The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Very well,” he said finally. “In the service of this end, I will be scheduling appointments directly after termination of this lecture.”

  Because of our ruse, Laura and I were scheduled consecutively, as future husband and wife, though Laura’s use for me had by this time expired and she pointedly avoided me as she strolled around campus in the towering company of Jim Willard, who, at six feet one and one hundred ninety pounds, provided stability under the boards for our basketball team. We went separately to Biology Hall on a bitter, wind-scoured December afternoon, the husks of leaves chasing across a dead scrub of lawn, the trees stripped and forlorn, and everybody on campus sniffling with the same cold. Laura had been scheduled first, and as the interviews in those days averaged just over an hour, there really wasn’t much point in my escorting her there. Still, I’d got cold feet the night before and when I ran into her and Willard on the steps of the library I’d argued that we should nonetheless show up together for appearances’ sake—I didn’t mind, I’d bring my books and study while she was in Kinsey’s office—but she was shaking her head before I’d even got the words out. “You’re very sweet, John,” she said, “and I appreciate your concern, I really do—but the semester’s nearly over. What can they do to us?”

  Willard was hovering in the background, giving me the sort of look he usually reserved for tip-offs at center court.

  “Besides,” she said, showing her teeth in a tight little smile, “people do fall out of love, don’t they? Even Dean Hoenig has to be realistic—she can’t expect every engagement to last.”

  I didn’t want to concede the point. I was feeling something I’d never felt before, and I couldn’t have defined it, not then, not with the powers available to me and the person I then was, but can I say that her face was a small miracle in the light spilling from the high, arching windows, that I remembered the kiss in the tavern, the feel of her stirring beside me in the lecture hall? Can I say that, and then let it rest?

  “What about disciplinary action?” I said.

  She let out a curt laugh. “Disciplinary action? Are you kidding?” She looked to Willard and back again. “I don’t care two snaps for all the disciplinary action in the world.”

  And so I went alone to Biology Hall, following the faint lingering traces of her perfume, the collar of my overcoat turned up against the wind, a load of books tucked under one arm. The building, like most on campus, was made of local limestone. It rose up out of the black grasp of the trees like a degraded temple, the sky behind it all but rinsed of light, and I couldn’t help thinking how different it had looked in September when it was cushioned in foliage. As I came up the path, leaves grating underfoot, I felt a sudden sharp stab of apprehension. I didn’t know Prok yet—or I knew him only as a distant and formal presence on the podium—and I was afraid of what he might think of me. You see, it wasn’t only the subterfuge with Laura that cast a shadow over things, but my history itself. I was deeply ashamed of it, ashamed of who I was and what I’d done, and I’d never broached the subject of sex with anyone, not my closest friends, not the school counselor or even the uncle (Robert, my father’s youngest brother) who did his best to take my dead father’s place till the wandering bug got him and he disappeared too.

  I was turning it over in my mind, wondering what sort of things Dr. Kinsey would want to know and whether I could dare equivocate—or lie, outright lie—when the outside door swung open and Laura emerged. She was wearing a dark, belted coat, white socks and saddle shoes, her lower legs bare against the cold, and she looked small and fragile in the lee of the building and the big weighted slab of the door. A gust came up and both her hands went automatically to her hat, and if she hadn’t glanced up in that instant and seen me there, I don’t know if I wouldn’t have just turned heel and vanished. But she did glance up. And she gave me a curious look, as if she couldn’t quite place me—or was somehow seeing me out of context. I had no choice but to continue along the path and up the stone steps, and now she gave me a rueful smile. “Your turn, huh?” she said.

  She was poised on the landing, holding the door for me. “What did he ask?” I puffed, taking the steps two at a time. The corridor behind her was deserted. I saw the dull gleam of linoleum tile, the lights set at intervals, the dark stairwell opening like a mouth at the far end.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, her breath streaming in the cold, “everything.”

  “Did he ask about, about us?”

  “Uh-uh. Frankly, I don’t think he cares one way or the other. He’s—he really believes in what he’s doing, and he wants people to … open up, I guess you’d say. It’s all about the research, about getting at the real truth of things, and the way he does it—I mean, it’s not what you’d think. It’s not embarrassing, not at all. You’ll see. He just puts you at ease.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this. She was right there beside me, so close I could smell the faint aroma of her mint toothpaste, which was all mixed up with her perfume and the scent of the shampoo she’d used on her hair. Her face was open and her lips parted, but her eyes looked beyond me, as if she expected Jim Willard—or Prok himself—to issue from the line of trees across the street. She simply stared, as if she’d just woken up—or been hypnotized by one of the charlatans at the county fair. The wind was at the back of my neck and I could feel the heated air of the building like the breath of some beast on my face. “He doesn’t hypnotize you, does he?”

  Her back was propped against the door and she gave me a long, slow look of appraisal. “No, John,” she said, patronizing me now, “no, he doesn’t hypnotize you. But listen”—she reached up to tuck one last flowing curl under her hat—“I never really got to thank you for what you’ve done—a lot of the boys I know wouldn’t have been caught dead in that course—and it was really white of you. So, thanks. Really.”

