The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  We must have gone a hundred yards, the trees flailing in the wind, the umbrella streaming, before I found something to say. “Do you—would you like to take a walk? Or do you need to, perhaps—because I could take you back to the dorm if that’s what you—”

  Her face was drawn and bloodless and she walked stiffly beside me, avoiding body contact as much as was possible under the circumstances. She stopped suddenly and I stopped too, awkwardly struggling to keep the crown of the umbrella above her. “A walk?” she repeated. “In this? You’ve got the wrong species here, I’m afraid—I’m a human animal, not a duck.” And then we were laughing, both of us, and it was all right.

  “Well, how about a cup of coffee then—and maybe a piece of, I don’t know, pie? Or a drink?” I hesitated. The rain glistened in her hair and her eyes were bright. “I could use a stiff one after that. I was—what I mean is, I never—”

  She touched my arm at the elbow and her smile suddenly bloomed and then faded just as quickly. “No,” she said, and her voice had gone soft, “me either.”

  I took her to a tavern crowded with undergraduates seeking a respite from the weather, and the first thing she did when we settled into a booth by the window was twist the rhinestone band off her finger and secrete it in the inside compartment of her purse. Then she unpinned her hat, patted down her hair and turned away from me to reapply her lipstick. I hadn’t thought past the moment, and once we agreed on where we were going, we hadn’t talked much either, the rain providing background music on the timpani of the umbrella and plucking the strings of the ragged trees as if that were all the distraction we could bear. Now, as I braced my elbows on the table and leaned toward her to ask what she wanted to drink, I realized that this was something very like a date and blessed my luck because I had two and a half dollars left in my wallet after paying out room and board from my scant weekly paycheck (I was working at the university library then, pushing a broom and reshelving books five evenings a week). “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and I could see she wasn’t quite herself yet. “What are you having?”

  “Bourbon. And a beer chaser.”

  She made a moue of her lips.

  “I can get you a soft drink, if you prefer—ginger ale, maybe?”

  “A Tom Collins,” she said, “I’ll have a Tom Collins,” and her eyes began to sweep the room.

  The lower legs and cuffs of my trousers were wet and my socks squished in my shoes as I rose to make my way to the bar. The place was close and steaming, shoulders and elbows looming up everywhere, the sawdust on the floor darkly compacted by the impressions of a hundred wet heels. When I got back to the table with our drinks, there was another couple sitting opposite Laura, the girl in a green velvet hat that brought out the color of her eyes, the man in a wet overcoat buttoned up over his collar and the knot of his tie. He had a long nose with a bump in it and two little pincushion eyes set too close together. I don’t remember his name—or hers either, not at this remove. Call them Sally and Bill, for the purposes of this account, and identify them as fellow students in the marriage course, sweethearts certainly—worlds more than Laura and I were to each other—though not yet actually engaged.

  Laura made the introductions. I nodded and said I was pleased to meet them both.

  Bill had a pitcher of beer in front of him, the carbonation rising up from its depths in a rich, golden display, and I watched in silence as he tucked his tongue in the corner of his mouth and meticulously poured out half a glass for Sally and a full one for himself. The golden liquid swirled in the glass and the head rose and steadied before composing itself in a perfect white disc. “You look like you’ve done that before,” I said.

  “You bet I have,” he replied, then lifted his glass and grinned. “A toast,” he proposed. He waited till we’d raised our glasses. “To Professor Kinsey!” he cried. “Who else?”

  This was greeted with a snicker from the booth behind us, but we laughed—all four of us—as a way of defeating our embarrassment. There was one thing only on our minds, one subject we all were burning to talk of, and though Bill had alluded to it, we weren’t quite comfortable with it yet. We were silent a moment, studying the faces of the people shuffling damply through the door. “I like your ring, Sally,” Laura said finally. “Was it terribly expensive?”

