by T. C. Boyle
I didn’t. But then this wasn’t a conversation, not anymore.
“John. I’m saying that you have to allow for your wife—if she remains sex shy, then that is certainly a part of her nature, but more, her acculturation, and that can be changed only if she’ll open herself up to what we’re trying to accomplish here. Like Violet Corcoran, for instance. Or Hilda, Vivian Brundage or that young woman friend of Corcoran’s—Betty, isn’t it? These things aren’t written in stone. Think of physiological response, John. Physiological.”
I was reminded of what Prok had said privately to a woman after a lecture one night in which the term “nymphomania” had come up. A nymphomaniac, he explained, is someone who has more sex than you do. Period.
I took a moment and then I told him that he was right and that I would consider it, absolutely, because Iris needed more experience, more variety, more physicality. For a moment, I was back in that attic, the women’s breasts shining with their sweat, the men hard and anxious, all my hopes and fears and inadequacies on display for everyone to see. “You’re right,” I repeated, “you are.” But then my voice cracked and I very nearly broke down right there in front of him. “Prok,” I said, miserable, absolutely miserable, as miserable as I’ve ever been in my life, “Prok, I love her.”
The word seemed to bounce off him like a pinball hitting a baffle, love, such an unlikely term to incorporate in the scientific lexicon, but give him credit: he bowed to it. “Yes,” he said dryly, “and I love Mac. And my children. And you too, John.”
He pushed himself back in his chair then and let his gaze wander, the pipes rattling overhead, the sun gracing the windows a moment and then vanishing. The interview was over. But there was something more; I could read it in his expression. He refocused his eyes on me and let just the hint of self-satisfaction creep over his features. “You know, I’ve arranged two lectures in Michigan City,” he said, “on very short notice. We’ll be taking some histories in conjunction, of course, two nights at the hotel there.” He paused, moved the pen from one corner of his desk to the other. “I thought you might like to come along.”
The drive up to Michigan City was uneventful, no different from a thousand other drives Prok and I had taken together, he at the wheel and I in the seat beside him, staring through the windshield and calling out directions because he tended to get involved in what he was saying and cruise right on by the crucial left-hand turn or miss the junction we were looking for and have to swing a U-turn a hundred yards up—at the risk of both our lives. Prok was getting older, less attentive to detail, and his driving had suffered. Of course, he would never consider asking me to get behind the wheel, not unless he’d been knocked unconscious. What else? It was spring again, another spring. The sun was unimpeded and the shoots of green things were springing up everywhere. We kept the windows down to feed on the glory of it.
We didn’t talk about Iris, but she was there with us the whole way, one more hurdle for Prok, the beginning and end of everything for me. I’d called, again and again, but she wasn’t coming to the phone and her mother’s voice could have crushed the hulls of icebreakers. I didn’t know what she expected from me. Didn’t know if this was the end or not, if we would divorce and my son would be taken from me—and my job. Because Prok wouldn’t have a divorced man on his staff—or even a remarried one. That was the rule, simple and final.
What we did talk about was Elster. “I don’t mean to say things behind anybody’s back,” I said, “but I think, well, I think it’s a mistake to hire the man. In any capacity. But especially not as our librarian, where he has access to our—well, you know what I mean.”
Prok didn’t know, and he interrogated me nearly the whole way there, his eyes gone cold and hard. He made me go over the details six times—“Fred Skittering? The reporter? And Elster put him on to you? How long ago was this?”—and he was still questioning me, still brooding over this treachery in his midst, when he pulled up to Iris’s girlhood home. It was a modest house on a street of modest houses, two stories, with rust streaks under the gutters and a battered Pontiac in the driveway. “This is it, then?” he asked, waiting for a car to pass before he backed in at the curb.
“Yes,” I said, my stomach sinking, “the white house, right here, number fourteen.”
He shut off the car and turned to face me. “What was the name of Iris’s mother again?”
