The Inner Circle (2 page)

I didn't know what to say to that, so I gave her a faint smile—it wouldn't do at all to look as if I were enjoying myself, because this was education, after all, this was science, and every face had been ironed sober—and allowed my right hand to rest lightly at her waist as I guided her through the crush and into the semi-darkened hall. We were fifteen minutes early, but already all the aisle seats had been taken and we had to edge awkwardly through a picket of folded knees, book bags and umbrellas to reach the middle of one of the back rows. Laura settled in, shook out her hair, waved to thirty or forty people I didn't recognize, then bent forward over her compact and stealthily reapplied her lipstick. She came up compressing her lips and giving me the sort of look she might have reserved for a little brother or maybe the family dog—she was a junior from Fort Wayne and I was a senior from Michigan City and no matter how much I wanted to believe otherwise there was nothing, absolutely nothing, between us.

I gazed down the row. Nearly all the girls were glancing round them with shining eyes while the men fumbled with loose-leaf binders and worried over the nubs of their pencils. A man from my rooming house—Dick Martone—happened to glance up then and our eyes met briefly. Both of us looked away, but not before I could read his excitement. Here we were—he wedged in between two other senior men, I with Laura Feeney preening at my side—about to see and engage what we'd been hungering after for the better part of our lives. I can't begin to
describe the
frisson
that ran through that hall, communicated from seat to seat, elbow to elbow, through the whole yearning mass of us. Over the course of the past weeks we'd been instructed in the history and customs of marriage, heard about the emotions evoked, the legal ramifications of the nuptial bond and even the anatomy of the structures involved in reproduction, heard the words “penis,” “nipple,” “vagina” and “clitoris” spoken aloud in mixed company, and now we were going to see for ourselves. I could feel the blood pounding in my extremities.

Then the side door swung open and Dr. Kinsey was there, striding purposefully to the podium. Though a moment before he'd been slogging across campus in galoshes and southwester, you would have thought he'd just stepped out of a sunlit meadow, the sheaf of his bristling flat-topped pompadour standing upright from the crown of his head as if it had been pressed from a mold, his dark suit, white shirt and bow tie impeccable, his face relaxed and youthful. He was in his mid-forties then, a looming tall presence with an oversized head, curiously narrowed shoulders and a slight stoop—the result of the rickets he'd suffered as a child—and he never wasted a motion or a single minute of anybody's time either. The anticipatory murmur fell off abruptly as he stepped up to the lectern and raised his head to look out on the audience. Silence. Absolute. We all became aware of the sound of the rain then, a steady sizzle like static in the background.

“Today we shall discuss the physiology of sexual response and orgasm in the human animal,” he began, without preliminary, without notes, and as his equable, matter-of-fact tones penetrated the audience, I could feel Laura Feeney go tense beside me. I stole a glance at her. Her face was rapt, her white blouse glowing in the dimness of the lecture hall as if it were the single radiant point in the concave sweep of the audience. She was wearing knee socks and a pleated skirt that pulled tight to reveal the swell of the long muscles of her thighs. Her perfume took hold of me like a vise.

Professor Kinsey—Prok—went on, with the help of the overhead projector, to document how the penis enlarges through vasocongestion and at orgasm releases between two and five million spermatozoa,
depending on the individual, and then turned his attention to the female reproductive organs. He talked at length about vaginal secretions and their function in easing intromission of the penis, spoke of the corresponding importance of the cervical secretions, which, in some cases, may serve to loosen the mucous plug that ordinarily lies in the opening—the
os
—of the cervix, and can prevent fertilization by blocking movement of the sperm into the uterus and subsequently the Fallopian tubes. We bowed our heads, scribbled furiously in our notebooks. Laura Feeney swelled beside me till she was the size of one of the balloons they floated overhead during the Macy's parade. Everyone in the place was breathing as one.

