The Inner Circle (19 page)

At any rate, with Rufus as our Virgil, we were able to track down the prostitutes (it was a slow night for them in any case, because of the rain, and they tended to bunch up in a few locales), and begin to record their histories. At first they tended to be skeptical—“Oh, yeah, honey, for one greenback dollar you just gone
talk
”—but Prok on the scent of histories was not to be denied and they quickly came round to the view that this was strictly on the up-and-up, pure science, and that we valued them not only as a resource but as human beings too, and this was another facet of Prok's genius—or his compassion, rather. He genuinely cared. And he had no prejudices whatever—either racial or sexual. It didn't matter to him if you were colored, Italian or Japanese, if you engaged in anal sex or liked to masturbate on your mother's wedding photo—you were a human animal, and you were a source of data.

The problem we encountered, however, was that since there were no adequate hotels nearby, we were at a loss for a private venue in which to conduct the interviews. We did have the car, but only one of us could interview in the Nash and the necessity was to conduct our interviews simultaneously. We were standing there on the street corner, the rain coming down harder now, in a forlorn little group—two prostitutes no older than I, Prok, Rufus and myself—when Rufus came up with the solution. “I got a room,” he said, “two blocks over. Nothin' fancy, but it's got a electric light, a bed and a armchair, if that'll do—”

In the end Prok decided to take the Nash himself and leave me to the relative comfort of Rufus's room, reasoning that I was still the amateur and didn't need any additional impediments—such as cold, rain and inadequate lighting—put in my way. It was a noble gesture, or a practical
one, I suppose, but either way, it was destined to backfire on him. I took my girl—and I call her a girl because she was just eighteen, with a pair of slanted cinnamon eyes and skin the color of the chocolate milk they mix up at Bornemann's Dairy back at home—up to Rufus's sitting room at the end of a hallway on the third floor of a detached brick apartment building that was once a single-family home. She seemed dubious at first, and maybe a bit nervous, and, of course, I was a bundle of nerves myself, not only because I'd taken so few female histories to this point but because of her race and the surroundings, the close, vaguely yellowish walls, the neatly made single bed that might have been a pallet in the penitentiary, the harsh light of the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling on its switch cord. Fifteen minutes into the interview, when she saw what it was, she relaxed, and I do think I did a very professional job with her that night (though, to be honest, I did find myself uncomfortably aroused, as with Mrs. Foshay).

Her history was what you might expect from a girl in her position—relations at puberty with both her father and an older brother, marriage at fourteen, the move north from Mississippi, abandonment, the pimp, the succession of johns and venereal diseases—and I remember being movedby her simple, unnuanced recitation of the facts, the sad facts, as I hadn't been moved before. Unprofessionally, I wanted to get up from my chair and hug her and tell her that it was all right, that things would get better, though I knew they wouldn't. Unprofessionally, I wanted to strip the clothes from her and have her there on the bed and watch her squirm beneath me. I didn't act on either impulse. I just closed down my mind and recorded her history, one of the thousands that would be fed into the pot.

The second woman—she was older, thirty or thirty-five, and she had a white annealed scar tracing the line of her jawbone on the right side of her face—came to the door the minute the first girl had left. This second woman had a belligerent look about her—a striated pinching of the lips, the weather report of her brow, the prove-it-to-me stance of her legs as she stood there arms akimbo at the door—and before she stepped into the room she demanded the dollar we were paying out to
each of our subjects that night. I dug around in my pockets and came up empty—Prok had the billfold of crisp green singles he'd withdrawn from the bank the previous afternoon and he'd neglected, in the confusion of sorting things out vis-à-vis appropriate interviewing venues, to give me more than the one I'd handed to the first girl. “I, well, I'm sorry,” I said, “I guess I'll have to, well—”

“Yeah, sure, you're sorry,” she said, her brow contorted, “and so am I.” She let out a curse. “And after I've went and dragged my sweet ass all the way over here in the rain too—”

“No,” I said, “no, you don't understand.”

“You just some schemer,” she said, “like all the rest. Somethin' for nothin', ain't that about right?”