“Deirdre. They’re Irish.”
“Irish. Yes. Right. And the father?”
I glanced at my watch. “Frank,” I said. “But he’ll be at work still.”
And then we were at the door, Prok running a hand through his hair while I rang the bell and the dog—a sheltie named Bug, which Iris’s father delighted in calling Bugger every chance he got—began barking at the rear of the house. There was the sound of footsteps, the scrabbling of the dog’s nails on the bare floor, more barking, and I tried to compose myself even as Iris’s mother pulled back the door and gave me a look of iron while the dog whined and leapt at my legs. “Um, well, hello,” I said, and I tried out her name, “Deirdre. Oh, yes, and this is Dr. Kinsey, my, well, my boss—”
Everything changed in that instant. Iris’s mother let her face bloom with a Kilkenny smile and the door swung wide. “Oh, yes, of course,” she said, “I would have recognized you anywhere, and please, please come in.”
I stepped through the door and froze: Iris. Where was Iris? And my son? I thought I heard the piping of a child’s voice from upstairs, from Iris’s old room, and I had to force myself to put one foot in front of the other. The dog whined and flapped about the floor and I stooped mechanically to stroke it.
I hadn’t been to the house in six months or more—we visited when we could, both Iris’s parents and my mother, but my work didn’t allow much time off, of course, as I think I’ve made clear here. At any rate, the place didn’t seem to have changed much, the same coats on the coat tree, the same umbrellas in the umbrella stand, even a pair of galoshes that looked vaguely familiar set aside in the corner. I noticed all these things with a kind of heightened perception—the dog looked shabbier, Iris’s mother older, the carpet was worn in the living room—because I was snarled up inside, twisted like wire. All I could think of was Iris. Would she talk to me? Would she see me even?
“Here, please, have a seat,” my mother-in-law was saying, “but you must be exhausted—did you drive all the way up today?”
“Yes,” Prok said, easing himself down on the sofa, “but John and I are used to it, isn’t that right, John?”
I stood there hovering over him, incapable of decision—I didn’t even know if I could sit, if the muscles would respond or the factory of my brain issue the command. “Yes,” I murmured.
Iris’s mother was transformed, as inflated as I’d ever seen her—there was a celebrity in the house, the great man himself, parked on the sofa in her living room at 14 Albion Drive. “Tea,” she said, extending her smile even to me, “would you like some tea? And sweet buns, I have sweet buns—”
Prok, at his most courtly, in the voice that had mesmerized how many thousands I couldn’t even begin to guess, said that that would be very nice indeed, a real treat, and my mother-in-law practically fell at his feet. I wondered, even in my distracted state, how long it would take before she volunteered to give up her history.
I was on the verge of breaking in, of demanding to know where my wife and son were and why she hadn’t gone to get them, first thing, when suddenly the sound of the clarinet came drifting down from above, something hesitant, broken, infinitely sad, as if all the sorrows of humankind had been distilled to the single failing breath of that melody. “That’s Wagner,” Prok said. “The ‘Liebestod,’ isn’t it? From Tristan and Isolde?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Iris’s mother said, throwing up her hands. “With Iris, it could be anything—”
And then I was gone, through the door and up the steps two at a time, and I didn’t care about Prok or the project or anything on this ear
th but her, Iris, my wife, the woman I loved and needed and wanted. I flung open the door and there was my son, sprawled out asleep in the middle of the bed as if he’d dropped down from the sky, and Iris at the window with her clarinet. She was wearing a pair of child’s slippers, fluffy and oversized, and a blouse that fed off the color of her eyes. She played two notes more, sostenuto e diminuendo, and then, very slowly, with infinite care, she laid the instrument aside and held out her arms. And can I tell you this?—I never let go of her, never once, never again.
