T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

The weather warmed. Prok and I spent more and more time in the garden, hauling rocks for edges and borders, spading up the earth, pushing wheelbarrows of shredded bark and chicken manure back and forth, trimming, cutting, pruning. We divided and transplanted endless clumps of lilies of all varieties, and irises — irises were his passion, and he’d collected over two hundred and fifty varieties of them and was forever trading and selling bulbs by post all across the country. We also planted trees — fruit trees, ornamentals, saplings we dug out of hollows in the hills — and all sorts of native plants, poke, goldenrod, snakeroot, wild aster, Queen Anne’s lace, which had a surprising cumulative effect, setting off the splendor of the flowerbeds and giving the whole property a sylvan air, as if it were the product of nature rather than man. While we worked, Prok talked of one thing only — sex — and particularly of the H-histories he was collecting not only in Chicago and Indianapolis now, but in New York as well. He was moved almost to tears by the accounts of sex offenders he’d interviewed in prison, people incarcerated for common acts that happened to run afoul of the antiquated laws of record and who were prosecuted almost arbitrarily, like the South Bend man jailed for having received oral sex from his wife (or rather ex-wife, and on her report), or the many homosexual couples ferreted out and exposed by vindictive spouses, parents, small-town police. Coitus out of wedlock was universally banned, masturbation illegal, sodomy a felony in most states. “You know,” he told me, and he told me more than once, making his case, already preparing the next lecture in his head, “it’s utterly absurd. It’s got to the point where if all the sex laws on the books were rigorously prosecuted, some eighty-five percent of the adult populace would be behind bars.”

I told him that I agreed with him. That I couldn’t agree more. That my life would have been a thousand times better if it weren’t for all the prohibitions placed on me from the time I knew what the equipment between my legs was for.

He smiled, put an arm round me. “I know, I know,” he said, “I’m preaching to the converted.”

I began to see more of Iris during this period — I took her to the pictures and we went for walks or met for study dates at the library — though with finals coming up, graduation looming and the time I was required to devote to the project, not to mention the garden, our relationship progressed by fits and starts. By this time both Prok and I were stripped down to the barest essentials while working out of doors, and both of us developed such deep tans you might have mistaken us for a pair of Italian laborers. Prok wasn’t a nudist, not officially (he was far too self-sufficient to join any group or movement), but he was often naked or as close to naked as he could reasonably be given the circumstances, because to his mind nudity was an expression of the most natural and relaxed state of the human animal — the very same agencies of social control that had proscribed certain sex acts dictated that people should wear clothing, whereas any number of societies outside the ken of the Judeo-Christian tradition did perfectly well without it, or with very little of it. “The Trobriand Islanders, for instance, Milk, think of the Trobriand Islanders. Or the Samoans.” To emphasize his point with the neighbors and any uninformed pedestrians who might happen by, Prok ultimately reduced his gardening costume to a kind of flesh-colored jockstrap and a single shoe, which he wore on the right foot, for digging. I followed suit, of course, because this was what was expected of me, and I always did what was expected. (It was a question of loyalty, that was all, of an ethic central to my training, my upbringing — my very nature, I guess — though Iris in later years could be savage on the subject.)

What happened next — it was just before graduation in June — surprised even me, and I was the initiator of it. All this talk of sex, of how natural and uncomplicated it was and would and should be if only society would loosen its strictures, got me thinking about my own situation and the outlets (Prok’s term) available to me. I was young, healthy, and the exercise and the sun and the feel and smell of the soil had me practically bursting with lust. I was hot, never hotter, frustrated, angry. I wanted Iris, wanted Laura Feeney, wanted anyone, but I didn’t know where to begin. On the other hand, Prok and I continued to have encounters (but how he would have hated the euphemism — sex, we had sex), though, as I say, my H-history was limited and if I were a 1 or at best a 2 on the 0–6 scale, that would describe the extent of my inclination in that direction, and so I began in my hesitant way to broach the subject of heterosexual relations with him. But let me draw back a moment, because I remember the day clearly and need to set the scene here.

It was a Sunday morning, and we’d got to work early in the garden, church bells tolling in the distance, people strolling by on their way to services, the air dense with heat and humidity, the promise of a late-afternoon shower brooding over the hills. The garden was open — each Sunday Prok posted a hand-lettered sign to that effect so that people could have a chance to tour the property and listen to him lecture on each variety of flower and plant, its classification, its near relatives, its preferences with regard to soil, light and watering. Prok liked nothing better than to show off what he’d accomplished horticulturally, and again, this derived as much from his competitive instincts (nobody’s lilies could ever hope to match his) as anything else. We were working on a massive clump of daylilies in one of the beds in the front yard, both of us down on all fours, when Prok glanced up and said, “Why, look, isn’t that Dean Hoenig? And who’s that with her? I’ll bet — yes, I’ll bet that would be her mother, come to visit all the way from Cleveland. Hadn’t somebody mentioned that her mother was visiting?”

Prok had risen to his knees, a tight smile on his lips. I looked up to see the Dean of Women, dressed for church, making her way along the walk past the house, talking animatedly with a stooped, open-faced old woman in a hat like an inverted wedding cake. I knew that the dean had just recently moved into a house two doors up from Prok’s, but beyond that I knew little or nothing of the faculty and really didn’t have an answer for him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

The smile broadened. He was watching them in the way of predator and prey, and I saw that they didn’t have a chance, the old woman moving with such deliberation she was practically standing still. “It occurs to me,” Prok said, his voice rich with subversive joy, “that the garden is open, is it not?”

I didn’t give back the smile. I wanted nothing to do with the dean. I might have been under Prok’s protection, but still I couldn’t help shrinking inside every time I saw her, guilty, guilty as charged, and the irony was I’d never got more than that single kiss out of Laura Feeney despite all the squirming the situation had caused me.

Prok caught them at the gate. “Dean Hoenig, Sarah!” he called, darting out onto the walk in his jockstrap and single flopping shoe. The dean gave him a look of bewilderment, while her mother, who couldn’t have stood more than four feet ten in her heels, visibly started. But Prok would have none of it. He was the smoothest, courtliest, most perfect gentleman in the entire state of Indiana, and he’d happened to see the ladies passing—“On your way home from church, I take it?”—and felt he just had to awaken them to the delights of his garden and offer them the rare privilege of a personal guided tour. “And who might this charming lady be?” he inquired, turning to the old woman with a bow. “Your mother, I presume?”