The Inner Circle (16 page)

I made some noises to the effect that I was.

He was watching me carefully. Still standing over me, still in shirt and bow tie. “You'll forgive me, Milk, but your emotions too often show in your face, and we can't have that the first time a woman—
this
woman tomorrow morning—tells you of something you may tend to find stimulating.”

I fought to keep my face rigid—and pale. “I think, well, if you'll give me the chance, I'm sure I can, that is—”

He wound up drilling me for two hours that night. First I was the woman, then he was, then vice versa and vice versa again. The questions came in spate, his eyes on me like whips, like cold pans of water first thing in the morning, intractable and unforgiving. He was exacting, demanding, hypercritical, and if I missed a beat he fed me hot coffee till my nerves were so jangled I don't think I slept at all that night. But Prok did. I lay there awake in the darkness, thinking of a thousand things, but mainly of Iris, whom I hadn't seen all summer though we'd written each other nearly every day. She was due back on campus the day after tomorrow, and I was thinking of her as the shadows softened and the first furtive wakening sounds of the street drifted in through the window and Prok puffed and blew and slept the sleep of the righteous.

In the morning, over breakfast in the room, Prok quizzed me again. I lifted a forkful of egg and toast to my mouth, put it down again, answered a question and took a quick sip of coffee. I nearly rebelled—didn't he have any confidence in me after all this time?—but I let him have his way, despite the fact that there was no essential difference in the way the male and female interviews were conducted, except that the sequence and type of the questions were specific to one sex or the other, as for example with the female you asked about the onset of menarche and the age at which breast development first appeared and so on. It
wasn't my competency Prok was questioning, it was my age and experience, or lack of it. He kept saying, “Milk, Milk, I wish you were twenty years older. And married. Married with children. How many children do you want, John—shall we make it three?”

I was downstairs in the conference room ten minutes before the scheduled appointment, which was at nine. Before a subject arrived, we would routinely record the basic data—the date, the number of the interview (for our files), the sex of the subject and the source of the history (that is, through what agency the subject had come to us, and in this case, of course, it was as a direct result of Prok's solicitation after the sociology lecture). I didn't know what to expect. We'd scheduled some twenty-eight interviews for the next three days and many more than that for our return trip the following week, and I had no way of connecting the names on the schedule sheet with any individual, though I'd sat there and registered them the night before. The woman I was to interview—and I'm going to assign her a fictitious name here, for confidentiality's sake—was a young faculty wife of twenty-five, as yet childless. Mrs. Foshay. Let's call her Mrs. Foshay.

There was a knock at the door. I was seated in an armchair by a dormant fireplace, the schedule sheet and Mrs. Foshay's folder spread out on a coffee table before me. The other chair—mahogany, red plush, standard Edwardian hotel fare—was positioned directly across from mine. “Come in,” I said, rising to greet her even as the door swung open.

In the doorway, peering into the room as if she'd somehow fetched up in the wrong place, was a very pretty young woman dressed in the height of fashion—dressed as if she'd just stepped out of a nightclub on Forty-second Street after an evening of dinner, dancing and champagne. She gave me a hesitant smile. “Oh, hello,” she said, “I wasn't sure if I was in the right place—”

I'd crossed the room to her and now I took her hand and gave it a curt, professional shake. “It's really, well, really kind of you to come—and important, important too—because every history, no matter how extensive, or, or, unextensive—nonextensive, I mean—contributes to the whole in a way that, that—”

Her smile opened up suddenly, a dazzling full-lipped smile that made whole flocks of birds take off and careen round my stomach. “Oh, it's my pleasure,” she murmured as I motioned to the chair and watched her settle into it, “anything for science, hey?”

I offered her a cigarette—she chose a Lucky—lit it for her and wished it were nine in the evening rather than nine in the morning so we could both have a drink. A drink would have gone a long way toward calming my case of nerves.

