The Inner Circle

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  My face must have shown my surprise, because few even of our highest-rating individuals would have approached that numerical category. “Per week?” I asked. And then, stupidly, “Or is that a monthly approximation?”

  Now it was her turn to blush, just the faintest reddening of the flesh under both cheekbones and around the flanges of her nostrils. “Oh, no,” she said. “No. I’m afraid that would be daily.”

  If Iris was at all miffed that I wasn’t there to greet her and Tommy and help drag her steamer trunk up three flights of stairs at the women’s dorm, she didn’t show it. Prok and I returned to Bloomington early on the morning of the fourth day, as planned—he still had his teaching schedule to work around in those days—and I went straight to the office to transcribe the coded sheets and add incrementally to our burgeoning data on human sexual behavior, and I should say that this was always exciting, in the way, I suppose, of a hunter returning from a successful expedition with his bag limit of the usual birds and perhaps a few of the exotic as well. (Further to the above interview, incidentally: please don’t think that all the interviewees had such a rich and extensive sex life as that young faculty wife. Much more typical, of the females especially, was a record of sexual repression, guilt and limited experience, both in number of partners and activities. I should add too, just to close out the anecdote, that the moment the door shut behind her—Mrs. Foshay—I couldn’t help relieving the pressure in my groin, though if Prok had heard of it he would have skinned me alive—professionalism, professionalism was the key word, at least on the surface. At least in the beginning. I came to orgasm in record time, the stale room still redolent with her perfume and the heat of her presence, and I barely had time to mop up with my handkerchief and tuck myself away before the next knock came at the door and the acne-stippled face of a nineteen-year-old sociology student, who wouldn’t have recognized the female genitalia if they’d been displayed for him on a gynecologist’s examining table, appeared in the doorway. He gave me a steady look, then said—or rather, croaked—“Am I in the right place?”)

  But Iris. Immediately after work I rushed across campus to the dorm. Earlier, when it looked as if Prok and I wouldn’t be finished till seven or so, I’d left a telephone message with the RA to the effect that I would come straight from work and take her to dinner (Iris, that is, not the RA), so she should hold off eating. And, though it was the RA I was talking with and so couldn’t really express much of what I was feeling, I added that I was looking forward to seeing her. After such a long time, that is. Very much. Very much so.

  I got there at quarter past seven, but Iris kept me waiting. I don’t know what she was doing—making me suffer just a bit on general principles, taking extra care with her dress and makeup so as to reinforce the impression she would make on me, falling back on the prerogative of women, as the pursued, to do whatever they damned well pleased—but I found myself jumping up from the sofa every other minute and pacing round the lounge, much to the dismay of the RA, who was at least putting on a show of reading from the book spread out on the desk before her. I was keyed up, and I couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was the anticipation—nearly three months apart, the exchange of letters and snapshots, the protestations of love on both sides—which was only to be expected. I couldn’t say that I’d been lonely over the summer, not exactly, not with Mac and Prok and the long hours I’d put in both traveling and at my desk, but I guess I did use the letters as an opportunity of opening up to her my hopes and aspirations (and fears; I was in line to receive my draft notice, as was practically every other man on campus), and that made the moment of our reunion all the more significant. And fraught. I’d quoted love poems to her as well—“Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,/Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!”—and now I would have to make good on all of that. And so would she. But did she care for me still? Had she found someone else? Was I worthy of her?

  It was nearly eight, and at least thirty women had come down the stairs and passed through the portals of the inner sanctum to meet and embrace their dates and go off to the pictures or the skating rink or the backseat of the car, when Iris finally appeared. I’d been pacing, and I was at the far end of the lounge, my back to the room, when I heard the faint wheeze of the door pulling back against the pneumatic device that kept it closed. I jerked round and there she was. Can I state the obvious? She was very beautiful, and beyond beautiful: she was special, one in a million, because I’d been writing to her and thinking of her all summer, because she was Iris McAuliffe and she was mine if I wanted her. I knew that then, knew it in the minute I saw her. This was love. This was it.

