The Professor of Desire Read Online Free Page A

vexatious ideas, and praying that he will not make a pass.
    Before he can, Louis is dismissed from the university, first for failing to show up at a single class during an entire semester, and then for not even deigning to acknowledge the notes from his adviser asking him to come talk over the problem. Snaps Louis indignantly, sardonically, disgustedly, “ What problem?” and darts and cranes his head as though the “problem,” for all he knows, might be somewhere in the air above us. Though all agree that Louis’s is an extraordinary mind, he is refused enrollment for the second semester of his junior year. Overnight he disappears from Syracuse (no goodbyes, needless to say) and almost immediately is drafted. So I learn when an F.B.I. agent with an undeflectable gaze comes around to question me after Louis deserts basic training and (as I picture it) goes to hide out from the Korean War in a slum somewhere with his Kierkegaard and his Kleenex.
    Agent McCormack asks, “What about his homosexual record, Dave?” Flushing, I reply, “I don’t know about that.” McCormack says, “But they tell me you were his closest buddy.” “They? I don’t know who you mean.” “The kids over on the campus.” “That’s a vicious rumor about him—it’s totally untrue.” “That you were his buddy?” “No, sir,” I say, heat again rising unbidden to my forehead, “that he had a ‘homosexual record.’ They say those things because he was difficult to get along with. He was an unusual person, particularly for around here.” “But you got along with him, didn’t you?” “Yes. Why shouldn’t I?” “No one said you shouldn’t. Listen, they tell me you’re quite the Casanova.” “Oh, yes?” “Yeah. That you really go after the girls. Is that so?” “I suppose,” turning from his gaze, and from the implication I sense in his remark that the girls are only a front. “That wasn’t the case with Louis, though,” says the agent ambiguously. “What do you mean?” “Dave, tell me something. Level with me. Where do you think he is?” “I don’t know.” “But you’d let me in on it, if you did, I’m sure.” “Yes, sir.” “Good. Here’s my card, if you should happen to find out.” “Yes, sir; thank you, sir.” And after he leaves I am appalled by the way I have conducted myself: my terror of prison, my Lord Fauntleroy manners, my collaborationist instincts—and my shame over just about everything.
    The girls that I go after.
    Usually I pick them up (or at least out ) in the reading room of the library, a place comparable to the runway of a burlesque house in its power to stimulate and focus my desire. Whatever is imperfectly suppressed in these neatly dressed, properly bred middle-class American girls is immediately apparent (or more often than not, immediately imagined) in this all-pervasive atmosphere of academic propriety. I watch transfixed the girl who plays with the ends of her hair while ostensibly she is studying her History—while I am ostensibly studying mine. Another girl, wholly bland tucked in her classroom chair just the day before, will begin to swing her leg beneath the library table where she idly leafs through a Look magazine, and my craving knows no bounds. A third girl leans forward over her notebook, and with a muffled groan, as though I am being impaled, I observe the breasts beneath her blouse push softly into her folded arms. How I wish I were those arms! Yes, almost nothing is necessary to set me in pursuit of a perfect stranger, nothing, say, but the knowledge that while taking notes from the encyclopedia with her right hand, she cannot keep the index finger of her left hand from tracing circles on her lips. I refuse—out of an incapacity that I elevate to a