The Professor of Desire (5 page)

Leaving my letter half-written, I go barging out into the street and walk halfway across London (in the direction of Soho generally) to bring myself under control. I try, on these Raskolnikovian sojourns (Raskolnikov, admittedly, as played by Pudd'nhead Wilson), to “think things through.” That is, I should like, if I can, to be able to deal with this unexpected turn of events the way Birgitta does. And since I don't seem able to arrive at that kind of equanimity spontaneously—or marshal that kind of strength, if strength it is—how about if I try to
reason
my way into her shoes? Yes, use my Fulbright fellow's brain—it's got to be good for something over here! Think it through, damn it! It's not that difficult. You didn't roll around on these two girls so as to set yourself up in business as a saint! Far from it! You didn't think up the things you all did so as to please the old folks at home! Far from it! Either go back and play patty-cake with Silky Walsh, or stay where you are and want what you want! Birgitta is human too, you know! Strong and clearheaded is human too (if strong and clearheaded it is), and blubbering is not becoming, over the age of four! Nor is the naughty-boy bit! Elisabeth is perfectly right: Gittan is Gittan, Bettan is Bettan, and now it is about time you were you!

Well, “thinking things through” in this manner, it is never too long before I wind up recollecting that night when Birgitta and I kept asking and asking Elisabeth—hounding and hounding Elisabeth—about what we had already cross-examined one another: what was it she secretly wanted most, what was it that she only dared to think about herself and never in her life had had the courage to do or to have done to her? “What is it you've never been able to admit to anyone, Elisabeth, not even to yourself?” Clinging with ten fingers to the blanket dragged from the bed to cover us all on the floor, Elisabeth began softly to weep, and in that charming, musical English admitted she wanted to be had from behind while bending over a chair.

I found no satisfaction in her reply. Only after I had pressed her further, only after I had demanded, “But what else—what more? That's nothing!”—only then did she at last break down and “confess” that she wanted me to do it to her like that while her hands and feet were tied down. And maybe she did and maybe she didn't …

Passing through Piccadilly, I compose yet another paragraph of moral speculation for the latest letter intended to educate my innocent victim—and me. In truth, I am trying with what wisdom—and what prose resources and literary models—is mine to understand if in fact I have been what the Christians call wicked and what I would call inhuman. “And even if you had
actually
wanted what you told us you wanted, what law says that whatever secret longing one is asked to satisfy must be satisfied forthwith?…” We had used the belt from my trousers and a strap from Birgitta's knapsack to bind Elisabeth to a straight-backed chair. Once again the tears came rolling down her face, causing Birgitta to touch her cheek and to ask her, “Bettan, you want to stop now?” But Elisabeth's long trailing locks, that child's length of amber hair, whipped across her bare back, so vehemently did she shake her head in defiance. Defiance of whom, I wonder. Of what? Why, I don't begin to know a thing about her! “No,” Elisabeth whispered. The only word she spoke from start to finish. “No stop?” I asked. “Or no go on? Elisabeth, do you understand me—? Ask her in Swedish, ask her—” But “no” is all she will answer; “no,” and “no,” and “no” again. And so it was that I proceeded as I sort of believed I was being directed to. Elisabeth weeps, Birgitta watches, and suddenly I am so excited by it all—by the panting, dog-like sounds the three of us are making, by what the three of us are
doing
—that all traces of reluctance drop away, and I know that I could do
anything,
and that I want to, and that I will! Why not four girls, why not five—“… who but the wicked would hold that whatever longing one is asked to satisfy must be satisfied forthwith? Yet, dearest, sweetest, precious girl, that appeared to be the very law under which we three had decided—had
agreed
—to live!” And by now I am in a hallway on Greek Street, where at last I stop thinking about what next to write to Elisabeth on the unfathomable subject of my iniquity, and thinking too about this unfathomable Birgitta—
has
she no remorse? no shame? no loyalty? no limits?—who must by now have read the half-written letter left by me in my Olivetti (and which surely will impress her with just how
deep
a sultan I am).

