The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online

(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