  “Sure,” I mumbled, “my pleasure,” and then she let the door go and I caught it with one hand and slipped into the building as she retreated down the steps.

  Dr. Kinsey’s office was at the end of the corridor on the second floor. My appointment was the last of the day, and the halls that had been thrumming with students an hour ago were deserted now. The staff had gone home too, all the offices and classrooms darkened up and down the length of the building—even the janitor was apparently busy elsewhere. I paused at the water fountain—my throat had gone dry—and then continued down the hallway, my footsteps echoing like gunshots in the empty innards of the building. There was a small anteroom, windowless and drab, and beyond it, the softly lit confines of the office itself. The door stood open and I could see two crammed metal bookcases reaching all the way to the ceiling, and then the blond flash of what I took to be Kinsey’s head bent over a desk in a nimbus of yellow light. I hesitated a moment, then rapped my knuckles on the doorframe.

  He swung his head out away from the desk so he could get a clear view of the doorway, then immediately sprang to his feet. “Milk?” he called, rushing to me with his hand extended and a look of transport on his face, as if I were the single person in all the world he was most happy to see. “John Milk?”

  I took his hand and nodded, fumbling through the usual gestures of greeting. “It’s a pleasure,” I might have said, but so softly I doubt if he would have heard me.

  “Good of you to come,” he pronounced, still squeezing my hand. We stood there in the doorway a moment, and I was conscious of his height—he was six feet tall at least—and of his sheer physical presence, thinking he would have made a match for Jim Willard if he were so inclined. “But please come in,” he said, releasing my hand and guiding me into the office, where he indicated the chair stationed on the near side of his desk. “Milk,” he was saying, as I settled in the chair and he in turn eased himself back behind the desk, “is that of German derivation—originally, that is?”

  “Yes, we were Milch in the old country, but my grandfather changed it.”

  “Too overtly Teutonic, eh? Of course there’s nothin
g hardier than good Anglo-German stock—except maybe the Scots. We’re Scots in my family, you know, though I suppose you surmised that from the surname … Care for a cigarette?”

  On the desk before me, spread out like an offering, were fresh packs of cigarettes in four different brands, as well as an ashtray and lighter. I didn’t know then how much Prok detested smoking—he thought it should be banned in all public places, and no doubt in most private ones as well—nor that he provided the cigarettes despite himself, in addition to soft drinks, coffee, tea and, in the appropriate venues, alcohol, all in an effort to make the interviewing process more congenial. What he wanted above all else was to gain the sort of intimacy that yields up confidences, and he had a true genius for it—for putting people at ease and bringing them out. Absent it, the project would never have gotten off the ground.

  At any rate, I selected the brand I liked best but couldn’t really afford, lit up and took a deep, palliative pull and let the gentle pulse of the nicotine calm me. All the while Prok was beaming at me, the kindliest, friendliest man in the world, and you would have thought from his expression that he’d invented cigarettes himself and owned a controlling interest in the Pall Mall company. “I hope you’ve enjoyed the marriage course,” he was saying, “and that any misconceptions you and your fiancée may have had—charming girl, by the way, lovely, very lovely—have been cleared up …”

  I looked away from him—a mistake, as it was one of his cardinal rules to engage the subject at all times in direct eye contact, as the first indicator of veracity. I said something noncommittal. Or rather mumbled something both noncommittal and non-audible.

  “Don’t be afraid, Milk, there’s no one here going to bite you—or sit in judgment either, and I’m well aware that any number of ingenious undergraduates are forming, let us say, convenient attachments in order to satisfy Dean Hoenig and the other self-appointed moral guardians of the campus and community.”

  I tapped my cigarette in the ashtray, studying the perfect cylinder of pale ash that dropped from it, then looked him in the eye. I felt my face flush in an instant, the old exposure. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said.

  He waved an impatient hand. “Nothing to be sorry for, Milk, nothing at all. I’m interested in getting information out to people who need it, and if it were up to me and me alone, there would be no prohibitions of any kind on the course. But tell me about yourself—you’re how old?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Birth date?”

  “October second, 1918.”

  “Are you a native of Indiana, born here, that is?”

  “Michigan City.”

  “And your parents?”

  “My mother teaches elementary school back at home. My father’s dead. He was killed in an accident on the lake—or, actually, no one really knows what went wrong. There was—they weren’t able to recover the body.”

  Prok never took his eyes from mine, but he was making notations on a single sheet of paper that lay on the desk before him. Without my knowing it, the interview had already begun, but he paused now to express his sympathy. He asked how old I was at the time of my father’s death—I was nine, not quite out of school for the summer, and my father had gone mad for sailing, sanding and varnishing the boat all winter and into the spring, and now it had been launched and all I could think of was the long irradiated days ahead when we would coast unencumbered over the chop like the God who made the water and the son who came to walk on it—and then he said that he too had had to make do without a father’s guidance, at least once he went to college and broke free of a stifling paternal influence. His father had seen him as an engineer—could I imagine that?—but he himself had preferred biology. Biology was his passion. And he made a casual gesture to the cramped office behind him, and the great standing racks of insects pinned in trays. “Did you know,” he added, “that I’ve identified sixteen new species of gall wasp?” And he let out a chuckle. “If it was up to my father they’d be unknown today.” His eyes were shining. “Poor things.”

