The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  That wasn’t the case here. I didn’t really discuss it with my colleagues, but for my part the sense of standing outside of the action only heightened my response, which was, to say the least, unprofessional. I was aroused, and no doubt about it. The woman—the female—was slim and dark, with perfectly symmetrical breasts, and she wore her hair the way Iris did, the brushed-out curls balling at her throat and shoulder blades as she went through her repertoire; the male was of medium build, his penis uncircumcised and about average in length and breadth (all those penny postcards came to mind, all those measurements duly recorded and addressed to Professor Alfred C. Kinsey, Zoology Department, University of Indiana) and there was something winning in his face, a sense of naïveté or insouciance, as if he weren’t performing a role at all, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have sex with your wife while a third party ran film through a camera. Both of them were attractive. Very attractive. And I’m sorry, because that shouldn’t make an iota of difference to a scientist concerned with individual variation, the homely, overweight and poorly favored every bit as significant as the Venuses and Adonises, but it did. My mouth was dry. My palms were sweating. And the rest—well, the rest of the physiological response should be obvious.

  Immediately, as the film began, the couple were naked, no foreplay or teasing as in the peep shows, the female seated atop the male on a couch, both of them facing the camera. His phallus was visible between her thighs, and she was manipulating it in her fingers and at the same time turning back over her shoulder to lap at his tongue. The scene held a moment, and then they shifted position, she going down to fellate him before he entered her and they went through the usual motions until finally rolling over so that she was atop him, her face to the camera, absolutely rapt, the eyes open and glaring, the mouth slack—almost grimacing—even as the shudder of orgasm ran through her.

  “There,” Prok cried. “See there? That is the expression of female orgasm, precisely, and it cannot be faked. The wife who smiles during coitus or the prostitute with her crying out and all the rest of her theatrics, should see this—every woman should see it.”

  We sat in silence, listening to the ratcheting of the film, contemplating the proposition.

  “Really,” Prok said, even as a second scene presented itself—they were in the kitchen now, she on the counter at waist-level, her legs spread, he visible only as a pair of tensed white buttocks until the camera shifted to show his erection—“this is first-rate work. Should we give them a special citation as friends of the research? What do you think, gentlemen?” Prok was making a joke, or coming as close to it as he was constitutionally able.

  “But seriously,” he added after a moment, “perhaps we should look them up next time we’re in—where was it, Florida?” He glanced round at us, the flicker of the film playing off his face. “I can’t help thinking how this might be improved with a little direct lighting, that is, and perhaps a more adept cameraman—or -woman.”

  Things moved swiftly after that. Prok was already campaigning for more space—new quarters, as befitted our success, with soundproofed interview rooms, individual offices, clerical space, a separate library to house the erotica collection—and the need for a photographic laboratory only added fuel to his argument. Ever since he’d joined the staff, Rutledge, an amateur photographer, had been taking photos of erotic drawings and art objects on loan to us from their owners around the world, and Prok had set up a primitive darkroom in the basement of the house on First Street to assist him here, but now we all saw how inadequate that was. Prok went into high gear. Royalties from the male volume were pouring into the Institute, and he resolved to acquire the finest photographic and cinematic equipment available and to take on a full-time staff photographer as well. That photographer—Ted Aspinall—would become the final member of the inner circle, privy to our deepest secrets and a participant in all that was to come.

  Aspinall was in his early thirties at the time, private, unmarried, rating perhaps a 3 on the 0–6 scale, and he was earning his living as a commercial photographer in Manhattan. Physically, he was somewhat imposing, six feet tall and blocky, with big squared-off hands and a massive bone structure, and yet his manner was anything but—he had the reticent, knowing air of the Greenwich Village hipster, he wore dark glasses even at night and never removed his tan trench coat except, presumably, to go to bed. When the male volume came out, he read it through twice, then telephoned Prok out of the blue to tell him how much it had affected him, and the two of them immediately hit it off. We met him when we were in New York, and then he took up Prok on his invitation to visit the Institute and things progressed from there.

