T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

At some point, and I didn’t really recall too much of it the following morning, let alone what I can summon up at this juncture, the conversation turned away from the war and how Dick and Ezra were sure to turn the tide, whip Hitler with one hand tied behind their backs and come steaming home triumphant by fall, to me and my situation. Dick was sunk into the couch, his arm fastened round Mary Ellen and his hand resting lightly on her left breast. The radio was on, the volume turned down low out of respect for the neighbors, something moody and blue seeping in out of the airwaves. “Kinsey really did get you that deferment, huh?” he said.

“Kinsey?” Mary Ellen said. “You mean Professor Kinsey? Dr. Sex ?”

Mary Jane, who’d been locked in an embrace with Ezra in the easy chair, lifted her head a moment to let out a giggle.

“That’s right,” I said. “Yes. Dr. Kinsey. I work for him.”

“Doing research,” Iris put in. “He’s terrific with statistics, he does all the figures—”

Ezra let out a snort. “I’ll bet he does — but what do you do with all those figures, huh, John?” And he and Dick shared a lascivious laugh.

Mary Ellen was slow to form the next thought, but I watched her compose her features and struggle with the notion till she got it out. “You mean … you, you’re a sex researcher?”

I was seated on one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs I’d dragged into the sitting room to make space for everyone. As I’ve said, I had no qualms whatever about the work — I was Prok’s right-hand man, his disciple in everything — but I didn’t like having to defend it, not in mixed company, not in my own living room. I looked into Mary Ellen’s eyes — she had nice eyes, her best feature, along with her consequential figure — and just nodded.

She made a cooing noise, turned to Dick and kissed him full on the mouth. When she came up for air she treated us to a coy smile and said that sex was the most fascinating subject she could think of. “I love sex,” she said, cooing still. “I love men, I’m sorry, but that’s just who I am.” A pause. “Do you get to watch? I mean, when people are …when they’re”—she looked to Iris to see how far she could go—“you know, doing it?”

I was long past the stage of coloring, but I felt the heat in that room and my wife’s eyes on me, and Dick’s and Ezra’s too. “No,” I said, raising a hand to smooth back my hair, “no, we just—”

“They just ask questions,” Iris answered for me. She gave me a look I couldn’t fathom. “Isn’t that right, John?”

Mary Jane had come back to consciousness, sprawled in Ezra’s lap and with her lipstick smeared in broad ovals at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dull with drink and the lateness of the hour. The faint wail of a saxophone rose from the radio like the cry of a strangled soul, then faded out again. “Questions?” she said. “What kind of questions?”

“How much do you masturbate?” Iris said, and she was still looking at me. “How many men you’ve been with, how many orgasms you have, how often you fellate your boyfriends. That sort of thing.”

There was a silence. Dick lifted his head as if he hadn’t heard a thing we’d said for the past five minutes. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I guess you’ve got a wife and all that, so I can’t blame you for taking the deferment, I really can’t.”

Another silence. The comment just sat there crouching over the evening, and no one wanted to touch it, least of all me. The announcer came on then to inform us that the station was signing off for the night, and we all stared at the radio till the fuzz of static replaced the broadcast and I began to think it was time to turn in. Finally Mary Jane roused herself again long enough to ask, “What’s fellate?”

Iris and I had agreed beforehand that we would retire early and let the two couples have the benefit of the couch and easy chair and the equable temperature produced by the furnace rather than having to make do in a frigid hallway somewhere or the backseat of a borrowed car, and so we went to bed not long after that and left our guests in the front room. I was fairly well gone at that point, and so was Iris, and I don’t think I even got around to brushing my teeth before I fell into the bed as if I were plummeting from a high dive. Instantly, I was asleep.

I woke sometime in the night with a dry throat, a condition that often afflicts me when I’ve been drinking. I was having a dream about walking into the drugstore and ordering a chocolate phosphate that magically turned into a Coca-Cola on ice with beads of condensation standing out on the glass that was like a cold compress in my hand, and then I was up and out of bed and heading toward the bathroom in my bare feet. But it wasn’t just my feet that were bare. I’ve always slept in the nude, at least ever since puberty when my mother stopped looking in on me at night, and in the disorientation of waking I’d forgotten entirely that there were guests in the house. The truth of it was, I was still drunk. Even so, something alerted me to the situation — a scent, the sound of a furtive movement, the faint trembling light of the candle Iris had left burning in the main room.

It took me a moment, fumbling my way down the hall step by faltering step, to realize that I was not alone. There was someone else there, a deepening shadow that seemed to concentrate the darkness against the wall just in front of me. I reached out a hand and felt flesh, a woman’s flesh, two complicit breasts to linger over, the heat of her skin, of her tongue, and a whisper: “I was looking for the bathroom …”

What would the proper host have done? Escorted her to the lavatory, I suppose. Provided her with fresh towels, a bar of soap, eau de cologne. I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t even have time to think, really — one minute I was asleep, and the next I was making tactile contact with the smooth hot inflammatory skin of a strange naked woman in my own hallway even while the sounds of distant snoring and the ticking, somewhere, of a clock, came to me. Her nipples were hard, her vagina was wet. Instantly, we were inseparable, and I don’t blame myself, not in the least, because it was the natural impulse of the moment, uncomplicated, salubrious, research on the fly, as it were.

I never did discover whether the friend of the research that night was Mary Ellen or Mary Jane, not that it mattered.

Automobiles were on my mind that winter, even as rationing went into effect and the auto assembly lines switched over to war production. In December, just before the Japanese struck, Prok had turned his considerable investigative energies to seeking out a second car, reasoning that it was unfair to deprive Mac and the children of transportation for such long stretches when we were out on the road lecturing and collecting histories. After having examined a dozen or more vehicles for sale around town, he finally settled on a late-model Buick that featured almost-new tires and an unblemished finish in a shade of blue so deep it was almost black. The car had belonged to one of his colleagues at IU, an elderly music professor who had passed on the year before and left the car garaged with his widow, who’d never learned to drive it. Prok sat down with the widow over tea one afternoon and collected not only the car (at a rock-bottom price), but her sex history as well. I was there, at the house on First Street, with Iris and Mac and the children, all of us waiting on pins and needles to see if Prok could pull it off, and I remember the celebratory flash of the sun catching the windshield as he swung into the driveway and the look of naked triumph on his face. Ostensibly, by the way, this was to be Mac’s car, while we continued to rely on the wheezing, unsteady Nash for our peregrinations, but in fact, from the day Prok motored into the driveway with it, the Buick was ours.