by T. C. Boyle
“No,” I told him, “no, I’m just tired,” but I did what he wanted, and all the time I was thinking of Iris, back at home, waiting for me.
On this particular trip—the first of a hundred or more the three of us would make together over the years—we were on our way to Indianapolis, where we were planning to interview prostitutes and, if possible, their johns, Corcoran looking on in the role of apprentice till he could acquire the necessary skills to join in. Prok was in high spirits, more talkative even than usual, and though he drove erratically, also as usual, and tried to maintain an even speed so as to conserve on fuel, we made good time and got to our hotel early enough to have a collegial dinner before going out on the streets. I’d wanted a highball before the meal, and so had Corcoran, but Prok wouldn’t hear of it—we’d be in and out of bars till all hours, and as that would almost certainly involve the consumption of a certain unavoidable quantity of alcohol there was no reason to start now; the last thing he wanted was an inebriated interviewer. Didn’t we agree? Yes, of course we did, albeit reluctantly, and after the waiter took our menus, Corcoran and I exchanged a glance over our glasses of virgin soda water and I thought I’d found an ally. We were under Prok’s thumb—always, and willingly—but we could rebel too, in our own quiet, complicit way, and that made me feel ever so slightly wicked, as if I’d found an elder brother to kick under the table when our father’s back was turned.
So we sipped soda water while Prok had a Coca-Cola (“I don’t really like the taste of the stuff,” he claimed, though his sweet tooth was legendary, “but it’s good for the caffeine, keeps me alert, you know”) and outlined our plan of attack for the evening. “Actually,” he said, pausing to look round him at the nearly deserted hotel dining room, “I have no doubt but that we’ll pick up some excellent data tonight, the sort of high-rating, lower-level histories we’re always seeking for balance—and you remember Gary, Milk, and how rich an arena that was—but I’ve been thinking that it’s not enough.”
The hotel was in the low- to mid-price range, and its restaurant was nothing to write home about (again, Prok’s thinking was, Why waste project funds on some fleeting luxury?), and he set his knife and fork down carefully beside the salad plate, on which three slices of pickled beet remained in a gory pool beside a brownish fragment of lettuce.
“What do you mean?” Corcoran asked. “No one’s ever accumulated data as accurate and complete as what you’ve showed me, you and John, I mean.”
Prok shot another glance round the room to make sure no one was listening, then leaned in over his plate. “What I’m thinking is this: while it’s all well and good to record direct accounts of sexual activity—while it’s essential, the backbone of everything we’re trying to accomplish—nevertheless we could be doing more, much more.”
Corcoran’s eyes jumped to mine and I gave him the faintest shrug of my shoulders. I couldn’t imagine what Prok was getting after.
“I’ve arranged something a little different for tonight,” Prok said, picking up his fork as if he’d never before seen a utensil, then setting it down again as if he couldn’t guess at its function. “Let me put it this way,” he went on, “while we have been able, as a species, to domesticate animals and breed them into their many varieties—to observe and manipulate, as it were, their sexual activity—we’ve never had the opportunity to do the same with human beings. To observe, that is.”
“Yes, of course,” Corcoran said, jumping on the notion, “because while we all participate, we’re never exactly watching, are we? Or even wearing our scientist’s hat—isn’t that right, John?”
“Well,” I said, “yes, sure,” and I gave him a grin. “In the heat of the moment, you’re not thinking in scientific terms; no one is—”
“Right. And where’s your objectivity?” Corcoran’s face was lit with pleasure. He was on the trail of something. The moment was his. “When you’re with a woman, in the throes of passion, everything else, every other consideration, goes right out the window, and at a certain point you don’t even care what she looks like, just as long as—”
“Exactly.” Prok gave us a satisfied look, the blue claws of his eyes pulling us to him even as he paused at the approach of the waiter and the three of us sat in silence as the steaming plates appeared before us. The waiter hovered expectantly—Could he bring us anything else?—and Prok waved him off. When the man had retreated to the far side of the room, Prok took a moment to poke at his entrée—corned beef and cabbage, sans potatoes, one of his alimentary prohibitions. “Tonight we’re going to do what no one in the field has even so much as dared before, at least as far as I know—that is, we’re going to observe the act itself, in commission. It’s all been arranged.”
