by T. C. Boyle
In the confusion, I didn’t get a chance to ask Prok what the problem was—he was already gliding into the back room, conferring with Rutledge over something—and I forgot all about it till he rounded us up an hour later and gathered us in the inner office. We didn’t yet have a conference table—or room for one—and so we just pulled up chairs and settled in. Prok took a seat too, but he didn’t stay seated for long. He had a newspaper in hand, and he fanned it twice and then held it up for us to see: it was a small-town paper, the Star Gazette or Journal Standard or some such. “Remember this place?” he asked, and he was on his feet now, giving us a withering look.
We did remember it, if only vaguely. It was one of the comatose Midwestern towns we’d invaded sometime in the past six months, and it might have had a factory or foundry, a grain elevator, a small Lutheran college maybe, and Prok had addressed the League of Women Voters or the Lions Club or the Intercollegiate Anthropological Society’s Annual Convocation. It hardly mattered to us: we’d got our data and moved on.
“Isn’t that that place in Minnesota?” Corcoran was straddling his chair backward, the dead pipe in his mouth. “The one where we went on that wild-goose chase after the farmer with the giant penis? Or the ostensible giant penis?”
I had a glimmer of recognition. Prok had heard of a man in northern Minnesota whose penis reportedly measured an extraordinary twelve and a quarter inches flaccid—the local M.D. had written him an account of it—and we’d arranged a lecture trip in the vicinity in order to record the measurements. And if it sounds faintly ridiculous to go off in search of some random individual’s rumored appendage, please remember that this is precisely what a taxonomist does, recording the entire range of variety in a given species, from the smallest features to the largest. And further, if you’d expect such an individual to have a name like “Long John” or some such and be famed throughout his community, then you’d be disappointed: these unusual specimens, whether they exhibited extremes at the top or bottom of the scale, were unassuming and all but unknown. As I recall, in fact, we never were able to verify any measurement greater than nine inches, and this particular individual—the farmer—always seemed to be out in some distant field when we came round to investigate.
“No,” Prok said, his mouth tightening, “not actually. This town”—a finger stabbing at the paper’s masthead—“is in Ohio, in point of fact. But that’s not the issue, whether you remember the venue or not. What matters—what’s alarming, actually—is this article here in the lower left-hand corner of the front page.” He handed the paper first to Rutledge, who scanned the article, then passed it on to Corcoran, who finally gave it to me. The piece seemed innocuous enough—of the who, where, when variety of Journalism 101, describing Prok’s lecture to “a packed house eager to hear the findings of the noted sex researcher” at St. Agnes College—but Prok was incensed by it.
“I’ve spoken with the president of St. Agnes, with the editor of the newspaper and the journalist involved, and I’ve let them know in no uncertain terms that this article stands in breach of our verbal agreement that our figures were not to be published, that no specifics whatsoever were to be revealed.” His voice was metallic, laminated with a thin layer of outrage, and he was using the precise diction that became ever more honed and formal when he felt himself pushed into a corner. “And that further, I am considering legal action in that such leakages of our material can be expected to adversely affect the reception of our inaugural volume early next year. What I mean is, if our findings are broadcast now, even by some, some—” He paused, searching for the word.
“Podunk,” Corcoran offered.
“—inconsequential rag in a town far off the beaten path, then we are in real trouble, and if you think this is a laughing matter, Corcoran—or you, Milk—then you are as much enemies of the project as this so-called journalist.”
The smile died on Corcoran’s lips. I dropped my eyes.
“If this should get out to the news magazines—to Time, Newsweek, any of them—it will bury us before we get started.”
There was a silence. I became aware of the heat clanking on somewhere in the depths of the building. Rutledge was the first to speak up. “But, Prok, as far as I can see from a quick scan, there really isn’t much in the way of figures here—”
“Oh, no?” Prok waved the paper as if it had caught fire. “What about this then—‘Because of the unrealistic and proscriptive nature of existing sex laws, Dr. Kinsey asserted, the general populace is driven to what is now branded criminal activity; in his home state of Indiana, population three million, five hundred thousand, the Indiana University zoologist estimates that there are some ninety million nonmarital sexual acts performed annually’?”