  But how did she look? She’d curled her hair so that it hung in a succession of intricate lapping waves at her shoulders and framed the locket at her throat, the locket I’d given her, and whose picture was in that locket? Her dress—blue, sleeveless, cut to the knee—was new, purchased for the occasion, and her eyes, always her focal point, seemed to leap across the room at me (an illusion, I later realized, that was enhanced by the skillful application of mascara, eye shadow and rouge). She seemed smaller, darker, prettier than I’d remembered. I just stood there, helpless, and watched her as she crossed the carpet to me and let me hold her and kiss her.

  “You’re back,” she said.

  “Yes. And so are you. Did I miss Tommy?”

  She nodded. “He had work, so he was only here for the day. He was disappointed, but he knew you were—where were you again?”

  “Purdue. And DePauw.”

  “He knew you were working.” The RA had fixed her eyes on us as if she had the power to look right through the layers of our clothing and our skin to reduce and examine our bones and even the marrow within. “He sends his regards.”

  I felt bad for a moment, a sudden little stab of regret penetrating and then withdrawing like the blade of a knife, and I knew I should have been there for her—for her and Tommy too—but I dismissed it. There was nothing I could have done. Prok’s schedule had been set months in advance and I was powerless to alter it. “I wish I’d been here,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the RA (not the limp blonde, but a new girl, heavyset, with a dead-white face and hair piled up like detritus on her head). The RA dropped her eyes. I turned back to Iris—Iris, whose hand I seemed to be holding—and said, “But you must be famished. How about a nice steak?”

  Now that I was settled—or as settled as a man who was awaiting his draft notice in uncertain times could ever expect to be—there was no real impediment to my seeing Iris as often as I wanted. I no longer had to attend classes, take exams or write papers, and my hours with Prok were relatively stable, if far in excess of the standard forty-hour workweek. Our only problem was the travel—I was out on the road with Prok for three to four days every other week, and that pace was soon to accelerate—but Iris and I were able to adjust, because we wanted to. If before we were dating casually, feeling each other out, no hurry, no pressure or commitment, now things were different, radically different. We went everywhere together—we met for meals, attended concerts, went dancing, hiking, skating, sat in the lounge in the evenings, side by side, so close we were breathing as one, Iris working at her studies and I poring over Magnus Hirschfeld and Robert Latou Dickinson to keep up with the literature in the field. It got to the point where I felt hollow if she wasn’t there, as if I had no inner being or essence without her. When she was in class or I was at work or sitting in some second-class hotel staring into the eyes of an overfed undergraduate who was obsessed with Rita Hayworth or masturbated too much, I thought of Iris, only Iris.

  The fall passed into winter and winter stretched across the holidays and into the New Year (we went home together, on the bus, to our respective families in Michigan City, and everything seemed new-made and cheerful, despite the fact that Tommy had been drafted into the United States Army and the Nazis, the Fascists and the Imperial Japanese were moving relentlessly forward on all fronts). We came back to the sunless gloom of Jan
uary, the campus burdened with snow and afflicted with the kind of winds that made hats and scarves superfluous. I’d registered for the draft too, as required by law, along with all the other twenty-one to thirty-five-year-old men, but my number hadn’t come up and so we picked up where we’d left off, spending every minute outside of work or school in each other’s company. All was well. We were happy. I wrote Paul Sehorn long, chatty letters and found myself whistling as I strode across the barrens to the women’s dorm each evening after work (where I couldn’t resist joking with the RA, who had become as familiar and innocuous as a doting grandmother, though she couldn’t have been more than twenty).

