The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Too personal?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How can you say that to me, of all people, when you give me a running description of everything you and Betsy do seven nights of the week, whether I want to hear it or not—”

  “Aah,” he said, and his hand rose and fell like a pulsing vein beneath the skin of the comforter, “you’re just a sad sack. You don’t even know where it goes, do you? You can’t imagine, for all your marriage course, how sweet it is, how hot and sweet, and I guess I’m going to have to help you find it the first time, huh, with what’s her name, Iris?”

  “Screw you, Paul. I resent that. I do. Just because you got lucky with Betsy, found somebody, I mean, that doesn’t—”

  “Okay,” he said, “all right. Keep your pants on. I’ll do it. Okay? You happy now?”

  It took me a moment, the breath congealing under my nose, the blanket drawn tight at my throat. “Yes,” I said finally, and I tried to sound mollified, above it all, but he’d hurt me, he had—I was inexperienced and I knew it, but was that a crime? Did he have to rub it in? Didn’t he think I wanted love—love and sex—as much as anybody else?

  He was thinking. He kicked absently at the fringe of the comforter to better wrap it round his stocking feet. Two fingers licked over the shadow of his mustache. “So where do I go? Are you signing people up, or what?”

  I was up off the bed and at the desk now, the blanket trailing across the floor, notebook in hand. “I’ve got his schedule right here,” I said.

  Before the month was out, I was promoted from library underling to special assistant to Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, and when I chanced to pass Elster in the hallway or on the steps of the biology building, he looked right through me as if I didn’t exist. I suppose there must have been some resentment among a faction of the biology majors as well—I had no training whatever in the field, aside from the introductory course I’d taken from Professor Eigenmann in my second year, and here I’d been rewarded with what might be considered one of the department’s plum positions—but what Prok was looking for above all was someone to whom he could relate, someone who could share in his enthusiasm for the inchoate project that would ultimately produce the two seminal works in the history of sex research. That person could have been anyone, regardless of discipline. That it was I, that I was elected to be the first of Prok’s inner circle, is something for which I will be forever grateful. And proud. To this day, I thank Laura Feeney for it.

  At any rate, Prok installed me at a desk in the back corner of the office, where I was wedged between towering gunmetal-gray bookcases and enjoyed a forward view of the windows, which were piled high with galls wrapped in mesh sacks to contain any insects that might hatch from them, and these galls might have been collected in the Sierra Madre Oriental or Prescott, Arizona, or even in the Appenines or the rugged hills outside Hokkaido (interested parties were sending Prok samples from all over the world). There was an indefinable smell to the office, not unpleasant, exactly, but curious, arising from and connected only to that constructed and confined space on the second floor of Biology Hall. The wasps had something to do with it, of course, but a gall—this is the woody excrescence found on oaks and rose bushes, the growth of which is promoted by the larvae of the wasps living within it—really has a bit of a pleasant smell, a smell of bark and tannin, I suppose. (Break one from a tree next time you’re out in the woods and hold it to your nose a moment and you’ll see what I mean.) And the wasps themselves had no discernible odor, so far as I could detect. There were the lingering traces of the cigarette smoke Prok’s subjects exhaled in dense blue clouds as they gave up their histories, and the smell of Prok himself—bristling and spanked clean; he was a great one for the cold plunge each morning and almost obsessive about soap. Finally, into the mix went the perfume of the three female assistants, who shared the desk with me and rotated shifts round my schedule, plus the usual odors of a working office: ink, pencil shavings, the machine oil of the typewriters and (in this case) the chemical used to discourage a minute species of beetle that routinely wreaks havoc on entomological collections round the world.

  On my first day, Prok helped me settle in and gave me my initial lessons in deciphering his secret code and translating the results to his files. He was very precise, a model of efficiency, and if his longhand was somewhat artistic, full of flourishes and great slashing loops, his printing, like mine, was an almost mechanical marshaling of block letters so uniform it might be mistaken at a glance for typescript. Looking over my shoulder, rocking from foot to foot, his energy barely contained, he would cluck over my writing, seize my hand impatiently or snatch the paper out of my hands and ball it up as a reject. This went on for hours that first day, he pacing back and forth from his own desk to mine, until finally, when he felt I’d got the hang of it, he eased one haunch down on the corner of my desk and said, “You know, Milk, you’re really doing quite well. And I have to confess that I’m pleased.”

