The Professor of Desire (4 page)

My misery is raw and colossal. In my wallet is the phone number of a teacher of paleography at King's given me by his friend, one of my Syracuse professors. But how can I phone this distinguished scholar and tell him within an hour of my arrival that I want to hand in my Fulbright and go home? “They chose the wrong applicant—I'm not serious enough to suffer like this!” With the captain's stout and kindly wife assisting—convinced by my coloring that I am Armenian, she mumbles to me all the while something about new carpets for the parlor—I find the phone in the hallway and dial. I am only inches from tears (I am really only inches from phoning collect to the Catskills), but scared and miserable as I am, it turns out that I am even more scared of confessing to being scared and miserable, for when the professor answers, I hang up.

Four or five hours later—night having fallen over Western Europe, and my first English meal of tinned spaghetti on toast having been more or less digested—I make for a London courtyard that I had learned about during the crossing. It is called Shepherd Market, and it provides me with an experience that alters considerably my attitude toward being a Fulbright fellow. Yes, even before I attend my first lectures on the epic and the romance, I begin to understand that for an unknown lad to have traveled to an unknown land may not have been a mistake after all. Terrified I am of course of dying like Maupassant; nonetheless, only minutes after peering timidly into the notorious alleyway, I have had a prostitute—the first whore of my life, and what is more, the first of my three sexual partners to date to have been born outside the continental United States (outside the state of New York, to be exact) and in a year prior to my own birth. Indeed, when she is astride me and is suddenly gravity's to do with as it wishes, I realize with an odd, repulsive sort of thrill that this woman whose breasts collide above my head like caldrons—whom I chose from among her competitors on the basis of these behemoth breasts and a no less capacious behind—was probably born prior to the outbreak of World War I. Imagine that, before the publication of
Ulysses,
before … but even as I am trying to place her in the century, I find that rather more quickly than I had planned—as though, in fact, one or the other of us is racing to make a train—I am being urged on to my big finale with the unbidden assistance of a sure, swift, unsentimental hand.

I discover Soho on my own the next night. I also discover in the
Columbia Encyclopedia
that I have lugged across the sea, along with Baugh's
Literary History of England
and the three paperback volumes of Trevelyan, that the final stages of
his
venereal disease finished Maupassant off at forty-three. Nonetheless, I still cannot think of anywhere I would rather be, following my dinner with the captain and the captain's wife, than in a room with a whore who will do whatever I wish—no, not after dreaming about paying for this privilege ever since I was twelve and had my allowance of a dollar a week to save up for anything I wanted. Of course if I chose whores less whorish-looking my chances of dying of VD rather than of old age might appreciably diminish. But what sense is there in having a whore who doesn't look and talk and behave like one? I am not in search of a girl friend, after all, not quite yet. And when I am ready for her it isn't to Soho that I take myself, but to lunch on a herring at a restaurant near Harrods called the Midnight Sun.

The mythology of the Swedish girl and her sexual freedom is, during these years, in its first effulgence, and despite the natural skepticism aroused in me by the stories of insatiable appetite and odd proclivities that I hear around the college, I happily play hooky from my ancient Norse studies in order to find out for myself just how much truth there may be in all this titillating schoolboy speculation. Off then to the Midnight Sun, where the waitresses are said to be sex-crazed young Scandinavian goddesses who serve you their native dishes while dressed in colorful folk costumes, painted wooden clogs that display their golden legs to great advantage, and peasant bodices that cross-lace up the front and press into view the enticing swell of their breasts.