In a little room above a Chinese laundry, I try my luck with a thirty-shilling whore, a fading Cockney milkmaid called Terry the Tart who thinks me “a sexy bah-stard” and whose plucky lewdness had, once upon a time, a most startling effect upon the detonation of my seed. Now Terry's skills go for nought. She gives me her extraordinary collection of dirty pictures to look at; she describes, with no less imagination than Mrs. Browning, the ways in which she will love me; indeed, she praises to the skies the breadth and height of my member and its depth of penetration when last seen erect; but the fifteen minutes of hard labor she then puts in over the recumbent lump is without significant result. Taking such comfort as I can from the tender way Terry puts it—“Sorry, Yank, 'e seems a bit sleepy tonight”—I head back across London to our basement, finishing up as I go with that day's inquiry into the evil I may or may not have done.

As it turns out, I would have been better off applying all this concentration to the excessive use of the kenning in the latter half of the twelfth century in Iceland. That, in time, is something I could have made some sense of. Instead, I seem to get nowhere near the truth, or even the feel of the truth, in the prolix letters I regularly address to Stockholm, while the scholarly essay I finally read before my tutorial group prompts the tutor to invite me back to his office after class, to sit me down in a chair, and to ask, with only the faintest trace of sarcasm, “Tell me, Mr. Kepesh, are you sure you are serious about Icelandic poetry?”

A teacher taking me to task! As unimaginable, this, as my sixteen days in one room with two girls! As Elisabeth Elverskog's attempt at suicide! I am so stunned and humiliated by this chastisement (especially coming in the wake of the accusations that I have been leveling at myself in my capacity as Elisabeth's family's attorney) that I cannot find the courage to return to the tutorial ever again; like Louis Jelinek I do not even respond to the notes asking me to come talk to my tutor about my disappearance. Can it be? I am on my way to failing a course.
In God's name, what next?

This.

One night Birgitta tells me that while I have been lying gloomily on Elisabeth's bed playing the “fallen priest” she has been doing something “a little perverse.” Actually it goes back sometime, to when she had first arrived in London two years ago and had gone to see a doctor about a digestive problem. The doctor had told her that to make a diagnosis he would need a vaginal smear. He asked her to disrobe and arrange herself on the examination table, and then with either his hand or an instrument—she had been so startled at the time she still wasn't sure—had begun to massage between her legs. “Please, what is it that you are doing?” she had asked him. According to Birgitta, he'd had the nerve to say in response, “Look, do you think I like this? I've a bad back, my dear, and this posture doesn't help it any. But I must have a specimen and this is the only way I can get it.” “Did you let him?” “I didn't know what else to do. How do I tell him to stop? I had just arrived three days here. I was frightened a little, you know, and I wasn't sure I understood his English. And he looked like a doctor. Tall and nice-looking and kind. And very nice clothes. And I thought maybe this is the way they do it here. He kept saying, ‘Are you getting cramps yet, my dear?' At first I didn't know what that means—then I got my clothes on and I left. There were people in the waiting room, there was a nurse … He sent a bill for two guineas.” “He did? And you paid it?” I ask. “No.” “And?” I ask, wavering between incredulity and excitement. “Last month,” says Birgitta, her English emerging even more deliberately than usual, “I go to him again. I started to think all the time of it. That's what I think of when you are writing all your letters to Bettan.” Is that true, I wonder—is any of it true? “And?” I say. “Now once a week I go to his office. For my lunch hour.” “And he masturbates you? You let him masturbate you?” “Yes.” “Is this the truth, Gittan?” “I close my eyes and he does it to me with his hand.” “And—then?” “I get dressed. I go back to the park.” I am craving for more—and more lurid even than this—but there is none. He masturbates her, and he lets her go. Can this be true? Do such things happen? “What's his name? Where is his office?” To my surprise, without any reluctance, Birgitta tells me.