  I looked up at him and murmured something in reply, trying to indicate my pleasure for the praise but at the same time not sound too obsequious—Prok may have been firmly in charge, always in charge, a born leader, but he never demanded obsequiousness, no matter what you might have heard from other sources.

  A moment slipped by. Then he said, “You’ve noticed the galls, of course.”

  He moved easily up off the corner of the desk, went to the bookcase and lifted down a massive, bulbous, many-faceted thing that looked like the preserved head of some extinct beast, then laid it on the wooden surface before me. “Biggest known gall extant,” he said. “Twelve chambers, fifteen point nine ounces. Collected it myself in the Appalachians.”

  We both admired it a moment, and then he encouraged me to run my hands over the craggy pocked surface of the thing—“Nothing to be afraid of, it’s simply the expression of a particularly vigorous colony of Cynipidae. But then you probably don’t know the first thing about Cynipids, do you? Unless, perhaps, Professor Eigenmann touched on them in the introductory course?” He was smiling now. Grinning, actually. This last was a joke, both on me—how could I have remembered?—and his colleague, who would have had to cover all of life on earth, from the paramecium to the horsetail to the giant sequoia and Homo sapiens, in the course of a semester and could hardly have devoted more than a single breath to the gall wasp, if that.

  I grinned back at him, not quite knowing what was expected of me. “I know that they’re wasps,” I said. “And that they’re relatively small compared to the ones that would be flying around out there if it were summer now.”

  “This is a parasitic insect, exquisitely adapted,” he said, looking down almost lovingly on the gall. “An all-but-sedentary species, flightless and living out its entire life cycle in a single gall on a single tree. Perhaps, once in a great while, the adults will emerge and crawl overland to another tree fifty or a hundred feet away, and that is the compass of their independence and the extent of their range, which makes them such an interesting study—you see, I have been able to trace the origins of a given species simply by following its geographic trail and noting variations in inherited characteristics.”

  He began pacing again, stopping only to pluck off his glasses and gaze out the window a moment, before coming back to the desk to gently remove the exemplary gall and carefully replace it atop the bookcase. “But I’m afraid I have some bad news for you”—he was grinning; this was another joke in infancy—“they do tend to have a rather limited sex life. Unfortunately—for them, that is—males are very rare indeed in Cynipid society, most species reproducing through parthenogenesis. You do recall parthenogenesis from Professor Eigenmann’s course, don’t you?”

  Another grin. His face dodged at mine and then away again. “Don’t think I bring up the subject of my Cynipids just to hear myself talk, and, yes, yes, I can see that questioning look in your eye, don’t try to hide it—What in God’s name is Kinsey up to now, you’re thinking, no? But there’s a method to my madn
ess. What I’m trying to say is, your presence here is the hallmark of a new era: as of Monday, I will be reducing the hours of my three female assistants in your favor, Milk. I’ve gone as far as I can with the gall wasp, and now, with your help and the prospect of adequate funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the National Research Council, we are going to focus on one thing and one thing only, and I do think you know what that is …”

  That year march came in like a lamb and went out like a lamb too, and I found myself doing double duty in Prok’s office and his garden alike. The mild weather seemed to invigorate him (as if a man of his almost superhuman energy needed invigoration), getting him out of doors as much as possible on weekends and particularly on Sundays. He’d had a strict Methodist upbringing that caused him all sorts of adolescent torment with regard to his natural urges, and once he’d discovered science and applied a phylogenetic approach to human behavior, he became rabidly a-religious and made a point of working his garden while the rest of Bloomington was at church. By the end of the month it was warm enough so that he was able to work bare-chested and in shorts, and he encouraged me to do the same. Eventually, as the days warmed into late spring and summer, we would both habitually work as near to naked as was decently possible—but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

