The Inner Circle

  Mac was smiling suddenly, even as the first footsteps hit the porch out front and the squeal of the hinges and the slamming of the door came to us in quick succession. “You know what?” she said, and the hammer pounded with a slow, deliberate rhythm that was like the drumbeat of a funerary march. “I think I’ll go have a talk with her.”

  Again, though, I can’t help thinking I’m straying off the path here, because this is about Prok—or it should be. Prok was the great man, not I. I was just fortunate to have been there with him from the beginning and to have been allowed to contribute in my small way to the greater good of the project and the culture at large. Prok was defined by his work, above all, and his detractors—those who find sex research a source of prurient jokes and adolescent sniggers, as if it weren’t worthy of investigation, as if it were some pseudoscience like studies of spacemen or ectoplasm or some such thing—might like to know just how consumed by it he was. I’ll give one example from around this period—I can’t really recall whether it was before or after Mac and Iris had their little tête-à-tête—but it speaks volumes of Prok’s single-mindedness and dedication. And it’s of interest for another reason too—it was the one occasion when our roles were reversed, when I was the teacher and he the pupil.

  But I’m already making too much of it. Anybody, any man on the street, could have given Prok what he required—I just happened to be available, that was all. In any case, we were in the office one evening—it must have been around six or so—and I don’t think we’d exchanged a word in hours, when I heard Prok get up from his desk. I had my head down, busy with one of the preliminary graphs on sources of orgasm for single males at the college level, and so I didn’t look up, but I did register the sound of the file drawer opening and closing again, of the turning of the key in the lock, signals that Prok was getting set to shut down the office for the day. A moment later, he was standing over me.

  “You know, John,” he said, “since Mac and the girls are away on this Girl Scout Jamboree, or whatever it is they call it, and my son seems to be absorbed in a school project he’s doing over at his friend’s house—the Casdens, decent people—I wonder if we shouldn’t spend the evening together—”

  I thought I knew what he meant, and I no doubt did have plans—brooding over Iris would have topped the list—but I nodded in compliance. “Yes,” I said, “sure.”

  He was opening up that dazzling smile, pleased, delighted—and, oddly, he reached across the desk and shook my hand as if I’d just given him the keys to the kingdom. “A bite of dinner, maybe, and perhaps we can combine that with what I had in mind, a little practice in one of the areas where I find myself sadly deficient—with an eye to improving my technique, that is.”

  “Technique?”

  “Interviewing, I mean.”

  I gave him an astonished look and said something along the lines that he was the consummate interviewer and that I couldn’t imagine how he could expect to improve on what was already as close to flawless as anyone could hope.

  “Kind of you to say,” he murmured, giving my hand a final squeeze and releasing it. “But we’re all capable of improvement, and, you know, I think, that I’m not as comfortable as I should be around revelers.”

  “Revelers?”

  “Where do we spend most of our time—in the field, that is?”

  I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about.

  “In taverns, Milk. In barrooms, roadhouses, beer halls, at parties and gatherings where smoking and drinking are de rigueur, and you know how I—how awkward I am, or perhaps untrained is a better word, with those particular sybaritic skills.”

  I still wasn’t following him. “Yes? And?”

  He laughed then, a short chopped-off laugh that began in his throat and terminated in his nose. “Well, isn’t it obvious? You’re the expert here, Milk. I’m the novice.”

  “You mean you want me, to, to—?”

  “That’s right. I want you to give me lessons.”

  We went back to the house on First Street that night with a brown paper bag of ham sandwiches, three packs of cigarettes, two cigars, a quart of beer and a fifth each of bourbon, scotch, gin, rum and vodka, as well as the standard mixers. It may have been raining. The house was cold. Prok built up a fire in the hearth and we spread our acquisitions out on the coffee table, set ourselves up with the proper glasses, ice and ashtrays, and started in.

  First came the cigarettes. “You don’t have to inhale, Prok,” I said, knowing how much he loathed the habit. “Just let the thing dangle from your lips, like this”—I demonstrated—“bend forward to light it, squelch the match with a flick of the wrist, take the smoke in your mouth, like so, hold it a moment, exhale. No, no, no—just leave the cigarette there, right there at the corner of your mouth, and let the smoke rise. That’s right. Squint your eyes a bit. But you see? Now your hands are free, and you can pick up your drink or, if you’re interviewing, go right on with your recording. Yes, yes, now you can remove it—two fingers, index and middle—and tap the ash. That’s it. Right. Very good.”

