The Inner Circle (25 page)

It was just before the holidays, the whole country whipped into a froth of martial hysteria and Prok already fretting over the rumored rationing of gasoline, tires and the rest, insisting we'd have to take the train more now, the train and the bus. Everyone was distracted, shocked, outraged, so caught up in the events of December seventh that even Christmas itself seemed inconsequential—who could think of Santa Claus when Tojo and Hitler were loose in the world? As I remember, we were having a cold snap, the sky the color of shell casings, snow flurries predicted for later in the day, and I was in the office early, with a number of tasks ahead of me. There was the endless tabulation of data, the drawing up of tables and graphs, and correspondence too, though of course the volume was nothing like what we—Prok mostly—had to contend with after publication of our findings in '48. By that time, Prok was receiving thousands of letters a year from absolute strangers seeking advice or adjustments of their sexual problems, offering up their services as friends of the research, sending on explicit photos and sex diaries, erotic art, dildos, chains, whips and the like. I remember one letter
in particular, from an attorney representing a client who had been charged with “knowing a pig carnally by the anus,” and requesting Prok's expert testimony as to the overall frequency of such acts with animals (six percent of the general population; seventeen percent of the single rural population). Prok declined. Politely.

At any rate, there I was, bent over the desk, a Christmas carol infesting some part of my brain (Iris and I had attended a choral concert the night before), one of Prok's colleagues clearing his throat or blowing his nose down the hall somewhere while secretaries in heels clacked on by as if so many miniature locomotives were running over the rails of a miniature train set. I turned to Iris's history first, and there were no surprises there, just as I'd assumed. She hadn't even known what the term “masturbation” meant until she was seventeen and already in college, and then she was too consumed with her own inhibitions to try it more than two or three times, and never to the point of orgasm; she'd experienced both manual and oral stimulation of her breasts on the part of men—boys—other than me, but no petting and no coitus until the time of her engagement and marriage. She'd had limited experience with her own sex, and that at a very young age, no animal contacts, few fantasies. She'd never employed foreign objects, never (till now) taken the male genitalia into her mouth.

There was nothing there I hadn't seen a hundred times already, and I wondered why she'd been so reluctant to give up her history—truly, it was as pedestrian as could be—and then I wondered if that wasn't it, that she was ashamed of having so little to offer us, as if all we cared about were the extreme cases, the sexual athletes, the promiscuous and jaded, the individuals who dropped off the end of the bell curve. Could that have been it? Or was it something deeper, some resistance to the tenor of the study itself? To Prok? To me? For a minute I felt my heart would break—it hadn't been easy for her, and she'd done it for me, for me alone, and if it weren't for that she'd never have offered herself up to the project. It just wasn't in her nature. I might have taken a moment then to stare out the window into the sealed gray crypt of the sky, might have spoken her name aloud:
Iris.
Just that:
Iris.

She was so nervous the day she came in, so tightly wound, so shy and soft and beautiful. “Dr. Kinsey,” she said in a voice that was barely audible, “hello. And hello, John.” I'd known she was coming, and I'd been in a state myself—all day, in fact. Every time I heard a footfall in the corridor, and never mind that it was hours still until her appointment, I couldn't help shifting in my seat and stealing a glance at the door. I thought I was ready for her, ready to put this thing behind us as if it were the last in a series of marital rites, like an inoculation or the VD test required for the license, and yet still, though I'd been watching the clock and there was an ache in the pit of my stomach as if I hadn't eaten in a week, when it came to it I was almost surprised to see her there. I'd been working on a calculation that was a bit over my head (standard deviation from the mean in a sample of men reporting nocturnal emissions) and she'd come in noiselessly, as soft-footed as a cat. I looked up and there she was, stoop-shouldered, waiflike, sunk into her coat like a child, her gloved hands, the hat, the quickest, fleeting, agitated smile on her lips. Prok and I rose simultaneously to greet her.

“Iris, come in, come in,” Prok was saying, all the mellifluous inflection of his smoothest interviewer's tones pouring out of him like syrup, “here, let me help you off with your coat—bitter out there, isn't it?”

