The Professor of Desire (6 page)

Yet, work myself up as I will over her photograph, it is with slender little Birgitta, a girl a good deal less innocent and vulnerable—a girl who confronts the world with a narrow foxy face, a nose delicately pointed and an upper lip ever so slightly protruding, a mouth ready, if need be, to answer a charge or utter a challenge—that I continue to live out my year as a visiting fellow in erotic daredevilry.

Of course, strolling around Green Park renting out deck chairs to passers-by, Birgitta is tendered invitations almost daily by men visiting London as tourists, or men out prowling on their lunch hour, or men on their way home to wives and children at the end of the day. Because of the opportunities for pleasure and excitement afforded by these meetings, she had decided against returning to Uppsala after her year's leave of absence and had given up her courses in London, too. “I think I get a better English education this way,” says Birgitta.

One March afternoon when suddenly the sun appears, out of the blue, over dreary London, I take the Underground to the park and, sitting under a tree, I watch her, some hundred yards away, engaged in conversation with a gentleman nearly three times my age who is reclining in one of the deck chairs. It is almost an hour before the conversation ends, the gentleman rises, makes a formal bow in her direction, and departs. Could it be somebody she knows? Somebody from home? Could it be Dr. Leigh from the Brompton Road? Without telling her, I travel to the park every afternoon for almost a week and, keeping back in the shadows of the trees, spy upon her at work. I am surprised at first to find myself so enormously excited each time I see Birgitta standing over a deck chair in which a man is seated. Of course, all they ever do is talk. That is all I ever see. Never once do I see either a man touching Birgitta or Birgitta touching a man. And I am almost certain she does not make assignations and go off with any of them after work. But what excites me is that she might, that she could … that if I proposed such a thing to her, she probably would do it. “What a day,” she says at dinner one evening. “The whole Portuguese navy is here. Feee! What men!” But if I were to say …

Only a few weeks later she startles me one evening by saying, “Do you know who came to see me today? Mr. Elverskog.” “Who?” “Bettan's father.” I think: They have found my letters! Oh, why did I put in writing that stuff about tying her hands to the chair! It's me they're after, the
two
families! “He came to see you here?” “He knows where I work,” say Birgitta, “so he came there.” Is Birgitta lying to me, is she doing something “a little perverse” again? But how can she possibly know that all along I have been terrified of Elisabeth breaking down and turning us in, and of her father coming after me, with a Scotland Yard detective, or with his whip … “What's he doing in London, Gittan?” “Oh, his business—I don't know. He just came to the park to say hello.”
And did you go off to his hotel room with him, Gittan? Would you like to make love with Elisabeth's father? Wasn't he the tall, distinguished-looking gentleman who bowed farewell to you that sunny day in March? Isn't he the old man I saw you listening to so avidly several months ago? Or was that the doctor who likes to play doctor with you in his office? What was he saying to you, that man, just what was he proposing that held your attention so?

I don't know what to think, and so I think everything.

In bed later, when she wants to be excited by hearing “all kinds of things,” I come to the very brink of saying to her, “Would you do it with Mr. Elverskog? Would you do it with a sailor, if I told you to? Would you do it with him for money?” I don't, not simply for fear that she will say yes (as she might, if only for the thrill of saying it), but because I might reply, “Then go ahead, my little whore.”