  Our conversation—it was just that—had developed its own logic and rhythm. It was uncanny. The longer we spoke, and it was almost like speaking with your inner self or confiding in the family doctor behind closed doors, the more he seemed to know what I was thinking and feeling. And it wasn’t simply that he was a master at what he was doing, but that you felt he really and truly sympathized, that when your heart was breaking, so was his.

  Which brings us to the real content of the interview: my sex history. We talked for perhaps fifteen minutes before the first question insinuated itself, as casually as if it were no more charged than a reflection on one’s parents or upbringing. We’d been talking about my playmates when I was a boy, and I was lost in nostalgic recollection, faces and places and names drifting like gauze through my brain, when Dr. Kinsey, in his softest, most dispassionate tones, asked, “How old were you when you first became aware of the anatomical differences between girls and boys?”

  “I don’t know. Early on, I suppose. Five? Six?”

  “Was there nudity in your home when you were a child? On the part of your parents or yourself?”

  I took a moment, trying to recollect. “No,” I said, “no, I don’t think so.”

  “Did your parents make you put your clothes on when you appeared naked?”

  “Yes. But again, this would have been at a very early age, probably two or three. Or no, later. There was one incident—I must have been five, five at least, because it was before we’d moved to the house on Cherry Street—a hot day, bathing with my mother at the lake, and I came out of the water and removed my wet trunks. She was angry with me, and I remember I couldn’t understand why.”

  “Were you reprimanded then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Physically?”

  “I must have been. Not the first time, though.”

  “What were the other occasions?”

  Each question followed logically from the one previous, and they were very much rapid-fire: as soon as Prok got and recorded his response, he was on to the next, and yet you never felt as if you were being interrogated, but rather were part of an ongoing conversation focused on the most fascinating subject in the world: yourself. And the questions were always formulated so as to achieve the most precise—and unambiguous—answer. So it was not “Have you ever masturbated?” but rather “When did you first masturbate?” and “How old were you when you first saw the naked genitalia of your own sex? Of the opposite sex?” All the while, as the interviewee progressed in recollected age, so too did the questions delve ever more deeply into his sexual practices, going from the relatively innocuous data-based queries (“How old were you when you first began to sprout pubic hair?”) and calculations of your height, weight and handedness, to “When did you first experience coitus?”

  My nose was dripping—I too had contracted the cold that held the campus in its thrall—and I was on my fourth cigarette and entirely unaware of where or even who I was by the time this last question came up. Dr. Kinsey studied my reaction, my face, his eyes locked on mine, his pencil poised over the sheet of paper. It’s all right, he seemed to say, whatever it is, it’s all right. You can confide in me. And further: You must confide in me.

  I hesitated, and that hesitation told him everything. “Never,” I said. “Or, that is, not yet, I mean.”

  Unbeknownst to me, there were a series of questions—twelve of them, to be exact—that gave an indication of one’s predilection toward same-sex behavior, or, as Prok liked to call it so as not to alarm or prejudice anyone, the H-history. It was at this point that he shifted in his chair and cleared his voice. “Backtracking now,” he said, “you were how old when you first saw the naked genitalia of a person of your own sex?”

  I gave him the answer, which he quickly checked against my previous response.

  “And when did you first see another individual’s erect penis?”

  I gave him the answer.

  And then the ques
tions proceeded in what we would come to call our “steamroller” fashion, one hard on the heels of the next. “When did you first touch the genitals of a person of your own sex? When did you first bring to orgasm a person of your own sex? When was the first time you brought a person of your own sex to orgasm orally?”

  I looked away and he broke off the interview a moment. There was a silence. I became aware of the bells tolling six on the clock tower across campus. “Milk,” he said, “John—let me remind you that there is nothing, nothing whatever, to be ashamed of. There is no sexual act between consenting parties that is in any way qualitatively different from any other, no matter what the prevailing ethos of a given society may be. If it will interest you to know, my own sex history was very much similar to yours when I was your age—and even later.”

  But perhaps this would be a judicious time to bring up the 0–6 scale Prok devised to measure an individual’s sexual preferences—a scale that seeks to chart the entire range of human sexual proclivities, from the purely opposite-sex context (0) to the purely homosexual (6). You see, Prok believed—and I’ve come to believe too—that man in a state of nature is pansexual, and that only the strictures of society, especially societies under the dominion of the Judeo-Christian and Mohammedan codes, prevent people from expressing their needs and desires openly, and that thus, whole legions suffer from various sexual maladjustments. But I get ahead of myself.