T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Liar.” She spat it at me. Heads turned. The lovers in the shadows came out of their clinches for one hard instant. “You’re a liar,” she said, then swung round, went up the steps and into the arena of light even as I stood there and watched her jerk open the door and slam it behind her.

A week later, Iris made an appointment with Prok and gave up her history. As I remember it, there was an unusual amount of rain that fall, and then an early snow. Everything was locked in, the weeks seemed to conflate, and then Corcoran sent word that he was accepting Prok’s offer and the Japanese climbed into their planes in the hour before dawn and descended on Pearl Harbor. And nothing was ever the same again.

Given what I’ve already revealed about myself, I suppose it will come as no surprise if I tell you that the first chance I got (when Prok was away on his own, lecturing to a civic group in Elkhart, and, incidentally, taking Violet Corcoran’s sex history in neighboring South Bend), I went straight to the files to look up two histories of special interest — Corcoran’s and my wife’s. Can I tell you too that I didn’t feel the slightest guilt or compunction? Not this time. Not anymore. Prok was away, and it was only his intervention that would have stopped me, and nothing short of it. I broke Prok’s new ironclad code within the hour, pulled the files and spread them out side by side on the desk before me.

It was just before the holidays, the whole country whipped into a froth of martial hysteria and Prok already fretting over the rumored rationing of gasoline, tires and the rest, insisting we’d have to take the train more now, the train and the bus. Everyone was distracted, shocked, outraged, so caught up in the events of December seventh that even Christmas itself seemed inconsequential — who could think of Santa Claus when Tojo and Hitler were loose in the world? As I remember, we were having a cold snap, the sky the color of shell casings, snow flurries predicted for later in the day, and I was in the office early, with a number of tasks ahead of me. There was the endless tabulation of data, the drawing up of tables and graphs, and correspondence too, though of course the volume was nothing like what we — Prok mostly — had to contend with after publication of our findings in ’48. By that time, Prok was receiving thousands of letters a year from absolute strangers seeking advice or adjustments of their sexual problems, offering up their services as friends of the research, sending on explicit photos and sex diaries, erotic art, dildos, chains, whips and the like. I remember one letter in particular, from an attorney representing a client who had been charged with “knowing a pig carnally by the anus,” and requesting Prok’s expert testimony as to the overall frequency of such acts with animals (six percent of the general population; seventeen percent of the single rural population). Prok declined. Politely.

At any rate, there I was, bent over the desk, a Christmas carol infesting some part of my brain (Iris and I had attended a choral concert the night before), one of Prok’s colleagues clearing his throat or blowing his nose down the hall somewhere while secretaries in heels clacked on by as if so many miniature locomotives were running over the rails of a miniature train set. I turned to Iris’s history first, and there were no surprises there, just as I’d assumed. She hadn’t even known what the term “masturbation” meant until she was seventeen and already in college, and then she was too consumed with her own inhibitions to try it more than two or three times, and never to the point of orgasm; she’d experienced both manual and oral stimulation of her breasts on the part of men — boys — other than me, but no petting and no coitus until the time of her engagement and marriage. She’d had limited experience with her own sex, and that at a very young age, no animal contacts, few fantasies. She’d never employed foreign objects, never (till now) taken the male genitalia into her mouth.

There was nothing there I hadn’t seen a hundred times already, and I wondered why she’d been so reluctant to give up her history — truly, it was as pedestrian as could be — and then I wondered if that wasn’t it, that she was ashamed of having so little to offer us, as if all we cared about were the extreme cases, the sexual athletes, the promiscuous and jaded, the individuals who dropped off the end of the bell curve. Could that have been it? Or was it something deeper, some resistance to the tenor of the study itself? To Prok? To me? For a minute I felt my heart would break — it hadn’t been easy for her, and she’d done it for me, for me alone, and if it weren’t for that she’d never have offered herself up to the project. It just wasn’t in her nature. I might have taken a moment then to stare out the window into the sealed gray crypt of the sky, might have spoken her name aloud: Iris. Just that: Iris.

She was so nervous the day she came in, so tightly wound, so shy and soft and beautiful. “Dr. Kinsey,” she said in a voice that was barely audible, “hello. And hello, John.” I’d known she was coming, and I’d been in a state myself — all day, in fact. Every time I heard a footfall in the corridor, and never mind that it was hours still until her appointment, I couldn’t help shifting in my seat and stealing a glance at the door. I thought I was ready for her, ready to put this thing behind us as if it were the last in a series of marital rites, like an inoculation or the VD test required for the license, and yet still, though I’d been watching the clock and there was an ache in the pit of my stomach as if I hadn’t eaten in a week, when it came to it I was almost surprised to see her there. I’d been working on a calculation that was a bit over my head (standard deviation from the mean in a sample of men reporting nocturnal emissions) and she’d come in noiselessly, as soft-footed as a cat. I looked up and there she was, stoop-shouldered, waiflike, sunk into her coat like a child, her gloved hands, the hat, the quickest, fleeting, agitated smile on her lips. Prok and I rose simultaneously to greet her.

“Iris, come in, come in,” Prok was saying, all the mellifluous inflection of his smoothest interviewer’s tones pouring out of him like syrup, “here, let me help you off with your coat — bitter out there, isn’t it?”

Iris said that it was. She gave me a smile as she shrugged out of her coat and Prok bustled round her, hot on the scent of yet another history. Did she look tentative, even a bit dazed? I suppose so. But I didn’t really have much time to think about it one way or the other because Prok immediately turned to me and said, “I expect you’ll want to go home a bit early this afternoon, Milk? Or better yet, perhaps you’d like to take your work down to the library—?”

And then there was Corcoran’s history.

But Corcoran’s history — and it was, as I’ve said, extensive, the most active single file we’d yet come across — isn’t perhaps as important at this juncture as sketching in the denouement of that scene with Iris on the steps of the dorm, because that has more than a little bearing on all of this, and all that was to come. She called me a liar. Slammed the door. Left me in the cold. As I stood there in the unrelenting wind, undergraduates and their dates slipping round me like phantoms, I was faced with two incontrovertible facts: Mac had told her everything, and she’d known about it all this time, through our reconciliation, our wedding and honeymoon and the dawdling intimate Sunday afternoons of summer and on into the fall, and she’d never said a word. She’d just watched me, like a spy, awaiting her opening. Well, now she had it. The door slammed behind her, the dorm swallowed her up and I staggered across campus like an invalid till I found a pay phone and rang her number.