  Of course, he hated it. Hated the smell, the taste, the idea, hated the smoke in his eyes and the artificial feel of the dampening paper at his lip. And on the second or third puff he inadvertently inhaled and went into a coughing fit that drained all the color from his face and swelled his eyes till I thought they would burst. The cigars were even worse. At one point he went to the mirror to examine how he looked with the sodden stub of a White Owl clenched in the corner of his mouth, and then wordlessly came back across the room and flung the thing in the fireplace. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “I just don’t. How can people derive enjoyment from burning weeds under their noses—from burning weeds anywhere? From inhaling burning weeds? And what about men with facial hair, with beards—what do they do? It’s a wonder every barroom in America hasn’t burned to the ground by now.” He was stalking back and forth across the floor. “It’s maddening is what it is. Maddening.”

  We did better with alcohol. I started him off with bourbon, my drink of choice, and I tried to have him dilute it with water or soda, but he insisted on taking it straight, reasoning that if he had to choose a favorite, something he could order casually at some gin mill to help put potential subjects at ease, he ought to know what it tasted like in its unadulterated form. I watched him sniff the sepia liquid, tip back the drink, swish it around in his mouth, and then, after a moment’s deliberation, spit it back into the glass. “No,” he said, giving me a grimace, “bourbon, I’m afraid, is not—viable.”

  And so on, through the other candidates (the beer, he said, had the smell of swamp gas and the taste of an old sponge that had been buried in the yard and then squeezed over a glass), until we got to the rum. He poured it, sniffed it, swirled it in his mouth and swallowed. The grimace never left his face and my impression was that the experiment had been a failure. But he leaned forward and poured a second drink, a very short one, and drank that off too. He gritted his teeth. Smacked his lips a time or two. His eyes were red behind the shining discs of his glasses. “Rum,” he said finally. “That’s the ticket. How does the song go?—‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.’”

  In fact, we didn’t have Iris’s history. I knew, though, almost exactly how it would tabulate—she’d been sex shy, inhibited by her upbringing and her religion; she’d masturbated guiltily while thinking of a boy in her class or some screen actor; she’d dated frequently, but not seriously, and had never, until now, allowed anything more than deep kissing and perhaps some awkward adolescent manipulation of her breasts; she’d had one sexual partner and had lost her virginity at the age of nineteen in the backseat of a Nash. And more: she loved that partner and intended to marry him. Or at least she had until a week ago.

  Though he tried not to show it, Prok was irritated that we hadn’t collected her history—how would it look vis-à-vis the project if the prospective wife of his sole colleague had decided again
st volunteering? Bad, to say the least. Unreasonable. Hypocritical. Even worse, it would tend to undermine everything we were trying to project with regard to openness about sex on the one hand and absolute confidentiality on the other. What was Iris thinking? Was she going to wind up being a detriment to the project? And if she was, would it cost me my job?

  The pressure was subtle. There was that initial inquiry of Prok’s on the afternoon he congratulated me on my engagement, and then, in the days and weeks that followed, the odd passing reference to Iris’s sexual adjustment or to the history he’d recorded of some coed in his biology course, who just happened to remind him of Iris—“Same build, you know, same bright sparking eyes. A peach of a girl, a real peach.” But once he’d found out—from Mac, I presume—that the engagement was off, he withdrew a bit, no doubt brooding over his options. He wanted me married, no question about it, and he wanted Iris’s history as a matter of course, but since I hadn’t yet chosen to confide in him, he couldn’t very well give me unsolicited advice or exert the direct pressure with which he was so much more comfortable. All that week—the week I walked around with the weight of the ring like an anvil in my pocket—he said nothing, though I could see he was bursting with the impulse to interfere, to lecture, advise, hector and, ultimately, set things right.

