T. Boyle: The Inner Circle

And then, abruptly, the first of the slides appeared, a full-color, closeup photograph of an erect, circumcised phallus, followed by a shot of the moist and glistening vagina awaiting it. “The vagina must be spread open as the erect male organ penetrates,” Dr. Kinsey went on, as the next slide dominated the screen behind him, “and thus the female has employed two fingers to this end. You will observe that the clitoris is stimulated at this point, thus providing the erotic stimulation necessary for the completion of the act on the part of the female.” There was more — a very detailed and mechanical account of the various positions the human animal employs in engaging in coitus, as well as techniques of foreplay — and a teaser (as if we needed one) for the next lecture, which was to focus on fertilization and (here the whispers broke out) how to circumvent it.

I heard it all. I even took notes, though afterward I could make no sense of them. Once the slides appeared I lost all consciousness of the moment (and I can’t overemphasize the jolt they gave me, the immediate and intensely physical sensation that was like nothing so much as plunging into a cold stream or being slapped across the face — here it was, here it was at long last!). I might have been sitting there upright in the chair, Laura Feeney swelling at my side, and I drew breath and blinked my eyes and the blood circulated through my veins, but for all intents and purposes I wasn’t there at all.

Afterward — and I can’t for the life of me recall how the lecture concluded — people collected their things in silence and moved up the aisles in a somber processional. There was none of the jostling and joking you would normally expect from a mob of undergraduates set loose after an hour’s confinement. Instead, the crowd shuffled forward listlessly, shoulders slumped, eyes averted, for all the world like refugees escaping some disaster. I couldn’t look at Laura Feeney. I couldn’t guide her with a hand to her waist either — I was on fire, aflame, and I was afraid the merest touch would incinerate her. I studied the back of her head, her hair, her shoulders, as we made our way through the crowd toward the smell of the rain beyond the big flung-open doors at the end of the hallway. We were delayed a moment on the doorstep, a traffic jam there on the landing as the rain lashed down and people squared their hats and fumbled with umbrellas, and then I had my own umbrella open and Laura and I were down the steps and out into the rain.

We must have gone a hundred yards, the trees flailing in the wind, the umbrella streaming, before I found something to say. “Do you — would you like to take a walk? Or do you need to, perhaps — because I could take you back to the dorm if that’s what you—”

Her face was drawn and bloodless and she walked stiffly beside me, avoiding body contact as much as was possible under the circumstances. She stopped suddenly and I stopped too, awkwardly struggling to keep the crown of the umbrella above her. “A walk?” she repeated. “In this? You’ve got the wrong species here, I’m afraid — I’m a human animal, not a duck.” And then we were laughing, both of us, and it was all right.

“Well, how about a cup of coffee then — and maybe a piece of, I don’t know, pie? Or a drink?” I hesitated. The rain glistened in her hair and her eyes were bright. “I could use a stiff one after that. I was — what I mean is, I never—”

She touched my arm at the elbow and her smile suddenly bloomed and then faded just as quickly. “No,” she said, and her voice had gone soft, “me either.”

I took her to a tavern crowded with undergraduates seeking a respite from the weather, and the first thing she did when we settled into a booth by the window was twist the rhinestone band off her finger and secrete it in the inside compartment of her purse. Then she unpinned her hat, patted down her hair and turned away from me to reapply her lipstick. I hadn’t thought past the moment, and once we agreed on where we were going, we hadn’t talked much either, the rain providing background music on the timpani of the umbrella and plucking the strings of the ragged trees as if that were all the distraction we could bear. Now, as I braced my elbows on the table and leaned toward her to ask what she wanted to drink, I realized that this was something very like a date and blessed my luck because I had two and a half dollars left in my wallet after paying out room and board from my scant weekly paycheck (I was working at the university library then, pushing a broom and reshelving books five evenings a week). “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and I could see she wasn’t quite herself yet. “What are you having?”

“Bourbon. And a beer chaser.”

She made a moue of her lips.

“I can get you a soft drink, if you prefer — ginger ale, maybe?”

“A Tom Collins,” she said, “I’ll have a Tom Collins,” and her eyes began to sweep the room.

The lower legs and cuffs of my trousers were wet and my socks squished in my shoes as I rose to make my way to the bar. The place was close and steaming, shoulders and elbows looming up everywhere, the sawdust on the floor darkly compacted by the impressions of a hundred wet heels. When I got back to the table with our drinks, there was another couple sitting opposite Laura, the girl in a green velvet hat that brought out the color of her eyes, the man in a wet overcoat buttoned up over his collar and the knot of his tie. He had a long nose with a bump in it and two little pincushion eyes set too close together. I don’t remember his name — or hers either, not at this remove. Call them Sally and Bill, for the purposes of this account, and identify them as fellow students in the marriage course, sweethearts certainly — worlds more than Laura and I were to each other — though not yet actually engaged.

Laura made the introductions. I nodded and said I was pleased to meet them both.

Bill had a pitcher of beer in front of him, the carbonation rising up from its depths in a rich, golden display, and I watched in silence as he tucked his tongue in the corner of his mouth and meticulously poured out half a glass for Sally and a full one for himself. The golden liquid swirled in the glass and the head rose and steadied before composing itself in a perfect white disc. “You look like you’ve done that before,” I said.

“You bet I have,” he replied, then lifted his glass and grinned. “A toast,” he proposed. He waited till we’d raised our glasses. “To Professor Kinsey!” he cried. “Who else?”

This was greeted with a snicker from the booth behind us, but we laughed — all four of us — as a way of defeating our embarrassment. There was one thing only on our minds, one subject we all were burning to talk of, and though Bill had alluded to it, we weren’t quite comfortable with it yet. We were silent a moment, studying the faces of the people shuffling damply through the door. “I like your ring, Sally,” Laura said finally. “Was it terribly expensive?”

And then they were both giggling and Bill and I were laughing along with them, laughing immoderately, laughing for the sheer joy and release of it. I could feel the bourbon settling in my stomach and sending out feelers to the distant tendrils of my nerves, and my face shone and so did theirs. We were in on a secret together, the four of us — we’d put one over on Dean Hoenig — and we’d just gone through a rite of initiation in a darkened hall in the biology building. It took a minute. Bill lit a cigarette. The girls searched each other’s eyes. “Jeez,” Bill said finally, “did you ever in your life see anything like that?”

“I thought I was going to die,” Sally said. She threw a glance at me, then studied the pattern of wet rings her beer glass had made on the table. “If my mother—” she began, but couldn’t finish the thought.