  And then they were both giggling and Bill and I were laughing along with them, laughing immoderately, laughing for the sheer joy and release of it. I could feel the bourbon settling in my stomach and sending out feelers to the distant tendrils of my nerves, and my face shone and so did theirs. We were in on a secret together, the four of us—we’d put one over on Dean Hoenig—and we’d just gone through a rite of initiation in a darkened hall in the biology building. It took a minute. Bill lit a cigarette. The girls searched each other’s eyes. “Jeez,” Bill said finally, “did you ever in your life see anything like that?”

  “I thought I was going to die,” Sally said. She threw a glance at me, then studied the pattern of wet rings her beer glass had made on the table. “If my mother—” she began, but couldn’t finish the thought.

  “God,” Laura snorted, making a drawn-out bleat of it, “my mother would’ve gone through the roof.” She’d lit a cigarette too, and it smoldered now in the ashtray, the white of the paper flecked red from the touch of her lips. She picked it up distractedly, took a quick puff, exhaled. “Because we never, in my family, I mean never, discussed, you know, where little boys and girls come from.”

  Sally raised a confidential hand to her mouth. “They call him ‘Dr. Sex,’ did you know that?”

  “Who does?” I felt as if I were floating above the table, all my tethers cut and the ground fast fading below me. This was heady stuff, naughty, wicked, like when a child first learns the verboten words Dr. Kinsey had pronounced so distinctly and disinterestedly for us just an hour before.

  Sally raised her eyebrows till they met the brim of her hat. “People. Around campus.”

  “Not to mention town,” Bill put in. He dropped his voice. “He makes you do interviews, you know. About your sex life”—he laughed—“or lack of it.”

  “I would hate that,” Sally said. “It’s so … personal. And it’s not as if he’s a medical doctor. Or a minister even.”

  I felt overheated suddenly, though the place was as dank as the dripping alley out back. “Histories,” I said, surprising myself. “Case histories. He’s explained all that—how else are we going to know what people—”

  “The human animal, you mean,” Laura said.

  “—what people do when they, when they mate, if we don’t look at it scientifically? And frankly, I don’t know about you, but I applaud what Kinsey’s doing, and if it’s shocking, I think we should ask ourselves why, because isn’t a, a … a function as universal as reproductive behavior just as logical a cause for study as the circulation of the blood or the way the cornea works or any other medical knowledge we’ve accumulated over the centuries?” It might have been the bourbon talking, but there I was defending Prok before I ever even knew him.

  “Yes, but,” Bill said, and we all leaned into the table and talked till our glasses were empty, and then we filled them and emptied them again, the rain tracing patterns in the dirt of the window, then the window going dark and the tide of undergraduates ebbing and flowing as people went home to dinner and their books. It was seven o’clock. I was out of money. My head throbbed but I’d never been so excited in my life. When Bill and Sally excused themselves and shrugged out the door and into the wafting dampness of the night, I lingered a moment, half-drunk, and put an arm round Laura’s shoulders. “So we’re still engaged, aren’t we?” I murmured.

  Her smile spread softly from her lips to her eyes. She plucked the maraschino cherry from her glass and rotated it between her fingers before gently pressing it into my mouth. “Sure,” she said.

  “Then shouldn’t we—or don’t we have an obligation, to, to—”

  “Sure,” she said, and she leaned forwa
rd and gave me a kiss, a kiss that was sweetened by the syrup of the cherry and the smell of her perfume and the proximity of her body that was warm now and languid. It was a long kiss, the longest I’d ever experienced, and it was deepened and complicated by what we’d seen up there on the screen in the lecture hall, by the visual memory of those corresponding organs designed for sensory gratification and the reproduction of the species, mutually receptive, self-lubricated, cohesive and natural. I came up for air encouraged, emboldened, and though there was nothing between us and we both knew it, I whispered, “Come home with me.”