Rutledge was sitting ramrod straight in his chair. He lifted a hand to stroke his mustache, then thought better of it. “Well, yes, Prok, I see what you mean, but that hardly qualifies as tipping our hand, if that’s what you’re afraid of—this is one statistic out of a thousand. Ten thousand.”
“He’s right, Prok,” Corcoran put in. “Or you’re both right. They shouldn’t have printed that, shouldn’t have printed anything other than maybe a general description of the talk, but I think you’re blowing it out of proportion, I mean, this is just some podunk—”
“And that’s where you’re wrong, Corcoran, categorically. Any slippage weakens us. And you, Rutledge, with your experience in the military, you above all should appreciate this—‘loose lips,’ eh? Wasn’t that the motto?” Prok was pacing now, working himself up, alternately brandishing the paper and balling his fist. “The interest is building out there, you know it is. Once they get a whiff of it, they’ll come after us like hounds, and they’ll take our figures out of context and make us out to be charlatans or cranks along the order of the Nudists or Vegetarians or the Anti-Vivisection Society. Imagine what they’ll do with a table like the one John drew up for us contrasting the peak age of sexual activity for male and female? Or the prevalence of H-activity? Or extramarital relations?”
No one said a word.
“Well you’d better imagine it. And you’d better brace yourselves. Because the invasion is coming.”
That was the beginning of paranoia, and throughout the year, as Prok struggled through the writing of the first volume and we punched data cards and produced the calculations and traveled as a team to collect histories while he lectured across the Midwest and in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, we were never clear of it. Prok had given over a thousand lectures in the past five years, and the ground rules for every last one of them were the same: no publication of specifics, no statistics, no sensationalizing. Since he’d never charged a fee for his public lectures (and wouldn’t begin to do so until after the male volume was published and the expenses of the Institute demanded it), at the very least he expected civility, probity and discretion from his auditors and sponsors. For the most part, he got it. But there were leaks, as with the paper from the little town in Ohio, and as Sexual Behavior in the Human Male neared completion and was set in (closely guarded) proofs, the press went mad after the scent of it, trying one gambit after another to pry loose information from us. We got letters, wires, telephone calls, people showed up at the door from places as far afield as Oregon, Florida and Maine, and in one case, Lugano, Italy, and Prok was polite but firm with them all: there would be no exclusives, no excerpts, no information whatever dispensed prior to publication for fear of sensationalizing a very sensitive subject. And, of course, the more we denied them, the more eager they were.
Even I was drawn into it. I recall an incident from later that year—it must have been late May or early June, Iris big as a house, the weather turned brooding and muggy. I was overworked, keyed up, feeling the stress of Prok’s ceaseless push to produce—and the sting of his temper too, as nothing I nor anyone else did seemed to be quite up to his standards—and after a long day of calculating correlation coefficients, medians, means and standard deviations from the mean,
I wasn’t ready to go home. I felt—blue, I guess you would call it. The house, as Prok had predicted, was in need of more attention than I could give it—a windstorm had taken the gutters and half the shingles off the roof over the bedroom, for one thing, and the pipes were so rusty our drinking water looked as if it had been distilled and bonded over the state line in Kentucky, and that was just the start of it, termites in the floor joists, mice in the walls, dry rot behind the tub—and the Dodge, my pride and joy, the one possession I truly loved, was up on the lift at Mike Martin’s garage with a frozen transmission. Five point two miles each way, a real trek, and Prok had been right there too. Corcoran had swung by for me that morning and Prok had offered to give me a lift home, but I didn’t want to impose, and as I say, I wasn’t going home. I called Iris and told her I was planning to head over to the garage to see about the car, and then, if it wasn’t ready, I’d probably have a couple drinks and catch a ride home later.
“And if it is?” she said, her voice small and distant.
“I don’t know,” I said. “But don’t wait dinner for me.”