  As it turned out, it was Mac who held the key. The day after I spoke with her she asked Iris over to the house for tea, and I don’t know how much she revealed (or I didn’t then) or just how she put it, but Iris seemed mollified. Mac called me at the rooming house—shouts, the tramping of feet up and down the stairs, Phone’s for you, Milk! —to tell me in her soft adhesive tones that I should go to Iris as soon as I could. It was past seven in the evening. I’d had an early supper alone at a diner (where I’d looked up from my hamburger to see Elster, my old antagonist from the biology library, giving me a look of contempt and naked, unalloyed jealousy), and I’d been stretched out on my bed ever since with a pint of bourbon, listening to the sad, worn, gut-clenching voice of Billie Holiday drifting over her sorrow. Was I drunk? I suppose so. I gave my effusive thanks to Mac, fought down my hair in the mirror, and then flung myself out the door.

  The campus. The dorm. A sound of frogs trilling along the creek. The RA and her welcoming smile. “Hi, John,” she said, and she gave me a wink. “Glad to see you’re back.” The big pale moon of her face rose and set again. “I’ve already rung her,” she said.

  As it happened, two other girls came through the door before Iris and I caught a glimpse of her on the stairs before the door wheezed shut, and in the interval between its closing and springing open again, I had a chance to compose myself. I smoothed down my hair, cupped a palm to my mouth and evaluated my breath (which smelled, essentially, no different from the neck of the bottle I’d left back in the room). What I needed was a stick of gum, but I’d given up the habit because Prok forbade it in the office and disapproved strenuously of it everywhere else. I fingered the ring in my pocket and stood rigid, awaiting my fate.

  She was wearing her best outfit, one I’d repeatedly praised, and it was evident that she’d spent a great deal of time on her hair and makeup. And what was she doing? Making me aware of what I’d been missing, of what she had to offer, of what she was worth, and as I watched her cross the room to me I tried to read her face. How much had Mac told her? And the lie. Was the lie still intact? I was drunk. I wanted to spread my arms wide and hold her, but her smile stopped me—it was a pinched smile, brave and artificial, and her chin was trembling as if she might begin to cry. “Iris,” I said, “listen, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’ve done or what I can do to, to make it up, but—”

  The RA was glorying. A study date indented the sofa nearest us, but there was no studying going on in that moment—or at least not of books and notes.

  “Not here,” Iris said, and she took me by the hand and led me out the door.

  The night was soft, a warm breath of air hovering over the dark unspooling stretches of lawn, streetlights masked in fog. The frogs trilled. Other couples, derealized in the drift of the night, loomed up on us and vanished. We wandered round the campus, hand in hand, not saying much, till at some point we found ourselves out front of Biology Hall, and we wound up sitting on the steps there till curfew. For the first hour we just held each other and kissed, murmuring the usual sorts of things—clichés; love thrives on them—until we got progressively more worked up and I asked her in a husky voice if I shouldn’t run for Prok’s car.

  We were fully clothed, exposed to the eyes of anyone who happened by, but I suppose my hand might have been on her thigh, under her skirt. And her hand—her hand had been pressed against the crotch of my flannel trousers, and the pressure it exerted, the slow sweet calculated friction, told me everything I needed to know. “No,” she said, and she didn’t withdraw her hand, “not tonight. It’s too late.”

  “Tomorrow, then?”

  She kissed me harder, kept rubbing. “Tomorrow,” she murmured.

  It took me a moment, floating there on the breath of the night as if I’d gone out of my body altogether, and I wasn’t thinking about Mac or versions of the truth or anything else. I was fumbling in my pocket for the ring. “In that case,” I said, releasing her lips and lifting her hand from my lap for the instant it took to slip the ring back in place and not a second more, “I guess the engagement’s back on, then?”