  The look of Laura’s face transformed suddenly. Her eyes sharpened and her features came into focus as if I’d never really seen them before, as if this wasn’t the girl I’d just kissed in a moment of sweet oblivion. We were both absolutely still, our breath commingling, hands poised at the edge of the table as if we didn’t know what to do with them, till she turned away from me and began to gather up her purse, her raincoat, her hat. I became aware of the voices at the bar then, someone singing in a creaking baritone, the hiss of a newly tapped keg. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, John,” she said, and I was getting to my feet now too, rattled suddenly, flushing red for all I knew. “I’m not that kind of agirl.”

  But let me step back a moment, because I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot—this isn’t about me, this is about Prok, and Prok is dead, and I’m sitting here in my study, the key turned in the lock, the sorry tepid remains of a Zombie cocktail at my elbow, trying to talk into this machine and sort out my thoughts while Iris paces up and down the hall in her heels, stopping on every third revolution to rattle the doorknob and remind me in a muffled shout that we’re going to be late. Late for what, I’d like to know. Late for tramping through the funeral home with a mob of newspaper reporters and the rest of the curiosity seekers? Late to show our support? Or dedication? Is it going to do Mac any good? Or the children? Or Corcoran, Rutledge, or even my own son, John Jr., who locked himself in his room at the top of the stairs two hours ago because he’s had enough of death and sorrow and mourning, because unlike the ghouls and the carrion sniffers and all the rest he hasn’t the faintest desire to look on the empty husk of greatness? The corpse, that is. The mortal remains. Prok in his casket, propped up like a wax effigy, drained and flushed and pumped full of formaldehyde, the man who had no illusions, the scientist, the empiricist, the evolutionist, Prok. Prok is dead, is dead, is dead, and nothing else matters.

  “John, goddamn you, will you open this door?” Iris is abusing the doorknob, she’s pounding with a balled-up fist at the oak panels of the door I myself stripped and varnished. And who took us to look at this house, who loaned us the money for it? Who gave us everything we have?

  “Okay, okay!” I shout, and then I’m up from the desk, forcing down the dregs of the joyless drink and shuffling across the carpet to twist the key in the lock and fling open the door.

  Iris is there, her face blotted with anger, with exasperation, stalking into the room in her black dress, her black stockings and heels, the hat and the veil. My wife. Thirty-six years old, the mother of my son, as slim and dark and wide-eyed and beautiful as the day I met her. And angry. Deeply, intensely angry. “What are you doing?” she demands, crowding into me, her hands windmilling in my face. “Don’t you realize we’re twenty minutes late already?” And then, catching sight of the glass in my hand: “Are you drinking? At two o’clock in the afternoon? Jesus, you make me sick. He wasn’t God, you know.”

  I’m feeling hollow, a cane with all the pith gnawed out of it. I don’t need prodding, don’t need anything but to be left alone. “Easy for you to say.”

  I don’t know what I expect, the baring of the talons, the first superficial swipes of the marital row that has been going on here now for the past fifteen years, and then the rending of the deeper wounds, the ones that fester. I’m ready for it, ready to fight and throw it all back at her, because she’s wrong and we both know it, but she surprises me. Her hands go to her hips, then drop to her side, and I watch her take the time to compose her face. “No, John,” she says finally, and she puts all the bruising power of the years into the sad low hopeless cadence of her voice, “it’s not easy. It’s never been easy. You know what I wish?”

  I won’t answer, won’t give her the satisfaction.

  “I wish I’d never met him, never heard of him. I wish he’d never been born.”

  I can hear our son moving around in his room overhead, the dull reverberation of his feet like distant thunder. Iris’s jaw is set, her shoulders thrown back in full martial display, and she’s already dismissed me, moving toward the door now in her brisk chopping strides. “Get your tie on,” she snaps over her shoulder, and she’s gone. But no. She’s back suddenly, on the rebound, her head framed in the doorway, her eyes slicing from me to the tape recorder and back again. “And shut that damn thing off, will you?”

