The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  A low spear of sun transfixed the interior of the car and illuminated Prok’s face from the lips down, as if he were wearing a beard of light. He gave me a dour look, head slightly canted, eyes showing white. “And where, exactly, did you get that notion?”

  “I—well, Laura Feeney. Laura Feeney told me yesterday morning. You know, the girl I took the marriage course with?”

  “With whom.”

  “Yes, right—the girl with whom.”

  The planks of the bridge rattled under the wheels and I saw the heron stiffen and protract its wings. Prok’s eyes were fixed on the road. He was silent a moment, then murmured, “I suppose Miss Feeney had an audience with President Wells himself? Or was it the Board of Trustees?”

  “You’re making light of it, Prok, and that’s not right. I’m just, well, I’m concerned, that’s all, and there are rumors, you can’t deny that—”

  He let out a sigh. Gave me a glance of commiseration, then turned back to the road. “I feel like Galileo,” he said, “if you want to know the truth. Hounded and oppressed and denied the basic right of scientific investigation, simply because some cleric or some dried-up old maid like Dean Hoenig or a has-been like Thurmond Rice feels threatened by the facts. They can’t face reality, and that’s the long and short of it.”

  My heart sank. So it was true. I stared out the window on the fierce geometry of the cornfields, the engine moaning beneath my feet, the world slipping by.

  “They’re going to offer me an ultimatum: drop the marriage course or give up the research, one or the other.”

  “But you can’t—that would be like an admission that sex is dirty, that they were right all along—”

  Another sigh. The hooded look. His hands were claws on the wheel. “You see, the problem is with doing the course and the interviews combined, not to mention the advisement on sexual matters that has been so much a natural concomitant of the information we dispense—”

  He shifted down as the car hurtled through a pothole, rising up off its springs and slamming down again with a shudder, and then he laid a hand on my knee. “It’s the research they’re after. They just can’t abide the idea of our getting impressionable young things behind closed doors, because you never know what might happen.” He gave my knee a squeeze. “Isn’t that right, John?”

  We were on a tight schedule, but we were fortunate that day because the DePauw subjects all appeared on time, delivered up their information and went back about their business so that we could go about ours. Trail mix and aqua pura in the car, Prok dodging farm wagons, overladen trucks and the odd cow, a long running trailer of intensely green fields alternating with flagrant forests and shadowy bottoms, and we were there, arrived safe and sound in West Lafayette three quarters of an hour before the lecture was scheduled to begin.

  I don’t remember much of the hotel, though I should, because that trip was a real watershed for me, but all the hundreds of towns and hotels and motor courts we’ve visited over the years seem to have produced a generic impression. It was a brick building from the last century, most likely, in need of sandblasting and paint, and it was, as likely or not, located on the main street near the courthouse. There would have been shade trees, a dog curled up on the sidewalk out front, cars parked on the diagonal. The building itself would be three stories, with a separate entrance for the restaurant and bar. We doubled up on the room, to save money—Prok was a prodigy of thrift—just as we would triple and quadruple up in later years, when we added Corcoran and finally Rutledge to the team.

  As for the lecture. Did Prok need anything? No, he was fine. He stood bare-chested in the bathroom, shaving before the mirror, then he changed his shirt, knotted his bow tie, slipped into his jacket and went off at a brisk gait for the university, his host, Professor McBride of the Sociology Department, struggling to keep pace. I brought up the rear. When we arrived, the auditorium was already full (the word was spreading, even in those early days, and if the combined sociology classes could boast sixty students among them, there must have been three hundred of the idle and curious there as well, hoping for a bit of titillation). As usual, Prok spoke ex tempore, without notes, and, as usual, he cast a spell over the audience from the first words out of his mouth to the last. (The subject might have been premarital sex, the psychology of sexual repression, the function of adolescent outlets, the history of sex research or the frequency of masturbation in the comparison of males and females of a given age group—it didn’t really matter to Prok; all speeches were one speech. And I should say here too that he had a particular gift for delivery that never resorted to tricks or theatrical gestures, his voice clear and distinct and largely unmodulated, every inch the man of science expatiating on a subject of deep interest to all humanity. He was no Marc Antony or even a Brutus, but he got the job done as no one else could have.)

  And again, as usual, a whole mob of potential subjects came forward to volunteer their histories at the conclusion of the lecture and Prok and I sat side by side at a long table set up behind the lectern and scheduled them. Dinner? I don’t remember if we did eat that night—it might have been sandwiches sent up to the room—but we both started right in on taking histories as soon as the lecture hall had cleared and we’d had a chance to get back to the hotel. Prok conducted his interviews in our room and I was accommodated with a private conference room located just behind the restaurant. It must have been past midnight by the time I was finished (three undergraduate men, sociology students out to earn extra credit with Professor McBride in coming forward as volunteers, the expected responses, nothing I hadn’t heard before), and I remember sinking into an armchair in the lobby, a watered-down drink at my side, watching the hands crawl round the clock as Prok conducted his final interview of the night.