  His first assignment for us was the aforementioned study of the means of sperm emission in the human male, because this was essential to our understanding of conception in the female. The medical literature of the time maintained that it was necessary for sperm to spurt out under pressure in order for fertilization to occur, but our data showed that the majority of males did not spurt but rather dribbled. And so Prok determined on a trial. We went to New York that fall (of 1948, that is, and I recall the date because the trip caused me to miss John Jr.’s first Halloween celebration—Iris dressed him as Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh books, in a costume she’d sewed herself from a pattern, and she was furious with me) and booked rooms, as usual, at the Astor. Aspinall showed up with his business partner, a man around my age whose name escapes me now—let’s call him “Roy,” for convenience’s sake—and Roy, who had extensive H-contacts, assured us he could get us the one thousand volunteers Prok had decided on for a definitive sample.

  Prok was skeptical at first. “One thousand?” he repeated. “Are you sure? Quite sure? Because anything less would be a waste of our time.” We were in our room on the fifteenth floor, looking out over the crush of humanity in the square below. The curtains were open wide—Prok favored light—and the furnishings were what you’d expect from a hotel in the low- to mid-priced range.

  Roy—struck wire, amphetamine-fueled, a little man waving his arms—let his voice ride up the register. “No, no, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. I know this boy, he’s a genius. He’s beautiful. Seventeen years old, perfect skin, hair like Karo syrup, he’s a German refugee, or Austrian maybe, with just a trace of that accent to spice things up, if you know what I mean. Right now he’s the hottest thing on the street, at least in this neighborhood. It’s two dollars for each volunteer, right? And two dollars for the kid for every one he brings in?”

  Prok, frowning, showed him his wallet.

  “Okay,” Roy said, “okay,” and Aspinall gave us a nod of assurance. “Tomorrow night, five p.m., at our studio, right?”

  The following night, Prok, Corcoran and I turned the corner onto the block where Aspinall and his partner ran their photographic business out of the ground floor of a brownstone, and my first thought was that there had been an accident, a fire, people evacuating the building and the hook and ladder on the way. It took me a moment to realize that the line of people stretching the entire block—the line of men, exclusively men—wasn’t leaving the building, but entering it. A number of them recognized Prok as we ducked through the crowd, calling out his name, pressing in for autographs, but Prok gave them his dispassionate face and reminded them that they were participants in a scientific experiment, not a radio quiz program. A hundred hands shot out to touch him notwithstanding, and he shook as many as he could, his grin fixed like a politician’s, as we climbed the stairs and strode through the open door of the studio.

  Everything was ready for us, camera, lights, mise-en-scène and a cast of hundreds, the young blond hustler at the head of the line awaiting the signal even as he chatted up those immediately behind him. “First, first,” he kept insisting, as we squeezed our way into the room, “I do first, and then I go out and bring more custom, ja?”

  Prok gave him a judicious look. Then he separated two bills from the wad of singles he extracted from his pocket and
handed them over. “Yes,” he told him, “yes, good thinking,” and the eyes of the men in the hallway fastened on us as if to memorialize the transaction: this was for real, and so was the money.

  Roy and Aspinall had pushed the furniture back against the wall and created a stage in the center of the room by means of spreading a sheet over the carpet and positioning the lights and camera above it—the idea was for each subject to disrobe, lie on his back on the floor and consummate his business as expeditiously as possible, and the photographers had provided a small mountain of pornographic magazines, both of the homosexual and heterosexual variety, as a stimulus. Aspinall hovered in his trench coat and dark glasses, fidgeting over the equipment, while Roy escorted us to the three chairs he’d set up just out of camera range, and then the filming began.