It took all my powers of persuasion, which, believe me, weren't much more than marginally developed at that point, to convince her to have a seat on the bed while I made a mad dash down the stairs, out into the street and back along the two blocks to where Prok sat in the Nash, interviewing his own colored prostitute. He wouldn't be thrilled over the interruption. It was a rule, hard and fast, that all interviews must be conducted straight through in a controlled and private location, without any distractions whatever that might compromise the rapport established with the subject, no telephones ringing, no third parties hovering in the background, no emergencies of any sort. I knew this. And I knew what Prok's impatience—and his wrath—could be like. Still, I had no choice. I ran hard all the way, afraid that my subject would get fed up and leave, and I rounded the corner by Shorty's in full stride, the dark hump of the Nash rising up out of the black nullity of the pavement like something deposited there by the retreating glaciers. There was a light on inside—Prok's flashlight—and the silhouettes of a pair of heads caught behind the windshield. Out of breath, I skidded to a halt on the wet sidewalk, took half a second to compose myself, and rapped gently at the driver's-side window.

That was the precise moment when the police cruiser rounded the corner behind me and the lights began to flash.

I had never in my life been in trouble with the law and had no reason to expect anything but courtesy and neighborly assistance from the two
peace officers who emerged from the cruiser, thinking absurdly that they'd come to help us contact as many prostitutes as possible so as to make it easier for us to line up our interviews. Events proved otherwise. Events, in fact, moved so swiftly from that moment on that I didn't really have a chance to make sense of them until much later. The two patrolmen, both short and stocky, with the barrel chests and bandy-legged gait of rugby players, converged on me where I stood arrested at the window of the Nash. The first of them—he looked to be Prok's age, with a pug nose and inflamed features—strode directly up to me, and without saying a thing took hold of both my arms, jerked them round behind me and clapped two conjoined discs of metal over my wrists. In a word, handcuffs.

“But, but what are you doing?” I demanded. Or rather, stuttered. The rain was in my face, soaking the sleeves and shoulders of my jacket and infiltrating the pomaded weave of my hair, which sprang loose now in a sad barbaric tangle (in my urgency, I'd left both hat and overcoat in the room). “No, no, no, this is all wrong. You see, you, well, you don't understand what—”

The second policeman—he was fair-haired, with pale eyebrows and a little mustache that vanished like Paul Sehorn's when the lights of the patrol car illuminated his face—had taken up my position at Prok's window. His rapping, with the business end of a nightstick, was more insistent than mine had been. The window rolled down and I saw Prok's astonished face framed there a moment, and then the policeman had his hand on the door and was jerking it open. “Okay,” he said, “out of the car.”

All the way to the station house, as we sat wedged in on either side of the prostitute (Verleen Loy, five foot five, one hundred twenty-seven pounds, D.O.B. 3/17/24), Prok remonstrated with the patrolmen in his precise, wrathful tones. Did they know who he was? Did they know that the NRC, the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University supported his research? Were they aware that they were holding up vital progress toward understanding one of the most significant behavioral patterns of the human animal?

They weren't aware of it, no. In fact, one of them—the red-faced
policeman who had handcuffed me and subsequently shoved me up against the brick wall at my back for no earthly reason—swung round in his seat at this point and addressed the prostitute in a tone I could only think was both crude and offensive. “Hey, Verleen,” he said, grinning wide, “are we holding up progress here?”

The passing aura of a streetlight caught her face then. She had battered-looking eyes, teeth that seemed to have been sharpened to points. Her voice was reduced, hardly audible over the swish of the tires on the wet pavement. “You ain't holdin' up nothin',” she said.

At the station house, things seemed to take a turn for the better. The night captain, though he was deeply skeptical, was impressed by Prok's manner and his dress (and I think he took pity on me too, with my disarranged hair and hangdog look). After determining that Prok was who he claimed to be, the night captain allowed him to put a call through to H.T. Briscoe, Dean of the Faculties at IU. I stood there looking on, the handcuffs digging at my wrists, as Prok recited the number from memory and the night captain conveyed it to the operator.