Iris said that it was. She gave me a smile as she shrugged out of her coat and Prok bustled round her, hot on the scent of yet another history. Did she look tentative, even a bit dazed? I suppose so. But I didn't really have much time to think about it one way or the other because Prok immediately turned to me and said, “I expect you'll want to go home a bit early this afternoon, Milk? Or better yet, perhaps you'd like to take your work down to the library—?”

And then there was Corcoran's history.

But Corcoran's history—and it was, as I've said, extensive, the most active single file we'd yet come across—isn't perhaps as important at this juncture as sketching in the denouement of that scene with Iris on the steps of the dorm, because that has more than a little bearing on all of this, and all that was to come. She called me a liar. Slammed the door. Left me in the cold. As I stood there in the unrelenting wind,
undergraduates and their dates slipping round me like phantoms, I was faced with two incontrovertible facts: Mac had told her everything, and she'd known about it all this time, through our reconciliation, our wedding and honeymoon and the dawdling intimate Sunday afternoons of summer and on into the fall, and she'd never said a word. She'd just watched me, like a spy, awaiting her opening. Well, now she had it. The door slammed behind her, the dorm swallowed her up and I staggered across campus like an invalid till I found a pay phone and rang her number.

The RA answered. “Bridget?” I said. “It's John Milk. Can you get Iris for me?”

“Yes, sure,” she said, but her voice was distant and cold, and I wondered how much she knew. The phone hit the table with a hard slap, as of flesh on flesh, and then I was listening to the buzz of static. After a moment, the usual sounds came through: the scuffing of feet in the background, a giggle, a man's voice. “Good night,” somebody said, another man, and then a girl's voice: “One more kiss.”

When Iris finally came on the line—it might have been two minutes later or ten, I couldn't say—she sounded as if she were speaking to a stranger, an unsolicited caller, somebody selling something. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“I just, well, I just wanted to, well,
talk
—that is, if, if—”

“What did you think you were doing?” she said then, and she sounded better now, sounded like herself—furious, but in some way resigned. “Did you think I was stupid or something? Or blind? Was that it?”

“No, it wasn't that. It was just that, well, I didn't think I'd done anything wrong, but I didn't want to upset you in any way, that was all. It's the project. It's the human animal. There's nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all.”

She was silent. I listened to the blitzkrieg of static over the line and she might have been a thousand miles away instead of just across the quad.

“Listen, Iris,” I said, “you're going to have to try to overcome these antiquated
notions about, well,
relations
between consenting adults—this is the modern age and we're scientists, or we mean to be, and all this superstition and fear and blame and finger-pointing is holding us back, as a society, I mean. Can't you see that?”

Her voice came back at me as if she hadn't heard what I was saying at all, a small voice, quavering around the edges: “And Prok?”

“What about him?” I said.

“You and Prok?”

I was in a phone booth, bathed in yellow light. It was cold. The wind rattled the door, seeped through the cracks where the hinges folded inward. I was shivering, I'm sure, but this was my wife, this was Iris, and I had to get everything out in the open, had to be straightforward and honest from here on out or we were doomed, I could see that now. “Yes,” I said.

What came next was a surprise. She didn't throw it back at me, didn't shout “How could you?” or demand to know the occasions and the number of times or ask me if I loved him or he me or where she and Mac fit into all of this, and she didn't use any of those hateful epithets people are so quick to make use of, invert, tribad, fag. She just said, “I see.”

What did I feel? Shame? A little. Relief? Yes, certainly, but it was as tenuous as the connection that fed our voices through the superstructure of the night. “I love you,” I said. “You, and nobody else. The rest is all—”

“A bodily function?”

“Iris, listen. I love you. I want to see you face-to-face, because this isn't—we shouldn't, not over the phone—”

“Mac,” she said, and I couldn't be sure—the connection was bad—but there was a knife edge of sorrow to her voice, a slicing away from the moment that made me feel she was about to break down in tears. “Mac and I talked. She's like a mother, but you know that, don't you? She, she told me the same thing you did. It doesn't mean anything, not a thing, it's just—just what? Animals rubbing their parts together.”

“Iris,” I said. “I love you.”

