T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

And here was where I found myself in deep water again, because I asked this conventionally pretty and very likely pampered professor’s wife, this elegant blond jewel of a woman dressed in impeccable taste, the next question in the sequence, that is: “How many orgasms do you experience on average?”

She was on her fifth cigarette, and if she’d been relaxed from the outset, now she was as warm and enthusiastic as any individual I’d yet interviewed. She looked at me. Gave a little smile. I had been continuously — and unprofessionally — hard for the better part of two hours now. “Oh, I would guess maybe ten or twelve.”

My face must have shown my surprise, because few even of our highest-rating individuals would have approached that numerical category. “Per week?” I asked. And then, stupidly, “Or is that a monthly approximation?”

Now it was her turn to blush, just the faintest reddening of the flesh under both cheekbones and around the flanges of her nostrils. “Oh, no,” she said. “No. I’m afraid that would be daily. ”

If Iris was at all miffed that I wasn’t there to greet her and Tommy and help drag her steamer trunk up three flights of stairs at the women’s dorm, she didn’t show it. Prok and I returned to Bloomington early on the morning of the fourth day, as planned — he still had his teaching schedule to work around in those days — and I went straight to the office to transcribe the coded sheets and add incrementally to our burgeoning data on human sexual behavior, and I should say that this was always exciting, in the way, I suppose, of a hunter returning from a successful expedition with his bag limit of the usual birds and perhaps a few of the exotic as well. (Further to the above interview, incidentally: please don’t think that all the interviewees had such a rich and extensive sex life as that young faculty wife. Much more typical, of the females especially, was a record of sexual repression, guilt and limited experience, both in number of partners and activities. I should add too, just to close out the anecdote, that the moment the door shut behind her — Mrs. Foshay — I couldn’t help relieving the pressure in my groin, though if Prok had heard of it he would have skinned me alive — professionalism, professionalism was the key word, at least on the surface. At least in the beginning. I came to orgasm in record time, the stale room still redolent with her perfume and the heat of her presence, and I barely had time to mop up with my handkerchief and tuck myself away before the next knock came at the door and the acne-stippled face of a nineteen-year-old sociology student, who wouldn’t have recognized the female genitalia if they’d been displayed for him on a gynecologist’s examining table, appeared in the doorway. He gave me a steady look, then said — or rather, croaked—“Am I in the right place?”)

But Iris. Immediately after work I rushed across campus to the dorm. Earlier, when it looked as if Prok and I wouldn’t be finished till seven or so, I’d left a telephone message with the RA to the effect that I would come straight from work and take her to dinner (Iris, that is, not the RA), so she should hold off eating. And, though it was the RA I was talking with and so couldn’t really express much of what I was feeling, I added that I was looking forward to seeing her. After such a long time, that is. Very much. Very much so.

I got there at quarter past seven, but Iris kept me waiting. I don’t know what she was doing — making me suffer just a bit on general principles, taking extra care with her dress and makeup so as to reinforce the impression she would make on me, falling back on the prerogative of women, as the pursued, to do whatever they damned well pleased — but I found myself jumping up from the sofa every other minute and pacing round the lounge, much to the dismay of the RA, who was at least putting on a show of reading from the book spread out on the desk before her. I was keyed up, and I couldn’t really say why. Perhaps it was the anticipation — nearly three months apart, the exchange of letters and snapshots, the protestations of love on both sides — which was only to be expected. I couldn’t say that I’d been lonely over the summer, not exactly, not with Mac and Prok and the long hours I’d put in both traveling and at my desk, but I guess I did use the letters as an opportunity of opening up to her my hopes and aspirations (and fears; I was in line to receive my draft notice, as was practically every other man on campus), and that made the moment of our reunion all the more significant. And fraught. I’d quoted love poems to her as well—“Now while the dark about our loves is strewn,/Light of my dark, blood of my heart, O come!”—and now I would have to make good on all of that. And so would she. But did she care for me still? Had she found someone else? Was I worthy of her?

It was nearly eight, and at least thirty women had come down the stairs and passed through the portals of the inner sanctum to meet and embrace their dates and go off to the pictures or the skating rink or the backseat of the car, when Iris finally appeared. I’d been pacing, and I was at the far end of the lounge, my back to the room, when I heard the faint wheeze of the door pulling back against the pneumatic device that kept it closed. I jerked round and there she was. Can I state the obvious? She was very beautiful, and beyond beautiful: she was special, one in a million, because I’d been writing to her and thinking of her all summer, because she was Iris McAuliffe and she was mine if I wanted her. I knew that then, knew it in the minute I saw her. This was love. This was it.

But how did she look? She’d curled her hair so that it hung in a succession of intricate lapping waves at her shoulders and framed the locket at her throat, the locket I’d given her, and whose picture was in that locket? Her dress — blue, sleeveless, cut to the knee — was new, purchased for the occasion, and her eyes, always her focal point, seemed to leap across the room at me (an illusion, I later realized, that was enhanced by the skillful application of mascara, eye shadow and rouge). She seemed smaller, darker, prettier than I’d remembered. I just stood there, helpless, and watched her as she crossed the carpet to me and let me hold her and kiss her.

“You’re back,” she said.

“Yes. And so are you. Did I miss Tommy?”

She nodded. “He had work, so he was only here for the day. He was disappointed, but he knew you were — where were you again?”

“Purdue. And DePauw.”

“He knew you were working.” The RA had fixed her eyes on us as if she had the power to look right through the layers of our clothing and our skin to reduce and examine our bones and even the marrow within. “He sends his regards.”

I felt bad for a moment, a sudden little stab of regret penetrating and then withdrawing like the blade of a knife, and I knew I should have been there for her — for her and Tommy too — but I dismissed it. There was nothing I could have done. Prok’s schedule had been set months in advance and I was powerless to alter it. “I wish I’d been here,” I said, glancing over my shoulder at the RA (not the limp blonde, but a new girl, heavyset, with a dead-white face and hair piled up like detritus on her head). The RA dropped her eyes. I turned back to Iris — Iris, whose hand I seemed to be holding — and said, “But you must be famished. How about a nice steak?”

Now that I was settled — or as settled as a man who was awaiting his draft notice in uncertain times could ever expect to be — there was no real impediment to my seeing Iris as often as I wanted. I no longer had to attend classes, take exams or write papers, and my hours with Prok were relatively stable, if far in excess of the standard forty-hour workweek. Our only problem was the travel — I was out on the road with Prok for three to four days every other week, and that pace was soon to accelerate — but Iris and I were able to adjust, because we wanted to. If before we were dating casually, feeling each other out, no hurry, no pressure or commitment, now things were different, radically different. We went everywhere together — we met for meals, attended concerts, went dancing, hiking, skating, sat in the lounge in the evenings, side by side, so close we were breathing as one, Iris working at her studies and I poring over Magnus Hirschfeld and Robert Latou Dickinson to keep up with the literature in the field. It got to the point where I felt hollow if she wasn’t there, as if I had no inner being or essence without her. When she was in class or I was at work or sitting in some second-class hotel staring into the eyes of an overfed undergraduate who was obsessed with Rita Hayworth or masturbated too much, I thought of Iris, only Iris.