The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  But Prok. This is how I remember him, how I want to remember him:

  I see Corcoran and me pulling up to the curb outside Wylie Hall, a winter’s day, five or six years ago. We are in Corcoran’s Cadillac and both of us are exhausted after the long drive out from New York City on roads slick with ice and fraught with potholes and a hundred other hazards. We’ve driven straight through, relieving each other at the wheel, and my stomach is queasy from too many cups of coffee and the blue-plate special at some anonymous diner in a town I’ve already forgotten. What we’re carrying is precious cargo—a group of outsized clay models left to the Institute by the late Robert Latou Dickinson, along with his library, the histories he’d taken, his sex diaries and erotica collection. The models are of human genitalia, depicted in the act of coitus, in a scale of roughly five to one, so that the phallus is nearly a yard long and the clay vagina meant to receive it proportional in every way. In all, we’ve transported seven of these models, and given their various angles and excrescences, it was no mean feat to maneuver them into the trunk and backseat of the car on the frigid streets of New York while a not-inconsiderable crowd of kibitzers looked on, and now, exhausted, we are faced with the task of removing them safely from the car and hustling them down the steps of the building, through the corridor and into the library without attracting undue attention.

  We’ve had Prok’s advice, by both letter and telephone—his very exacting advice as to routes, padding to protect the models, the ideal speed we should maintain, how much rest we should need and where we should stop for meals, et cetera—and we can both hear his voice in our heads as we throw open the door and begin fumbling with the first of the models, the one with the fragile outsized phallus. It is windy. A cold rain has begun to fall. One misstep and the model is forever destroyed. I want only to be done with this, to be home with Iris and my son, sitting by the fire with a glass of bourbon and something warm and wholesome in my stomach, and my attention has wandered. I’m bushed. I tug in one direction, Corcoran in the other.

  Then I hear Prok behind me. “I’m sorry, Milk,” he says, “but I can see that you don’t know the first thing about unloading an automobile. Here,” he says, “let me,” and I feel him take the load from me as if it had never been there at all.

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction, and all characters and situations have been invented, with the exception of the historical figures of Alfred C. Kinsey and his wife, Clara Bracken (McMillen) Kinsey. I am indebted to Dr. Kinsey’s biographers—Cornelia Christenson, Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, James H. Jones and Wardell B. Pomeroy—for much of the factual material delineating the details of their lives. In addition, I would like to thank Jenny Bass and Shawn C. Wilson of the Kinsey Institute for their help and generosity.

  A Note on the Author

  T.C. Boyle’s novels include World’s End, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, Riven Rock, A Friend of the Earth, Drop City (which was a finalist for the National Book Awards), The Women and When the Killing’s Done. His short story collections include After the Plague, Tooth and Claw and Wild Child, and his stories appear regularly in most major magazines, including the New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, Granta and the Paris Review. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages.

  By the Same Author

  Novels

  When the Killing’s Done

  The Women

  Talk Talk

  Drop City

  A Friend of the Earth

  Riven Rock

  The Tortilla Curtain

  The Road to Wellville

  East Is East

  World’s End

  Budding Prospects

  Water Music

  Short Stories

  Wild Child

  Tooth and Claw

  The Human Fly

  After the Plague

  T.C. Boyle Stories

  Without a Hero

  If the River Was Whiskey

  Greasy Lake

  Descent of Man

  First published in Great Britain 2005

  This paperback edition published 2005

  Copyright © 2004 by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise

  make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means

  (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying,

  printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the

  publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication

  may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages

  Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 36 Soho Square, London W1D 3QY

  A CIP catalogue record is available from the British Library

  eISBN 9781408826775

  www.tcboyle.co.uk

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