The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Did you hear that?” Iris was bent over the stroller, vanilla ice cream running like white blood over her fingers, our son’s hands jerking in clonic display, and the train just pulling into the station with a long attenuated shriek of the brakes.

  “What?”

  “The baby. He just said ‘ice cream’ clear as day.”

  “No,” I said, “did he?”

  “His first words, John. ‘Ice cream.’ I heard him.”

  I have a picture of that moment in my head, Iris squatting over the baby, her hair in a ponytail, shoulders bare and freckled with the sun, her shorts riding up her thighs, her sandals and painted toenails and the shining arches of her feet, and the train standing there like an illusion, a moving wall, abracadabra. I bent to my son, one eye on the passenger cars as the doors wheezed open. “Ice cream,” I said. “Ice cream, Johnnie.”

  A jerk of the fleshy arms, the glutinous hands clapping together in accidental percussion. And the reduced gurgling glissade of sound: “Iiiice,” John Jr. said. “Iiiice.”

  When I looked up, Professor Shadle was standing there with his suitcase in hand. He was in his mid-sixties, short—very short, almost dwarfish—with a pronounced midsection and clumps of white hair that might have been cotton balls stuck randomly to his skull. “Beautiful baby,” he murmured.

  “Oh, excuse me,” I said, rising to my feet to take his damp dwarfish hand in my own. “Professor Shadle, welcome. To, well, to Indiana. We met in Buffalo, you remember?”

  “Yes,” he said, in a lisping rasp, his eyes ducking away from mine. “Of course.”

  “And this is my wife, Iris. And our son, John Jr.”

  “He just said his first words,” Iris put in. She was beaming. “Aside from ‘mama’ and ‘dada,’ I mean.”

  The professor lifted his eyebrows. “Really? And what were these momentous words?”

  “Ice cream,” we said in unison, and then there was the echo of the little voice beneath us, John Jr. mute no more. Two words, thin as wire: Iiiice keen.

  “Beautiful,” the professor breathed. “Just beautiful.” And he left it at that.

  In the evening there was a dinner in Professor Shadle’s honor at the house on First Street, Prok having whipped up one of his goulashes with a side of homemade coleslaw (“For the cooling effect”), after which we retired to the living room to watch the films on equipment Prok had borrowed from the audiovisual department at the university. Shadle had eight films in all, each sequestered in a round tin, and he chattered happily with Prok as he meticulously threaded the first of them through the projector. We were all there, all of us of the inner circle, and the atmosphere was relaxed and convivial—in fact there was a real air of pleasurable anticipation, as if we’d all gone to the picture show and were sitting there in the dark awaiting the first flickers of light to illuminate the screen.

  “All we need is popcorn,” Hilda Rutledge said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “And Jujubes,” Iris said, “don’t forget Jujubes.”

  “You like those—Jujubes? Really?” Violet Corcoran was sitting on the floor, on the rag rug, her elbows propped up on the chair behind her. “They practically pull the fillings out of your teeth. Dots,” she said. “Give me Dots anytime.”

  “What about jawbreakers?” This was Corcoran, leaning in, hands clasped over his knees. “That’s what we had as kids. Last the whole movie, double feature even.”

  “Sure,” Iris said, “if you don’t suck or swallow—or use your teeth. Use your teeth and they’re gone in no time. We used to go through a whole bag of jawbreakers in a double feature. Remember that, John—that candy store across from the movie theater? Laura Hutchins and I used to buy the stuff there and smuggle it in.”

  I gave her a smile. I was happy, feeling relaxed and tranquil, and for once alcohol had nothing to do with it. “At about half the price they charged in the theater.”

  “Captive audience,” Corcoran said with a shrug. “You can’t blame them for trying to make a good Yankee dollar.”

  “No,” Iris said, “but you can save a good Yankee nickel if you think ahead, but of course most kids don’t.”

  “Licorice whips,” Hilda said.