  There was one essential problem, though, and I’m sure you’ve anticipated me here. Sex. Sex was the problem. Even if Iris was willing, and to this point I wasn’t at all certain that she was, given her background and her virginity, there was absolutely no place we could go to put it to a trial. The year before, when I’d propositioned Laura Feeney in a headlong rush of sexual derangement, it was only bravado talking: I couldn’t have brought her home unless Mrs. Lorber had coincidentally died of a stroke in the very moment of my asking. And even if I could somehow have sneaked Iris through a second-story window in the middle of the night, there was my new roommate to consider (a senior from a remote hamlet by the name of Ezra Vorhees, whose sensibilities and personal hygienic habits were, shall we say, rustic, to put it mildly). It was frustrating. Iris and I would neck for hours in the lounge or the library till I was in pain—actual physical pain, from what undergraduates termed “blue balls” and Prok defined as an excess buildup of seminal fluids in the testicles and vas deferens—and then I would have to go back to my room and relieve myself under the blankets while my roommate pretended to be asleep. Whenever I could, I went to Mac, but I didn’t feel good about it, not anymore.

  Prok was the one who came up with the solution. As I say, he’d taught me to drive that summer, and now, as I explained my situation to him, he demonstrated just how generous he was—and how much he was willing to go out of his way for me. I remember broaching the subject to him on one of our collecting trips (this time to Gary and a particular Negro neighborhood there, and more on that later), and his turning to me with a smile and saying, “Yes, it’s about time, Milk. You do need another outlet, as we all do. Why not this? Take the Nash. Take it any time you like.”

  “But I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you—or Mac.”

  “No inconvenience at all—we never use the car at night anyway. In fact, what I’ll do is simply leave the key under that loose brick we never got around to repairing last summer—you know, out back in the low wall round the persimmon tree? You know the one I mean?”

  And so, for the first time in my life I had an automobile to do with as I liked, though of course I would have to be especially cautious since it represented the project’s single biggest nonhuman asset, and where would we have been without it? At any rate, when we got back from the trip I went straight to Iris—I caught her in the quad as she was going between classes—and informed her I’d be picking her up in style that night.

  “In style?” she said. She gave me a knowing smile. The wind lifted the brim of her hat and then set it fluttering like a bird’s wing.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Your own limousine, at your service, mademoiselle.”

  “Kinsey’s car,” she said. “The bug buggy. The wasp wagon.”

  “I’m taking you out of town. To a roadhouse. To celebrate.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Kinsey’s car?”

  “It’s better than nothing.” I felt as if I’d been transposed to one of Shakespeare’s comedies, trading quips with Rosalind or Beatrice in the forest of Arden or a sunny piazza in Messina. Only this was Indiana and it was winter and Iris was letting me dangle. Just for fun.

  “Do you know any roadhouses? Have you ever been to one?”

  “Sure,” I lied. “Sure, dozens of times.”

  “And then what?” she asked, fixing me with a teasing look.

  “We eat, drink and make merry.”

  “And then?”

  “And then,” I said, leaning into her, the wind tearing at my collar, a flurry of students hurrying by with pale numb faces, “then afterwards we can drive off into some quiet, dark lane and, well, and have some real privacy.”

  Despite everything, despite all the thought I’d put into getting Iris alone in a private setting, not to mention the fantasies I’d indulged, I was all nerves that night. The roadhouse was anything but romantic, a smoky, ill-lit den ranged round with leering, drunken faces that offered up the kind of cuisine that gave Hoosier cooking a bad name. I had a bowl of what purported to be beef stew with at least half an inch of melted tallow floating atop it and a packet of stale saltines to help soak it up. Iris pushed something called a Salisbury steak around her plate until finally she gave up and mashed the peas that accompanied it into a kind of paste and ate that on the crumbling saltines. We each had two beers.

  I was watching her over the second one, trying to gauge her mood. I’d made a number of passing references to what I hoped the evening would bring, and she’d seemed amenable, or at least resigned. “Hurry up and finish that beer,” I said.

  She gave me a smoldering look—or maybe that was just my imagination; more likely its intention was satiric. She did love to clown. “Oh, and why? Have you got something planned for the rest of the evening? There’s a meeting of the Backgammon Club on campus, you know. And there’s a group sing at the Presbyterian church. Do you feel like a good sing, John—wouldn’t that be swell?”