We waited in a kind of palpitating silence, till he added: “With one of the young women, that is. We’ll be secreted in the room—in the closet, actually—when she entertains her tricks.”
“You mean”—I couldn’t help myself—“we’ll be peeping then, as if we were, well … you mean, like Peeping Toms?”
“Voyeurs,” Corcoran pronounced with a faint smile.
Prok gave each of us a look. “Yes,” he said. “That’s it exactly.”
Jean Sibelius—one of Prok’s particular favorites—had been the focus of the previous week’s musicale, and I remember having gone to Prok’s without much enthusiasm only to find myself pleasantly surprised. As I’ve said, swing was more to my taste than classical, but the music Prok chose that night was melodic and warm—almost dreamlike—and before I knew it I’d lost all consciousness of my surroundings and let it sweep over me like some natural force. I suppose something similar happened to jitterbuggers out on the dance floor—to Iris and me when we danced before a bandstand—but all that was driven by the intoxication of the moment and the coronary thump of the bass drum. This was different. Once the record began I found myself slipping into a reverie, utterly calm and at ease, my thoughts bumping along from one repository to another without logic or connection. For the first time I began to understand what Prok saw in his music and why he was so devoted to it.
Iris and I had been on time, for a change, and I’d taken a seat in the front row, as Prok expected me to, with Iris on my right and Corcoran seated beside her, the preliminaries this time reduced to a few minutes of strained chitchat with President Wells over a plate of stale crackers and rumless fruit punch, and I remember speculating about Wells even as he eased into the seat beside me. He was a short, energetic, rotund little man, and a great supporter of Prok against the storm of criticism, invective and innuendo that continually came our way, and yet he was unmarried in his forties, and that seemed odd—very odd—given the time and place. I made a note to myself to pull his history the first chance I got.
The room was cold that night, Prok having turned down the thermostat in the expectation that the aggregate body heat of his guests would be sufficient to warm the place up—that and the coloration of the music. There was a small fire going in the hearth, but it was dying because Prok didn’t like to fuss with tending a fire when a record was on the turntable, and who could blame him? So we were cold, and I suppose I must have felt a bit sorry for the first-time guests who hadn’t dressed for what might as well have been an outdoor concert, as Iris, Corcoran and I had. For all that, Prok was his usual warm and outgoing self, entertaining us with a brief lecture on the composer’s career and the piece we were about to hear. He talked of Sibelius’s love of his native Finland and the charm of his sylvan settings and how the majority of his symphonic poems were based on Finland’s great epic, the Kalevala.
Then the room hushed as he retreated to the gramophone, sharpened the needle and let it fall. We heard “The Swan of Tuonela” that night and selections from “Pohjola’s Daughter,” and, as I say, I simply closed my eyes and let the music carry me away. There was an intermission, during which Mac served refreshments—non-alcoholic—and the guests got up and mingled, and then there were a few songs (“Was It a Dream?” and �
��The Maid Came from Her Lovers’ Tryst,” both of which I remember distinctly because as soon as I was able I went out and purchased a recording of them, which I treasure to this day), and then the party broke up. The reason I mention all of this, is because of what happened during the intermission—or what might have happened, because I can’t say for sure that that was the beginning of it, though I have my suspicions.
