The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Good, very good.” Prok had got down on the floor now, and he eased himself into a cross-legged posture, as if he were an Indian chief presiding over a sheaf of tobacco leaves. “All right, girls,” he said, “sit right here with me, that’s right, cross your legs just like this, because we’re going to pretend that we are out in the deep woods sitting round a campfire roasting marshmallows—do you like marshmallows? Yes, good. Very good. Of course you do.” And, magically, from his coat pocket, appeared two white puffs of the very substance.

  I should say here that despite what you may have heard to the contrary —and I am aware of some of the more malicious and odious rumors spread by enemies of the project, people who choose to see dirt in everything—that Prok was as delicate, respectful and proper with our juvenile subjects as anyone I could imagine. And we all learned from him and attempted to adopt his methods, though none of us could ever manage to establish the instant rapport with children that Prok was capable of. This was one of his great gifts as an interviewer, and as a personality too. Just as he could sidle up to a urinal at Penn Station and immediately cultivate the trust of a homosexual hustler in search of action or wander the Negro neighborhoods of Gary and Chicago with the authentic argot dropping from his lips, so too could he relate in the most open and innocent way to children. And children’s histories were vital to the research, because while we routinely asked our subjects about their initial sexual awakening, nearly all of them were at least somewhat hazy on the details, and we felt we could correct for the inadequacy of memory in our adult subjects by collecting data directly from children, whose experiences were still vivid and ongoing. That seemed to make sense. And yet, inevitably, there was criticism—we were sullying the children’s minds, leading them astray, that sort of thing. But I can assure you that nothing could have been further from the truth.

  On this particular day, as Prok led these two beautiful wide-eyed girls through an imaginary forest and sat with them round a fanciful camp-fire, ever so subtly and gracefully posing his questions, first to Suzy as her sister played in the corner, and then to Katie, I have to admit it was an education for me. The questions were entirely innocent, yet telling: Do you play more often with girls or boys? Do you like boys? But boys are different from girls, aren’t they? Yes? And how is that? How do you know? I sat there in the principal’s chair, clinging to a grin and exchanging the occasional glance with the mother while recording her daughters’ responses, and I felt myself expanding into the possibilities. Children. I’d never really thought much about them one way or another. In fact, they’d always made me nervous and uncertain—I didn’t know how to act around them, didn’t have a clue—and now here was Prok, one of the most eminent men of his generation, a starred scientist, showing me the way. “Just talk to them,” he said. “Just talk and listen.”

  All this sex, and what was it for? For this. For children. It came to me as a revelation that afternoon, my brain struggling with the insupportable image of Iris spread out naked on my desk and Corcoran rising above her even as the piping immature voices gave rise to opinions and qualified expectations. They trooped through the office, one child after another, shy, brassy, eager, reticent, and I found myself groping toward the beginnings of perspective. Those organs we’d so diligently focused on with Ginger and her clients, the acts, the consummation, the reproductive tract—it came to this, to children. And John Jr. wouldn’t be born for another five years yet.

  We got back to Bloomington late on the third night, after having overstayed ourselves in order to record a number of serendipitous interviews that came our way at the last minute—the school janitor and his brother, who ran the filling station, and a local minister, his wife and their seventeen-year-old daughter. I came in the door and there was Iris, in her kimono, waiting up for me over her poetry text. “But you didn’t have to wait up,” I said, and she came to me, her eyes full, and held me, rocking gently with me there in the middle of the living room. “Don’t you have class tomorrow?”

  “Hush,” she said, “hush,” and then we went to bed, and I was made of wood. We had intercourse though, almost as soon as I could get my clothes off, and she might have broken down during the process—might have cried, might have buried her face in my chest and sobbed for all I know—but I was made of wood and I can’t really say for certain. She was gone before I woke in the morning, and then I was at the office in Biology Hall, surrounded by galls and running a slow, lingering hand over the surface of my desk as if I’d never seen anything like it before.

