T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Anything you want, honey,” she said, bending to run her hand up the crotch of his pants. “You’re the doctor.”

She wasn’t wearing underpants — stockings, yes, supported by black garters at the swollen midpoint of her thighs — and she was reluctant to fully undress, though that was what we wanted, as Prok had made clear beforehand. (From her point of view, removing her dress and brassiere was both a bother and a waste of time, an impediment to moving her johns in an efficient conga line in and out of the room, but from ours it was essential, if we were to observe the way the female corpus responds to sexual stimulation.) The man — the trick, the john — let her undo his fly while she was still fully dressed, and he massaged her scalp, squeezed her head as if it were a bowling ball he was about to pluck up and fling down the alley, as she fellated him. Her lips shone with the viscous fluid released by the Cowper’s glands by way of lubrication, and she took the whole thing into her mouth — and this was amazing — his entire phallus, right down to the root, as if she were a sword-swallower performing at the carnival. We were later to discover, incidentally, that among the many physiological modifications occurring during sexual activity, suspension of the gag reflex occurs in a high percentage of both women and men, thus demonstrating the adaptive role of the oral component in sexual response. But all that aside, can I tell you how amazed I was? How — unprofessionally — titillated?

He pulled away from her before he reached orgasm, and only then did he begin to tug down his trousers. “On the bed, sister,” he told her, “because if you think you’re getting off that easy, you’re nuts. I paid for a fuck, didn’t I?”

Ginger stretched out on the bed in compliance, hiking her skirts to display her nakedness, but then she seemed to remember her mission — we were in the closet, her auxiliary johns, and we’d paid for our fuck too — and she sat up again, took his penis in her hand and caressed it a moment, then pulled the dress up over her head and reached behind her to release the snaps of the brassiere and let her breasts fall free. Immediately he was on her, stimulating her nipples both with his fingers and tongue even as she guided him into her, but then, suddenly, he stopped in mid-thrust. “The light,” he said. “What gives with the fucking light? Don’t you know nothing about romance, sweetheart?”

She did. Or at least apparently she did. Because until the moment he pulled out of her and snatched for the light, she’d been moaning and singing out to him as if there were no man better in the world and no moment richer than this. “Leave it on, honey,” she said. A theatrical pause, one finger stuck in the corner of her mouth. “I want to see every inch of you.”

The first thing I did when we got back to Bloomington three days later was go straight to Iris. It was past two in the morning, I was dirty, exhausted, hungry — famished, actually, since we hadn’t stopped to eat — and I could still feel the throb of the Buick’s engine like a permanent dislocation in the back of my skull. I’d personally recorded eight histories, including Gerald’s and Ginger’s, and I’d watched from the closet with Prok and Corcoran as Ginger entertained sixteen different men over the course of the three nights we spent in her company. Surprisingly, there really wasn’t all that much variety, and while I admit to being in a state of permanent sexual excitation throughout the entire time we were there, the novelty did tend to wear off after a while. The men were hirsute, glabrous, tall, short, fat, thin, they wore long johns, boxer shorts, sports coats and flannel shirts, galoshes, boots, tennis shoes. They had moles, birthmarks, tattoos, they were circumcised and uncircumcised, their penises angled to the left or the right or straight up, and they folded their clothes neatly atop the bureau or threw them on the floor in a twisted heap. As for the sex, it was entirely conventional, beginning with a brief period of fellatio in about half the cases and a certain degree of fumbling, licking and squeezing in the others, followed by penetration, the pumping of the naked white buttocks that were variously flaccid or tight with the strain of the gluteal muscles, Ginger’s increasingly theatrical simulation of orgasmic ecstasy, and then the decline and fall and the absolute lack of interest in the female’s nudity, her exposed genitalia or even her face and eyes as the clothes were silently gathered up and hurriedly pulled back on and the door swung open and shut again.

But I went to Iris. Went directly up the walk from the backseat of Prok’s car and into the apartment, which was utterly still and dark now but for the light leaching in from the streetlamp and the moon that hung over the town with all its symbolic heft. I went straight into the bedroom. She was asleep. Bundled in the blankets against the cold, her hair splayed out on the pillow, one eye winking open as I switched on the light beside the bed and the clock glowing and no sound anywhere in the bottomless cavern of the night. I was stripping off my clothes, jacket, shirt, trousers, and the light was on. I wanted her to see me, wanted her to admire me and the souvenir I’d held on to for her through three grueling days in a whore’s closet in Indianapolis. “John?” she murmured. “John? What time is it?”

There was the smell of her, a smell I can’t describe, her own personal fragrance that was like no other, a compound of body heat, the emollients she used on her face and hands, the traces of her shampoo and her perfume and the natural oils of her scalp. “Shhhh,” I said, and I waited for her to acknowledge me, to see what I’d brought her, and yes, I know that our published research has shown that the majority of females are unaffected by a display of the erect phallus and that a portion are even offended by it, but it didn’t matter a whit that night. I was stimulated to the point of bursting and I wanted her to see that, to know it and feel it. “Shhhh,” I repeated, and I threw back the covers, all that warmth, the sight of her naked feet and ankles, her face turned to me now and her arms spreading wide in invitation. I slipped between the covers and lifted her nightgown and we never did shut the light off, not till morning.

One night in a thousand nights, in five thousand nights, a man and his wife — a sex researcher and his wife — gratifying each other’s needs. It was the most ordinary thing in the world — or no, it was celebratory, celebratory still because we had the license of our own apartment and no John Jr. to worry over or anything else. We had intercourse six or seven times a week. We experimented with extended foreplay, with teasing, strip poker, with all the coital positions we could imagine. And all the while the project went forward, gained momentum, and Corcoran and I became ever more deeply involved — as friends, as colleagues — even as we jockeyed for position with Prok.

Corcoran offered me a ride home after work one evening, and we wound up stopping off at a tavern for a drink. I thought of calling Iris, to tell her I’d be late, but there was no need really — the hours were never regular when you worked for Prok, and there was no telling when I’d be home on a given evening, but it was rarely earlier than seven. The tavern was the same student hangout I frequented senior year, the place where I’d sat breathless and palpitating with Laura Feeney and her friends in the wake of Prok’s arresting slide show. I remember smiling at the memory. It had seemed like a hundred years ago — and it was, in terms of what I’d learned and experienced since. Corcoran laid a bill on the bar and asked me what was so amusing.