“Good,” I said, poised over the interview sheet, pencil in hand. “So, Mrs. Foshay, perhaps you'd like to tell me something of yourself—”

“Alice, call me Alice.”

“Yes,
Alice.
You've lived here long, here in West Lafayette, I mean?”

The small talk, designed, as I've said, to put the subject at ease, consumed perhaps five minutes and then my brain froze up. I couldn't help noticing how Mrs. Foshay's breasts filled out the material of her blouse—filled it to the point of strain—and how silken her legs looked in a pair of sheer stockings. A moment of silence passed like a freight train. “All right, then,” I said, “so. And you lived in Trenton, you say, until what age?”

I did manage to get into the rhythm of things as we moved along through the factual data (number of brothers, sisters, twin status, sorority membership, frequency of attending motion pictures, et cetera) keeping it in a simple question-response mode, and even the early sequential questions about onset of puberty came off well, but I'm afraid I broke down a bit when we got to the more sensitive areas. “When did you first begin to masturbate?” I asked, lighting a cigarette myself.

“I must have been eleven,” she said, drawing at her Lucky. “Or maybe it was twelve.” She threw her head back and exhaled, no more concerned than if she were at the hairdresser's or conferring with a girlfriend on the telephone. “We were living in Newark still, and I remember the curtains—my mother had made them for me when I was a child, very colorful, decorated with little figures out of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, that sort of thing. My sister Jean—she's a year older than I—she showed me the technique.”

I set down the cigarette, made a notation in the proper square. “Yes? And what was that technique?”

She tried to look away, but I held onto her with my eyes. I didn't blink. Didn't move.

“Well, you might find this odd or maybe hard to believe …”

“No,” I said, and my voice was so pinched I could barely get it out, “no, not at all—there is no activity we haven't recorded, and certainly, as Prok—
Dr. Kinsey,
that is—outlined in the lecture last night, we make no judgments …”

She seemed encouraged. She patted her hair, which was piled up and pinned at the crown in a roll, with the bangs brushed into an exaggerated pompadour, reminiscent of the way Dolly Dawn used to wear her hair, and most people I think will remember her from George Hall's band (“It's a Sin to Tell a Lie” should ring a bell, or, at the very least, “Yellow Basket”). “Well,” she said, “I'm double-jointed. So's Jean. And my brother Charlie.”

“Yes?” I said, pencil poised.

“We—Jean and I—would get up on the bed, side by side, and do a kind of back flip, you know, the sort of things acrobats do at the circus? Only we would hold it there and then, well, because of being double-jointed, we would lick ourselves.”

The term that came into my head was “auto-cunnilingus.” Prok hadn't yet devised a box or code for that one, so I made a spontaneous notation. I was probably blushing. Certainly I was hard.

We forged on.

Was this her first marriage? Yes. Had she experienced deep kissing prior to the time she was married? Yes. Had she experienced petting? Yes. Had she fondled the male genitalia, experienced mouth-to-genital contact, engaged in coitus? Yes, yes and yes. How many partners had she had, excluding her husband? Somewhere, she guessed, around twenty. “Twenty?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice neutral. She couldn't say, really, it might have been a few less or even as many as twenty-five, and her eyes went dreamy a moment as she tried to recollect. And what about orgasm: When was the first time she was aware of having experienced
an orgasm? Had she been able to bring herself to orgasm through masturbation, petting, intercourse? When had she most recently experienced an orgasm?

And here was where I found myself in deep water again, because I asked this conventionally pretty and very likely pampered professor's wife, this elegant blond jewel of a woman dressed in impeccable taste, the next question in the sequence, that is: “How many orgasms do you experience on average?”

She was on her fifth cigarette, and if she'd been relaxed from the outset, now she was as warm and enthusiastic as any individual I'd yet interviewed. She looked at me. Gave a little smile. I had been continuously—and unprofessionally—hard for the better part of two hours now. “Oh, I would guess maybe ten or twelve.”

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.