  Iris’s eyes went distant. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “licorice whips. Yeah. But the red ones, only the red ones—”

  The women were in summer dresses, their shoulders bare, their limbs fluid, poured like liquid, bare flesh, the hovering light, and Prok at the shades now, closing down the fading sun while Professor Shadle worked at the projector. We were in shirtsleeves—Rutledge, Corcoran and I, and Corcoran was even sporting a pair of shorts in a bright madras pattern—but Prok was wearing his jacket and bow tie still, and I wondered about that until it occurred to me that he was putting on a show of formality for his colleague from Buffalo. Shadle had no such scruples. He’d come to dinner in a voluminous Hawaiian shirt, through which he sweated steadily as he bent to the projector. “You’ll be seeing Dannie—he’s a year younger—and Peterkin,” he said, in a voice that lifted away from his conversation with Prok to address us all. “They were wed last year, or at least that’s the way I like to put it. But you’ll see, in just a”—he paused to focus on pulling the last loop of film through the projector and attaching it to the take-up reel—“in just a minute.”

  Prok said nothing. He’d completed his round of the windows, and the room was illuminated now only by the lamp that stood behind the projector. It was noticeably hotter with the shades drawn, and there was an aggregate smell of us, of the inner circle, the gently perspiring odor of our humanity, friends and colleagues all, casually gathered on yet another social occasion. Prok said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking—he was thinking that “wed” was just a euphemism, a convenience, and that Professor Shadle, despite his training as a biologist, was dangerously close to falling into the category of the sex shy. I wondered if we had his history.

  But then, just as Shadle straightened up and flicked on the projector, the door from the kitchen swung open and Mac appeared, her thin white arms bowed before her under the weight of the biggest ceramic bowl in the house, and the scent of fresh-popped corn, invested liberally with butter and salt, filled the room. “Well,” she laughed, setting the bowl down on the coffee table, “I thought since we are having a picture show,” and there was a corresponding whoop from Hilda.

  “Perfect,” Hilda exclaimed, “perfect.” She drew up her legs and leaned forward to dip her hand in the bowl. “Did you know we were just reminiscing about the movies, and here we are, with popcorn and everything?”

  And then the lamp snapped off and the projector began to click and groan and the first flickers of substance illuminated the silica granules of the screen Prok had set up at the far end of the room. I saw a patch of grass, wavering and dark, the camera jumping in the next frame to the pocked gray trunks of a grove of pine trees surrounded by a hurricane fence, and then we were in the enclosure and the creatures were there, two dense clots of life rising up out of the backdrop till they filled the screen and the camera drew back. The animals’ quills were combed down like the densest of beards, only their eyes and the occasional glimpse of their teeth shining through. They seemed to sniff at each other, nose to nose, like dogs meeting for the first time, and then, to the prompting of Shadle’s narration (“Now watch, this is precious”), they rose up simultaneously on their hind legs and embraced, their black-lipped mouths coming together as if for a kiss. The whole operation was slow and stately, a kind of porcupine minuet.

  Prok let out a low chuckle of delight. “Foreplay,” he said, in a wondering voice, “they’re engaging in foreplay.”

  And so they were. Beasts, mere beasts, and they might have been human, philosophers in their long coats, coming together in the tenderest way, taking their time, enjoying themselves.

  Hilda Rutledge made a clicking noise, tongue to palate, and said, “Aren’t they cute?”

  “Which one’s the girl?” Iris wanted to know.

>   “That’s Peterkin on the right,” Shadle whispered, and it was as if we were in a church, kneeling in the pews. “She’s never been bred before—or Dannie either.”

  “So this is their first date?” Hilda’s voice floated up out of the darkness, making a joke of it.

  No one answered her.

  Now, up on the screen, the animals slowly descended to all fours and the male began to press on the female’s haunches until suddenly she opened up to him, the barbed quills magically unfolding to reveal the place of entry. The male nosed her there a moment, then entered her with a series of rapid thrusts before withdrawing to lick his penis clean. And that was it. It was over. Someone—I think it was Corcoran—began to clap, and then we all applauded, Prok among the loudest, and I remember his laughter too. He took the purest, most uncomplicated delight in these films, and the films that were to come, not only of the lower animals but of the human animal too, and that delight, as much as anything, helped to keep him going.