  I remember that month distinctly as a time when I felt at peace with myself in a way I hadn’t for a long while, if ever. There was the constant attention of Prok, his gentle prodding, his instruction, the feeling of mutuality as we sat in silence, bent over our desks, the sense of getting in on the ground floor of something revolutionary and exciting. There were nature hikes—he and Mac took me and the children to Lake Monroe, Bluespring Caverns, Clear Creek, for rambles in the patchwork of fields and forest out back of their house, Prok all the while lecturing on the geology of the soil, on the weeds and wildflowers that had begun to spring up in the clearings or the first of the migratory birds to reappear—and I remember too the enveloping peace of the dinner table and the hearth. It felt good to be with them, good just to be there. Mac simply took to preparing an extra portion any time I was working in the garden or we returned from one of our rambles, and the more I protested that I was putting them out, that I didn’t want to be a pest or nuisance, the more the two of them went out of their way to reassure me. It got to the point where I was spending more time at the Kinseys’ than at Mrs. Lorber’s, and Paul, who’d been the rock of my world for the past three years—my dearest and closest friend on campus—began to joke that the only time he saw me anymore was when I was asleep. He had Betsy, I had Prok and Mac. It was only inevitable that we should grow apart.

  It was around this time that I did something of which I’m not particularly proud, but which should be reported here, just to set the record straight. Or rather keep it straight. After all, what is the point of this exercise—of this remembrance of things past—if I’m not going to be absolutely candid? I have nothing to hide. I’m a different person now than I was when I stepped into that marriage course, and I wouldn’t change anything that’s happened, not for the world.

  At any rate, I was an apt pupil—I’ve always been good with puzzles and ciphers—and I learned Prok’s code in record time. Within two or three weeks I had it memorized. One afternoon—it was midweek and Prok had driven up to Indianapolis to address the faculty of a private school on the subject of the sexual outlets available to adolescents, and, not coincidentally, to collect as many histories as he could, of both staff and student body—I found myself alone in the office, transcribing coded histories from Prok’s notation sheets to a larger format for the files so that we could calculate the incidence of various behaviors for statistical analysis (in Prok’s system, a single encrypted sheet contained as much as twenty pages of information; eventually, of course, this information would have to be collated, at first by hand, and then, after we got our Hollerith tabulating machine, on punch cards). Initially, the work seemed exciting—the subject was sex, after all—but on this day, with these histories, which were of undergraduate men not much different from the one-hundred-percent group I’d managed to get him from my rooming house, it was pretty pedestrian. There had been some (limited) experimentation with other boys and farm animals, furtive masturbation, little coital experience but a good dose of petting, deep kissing and (again limited) forays into oral-genital contact. My hand ached from clutching the pen. My fingertips were stained with ink. I stifled a yawn.

  I don’t know what came over me or how the idea even sprang into my head, but I found myself looking through Prok’s desk for the secondary code, the one that gave the key to the identities of all the individuals in his files—a code he was distinctly chary of sharing with me or anyone else, for security’s sake. If his subjects weren’t absolutely assured of anonymity, the vast majority of them would never have given up their histories in the first place. Security was the cornerstone of the project—then, as it is now. But when I actually had that code in my hand, I couldn’t help noticing certain correspondences with the interview code (imagine a kind of reinvented shorthand, conflating abbreviations, scientific symbols and the markers of the stenographer’s code into a new sort of encryption), and once I hit on those correspondences I couldn’t help my mind from leaping ahead. In brief, it took me less than an hour to break the secondary code, and when I had it, when I held the key to all the files in my hand, I couldn’t help using it. I couldn’t. I just couldn’t resist.

  In later years, when Prok was the single most recognized person in this country outside of the president himself, when he appeared on the cover of Time magazine and the press couldn’t get enough of him, the most frequent question put to him concerned his own sex life, and he would invariably answer that he had contributed his history to the project as so many thousands of others had and that it would remain anonymous just as theirs would. That, of course, was true, and only we of the inner circle came to know the details of that sex life firsthand—we were sworn to secrecy, because the fabric of all of our lives would have unraveled if any of it got out—but on that sleepy afternoon with an over-active sun poking through the blinds and big droning flies sailing obliviously over the racks of preserved wasps, Dr. Kinsey’s was the first file I went to, and after his, it was Mac’s.