  We’d budgeted five minutes per man, one after the other coming in, removing his clothes and taking his position on the floor even as the man before him vacated it, a kind of assembly line, but it soon became apparent that we would have to find some means of speeding things up because there were the inevitable delays, subjects unable to perform for the camera, those who needed extra time, a trip to the bathroom and so on. After the first couple of hours we came to realize that just the undressing itself was taking too much time—thirty seconds, forty, a minute—and Prok asked Roy if he wouldn’t have the next several men in line undress in the hallway, distribute the magazines and prepare themselves, as much as possible, beforehand. Corcoran had maintained that it didn’t make much difference whether the men were clothed or not—all that mattered, really, was the penis, the hand and the ejaculation—and I tended to agree, but Prok, accusing us of undermining the project, insisted on full-frontal nudity. “We want everything, technique, facial expression, the works,” he said in a tense whisper, even as the fiftieth or sixtieth subject was going at it on the increasingly soiled sheet, “because all of it is relevant—or will be relevant—in the long run. Jackknifing, for instance.”

  “Jackknifing?” I said aloud, the man before us in the shaft of light pounding at himself as if he meant to tear the organ right out of his body, his expression hateful and cold, hair all over him, bunched on the backs of his knuckles and toes, creeping up over his shoulders and continuous from neck to hairline, an ape of a man, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and if you think sex research is stimulating, believe me, after the initial jolt—whether it be living sex or captured on film—a debilitating sameness sets in. We might as well have been counting salmon going upriver to spawn. It was past midnight. I stifled a yawn.

  “Yes, of course. At orgasm. One percent of our sample reports it, and I should say, Milk, that you, of all people, should be aware of that fact. Very common in some of the lower animals. Rabbit, guinea pig.” Prok looked bored himself. Looked testy. He glanced at the man grunting on the floor, leaned over and said, in a soft voice, “If you could please just come now—”

  We were there ten days in all, and toward the end we tried doubling up the sessions for the sake of expediency, and finally tripling them, Aspinall expertly maneuvering the camera from one subject to the other without once missing the climactic moment. I don’t think any of us, no matter our degree of dedication, had even the slightest inclination to observe masturbation in the human male ever again, but Prok did finally get his one thousand subjects on film and was able, on the basis of it, to settle once and for all the question of the physiology of ejaculation. It was a job well done, if tedious—and expensive, coming to just over four thousand dollars in fees to the subjects and the little blond hustler, who must have been the best-heeled teenager in New York by the time we left—and we were in a mutually congratulatory mood in the train on the way back. I remember Prok springing for drinks as the dining car trawled the night and presented us with fleeting visions of dimly lit waystations and farmhouses saturated in loneliness. I had the fish, Prok the macaroni au fromage, and Corcoran the porterhouse steak. We grinned at each other throughout the meal, and Prok retired early to his berth to write up his observations while Corcoran and I sat up over cards in the club car, drinking cocktails and smoking cigars. I slept like one of the dead.

  The next morning, after driving down from the station at Indianapolis (we’d taken my car so as to leave the Buick and Cadillac free for Mac and Violet, respectively), I dropped off Prok at the Institute and Corcoran at his place, then drove out to the farmhouse. I’d thought of picking up a little gift for Iris—flowers, a box of candy, perfume—but hadn’t got round to it, so I stopped at the market and wandered the aisles till I found something I thought she might like, and it represented a bit of an extravagance for us: a two-pound sack of California pistachios, salted and roasted in the shell. I was all the way up to the counter before I remembered John Jr., and I had to go back and dig a pint of Neapolitan ice cream out of the freezer, and then I wondered if Iris might not have run out of coffee or bread or eggs while I was gone, so I wound up getting some basic supplies too.

  I pulled in under the canopy of the weeping willow out front, its remnant of yellowed branches hanging in a skeletal curtain, and already felt my mood sour. It was always this way. As much as I looked forward to seeing Iris and my son, as much as I held their faces before me as a kind of talisman during the tedious hours of travel and history-taking, the minute I pulled into the drive I saw a host of things that had been neglected in my absence, the trashcan overflowing at the rear of the house, the door to the basement left gaping, the tarp blown clear of the fire-wood. And more: she’d left the porch light burning, no doubt for the whole ten days, and that kind of waste just infuriated me. I bundled the groceries in one arm and took the suitcase in the other, and the first thing I did on mounting the steps was kick the deliquescing remains of a jack-o’-lantern off the corner of the porch. Which made a mess of my shoe. And then I had to fumble with the door, almost dropping the groceries in the process.

