T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

The RA answered. “Bridget?” I said. “It’s John Milk. Can you get Iris for me?”

“Yes, sure,” she said, but her voice was distant and cold, and I wondered how much she knew. The phone hit the table with a hard slap, as of flesh on flesh, and then I was listening to the buzz of static. After a moment, the usual sounds came through: the scuffing of feet in the background, a giggle, a man’s voice. “Good night,” somebody said, another man, and then a girl’s voice: “One more kiss.”

When Iris finally came on the line — it might have been two minutes later or ten, I couldn’t say — she sounded as if she were speaking to a stranger, an unsolicited caller, somebody selling something. “What do you want?” she demanded.

“I just, well, I just wanted to, well, talk — that is, if, if—”

“What did you think you were doing?” she said then, and she sounded better now, sounded like herself — furious, but in some way resigned. “Did you think I was stupid or something? Or blind? Was that it?”

“No, it wasn’t that. It was just that, well, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but I didn’t want to upset you in any way, that was all. It’s the project. It’s the human animal. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all.”

She was silent. I listened to the blitzkrieg of static over the line and she might have been a thousand miles away instead of just across the quad.

“Listen, Iris,” I said, “you’re going to have to try to overcome these antiquated notions about, well, relations between consenting adults — this is the modern age and we’re scientists, or we mean to be, and all this superstition and fear and blame and finger-pointing is holding us back, as a society, I mean. Can’t you see that?”

Her voice came back at me as if she hadn’t heard what I was saying at all, a small voice, quavering around the edges: “And Prok?”

“What about him?” I said.

“You and Prok?”

I was in a phone booth, bathed in yellow light. It was cold. The wind rattled the door, seeped through the cracks where the hinges folded inward. I was shivering, I’m sure, but this was my wife, this was Iris, and I had to get everything out in the open, had to be straightforward and honest from here on out or we were doomed, I could see that now. “Yes,” I said.

What came next was a surprise. She didn’t throw it back at me, didn’t shout “How could you?” or demand to know the occasions and the number of times or ask me if I loved him or he me or where she and Mac fit into all of this, and she didn’t use any of those hateful epithets people are so quick to make use of, invert, tribad, fag. She just said, “I see.”

What did I feel? Shame? A little. Relief? Yes, certainly, but it was as tenuous as the connection that fed our voices through the superstructure of the night. “I love you,” I said. “You, and nobody else. The rest is all—”

“A bodily function?”

“Iris, listen. I love you. I want to see you face-to-face, because this isn’t — we shouldn’t, not over the phone—”

“Mac,” she said, and I couldn’t be sure — the connection was bad — but there was a knife edge of sorrow to her voice, a slicing away from the moment that made me feel she was about to break down in tears. “Mac and I talked. She’s like a mother, but you know that, don’t you? She, she told me the same thing you did. It doesn’t mean anything, not a thing, it’s just — just what? Animals rubbing their parts together.”

“Iris,” I said. “I love you.”

There was a long silence. When she finally spoke, her voice was reduced to nothing. “What about me and Prok then?” she whispered. “Is that what you want?”

I might have been carved of cellulose, absolutely wooden, the effigy of John Milk propped up inside a phone booth on the far side of the quad on the IU campus on a blustery autumn night. Hammer nails into me, temper me, whittle away with every tool at your disposal: I was insensate. “No,” I said. “No, I don’t want — that’s not … You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

“But I’m giving up my history, aren’t I? Why not give up the rest of me too?” A pause. The wind rattled the booth. “It doesn’t mean anything, does it?”

I was made of wood. I couldn’t speak.

“John? John, are you still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Your — what should I call him? Your colleague — Corcoran,” and now a new tone came into her voice, a tone I didn’t like at all. “He certainly seemed interested. Did you see him tonight? Did you? He was on me like a bird dog.”

And so I went for Corcoran’s history. After things had settled down, that is — after Iris and I had talked it out a hundred times, after we’d reaffirmed the vows we’d taken before the justice of the peace and loved each other in the backseat of the Nash and scraped our money together to put down a deposit on our first apartment because this was intolerable, this separation, this yearning, these misunderstandings, and it was all right, it was going to be all right as far as I could tell on that hollowed-out December morning when Prok was away and I went to the files and saw what Corcoran was. What can I say? I sat there under the lamp and ran my finger down the interview sheet, noting acts, ages, frequencies, reconstructing an ever-expanding scenario of experimentation and sexual derring-do. Corcoran, in fact, was very nearly my diametrical opposite so far as experience was concerned. He’d matured early and taken advantage of it, precisely the type of individual we would later label as “high raters,” who consistently, throughout their lives, experienced more sex with more partners than the average, and far more than the “low raters” on the other end of the scale.

Corcoran was raised in Lake Forest, the son of a professor who later (when Corcoran was fourteen) moved the family to South Bend in order to accept a position at Notre Dame University. His father was Catholic, but only minimally involved in the church, and his mother was Unitarian, and something of a free spirit. There was nudity in the household, both parents having been involved at one time with the Nudist Movement, a fact his father took pains to conceal from his superiors at the university, just as Prok had to keep his own private affairs sub rosa in the IU community. Corcoran could remember having experienced erections in childhood, and his mother assured him that he’d had them in infancy even — she used to joke about it, in fact, saying he was like a little tin soldier, poking right up at her every time she went to change his diaper — and while this is unusual, our research into childhood sexuality has shown that it is not at all anomalous, especially among high-rating individuals. When he was eleven, he had his first orgasm, after which he participated enthusiastically in what in the vernacular would be called “circle jerks” with other neighborhood boys, first in Lake Forest and then in South Bend, where it seems he was the initiator of a whole range of sexual activities involving both boys and girls.

First coitus came at the age of fourteen, at a summer cottage on one of the lakes in the upper Michigan peninsula. There were, apparently, a number of like-minded individuals taking summer cabins in the region — nudists, that is — and he and his two sisters went without clothing throughout the summer, “tanned,” as he later put it, “in every crevice.” It was his aunt — his mother’s sister — who first initiated him, and from there he went on to the sixteen-year-old daughter of one of the other campers, with whom he pursued every means of gratification he could think of. He found, as he liked to say, that he had a talent for sex, that he enjoyed it more than any other activity he’d ever discovered, and before long he’d lost all interest in the boyish pastimes of baseball, trout fishing, picture shows and adventure novels, devoting himself almost wholly to satisfying his urges in as many ways and with as many partners as he could. He met his wife, Violet, in college, and she was, from the beginning, a sexual enthusiast as well (at this juncture I could only configure her in my imagination, and I have to confess that I found myself becoming stimulated at the thought of transcribing her interview for our records). They had two children, both girls, of seven and nine years of age respectively. On occasion, they entertained other couples, Corcoran himself indiscriminate as to whether he had sex with the men or the women or both (he rated himself no higher than a 3 on Prok’s 0–6 scale and thought of himself as fully bi-sexual). Finally, and this was to endear him to Prok and provide an ever-accumulating source of data for our files, he kept a little black book of his conquests, which ran, at this point, into the hundreds.