  Part I

  Biology Hall

  1

  For all my bravado that day at the tavern, I have to admit I had my qualms about the interview, and I know this must sound ridiculous coming from me, since I’ve contributed materially to the project to a degree exceeded only by Corcoran and Prok himself, and ultimately wound up conducting some two thousand interviews on my own, but if the truth be known, I was scared. Or perhaps “intimidated” would be a better word. You have to understand that back then sex and sexuality simply weren’t discussed—anywhere, in any forum—and certainly not in a public lecture hall on a college campus. Marriage courses had begun to spring up at other colleges and universities around the country, most pointedly in response to the VD scare of the thirties, but they were bland and euphemistic, and as far as counseling was concerned, as far as a frank face-to-face discussion of pathologies and predilections, there was nothing available to the average person aside from the banalities of the local minister or priest.

  And so, as Dr. Kinsey reiterated in his concluding lecture, he was undertaking a groundbreaking research project to describe and quantify human sexual behavior as a way of uncovering what had been so long hidden behind a veil of taboo, superstition and religious prohibition, so as to provide data for those in need of them. And he was appealing to us—the prurient, feverish, sweaty-palmed undergraduates of the audience—to help him. He had just concluded his overview of the course, summarizing his comments on individual variation, as well as his remarks on birth control (adding, almost as an afterthought, that if condoms lacked the natural lubrication provided in the male by secretions from the Cowper’s glands, saliva could be used as an effective succedaneum), and he stood there before us, his face animated, his hands folded on the lectern in front of him.

  “I appeal to you all,” he said, after a momentary pause, “to come forward and give me your individual histories, as they are absolutely vital to our understanding of human sexuality.” The light was dim and uniform, the hall overheated, a faint smell of dust and floor wax lingering in the air. Outside, the first snow of the season was briefly whitening the ground, but we might as well have been in a sealed vault for all it mattered. People squirmed in their seats. The young woman in front of me glanced furtively at her watch.

  “Why, we know more about the sex life of Drosophila melanogaster —the fruit fly—than we know of the commonest everyday practices of our own species,” he went on, his voice steady, his eyes fixed on the audience, “more of an insect’s ways than of the activities that go on in the bedrooms of this country, on living room sofas and in the rear seats of automobiles for that matter, the very activities through the agency of which each of us is present here in this room today. Does that make scientific sense? Is it in the least rational or defensible?”

  Laura was seated beside me, keeping up the pretext, though in the course of the semester she’d fallen hard for a member of the basketball team by the name of Jim Willard and had twice been caught in his company by Dean Hoenig, who had a fine eye for the temperature gradient of campus romances. Both t
imes Laura had managed to wriggle out of it—Jim was a friend of the family, a cousin actually, second cousin, that is, and she was just taking it upon herself to help him with his studies, seeing that basketball consumed so much of his time—but Dean Hoenig was on to us. She’d bristled visibly as we came in the door together and made what I thought was a wholly inappropriate remark about wedding bells, and I was still fuming over it midway through the lecture. At any rate, Laura was by my side, her head bent to her notebook in the further pretext of taking notes, when in fact she was doodling, sketching elongated figures in dresses and furs and elaborate feathered hats and at least one palpitating heart transfixed by the errant arrow.

  What Dr. Kinsey wanted from us—what he was appealing for now—was our one-hundred-percent cooperation in arranging private sessions with him to give up our sex histories. For the sake of science. All disclosures to be recorded in code and to remain strictly confidential—in fact, no one but he knew the key to this code he’d devised, and thus no one could ever possibly put a name to a given history. “And I must stress the importance of one-hundred-percent cooperation,” he added, gesturing with a stiff swipe of his hand, “because anything short of that compromises our statistical reliability. If we are to take histories only from those who seek us out, we will have a very inaccurate picture indeed of the society at large, but if we can document one-hundred-percent groups—all the college students present in this lecture hall, for instance, all the young men in a given fraternity house, the membership of the Elks’ Club, women’s auxiliaries, the incarcerees at the State Penal Farm in Putnamville—then we are getting an accurate, top-to-bottom picture.” He paused to run his gaze over the entire audience, left to right, back to front. A stillness descended on us. Laura lifted her head.