Epilogue
Bloomington, Indiana
August 27, 1956
I’d like to be able to report that everything continued on an even keel, that Iris and I were able to make the necessary adjustments and live in harmony ever after—or until the present, at any rate—and that the project came to fruition and Prok received the recognition he deserved as one of the great original geniuses of the twentieth century, but in life, as distinct from fiction, things don’t always tie up so neatly. Iris never attended a musicale again, and she never again mounted the stairs to the attic at the house on First Street. She was present for the social occasions, the picnics, the occasional staff dinners at Prok’s, the holiday celebrations, but she saw them as an obligation, nothing more, and gradually she began to withhold her friendship from Mac and Violet Corcoran and Hilda Rutledge and take up with a new circle of people she’d known from her days at school, even talking about going back to teaching once John Jr. matriculates from the lower grades. In the interval, I’ve continued with the business of the Institute, with the interviews and the travels and the filming, sometimes as an observer, sometimes a participant. Iris and I don’t discuss it. I try to leave my work at the office, as they say. And Elster—Prok had him transferred back to the biology library the day we returned from Michigan City and he’s been persona non grata in Wylie Hall ever since. Good riddance, is what I say.
As for Prok, his life was too short. Dead at sixty-two, buried this morning. He wanted to record one hundred thousand histories—that was his grand ambition, the definitive sample—but at last count we had something less than twenty percent of that figure. And he projected another several volumes in the series to take advantage of all that raw data, a volume on sex offenders to follow the female, but everything is in flux now. His last words to me, as they bundled him off to the hospital, were: “Don’t do anything till I get back.” I don’t know. I’m too distraught right now to see things clearly, but if there was a catalyst in all this—in his exhaustion and the wear and tear on his heart that ultimately killed him—it was the female volume. Less than three years after its publication, he was dead.
Publishers are forever using the cliché “eagerly anticipated” to describe ordinary and humdrum volumes of which no one is even remotely aware, but I can say, without doubt, that Sexual Behavior in the Human Female was the most feverishly awaited and explosive title of the century. Everything that worked so spectacularly for the male volume—the marshalling of the press, the close-guarding of the proofs, the secrecy and vigilance—was redoubled for the female. During the months leading up to publication, Prok brought the press in for a series of lectures, meetings with the inner circle, long exhaustive face-to-face talks until late in the night, and, of course, a first look at the proofs and the signing of his standard contract limiting their articles to five thousand words and a proscription against publishing before August 20—1953, that is—which one wag had already dubbed “K-Day.” Excitement was so high, in fact, that we had to reschedule the publication date from the fourteenth of September to the ninth, because the retail outlets began putting the book on the shelves the minute they received their shipments, no matter the prohibitions and pleas from the Saunders Company. Predictably, sales were spectacular, outstripping those of the male volume by something like two to one in the first weeks.
But then, as I’m sure you’re aware, the adverse reaction set in. It’s not as if we didn’t expect it—Prok had warned us from the outset that the public would react very differently to revelations about female sexuality than to those regarding the male of the species, but that it was absolutely necessary that we publish our findings in any case, because, as he liked to say, people just had to learn to face reality. If the male volume was shocking, especially in regard to the statistics relating to pre- and extramarital relations and the prevalence of H-behavior, at least the general public had always viewed men’s sexual mores with some degree of skepticism, but to put women in the same category was something else altogether.
Whether Prok liked it or not, women had been placed on a pedestal—they were our wives, daughters, mothers—and people came to see the book less as a scientific survey than as an attack on American womanhood. They objected to hearing women called “human animals,” a phrase that recurs some forty-eight times in the text, and to Prok’s bias toward premarital sex as well (our statistics, as I informed Iris in the backseat of the Nash so long ago, showed that women who engaged in premarital sex were more likely to make a satisfactory adjustment to marriage than those who did not). In fact, they hated all our statistics and what they implied—that women were sexual beings too, 62 percent of whom had masturbated, while 90 percent had engaged in petting, 50 percent had had premarital intercourse and 3.6 percent reported sexual contacts with lower animals. Mothers and daughters having sex with animals (and never mind that only one of our subjects had experienced full coitus with her pet, a German shepherd, as I recall, and that our single highest rater had achieved no more than perhaps six hundred orgasms through oral-genital contact with her cat)—the notion alone was enough to inflame the public to almost universal condemnation of us, our methods, our objectives, personalities and characters. There were even stirrings among the legislators on Capitol Hill to the effect that Sexual Behavior in the Human Female played into the hands of the Communist menace that sought to destroy the moral fiber of the country.