  13

  There was the sound of footsteps clattering in the stairwell, the faint reverberant echo of voices, growing louder now, coming closer, and my first thought was of Prok, returning from his early class with students in tow. By this time I’d recovered myself and I was settled in at my desk, organizing the material we’d collected at the Fillmore School and sinking numbly into the familiar grip of routine. I’d sharpened all the pencils, squared away the papers on the desk. A mug of black coffee stood at my elbow, giving off steam. Outside, beyond the windows, a mild drizzle softened the lines of Maxwell Hall, across the way.

  But that was Prok’s voice, no doubt about it, a sort of lucid mumble rising above the ambient sounds, and there was another voice attached to it, hearty and unflappable, a voice I couldn’t help but recognize, and a moment later, there they were, Prok and Corcoran, ducking through the door. “Milk, good morning,” Prok sang out, “sleep well?”

  “Morning, John,” Corcoran put in. He stood there hovering over Prok’s desk, no more than ten feet from me, arms akimbo, exuding nonchalance—nothing wrong here, not a thing in the world. “I tell you, it’s good to be back—the drive was killing, absolutely killing. And how was your trip?”

  For the moment, I was at a loss for words. I suppose I’d thought of nothing really over the course of the past four days but Corcoran and what I would say to him, what he would say to me, how I’d face up to him and what it would mean for all of us—for the present and the future too. “We, well,” I faltered. “I’m sure Prok—” I gestured vaguely, and then let my hand drop, too full of anguish to go on.

  Prok was already seated at his desk. His head was down, and he was shuffling through his papers. “Splendid,” he said. “Couldn’t have been better. We got some fourteen juvenile histories, very interesting, very significant, and it just confirms in me the resolve to get more. Isn’t that right, Milk?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It was, uh, a real experience.”

  Corcoran was watching me closely. “Oh?” he said. “How so?”

  Prok’s head rose as he glanced up to monitor my answer.

  “I don’t know,” I said, reaching for the coffee cup to cover myself. “It was—I guess you’d have to call it an awakening. Of sorts.”

  Corcoran was smiling, always smiling. He was so at ease I could have killed him, could have leapt up from the desk and strangled him right there in the middle of the linoleum floor and never thought twice about it. I think he was about to press it further, ask for some clarification—because this was interesting, it was. He might have been about to say, What do you mean? Or turn it into a joke: But how long were you asleep, then?

  Prok got there first. “Good,” he said. “Well put. I felt it myself, and this is a new avenue—one we have to tread a whole lot more in future, but cautiously of course.” There was a silence as we all three contemplated just what that caution entailed, and then Prok, in his briskest voice, said, “I’m going to need you to take some dictation, Milk—follow-up letters, and not just to the parents, but to the children as well.” He glanced up sharply, as if I were about to demur. “Because, you understand, we have to be absolutely aboveboard here, and the parents will see the letters—follow-up, that is, and I can’t stress how vital this is. And should be. My feeling is that if a volunteer goes out of his way to be a friend of the research, no matter how young or old, we are in that person’s debt and should acknowledge it at the very first opportunity.”
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br />   I should point out that these were still the early days of the Institute for Sex Research and we didn’t yet have a full-time secretary or even adequate office space, though with the arrival of Corcoran, Prok had convinced the administration to incorporate the classroom next door into what was now a little suite of offices. A door had been carved out of a wall of the original office, giving onto this new space, and Corcoran’s desk was located in there, as well as the overflow from our files and the ever-increasing library of material in the field that Prok had begun to amass (including the erotica collection so much has been made of recently). But truly, from humble beginnings …

  In any case, I mention it only because of what came next—just to locate you in situ—so you can appreciate where all three of us were in relation to one another. The pleasantries were over, and Prok was the last to tolerate any procrastination—work was what he wanted and work was what we were there for—and yet still Corcoran hadn’t moved. “John,” he said, dropping his voice, “listen, I wonder if you and I could have a few words, later, after work, I mean. We must talk.”

  Prok lifted an eyebrow, shot us both a look. “That would be splendid, Corcoran,” he said, “but I assure you I’ll be more than happy to fill you in on the details of what we’ve learned, and what we hope to learn. Fascinating, really.”