  I stood there at the filing cabinet, my breath coming in shallow gulps, the manila folder spread open before me. Every other second I stole a glance over my shoulder, ready to slip the file back in place at the first hint of a sound from the outer office. I was keyed up, yes, but riveted too. Here was Prok’s history, right here in my hand, his deepest nature revealed in the most elemental way: he had my history, and now I had his, and it was unlike anything I’d anticipated.

  As a boy Prok had been even more awkward and shy than I, not at all interested in organized athletics or social activities of any kind, and to compensate for a system weakened by early bouts with rickets, typhoid and rheumatic fever, he took to nature, hiking and exploring obsessively till he’d built himself into the fit and vigorous man I knew (though he never lost his pronounced stoop, a result of double curvature of the spine). He was an Eagle Scout. He masturbated compulsively. His father was a religious moralist. Until he was well into his twenties—older than I—he never had a mature and satisfying sexual experience, and that came only after his marriage to Clara.

  And here was where his history got interesting. Though the honeymoon involved a long and arduous early-summer hiking trip through the White Mountains during which he and his bride were forced together in the close proximity of their tent each night, the marriage wasn’t consummated till some months on. The delay, as I was later to learn, was a result both of their inexperience and a slight physiological impediment with regard to Clara’s hymen, which was unusually thick (added to the fact that Prok’s penis was a good deal larger than normal). I pictured their mutual embarrassment, their prudery, their lack of knowledge or insight, envisioned them kissing and stroking and wrestling in their sleeping bags and tents, on the
cots in the summer camp where they served as counselors in July and August of that year, and then back at home in their first rental in Bloomington, nothing gained but frustration. After three months of marriage, sex still remained a mystery for them—it wasn’t until a surgical procedure relieved Mac’s discomfiture that they were finally able to achieve coitus. Prok was twenty-eight at the time.

  Knowing this—uncovering it in the way an Egyptologist might have decrypted the hieroglyphs telling of the life and habits of some ancient pharaoh—gave me a strange rush of sensation. On the one hand, I couldn’t help thinking of my mentor as somewhat diminished—here he was preaching sexual liberation, at least privately—and he’d been as much a prisoner of antiquated mores, of shyness, ignorance and his own inability to act, as I was. And yet, on the other, his history gave me hope and a kind of eerie confidence that my own sexual confusion would eventually resolve itself.

  There was more. His H-history, which began with adolescent alliances, as mine had, became increasingly complex. The zoology professor, the distinguished scientist with a star beside his name in American Men of Science, the middle-aged father of three and happily married entomologist with the no-nonsense manner, was moving higher up the 0–6 scale, having initiated relations with several of his graduate students in the course of their long field trips and ultimately experiencing an intense and very close relationship with a male student not much older than I. And how do you suppose that made me feel? And Mac, what of her?

  My blood was racing and I suppose if anyone had looked in on me in the office that day they would have seen the color in my face. I riffled through the pages, all greedy eyes and trembling fingers, then slipped Prok’s folder back into the cabinet and took up Mac’s. Her history was more extensive than I would have guessed, and as the symbols gave themselves up to me I couldn’t help picturing her naked, her hands, her lips, the way she walked, the cloying catch in her voice. I was aroused, I admit it, and I was already up from the desk and searching through the files for Laura Feeney’s history, for Paul’s and the Kinseys’ children’s, when I caught myself. What was I doing? This was voyeuristic, it was wrong, a violation of the trust Prok had invested in me, and here I was throwing it all over just to satisfy the tawdriest kind of curiosity. Suddenly—it was dark now, the lamps softly glowing, the galls shadowy and surreal—I felt ashamed, as deeply ashamed as I’d ever felt in my life. I could barely breathe until I’d put the files back and replaced the code under lock and key in the drawer, all the while listening for footsteps in the hall. I switched off the lights. Locked up. And when I slunk off into the corridor, I turned up my collar and averted my face like a criminal.