In any case, I was doing my best with a fistful of stale crackers and a cup of tepid punch while Prok pinned me in the corner along with President Wells, expatiating on the music we’d just heard (and on the research, of course), when I looked across the room and saw that Iris was alone with Corcoran, just as she had been on the last occasion—back in the fall—when we’d all three gathered for a musical evening. I wouldn’t have paid it any attention really if it weren’t for what she’d said that night over the wire while I sank miserably into the glass crevice of the phone booth: He was on me like a bird dog. Prok was informing President Wells and me (though I’d heard it before) that he liked to study the faces of the audience during musical performances for signs of sensual transport—one professor emeritus in his seventies had actually become physically aroused one night over Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde—but I was watching Iris, watching her face, watching Corcoran and how he seemed to anticipate her every movement, as if they were dancing to an imaginary orchestra. “Prok,” I said, cutting him off, “President Wells, I, just, well, if you’ll excuse me, please, and I’ll be right back—”
Prok gave me a wondering look, but he didn’t miss a beat. As I wandered off, making sure to head in the direction of the lavatory, I heard him say, “Of course, I would never name that gentleman, for fear of embarrassing him, but really, there’s absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about—”
I came up on Corcoran and my wife from behind, having made a detour past the lavatory in the event that Prok and Wells were watching, and I seemed to have startled them. Whatever they’d been talking about so intently just a moment before fell off a conversational cliff and the two of them looked up at me in confusion. I wanted to say something blithe like, “Am I interrupting anything here?” but when I saw the looks on their faces the words died in my throat. “Hello,” was the best I could manage.
Corcoran treated me to a smile. “Oh, hi, John. We were just discussing the way Prok seems to have taken charge of our president.” He gave a sidelong glance to where the two of them stood in the corner still, Prok lecturing, Wells stifling a yawn.
Iris said, “He never misses an opportunity, does he?”
I was angry suddenly, or testy, I suppose—testy would be a better word. “He has every right,” I said, staring her in the face, and I wasn’t smiling, wasn’t keeping it blithe and light. “Because you’d be amazed how much each department has to fight for funding. And we’ve got the prospect of expanding our grant base, which in turn should help convince Wells—or the university, I mean—to give us more for salary, materials, travel expenses and the like.”
Iris was wearing a little smile of amusement. “So?” she said.
“So don’t go accusing Prok, of, of—pandering—or whatever you want to call it, because if it weren’t for him we’d be—”
“Up shit’s creek without a paddle,” Corcoran said, expanding his smile. He had a glass of mauve-colored punch in his hand and he was rotating it against his palm as if he were about to snatch up three or four others and start juggling them to break the ice and get the party rolling, irrespective of Prok and Wells and the high tone of the evening. But then he laid a hand on my arm. “It’s okay, John,” he said, and Iris warmed up her smile too, “we’re on your side. We’re all in this together, aren’t we?”
I suppose that was when I first began to have my suspicions—Corcoran, the sexual Olympian on the loose, and Iris, the love of my life, stinging still over what I’d done in bed with Mac and with Prok—but I was paralyzed. I wanted to believe that there was nothing between them beyond the usual goodwill that existed between one colleague and the spouse of another, and I was afraid of any sort of confrontation with Iris, because I knew she’d throw it back at me, every phrase, every excuse and rationale, every occasion on which I’d ever spoken of our animal nature and sex as a function divorced from emotion of any kind, no different from hunger or thirst. Of course, I dropped hints. Put out probes, as it were. I came home from work, complimented the aroma of whatever was cooking, poured a drink, sat with her and reviewed my day, and of course my day included Corcoran—I dropped his name whenever I could, scanning her face for a reaction. There was nothing there. But what did she think of him? I pressed. Oh, he was nice enough, she said. Better than she’d thought. She really did think he was going to work out, and she was sorry if at first she’d seemed negative about him. “Yes,” I said, “I told you, didn’t I?” And then a smile, as if it were all a joke, “And what about his bird dog propensities?”
She was busy suddenly—a pot was boiling over on the stove, there was an onion to be peeled. It was a joke, sure it was, and she just laughed. “He’s like that with all women,” she said. “And men too. But you would know better than I, John.”
If I were a turtle—one of Darwin’s Galápagos tortoises Prok was always talking about—I could have pulled all my exposed parts back into my shell, and I suppose, in a metaphorical way, that was what I did do. We went to Indianapolis, the three of us, colleagues on a mission, and Corcoran and I sat across the table from each other exchanging our own private signals while Prok informed us that we were going to do something illegal, if not immoral, despite the testimonial letters from Dean Briscoe, President Henry B. Wells and Robert M. Yerkes: for this night, anyway, we were going to be Peeping Toms.