And then, abruptly, the first of the slides appeared, a full-color, closeup photograph of an erect, circumcised phallus, followed by a shot of the moist and glistening vagina awaiting it. “The vagina must be spread open as the erect male organ penetrates,” Dr. Kinsey went on, as the next slide dominated the screen behind him, “and thus the female has employed two fingers to this end. You will observe that the clitoris is stimulated at this point, thus providing the erotic stimulation necessary for the completion of the act on the part of the female.” There was more—a very detailed and mechanical account of the various positions the human animal employs in engaging in coitus, as well as techniques of foreplay—and a teaser (as if we needed one) for the next lecture, which was to focus on fertilization and (here the whispers broke out) how to circumvent it.

I heard it all. I even took notes, though afterward I could make no sense of them. Once the slides appeared I lost all consciousness of the moment (and I can't overemphasize the jolt they gave me, the immediate and intensely physical sensation that was like nothing so much as plunging into a cold stream or being slapped across the face—here it was, here it was at long last!). I might have been sitting there upright in the chair, Laura Feeney swelling at my side, and I drew breath and blinked my eyes and the blood circulated through my veins, but for all intents and purposes I wasn't there at all.

Afterward—and I can't for the life of me recall how the lecture concluded—people collected their things in silence and moved up the
aisles in a somber processional. There was none of the jostling and joking you would normally expect from a mob of undergraduates set loose after an hour's confinement. Instead, the crowd shuffled forward listlessly, shoulders slumped, eyes averted, for all the world like refugees escaping some disaster. I couldn't look at Laura Feeney. I couldn't guide her with a hand to her waist either—I was on fire, aflame, and I was afraid the merest touch would incinerate her. I studied the back of her head, her hair, her shoulders, as we made our way through the crowd toward the smell of the rain beyond the big flung-open doors at the end of the hallway. We were delayed a moment on the doorstep, a traffic jam there on the landing as the rain lashed down and people squared their hats and fumbled with umbrellas, and then I had my own umbrella open and Laura and I were down the steps and out into the rain.

We must have gone a hundred yards, the trees flailing in the wind, the umbrella streaming, before I found something to say. “Do you—would you like to take a walk? Or do you need to, perhaps—because I could take you back to the dorm if that's what you—”

Her face was drawn and bloodless and she walked stiffly beside me, avoiding body contact as much as was possible under the circumstances. She stopped suddenly and I stopped too, awkwardly struggling to keep the crown of the umbrella above her. “A walk?” she repeated. “In this? You've got the wrong species here, I'm afraid—I'm a
human animal,
not a duck.” And then we were laughing, both of us, and it was all right.

“Well, how about a cup of coffee then—and maybe a piece of, I don't know, pie? Or a drink?” I hesitated. The rain glistened in her hair and her eyes were bright. “I could use a stiff one after that. I was—what I mean is, I never—”

She touched my arm at the elbow and her smile suddenly bloomed and then faded just as quickly. “No,” she said, and her voice had gone soft, “me either.”

I took her to a tavern crowded with undergraduates seeking a respite from the weather, and the first thing she did when we settled into a booth by the window was twist the rhinestone band off her finger and secrete it in the inside compartment of her purse. Then she unpinned
her hat, patted down her hair and turned away from me to reapply her lipstick. I hadn't thought past the moment, and once we agreed on where we were going, we hadn't talked much either, the rain providing background music on the timpani of the umbrella and plucking the strings of the ragged trees as if that were all the distraction we could bear. Now, as I braced my elbows on the table and leaned toward her to ask what she wanted to drink, I realized that this was something very like a date and blessed my luck because I had two and a half dollars left in my wallet after paying out room and board from my scant weekly paycheck (I was working at the university library then, pushing a broom and reshelving books five evenings a week). “Oh, I don't know,” she said, and I could see she wasn't quite herself yet. “What are you having?”

“Bourbon. And a beer chaser.”

She made a moue of her lips.

“I can get you a soft drink, if you prefer—ginger ale, maybe?”

“A Tom Collins,” she said, “I'll have a Tom Collins,” and her eyes began to sweep the room.

