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

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!
    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,