There was a pause. We hadn’t been getting on as well as we might have, and that was my fault, I admit it, what with the pressures of work and her moods—you would have thought no woman had ever been pregnant in the history of the world before. As she put on weight, as she settled into the awkwardness of pregnancy, flat-footed, distended, sloppy in her personal habits, I began to have second thoughts about this baby, this child, and I suppose every father goes through that sort of thing—one day you’re ecstatic, and the next you think your life is over. Or maybe I had it worse. Maybe I wasn’t ready, after all. Did I resent the child? Did I resent the fact that my wife was in her eighth month and we weren’t having marital relations anymore and that just the night before she’d declined to satisfy me with her mouth or even her hand?
“That’s all right, John,” she said after a moment. “You need a break, don’t you? I understand. Go out and have a couple of drinks, but be careful if you do wind up driving home.” There was a click over the line, and I thought she’d hung up, but then her voice came back: “Did Mike say how much the car was going to be?”
“I don’t know. Fifty dollars, maybe sixty, seventy. Who knows?”
“Oh, John.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”
There was no one I recognized at the tavern, a new crop of students, two men my age at the end of the bar who might have been lecturers or assistant lecturers, a smattering of women sitting with men in shirtsleeves, the jukebox going, the bartender presiding with his swollen, tenderized face. It was hot and the ceiling fan wasn’t doing much to improve the situation. I settled in with a beer and bourbon chaser and lost myself in the newspaper. After a while—I might have been on my second round, I suppose—I became aware of movement to my right, of someone hovering there on the periphery, and I looked up absently into the face of Richard Elster. He was smiling, as if he were glad to see me, and there was another man with him—tall, thin-faced, in a dark wool suit that looked expensive and much too heavy for the place and the season—and he was smiling too, as if we were old acquaintances. “Hi, John,” Elster said, “nice to see you. This is Fred Skittering. Fred, John.”
We shook hands, and then Fred Skittering said something about how hot it was and he reached up to pull his tie loose and unfasten the top button of his shirt collar. “No reason to stand on formality here, is there?” he said. “We are in Indiana, after all, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” I said, “that we are.”
Elster’s grin was of the canned variety, and there was something in his eyes I should have been alert to. Years had gone by since I’d worked as his underling and we saw each other almost daily in the corridors of Biology Hall, and yet there had always been a coldness between us. As I’ve said, he was the petty sort, and though Prok had put him in charge of that part of our library that remained on the shelves—that is, the tamer books in the field—he never forgave me my elevation above him. Generally, he passed me in the hall or on the walk out front of the building without so much as a nod—and now, here he was, elbowing in beside me at the bar, all smiles, with his sliver-faced friend in the big-city suit. Warning bells should have gone off in my head, but I was preoccupied and I was drinking and I just looked from Elster to his friend and back again, chasing round a smile myself. I suppose, in my mood, I was glad for the company.
I watched them order, light cigarettes, watched the bartender move heavily from the tap and set down two beers on the counter before them. Fred Skittering drained his in a gulp, while Elster raised the glass to his lips with both hands, like a priest with the chalice, and took a delicate sip. Both of them set down their glasses with a sigh of satisfaction, and then Elster leaned in confidentially and asked, “Everything going all right with Iris? It’s her first, isn’t it?”
I didn’t know what to say. This was the first I knew that he was even aware I was married, let alone that my wife was pregnant.
“You know, Claudette’s expecting too—in three weeks, actually. This’ll be our third—we’ve got one of each now, and she wants a girl, but I’m hoping for another boy.” He bent to his beer. Skittering held on to his smile. “They have the same obstetrician,” Elster went on, “the one Prok recommended. He did recommend Bergstrom to you, didn’t he?”
Again, I was astonished. Prok? He was calling Kinsey Prok? “You—I didn’t know, well, that you—and Prok, that is—”
“Oh, yes, yes. We’ve been conferring on the library quite a bit, you know. Space, that’s what we’re looking for, more space.”