  Inside, it was worse. She must have had the thermostat set at a hundred—more waste—and the chemical reek of ammonia from the cat’s litter pan hit me like a fist in the face, and whose job was it to change that? There were toys and infant’s clothes scattered round the living room, newspapers, spine-sprung books, knitting—and food, a smear of it, in two shades of apricot, on the new-painted, or recently painted, wall. I didn’t say anything, didn’t call out her name, just dropped the suitcase at the door, trudged out to the kitchen and set the groceries on the counter. And, of course, the kitchen was a story in itself. I tried to stay calm. I was tired, that was all—irritable, maybe a bit hungry—and Iris had had her hands full, stuck out here all by herself, John Jr. in his roaming phase, getting into everything, needful, always needful. I tried, but even as I mounted the stairs to the bedroom, I could feel a dark knot of irascibility beating at my temples like something shoved under the skin, like a splinter and the hot needle to chase it down.

  Iris was in bed, asleep, curled round the prow of her hip and the sharp terminus of her folded knees; John Jr. stood silently in the playpen at the foot of the bed, clutching the bars and staring at me as if I were a visitation out of the universal unconscious. He had Iris’s eyes exactly. “Hey, champ,” I said, and I squatted down to poke my face in his, “Daddy’s home.”

  My son gave me a smile of sudden stunned recognition, followed by a gurgle of infantile transport, baby joy naked and unfeigned, and I took him under the arms and swung him out of the playpen even as the fecal odor swamped the room: he needed to be changed, had needed to be changed for some time. “Yes,” I cooed, “that’s the boy,” and set him back on his feet behind the wooden slats of his gaudy prison. At which point, he began to wail.

  “What?” Iris pushed herself up, struggling to focus. There were two parallel indentations on her cheek where her face had creased the pillow, red stripes that might have been wounds. She was in her nightgown still, though it was nearly noon. “John? Oh, God, you scared me.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I scare myself sometimes too.” I made no move toward her. John Jr
. began to outdo himself, each shriek building on its predecessor like waves crashing in a storm.

  “Here,” she said, holding out her arms, “give him here.”

  I lifted the squalling bundle of him from the playpen, careful to avoid the wet spot at the crotch of his playsuit. Playpen, playsuit, playmate, playtime: more euphemisms. “He needs to be changed,” I said.

  I watched her fussing over him, the shrieks subsiding into disconnected wails that were like the sound of shingles falling off a roof. The walls closed in on me. Everything was a mess, everything stank. “What,” I said, “are you sick?”

  No, she wasn’t sick, she wasn’t sick at all. She’d never felt better—physically, that is.

  So what was the problem?

  She was depressed.

  “You’re depressed?” I loomed over the bed. Her face was small, a nugget, sidelong and averted. “What about me? I’m the one who had to sit in some rancid overheated room for ten days and watch a thousand men jerk off. You think that’s fun? You think I like it?”

  A silence. The tragic underlip. “Yes, John,” she said finally, her eyes fixed on mine, “I think you do. You do it with Prok, don’t you? And Purvis? And half the tramps and male hustlers in, in—go ahead, hit me. Will that make you feel like a big man, huh, will it?”

  I didn’t hit her. I’ve never hit her and never will. And when I spoke earlier in pugilistic terms, of bouts and rounds, you have to understand that it was meant metaphorically, strictly metaphorically. Certainly we had our disagreements, like anyone else, but violence had no place in them, at least not physical violence. I just turned my back on her and stalked out the door. I might have kicked something against the wall in the living room, a teddy bear or a toy dump truck, I don’t remember, and then I went out in the yard to have a smoke and let the dead gray November sky feed my mood.