  The wedding was modest, as it had to be, considering my salary, the financial status of Iris’s parents—her father delivered milk for Bornemann’s Dairy in Michigan City and environs—and the instability of the times. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a joyful, inspiriting ceremony and a celebration I’ll remember all my life, the emotional core of the scene worth all the palatial weddings in the world. The bride wore white tulle, the lace veil setting off her hair and the uncontainable flash of her eyes, and the bridegroom found himself in a rented tuxedo, the first he’d ever pulled over his shoulders and forced down the slope of his chest. Tommy was best man, Iris’s roommate the maid of honor (a trembling tall horse of a girl, with pinpricks for eyes and a mouth that swallowed up her lower face, and it’s odd that I can’t remember her name now, though it hardly matters: she was there, dressed in a strapless gown, doing her part). At first, Iris’s parents had pushed for a church wedding, presided over by a priest, but Iris had begun to drift (or rather, swim, head-down, against the current) away from the Roman Catholic faith since she’d come to college, and I, a lapsed Methodist, had no real desire to join any church of any denomination, and certainly not one so compromised by mystery, superstition and repression. And, of course, to Prok, who was hosting the affair, all religions and religious persons were anathema.

  But a word about Iris, because I see I haven’t given her her due here—and she is central to all this, to Prok’s story, that is, because on that day at the end of May in 1941 she was to become the fourth member of the inner circle, taking her place alongside Prok, Mac and me, and everything that’s happened since concerns her as much as it does anyone else. She was—well, she had an independent streak. She thought for herself. Formed her own opinions. And while I didn’t necessarily recognize it at the time, so caught up was I in the project and what we’d set out to accomplish, I would say that her independence grew over the years until it was almost antithetical—a rebellion, very nearly a rebellion—against what we believed in. But that’s off subject. Iris. Let me put her down here in a few words. Beautiful, certainly. Stubborn. Witty (I’ve never encountered anybody so quick except maybe Corcoran). Smart as a whip. Organized. She played clarinet throughout high school and college, and until her senior year, when we were already married, she put on a starched uniform every Saturday morning and marched across the shimmering greensward with the band. She was a conscientious student, though her grades weren’t nearly as high as mine (not that it matters, of course), and she had a stunning artistic sense, able to make a household, our eventual household, that is, look nothing short of elegant on just
the barest of means. What else? Her smile. I wanted to sail away on that smile, and I did, for a long while. And her sexual response, of course—I can’t leave that out, not in an account of this nature. What I’d told Prok was true, more or less. She’d opened up to me—she loved me—and as we became more acclimated to one another, as we spent more and more time in the backseat of Prok’s car and then, as the weather warmed, on a blanket in a hidden corner of the park, she let her passionate side emerge. We began to experiment, and she was increasingly enthusiastic, on several occasions even climbing atop me in the female-superior position without any prompting on my part. And while she wouldn’t dream of using crude language in any situation, she used it then, used it when her eyes began to roll back in her head and her hands jerked at my shoulders as if she wanted to pull me right down inside her rib cage and beyond, into the ground beneath, and deeper, deeper yet: “Oh, fuck,” she’d say. “Fuck, cunt, fuck.”

  Prok had arranged for the justice of the peace to perform a simple civil ceremony under the persimmon tree at the rear of the house, and he’d gone to considerable trouble to move the piano out of doors as well so that we could have the bridal march to put the official seal on the ceremony. (I haven’t mentioned that Prok had dreamed of becoming a concert pianist when he was a boy and gave it up only when he’d discovered his true vocation in science. He was good, as accomplished as anyone you might find on the stage in the concert hall down the street, and he serenaded us not only with the wedding march that afternoon, but with a host of selections from Peer Gynt, which went eerily well with the fairy-tale setting.) Prok at the piano, Iris in my arms, Tommy at my side: it was as close to heaven as I’d yet come. And my mother, of course. She was there with Aunt Marjorie, a small distant smile on her face, and I think she drank too much that day (rum drinks—Prok had gone mad for them, not so much because he enjoyed drinking all that much himself, but because he was swept away with the idea of collecting recipes, and so we had Zombies that afternoon, and something called Charleston Cup in a crystal bowl set in a bed of ice). She didn’t cry, though Mac did, briefly. For my mother, never one to sentimentalize (she’d described herself to me as a fatalist on more than one occasion), the ceremony must have brought her back to her own wedding day so many years ago and the wreckage that had been left in place of the dreams of a young bride. Still, she did approve of Iris because she felt that Iris had grit and grit was the only thing my mother understood in terms of getting by—you needed grit and toughness, especially if you were a woman, in order to survive in a world of war and depredation and boating accidents.