Some hours later, having failed to comprehend a single paragraph of
Arthurian Tradition and Chrétien de Troyes
(an invaluable source, I have been told, for the paper now due in my other tutorial), I rush out to a telephone kiosk at the end of our street and search the directory for the doctor's name—and find it, and at the Brompton Road address! Tomorrow morning first thing I will call him up—I will say (perhaps even in my Swedish accent), “Dr. Leigh, you had better watch out, you had better leave your hands off foreign young girls or you are going to get yourself in a lot of trouble.” But it seems that I do not really want to reform the lascivious doctor so much as to find out (inasmuch as I can) whether Birgitta's story is true. Not that I know for sure even yet whether I want it to be true or not. Wouldn't I be better off if it weren't?

When I get back to the flat I undress her. And she submits. With what self-possession does she submit—she and submission are thick as thieves! We are both panting and greatly worked up. I am clothed and she is naked. I call her a little whore. She begs me to pull her hair. How hard she wants it pulled I am not sure—no one has ever asked such a thing of me before. God, how far I have come from kissing Silky's navel in the dormitory laundry room just last spring! “I want to know you're here,” she cries—“do it more!” “Like this?” “Yes!” “Like this, my whore? my filthy little Birgitta whore!” “Ah, yes! Ah, yes, yes!”

An hour earlier I had been fearful that it might be decades before I was potent again, that my punishment, if such it was, might even last
forever.
Now I spend a night overcome by a passion whose harsh energies I have never allowed myself to begin to know before; or maybe it is that I have never before known a girl of roughly my own age to whom such forcefulness would have been anything other than an outrage. I have been so steeped in cajoling and wheedling and begging my way toward pleasure that I had not known I was actually capable of such a
besiegement
of another, or that I wished to be besieged and assaulted in turn. Straddling her head with my legs, I force my member into her mouth as though it were at once the lifeline that will prevent her suffocation and the instrument upon which she will strangle. And, as though I am her saddle, she plants herself upon my face and rides and rides and rides, “Tell me things!” cries Birgitta, “I like to be told things! Tell me all kind of things!” And in the morning there is no remorse for anything said or done—far from it. “We appear to be two of a kind,” I say. She laughs and says, “I know that a long time.” “That's why I stayed, you know.” “Yes,” she replies, “I know that.”

Yet I continue writing to Elisabeth (though no longer in Birgitta's presence). In care of a university residence hall—an American friend has arranged to receive my mail in his box there, and forward it to me—Elisabeth sends a photograph showing that her arm is no longer in a cast. On the back of the photograph she has printed, “Me.” I write immediately to thank her for the picture of herself healed and healthy again. I tell her that I am making progress in my Swedish grammar book, that I pick up a
Svenska Dugbladet
on Charing Cross Road each week and try at least to read the front-page stories with the aid of the English-Swedish pocket dictionary she gave me. And though in fact it is Birgitta's newspaper that I take a stab at translating—during the time previously reserved for sweating over my Eddas—while I am writing to Elisabeth I believe I am doing it for her, for our future, so that I can marry her and settle down in her homeland, eventually to teach American literature there. Yes, I believe I could yet fall in love with this girl who wears around her neck a locket with her father's picture in it … indeed, that I should have already. Her face
alone
is so lovable! Look at it, I tell myself—look, you idiot! Teeth that couldn't be whiter, the ripe curve of her cheeks, enormous blue eyes, and the reddish-amber hair that I once told her—it was the night I received the little dictionary inscribed “From me to you”—was best described in English by “tresses,” a poetical word out of fairy stories. “Common” is the English word which she tells me (after looking in the dictionary) best describes her nose. “It is a farm girl's nose,” she says, “it is like the thing you plant in the garden to grow tulips.” “Not quite.” “How do you say that?” “Tulip bulb.” “Yes. When I am forty I will look horrible because of this tulip bulb.” But the nose is just the nose of millions and millions, and, on Elisabeth, actually touching in its utter lack of pride or pretension. Oh, what a sweet face, so full of the happiness of her childhood! the frothiness of her laugh! her innocent heart! This is the girl who knocked me out just by saying “I got a hand like a foot!” Oh, how incredibly moving a thing it is, a person's innocence! How it catches me off guard each time, that unguarded trusting look!