The Inner Circle (10 page)

Knowing this—uncovering it in the way an Egyptologist might have decrypted the hieroglyphs telling of the life and habits of some ancient pharaoh—gave me a strange rush of sensation. On the one hand, I couldn't help thinking of my mentor as somewhat diminished—here he was preaching sexual liberation, at least privately—and he'd been as much a prisoner of antiquated mores, of shyness, ignorance and his own inability to act, as I was. And yet, on the other, his history gave me hope and a kind of eerie confidence that my own sexual confusion would eventually resolve itself.

There was more. His H-history, which began with adolescent alliances, as mine had, became increasingly complex. The zoology professor, the distinguished scientist with a star beside his name in
American Men of Science,
the middle-aged father of three and happily married entomologist with the no-nonsense manner, was moving higher up the 0–6 scale, having initiated relations with several of his graduate students in the course of their long field trips and ultimately experiencing an intense and very close relationship with a male student not much older than I. And how do you suppose that made me feel? And Mac, what of her?

My blood was racing and I suppose if anyone had looked in on me in the office that day they would have seen the color in my face. I riffled through the pages, all greedy eyes and trembling fingers, then slipped Prok's folder back into the cabinet and took up Mac's. Her history was more extensive than I would have guessed, and as the symbols gave
themselves up to me I couldn't help picturing her naked, her hands, her lips, the way she walked, the cloying catch in her voice. I was aroused, I admit it, and I was already up from the desk and searching through the files for Laura Feeney's history, for Paul's and the Kinseys' children's, when I caught myself. What was I doing? This was voyeuristic, it was wrong, a violation of the trust Prok had invested in me, and here I was throwing it all over just to satisfy the tawdriest kind of curiosity. Suddenly—it was dark now, the lamps softly glowing, the galls shadowy and surreal—I felt ashamed, as deeply ashamed as I'd ever felt in my life. I could barely breathe until I'd put the files back and replaced the code under lock and key in the drawer, all the while listening for footsteps in the hall. I switched off the lights. Locked up. And when I slunk off into the corridor, I turned up my collar and averted my face like a criminal.

The next day Prok was back, a volcano of energy, whistling a Hugo Wolf song under his breath, bustling about the office in a running pantomime of quick, jerky movements, up from his desk and back again, a glance into one of the Schmitt boxes, then the files, a cursory check of a two-years'-dormant gall that had suddenly begun to hatch out and then a shout from the microscope—“A new genus, here, Milk, I believe, a new genus altogether!” When I'd first come in he gave me half a moment to settle myself and then, with a grin, he laid a compact folder on my desk. “Eighteen histories,” he said, showing his teeth. “And thirty-six more promised. I was up till two in the morning just to record them.”

“Wonderful news,” I said, sharing the grin with him.

“Any difficulties while I was away?”

I fought to keep my face straight.
Don't shift your eyes,
I told myself,
don't.
“No,” I said, shifting my eyes, “no, everything was fine.”

He was looking at me curiously. I opened the folder in the hope of distracting him, but it didn't work. Actually, I don't think there was ever a person born on this earth more attuned to the nuances of human behavior than Prok, no one more sensitive to facial expression and what we've come to call body language—he was a bloodhound of the emotions, and he never missed a thing. “Everything?” he prodded.

I wanted to confess in that moment, but I didn't. I murmured something
in the affirmative, and, further to distract him, said, “Do you want me to transcribe these right away?”

He seemed absent, and didn't answer immediately. He was always young-looking for his age—in those days people routinely took him for five to ten years younger than he actually was—but I saw the lines in his face then, the first faint tracings of the finished composition he would take to his grave with him. But he must be exhausted, I thought, pushing himself to collect his histories, driving all that way in his rattling old Nash, up late, up early, nobody to help him. “You know,” he said after a moment, and it was almost as if he were reading my mind, “I've been thinking how convenient it would be—how essential—for me to train another interviewer, someone I could trust to collect the data along with me, a person who might not necessarily have any scientific training but who could immerse himself in the technique I've developed and apply it rigorously. A quick study, John. Somebody like you.” A pause. “What do you say?”

