The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  7

  “So it’s iris—the lucky girl, that is?”

  Prok was at his desk, bent over his papers in a cone of light. The windows looked as if they’d been soldered over, the corridor was in shadow and the dull weight of a steady drizzle seemed to have put the entire campus into hibernation. It was our lunch hour and we were eating at our desks, as we did most days, Prok dining on his trail mix while I made the best of a disintegrating tuna sandwich from the Commons, and I’d just told him the good news, though I’d been bursting with it since I got in that morning. (If you’re wondering why I’d hesitated, it was because Prok had been even more than usually absorbed in his work all morning and I couldn’t seem to find an opportunity—he hated to be interrupted—and, if truth be told, I was uncertain how he would take the news. Yes, he’d wanted me to marry, but that was in the abstract, on another temporal plane altogether, and this was in the here and now. I knew his first thought would be for the project and how my altered status would affect it.)

  “Well,” he said, looking distracted as he shuffled through his papers in search of something he’d momentarily misplaced—but that was a ruse, a ruse so he could buy time to sort out his thoughts—“she’s an attractive girl, there’s no doubt of that. And intelligent. Intelligent too.” Another moment trundled by, the wheels turning in his brain with a creak and groan I could hear all the way across the room, and then it was done. “But what am I thinking?” he shouted, and suddenly he was on his feet and striding to my desk, his hand outstretched and his face lit with the wide-angle grin he used to such effect when it suited him. “Congratulations, John. Really. This is the best news I’ve heard all week.”

  I took his hand and gave him what must have been a shy but self-satisfied smile. “I’m glad, I’m really—because I didn’t know, well, how you’d feel—” I was saying, but he cut me off, already racing on ahead of me.

  “When did you say the date was?”

  “Well, that is, I didn’t. But we were thinking we’d like to, well, as soon as possible. March. Iris thought March would be—”

  He was shaking his head. “That’ll never do. Not March. The garden, as you of all people should know, is barely worthy of the name in March. No, it will have to be May, no question about it.”

  “The garden?”

  He was looking directly at me—staring into my eyes—but I don’t think he was seeing me at all. He was seeing sunshine and flowers, Iris in a trailing satin gown, the justice of the peace in his ceremonial robes, the deep cerulean arc of the sky overhead. “Yes, of course. I’m offering it to you—my gift, John. And think of it, in May the irises will be at their best—irises for Iris. What could be better?”

  I told him it was all right with me—I thanked him lavishly, in fact—but that Iris had already called her mother and that certain undeniable forces had been set in motion, so that I wasn’t sure if we could postpone it at this juncture. He didn’t seem to hear me. “We’ll have Mac do something special,” he said. “A persimmon wedding cake, how about that? And I’ll make up the nuptial supper, cold meats and that sort of thing, and a goulash—and champagne, of course we’ll have to have champagne …” He trailed off and seemed to become aware of me again, as if I’d ducked out of the room and left a standing effigy behind and had just now returned to inhabit its shell. “But Iris,” he said, “your intended—the sexual adjustment was satisfactory, I take it?”

  I stood there in the gloom of the office, the desk between us, a numb smile adhering to my lips. I nodded.

  He was grinning even more intensely now, shifting from foot to foot, squaring his shoulders and rubbing his hands as if to warm them. “Yes,” he said, “yes. Nothing like the automobile for a modern-day aphrodisiac, eh? You see what I’ve been telling you all along, how fulfilled young couples across America would be, all those frustrated undergraduates out there, the lovesick high school faction, couples too poor to marry”—his arm swept the campus and the rooftops of the town beyond—“if only they could have the privacy and freedom from prejudice to express their sexual needs when and how they choose. Of course, John,” and his eyes took hold of mine, “I hope you’re not confusing the coital experience with the sort of commitment needed to build and sustain a marriage … Or Iris. She does know that sex is—or can, and in many cases should be—independent of marriage? That she doesn’t have to marry the first—” And here he stopped himself, leaving the rest unspoken.

