The Inner Circle (3 page)

“Yes, but,” Bill said, and we all leaned into the table and talked till our glasses were empty, and then we filled them and emptied them again, the rain tracing patterns in the dirt of the window, then the window going dark and the tide of undergraduates ebbing and flowing as people went home to dinner and their books. It was seven o'clock. I was out of money. My head throbbed but I'd never been so excited in my life. When Bill and Sally excused themselves and shrugged out the door and into the wafting dampness of the night, I lingered a moment, half-drunk, and put an arm round Laura's shoulders. “So we're still engaged, aren't we?” I murmured.

Her smile spread softly from her lips to her eyes. She plucked the
maraschino cherry from her glass and rotated it between her fingers before gently pressing it into my mouth. “Sure,” she said.

“Then shouldn't we—or don't we have an obligation, to, to—”

“Sure,” she said, and she leaned forward and gave me a kiss, a kiss that was sweetened by the syrup of the cherry and the smell of her perfume and the proximity of her body that was warm now and languid. It was a long kiss, the longest I'd ever experienced, and it was deepened and complicated by what we'd seen up there on the screen in the lecture hall, by the visual memory of those corresponding organs designed for sensory gratification and the reproduction of the species, mutually receptive, self-lubricated, cohesive and natural. I came up for air encouraged, emboldened, and though there was nothing between us and we both knew it, I whispered, “Come home with me.”

The look of Laura's face transformed suddenly. Her eyes sharpened and her features came into focus as if I'd never really seen them before, as if this wasn't the girl I'd just kissed in a moment of sweet oblivion. We were both absolutely still, our breath commingling, hands poised at the edge of the table as if we didn't know what to do with them, till she turned away from me and began to gather up her purse, her raincoat, her hat. I became aware of the voices at the bar then, someone singing in a creaking baritone, the hiss of a newly tapped keg. “I don't know what you're thinking, John,” she said, and I was getting to my feet now too, rattled suddenly, flushing red for all I knew. “I'm not that kind of agirl.”

But let me step back a moment, because I don't want to get off on the wrong foot—this isn't about me, this is about Prok, and Prok is dead, and I'm sitting here in my study, the key turned in the lock, the sorry tepid remains of a Zombie cocktail at my elbow, trying to talk into this machine and sort out my thoughts while Iris paces up and down the hall in her heels, stopping on every third revolution to rattle the doorknob and remind me in a muffled shout that we're going to be late. Late for what, I'd like to know. Late for tramping through the funeral home with a mob of newspaper reporters and the rest of the curiosity seekers?
Late to show our support? Or dedication? Is it going to do Mac any good? Or the children? Or Corcoran, Rutledge, or even my own son, John Jr., who locked himself in his room at the top of the stairs two hours ago because he's had enough of death and sorrow and mourning, because unlike the ghouls and the carrion sniffers and all the rest he hasn't the faintest desire to look on the empty husk of greatness? The corpse, that is. The mortal remains. Prok in his casket, propped up like a wax effigy, drained and flushed and pumped full of formaldehyde, the man who had no illusions, the scientist, the empiricist, the evolutionist, Prok. Prok is dead, is dead, is dead, and nothing else matters.

“John, goddamn you, will you open this door?” Iris is abusing the doorknob, she's pounding with a balled-up fist at the oak panels of the door I myself stripped and varnished. And who took us to look at this house, who loaned us the money for it? Who gave us everything we have?

“Okay, okay!” I shout, and then I'm up from the desk, forcing down the dregs of the joyless drink and shuffling across the carpet to twist the key in the lock and fling open the door.

Iris is there, her face blotted with anger, with exasperation, stalking into the room in her black dress, her black stockings and heels, the hat and the veil. My wife. Thirty-six years old, the mother of my son, as slim and dark and wide-eyed and beautiful as the day I met her. And angry. Deeply, intensely angry. “What are you doing?” she demands, crowding into me, her hands windmilling in my face. “Don't you realize we're twenty minutes late
already
?” And then, catching sight of the glass in my hand: “Are you drinking? At two o'clock in the afternoon? Jesus, you make me sick. He wasn't God, you know.”

