T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Evenin’, friend,” Prok said, fastening on the man with the blue talons of his eyes. “I’m lookin’ for Rufus Morganfeld. You know him?”

The man in the electric-blue suit took his time, regarding Prok from eyes drawn down to slits. He had a cigarette in one hand, a not-quite-empty glass in the other. “You the law?”

“Uh-uh.”

“What then? Sellin’ Bibles?”

“Who I am is Doctor Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology at Indiana University, and Rufus — brother Rufus — say he gone meet me here.”

“That’s somethin’,” the man said softly. “Doctor, huh? What, you come to cure my hemorrhoids?”

Prok’s face never changed. No one laughed. “You wouldn’t be needin’ a cocktail there by any chance, would you?” he asked.

There was a long interval, Prok remaining absolutely motionless, his eyes never wavering, and then the man in the blue suit let a smile creep out of the furrows at the corners of his mouth. “Crown Royal and soda,” he said.

The drink was ordered, the drink came, the drink was handed over. By this time Prok was deep in conversation with the man in the blue suit and a group of four or five others who were nearest him at the bar, and Rufus Morganfeld himself — our contact, who had been down at the other end of the bar to this point, waiting to see how things sorted out — came up and introduced himself. Prok greeted him warmly, and I thought he was going to offer Rufus a drink as well, but instead he shook hands all around, took Rufus in one arm and me in the other and shepherded us out into the street. Immediately Prok went back to being Prok, as there was no need to coddle Rufus, whom he’d met at the work farm, whose history he’d recorded and who was being paid fifty cents for every history he helped us collect among the prostitutes who worked the neighborhood. (I should say that Prok was intensely interested in prostitutes, at least in the beginning, because their experience was so much wider than most — this was before we actually got to observe them at work — but ultimately, they weren’t as useful as you might imagine in regard to the physiology of various sex acts because of their propensity to counterfeit response.)

At any rate, with Rufus as our Virgil, we were able to track down the prostitutes (it was a slow night for them in any case, because of the rain, and they tended to bunch up in a few locales), and begin to record their histories. At first they tended to be skeptical—“Oh, yeah, honey, for one greenback dollar you just gone talk ”—but Prok on the scent of histories was not to be denied and they quickly came round to the view that this was strictly on the up-and-up, pure science, and that we valued them not only as a resource but as human beings too, and this was another facet of Prok’s genius — or his compassion, rather. He genuinely cared. And he had no prejudices whatever — either racial or sexual. It didn’t matter to him if you were colored, Italian or Japanese, if you engaged in anal sex or liked to masturbate on your mother’s wedding photo — you were a human animal, and you were a source of data.

The problem we encountered, however, was that since there were no adequate hotels nearby, we were at a loss for a private venue in which to conduct the interviews. We did have the car, but only one of us could interview in the Nash and the necessity was to conduct our interviews simultaneously. We were standing there on the street corner, the rain coming down harder now, in a forlorn little group — two prostitutes no older than I, Prok, Rufus and myself — when Rufus came up with the solution. “I got a room,” he said, “two blocks over. Nothin’ fancy, but it’s got a electric light, a bed and a armchair, if that’ll do—”

In the end Prok decided to take the Nash himself and leave me to the relative comfort of Rufus’s room, reasoning that I was still the amateur and didn’t need any additional impediments — such as cold, rain and inadequate lighting — put in my way. It was a noble gesture, or a practical one, I suppose, but either way, it was destined to backfire on him. I took my girl — and I call her a girl because she was just eighteen, with a pair of slanted cinnamon eyes and skin the color of the chocolate milk they mix up at Bornemann’s Dairy back at home — up to Rufus’s sitting room at the end of a hallway on the third floor of a detached brick apartment building that was once a single-family home. She seemed dubious at first, and maybe a bit nervous, and, of course, I was a bundle of nerves myself, not only because I’d taken so few female histories to this point but because of her race and the surroundings, the close, vaguely yellowish walls, the neatly made single bed that might have been a pallet in the penitentiary, the harsh light of the naked bulb dangling from the ceiling on its switch cord. Fifteen minutes into the interview, when she saw what it was, she relaxed, and I do think I did a very professional job with her that night (though, to be honest, I did find myself uncomfortably aroused, as with Mrs. Foshay).

Her history was what you might expect from a girl in her position — relations at puberty with both her father and an older brother, marriage at fourteen, the move north from Mississippi, abandonment, the pimp, the succession of johns and venereal diseases — and I remember being movedby her simple, unnuanced recitation of the facts, the sad facts, as I hadn’t been moved before. Unprofessionally, I wanted to get up from my chair and hug her and tell her that it was all right, that things would get better, though I knew they wouldn’t. Unprofessionally, I wanted to strip the clothes from her and have her there on the bed and watch her squirm beneath me. I didn’t act on either impulse. I just closed down my mind and recorded her history, one of the thousands that would be fed into the pot.

The second woman — she was older, thirty or thirty-five, and she had a white annealed scar tracing the line of her jawbone on the right side of her face — came to the door the minute the first girl had left. This second woman had a belligerent look about her — a striated pinching of the lips, the weather report of her brow, the prove-it-to-me stance of her legs as she stood there arms akimbo at the door — and before she stepped into the room she demanded the dollar we were paying out to each of our subjects that night. I dug around in my pockets and came up empty — Prok had the billfold of crisp green singles he’d withdrawn from the bank the previous afternoon and he’d neglected, in the confusion of sorting things out vis-à-vis appropriate interviewing venues, to give me more than the one I’d handed to the first girl. “I, well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I’ll have to, well—”

“Yeah, sure, you’re sorry,” she said, her brow contorted, “and so am I.” She let out a curse. “And after I’ve went and dragged my sweet ass all the way over here in the rain too—”

“No,” I said, “no, you don’t understand.”

“You just some schemer,” she said, “like all the rest. Somethin’ for nothin’, ain’t that about right?”

It took all my powers of persuasion, which, believe me, weren’t much more than marginally developed at that point, to convince her to have a seat on the bed while I made a mad dash down the stairs, out into the street and back along the two blocks to where Prok sat in the Nash, interviewing his own colored prostitute. He wouldn’t be thrilled over the interruption. It was a rule, hard and fast, that all interviews must be conducted straight through in a controlled and private location, without any distractions whatever that might compromise the rapport established with the subject, no telephones ringing, no third parties hovering in the background, no emergencies of any sort. I knew this. And I knew what Prok’s impatience — and his wrath — could be like. Still, I had no choice. I ran hard all the way, afraid that my subject would get fed up and leave, and I rounded the corner by Shorty’s in full stride, the dark hump of the Nash rising up out of the black nullity of the pavement like something deposited there by the retreating glaciers. There was a light on inside — Prok’s flashlight — and the silhouettes of a pair of heads caught behind the windshield. Out of breath, I skidded to a halt on the wet sidewalk, took half a second to compose myself, and rapped gently at the driver’s-side window.