The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  A woman answered the door—or rather a female, as Prok would have it. She was tiny, childlike, with hair even blacker than Iris’s and cut short in a bob that left her ears exposed. She had a beautiful smile, natural and unaffected, and she was training it on me even as she pulled the door back with a slim white hand.

  “I was—I’ve come—Does Professor Kinsey live here? By any chance?”

  “I’m Clara,” she said, already accepting the cheese. “And you must be John. But here, come on in, Prok’s just finishing up some things and he’ll be with us in a moment.”

  She led me inside, into the living room, which was as unconventional as the exterior of the house. The walls were painted black (or, as I was later to learn, stained with tea, which Prok felt would preserve them more effectively than paint) and the furniture, rustic and homemade, was of bent hickory, similarly painted black. There was a stand-up piano against one wall (also black), several bookcases full of records, and a gramophone. Lamps were placed about the room, softening the corners, and a fire burned in the open hearth. There was no sign of other guests.

  “Mrs. Kinsey, I have to tell you I’m so sorry to have been, well, late—I’m not normally—but, I, uh, had some trouble finding the place, and I, uh—”

  “Nonsense,” she said. “We don’t stand on ceremony here, John—we’ll eat when we’re hungry, so don’t you worry yourself. And please, call me Clara. Or better yet, Mac.” Her voice was breathy and hesitant, each syllable pulling back from the next with a gentle adhesion, as if words were like candy, like taffy, lingering reluctantly on her lips. She was forty-one years old, the mother of three, and no beauty, but she was fascinating, utterly, and from that moment forward she had me in her thrall.

  We were standing in the middle of the room on what appeared to be a homemade rug. I must have been studying it unconsciously because Mac (her nickname, an abbreviation of her maiden name, McMillen, just as Prok was the short version of Professor K.) remarked, “Lovely, isn’t it? My husband’s handiwork.”

  I said something inane in reply, along the lines that he was a very talented man.

  Mac let out a little laugh. I wondered where the children were, where the other guests were, and at the same time secretly prayed there would be none. “But listen to me—I haven’t asked if you would like something to drink?”

  I would. I wanted a bourbon, a good stiff one, to bring back the feeling in my fingers and toes and unfasten my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Oh,” I said, “I don’t know. Anything. Water maybe?”

  At that moment, as if on cue (but that’s a cliché: he was there all along, observing from the hallway, I’m sure of it), Prok appeared with an enameled tray in his hand, and on it a selection of liqueurs and three miniature long-stemmed glasses.

  “Milk,” he cried, “glad you could make it, and welcome, welcome.” He set the tray down on a low black table in front of the hearth and motioned for me to take a seat. “I see you’ve already met Mac, and what’s this—a cheese?—ah, splendid. Perhaps Mac would do the honors, and some crackers, please, dear, crackers would be nice. And now,” turning back to me, “you’ll have a glass of spirits?”

  I accepted one of the little glasses—about a thimbleful—while Prok expatiated on the properties of the various liqueurs on the tray, remarking how a colleague traveling in Italy had brought him back this one and how that one had come highly recommended by Professor Simmonds of the History Department, and I really didn’t have to say much in response. I sipped at the drink—it smelled powerfully of some herb I couldn’t quite place and had the consistency and cloying sweetness of molasses—all the while realizing that my initial surmise was correct: Professor Kinsey didn’t know the first thing about drinking. We were talking about the marriage course—my impressions of it—when Mac slipped back into the room with another tray, this one featuring my Stilton in the center of an array of saltine crackers.

  “Just dissecting the marriage course,” he said, giving her a look I couldn’t fathom, and it occurred to me then that he must have taken her sex history as well—she must have been among the first—and the thought of that, of the husband quizzing the wife, gave me a strange rush of feeling. He was a master of the interview, as I knew from experience and would have reemphasized for me again and again as the years went by, and there was no dodging him—he could tell in an instant if the subject was hedging, almost as if he were hooked up to him like a human lie detector. She would have had to tell him everything, and he would know her secrets, as he knew mine. I saw, with a sudden thrill, the power of that knowledge. To give up your history was to give up your soul, and to possess it was the ultimate aggrandizement, like the cannibal growing ever greater with the subsumed spirit of each of his successive victims.