I was so taken by surprise—and so consumed with guilt over my invasion of the files—that I fumbled this one badly. “I—well, of course,” I began. “Well, certainly, you know, I would—and I
do
have to graduate yet …”

“English,” he said, and the noun came off his tongue like something distasteful, something chewed over and spat out again. “I never quite understood the application of that—as a field, that is.”

“I don't know.” I shrugged. He was watching me still, watching me with a preternatural intentness. “I thought I might like to maybe teach. Someday, I mean.”

He sighed. For all his qualities, patience wasn't one of them. Nor did he take disappointment well. “Just think about it, John, that's all I ask. No need to decide right this minute—let's talk over dinner, and we are expecting you tonight, six sharp, that is, unless you have other plans?”

“Sex research? Are you nuts?”

Paul was stretched across his bed as if he'd been washed up there by a tide just recently receded. He was chewing gum and idly bouncing a
tennis ball up off the racquet propped on his chest. Half a dozen books were scattered across the floor, face-down, another kind of flotsam. I didn't feel like explaining it to him—he wouldn't have understood anyway.

“At least it's a job,” I said, pulling the sweater up over my head as carefully as I could so as not to disarrange my hair. I was changing for the Kinseys (they didn't stand on ceremony, as Mac had said—behind closed doors they were even what might have been considered bohemian—but I felt that a dinner invitation, no matter how frequent or informal, required a jacket and tie, and I still feel that way).

Paul let the ball dribble off the racquet and fall to the floor, where it took three or four reduced hops and disappeared under my desk. “But the sort of questions he asks—it's embarrassing. You're not going to—?” he caught himself, then saw it in my face. “You are, aren't you?”

I was knotting my tie in the mirror, studying my eyes, the way the hair clung slick to the sides of my head. “You didn't seem to have any objections at the time, if I recall—you said, in fact, that you found the experience unique. Wasn't that the word you used, ‘unique'?”

“Look, John, I might be all wet about this, but don't you think it takes kind of an
unusual
sort of person to be poking into people's dirty underwear all the time?”

I gave him a look that projected from the mirror all the way across the room, and there he was, diminished on the bed, diminished and growing smaller by the moment. I didn't say anything.

“I wouldn't want to call the professor an odd duck or a pervert or anything, but don't you realize everyone's going to think of you that way? And what about your mother? You think she's going to approve—as a career choice, I mean?”

“I've told you a thousand times,” I said, slipping into my jacket now, “it's science, research, just like anything else. Like Lister discovering antiseptic or what's his name with the mold on the bread. Why shouldn't we know as much as we possibly can about everything the human animal does?” I was at the door now, on my way out, but I paused to give him his chance to reply.

“The human animal? You sound just like him, John, you realize that? That's what he says. But what about human beings, made in the image of God? What about us? What about the soul?”

I was irritated suddenly. “There is no God. And no soul either. You know what's wrong with you?”

He never moved from the bed, never even lifted his head. “No, but I guess you're going to tell me.”

“You just have a narrow mind, that's all,” I informed him, and I let the door punctuate the truth of it on my way out.

Mrs. Lorber nodded to me from her post in the rocking chair and I gave her a strained smile in return, and then I was out in the street, the pussy willows at the corner in bloom, the tight pale buds firing on the trees, a warm breeze coming up out of the south freighted with the promise of the season to come. My eyes followed a trim dark girl as I crossed Atwater in front of the campus, her legs bare and thrilling as she receded down the avenue of trees, and I thought of Iris. I hadn't seen her in over a month, since I'd stood her up, that is, and I felt bad about it—and, of course, the longer I put off facing her the worse it was.