Skittering flagged down the bartender. “Another round,” he said, and what I heard in his voice was New York, cab drivers, alleyways, nightclubs. “And buy one for John here too,” he said. “On me.”
The beers came, and a shot of bourbon with each of them. I thanked Skittering and we made small talk awhile. What did he do for a living? Oh, he traveled. For a company. Nothing exciting really. “And what about you?” he asked.
I told him I worked with Dr. Kinsey.
“The sex researcher?”
“I’m part of his staff.” I drank off the bourbon and chased it with a long pull at the beer. “The first person he took on, actually,” I said, and I couldn’t help the pride from creeping into my voice. “I’ve been with him since the beginning.”
“Really?” he said. “Well, that’s certainly interesting.” And he tipped his head back to drain the shot glass while Elster, his grin still in place, toyed with his own. “But uh, sex research—how exactly do you go about that, I mean, you can’t just burst into people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, can you? Say, barkeep,” he called and made a circular motion with one hand to indicate that another round was in order. “What is it, surveys and the like?”
I’m sure you’ve already anticipated me, of course—I was being played here, and by a past master. Fred Skittering, as it turned out, had been a war correspondent and had made something of a name for himself in the European Theater, a name I might have recognized in another connection. But here, in Bloomington, in the neighborhood tavern I’d been frequenting since my student days, it went right by me. He was working for the Associated Press even as he stood there at the bar, though I didn’t yet know it and I’d already taken the bait. “Surveys?” I gave a disdainful shrug. “Surveys are all but useless. Think of it: where’s the control? You get a survey in the mail and either you fill it out or you don’t, either you’re honest and forthcoming or not, and who’s to know the difference? No, our methods”—I lowered my voice—“our methods are as scientific and statistically reliable as you could ever hope to get.”
A period of time went by. People drifted in and out of the bar. Beyond the windows, at the far end of the street where the trees gave out, lightning snaked across the horizon. I was never particularly loquacious, never one to run off at the mouth, as our lower-level subjects might have put it, but I just couldn’t seem to stop
talking that night. Maybe it was my mood. The weather. Iris. Maybe it was just shop talk—I was inordinately proud of what we were accomplishing, Prok, Corcoran, Rutledge and I, four against the world, and yet I was frustrated too because to this point we’d kept it all so close. Here was a sympathetic ear. Here was Elster—and this stranger—and who would have guessed?
What saved me was Betty. I was on the verge of compromising the project, undermining Prok’s faith in me, embarrassing myself in the deepest, most hopeless way, the way of the apostate, the quisling, the dupe, when Betty appeared. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since she’d played the female lead in the previous fall’s demonstration in Prok’s attic—I didn’t even remember her name actually. But there she was, ducking through the door with another young woman, both of them dressed casually, in skirt and blouse, as if they were students—or wanted to be taken for students. I looked up and we exchanged a glance, and then she was slipping into a booth at the far end of the room in a single graceful movement, one hand going to the back of her thighs to smooth out her skirt as she slid over the slick wooden surface of the bench. Skittering was saying something about another sex survey he’d heard of—in Denmark, he thought it was—while Elster (his shill? his Judas?) leaned over his elbows and concentrated on my face.
I saw the girl—Betty, and her name came to me in a flash—glance up at me again as the waitress set two martinis down on the table. She gave me a smile when she saw that I’d recognized her, the child’s eyes fading into the woman’s face, the prominent cheekbones, the sharp teeth, her hair pinned up at the crown and spilling into a complex of curls at her shoulders. I smiled back even as Skittering said, “But Kinsey, the man, I mean, what’s it like working with him?” and because I was drunk, I raised my glass and saluted her across the room.
And then I was back in the moment, regarding Elster’s face—the face of a saboteur, not a friend or well-wisher—in a whole new light. I took a moment, studying Skittering now, and all at once I understood. Skittering had got to Elster, and Elster had got to me, and what they were after wasn’t statistics, but something deeper, more dangerous. I shrugged. “He’s a genius,” I said. “A great man. The greatest man I’ve ever known.”