The Inner Circle (8 page)

For my part, I luxuriated in the attention. I'd never thought of myself as anything other than ordinary, even when I made A's in my course work or managed to score a touchdown on a broken play in a high school football game, and here were two vibrant, intelligent, worldly people—two adults—soliciting my opinions and treating me as an equal. It was heady, and I felt I never wanted to leave that table or that sofa by the fireplace where we settled in after dinner with bowls of vanilla ice cream while Prok lectured in his high tireless voice and Mac knitted with perfect articulation. Nine o'clock came and went, and then ten. Mac disappeared at one point to be sure the children were in bed (two girls of fourteen and sixteen, and a boy of eleven), and there was an awkward moment during which I expressed my concern over the lateness of the hour, but Prok dismissed me with a wave. Far from being exhausted, he shifted into a higher gear.

He poked at the fire, then eased himself down on the floor with the cloth braids he was fashioning into a new rug (“Very economical, Milk—you should take it up. Any discards, old clothes, sheets and the
like, plus strips of muslin dyed in whatever color you prefer, and you'd be surprised how durable such a rug can be. Why this one, the one beneath me here? I wove this as an assistant professor in our quaint little rental back in 1921, our first home, in fact, after we were married”) and in the quiet broken only by the snap and hiss of the fire, he opened up to me all his hopes and aspirations for the project. Ten thousand interviews, that was what he wanted—at a minimum—and the interviews had to be conducted face-to-face to assure accuracy, unlike the printed questionnaires or subjective analyses previous researchers had favored. Only then could
we
(he was already including the young neophyte before him) have the data to drive down the hidebound superstitions that had ruined so many lives. Take masturbation, for instance. Did I know that reputable people—doctors, ministers and the like—had actually promoted the egregious notion that masturbation leads to insanity?

He turned to me, his spectacles giving back twin images of the fire eating at a split oak log so that the reflection dissolved into his eyes. “Why, masturbation is the most natural and harmless outlet the species has acquired for release of sexual tension. It is purely positive, a veritable benefit to the species and to the society at large, and any minister worth his salt should be delivering sermons on that subject, believe me. Just think, Milk, just think of all the harm done by sexual repression and the guilt normal healthy adolescents are meant needlessly to feel—” I must have colored at this point, thinking of our last interview, because he changed tack suddenly and asked me point-blank if I wouldn't help him by contributing to the project.

“Well, yes, I mean—certainly, I would be—” I fumbled, trying to recover myself. “But what could I do, in any material way, that is—?”

“Very simple,” he said, shifting his legs on the rug. “Just poll the men in your rooming house—you say there are fourteen of them in addition to yourself?”

“That's right,” I said. “Yes. Fourteen.”

“Just poll them and convince them to come on into my office to give up their histories—you've got a potential one-hundred-percent group, there, John, do you realize that?”

I wasn't the sort who fraternized easily—I think I've made that much clear here—and the prospect was daunting, but I found myself nodding my head in assent, because, as I say, you just didn't say no to Prok.

And yet, even as I sat there conspiring with him like a favored son, somewhere in the back of my mind, obscured for the moment, was a dull but persistent sense of guilt over Iris. You see, it wasn't simply my indecision over the cheese that had made me late that evening, but the fact that I'd left Iris—or the Iris situation, I should say—to the last minute. I don't know why that was—I'm not a procrastinator, or not normally, else I wouldn't have accomplished what I had at school or would come to achieve in later years with Prok—but every time I thought of phoning Iris my heart began to pound so violently I was afraid I was having a seizure, until finally I realized I had to see her in person, if only to explain myself and try to patch things as best I could. I did want to go out with her, very much so—I'd begun to think about her at odd moments, picturing her the way she was that day in the library or that afternoon at my mother's, swinging her legs beneath the chair like a little girl, gesticulating to make a point, her eyes boiling up like cataracts over any issue at all, over parasites or poetry or the plight of the Lithuanians—but the longer I put off breaking our date the worse it was.

Finally it was Saturday, and I still hadn't mounted the courage to see her. I woke to a burst of Paul's blunt, ratcheting snores and a gray scrim of ice on the window, thinking Iris, thinking I had to go to her dorm right that minute and ask her to breakfast so I could look into her eyes over fried eggs and muffins and coffee and tell her I'd take her out the following Saturday, without fail, that I was looking forward to it, that there was nothing I'd rather do (and maybe, since I'd already bought the tickets for tonight she might want to go with a friend?), but that she had to understand, and I was sorry, more than sorry—distraught—and could she ever forgive me? But I didn't go to her dorm. It was too early. Seven. It was only seven, or just past, and she wouldn't be up for hours, or so I told myself. Instead, I took my books to breakfast alone at the Commons and read the first six stanzas of Milton's “Il Penseroso” over and over till I couldn't take it anymore (“Hence vain deluding Joys,/The
brood of Folly without father bred,” et cetera), pushed myself up from the table and slammed out the door before I knew what I was doing.