  I was about to reassure him, to tell him that we loved each other and had been dating, as he well knew, for some time now, and that our sexual adjustment was just fine, thank you, more than adequate—terrific, even—and that we knew perfectly well what we were doing, but again he cut me off.

  “But this is great news! To have you married, Milk—don’t you see what this will do for the project? You won’t be—and you’ll forgive me—so wet behind the ears, or appear to be, at any rate. A married man conducting interviews has got to inspire more confidence, especially in older subjects, and females, of course, than a bachelor. Don’t you think?”

  And here I could answer him with confidence even as the image of Mrs. Foshay fought to crowd everything else out of my brain. “That goes without saying, Prok, and I have been listening, believe me, on all those occasions when you kept wishing I was older and more, well, experienced—”

  “Good, good,” he said, “good,” and he’d turned to go back to his desk when he swung round on me with an afterthought. “Iris,” he said. “Do we have her history?”

  Over the course of the next two months, Prok was in increasing demand as a lecturer, and we began, of necessity, to step up our travel schedule. Word had gotten around. It seemed that every civic group, private school and university in a five-hundred-mile radius wanted him to appear, and at this stage, Prok never turned down an invitation. Nor did he charge a fee, even going so far as to pay traveling expenses out of his own pocket, though his first fledgling grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation helped cover him here—as they did with my salary as his first full-time employee. The routine was the same as always—Prok would find himself in a hall somewhere, the crowd already gathered, and he would lecture with his usual frankness on previously taboo subjects and then ask for volunteers—friends of the research, he’d begun to call them—to step forward and have their histories taken. When we weren’t in his office, working out our tabulations, curves and correlation charts, we were off on the road, collecting data, because, as Prok said, over and over, you could never have enough data.

  And how did I feel about all this? I was excited, of course, and I was infused with Prok’s enthusiasm—I believed in the project with every ounce of my being, and I still do—but the timing was a bit awkward, as you can imagine. Iris and I had just become engaged. We treasured each other’s company. We’d begun to enjoy each other sexually (though both of us were still fighting our inhibitions and it wasn’t at all the same as it was with Mac). I wanted to be with her, to stroll arm in arm round Bloomington and poke through the secondhand shops, looking for dishware, rugs and the like, pricing furniture for the household we hoped to set up come June—and we needed to find an apartment we could afford within our limited means, and that was going to take some time and footwork too. But instead I was sitting up in second-rate hotels till one and two in the morning, utterly exhausted, trying to squeeze as many histories as possible into each working day. I was drinking and smoking too much. My ears rang, my head ached, my eyes felt molten, and nothing, not even the details of the most arcane sexual practices, could arouse me from my torpor—not coprophilia, incest or sex with barnyard animals. I just nodded, held the subject’s eyes, and made my notations on the position sheet.

  We must have collected some two hundred histories during this period, really driving ourselves, but thus far the research was skewed by the fact that the majority of our histories were predominantly upper-level—that is, from college students and professionals. We’d begun to branch out
, as I’ve mentioned, and we did make trips to collect histories among the denizens of the homosexual underground in Indianapolis and Chicago, as well as at least one prison and the state work farm where Prok had made so many of his most valuable contacts—and one contact invariably gave rise to another, and another, ad infinitum, so that now we were determined to pursue as many of these lower-level histories as we could. What we lacked above all were black histories, and so we decided to mount a second expedition to Gary, Indiana, and the aforementioned Negro neighborhood there.