  My hand found her knee beneath the table. “You know what I want,” I said.

  “No,” she said, all innocence. “Whatever could that be?”

  The night was cold—arctic, in fact—and the Nash’s heater didn’t really amount to much. I’d heard of a couple who’d kept the car running inside the garage (it was the girl’s father’s car, three in the morning, her parents asleep upstairs in the house) and wound up asphyxiating themselves, only to be discovered half-undressed and rigid as ice sculptures the next morning, and I was aware of the dangers. Still, we were outside and the wind—the implacable, unrelenting, stern and disapproving wind—would at least fan the exhaust away from the cab, and, more important, the backseat. For a long while we sat there in front, necking and watching the stars, and then something seemed to give in her, a sense of release, as if all the old strictures and prohibitions had suddenly fallen away. She let me pull open her jacket, and then her blouse, and after a moment I tugged her brassiere down so that her breasts fell free and I began to stimulate them orally. She responded and that encouraged me. I was petting her now, petting her furiously, kissing her deeply, massaging her bare breasts and working the nipples between my fingertips, absolutely aflame, when I murmured, “Shall we—the backseat, I mean?”

  She didn’t say anything, so I took that for a yes, and after an awkward moment we were over the seat and into the back, my body stretched full atop hers, the engine eructating beneath us, the heater fighting down the onslaught of the cold. I was thinking of Mac, thinking of our first time in the garden and how receptive she was, how natural and pleasurable and easy it had been, when suddenly Iris clamped her legs together on the fulcrum of my right hand.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  Her face was faint and ghostly in the light of the stars that seeped in through the trees. I smelled the heat of her, her breath commingled with mine, the perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears that was all but dissipated now. “You don’t think I’m going to go all the way, do you?”

  I was stretched out atop her. My trousers were down at my knees. She’d had her hand on my penis and her tongue in my mouth. Suddenly I became eloquent. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You know it’s the most natural thing in the world, and it’s only convention—superstition, priests, ministers, bogeymen—that keeps people from expressing themselves to the full. Sexually, I mean. Come on, Iris. Come on, it
’s nothing. You’ll like it, you will.”

  She was silent. She hadn’t moved. Her face was inches from mine, floating there in the dark of the car like a husked shell on a midnight sea.

  “You know what we’re discovering?” I whispered.

  “No,” she whispered back. “What?”

  “Well, that premarital sex is actually beneficial, that people who have it—premarital sex, that is—are much better, well, adjusted than those who don’t. And it carries over into their married sex life as well. They’re happier, Iris. Happier. And that’s the long and short of it, I swear.”

  She was silent again. I could feel myself shrinking, the blood ticking along the length of the shaft and ever so slowly draining away. The wind buffeted the car and we both tensed a moment, and then it passed, and the silence deepened. “Premarital,” she murmured after a moment. “Pre,” she said, holding it a beat, and then releasing it, “marital. Isn’t that what you said, John?”

  “Yes,” I said, eager now, not quite taking her point. “Premarital. Sex before, well, marriage.”

  Another silence, but I could feel the change coming over her, communicated along the length of her body, through the nerve endings of her skin, directly to mine. She was grinning, I knew it, though it was too dark to read her face. “So,” she said, “I take it you’re proposing to me, then?”

  In the end, President Wells did deliver the ultimatum Prok had been expecting, but Prok surprised him and the Board of Trustees too. They had assumed he’d choose the marriage course over the research, the teaching to which he’d devoted himself and at which he’d excelled for the past twenty years rather than what they must have seen as a new and perhaps passing enthusiasm, but they didn’t know him very well. It hurt him, it outraged him, it made him more determined than ever to overturn the cant and hypocrisy of the guardians of the status quo, of the Rices, the Hoenigs and all the rest, but he gave up the marriage course—eventually gave up teaching across the board—in order to pursue the new and great goal of his life. Soon, very soon, the Institute for Sex Research would be born and the inner circle would expand by three.