The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  That day, in that room, with a handkerchief pressed to my dripping nose and Prok’s presence guiding me, I began to know myself in a way I’d never thought possible. What I’d seen as a source of shame became usual—Prok himself had had similar experiences as a boy and had masturbated continually—and if I could say I rated perhaps a 1 or 2 on the 0–6 scale, then that was something, something momentous. And I hungered for experience, like anyone else, that was all. I’d been awkward with girls, terrified of them—I’d placed them on a pedestal and never saw them as sexual beings just like me, who had the same needs and desires as I, and that it had been perfectly natural to experiment with the only partners available to me, with boys, because as Prok says, we all need outlets. Or perhaps I didn’t realize all this on that late afternoon in Prok’s office, but I did think of Laura Feeney sitting there before me—in the very chair—and how Prok would have asked her at what age she began to masturbate and when she’d first seen the naked genitalia of the opposite sex, and when she’d first seen the phallus erect and first brought the opposite sex to orgasm, and I felt like Columbus spying land on the horizon.

  The clock on the tower was tolling the quarter hour, for six forty-five, by the time we were finished and Dr. Kinsey leaned across the desk to hand me a penny postcard addressed to himself—Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, Biology Hall, University of Indiana. “Just here, you see,” he was saying, “I will need four basic measurements, please.”

  “Yes,” I said, taking the card in what seemed like a trance—and no, he hadn’t hypnotized me, not in the conventional sense, but he might as well have.

  “Very well, then. We will need you, when you arrive at home, to measure first the circumference and then the length, from the base of the abdomen out, of the flaccid penis, and then, when you’re properly stimulated, the circumference and length while erect. And, oh, yes, if you would just note the angle of curvature as well …”

  The wind perched in the trees that night, gathering force for a run down into Kentucky, and by nine o’clock it was flinging compact little pellets of sleet against the window of the attic room I shared with a fellow senior, Paul Sehorn, in Mrs. Elsa Lorber’s rooming house on Kirkwood Avenue. This was an old house, aching in its bones and not at all shy about voicing its complaints, especially at night. It had been built in the 1870s and was solid enough, I suppose, even after a generation of undergraduates had given it the sort of hard use that had brought down any number of other houses of its era. Unfortunately, it was insulated about as thoroughly as an orange crate and the balky antiquated coal furnace never seemed to elevate the temperature much above the zone of the distinctly uncomfortable. The winter previous, I’d woken one morning to find a crust of ice interposed between my lips and the water in the glass I’d left out on the night table, and for a month thereafter Paul referred to me as Nanook.

  There was a desk in one corner, dominated by the secondhand Olympia typewriter my mother gave me when I went off to college and an old Philco radio I’d salvaged after my grandmother had given up on it. Against the facing wall, beside the door, was an armoire that stank regally of naphtha, and we shared its limited space, our shirts, trousers and suits (we each had one, mine in glen plaid, to match my tie, Paul’s a hand-me-down blue serge that showed a good three inches of cuff at the wrist) hanging side by side on a dozen scuffed wooden hangers. Other than that, it was shoes under the bed, overcoats downstairs on the hooks reserved for them in the vestibule, personal items laid out on our matching bureaus and books neatly aligned on a cheap pine bookcase I’d found at a rummage sale (four shelves, equally divided, eighteen inches per shelf for me, eighteen inches for Paul). The bathroom was across the hall.

  Most nights, Paul and I tuned in the radio (we limited ourselves to two serials, and then it was swing out of Cincinnati, as soft and fuzzed with distance as a whisper), propped ourselves up in our beds and studied till our fingers went numb from the cold. Tonight, though, Paul was out on a date and I had the room to myself, though it was hardly peaceful, what with the unending stamp and furor of the other undergraduate men in the house and the long disquisitions on everything from the existence of God to the Nazi push for lebensraum that seemed always to take place outside the bathroom door. By ten, the sleet had changed to snow.