  At dinner, the conversation was exclusively of sex. Prok went on about his project, how he could develop a taxonomy of human sexual behavior in the way he was able to classify wasps according to variations within the species. We were eating a stew of some sort—goulash, Prok called it—which he’d prepared himself. He served milk rather than beer or wine, pouring it out of a glass pitcher and making one of his rare stabs at wit (“Care for some milk, Milk? ”), and there were just the three of us at table. The children had apparently been fed earlier, so that, as Prok put it, “We can get to know one another without having to divide our attention,” and every time Prok drew a breath, which was rarely, Mac put in her two cents on the subject. And that surprised me, because she was every bit as informed as he—and every bit as capable of dropping terms like “cunnilingus” and “fellatio” into the dinner conversation.

  For my part, I luxuriated in the attention. I’d never thought of myself as anything other than ordinary, even when I made A’s in my course work or managed to score a touchdown on a broken play in a high school football game, and here were two vibrant, intelligent, worldly people—two adults—soliciting my opinions and treating me as an equal. It was heady, and I felt I never wanted to leave that table or that sofa by the fireplace where we settled in after dinner with bowls of vanilla ice cream while Prok lectured in his high tireless voice and Mac knitted with perfect articulation. Nine o’clock came and went, and then ten. Mac disappeared at one point to be sure the children were in bed (two girls of fourteen and sixteen, and a boy of eleven), and there was an awkward moment during which I expressed my concern over the lateness of the hour, but Prok dismissed me with a wave. Far from being exhausted, he shifted into a higher gear.

  He poked at the fire, then eased himself down on the floor with the cloth braids he was fashioning into a new rug (“Very economical, Milk—you should take it up. Any discards, old clothes, sheets and the like, plus strips of muslin dyed in whatever color you prefer, and you’d be surprised how durable such a rug can be. Why this one, the one beneath me here? I wove this as an assistant professor in our quaint little rental back in 1921, our first home, in fact, after we were married”) and in the quiet broken only by the snap and hiss of the fire, he opened up to me all his hopes and aspirations for the project. Ten thousand interviews, that was what he wanted—at a minimum—and the interviews had to be conducted face-to-face to assure accuracy, unlike the printed questionnaires or subjective analyses previous researchers had favored. Only then could we (he was already including the young neophyte before him) have the data to drive down the hidebound superstitions that had ruined so many lives. Take masturbation, for instance. Did I know that reputable people—doctors, ministers and the like—had actually promoted the egregious notion that masturbation leads to insanity?

  He turned to me, his spectacles giving back twin images of the fire eating at a split oak log so that the reflection dissolved into his eyes. “Why, masturbation is the most natural and harmless outlet the species has acquired for release of sexual tension. It is purely positive, a veritable benefit to the species and to the society at large, and any minister worth his salt should be delivering sermons on that subject, believe me. Just think, Milk, just think of all
the harm done by sexual repression and the guilt normal healthy adolescents are meant needlessly to feel—” I must have colored at this point, thinking of our last interview, because he changed tack suddenly and asked me point-blank if I wouldn’t help him by contributing to the project.

  “Well, yes, I mean—certainly, I would be—” I fumbled, trying to recover myself. “But what could I do, in any material way, that is—?”

  “Very simple,” he said, shifting his legs on the rug. “Just poll the men in your rooming house—you say there are fourteen of them in addition to yourself?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “Yes. Fourteen.”

  “Just poll them and convince them to come on into my office to give up their histories—you’ve got a potential one-hundred-percent group, there, John, do you realize that?”

