T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

Her face was faint and ghostly in the light of the stars that seeped in through the trees. I smelled the heat of her, her breath commingled with mine, the perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears that was all but dissipated now. “You don’t think I’m going to go all the way, do you?”

I was stretched out atop her. My trousers were down at my knees. She’d had her hand on my penis and her tongue in my mouth. Suddenly I became eloquent. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You know it’s the most natural thing in the world, and it’s only convention — superstition, priests, ministers, bogeymen — that keeps people from expressing themselves to the full. Sexually, I mean. Come on, Iris. Come on, it’s nothing. You’ll like it, you will.”

She was silent. She hadn’t moved. Her face was inches from mine, floating there in the dark of the car like a husked shell on a midnight sea.

“You know what we’re discovering?” I whispered.

“No,” she whispered back. “What?”

“Well, that premarital sex is actually beneficial, that people who have it — premarital sex, that is — are much better, well, adjusted than those who don’t. And it carries over into their married sex life as well. They’re happier, Iris. Happier. And that’s the long and short of it, I swear.”

She was silent again. I could feel myself shrinking, the blood ticking along the length of the shaft and ever so slowly draining away. The wind buffeted the car and we both tensed a moment, and then it passed, and the silence deepened. “Premarital,” she murmured after a moment. “Pre,” she said, holding it a beat, and then releasing it, “ marital. Isn’t that what you said, John?”

“Yes,” I said, eager now, not quite taking her point. “ Premarital. Sex before, well, marriage.”

Another silence, but I could feel the change coming over her, communicated along the length of her body, through the nerve endings of her skin, directly to mine. She was grinning, I knew it, though it was too dark to read her face. “So,” she said, “I take it you’re proposing to me, then?”

In the end, President Wells did deliver the ultimatum Prok had been expecting, but Prok surprised him and the Board of Trustees too. They had assumed he’d choose the marriage course over the research, the teaching to which he’d devoted himself and at which he’d excelled for the past twenty years rather than what they must have seen as a new and perhaps passing enthusiasm, but they didn’t know him very well. It hurt him, it outraged him, it made him more determined than ever to overturn the cant and hypocrisy of the guardians of the status quo, of the Rices, the Hoenigs and all the rest, but he gave up the marriage course — eventually gave up teaching across the board — in order to pursue the new and great goal of his life. Soon, very soon, the Institute for Sex Research would be born and the inner circle would expand by three.

“So it’s iris — the lucky girl, that is?”

Prok was at his desk, bent over his papers in a cone of light. The windows looked as if they’d been soldered over, the corridor was in shadow and the dull weight of a steady drizzle seemed to have put the entire campus into hibernation. It was our lunch hour and we were eating at our desks, as we did most days, Prok dining on his trail mix while I made the best of a disintegrating tuna sandwich from the Commons, and I’d just told him the good news, though I’d been bursting with it since I got in that morning. (If you’re wondering why I’d hesitated, it was because Prok had been even more than usually absorbed in his work all morning and I couldn’t seem to find an opportunity — he hated to be interrupted — and, if truth be told, I was uncertain how he would take the news. Yes, he’d wanted me to marry, but that was in the abstract, on another temporal plane altogether, and this was in the here and now. I knew his first thought would be for the project and how my altered status would affect it.)

“Well,” he said, looking distracted as he shuffled through his papers in search of something he’d momentarily misplaced — but that was a ruse, a ruse so he could buy time to sort out his thoughts—“she’s an attractive girl, there’s no doubt of that. And intelligent. Intelligent too.” Another moment trundled by, the wheels turning in his brain with a creak and groan I could hear all the way across the room, and then it was done. “But what am I thinking?” he shouted, and suddenly he was on his feet and striding to my desk, his hand outstretched and his face lit with the wide-angle grin he used to such effect when it suited him. “Congratulations, John. Really. This is the best news I’ve heard all week.”

I took his hand and gave him what must have been a shy but self-satisfied smile. “I’m glad, I’m really — because I didn’t know, well, how you’d feel—” I was saying, but he cut me off, already racing on ahead of me.

“When did you say the date was?”

“Well, that is, I didn’t. But we were thinking we’d like to, well, as soon as possible. March. Iris thought March would be—”

He was shaking his head. “That’ll never do. Not March. The garden, as you of all people should know, is barely worthy of the name in March. No, it will have to be May, no question about it.”

“The garden?”

He was looking directly at me — staring into my eyes — but I don’t think he was seeing me at all. He was seeing sunshine and flowers, Iris in a trailing satin gown, the justice of the peace in his ceremonial robes, the deep cerulean arc of the sky overhead. “Yes, of course. I’m offering it to you — my gift, John. And think of it, in May the irises will be at their best — irises for Iris. What could be better?”

I told him it was all right with me — I thanked him lavishly, in fact — but that Iris had already called her mother and that certain undeniable forces had been set in motion, so that I wasn’t sure if we could postpone it at this juncture. He didn’t seem to hear me. “We’ll have Mac do something special,” he said. “A persimmon wedding cake, how about that? And I’ll make up the nuptial supper, cold meats and that sort of thing, and a goulash — and champagne, of course we’ll have to have champagne …” He trailed off and seemed to become aware of me again, as if I’d ducked out of the room and left a standing effigy behind and had just now returned to inhabit its shell. “But Iris,” he said, “your intended — the sexual adjustment was satisfactory, I take it?”

I stood there in the gloom of the office, the desk between us, a numb smile adhering to my lips. I nodded.

He was grinning even more intensely now, shifting from foot to foot, squaring his shoulders and rubbing his hands as if to warm them. “Yes,” he said, “yes. Nothing like the automobile for a modern-day aphrodisiac, eh? You see what I’ve been telling you all along, how fulfilled young couples across America would be, all those frustrated undergraduates out there, the lovesick high school faction, couples too poor to marry”—his arm swept the campus and the rooftops of the town beyond—“if only they could have the privacy and freedom from prejudice to express their sexual needs when and how they choose. Of course, John,” and his eyes took hold of mine, “I hope you’re not confusing the coital experience with the sort of commitment needed to build and sustain a marriage … Or Iris. She does know that sex is — or can, and in many cases should be — independent of marriage? That she doesn’t have to marry the first—” And here he stopped himself, leaving the rest unspoken.

I was about to reassure him, to tell him that we loved each other and had been dating, as he well knew, for some time now, and that our sexual adjustment was just fine, thank you, more than adequate — terrific, even — and that we knew perfectly well what we were doing, but again he cut me off.