  I lay there beneath the comforter on my bed, trying to read—as I remember, I had an exam the following day—but I didn’t get very far. The branches of the elm out back kept scraping at the house as if something were trying to crawl up the side of the building to escape the storm and the reception on the radio was so bad I had to get up and switch it off. I rubbed a circle in the frost and peered out the window. The world was dense and blurred, the streetlights pinched down to nothing, no sound but the wind and the intermittent rasp of the snow thrust up against the pane. I felt small and boxed-in. Felt restless. Bored.

  I thought of Dr. Kinsey then—if truth be told, I hadn’t really thought of much else all evening, even at dinner—and crossed the room to my desk for what must have been the twentieth time to examine the postcard he’d given me. I let a hand drop to my trousers, a pressure there, and began massaging myself absently through a layer of gabardine. And how would I measure it? I didn’t have a ruler, but I could easily have gone down the hall and borrowed one from Bob Hickenlooper, the architectural whiz—if anyone would have one, he would—and yet I still wasn’t sold on the idea. It was vaguely obscene, ridiculous even. Measuring your own penis? But there was more to it than that, of course—and I’m sure you’ve anticipated me here—what if I didn’t measure up? What if I was, well, smaller, than other men? What then? Would I add an inch or two so as not to disappoint the distinguished scientist eagerly waiting to tabulate the results? Of course, I had little idea what the average length of the male penis was—but then wasn’t that the whole concept of the enterprise to begin with? What had Kinsey’s lecture on individual variation been but an attempt to make us all feel a bit more secure with regard to such things as breast size and penis length and the like?

  Yes, I told myself, yes, certainly I’ll do the measurements and see to it that I’m as accurate and honest as possible. But, of course, in thinking about it, imagining the cold butt of some architectural student’s T square pressed to my penis, I found I had an erection. It was then (and please don’t mistake my meaning here) that I thought of Mrs. Lorber. She sat in the parlor downstairs each evening, listening to her own radio and knitting, and I knew she had a tape measure in her sewing basket, a soft and supple one, made of finger-burnished cloth, the very sort of thing you might imagine yourself using in a private scientific endeavor akin to the one I was contemplating.

  All right. Fine. Before I could think I was thumping down the three flights of loose-jointed stairs, ignoring a shout from Tom Tomalin to come play a hand of pinochle and an off-color greeting from Ben Webber, all two hundred and forty-five pounds of him, who was laboring up to his room on the second floor. Out of breath, and with my excitement barely contained, I paused outside the open parlor door and tapped gently at the doorframe. Mrs. Lorber was seated in her favorite armchair, working at a ball of butterscotch-colored yarn, a cat sprawled in her lap. She didn’t glance up, though she knew I was there—she knew everything that went on in the house, every least stir and breath of her charges, and she’d positioned her chair so as to give her a strategic view of the entry hall and stairway in the event that anyone might be so foolish as to attempt to smuggle contraband into his room. (Mrs. Lorber was in her mid-sixties then, a big-shouldered ventricose old lady with a succession of chins and a focused, predatory look: alcoholic beverages, foods that required heating and, especially, women were strictly interdicted.)

  “Uh, excuse me, Mrs. Lorber?” I murmured.

  She fixed her gaze on me, and I expected her to smile or at least nod in recognition, but her face showed nothing.

  “I just wondered, if I could, uh—if I could borrow your, uh, tape measure. For just a minute. I’ll bring it right
back, I promise.”

  She let out a sigh compounded of all the little inconveniences, crises and mounting disasters undergraduates had inflicted on her over the years, and then, without a word, leaned down to her right and began fishing through her sewing basket. “Here,” she said finally, coming up with the tape measure as I crossed the room to her, “but just make sure you return it.”

  Leaning over her, I caught a smell of the liniment she rubbed on her legs each night and of the warm, yeasty air trapped beneath her skirts. The cat looked up at me blankly. “Yes,” I said, her cool, dry fingers coming into contact with mine as I took the tape measure from her, “I will. It’ll just be a minute and I’ll be right back with it, I promise.”

