The Professor of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page A

while arching farther and farther back from the waist. To the seven other girls in brief, white, pleated skirts and bulky white sweaters the sequence of movements seems only so much peppy gymnastic display, to be executed with unsparing energy and at the edge of hilarity. Only in the slowly upturning belly of Marcella Walsh is there the smoldering suggestion (inescapable to me) of an offering, of an invitation, of a lust that is eager and unconscious and so clearly (to my eyes) begging to be satisfied. Yes, she alone seems (to me, to me) to sense that the tame and harnessed vehemence of this insipid cheer is but the thinnest disguise for the raw chant to be uttered while a penis propels into ecstasy that rising pelvis of hers. Oh, God, how can my coveting that pelvis thrust so provocatively toward the mouth of the howling mob, how can coveting those hard and tiny fists which speak to me of the pleasantest of all struggles, how can coveting those long and strong tomboyish legs that quiver ever so slightly as the arc is made and her silky hair (from which derives her pet name) sweeps back against the gymnasium floor—how can coveting the minutest pulsations of her being be “meaningless” or “trivial,” “beneath” either me or her, while passionately rooting for Syracuse to win the NCAA basketball championship makes sense?
    This is the line of reasoning that I take with Silky herself, and with which in time (oh, the time! the hours of debate that might have been spent cheering one another on to oceanic orgasms!) I hope to clear the way for those piercing erotic pleasures I have yet to know. Instead, I have to put aside logic, wit, candor, yes, and literary scholarship too, to put aside every reasonable attempt at persuasion—and at last all dignity as well—I have finally to turn as pitiful and craven as a waif in a famine before Silky, who has probably never seen anyone quite so miserable before, will allow me to shower kisses on her bare midriff. Since she really is the sweetest and most well-meaning of girls, hardly cruel enough or cold enough to reduce even a dirty-minded Romeo, a dean’s list Bluebeard, a budding Don Giovanni and Johannes the Seducer to abject suppliance, I may kiss the belly about which I have spoken so “obsessively,” but no more. “No higher and no lower,” she whispers, from where I have her bent backward over a sink in the pitch-black laundry room of her dormitory basement. “David, no lower, I said. How can you even want to do a thing like that?”
    So, between the yearnings and the myriad objects of desire, my world interposes its arguments and obstructions. My father doesn’t understand me, the F.B.I. doesn’t understand me, Silky Walsh doesn’t understand me, neither the sorority girls nor the bohemians understand me—not even Louis Jelinek ever really understood me, and, unlikely as it sounds, this alleged homosexual (wanted by the police) has been my closest friend. No, nobody understands me, not even I myself.
    *   *   *
    I arrive in London to begin my fellowship year in literature after six days on a ship, a train ride up from Southampton, and a long ride on the Underground out to a district called Tooting Bec. Here, on an endless street of mock Tudor houses, and not in Bloomsbury, as I had requested, the King’s College accommodations office has arranged lodgings for me in a private home. After I am shown to my grim little attic room by the retired army captain and his wife whose tidy, airless house this is—and with whom, I learn, I will be taking my evening meals—I look at the iron bedstead on which I am to spend the next three hundred nights or so, and in an instant am bereft of the high spirits with which I had crossed the Atlantic, the pure joy with which I had fled from all the constraining rituals of undergraduate life, and from the wearisome concern of the mother and father