  We left Bloomington on a drizzly Saturday morning in mid-April (we were still working around Prok’s teaching schedule then—though the marriage course was dead, he was nonetheless committed to his biology classes, one of which met at eight o’clock on Saturday mornings, a cruel hour for any undergraduate to have to bend over a dissecting pan or distinguish between mono- and dicotyledons). We drove straight through, going as fast as the roads, the Nash and the state police would abide, arriving just after dark. We had an indifferent meal at a poorly lit diner, and sat there over coffee and pie as the drizzle solidified into a gray intermittent rain that wasn’t going to make our work—outdoor work, on the streets—any easier. Prok looked grim. He kept checking his watch, as if that could somehow stop the rain and accelerate the coming of the hour at which we were to meet our contact. He had good reason to be anxious. Our first expedition to Gary, in the deep-freeze of February, had been a failure. We’d spent endless hours circling one block after another, peering hopefully through the windshield any time a figure appeared on the deserted streets, but Prok’s contact failed to show up, and we didn’t get a single history. Neither of us mentioned it now. We just finished our coffee, shrugged into our rain gear and climbed back into the car, heading six blocks south, into the Negro neighborhood.

  Prok parked on a side street around the corner from a bar called Shorty’s Paradise, in a neighborhood of modest storefronts (HAIR-DRESSER, SANDWICHES MADE TO ORDER, BUTCHER SHOP) with walkup apartments above them and the smokestacks of the factories looming up in the near distance like the battlements of a degraded castle. The street was littered with sodden newspaper, bottles, discarded food wrappers. Rain streaked the windshield and painted a sheen of reflected light on the pavement. There was no sign of life. We got out of the car and the doors slammed behind us like a cannonade.

  My first surprise came when we turned the corner—the street outside Shorty’s Paradise was thronged with people despite the rain, a whole mob spilling from the open door of the saloon and fanning out in both directions under the tattered awning. But these were black people, exclusively black, and I have to confess that I’d never to this point had much contact with Negroes, aside from the occasional pleasantry—“Nice day, isn’t it?”—I exchanged with the odd maid or cook who came into the market where I’d worked summers. There was music drifting out the open door, a gaggle of voices, the smell of tobacco, marijuana, alcohol. I didn’t know what to do. I hesitated.

  But Prok. Prok was the second surprise. Though he detested bars, cigarettes and, especially, what he termed the “jungle beat” of popular music, he strode right past the crowd and though the front door as if he’d been going there every Saturday night of his life. He was dressed, as always, in his dark suit, white shirt and bow tie, over which he’d casually slung a yellow rain slicker that seemed always to hitch up in back as if it had been sewn together from two mismatching bolts of oilcloth. I was dressed in a dark suit and tie as well, though my overcoat—a thing my grandmother had picked out for me—was gray with black flecks and hung to my ankles. I could feel the hair prickling under the band of my hat, ready to spring loose the minute I stepped inside. I ducked my head and followed Prok through the door.

  A long, trailing mahogany-topped bar dominated the place, and it was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with chattering people, all of whom glanced up as we stepped through the door, then turned away as if they hadn’t seen us at all. The jukebox was playing “Minnie the Moocher” at a dynamic volume and everyone in the place seemed to be shouting to be heard above it. Prok went straight to the bar, elbowed his way in and immediately started up a conversation with a towering man in an electric-blue double-breasted suit. And this was the third thing, the oddest of all: Prok began to speak in dialect. I was stunned. As you may know, Prok was a real stickler for standard English, and he wasn’t at all shy about correcting grammatical mistakes—he could be brutally sarcastic about it too—but here he was, switching to the vernacular like a ventriloquist. The conversation went something like this:

  “Evenin’, friend,” Prok said, fastening on the man with the blue talons of his eyes. “I’m lookin’ for Rufus Morganfeld. You know him?”

  The man in the electric-blue suit took his time, regarding Prok from eyes drawn down to slits. He had a cigarette in one hand, a not-quite-empty glass in the other. “You the law?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “What then? Sellin’ Bibles?”

  “Who I am is Doctor Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology at Indiana University, and Rufus—brother Rufus—say he gone meet me here.”

  “That’s somethin’,” the man said softly. “Doctor, huh? What, you come to cure my hemorrhoids?”

  Prok’s face never changed. No one laughed. “You wouldn’t be needin’ a cocktail there by any chance, would you?” he asked.

  There was a long interval, Prok remaining absolutely motionless, his eyes never wavering, and then the man in the blue suit let a smile creep out of the furrows at the corners of his mouth. “Crown Royal and soda,” he said.