  I was nearly out of the room when she stopped me. “But what on earth would you need to measure, John? What is it, curtains? Because I sincerely hope you two haven’t damaged—”

  “It’s a, uh, project. For my literature class.”

  “Literature? What, lines of poetry? The number of feet per line in ‘Don Juan’? Hmm?” She let out a laugh. “Now there was a poem—is that part of the syllabus still? Or, no, of course it must be. Lord Byron, eh? Now there was a poet.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, “but you’ll have to, I mean, I have to—”

  “Go, go,” she said, making a shooing motion with both hands. “No need to waste your time on an old woman when you’ve got measuring to do.”

  I trudged back up the stairs, the tape measure burning like a hot coal in my pocket. I felt guilty, dirty, all the worse for the lie and the use to which I was going to put my landlady’s blameless instrument, and I kept thinking of her handling the thing and holding it up to a scarf she was knitting for a favorite niece or granddaughter. Maybe I should just return it to her, I thought, right now, before it’s been desecrated. I could slip out in the morning and purchase one of my own—a tape measure was a practical thing to have, after all, because you never knew when you’d be called upon to measure something, like bookshelves, for instance. My feet hit the stairs like hammers. The storm whispered at the windowpanes.

  By the time I got back to the room, I found that my enthusiasm for Dr. Kinsey’s little statistical exercise had worn thin, but I loosened my belt and dropped my trousers dutifully, unscrolling Mrs. Lorber’s tape measure to record my now-flaccid dimensions. But the thing was, as soon as I laid the measure against my penis I began to grow hard again and couldn’t get an accurate measurement; before I knew it, I was stroking myself and trying to summon the look of Laura Feeney as she sat beside me in the semi-darkness of the lecture hall while the slide projector clicked and clicked again and we all held our breath. And then I was seeing a girl from the front row of my literature class, a girl with puffed lips and violet eyes and calves that caressed each other under the desk until I wanted to faint from the friction of it, and finally there was just a woman, featureless, anonymous, with her breasts thrust out and nipples hard and her cunt—that was what I wanted to call it, her cunt—just exactly like the one on the screen.

  I was up early the next morning, the light through the window trembling on the sloped ceiling above the bed—it was a paler light than we’d been used to, bluer, like the aqueous glow at the bottom of a swimming pool, and I was filled with the anticipation that comes with the first good snow of the season. The storm had passed on, but outside the sky was a polished silver, a big, upended tureen of a sky, flurries trailing down like an afterthought. I didn’t wake Paul. He’d come in late—long after I’d gone to bed—and I didn’t want to disturb him, not so much out of any consideration for his beauty rest, but because I wasn’t in the mood for company. I wanted to tramp the streets, see the world transformed—just enjoy it, all to myself—before heading over to the Commons for breakfast and a final look at my notes for the exam.

  There was a foot and a half of snow, maybe more—it was hard to say because the wind had piled it up in drifts against the fences and buildings. None of the walks had been cleared yet, people’s automobiles sat drifted over at the curb and the birds dipped in perplexity from the black field of the evergreens along the street to the sealed white envelope of the ground. Lights gleamed dully from the depths of the houses. I smelled bacon, woodsmoke, the clean, dense perfume of the new air swept down out of the north.

  It wasn’t yet seven, and hardly anyone was stirring on campus. Those who were out moved silently across the quad, huddled figures excised from a dream and patched in here where they didn’t belong, and there were no more than ten students in the Commons where normally there would have been a hundred—even the staff was reduced to a single illdefined woman who served out the food mechanically and then moved to the cash register through crashing waves of silence to record the sale. I took a table by the window and sat there staring out over my books and into the trees along the creek, idly stirring sugar into a cup of coffee. It was one of those quiet, absorbing moments when the world slows to a standstill and all its inherent possibilities become manifest. Magic. The magic moment—isn’t that what they call it in the love songs?