Prok was called variously “an advocate for free love,” “a peddler of obscene literature and smut,” and a “deranged Nebuchadnezzar” whose agenda was to drag women down to the level of “the beasts of the jungle.” Old adversaries like Margaret Mead and Lawrence Kubie arose to denounce him, as well as new ones like the Reverend Billy Graham, Reinhold Niebuhr and Karl Menninger, the latter of whom had praised the male volume and now wounded Prok deeply and insupportably with his apostasy. The criticism? At first it was strictly on moral grounds, taking Prok to task for suggesting that all sexual outlets were equally unobjectionable and that frequency and numbers somehow legitimized certain behaviors, asserting instead that in fact such behaviors should make people feel guilty because guilt was essential to the establishment and preservation of basic morality, but then the scientific community weighed in to undermine our statistical analysis, and that was truly devastating.
Of course, Prok was shrewd enough to escape the initial furor—all of us, Mac, Corcoran, Rutledge, Aspinall and myself, piled onto the train on publication day and made a three-week excursion to the Pacific Coast, where we locked ourselves up with the inmates in San Quentin, as out of reach as anyone could ever hope to be. But then it was back to Bloomington, where the phone never stopped ringing, and Prok began his counterattack. If anything, he pushed himself even harder now, seeking justification, fighting for the very existence of the Institute, but the Rockefeller Foundation, feeling the heat, dropped our funding and even President Wells’s defense of academic freedom began to ring hollow in the face of assaults from outraged alumni, the Board of Trustees and the Indiana Provincial Council of Catholic Women. Prok slipped. He faltered. The more he drove himself, the greater the strain on his recalcitrant heart. He began to suffer a series of small strokes. His physicians recommended bed rest, but there was no keeping Prok in bed. Even his vacation, a trip to Europe with Mac designed to slow the pace and distract him from his work, proved exhausting, as he couldn’t help but stay out till all hours interviewing prostitutes and male hustlers in the streets of London, Copenhagen an
d Rome. Finally, inevitably, he gave out.
But I don’t want to remember him like that, I don’t want to remember the drawn and confused-looking shell of a man who began to convene daily meetings because he no longer had the focus and mental capacity for work, the imposter Prok who we all felt would throw off the mask at any moment and roar out, “Milk, Corcoran, Rutledge, you’re obfuscating the facts and delaying the project!” The dead Prok. The Prok in the casket that felt as if it were filled with rock, with lead, with hot lava, because no mere mortal could weigh anywhere near that much—
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I don’t even know if I’ll have a job come tomorrow. And I can’t drink another Zombie cocktail because they no longer have an effect on me, and this one before me is the last I’ll ever have, in honor of Prok, out of respect to him. Bourbon, I’ll drink bourbon, but not rum. Never again. Just the smell of it brings him back, Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest. But here I am, locked in my study, the recording tape moving through the sprockets and across the heads, a fleeting tan strip of magnetized tape imprinted with the thinnest layer of everything I’ve ever felt in my life. It’s hot. Blistering. Not a breath of air. Iris is in the living room, in her black dress, drinking iced tea and leafing through a magazine, and John Jr., released from the onus of mourning, is out in the yard—or the neighbor’s yard—playing ball or running through the sprinkler with his playmates. If I concentrate, I can hear their shouts and cries carrying out over the lawn.