At the end of the term Birgitta and I take a hitchhiking trip on the Continent, looking at museums and cathedrals during the day, and then after dark, in cafés and
caves
and tavernas, training our sights on girls. About leading Birgitta back into this, I have no such scruples as I had in London about tempting her to visit Mr. Elverskog in his hotel. “Another girl” is one of those “things” with which we have aroused one another continually during the months since Elisabeth's departure. To find other girls is, in fact, one of the reasons we are on this holiday. And we are not bad at it, not at all. To be sure, alone neither Birgitta nor I is ever quite so cunning or brave, but together it seems that we strongly reenforce one another's waywardness and, as the nights go by, become more and more adroit at charming perfect strangers. Yet, no matter how skillfully, how
professionally,
we come to maneuver as a team, I still go a little weak and dizzy when it appears that we have actually succeeded in finding a willing third and all of us get up as one to go find a quieter place to talk. Birgitta reports similar symptoms in herself—though out on the street wins my admiration by daring to reach out and push away from her face the hair of the game young student who is daring to see what develops. Yes, seeing my partner so plucky and confident, I recover my faculties—and my balance—and give each of the girls an arm, and, now, without so much as a quiver in my voice, with my worldly mix of irony and bonhomie, say, “Let's go, friends—come along!” And all the while I am thinking what I have been thinking now for months:
Is this happening? This, too?
For in my wallet along with Elisabeth's picture is a photo of her family's seaside house, sent to me just before I received my lamentable grades and boarded the boat-train with Birgitta. I have been invited to visit her on tiny Trångholmen and to stay on the island as long as I wish. And why don't I? And marry her there! Her father knows nothing, and he never will. The whip, the detective, the scenes of vengeful murderous rage, the secret plot to make me pay for what I have done to his daughter—that is all my imagination running wild. Why not let my imagination run another way? Why not imagine Elisabeth and myself rowing past the rocky shore and the tall pine trees, all the way down the length of the island to where the Waxholms ferry docks each day? Why not imagine her family beaming and waving at us when we return in the boat with the milk and the mail? Why not imagine this sweet Elisabeth on the porch of the Elverskogs' pretty barn-red house, pregnant with the first of our Swedish-Jewish children? Yes, there is Elisabeth's unfathomable and wonderful love and there is Birgitta's unfathomable and wonderful daring,
and whichever I want I can have.
Now isn't
that
unfathomable! Either the furnace or the hearth! Ah, this must be what is meant by the possibilities of youth.

More youthful possibilities. In Paris, in a bar not far from the Bastille, where the infamous marquis had himself been punished for his vile and audacious crimes, a prostitute sits in a corner with us and, while she jokes with me in French about my crew cut, is busy stroking Birgitta beneath the table. In the midst of our excitement—for I also have a hand moving under the table—a man looms up, berating me for the indignities that I am making my young wife submit to. I rise with a throbbing heart to explain that we happen not to be husband and wife, that we are students, that what we do is our business—but, despite my excellent pronunciation and perfect grammatical constructions, he pulls a hammer out of his overalls, and raises it into the air.
“Salaud!”
he cries.
“Espèce de con!”
Hand in hand with Birgitta, and for the first time ever, I run for my life.

We do not discuss what will happen when the month is over. Rather, each thinks: Given what has been, what else can be? That is, I assume that I will return to America alone in order to resume my education, this time
seriously,
and Birgitta assumes that when I leave she will pack her knapsack and come with me. Birgitta's parents have already been told that she is thinking of going to study next in America for a year, and apparently that is all right with them. Even if it weren't, Birgitta would probably still do as she pleased.

When I rehearse the difficult conversation that must take place sooner or later, I hear myself sounding very limp and whiny indeed. Nothing I can say comes out right, nothing she can say sounds wrong—and yet it is I, of course, who invent the dialogue. “I am going to Stanford. I am going back to get my degree.” “So?” “I have terrible dreams about school, Gittan. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. I fucked up my Fulbright but good.” “Yes?” “And, as for the two of us—” “Yes?” “Well, I don't see that we have any future. Do
you?
I mean we would never be able to go back to ordinary sex. That can never work for us—we've upped the ante much too high. We've gone too far to go back.” “We have?” “I think so, yes.” “But it wasn't my idea alone, you know.” “I didn't say that it was.” “So then we stop going too far.” “But
we
can't. Oh, come on, you know that.” “But I do whatever you want.” “That's not possible any longer. Or are you saying that I've had you in my power all along, that you're another Elisabeth I've corrupted?” She smiles her fetching buck-toothed smile. “Who then is the other Elisabeth?” she asks.
“You?
Oh, but that is not so. You say so yourself. You are a whoremaster by nature, you are a polygamist by nature, there is even the rapist in you—” “Well, maybe I've changed my mind about all that; maybe I was foolish to say such things.” “But how can you change your mind about what is your nature?” she asks.