It is here that I meet Elisabeth Elverskog—and poor Elisabeth meets me. Elisabeth has taken a year off from the University of Lund in order to improve her English, and is living with another Swede, the daughter of friends of her family, who had left the University of Uppsala two years earlier to improve
her
English, and has not gotten around yet to going back. Birgitta, who entered England as a student and supposedly is taking courses at London University, works in Green Park collecting the penny rental for a deck chair, and, unbeknownst to Elisabeth's family, collecting such adventures as come her way. The basement flat Elisabeth shares with Birgitta is in a rooming house off Earl's Court Road inhabited mostly by students several tones darker than the girls. Elisabeth confesses to me that she is not too crazy about the place—the Indians, against whom she has no racial prejudice, distress her by cooking curried dishes in their rooms all hours of the night, and the Africans, against whom she has no racial prejudice either, sometimes reach out and touch her hair when they pass in the corridor, and though she understands why, and realizes they mean her no harm, it still makes her tremble a little each time it happens. However, in her compliant and good-natured way, Elisabeth has decided to accept the minor indignities of the hallway—and the general squalor of the neighborhood—as part of the adventure of living abroad until June, when she will return to spend the summer with her family at their vacation house in the Stockholm archipelago.

I describe for Elisabeth my own monkish accommodations and do an imitation that amuses her enormously of the captain and his wife telling me that they do not permit cohabitation on the premises, not even between themselves. And when I do an imitation of her own singsong English, she laughs still more.

For the first few weeks, small, dark-haired, and (to my mind) fetchingly buck-toothed Birgitta pretends to be asleep when Elisabeth and I arrive in their basement room and pretend not to be making love. I don't think the excitement I experience when we three suddenly give up the pretense is any greater than it was while we all held our breath and pretended that nothing out of the ordinary was going on. I am so dizzily elated over the change that has taken place in my life since I thought to have lunch at the Midnight Sun—indeed, since I subdued my fears and stepped into Shepherd Market to seek out the whoriest of whores—I am in such an egoistical frenzy over this improbable thing that is happening to me, not just with one but with two Swedish (or, if you will,
European
) girls, that I do not see Elisabeth slowly going to pieces from the effort of being a fully participating sinner in our intercontinental ménage, a half of what can only be called my harem.

Maybe I don't see it because she is in something of a frenzy of her own—a drowning frenzy, a wild thrashing about in order to stay afloat—and as a result seems often to be
enjoying
herself so much; that is, I take the excitement for pleasurable excitement, certainly so when we three go off with a picnic lunch and a tennis ball to spend a Sunday on Hampstead Heath. I teach the girls “running bases”—and could Elisabeth be more delighted by anything than to be caught in a screaming, hilarious rundown between Birgitta and myself?—and they teach me
brännboll,
bits and pieces of fly-catcher-up and stickball, which combine into a game they played in Stockholm as schoolchildren. When it rains we play cards together, gin or canasta. The old king, Gustav V, was a passionate gin-rummy player, I am told, as are Birgitta's mother and father and brother and sister. Elisabeth, whose circle of Gymnasium friends had apparently idled away hundreds of afternoons at canasta, picks up gin rummy after just half an hour of watching a few games between Birgitta and me. She is captivated by the patter I deliver during the game, and takes immediately to using it herself—as did I at eight or so, back when I learned it all at the feet of Klotzer the Soda Water King (said by my mother to be the heaviest guest in Hungarian Royale history—when Mr. Klotzer lowered his behind onto our wicker, she had sometimes to cover her eyes—and a marathon monologuist and sufferer at the card table). Says Elisabeth, sadly arranging and rearranging the cards that Birgitta has dealt her, “I got a hand like a foot,” and when she lays down her melds in triumph, it pleases her no end—it pleases
me
no end—to hear her ask of her opponent, “What's the name of the game, Sport?” Oh, and when she calls the wild card in canasta the “yoker”—well, that just slays me. How on earth can she be going to pieces?
I'm
not! And what about our serious and maddening discussions of World War II, during which I try to explain—and not always in a soft voice either—to explain to these two self-righteous neutralists just what was going on in Europe when we were all growing up? Isn't it Elisabeth who is in fact more vehement (and innocently simple-minded) than Birgitta, who insists, even when I practically threaten to
slap
some sense into her, that the war was “everybody's fault”? How then can I tell that she is not only going to pieces but also thinking from morning to night about how to do herself in?