  Corcoran’s smile was fading. “No, it was another matter, Prok.”

  “Oh?”

  For all my will power, I felt the color rising to my face. I stared into the coffee mug.

  “A private matter,” Corcoran said.

  Prok’s eyebrow lifted a degree higher. “Oh?”

  “It’s nothing, really. Just—well, just something between colleagues, isn’t that right, John?”

  What could I say? I’d been shot through the shoulder blades, brought down at a gallop on the high plains, hooves kicking futilely in the air. I felt the shaft of the arrow emerging under my breastbone, the hot sharp little tip of the skewer. “Yeah,” I said. “Or, yes, I mean. Yes, that’s right.”

  I don’t suppose it will come as a surprise if I told you I had trouble concentrating on my work that day. As much as I tried to fight them down, I was prey to my emotions—stupidly, I know. Falsely. Anachronistically. I kept telling myself I was a sexologist, that I had a career and a future and a new outlook altogether, that I was liberated from all those petty, Judeo-Christian constraints that had done such damage over the centuries, but it was no good. I was hurt. I was jealous. I presented my ordinary face to Prok and, through the doorway and across the expanse of the inner room, to Corcoran, but I was seething inside, burning, violent and deranged with the gall of my own inadequacy and failure—my own sins—and I kept seeing the stooped demeaning figure of the cuckold in the commedia dell’arte no matter how hard I tried to dismiss it. I stared at Corcoran when he wasn’t looking. I studied the way he scratched at his chin or tapped the pencil idly on the surface of the blotting pad as if he were knocking out the drumbeat to some private rhapsody. Kill him! a voice screamed in my head. Get up now and kill him!

  Then we were locking up, the three of us gathered there at the front door of the office while Prok turned the key and we chatted, in a valedictory way, about the business of sex. Prok had his umbrella with him, and his galoshes, but no overcoat—it was too mild and he was the sort who could endure anything, in any case—and he made some comment about the two of us, Corcoran and I, needing to better attune ourselves to the weather as neither of us had any protection at all, save for sports coat and tie, and then he bade us good night and headed off down the hall. “Well,” Corcoran breathed, hesitating, “shall we—do you want to take the car?”

  I just nodded and we walked to his car in silence. As soon as we’d slammed the doors, Corcoran turned over the engine and the radio came to life, blaring out a popular dance tune, and it was that, as much as anything, that made my anger rush to the surface—I had to hold tight to the doorframe to keep from doing something I might have regretted for the rest of my professional career.

  Corcoran had put the car in gear and we were moving slowly down the street, but I was so wrought up I barely registered the movement. After a moment, he said, “What about the tavern? How’s a drink sound? It’s on me.”

  There was a clarinet solo in that tune—the band was famous for its clarinetist—and we both listened as the instrument went slipping and eliding through its paces. “I never realized how much I hate the clarinet,” I said, “not till now, anyway.”

  Corcoran reached out a cuff-linked wrist to flick off the radio. He seemed to decide something then, swinging the wheel hard to the right to nose the car in at the curb. “Listen,” he said, “John, I hope you’re not going to take this the wrong way, because it can get awkward for all of us, and there’s no reason—”

  Was I glaring at him? I don’t know. All of a sudden, and this was the foremost thing in my mind, grown there full-blown like an instantaneous cancer, I was overcome with a fear of embarrassing myself, of showing my hand—of being petty, hidebound, of being the cuckold. “No,” I said, turning away from him, and I didn’t know what proposition or argument I was dismissing.

  “It doesn’t mean anything. Not a thing. Not between us.” He was turned to me, studying me in profile, and I could feel him there, feel the heat of his breath against the carved wooden mask of my face. “Look, before I did anything I consulted Prok—”

  At first I thought I hadn’t heard him right—Prok? What did Prok have to do with this?—and then the single curt syllable began to reverberate in my head like a pinball ringing up the score. Maybe my ears reddened. Still I didn’t turn to him, but just sat there staring out the window, fighting for control.