  I wasn’t the sort who fraternized easily—I think I’ve made that much clear here—and the prospect was daunting, but I found myself nodding my head in assent, because, as I say, you just didn’t say no to Prok.

  And yet, even as I sat there conspiring with him like a favored son, somewhere in the back of my mind, obscured for the moment, was a dull but persistent sense of guilt over Iris. You see, it wasn’t simply my indecision over the cheese that had made me late that evening, but the fact that I’d left Iris—or the Iris situation, I should say—to the last minute. I don’t know why that was—I’m not a procrastinator, or not normally, else I wouldn’t have accomplished what I had at school or would come to achieve in later years with Prok—but every time I thought of phoning Iris my heart began to pound so violently I was afraid I was having a seizure, until finally I realized I had to see her in person, if only to explain myself and try to patch things as best I could. I did want to go out with her, very much so—I’d begun to think about her at odd moments, picturing her the way she was that day in the library or that afternoon at my mother’s, swinging her legs beneath the chair like a little girl, gesticulating to make a point, her eyes boiling up like cataracts over any issue at all, over parasites or poetry or the plight of the Lithuanians—but the longer I put off breaking our date the worse it was.

  Finally it was Saturday, and I still hadn’t mounted the courage to see her. I woke to a burst of Paul’s blunt, ratcheting snores and a gray scrim of ice on the window, thinking Iris, thinking I had to go to her dorm right that minute and ask her to breakfast so I could look into her eyes over fried eggs and muffins and coffee and tell her I’d take her out the following Saturday, without fail, that I was looking forward to it, that there was nothing I’d rather do (and maybe, since I’d already bought the tickets for tonight she might want to go with a friend?), but that she had to understand, and I was sorry, more than sorry—distraught—and could she ever forgive me? But I didn’t go to her dorm. It was too early. Seven. It was only seven, or just past, and she wouldn’t be up for hours, or so I told myself. Instead, I took my books to breakfast alone at the Commons and read the first six stanzas of Milton’s “Il Penseroso” over and over till I couldn’t take it anymore (“Hence vain deluding Joys,/The brood of Folly without father bred,” et cetera), pushed myself up from the table and slammed out the door before I knew what I was doing.

  The clock tower was ringing eight; the cold leached through the soles of my shoes. One of Laura Feeney’s discarded lettermen, vastly overfed and with feet like snowshoes, limped past me on his way to the gym, even as I cut through a patch of woods and made diagonally across a dead brown strip of lawn for Iris’s dorm. Inside, there was a smell of artificial fragrance, as if I’d somehow been transposed to the Coty counter at Marshall Field’s, and the resident assistant—a girl of twenty with bad skin and a limp blond pageboy—looked up at me as if I’d come to ravish every coed on the premises. “Hello,” I said, moving briskly across the room and trying to keep my head of steam up, because it was now or never, “I was wondering if, by any chance, well, if Iris McAuliffe is in. If she’s up yet, I mean.”

  She gave me a stricken look, her features reduced to the essentials.

  “I’m John,” I said. “John Milk. Would you tell her John Milk is here? Please?”

  “She’s not in.”

  “What do mean she’s not in? At eight o’clock in the morning? On a Saturday?”

  But the RA wasn’t forthcoming. She simply repeated herself in a long, drawn-out sigh of exasperation, as if I’d spent every morning of my life in the reception hall of the girls’ dorm, pestering her: “She’s not in.”

  I looked to the door at the far end of the lounge, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum beyond, and at that moment it swung open and two girls emerged, buttoning up their coats and adjusting their hats for the plunge through the outer doors and into the concrete clasp of the morning. They gave me a look of amusement—what man in his right mind would be calling for a girl at this hour?—and passed out of doors in a flurry of giggles. “All right, then,” I said, taking the coward’s way out, “can I leave her a note?”