The idea of it, I have to admit, made my blood race. I think we all have the capacity for voyeurism, we all burn to see how other people live through their private moments so that we can hold them up against our own and thrill with a feeling of superiority, or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, feel the sharp awakening slap of inadequacy. So that’s how it’s done, we think. I could do it that way. Or could I? Yes, sure I could, and I could do it better too. I’d like to be doing it right now—but look at her, look how she clings to him, how she rises to meet him, how —
Beyond that, of course, we were scientists, and we convinced ourselves that we had a duty to the research that rated above all other considerations. We needed to do fieldwork, like any other investigators, needed to engage in direct observation of sexual experience in all its varieties, else how could we presume to call ourselves experts? How could our data have the kind of validity we sought if it were paper data only? If you think of it, everything we were attempting to accomplish, every close observation, every measurement, should have been rendered redundant by a hundred studies that had come before us. But there weren’t a hundred studies, there weren’t fifty—there wasn’t even one. We’d built our civilization, gone to war, delved into the smallest things, the microbe and the atom, and still the hypocrites and the lily-whites were there to shout us down: sex is dirty, they said. Sex is shameful, private, obscene, unfit for examination. Well. We got up from the table, paid the check and walked out into the night to prove them wrong.
This time it wasn’t raining, wasn’t even all that cold, considering the season. Prok wasn’t wearing an overcoat, though the streets were damp from a series of rainstorms the previous week and he’d pulled a pair of rubbers on over his shoes. Corcoran was wearing his tan fedora and a pale camel trench coat, as if he’d just stepped off the set of a picture about foreign agents and the assignations of war. For my part, I was dressed as usual, coat and tie, no hat, and my feet—in a pair of fresh-polished cordovans—would just have to get wet if I wasn’t absolutely vigilant about the puddles in the street. “All right,” Prok said, gathering us to him on a street corner, “I think it’s this way, down this street and one block over to the left—and the contact, incidentally, is a young woman, a redhead by the name of Ginger.”
We found Ginger without any trouble, dressed in a cheap imitation fur and sipping a soft drink through a straw on a bench in the back of the local pool hall. There was a man slouched beside her, a sharp dresser with a flashy tie and elephantine pants that concealed the boniness of his legs, till he leaned back to light a cigarette and crossed his ankles, that is. He regarded the three of us with suspicion—he was the pimp, and his name was Gerald—till Prok won him over with a brief speech in the vernacular and a contribution of three dollars to the support of his staff and a dollar more for each history he brought us, including his own. Ginger was a big girl, five eight or five nine, twenty-two years old, with a solid, thick-fleshed physique that would sink her in fat by the time she was thirty and the milky coloring of a natural redhead. She didn’t make a move. Just sucked at the straw within the red bow of her mouth and watched her pimp fold Prok’s bills and tuck them away in the voluminous pockets of his trousers. “Okay,” Gerald said then, “okay,” and he smiled to reveal a set of hopeless teeth, variously colored. He looked to Ginger and the smile vanished. “So what you waitin’ for? Go peddle your goods—and take these gennemen with you.”
Then we were outside, dodging puddles, Prok at Ginger’s side as if he were escorting her to a cotillion that would miraculously appear round the next corner in a pure white outflowing of light, Corcoran and I bringing up the rear. It was an awkward scenario, none of us—even Prok—inclined to say much, Ginger leading us on with a hypnotic shake and roll of her hips, faces appearing out of the dark to dodge away again, slatted eyes assessing us as potential johns or mugging victims. Ginger had a ground-floor room, convenient to the street, in a house from the Victorian era that was in serious need of repair and paint too, and she separated herself from Prok and strolled right in through the unlocked door without turning around to invite us in or even to see if we were still there.