T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

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?