The clock tower was ringing eight; the cold leached through the soles of my shoes. One of Laura Feeney's discarded lettermen, vastly overfed and with feet like snowshoes, limped past me on his way to the gym, even as I cut through a patch of woods and made diagonally across a dead brown strip of lawn for Iris's dorm. Inside, there was a smell of artificial fragrance, as if I'd somehow been transposed to the Coty counter at Marshall Field's, and the resident assistant—a girl of twenty with bad skin and a limp blond pageboy—looked up at me as if I'd come to ravish every coed on the premises. “Hello,” I said, moving briskly across the room and trying to keep my head of steam up, because it was now or never, “I was wondering if, by any chance, well, if Iris McAuliffe is in. If she's up yet, I mean.”

She gave me a stricken look, her features reduced to the essentials.

“I'm John,” I said. “John Milk. Would you tell her John Milk is here? Please?”

“She's not in.”

“What do mean she's not in? At eight o'clock in the morning? On a Saturday?”

But the RA wasn't forthcoming. She simply repeated herself in a long, drawn-out sigh of exasperation, as if I'd spent every morning of my life in the reception hall of the girls' dorm, pestering her: “She's not in.”

I looked to the door at the far end of the lounge, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum beyond, and at that moment it swung open and two girls emerged, buttoning up their coats and adjusting their hats for the plunge through the outer doors and into the concrete clasp of the morning. They gave me a look of amusement—what man in his right mind would be calling for a girl at this hour?—and passed out of doors in a flurry of giggles. “All right, then,” I said, taking the coward's way out, “can I leave her a note?”

But now I was with Prok, in front of the fire, agreeing to take my first unambiguous step on the road to a career in sex research, and who
would have guessed? Who even knew there was such a thing? Ask a boy what he wants to be and he'll answer cowboy, fireman, detective. Ask an undergraduate and he'll say he intends to go into the law or medicine or that he wants to teach or study business or engineering. But no one chooses sex research.

I watched Prok work at his rag rug, pulling tight a six-inch strand of cloth, then interweaving it with another, the whole business spread now like a skirt over his sprawled legs. He was talking about his H-histories, how he'd been to the penal farm at Putnamville on his own and begun taking histories among the prisoners—“And they are very extensive histories, Milk, make no doubt about it”—and how one man in particular had offered to introduce him into the homosexual underworld of Chicago, and how significant that was, as H-histories were every bit as vital to assessing the larger picture as heterosexual histories, as I, no doubt, could appreciate. And then he paused a moment to offer a clarification, his eyes seeking mine and holding to them with that unwavering gaze he must have mastered by staring down his own image in the mirror for whole hours at a time. His voice softened, dropped. “That is, John, I believe you, of all people, should be especially attuned to the issue—”

I might have colored. I don't know. But I do remember his embrace that night as he stood at the door thanking me for coming, thanking me for the cheese and my insights and offering all sorts of Prok-advice and admonishments about the cold, the icy streets, incompetent drivers and the like. “Goodnight, Milk,” he said, and took me in his arms and pressed me to him so that I could feel the ripple and contraction of his muscles and the warmth of him and breathe in the scent of his hair oil, his musk, the hot sweet invitation of his breath.

He let me go. The door pulled shut. I walked off into the darkness.

“So, paul, please, you're going to have to reiterate it for me, because I must be missing something here. You're opposed to science, is that it? To data collection? Honestly, I just don't get it.”

We were in our room, waiting to go over to dinner, the day shutting down around the last pale fissures of a lusterless sun. It was cold. And not only outside: Mrs. Lorber must have had the furnace running on fumes. Paul—and I realize I haven't yet described him, and you'll forgive me, I hope, because I'm a novice at this—Paul was lying diagonally across his unmade bed, his head propped against the wall behind him, a comforter drawn up to his chin. He was almost a full year older than I and he wore a very thin, obsessively manicured mustache of the Ronald Colman variety, but his natural hair color was so pale and rinsed-out that you could barely detect it, even close up. His eyes were blue, but again, so weak a shade as to be almost transparent. He had two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin—and a pair of thin colorless lips that always seemed to be clamping down on something, due, I think, to a congenital overbite. What else? His parents were English, from Yorkshire, he loved chess, Lucky Strikes and
The Lone Ranger,
and, of course, Betsy. With whom he'd gone all the way, though they were yet to be married—or rather, with whom he went all the way all the time. How did I know? He'd described it to me—coitus with Betsy—in the kind of detail that would have gratified Prok, if only I could get him to sit for an interview.

I would stay awake nights waiting for him to come home so we could lie smoking in the dark while he went on in his soft hoarse tones about how he'd maneuvered her against the wall in the hallway of the campus heating plant or pinned her beneath him on the backseat of a borrowed car, the heater going full, and how willing she was, how hot, how she
only wore skirts now and no underwear, just to facilitate things, and how they longed to be married so they could do it in a bed, with sheets and blankets and no worries of the police or the night watchman or anybody else …

“But why should I?” he said. “Why should I waste an hour and a half—or what, two hours?—on some stranger I've never met and might not even like? What's in it for me?”

“Science,” I said. “The advancement of knowledge. Did you ever stop to consider that if there were more men like Dr. Kinsey maybe you wouldn't have to sneak in and out of the heating plant with your fiancée, because premarital sexual relations would be sanctioned, even encouraged?”

He was silent a moment. The window had gone gray and I got up to switch on the lamp before wrapping myself in a blanket and easing back down on my bed. Shadows infested the corners. I could see my breath hanging atomized in the air. “I don't know,” he said, “it's too personal.”

“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.