I'm feeling hollow, a cane with all the pith gnawed out of it. I don't need prodding, don't need anything but to be left alone. “Easy for you to say.”

I don't know what I expect, the baring of the talons, the first superficial swipes of the marital row that has been going on here now for the past fifteen years, and then the rending of the deeper wounds, the ones that fester. I'm ready for it, ready to fight and throw it all back at her, because
she's wrong and we both know it, but she surprises me. Her hands go to her hips, then drop to her side, and I watch her take the time to compose her face. “No, John,” she says finally, and she puts all the bruising power of the years into the sad low hopeless cadence of her voice, “it's not easy. It's never been easy. You know what I wish?”

I won't answer, won't give her the satisfaction.

“I wish I'd never met him, never heard of him. I wish he'd never been born.”

I can hear our son moving around in his room overhead, the dull reverberation of his feet like distant thunder. Iris's jaw is set, her shoulders thrown back in full martial display, and she's already dismissed me, moving toward the door now in her brisk chopping strides. “Get your tie on,” she snaps over her shoulder, and she's gone. But no. She's back suddenly, on the rebound, her head framed in the doorway, her eyes slicing from me to the tape recorder and back again. “And shut that damn thing off, will you?”

For all my bravado that day at the tavern, I have to admit I had my qualms about the interview, and I know this must sound ridiculous coming from me, since I've contributed materially to the project to a degree exceeded only by Corcoran and Prok himself, and ultimately wound up conducting some two thousand interviews on my own, but if the truth be known, I was scared. Or perhaps “intimidated” would be a better word. You have to understand that back then sex and sexuality simply weren't discussed—anywhere, in any forum—and certainly not in a public lecture hall on a college campus. Marriage courses had begun to spring up at other colleges and universities around the country, most pointedly in response to the VD scare of the thirties, but they were bland and euphemistic, and as far as counseling was concerned, as far as a frank face-to-face discussion of pathologies and predilections, there was nothing available to the average person aside from the banalities of the local minister or priest.

And so, as Dr. Kinsey reiterated in his concluding lecture, he was undertaking a groundbreaking research project to describe and quantify human sexual behavior as a way of uncovering what had been so long hidden behind a veil of taboo, superstition and religious prohibition, so as to provide data for those in need of them. And he was appealing to us—the prurient, feverish, sweaty-palmed undergraduates of the audience—to help him. He had just concluded his overview of the course, summarizing his comments on individual variation, as well as his remarks on birth control (adding, almost as an afterthought, that if condoms lacked the natural lubrication provided in the male by secretions from the Cowper's glands, saliva could be used as an effective succedaneum), and he stood there before us, his face animated, his hands folded on the lectern in front of him.

“I appeal to you all,” he said, after a momentary pause, “to come forward and give me your individual histories, as they are absolutely vital to our understanding of human sexuality.” The light was dim and uniform, the hall overheated, a faint smell of dust and floor wax lingering in the air. Outside, the first snow of the season was briefly whitening the ground, but we might as well have been in a sealed vault for all it mattered. People squirmed in their seats. The young woman in front of me glanced furtively at her watch.

“Why, we know more about the sex life of
Drosophila melanogaster
—the fruit fly—than we know of the commonest everyday practices of our own species,” he went on, his voice steady, his eyes fixed on the audience, “more of an insect's ways than of the activities that go on in the bedrooms of this country, on living room sofas and in the rear seats of automobiles for that matter, the very activities through the agency of which each of us is present here in this room today. Does that make scientific sense? Is it in the least rational or defensible?”

Laura was seated beside me, keeping up the pretext, though in the course of the semester she'd fallen hard for a member of the basketball team by the name of Jim Willard and had twice been caught in his company by Dean Hoenig, who had a fine eye for the temperature gradient of campus romances. Both times Laura had managed to wriggle out of it—Jim was a friend of the family, a cousin actually, second cousin, that is, and she was just taking it upon herself to help him with his studies, seeing that basketball consumed so much of his time—but Dean Hoenig was on to us. She'd bristled visibly as we came in the door together and made what I thought was a wholly inappropriate remark about wedding bells, and I was still fuming over it midway through the lecture. At any rate, Laura was by my side, her head bent to her notebook in the further pretext of taking notes, when in fact she was doodling, sketching elongated figures in dresses and furs and elaborate feathered hats and at least one palpitating heart transfixed by the errant arrow.