  Afterward, we compared notes as we got ready for bed, and that was when we discovered a discrepancy in the schedule for the following morning: we had inadvertently scheduled two females for the same hour, rather than one female and one male. Which meant we were either going to have to cancel or I would be forced to record my first female history, a step Prok to this point hadn’t deemed me qualified to take. He looked up from the schedule, shook his head slowly, then rose from the sofa and padded into the bathroom to see to his dental prophylaxis (he was a great one for maintaining his teeth in good condition, a hygienic habit that allowed him to take the full set to his grave with him). “I don’t know, Milk,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the sound of running water, “but I do hate to cancel. It’s inefficient, for one thing. And it could cost us data, for another. No. There’s nothing to do but go through with it.”

  A moment later he was back in the room, hovering over me, fully clothed, which in itself was odd because the moment we were done for the day he usually stripped to the skin and encouraged me to do the same. (Yes, we were alone together a great deal on these trips, and we continued to have sexual relations, though my education—and my predilections—were taking me in the opposite direction. I revered Prok—I revere him still—but gradually I was growing away from him in this one regard and toward Mac, toward Iris, toward the coeds in their loose sweaters and tight skirts who drifted across the campus like antelope on the plain. No matter: I enjoyed being with Prok—I felt privileged to be with him—and I looked forward to these trips because they took me away from the tedium of my desk and the constriction of small-town life and enabled me to see and absorb something of the larger world, of Indiana certainly, but eventually of Chicago and New York, San Francisco and Havana too.) “We’re going to have to accelerate your training,” he said, and there was no trace of levity to his tone.

  I was exhausted. The travel, the skimped meals, the force of concentration required to record five histories in a single day—all of it combined to sap me as surely as if I’d spent the day at hard labor, chained to a convict and breaking up rock with a mallet. “We are?” I echoed.

  “The interview for women requires, I would think, a little more finesse than th
e men’s, especially the ones you’ve been conducting with undergraduates near to your own age, where you appear as a sort of fraternity colleague or perhaps an older brother. No, I am aware of how you feel in these matters, with regard to women, that is, and Mac and I have discussed it thoroughly”—he let that hang a moment—“and I wonder if you’re capable of being absolutely disinterested and professional.”

  I made some noises to the effect that I was.

  He was watching me carefully. Still standing over me, still in shirt and bow tie. “You’ll forgive me, Milk, but your emotions too often show in your face, and we can’t have that the first time a woman—this woman tomorrow morning—tells you of something you may tend to find stimulating.”

  I fought to keep my face rigid—and pale. “I think, well, if you’ll give me the chance, I’m sure I can, that is—”

  He wound up drilling me for two hours that night. First I was the woman, then he was, then vice versa and vice versa again. The questions came in spate, his eyes on me like whips, like cold pans of water first thing in the morning, intractable and unforgiving. He was exacting, demanding, hypercritical, and if I missed a beat he fed me hot coffee till my nerves were so jangled I don’t think I slept at all that night. But Prok did. I lay there awake in the darkness, thinking of a thousand things, but mainly of Iris, whom I hadn’t seen all summer though we’d written each other nearly every day. She was due back on campus the day after tomorrow, and I was thinking of her as the shadows softened and the first furtive wakening sounds of the street drifted in through the window and Prok puffed and blew and slept the sleep of the righteous.

  In the morning, over breakfast in the room, Prok quizzed me again. I lifted a forkful of egg and toast to my mouth, put it down again, answered a question and took a quick sip of coffee. I nearly rebelled—didn’t he have any confidence in me after all this time?—but I let him have his way, despite the fact that there was no essential difference in the way the male and female interviews were conducted, except that the sequence and type of the questions were specific to one sex or the other, as for example with the female you asked about the onset of menarche and the age at which breast development first appeared and so on. It wasn’t my competency Prok was questioning, it was my age and experience, or lack of it. He kept saying, “Milk, Milk, I wish you were twenty years older. And married. Married with children. How many children do you want, John—shall we make it three?”

  I was downstairs in the conference room ten minutes before the scheduled appointment, which was at nine. Before a subject arrived, we would routinely record the basic data—the date, the number of the interview (for our files), the sex of the subject and the source of the history (that is, through what agency the subject had come to us, and in this case, of course, it was as a direct result of Prok’s solicitation after the sociology lecture). I didn’t know what to expect. We’d scheduled some twenty-eight interviews for the next three days and many more than that for our return trip the following week, and I had no way of connecting the names on the schedule sheet with any individual, though I’d sat there and registered them the night before. The woman I was to interview—and I’m going to assign her a fictitious name here, for confidentiality’s sake—was a young faculty wife of twenty-five, as yet childless. Mrs. Foshay. Let’s call her Mrs. Foshay.

  There was a knock at the door. I was seated in an armchair by a dormant fireplace, the schedule sheet and Mrs. Foshay’s folder spread out on a coffee table before me. The other chair—mahogany, red plush, standard Edwardian hotel fare—was positioned directly across from mine. “Come in,” I said, rising to greet her even as the door swung open.