  The drink was ordered, the drink came, the drink was handed over. By this time Prok was deep in conversation with the man in the blue suit and a group of four or five others who were nearest him at the bar, and Rufus Morganfeld himself—our contact, who had been down at the other end of the bar to this point, waiting to see how things sorted out—came up and introduced himself. Prok greeted him warmly, and I thought he was going to offer Rufus a drink as well, but instead he shook hands all around, took Rufus in one arm and me in the other and shepherded us out into the street. Immediately Prok went back to being Prok, as there was no need to coddle Rufus, whom he’d met at the work farm, whose history he’d recorded and who was being paid fifty cents for every history he helped us collect among the prostitutes who worked the neighborhood. (I should say that Prok was intensely interested in prostitutes, at least in the beginning, because their experience was so much wider than most—this was before we actually got to observe them at work—but ultimately, they weren’t as useful as you might imagine in regard to the physiology of various sex acts because of their propensity to counterfeit response.)

  At any rate, with Rufus as our Virgil, we were able to track down the prostitutes (it was a slow night for them in any case, because of the rain, and they tended to bunch up in a few locales), and begin to record their histories. At first they tended to be skeptical—“Oh, yeah, honey, for one greenback dollar you just gone talk”—but Prok on the scent of histories was not to be denied and they quickly came round to the view that this was strictly on the up-and-up, pure science, and that we valued them not only as a resource but as human beings too, and this was another facet of Prok’s genius—or his compassion, rather. He genuinely cared. And he had no prejudices whatever—either racial or sexual. It didn’t matter to him if you were colored, Italian or Japanese, if you engaged in anal sex or liked to masturbate on your mother’s wedding photo—you were a human animal, and you were a source of data.

  The problem we encountered, however, was that since there were no adequate hotels nearby, we were at a loss for a private venue in which to conduct the interviews. We did have the car, but only one of us could interview in the Nash and the necessity was to conduct our interviews simultaneously. We were standing there on the street corner, the rain coming down harder now, in a forlorn little group—two prostitutes no older than I, Prok, Rufus and myself—when Rufus came up with the solution. “I got a room,” he said,
“two blocks over. Nothin’ fancy, but it’s got a electric light, a bed and a armchair, if that’ll do—”

  In the end Prok decided to take the Nash himself and leave me to the relative comfort of Rufus’s room, reasoning that I was still the amateur and didn’t need any additional impediments—such as cold, rain and inadequate lighting—put in my way. It was a noble gesture, or a practical one, I suppose, but either way, it was destined to backfire on him. I took my girl—and I call her a girl because she was just eighteen, with a pair of slanted cinnamon eyes and skin the color of the chocolate milk they mix up at Bornemann’s Dairy back at home—up to Rufus’s sitting room at the end of a hallway on the third floor of a detached brick apartment building that was once a single-family home. She seemed dubious at first, and maybe a bit nervous, and, of course, I was a bundle of nerves myself, not only because I’d taken so few female histories to this point but because of her race and the surroundings, the close, vaguely yellowish walls, the neatly made single bed that might have been a pallet in the penitentiary, the harsh light of the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling on its switch cord. Fifteen minutes into the interview, when she saw what it was, she relaxed, and I do think I did a very professional job with her that night (though, to be honest, I did find myself uncomfortably aroused, as with Mrs. Foshay).

  Her history was what you might expect from a girl in her position—relations at puberty with both her father and an older brother, marriage at fourteen, the move north from Mississippi, abandonment, the pimp, the succession of johns and venereal diseases—and I remember being movedby her simple, unnuanced recitation of the facts, the sad facts, as I hadn’t been moved before. Unprofessionally, I wanted to get up from my chair and hug her and tell her that it was all right, that things would get better, though I knew they wouldn’t. Unprofessionally, I wanted to strip the clothes from her and have her there on the bed and watch her squirm beneath me. I didn’t act on either impulse. I just closed down my mind and recorded her history, one of the thousands that would be fed into the pot.