What Dr. Kinsey wanted from us—what he was appealing for now—was our one-hundred-percent cooperation in arranging private sessions
with him to give up our sex histories. For the sake of science. All disclosures to be recorded in code and to remain strictly confidential—in fact, no one but he knew the key to this code he'd devised, and thus no one could ever possibly put a name to a given history. “And I must stress the importance of one-hundred-percent cooperation,” he added, gesturing with a stiff swipe of his hand, “because anything short of that compromises our statistical reliability. If we are to take histories only from those who seek us out, we will have a very inaccurate picture indeed of the society at large, but if we can document one-hundred-percent groups—all the college students present in this lecture hall, for instance, all the young men in a given fraternity house, the membership of the Elks' Club, women's auxiliaries, the incarcerees at the State Penal Farm in Putnamville—then we are getting an accurate, top-to-bottom picture.” He paused to run his gaze over the entire audience, left to right, back to front. A stillness descended on us. Laura lifted her head.

“Very well,” he said finally. “In the service of this end, I will be scheduling appointments directly after termination of this lecture.”

Because of our ruse, Laura and I were scheduled consecutively, as future husband and wife, though Laura's use for me had by this time expired and she pointedly avoided me as she strolled around campus in the towering company of Jim Willard, who, at six feet one and one hundred ninety pounds, provided stability under the boards for our basketball team. We went separately to Biology Hall on a bitter, wind-scoured December afternoon, the husks of leaves chasing across a dead scrub of lawn, the trees stripped and forlorn, and everybody on campus sniffling with the same cold. Laura had been scheduled first, and as the interviews in those days averaged just over an hour, there really wasn't much point in my escorting her there. Still, I'd got cold feet the night before and when I ran into her and Willard on the steps of the library I'd argued that we should nonetheless show up together for appearances' sake—I didn't mind, I'd bring my books and study while she was in Kinsey's office—but she was shaking her head before I'd even got the words out. “You're very sweet, John,” she said, “and I appreciate your concern, I really do—but the semester's nearly over. What can they do to us?”

Willard was hovering in the background, giving me the sort of look he usually reserved for tip-offs at center court.

“Besides,” she said, showing her teeth in a tight little smile, “people do fall out of love, don't they? Even Dean Hoenig has to be realistic—she can't expect
every
engagement to last.”

I didn't want to concede the point. I was feeling something I'd never felt before, and I couldn't have defined it, not then, not with the powers available to me and the person I then was, but can I say that her face was a small miracle in the light spilling from the high, arching windows, that I remembered the kiss in the tavern, the feel of her stirring beside me in the lecture hall? Can I say that, and then let it rest?

“What about disciplinary action?” I said.

She let out a curt laugh. “Disciplinary action? Are you kidding?” She looked to Willard and back again. “I don't care two snaps for all the disciplinary action in the world.”

And so I went alone to Biology Hall, following the faint lingering traces of her perfume, the collar of my overcoat turned up against the wind, a load of books tucked under one arm. The building, like most on campus, was made of local limestone. It rose up out of the black grasp of the trees like a degraded temple, the sky behind it all but rinsed of light, and I couldn't help thinking how different it had looked in September when it was cushioned in foliage. As I came up the path, leaves grating underfoot, I felt a sudden sharp stab of apprehension. I didn't know Prok yet—or I knew him only as a distant and formal presence on the podium—and I was afraid of what he might think of me. You see, it wasn't only the subterfuge with Laura that cast a shadow over things, but my history itself. I was deeply ashamed of it, ashamed of who I was and what I'd done, and I'd never broached the subject of sex with anyone, not my closest friends, not the school counselor or even the uncle (Robert, my father's youngest brother) who did his best to take my dead father's place till the wandering bug got him and he disappeared too.