by Philip Roth
Well, “thinking things through” in this manner, it is never too long before I wind up recollecting that night when Birgitta and I kept asking and asking Elisabeth—hounding and hounding Elisabeth—about what we had already cross-examined one another: what was it she secretly wanted most, what was it that she only dared to think about herself and never in her life had had the courage to do or to have done to her? “What is it you’ve never been able to admit to anyone, Elisabeth, not even to yourself?” Clinging with ten fingers to the blanket dragged from the bed to cover us all on the floor, Elisabeth began softly to weep, and in that charming, musical English admitted she wanted to be had from behind while bending over a chair.
I found no satisfaction in her reply. Only after I had pressed her further, only after I had demanded, “But what else—what more? That’s nothing!”—only then did she at last break down and “confess” that she wanted me to do it to her like that while her hands and feet were tied down. And maybe she did and maybe she didn’t …
Passing through Piccadilly, I compose yet another paragraph of moral speculation for the latest letter intended to educate my innocent victim—and me. In truth, I am trying with what wisdom—and what prose resources and literary models—is mine to understand if in fact I have been what the Christians call wicked and what I would call inhuman. “And even if you had actually wanted what you told us you wanted, what law says that whatever secret longing one is asked to satisfy must be satisfied forthwith?…” We had used the belt from my trousers and a strap from Birgitta’s knapsack to bind Elisabeth to a straight-backed chair. Once again the tears came rolling down her face, causing Birgitta to touch her cheek and to ask her, “Bettan, you want to stop now?” But Elisabeth’s long trailing locks, that child’s length of amber hair, whipped across her bare back, so vehemently did she shake her head in defiance. Defiance of whom, I wonder. Of what? Why, I don’t begin to know a thing about her! “No,” Elisabeth whispered. The only word she spoke from start to finish. “No stop?” I asked. “Or no go on? Elisabeth, do you understand me—? Ask her in Swedish, ask her—” But “no” is all she will answer; “no,” and “no,” and “no” again. And so it was that I proceeded as I sort of believed I was being directed to. Elisabeth weeps, Birgitta watches, and suddenly I am so excited by it all—by the panting, dog-like sounds the three of us are making, by what the three of us are doing—that all traces of reluctance drop away, and I know that I could do anything, and that I want to, and that I will! Why not four girls, why not five—“… who but the wicked would hold that whatever longing one is asked to satisfy must be satisfied forthwith? Yet, dearest, sweetest, precious girl, that appeared to be the very law under which we three had decided—had agreed—to live!” And by now I am in a hallway on Greek Street, where at last I stop thinking about what next to write to Elisabeth on the unfathomable subject of my iniquity, and thinking too about this unfathomable Birgitta—has she no remorse? no shame? no loyalty? no limits?—who must by now have read the half-written letter left by me in my Olivetti (and which surely will impress her with just how deep a sultan I am).
In a little room above a Chinese laundry, I try my luck with a thirty-shilling whore, a fading Cockney milkmaid called Terry the Tart who thinks me “a sexy bah-stard” and whose plucky lewdness had, once upon a time, a most startling effect upon the detonation of my seed. Now Terry’s skills go for nought. She gives me her extraordinary collection of dirty pictures to look at; she describes, with no less imagination than Mrs. Browning, the ways in which she will love me; indeed, she praises to the skies the breadth and height of my member and its depth of penetration when last seen erect; but the fifteen minutes of hard labor she then puts in over the recumbent lump is without significant result. Taking such comfort as I can from the tender way Terry puts it—“Sorry, Yank, ’e seems a bit sleepy tonight”—I head back across London to our basement, finishing up as I go with that day’s inquiry into the evil I may or may not have done.
As it turns out, I would have been better off applying all this concentration to the excessive use of the kenning in the latter half of the twelfth century in Iceland. That, in time, is something I could have made some sense of. Instead, I seem to get nowhere near the truth, or even the feel of the truth, in the prolix letters I regularly address to Stockholm, while the scholarly essay I finally read before my tutorial group prompts the tutor to invite me back to his office after class, to sit me down in a chair, and to ask, with only the faintest trace of sarcasm, “Tell me, Mr. Kepesh, are you sure you are serious about Icelandic poetry?”
A teacher taking me to task! As unimaginable, this, as my sixteen days in one room with two girls! As Elisabeth Elverskog’s attempt at suicide! I am so stunned and humiliated by this chastisement (especially coming in the wake of the accusations that I have been leveling at myself in my capacity as Elisabeth’s family’s attorney) that I cannot find the courage to return to the tutorial ever again; like Louis Jelinek I do not even respond to the notes asking me to come talk to my tutor about my disappearance. Can it be? I am on my way to failing a course. In God’s name, what next?
This.