  But already Shadle was hushing us, because the camera was again hovering over the animals, the light different—brighter now, another day—and the courtship went on again and again, through eight full reels.

  Later, as we strolled out to the car, I asked Iris what she’d thought of it all. She’d been in a giddy mood all night, girlish and quick to laugh, the business with Corcoran and Violet long behind us now, and I had a sense that she’d enjoyed herself, really enjoyed herself, for the first time in a long while. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was better than I thought it would be, I guess.”

  “Yeah, it was really something, wasn’t it? I didn’t know what to expect really, but it was nice, don’t you think? Charming. They were charming. Almost like—”

  “People?”

  I let out a laugh. “Exactly.”

  The night was still. Fireflies traced perforated lines over the flowerbeds and up into the trees as if they were all working in concert on some elaborate design we could only guess at. There was a powerful smell of the chicken manure Prok and I had spread on the flowerbeds the previous weekend, and something else too, a scent of the earth itself, worked and reworked under Prok’s tireless spade. “But isn’t that the point?” she said. “That we’re really no better than—what are they, rodents? They mate and so do we, right?”

  “Sure,” I said, giving a shrug she couldn’t see because it was fully dark now. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

  We were silent a moment and I opened the car door for her and then leaned in and pressed my lips to hers. My hands found her shoulders, the silken flesh of her upper arms, and I smoothed back her hair and kissed her throat. We held the pose for a long moment because we were young still, still in love, and John Jr. was with the babysitter and this was what couples did when they were free of responsibility and the night opened up above them into the dark avenues of the universe that had no reason or end. “Mmm,” she said finally, her lips brushing mine, “maybe we should watch the porcupines going at it more often. You think Professor Shadle would mind coming over to the house for a command performance?”

  “No,” I whispered, “we don’t need the learned professor or his porcupines either,” and then the door of the house swung open behind us—a parallelogram of yellow light painted on the walk—and there was the sound of voices, footsteps, high heels rapping at the pavement. I backed out of the car, shut the door on Iris, and circled round to the driver’s side. “We don’t need anybody,” I said, sliding into the seat and laying a hand on her knee before letting it ride up her thigh under the thin summer dress.

  “No,” she said, “not even Prok.”

  That was when the Corcorans emerged from the front yard, their voices twined in murmurous oblivion, and we sat in the darkness of the cab and watched them turn up the walk, arm in arm. I reached for the keys then, to start up the car and take us home, but Iris stopped me. Her hand was on mine, and she guided me back to her, to her naked thighs and the pushed-up rumple of her dress. “You don’t mean—not here?” I whispered.

  “Yes,” she said. “Here. Right here.”

  7

  Film was the new medium, we all saw that, and we understood from the beginning—from that night at Prok’s with Professor Shadle and those indelible images of his amorous porcupines—that it would revolutionize the course of our research. Whereas before we’d been able to observe sexual activity in the flesh, first with Ginger and her clients and then, much more transparently, with Betty and Corcoran, now we had a means to record it so that the sequence of events—from passivity to arousal, engorgement and penetration—could be studied over and over for the details that might have escaped notice in the heat of the moment. And it was especially valuable at this juncture because we were now beginning to turn our attention to sexual behavior in the female. Not only did we have to make sense of a mountain of data, we needed to observe and record physiologic reaction as well, so that we could, for instance, determine individual variation in the amount of fluid secreted by the Bartholin’s glands or settle once and for all the debate Freud initiated over the question of the vaginal versus clitoral orgasm.