  “Well, of course I did. You don’t think I would just—hey, I might have an overactive libido, I admit to it, but I wouldn’t do a thing without Prok’s go-ahead, not anymore, not now, not with the situation out there in the world like it is. That’d be nuts, that’d be suicide.”

  Prok. He’d consulted Prok—Prok, but not me. As if—but I couldn’t finish the thought, because Prok had known all along, Prok had approved, given him the green light and his blessing too, all for one and one for all. And I’d sat there stolidly through the morning while Prok loomed over me dictating letters, my fingers hammering away at the keys of the typewriter as if I were some obsequious little clerk in a Dickens novel. Letter after letter, and never a word about Iris or me. First there were the letters to the parents, then to the principal, the superintendent, the minister and the gas station attendant, and finally, the children.

  Dear Suzy: Uncle Milk and I wanted you to have a very special letter all your own that the mailman will bring to the box just for you. We will write a special letter to your sister, Katie, too, and the mailman will bring it just for her so that she can have one as well. What we want to say, most of all, is how much we enjoyed meeting such a sweet and intelligent girl as yourself and how proud you should be for helping us with our science. Yours Truly, Uncle Kinsey

  “And I think you know how he feels when it comes to the inner circle—we have no secrets, we’re bonded, each of us, together. John, listen, he encouraged me—for your good and mine. And Iris’s, don’t forget Iris.”

  I hadn’t forgotten her, not for an instant.

  Corcoran’s face hung there in the car as if dissociated from his body, the last light of the day laminating his features at the far blurring edge of my peripheral vision, and still I was staring straight ahead. I wouldn’t look at him. I couldn’t. There was a picket fence two doors up, fresh white paint peerless against the unfolding copper-green leaves of the climbing roses that were just then starting to take hold of it. “And there’s Violet, don’t forget Violet. She’s a very passionate woman, John, believe me. And she’ll be here sooner than you know.”

  In my hurt—in my hurt and my refusal to acknowledge it to Corcoran, Prok or Iris or anyone else—I went to Mac. I telephoned beforehand to let her know I was coming—it was Saturday morning, I
ris behind the cash register at the five-and-dime, Prok lecturing his biology students on gametes and zygotes or the sex life of the fruit fly or I don’t know what, nest robbers, parasitic wasps, the cowbird and the cuckoo—and she was waiting for me at the door in a light sweater and her walking shorts. “I thought you might want to go for a walk,” she said, her eyes searching mine.

  I gave her nothing back, just nodded, and we went off empty-handed down the street and through the familiar fields and into the woods beyond. It was coming on to high spring in southern Indiana, the wet black furrows spread open under the sun, wildflowers in the clearings, a smell of mud and ferment under the trees, birds everywhere. And gnats. We swatted them as we moved along, ducking away from one swarm only to walk headlong into another. It was warm where the sun hit us, cool, even a little chilly, in the shade. Mac went out of her way to make small talk—if Prok knew, then she knew—and I give her credit for that, trying to defuse the situation in the way Corcoran had, nothing amiss here, life as usual, the study of sex and the free and unencumbered practice of it inextricably linked, and where were the grounds for complaint? We found a spot in one of the clearings where the sun invested a spike of weather-worn rock with its heat, and made ourselves comfortable.

  For a long while I just sat there, my back against the rock, and let Mac do the talking. She wasn’t saying much, nothing of substance, that is, and I knew what she was doing (“Isn’t that a bluebird over there, on that branch just above the stump, right there, see? They’re getting rare, aren’t they, ever since the starlings invaded, anyway, but don’t you love the smell of the outdoors, especially this time of year? I do. I can’t get enough of it. When I was a girl, oh, no older than eight or nine—have I ever told you this?”) but I didn’t care, it was conversation as anodyne, and I let it wash over me. Gratefully. I don’t know how long this went on—ten minutes, twenty—but eventually she fell silent. I leaned back, closed my eyes and let the sun probe my face. I wanted her, and we’d come here to engage in sex, but I was in no hurry—or maybe I was fooling myself, maybe I didn’t want her at all.