïve like :Aren’t stock market figures due to how a company is doing? Quarterly reports and such?” “No,” said Bellagio. “Not really. The stock market is more about what’s on our minds, what we think. Like the market of love, its driven by beliefs.”

Another day not long before the end of the quarter, sitting in Bellagio’s office, I found I had lost my concentration. We were talking about supply and demand, but I stopped and looked pensively out the window at the wisteria. Eventually I said, “You know, I cant help but thinking that desire has something to do with how we feel about ourselves. Have you ever heard the saying, ‘I love you not for who you are but for who I am when I am with you’? Doesn’t desire have something to do with wanting to be acknowledged?”

“Then you’re saying that desire is a form of self-love?” He nodded, intrigued. “But, tell me, why not look in the mirror to find it?”

“We’re all vampires?” I ventured. Perhaps I was thinking of Daniel and me. We had finally broken up two days before the meeting with Bellagio. Daniel had come to my dorm and wanted to spend the night. Some people came by with blankets, flashlights, and guitars, on their way to the caves in the mountains. I wanted to go; he wanted to stay back, together. We fought. IN the end, we agreed it would be best to break up. Outside Bellagio’s office that day, the surf was choppy and white-capped. The clouds were closing in. I worried about my own failure – failure to make someone happy, to make things right, to attach.

I asked Bellagio if the dynamics of scarcity and value still worked when you got older, married. He suddenly looked preoccupied and admitted something unexpected when you get old” “You begin to desire desire itself”. I looked at him for a long time. Then he opened his arms, and I moved toward him. It was the kind of act that, today, might invite censure, but I took it for what it was – a moment of tenderness from a man lamenting. There was something protective about his gesture, as if he wanted to keep me safe from all that might be lost to time.

The course ended. Bellagio asked me to write a paper on any aspect of desire. I chose the idea that in desiring we are in some ways loving ourselves, trying to find ourselves. What I discovered is that this idea – that self-awareness comes into being when we see ourselves reflected in another person’s eyes – is a fundamental idea in much of Western philosophy. We are born, in a sense, in a process that involves other people’s awareness of us.

I continued to take many courses in psychology, but none again with Bellagio. Yet his theory of desire – that desire is about what we cant have – consumed me as I began to have a spate of crushes. My teaching assistant in philosophy was a graduate student from Vienna I’ll call him Fabian. Of course I realize now that he was a guy on the make, but to me he seemed a romantic hero. Fabian had full, sensual lips set against skin so pale it seemed bloodless as paper, which lent him slightly macabre cast (think Edward Scissorhands). With his greasy black hair falling into his eyes, his heavy brooding over tomes of philosophy, and a thick accent – which to my sophomore ears made the most banal of utterances sound as if he were reciting Goethe – he might as well have been Lord Byron himself.

One day at philosophy class party, Fabian approached me as I sat in a wing chair. He leaned against it. In the background someone exclaimed, “This California beach town is haven!” “What is this haven? What does this mean, haven?’ Fabian turned and bent toward me.

“Its kind of..well…shelter, but paradise too.”

Fabian squatted, moved in close, and said, “Oh, I see. It is like…” He searched my face, staring intently, meaningfully, as if to imply “like love.” It was a cheap and easy move, and I am embarrassed that I fell for it. The truth is that it took me wholly off guard. I’d never met a man whose manner was so forward and suggestive. I was thrilled.

It wasn’t long before Fabian and I were spending romantic evenings together – first we went to a movie, where he began kissing me during the opening credit. He kissed me throughout the entire movie, for that matter.

Then I took him to the boardwalk and introduced him to the roller coaster. When I think back on those dates, they seem like an interlude in my corny movie - music plays, swells with emotion, the couple walk along the beach and kiss and kiss and smile into each other's eyes. They ride a roller coaster and laugh with abandon as they try to kiss and hold onto each other even as they are being rocked about.

That night changed the way I experience the sea, the night air. It was as if someone had lifted a film from my eyes, my skin, my senses. I saw the realness of things, the very magic of existence.

I can see why you like the roller coaster," Fabian said, as we sat on the sand. His cheeks still flushed. He smiled into my face and studied me as if he had a new respect for me. I felt wholly other - seen anew. I felt admired, and that is what being with him was all about, a longing to discover who I could be when I was with him (older, philosophical, European, cosmopolitan). It was as if, with him, I could walk into someone else's skin, or walk out of my own. I was leaving behind the college sophomore, leaving behind my hometown suburbs, leaving behind the depression and failure of those last months with Daniel. Oddly, the more I felt myself the new person with Fabian, the more differently I acted, as if his imagination was bringing me alive. I found myself saying clever things, teasing him, taking risks, and acting in a way I have never had.

After our first date, I remembered Bellagio's theory about romance and the market, that we chase an idea. But this no illusion. What I felt now seemed an attraction to a something so outside of myself. Fabian was no illusion. He was a current running through me, a force, a power, a necessity, like electricity. On our next date, he brought me a thermos of martinis to Seacliff, where we sat on craggy rocks watching a swollen sun drop into the ocean. Afterward we made out in his car. He let me off at my apartment.