  It was almost as if the public anticipated us. If we were inundated with mail—letters seeking advice, hastily scrawled notes criticizing our methods, morals and sanity, offers of every sort of sexual adventure imaginable—we also began to receive films. Some of them, of the mating behavior of rats, pigeons and mink, came from a coterie of animal behaviorists Prok had cultivated over the years (the mink were magnificent, as close to sadomasochists as you could find in a state of nature, both partners rendered bloody by the time the affair was consummated), while others—crudely shot on eight-millimeter black-and-white film—were from friends of the research and they depicted human sex. I remember the first of them quite distinctly. We’d just come out of a staff meeting—it must have been a Friday, our regular meeting day—to find Mrs. Matthews at her desk in the anteroom, sorting through the morning’s mail. “Dr. Kinsey,” she called as we emerged from the back room, “you might want to have a look at this.”

  The letter that accompanied the film was from a young couple in Florida who lavishly praised our research efforts (“It’s about time someone had the courage to stand up and lead this puritanical society out of the sexual Dark Ages”) and expressed, at considerable length (something like twenty-two pages, if memory serves), their own somewhat garbled but libertine philosophy with regard to sex. In essence, they felt that sex was one of the grounding pleasures of life and should be appreciated without constraint, and as they were both highly sexed, they’d enjoyed relations two or three times a day since their marriage six years earlier and claimed to be all the healthier for it, both mentally and physically. The enclosed film, they hoped, would not only demonstrate the unbridled joy they took in the activity, but also provide a valuable addition to our research archives. “Use it freely,” they concluded, “and show it widely,” and signed themselves “Blissful in West Palm Beach.” They included a return address and a telephone number, in the event we’d like to contact them for a live demonstration.

  We’d all gravitated to our desks, but we couldn’t help keeping an eye on Prok as he read through the letter. At first, there was no reaction, his expression dour and preoccupied, the glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose, but he began to smile and even chuckle to himself as he went on. “Listen to this,” he called out, the old enthusiasm firing his voice, and he began to quote from the letter until he wound up reading the whole of the last two pages aloud. When he’d finished, he lifted the film canister from his desk and held it up so that we could all see it, and it might have been an exhibit in a court of law, he the judge and we the jury. He was smiling, grinning wide—it was the old grin, the one that had been missing lately, seductive, boyish, devil-may-care, quintessential Prok. “You know,” he said, and even Mrs. Matthews paused in her furious assault on the typewriter keys, “I do think it might just behoove us to stay past five this evening and arrange a private
screening here in the offices. What do you say—Corcoran? Rutledge? Milk? Am I stepping on any toes here?”

  No one objected.

  “Good,” he said. “Good. We’ll just call our wives and delay dinner a bit, then.” The grin was gone now, no hint of it left, even in his eyes. “In the interest of science, that is,” he said, and turned back to his work.

  I telephoned Iris and told her I’d be late—something had come up, yes, another nature film Prok was hot on—and then watched the clock till the hour struck five and Mrs. Matthews tidied up her desk, pulled the vinyl cover over her typewriter and left for the day. Prok never glanced up. He was busy, head down, charging through an opinion on a court case that had been consuming him lately—a man in Pennsylvania, victim of a barbarously antiquated statute, was being tried for performing oral sex on his own wife—and he didn’t want to appear overeager to view the film, though I could see from certain characteristic gestures, the tapping of a pencil on the spine of the text before him, a repetitive running of his fingers through his hair, that he was as anxious over the film as we were.

  We worked in silence for another quarter hour, exchanging glances among ourselves, till finally Corcoran pushed himself up from his desk with a sigh and made a conspicuous show of stretching. “Well,” he said, “Oscar, John, what do you think—isn’t it getting to be that time?”

  Prok looked up from his work, then stole a quick glance at his watch.

  “Prok? What do you say?”

  The film was of surprisingly good quality, and since both participants were present throughout, that brought up the rather interesting question of who might have been behind the camera for what proved to be as unexpurgated and varied a performance as the one we’d all witnessed in the flesh on the night Corcoran introduced us to Betty. But this was different, very different. I’m no student of film and doubtless this has been observed many times before, but there was something about the distance and anonymity of the viewer that made the performance all the more stimulating. In the raw—with Corcoran and Betty, that is, with Ginger and her clients—there was always a sense of uneasiness, of fragility, as in a theater production when a single gesture or comment from the audience could break the spell and bring the whole thing down.