After the “accident”—so we describe in the telegram to her parents the broken arm and the mild concussion Elisabeth sustains by walking in front of a truck sixteen days after I move from Tooting Bec into the girls' basement—I continue to hang my tweed jacket in her closet and to sleep, or to try to, in her bed. And I actually believe that I am staying on there because in my state of shock I am simply
unable
to move out as yet. Night after night, under Birgitta's nose, I write letters to Stockholm in which I set out to explain myself to Elisabeth; rather, I sit down at my typewriter to begin the paper I must soon deliver in my Icelandic Saga tutorial on the decline of skaldic poetry through the overuse of the kenning, and wind up telling Elisabeth that I had not realized she was trying only to please me, but altogether innocently—“altogether unforgivably”—had believed that, like Birgitta and like myself, she had been pleasing herself first of all. Again and again—on the Underground, in the pub, during a lecture—I take her very first letter, written from her bedroom the day she had arrived back home, and un-crumple it to reread those primary-school sentences that have the Sacco and Vanzetti effect every time—what an idiot I have been, how callous, how blind!
“Älskade David!”
she begins, and then, in her English, goes on to explain that she had fallen in love with me, not with Gittan, and had gone to bed with the two of us only because I wanted her to and she would have done anything I wanted her to do … and, she adds in the tiniest script, she is afraid she would again if she were to return to London—

I am not a strong girl as Gittan. I am just a weak one Bettan, and I can't do anything about it. It was like being in hell. I was in love with someone and what I did had nothing to do with love. It was like I no more was human being. I am so stupid and my english is strange when I write, I am sorry for that. But I know I must never again do what we three did as long as I live. So the silly girl have learned something.

Din Bettan

And, below this, Bettan's forgiving afterthought:
“Tusen pussar och kramar”
—a thousand kisses and hugs.

In my own letters I confess again and again that I had been blind to the nature of her real feeling for me—blind to the depth of my feelings for
her!
I call that unforgivable too, and “sad,” and “strange,” and when the contemplation of this ignorance of mine brings me nearly to tears, I call it “terrifying”—and mean it. And this in turn leads me to try to give both of us some hope by telling her that I have found a room for myself (in only a matter of days I do intend to inquire about one) in a university residence hall, and that henceforth she should write to me there—if she should ever want to write to me again—rather than at the old address, in care of Birgitta … And in the midst of composing these earnest apologias and petitions for pardon, I am overcome with the most unruly and contradictory emotions—a sense of unworthiness, of loathsomeness, of genuine shame and remorse, and simultaneously as strong a sense that I am not guilty of anything, that it is as much the fault of those Indians cooking curried rice at 2 a.m. as it is mine that innocent, undefended Elisabeth stepped in the path of that truck. And what
about
Birgitta, who was supposed to have been Elisabeth's protector, and who now merely lies on the bed across the room from me, studying her English grammar, unmoved utterly—or so she pretends—by my drama of self-disgust? As though, since it was Elisabeth's arm, rather than neck, that was broken by the truck,
she
is entirely in the clear! As though Elisabeth's behavior with us is for Elisabeth's conscience alone to reckon with … and not hers … and not mine. But surely,
surely,
Birgitta is no less guilty than I am of misusing Elisabeth's pliable nature. Or is she? Wasn't it Birgitta rather than me to whom Elisabeth would instinctively turn for affection whenever she needed it most? When, depleted, we lay together on the threadbare rug—for it was the floor, not the bed, we used mostly as our sacrificial altar—when we would be lying there, dead limbs amid the little undergarments, groggy, sated, and confused, it was invariably Birgitta who held Elisabeth's head and gently stroked her face and whispered lullaby words like the kindest of mothers. My arms, my hands, my words didn't seem to be of any use to anyone at that point. The way it worked, my arms, hands, and words meant everything—until I came, and then the two girls huddled up together like playmates off in a tree house, or in a tent where there is just no room for another …