The Professor of Desire Read Online Free

wrappings—the perfect mess! Just look upon the clotted Kleenex beside his ravaged bed, Kleenex clinging to his tattered carpet slippers. Only seconds after orgasm, and even in the privacy of my locked room, I automatically toss into a waste-basket the telltale evidence of self-abuse, whereas Jelinek—eccentric, contemptuous, unaffiliated, and unassailable Jelinek—seems not to care at all what the world knows or thinks of his copious ejaculations.
    I am stunned, can’t grasp it, for weeks afterward won’t believe it when a student in the philosophy program says in passing one day that “of course” my friend is a “practicing” homosexual. My friend? It cannot be, “Sissies,” of course, I am familiar with. Each summer we would have a few famous ones at the hotel, little Jewish pashas on holiday, first brought to my attention by Herbie B. With fascination I used to watch them being carried out of the sunlight and into the shade, even as they dizzily imbibed sweet chocolate drinks through a pair of straws, and their brows and cheeks were cleansed and dried by the handkerchiefs of galley slaves called Grandma, Mamma, and Auntie. And then there were the few unfortunates at school, boys born with their arms screwed on like girls, who couldn’t throw a ball right no matter how many private hours of patient instruction you gave them. But as for a practicing homosexual? Never, never, in all my nineteen years. Except, of course, that time right after my bar mitzvah, when I took a bus by myself to a stamp collectors’ fair in Albany, and in the Greyhound terminal there was approached at the urinal by a middle-aged man in a business suit who whispered to me over my shoulder, “Hey, kid, want me to blow you?” “No, no, thank you,” I replied, and quickly as I could (though without giving offense, I hoped) moved out of the men’s room, out of the terminal, and made for a nearby department store, where I could be gathered up in the crowd of heterosexual shoppers. In the intervening years, however, no homosexual had ever spoken to me again, at least none that I knew of.
    Till Louis.
    Oh, God, does this explain why I am told to keep my hands to myself when our shirtsleeves so much as brush against each other? Is it because for him being touched by a boy carries with it the most serious implications? But, if so, wouldn’t a person as forthright and unconventional as Jelinek come right out and say so? Or could it be that while my shameful secret with Louis is that under it all I am altogether ordinary and respectable, a closet Joe College, his with me is that he’s queer? As though to prove how very ordinary and respectable I really am, I never ask. Instead, I wait in fear for the day when something Jelinek says or does will reveal the truth about him. Or has his truth been with me all along? Of course! Those globs of Kleenex tossed about his room like so many little posies … are they not intended to divulge? to invite?  … is it so unlikely that some night soon this brainy hawk-nosed creature, who disdains, on principle, the use of underarm deodorant and is already losing his hair, will jump forth in his ungainly way from behind the desk where he is lecturing on Dostoevsky and try to catch me in an embrace? Will he tell me he loves me and stick his tongue in my mouth? And what will I say in response, exactly what the innocent, tempting girls say to me? “No, no, please don’t! Oh, Louis, you’re too smart for this! Why can’t we just talk about books?”
    But precisely because the idea frightens me so—because I am afraid that I may well be the “hillbilly” and “hayseed” that he delights in calling me when we disagree about the deep meaning of some masterpiece—I continue to visit him in his odoriferous room and sit across the litter from him there talking loudly for hours about the most maddening and