  But now I was with Prok, in front of the fire, agreeing to take my first unambiguous step on the road to a career in sex research, and who would have guessed? Who even knew there was such a thing? Ask a boy what he wants to be and he’ll answer cowboy, fireman, detective. Ask an undergraduate and he’ll say he intends to go into the law or medicine or that he wants to teach or study business or engineering. But no one chooses sex research.

  I watched Prok work at his rag rug, pulling tight a six-inch strand of cloth, then interweaving it with another, the whole business spread now like a skirt over his sprawled legs. He was talking about his H-histories, how he’d been to the penal farm at Putnamville on his own and begun taking histories among the prisoners—“And they are very extensive histories, Milk, make no doubt about it”—and how one man in particular had offered to introduce him into the homosexual underworld of Chicago, and how significant that was, as H-histories were every bit as vital to assessing the larger picture as heterosexual histories, as I, no doubt, could appreciate. And then he paused a moment to offer a clarification, his eyes seeking mine and holding to them with that unwavering gaze he must have mastered by staring down his own image in the mirror for whole hours at a time. His voice softened, dropped. “That is, John, I believe you, of all people, should be especially attuned to the issue—”

  I might have colored. I don’t know. But I do remember his embrace that night as he stood at the door thanking me for coming, thanking me for the cheese and my insights and offering all sorts of Prok-advice and admonishments about the cold, the icy streets, incompetent drivers and the like. “Goodnight, Milk,” he said, and took me in his arms and pressed me to him so that I could feel the ripple and contraction of his muscles and the warmth of him and breathe in the scent of his hair oil, his musk, the hot sweet invitation of his breath.

  He let me go. The door pulled shut. I walked off into the darkness.

  3

  “So, paul, please, you’re going to have to reiterate it for me, because I must be missing something here. You’re opposed to science, is that it? To data collection? Honestly, I just don’t get it.”

  We were in our room, waiting to go over to dinner, the day shutting down around the last pale fissures of a lusterless sun. It was cold. And not only outside: Mrs. Lorber must have had the furnace running on fumes. Paul—and I realize I haven’t yet described him, and you’ll forgive me, I hope, because I’m a novice at this—Paul was lying diagonally across his unmade bed, his head propped against the wall behind him, a comforter drawn up to his chin. He was almost a full year older than I and he wore a very thin, obsessively manicured mustache of the Ronald Colman variety, but his natural hair color was so pale and rinsed-out that you could barely detect it, even close up. His eyes were blue, but again, so weak a shade as to be almost transparent. He had two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin—and a pair of thin colorless lips that always seemed to be clamping down on something, due, I think, to a congenital overbite. What else? His parents were English, from Yorkshire, he lov
ed chess, Lucky Strikes and The Lone Ranger, and, of course, Betsy. With whom he’d gone all the way, though they were yet to be married—or rather, with whom he went all the way all the time. How did I know? He’d described it to me—coitus with Betsy—in the kind of detail that would have gratified Prok, if only I could get him to sit for an interview.

  I would stay awake nights waiting for him to come home so we could lie smoking in the dark while he went on in his soft hoarse tones about how he’d maneuvered her against the wall in the hallway of the campus heating plant or pinned her beneath him on the backseat of a borrowed car, the heater going full, and how willing she was, how hot, how she only wore skirts now and no underwear, just to facilitate things, and how they longed to be married so they could do it in a bed, with sheets and blankets and no worries of the police or the night watchman or anybody else …

  “But why should I?” he said. “Why should I waste an hour and a half—or what, two hours?—on some stranger I’ve never met and might not even like? What’s in it for me?”

  “Science,” I said. “The advancement of knowledge. Did you ever stop to consider that if there were more men like Dr. Kinsey maybe you wouldn’t have to sneak in and out of the heating plant with your fiancée, because premarital sexual relations would be sanctioned, even encouraged?”

  He was silent a moment. The window had gone gray and I got up to switch on the lamp before wrapping myself in a blanket and easing back down on my bed. Shadows infested the corners. I could see my breath hanging atomized in the air. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s too personal.”