The lower legs and cuffs of my trousers were wet and my socks squished in my shoes as I rose to make my way to the bar. The place was close and steaming, shoulders and elbows looming up everywhere, the sawdust on the floor darkly compacted by the impressions of a hundred wet heels. When I got back to the table with our drinks, there was another couple sitting opposite Laura, the girl in a green velvet hat that brought out the color of her eyes, the man in a wet overcoat buttoned up over his collar and the knot of his tie. He had a long nose with a bump in it and two little pincushion eyes set too close together. I don't remember his name—or hers either, not at this remove. Call them Sally and Bill, for the purposes of this account, and identify them as fellow students in the marriage course, sweethearts certainly—worlds more than Laura and I were to each other—though not yet actually engaged.

Laura made the introductions. I nodded and said I was pleased to meet them both.

Bill had a pitcher of beer in front of him, the carbonation rising up from its depths in a rich, golden display, and I watched in silence as he
tucked his tongue in the corner of his mouth and meticulously poured out half a glass for Sally and a full one for himself. The golden liquid swirled in the glass and the head rose and steadied before composing itself in a perfect white disc. “You look like you've done that before,” I said.

“You bet I have,” he replied, then lifted his glass and grinned. “A toast,” he proposed. He waited till we'd raised our glasses. “To Professor Kinsey!” he cried. “Who else?”

This was greeted with a snicker from the booth behind us, but we laughed—all four of us—as a way of defeating our embarrassment. There was one thing only on our minds, one subject we all were burning to talk of, and though Bill had alluded to it, we weren't quite comfortable with it yet. We were silent a moment, studying the faces of the people shuffling damply through the door. “I like your ring, Sally,” Laura said finally. “Was it terribly expensive?”

And then they were both giggling and Bill and I were laughing along with them, laughing immoderately, laughing for the sheer joy and release of it. I could feel the bourbon settling in my stomach and sending out feelers to the distant tendrils of my nerves, and my face shone and so did theirs. We were in on a secret together, the four of us—we'd put one over on Dean Hoenig—and we'd just gone through a rite of initiation in a darkened hall in the biology building. It took a minute. Bill lit a cigarette. The girls searched each other's eyes. “Jeez,” Bill said finally, “did you ever in your life see anything like that?”

“I thought I was going to die,” Sally said. She threw a glance at me, then studied the pattern of wet rings her beer glass had made on the table. “If my mother—” she began, but couldn't finish the thought.

“God,” Laura snorted, making a drawn-out bleat of it, “my mother would've gone through the roof.” She'd lit a cigarette too, and it smoldered now in the ashtray, the white of the paper flecked red from the touch of her lips. She picked it up distractedly, took a quick puff, exhaled. “Because we never, in my family, I mean never, discussed, you know, where little boys and girls come from.”

Sally raised a confidential hand to her mouth. “They call him ‘Dr. Sex,' did you know that?”

“Who does?” I felt as if I were floating above the table, all my tethers cut and the ground fast fading below me. This was heady stuff, naughty, wicked, like when a child first learns the verboten words Dr. Kinsey had pronounced so distinctly and disinterestedly for us just an hour before.

Sally raised her eyebrows till they met the brim of her hat. “People. Around campus.”

“Not to mention town,” Bill put in. He dropped his voice. “He makes you do interviews, you know. About your sex life”—he laughed—“or lack of it.”

“I would hate that,” Sally said. “It's so …
personal.
And it's not as if he's a medical doctor. Or a minister even.”

I felt overheated suddenly, though the place was as dank as the dripping alley out back.
“Histories,”
I said, surprising myself. “Case histories. He's explained all that—how else are we going to know what people—”

“The human animal, you mean,” Laura said.

“—what people do when they, when they mate, if we don't look at it scientifically? And frankly, I don't know about you, but I applaud what Kinsey's doing, and if it's shocking, I think we should ask ourselves why, because isn't a, a … a
function
as universal as reproductive behavior just as logical a cause for study as the circulation of the blood or the way the cornea works or any other medical knowledge we've accumulated over the centuries?” It might have been the bourbon talking, but there I was defending Prok before I ever even knew him.