In reality, going home to resume my serious education hardly requires that I fight my way, a little helplessly, a little foolishly, through this thicket of flattering objections. No, no challenging debate about my “nature” is necessary for me to be free of her and our fantastical life of thrilling pleasures—at least not right then and there. We are undressing for bed in a room we have rented for the night in a town in the Seine Valley, some thirty kilometers from Rouen, where I intend the next day to visit Flaubert's birthplace, when Birgitta begins to reminisce about the silly dreams that used to be awakened in her as a teenager by the name California: convertible cars, millionaires, James Dean— I interrupt: “I'm going to California by myself. I'm going by myself—on my own.”

Minutes later she is dressed again and her knapsack is ready for the road. My God, she is bolder even than I imagined! How many such girls can there be in the world? She dares to do everything, and yet she is as sane as I am. Sane, clever, courageous, self-possessed—and wildly lascivious! Just what I've always wanted. Why am I running away, then? In the name of what? More Arthurian legends and Icelandic sagas? Look, if I were to empty my pockets of Elisabeth's letters and Elisabeth's photographs—and empty my imagination of Elisabeth's father—if I were to give myself completely over to what I have, to whom I am with, to what may actually
be
my nature—“Don't be ridiculous,” I say, “where can you find a room at this hour? Oh, damn it, Gittan, I
have
to go to California alone! I've got to go back to school!”

In response, no tears, no anger, and no real scorn to speak of. Though not too much admiration for me as a shameless carnal force. She says from the door, “Why did I like you so much? You are such a boy,” and that is all there is to the discussion of my character, all, apparently, that her dignity requires or permits. Not the masterful young master of mistresses and whores, not the precocious dramatist of the satyric and the lewd, and something of a fledgling rapist too—no, merely “a boy.” And then gently, so very gently (for despite being a girl who moans when her hair is pulled and cries for more when her flesh is made to smart with a little pain, despite her Amazonian confidence in the darkest dives and the nerves of iron that she can display in the chancy hitchhiking world, aside from the stunning sense of inalienable right with which she does whatever she likes, that total immunity from remorse or self-doubt that mesmerizes me as much as anything, she is also courteous, respectful, and friendly, the perfectly brought-up child of a Stockholm physician and his wife), she closes the door after her so as not to awaken the family from whom we have rented our room.

Yes, easily as that do young Birgitta Svanström and young David Kepesh rid themselves of each other. Ridding himself of what he is
by nature
may be a more difficult task, however, since young Kepesh does not appear to be that clear, quite yet, as to what his nature is, exactly. He is awake all night wondering what he will do if Birgitta should steal back into the room before dawn; he wonders if he oughtn't to get up and lock the door. Then when dawn arrives, when noon arrives, and she is nowhere to be found, neither in the town of Les Andelys nor in Rouen—not at the Grosse Horloge; not at the Cathedral; not at the birthplace of Flaubert or the spot where Joan of Arc went up in flames—he wonders if he will ever see the likes of her and their adventure again.

*   *   *

Helen Baird appears some years later, when I am in the final stretch of graduate studies in comparative literature and feeling triumphant about the determination I have mustered to complete the job. Out of boredom, restlessness, impatience, and a growing embarrassment that naggingly informs me I am too old to be sitting at a desk still being tested on what I know, I have come near to quitting the program just about every semester along the way. But now, with the end in sight, I utter my praises aloud while showering at the end of the day, thrilling myself with simple statements like “I did it” and “I stuck it out,” as though it is the Matterhorn I have had to climb in order to qualify for my orals. Following the year with Birgitta, I have come to realize that in order to achieve anything lasting, I am going to have to restrain a side of myself strongly susceptible to the most bewildering and debilitating sort of temptations, temptations that as long ago as that night outside Rouen I already recognized as inimical to my overall interests. For, far as I had gone with Birgitta, I knew how very easy it would have been for me to have gone further still—more than once, I remember the thrill it had given me imagining her with men other than myself, imagining her taking money to bring home in her pocket … But
could
I have gone on to that so easily? Actually have become Birgitta's pimp? Well, whatever my talent may have been for that profession, graduate school has not exactly encouraged its development … Yes, when the battle appears to have been won, I am truly relieved by my ability to harness my good sense in behalf of a serious vocation—and not a little touched by my virtue. Then Helen appears to tell me, by example and in so many words, that I am sadly deluded and mistaken. Is it so as never to forget the charge that I marry her?