It was past two in the morning. Verleen had been taken off and locked up in a cell somewhere, and I could hear the occasional shout or whimper emanating from the men's cell block in the rear. I was frightened, and I'm not ashamed to admit it. I wasn't yet twenty-three, I'd seen little or nothing of the world, and here I was, on the wrong side of the law and facing some sort of convoluted morals charge that would blemish my record forever, and I was already frantic over what I would tell my mother—what I would tell Iris, for that matter. Solicitation. Wasn't that what they charged you with? What about Sodomy? Fornication? Corrupting the morals of a minor? I saw myself at the work farm, in prison stripes, shuffling out to rake the yard.

But then I heard Prok's cool, collected tones as he explained the situation to Dean Briscoe, rudely awakened from his bed in a cozy room in a comfortable house back in the very Eden of Bloomington, and then I watched the night captain's face as Prok handed him the phone and Dean Briscoe delivered his authoritative testimonial on the other end of the line, and it was only then that I knew the crisis had passed. Unfortunately,
I never did recover my overcoat and hat, and we managed only six interviews on that trip, but on the positive side, it taught us a lesson—from then on, Prok never went anywhere without a letter from Dean Briscoe explaining his project and its validation by the highest authorities of Indiana University, said letter to be produced “in the event that the nature of his research takes him into localities where the purpose of what he is doing might not be clearly understood.”

Back safe in Bloomington, I gave Iris a truncated version of our little contretemps, tried to make a joke of it, in fact, though my psychic wounds were still open and festering, but Iris didn't find the story amusing, not at all. We were taking dinner together at the Commons (the roast pork with brown gravy, fitfully mashed potatoes and wax beans cooked to the consistency of cud), and she'd innocently asked how the trip had gone. I told her, glossing over some of the seamier details, and winding up with an extended lament over the loss of my hat and overcoat (for which Prok would make allowance in my next paycheck, incidentally).

“Prostitutes, huh?” she said.

I nodded. The overhead lighting made a gargoyle's mask of my face (I know because I was staring into my own reflection in a long dirty strip of mirror on the wall behind Iris). Outside, it was raining, a local manifestation of the same pandemic storm that had dogged us in Gary.

Iris's face was very pale and her mouth drawn tight. She laid her knife and fork carefully across her plate, though she'd barely touched her food. When she spoke, her voice was thick with emotion. “Do you often go with prostitutes?”

“Well, no,” I said. “Of course not. That goes without saying.”

“Do you ever—do you sleep with them?”

I didn't like the implied accusation, didn't like the criticism—or belittling—of my professionalism and my work. And I was especially annoyed after what I'd been through the previous night. She couldn't begin to imagine. “No,” I snapped. “Don't be ridiculous.”

“Did you ever?”

“Iris. Please. What do you think I am?”

“Did you?”

“No. And if you want to know the truth I never laid eyes on a prostitute in my life till last night and I wouldn't treat them, prostitutes, that is, any different from anybody else. As far as interviews are concerned. You know perfectly well that for the project to succeed we need everybody's history, from as wide a range of people as we can manage to contact, ministers' wives, Daughters of the American Revolution, Girl Scout leaders”—and here the image of Mac, naked, flitted quickly through my brain like one of the flecks and blotches on the screen when the projector first flicks on—“and, yes, prostitutes too.”

She looked away, caught in profile, her hair a small conflagration of shadow and light. “Did you ever sleep with anybody?” She spoke to the wall, her voice a whisper. “Besides me?”

“No,” I said, and I don't know why I lied when the whole ethos behind the project was to bring human sexuality out of the dungeon to which the priests had confined it and to celebrate it, glory in it, experience it to the full, without prohibition or inhibition. But still, given the moment and the situation, which was fraught to say the least, I lied.

“But why not?” she said, lifting her head to give me a sidelong glance, the glance of the executioner and the hanging judge. “Isn't that—sleeping with people, I mean—exactly what Dr. Kinsey—
Prok
—says is the right thing to do? Isn't it part of the program? Sexual experimentation, I mean?”