  She was speaking to me before I became aware of her—“Hello, John; hello, I said”—and when I did look up I didn’t recognize her at first. She was in a winter coat and hat, the black silk of her hair tugged down like an arras on either side of her face, her eyes lit from within as if there were twin filaments behind them and a battery secreted under her clothes. It was seven a.m.—or no, not even—and she was wearing mascara, the better to show off the color of those eyes, which managed to be both blue and green at the same time, like the sea off the port of Havana where the onshore waters meld with the pelagic and the white prow of your boat drifts placidly from one world to another and everything dissolves in a dream. “Don’t you recognize me?”

  She was unfastening the snap at her collar, working at her hat, her hair, the scarf wrapped twice round her throat. Everything was suddenly in motion again, as if a film had just been rethreaded through the projector, her books sliding onto the tabletop beside mine, the coat open to reveal her dress and the way it conformed to her, and then the chair beside me pulling out and the girl—who was she?—perching at the edge of it. And then it came to me. “You’re Iris,” I said.

  She was giving me her full-lipped smile, the smile that borrows some of the juice from her eyes and runs off the same hidden power source. “Iris McAuliffe, Tommy’s little sister. But you knew that.”

  “I did, yes. Of course I did. My mother—I mean, she, and then I saw you around campus, of course—”

  “I hear you’re engaged.”

  I didn’t know what to say to this—I certainly wouldn’t want it getting back to my mother in any way, shape or form—so I dipped my head and took a sip of coffee.

  Iris’s smile faded. “She’s very pretty,” she murmured. “Laura Feeney.”

  “Yes,” I said, my gaze fixed on the cup. “But I’m not really—we’re not …” I looked up at her. Off on the periphery of my vision the woman at the cash register rang up a coffee and cruller as if she were moving underwater, and I saw the balding head and narrow shoulders of my literature professor, his coat dusted with snow. “That is, it was a pretense, you know. For the marriage course.”

  I watched her grapple with this ever so briefly before the smile came back. “You mean, you—faked it? Just to—? God,” she said, and she let her posture go, slouching back in the seat, all limbs and jangling, nervous hands, “I hear it was really dirty …”

  2

  I took exams, wrote papers (“Duality in John Donne’s Love Poems”; “Malinowski’s Melanesia”), took a bus home to Michigan City for Christmas break and gave my mother a set of bath oils and scented soaps carved in the shape of fishes and mermaids. Some of my old high school friends came round—Tommy McAuliffe, in particular, who was now assistant manager at the grocery—and what a surprise that he’d thought to bring his kid sister Iris along, and did I know that she was a sophomore at IU now? There she was, standing on the doorstep beside him, and
though I barely knew her I began to appreciate that here was the kind of girl who understood what she wanted and always got it—always, no matter what. I told Tommy I’d just seen her on campus—on the day of the snowfall, wasn’t it?—while she looked on with her big ever-widening sea-struck eyes as if she’d forgotten all about it. We ate pfefferneuse cookies in front of the fireplace and sneaked drinks of brandy every time my mother went back out to the kitchen to check on her pies. Just before New Year’s I thought of asking Iris to the pictures or maybe to go skating—on a date, that is—but I never got around to it. Then I was back at school and the days closed down on the bleak dark kernel of mid-January.

  One night I was at the library, reshelving books in the second-floor stacks, when I glanced up at the aisle directly across from me and there was Prok—Dr. Kinsey—down on one knee, scanning the titles on the bottom shelf. He was a tumult of motion, grasping the spine of one book or another and at the same time shoving it back in place, all the while scooting back and forth on the fulcrum of his knee. It was strange to see him there—or not strange so much as unexpected—and I froze up for a moment. I didn’t know what to do—should I say hello, ignore him, grab an armload of books and duck round the corner? Even if I did say hello, would he remember me? He had hundreds of students, and though he’d conducted private interviews—like mine—with all of them, or practically all of them, how could he be expected to recall any one individual? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be muttering to himself—was it a call number he was repeating?—and then he found what he was looking for, slipped it from the shelf and sprang to his feet, all in one motion. That was when he brought his eyes forward and saw me there.

  It took a moment. I watched his neutral expression broaden into recognition, and then he came down the aisle and extended his hand. “Milk,” he said, “well, hello. Good to see you.”