There was a long silence. When she finally spoke, her voice was reduced
to nothing. “What about me and Prok then?” she whispered. “Is that what you want?”

I might have been carved of cellulose, absolutely wooden, the effigy of John Milk propped up inside a phone booth on the far side of the quad on the IU campus on a blustery autumn night. Hammer nails into me, temper me, whittle away with every tool at your disposal: I was insensate. “No,” I said. “No, I don't want—that's not … You don't have to do anything you don't want to do.”

“But I'm giving up my history, aren't I? Why not give up the rest of me too?” A pause. The wind rattled the booth. “It doesn't mean anything, does it?”

I was made of wood. I couldn't speak.

“John? John, are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“Your—what should I call him? Your colleague—Corcoran,” and now a new tone came into her voice, a tone I didn't like at all. “He certainly seemed interested. Did you see him tonight? Did you? He was on me like a bird dog.”

And so I went for Corcoran's history. After things had settled down, that is—after Iris and I had talked it out a hundred times, after we'd reaffirmed the vows we'd taken before the justice of the peace and loved each other in the backseat of the Nash and scraped our money together to put down a deposit on our first apartment because this was intolerable, this separation, this yearning, these
misunderstandings,
and it was all right, it was going to be all right as far as I could tell on that hollowed-out December morning when Prok was away and I went to the files and saw what Corcoran was. What can I say? I sat there under the lamp and ran my finger down the interview sheet, noting acts, ages, frequencies, reconstructing an ever-expanding scenario of experimentation and sexual derring-do. Corcoran, in fact, was very nearly my diametrical opposite so far as experience was concerned. He'd matured early and taken advantage of it, precisely the type of individual we would later label as “high raters,” who consistently, throughout their lives, experienced more sex with more partners than the average, and far more than the “low raters” on the other end of the scale.

Corcoran was raised in Lake Forest, the son of a professor who later (when Corcoran was fourteen) moved the family to South Bend in order to accept a position at Notre Dame University. His father was Catholic, but only minimally involved in the church, and his mother was Unitarian, and something of a free spirit. There was nudity in the household, both parents having been involved at one time with the Nudist Movement, a fact his father took pains to conceal from his superiors at the university, just as Prok had to keep his own private affairs sub rosa in the IU community. Corcoran could remember having experienced erections in childhood, and his mother assured him that he'd had them in infancy even—she used to joke about it, in fact, saying he was like a little tin soldier, poking right up at her every time she went to change his diaper—and while this is unusual, our research into childhood sexuality has shown that it is not at all anomalous, especially among high-rating individuals. When he was eleven, he had his first orgasm, after which he participated enthusiastically in what in the vernacular would be called “circle jerks” with other neighborhood boys, first in Lake Forest and then in South Bend, where it seems he was the initiator of a whole range of sexual activities involving both boys and girls.

First coitus came at the age of fourteen, at a summer cottage on one of the lakes in the upper Michigan peninsula. There were, apparently, a number of like-minded individuals taking summer cabins in the region—nudists, that is—and he and his two sisters went without clothing throughout the summer, “tanned,” as he later put it, “in every crevice.” It was his aunt—his mother's sister—who first initiated him, and from there he went on to the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the other campers, with whom he pursued every means of gratification he could think of. He found, as he liked to say, that he had a talent for sex, that he enjoyed it more than any other activity he'd ever discovered, and before long he'd lost all interest in the boyish pastimes of baseball, trout fishing, picture shows and adventure novels, devoting himself almost wholly to satisfying his urges in as many ways and with as many partners as he could. He met his wife, Violet, in college, and she was, from
the beginning, a sexual enthusiast as well (at this juncture I could only configure her in my imagination, and I have to confess that I found myself becoming stimulated at the thought of transcribing her interview for our records). They had two children, both girls, of seven and nine years of age respectively. On occasion, they entertained other couples, Corcoran himself indiscriminate as to whether he had sex with the men or the women or both (he rated himself no higher than a 3 on Prok's 0–6 scale and thought of himself as fully bi-sexual). Finally, and this was to endear him to Prok and provide an ever-accumulating source of data for our files, he kept a little black book of his conquests, which ran, at this point, into the hundreds.