One night Birgitta tells me that while I have been lying gloomily on Elisabeth’s bed playing the “fallen priest” she has been doing something “a little perverse.” Actually it goes back sometime, to when she had first arrived in London two years ago and had gone to see a doctor about a digestive problem. The doctor had told her that to make a diagnosis he would need a vaginal smear. He asked her to disrobe and arrange herself on the examination table, and then with either his hand or an instrument—she had been so startled at the time she still wasn’t sure—had begun to massage between her legs. “Please, what is it that you are doing?” she had asked him. According to Birgitta, he’d had the nerve to say in response, “Look, do you think I like this? I’ve a bad back, my dear, and this posture doesn’t help it any. But I must have a specimen and this is the only way I can get it.” “Did you let him?” “I didn’t know what else to do. How do I tell him to stop? I had just arrived three days here. I was frightened a little, you know, and I wasn’t sure I understood his English. And he looked like a doctor. Tall and nice-looking and kind. And very nice clothes. And I thought maybe this is the way they do it here. He kept saying, ‘Are you getting cramps yet, my dear?’ At first I didn’t know what that means—then I got my clothes on and I left. There were people in the waiting room, there was a nurse … He sent a bill for two guineas.” “He did? And you paid it?” I ask. “No.” “And?” I ask, wavering 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 i
s 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 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, spy upon her at work. I am surprised at first to find myself so enormously excited each time I see Birgitta standing over a deck chair in which a man is seated. Of course, all they ever do is talk. That is all I ever see. Never once do I see either a man touching Birgitta or Birgitta touching a man. And I am almost certain she does not make assignations and go off with any of them after work. But what excites me is that she might, that she could … that if I proposed such a thing to her, she probably would do it. “What a day,” she says at dinner one evening. “The whole Portuguese navy is here. Feee! What men!” But if I were to say …
Only a few weeks later she startles me one evening by saying, “Do you know who came to see me today? Mr. Elverskog.” “Who?” “Bettan’s father.” I think: They have found my letters! Oh, why did I put in writing that stuff about tying her hands to the chair! It’s me they’re after, the two families! “He came to see you here?” “He knows where I work,” say Birgitta, “so he came there.” Is Birgitta lying to me, is she doing something “a little perverse” again? But how can she possibly know that all along I have been terrified of Elisabeth breaking down and turning us in, and of her father coming after me, with a Scotland Yard detective, or with his whip … “What’s he doing in London, Gittan?” “Oh, his business—I don’t know. He just came to the park to say hello.” And did you go off to his hotel room with him, Gittan? Would you like to make love with Elisabeth’s father? Wasn’t he the tall, distinguished-looking gentleman who bowed farewell to you that sunny day in March? Isn’t he the old man I saw you listening to so avidly several months ago? Or was that the doctor who likes to play doctor with you in his office? What was he saying to you, that man, just what was he proposing that held your attention so?
I don’t know what to think, and so I think everything.
In bed later, when she wants to be excited by hearing “all kinds of things,” I come to the very brink of saying to her, “Would you do it with Mr. Elverskog? Would you do it with a sailor, if I told you to? Would you do it with him for money?” I don’t, not simply for fear that she will say yes (as she might, if only for the thrill of saying it), but because I might reply, “Then go ahead, my little whore.”
At the end of the term Birgitta and I take a hitchhiking trip on the Continent, looking at museums and cathedrals during the day, and then after dark, in cafés and caves and tavernas, training our sights on girls. About leading Birgitta back into this, I have no such scruples as I had in London about tempting her to visit Mr. Elverskog in his hotel. “Another girl�
�� is one of those “things” with which we have aroused one another continually during the months since Elisabeth’s departure. To find other girls is, in fact, one of the reasons we are on this holiday. And we are not bad at it, not at all. To be sure, alone neither Birgitta nor I is ever quite so cunning or brave, but together it seems that we strongly reenforce one another’s waywardness and, as the nights go by, become more and more adroit at charming perfect strangers. Yet, no matter how skillfully, how professionally, we come to maneuver as a team, I still go a little weak and dizzy when it appears that we have actually succeeded in finding a willing third and all of us get up as one to go find a quieter place to talk. Birgitta reports similar symptoms in herself—though out on the street wins my admiration by daring to reach out and push away from her face the hair of the game young student who is daring to see what develops. Yes, seeing my partner so plucky and confident, I recover my faculties—and my balance—and give each of the girls an arm, and, now, without so much as a quiver in my voice, with my worldly mix of irony and bonhomie, say, “Let’s go, friends—come along!” And all the while I am thinking what I have been thinking now for months: Is this happening? This, too? For in my wallet along with Elisabeth’s picture is a photo of her family’s seaside house, sent to me just before I received my lamentable grades and boarded the boat-train with Birgitta. I have been invited to visit her on tiny Trångholmen and to stay on the island as long as I wish. And why don’t I? And marry her there! Her father knows nothing, and he never will. The whip, the detective, the scenes of vengeful murderous rage, the secret plot to make me pay for what I have done to his daughter—that is all my imagination running wild. Why not let my imagination run another way? Why not imagine Elisabeth and myself rowing past the rocky shore and the tall pine trees, all the way down the length of the island to where the Waxholms ferry docks each day? Why not imagine her family beaming and waving at us when we return in the boat with the milk and the mail? Why not imagine this sweet Elisabeth on the porch of the Elverskogs’ pretty barn-red house, pregnant with the first of our Swedish-Jewish children? Yes, there is Elisabeth’s unfathomable and wonderful love and there is Birgitta’s unfathomable and wonderful daring, and whichever I want I can have. Now isn’t that unfathomable! Either the furnace or the hearth! Ah, this must be what is meant by the possibilities of youth.
