The Professor of Desire by Philip Roth Read Free Book Online Page A

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