  In the doorway, peering into the room as if she’d somehow fetched up in the wrong place, was a very pretty young woman dressed in the height of fashion—dressed as if she’d just stepped out of a nightclub on Forty-second Street after an evening of dinner, dancing and champagne. She gave me a hesitant smile. “Oh, hello,” she said, “I wasn’t sure if I was in the right place—”

  I’d crossed the room to her and now I took her hand and gave it a curt, professional shake. “It’s really, well, really kind of you to come—and important, important too—because every history, no matter how extensive, or, or, unextensive—nonextensive, I mean—contributes to the whole in a way that, that—”

  Her smile opened up suddenly, a dazzling full-lipped smile that made whole flocks of birds take off and careen round my stomach. “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” she murmured as I motioned to the chair and watched her settle into it, “anything for science, hey?”

  I offered her a cigarette—she chose a Lucky—lit it for her and wished it were nine in the evening rather than nine in the morning so we could both have a drink. A drink would have gone a long way toward calming my case of nerves.

  “Good,” I said, poised over the interview sheet, pencil in hand. “So, Mrs. Foshay, perhaps you’d like to tell me something of yourself—”

  “Alice, call me Alice.”

  “Yes, Alice. You’ve lived here long, here in West Lafayette, I mean?”

  The small talk, designed, as I’ve said, to put the subject at ease, consumed perhaps five minutes and then my brain froze up. I couldn’t help noticing how Mrs. Foshay’s breasts filled out the material of her blouse—filled it to the point of strain—and how silken her legs looked in a pair of sheer stockings. A moment of silence passed like a freight train. “All right, then,” I said, “so. And you lived in Trenton, you say, until what age?”

  I did manage to get into the rhythm of things as we moved along through the factual data (number of brothers, sisters, twin status, sorority membership, frequency of attending motion pictures, et cetera) keeping it in a simple question-response mode, and even the early sequential questions about onset of puberty came off well, but I’m afraid I broke down a bit when we got to the more sensitive areas. “When did you first begin to masturbate?” I asked, lighting a cigarette myself.

  “I must have been eleven,” she said, drawing at her Lucky. “Or maybe it was twelve.” She threw her head back and exhaled, no more concerned than if she were at the hairdresser’s or conferring with a girlfriend on the telephone. “We were living in Newark still, and I remember the curtains—my mother had made them for me when I was a child, very colorful, decorated with little figures out of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, that sort of thing. My sister Jean—she’s a year older than I—she showed me the technique.”

  I set down the cigarette, made a notation in the proper square. “Yes? And what was that technique?”

  She tried to look away, but I held onto her with my eyes. I didn’t blink. Didn’t move.

  “Well, you might find this odd or maybe hard to believe …”

  “No,” I said, and my voice was so pinched I could barely get it out, “no, not at all—there is no activity we haven’t recorded, and certainly, as Prok—Dr. Kinsey, that is—outlined in the lecture last night, we make no judgments …”

  She seemed encouraged. She patted her hair, which was piled up and pinned at the crown in a roll, with the bangs brushed into an exaggerated pompadour, reminiscent of the way Dolly Dawn used to wear her hair, and most people I think will remember her from George Hall’s band (“It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” should ring a bell, or, at the very least, “Yellow Basket”). “Well,” she said, “I’m double-jointed. So’s Jean. And my brother Charlie.”

  “Yes?” I said, pencil poised.

  “We—Jean and I—would get up on the bed, side by side, and do a kind of back flip, you know, the sort of things acrobats do at the circus? Only we would hold it there and then, well, because of being double-jointed, we would lick ourselves.”

  The term that came into my head was “auto-cunnilingus.” Prok hadn’t yet devised a box or code for that one, so I made a spontaneous notation. I was probably blushing. Certainly I was hard.

  We forged on.

  Was this her first marriage? Yes. Had she experienced deep kissing prior to the time she was marri
ed? Yes. Had she experienced petting? Yes. Had she fondled the male genitalia, experienced mouth-to-genital contact, engaged in coitus? Yes, yes and yes. How many partners had she had, excluding her husband? Somewhere, she guessed, around twenty. “Twenty?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice neutral. She couldn’t say, really, it might have been a few less or even as many as twenty-five, and her eyes went dreamy a moment as she tried to recollect. And what about orgasm: When was the first time she was aware of having experienced an orgasm? Had she been able to bring herself to orgasm through masturbation, petting, intercourse? When had she most recently experienced an orgasm?

  And here was where I found myself in deep water again, because I asked this conventionally pretty and very likely pampered professor’s wife, this elegant blond jewel of a woman dressed in impeccable taste, the next question in the sequence, that is: “How many orgasms do you experience on average?”

  She was on her fifth cigarette, and if she’d been relaxed from the outset, now she was as warm and enthusiastic as any individual I’d yet interviewed. She looked at me. Gave a little smile. I had been continuously—and unprofessionally—hard for the better part of two hours now. “Oh, I would guess maybe ten or twelve.”