A car rolled slowly up the street, so slowly I thought the driver meant to pull up to the curb and park. He was an old man, his face drawn and anxious, and he gripped the wheel as if he were afraid someone was about to snatch it away from him. I watched him a moment, long enough to see a pair of bicyclists overtake him, and he never looked right or left or gave any sign he noticed them or anything else, and I found myself daydreaming about getting a car of my own someday and just taking off up over the hills and out of town until the road spooled out beneath me and I could be anywhere. Students drifted by in both directions. A pair of boxer dogs sat on their haunches and regarded me steadily from behind a picket fence.

As I turned onto First, I encountered a couple just ahead of me, the girl leaning into the man till they were a single entity, strolling along on four synchronized limbs, and I crossed to the far side of the street to avoid having to overtake them; seeing them there, seeing the way they made each other complete, made me think of Iris again. What I'd done was inexcusable, and I told myself I was going to call her the very next
day—just steel myself and do it—and if she told me to get lost, drop dead, dry up and blow away, well, at least the situation would be resolved. And there was no denying I deserved it.

So I walked. And if I noticed the various operations of nature in its season of renewal—if I smelled the scent of the forsythias or watched the birds ascend to the trees with bits of straw or twig clamped transversely in their beaks—I don't know if I really remarked them, at least not consciously. It was spring, that was all, and I was on First Street, going to the Kinseys'. For dinner.

Prok himself met me at the door. He was dressed in his gardening shorts and nothing else, his legs lean and muscled, his bare toes gripping the long polished boards of the sweet-gum floor. His hair, as always, looked as if it had been freshly barbered. “Ah, Milk,” he said, ushering me in, “I've just been spreading a little humus on the irises—and the lilies too. Couldn't resist it, the weather's so agreeable.”

He put on a short-sleeved shirt for dinner, but no shoes and no socks. Mac too was dressed more informally than she'd been on any of the previous occasions I'd come to dinner, in her own pair of shorts and a pale blue cotton blouse that showed off her throat and the delicate line of her clavicle. She seemed to have cut her hair as well, and it was as short now—nearly, that is—as a man's. I felt a bit foolish in my coat and tie, but both Prok and Mac reassured me: they were just rushing the season a bit, that was all.

After dinner the children dispersed, and Prok, Mac and I sat in the front room awhile, chatting. Prok was at his rug, Mac at her knitting. Prok had been talking excitedly about the premature return of some sort of bird—I forget which—and how it portended an early summer, when he broke off abruptly and turned to me. “Milk,” he said, “John. Have you thought about what I said this afternoon?”

Mac's needles flashed. She was studying me out of her soft brown eyes, a maternal smile fixed at the corners of her lips.

I told him—told
them
—that I had. “It would be, well,” I said, “an honor. And I want to say how much, that is—that you can be so generous to a young man, a student, who, uh—”

“Good,” Prok said, in his honeyed tones, “very good. We'll see about
increasing your hours, then, and as soon as the semester is out, you'll come on with me full-time. Salary to continue as current. And of course we'll be working together in the garden as well.”

The evening went on in that vein—a congratulatory vein, in a relaxed and amiable atmosphere—until Mac excused herself and Prok and I were left alone. I had no qualms about the work he was offering—it was important, exciting, noble even—and I was deeply grateful to have been offered steady employment at a time when the global situation was anything but settled, yet I did have one reservation. Or rather scruple, I suppose I should say. I didn't feel right about what I'd done in the office behind his back. Here he was, going out of his way to make something of me, to invest in me and my future in the most concrete way, and I had let him down, cheated him, betrayed his trust in me. He was talking about the school in Indianapolis—the Porter School, it was called—describing some of the details of the more intriguing histories, especially of two of the male faculty, who were hiding their extensive H-histories from the administration and the community too, when I interrupted him.

“Professor Kinsey,” I said. “Prok. Listen, I, well, I must tell you something.”

He stopped what he was doing—his long nimble fingers arrested on the fringe of the making rug—to focus his gaze on me. “Yes,” he said. “What is it, Milk?”