I wanted to call him to thank him that night, but I waited, hoping he'd call me; no call came. I determined to wait until the next morning. Well aware of Bellagio's theory about scarcity and love, I knew that I had to appear to be scarce - like gold.

My plan was to lie low for a few days, not answer the phone. The first time it rang the morning after our date, I nearly ripped it out of my roommate's hand. It wasn't Fabian. I sat in my room trying to read. The words skimmed the surface, wouldn't soak in. Thoughts of Fabian and his luscious lips (and what I imagined was "continental kissing") saturated my consciousness. I read page after page of homework without comprehension. I moved the phone into my room (back then, a complex negotiation). Unfortunately, the plan of appearing scarce grew intolerable by lunch; I was nearly shaking with anxiety. I checked the phone to make sure it wasn't accidently off the hook. It wasn't. That's when I had an inspiration. Instead of waiting for Fabian to call me, I would call Fabian. Brilliant.

"But wont that make you look eager?' asked Roberta, my roommate. I explained that I would figure out a way to make myself seem scarce, but actually get to talk to him. (Never mind that I was selectively forgetting the rest of what Bellagio had told me). Here was my plan: I would make contact, but hang up quickly, thereby making myself look aloof, look scarce. In fact, I reasoned, I'd better call soon since acting nonchalant might make me so very desirable to Fabian.

After a brief greeting, I told him I'd had a nice night last night. "Yes," he said, "Look," he added, "I'm grading papers, can I call you back?"

"Sure."

I hung up in humiliation. Not only had I not been able to prove myself scarce, but now I was on the opposite end of scarce. He could smell my desire. Desire, I thought. The bad breath of dating.

Day two: I abstain from calling Fabian. This was my diet.
Day Three: I abstained again. A fast.
On day four, I saw him coming out of the library. A sheer coincidence for which I'd spent several hours calculating. I had donned a stunning white sundress especially planned for this coincidence.

He approached, then spoke. "You look lovely - like a lovely white bird." He eyed me carefully, searching my face for something.

I stood there. I tried to force myself to look away, tried to force my body to walk away, to turn, but all I could do is look back into Fabian's eyes like a simpering, longing kid...waiting...waiting...and wanting.

Bellagio was right about hiding it. Desire is an opened-mouth fool. As much as forcing me to cry out: I am a smoldering cigarette butt. Walk on me. When you feel desire, you can't fake it.

Against all will, all intention, I looked up at Fabian with innocent, hungry eyes, I am air. Cheap as air. Free. Inhale me. Fabian took a big breath. Was he nervous? Was he going to ask me out? He stared off into the redwood forest that surrounded our library. "Yes, you are beautiful in that dress. A beautiful bird. Go ahead bird," he said, "fly away."

Over my dating years I found that Bellagio's prophesy about playing both roles would be true. Sometimes I played the more uncomfortable part in that game of tag in the dark, being the seeker; and other times I had had the twisted privilege of wanting more freedom. But Bellagio had made me aware that desire sets up a dynamic, a game with rules that seemed to be invented in some torture chamber of the heart - all devised to make seeking real love, real connection, quite simply painful. We want what we cannot have - that is the strange irony of desire, of passion. And when we have it, often we lose the wanting.

And then I was married. I had always feared marriage as the end of those electric moments of discovery, of passion, the exquisite exuberance that comes with desire. If passion required scarcity, how can someone seem scarce if they use you're bathroom every day? How can someone seem scarce if they become so common as to almost be invisible?

Yet marriage, paradoxically, set me free. It was the great equalizer. In marriage, it didnt quite matter who was leaning in which direction. Sometimes I was running away, looking for time to myself; and sometimes my husband was the one who ran. The power struggle of desire versus freedom faded into the background as we got on with the business of making a family.

The Buddhists say that all desire leads only to suffering. Perhaps this is what Bellagio meant when he spoke of desire as an illusion. But what replaces that erotic feeling of aliveness that characterized my first dates with Fabian?

What we lived in marriage, of course, is what countless people have lived: the realization that in giving, in truly loving, we actually stop wanting. In desire, we go from place to place of need and try to satisfy ourselves; in loving we leave our own needs behind and paradoxically find them met.

Still, there has been a way of capturing some moments of passion. I confess that my husband and I have stumbled onto a trick whereby each one of us is, "the one who wants more," each one of us is the slave to love. The answer comes in having children (and, in our case, one with special needs).

The secret is in being so busy, so distracted, that we inadvertently make ourselves "scarce". Between balancing four separate schedules, driving to doctors' appointments, shuttling kids to lessons and playdates, and frantically making money to pay for them all, we rarely, if ever, have time for each other. We are usually too exhausted to think about desire. We no longer desire desire; what we desire too often is solitude.

Still, if some evening (or even some month or year) we find ourselves awake at the same time, and strong enough to hold our eyes open in dim light, we may look up suddenly and see each other, almost as if we had just met, and I feel again what I felt when we were first dating. Then intimacy becomes as illicit, as surprising, as fantastical - and even as surreal - as if we were making out on top of a rollercoaster. Probably because we are.