T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Did I want to? Honestly? No, not then. It was too complicated, what with the auras of Iris, Violet and Mac hovering over the scene and my own limited H-history, but Prok could be extraordinarily charming and persuasive and there were no hidebound moral strictures or antiquated notions of fidelity to hold us back, not here in a New Mexico motel, not anywhere, not in Bloomington or Indianapolis or New York, and so, in the end, I acquiesced. Why? I suppose because it was just easier that way. Certainly that was part of it, but to be honest, there was more to it than that: I loved him. I did. Not in the way I loved Iris, perhaps, or even Mac, but in a deeper way, in the way a patriot loves his country or a zealot his God, and if that love meant molding my needs to his, then so be it.

At any rate, the following morning we took the cold shower Prok always insisted upon when we were traveling, winter or summer, outdoors or in-, toweled ourselves vigorously, sat down to an anticipatory breakfast at the local diner, and went back to the room to await Mr. X’s arrival. Sitting there in the unmodulated glare of the morning, our fingers tapping idly at the scuffed furniture while we belched softly over our scrambled eggs and waffles, pencils sharpened and ready, we couldn’t help speculating about the man. He was sixty-three, yes, but a sexual giant for all that, and we pictured an individual of imposing build, broad-shouldered, with big, work-hardened hands and catapulting arms, a man with the strength and tenacity to put all our other high raters into another category altogether, a kind of Paul Bunyan of sex, towering over the field. But of course expectations are meant to be defeated and looks can be deceiving.

Mr. X was five feet five inches tall, one hundred twenty-two pounds. He walked with a limp, hunched his shoulders forward and appeared, if anything, older than his years. Anyone over forty seemed ancient to me in those days — aside from Prok, of course — but this man, Mr. X, might have told us he was eighty and I wouldn’t have been surprised. The flesh beneath his chin hung in folds, and his hands were maculated with liver spots. He was almost entirely bald (a sign of virility, Prok maintained, if you excepted the three of us present and the legend of Samson and Delilah), and his face was cross-hatched with infinitely fine lines and the deeper gouges of age and experience. When he first came to the door I thought there must be some mistake, but Prok never missed a beat. “Welcome,” he said, holding the door open for him, “we’ve been expecting you.”

Our subject stood there expressionless in the doorway, a cordovan suitcase at his feet, his eyes glittering like flecks of glass in a dry riverbed. He looked round the room a moment, took note of Corcoran and me, then lifted his upper lip in the simulacrum of a grin. Something shrewd came into his eyes. “Dr. Kinsey, I presume?” he said with a mock bow, and let out a low, hoarse laugh.

“Yes,” Prok returned, taking his hand, “Alfred C. Kinsey. It’s a great pleasure. And these are my colleagues, Purvis Corcoran and John Milk. But can I get you anything? Coffee? Juice? Perhaps a rum cocktail, if it’s not too early?”

In the suitcase were the remaining volumes of his sex diaries, which included detailed descriptions of all the omnifarious encounters he’d ever had, as well as measurements of the various penises and clitorises with which he’d personally come into contact over the course of his long career; photographs he’d taken of sex acts with a whole variety of individuals, in many of which he himself appeared, first as a young man, then middle-aged and finally elderly; a selection of sex aids and lubricants; and, puzzlingly, a single carpenter’s drill fitted with a half-inch bit. After shaking hands with Corcoran and me, Mr. X unceremoniously flung the suitcase on the bed, flipped the twin latches, and began passing the artifacts round the room as if they were holy relics.

The photographs — there were a hundred or more — had the most immediate effect. I remember one in particular, which showed only the hand of an adult, with its outsized fingers, manipulating the genitalia of an infant — a boy, with a tiny, twig-like erection — and the look on the infant’s face, its eyes unfocused, mouth open, hands groping at nothing, and the sensation it gave me. I felt myself go cold all over, as if I were still in the bathtub, standing rigid beneath the icy shower. I glanced at Corcoran, whose face showed nothing, and then at Prok, who studied the photograph a moment and pronounced it “Very interesting, very interesting indeed.” He leaned in close to me to point out the detail, and said, “You see, Milk, here is definitive proof of infantile sexuality, and whether it’s an anomaly or not, of course, is yet to be demonstrated statistically—”

Still bent over the open suitcase, shuffling through his trove, our subject let out a soft whistle. “Believe me,” he said, “it’s no anomaly.”

We let that hang in the air a moment, and then Prok said, “But the drill — what’s the significance of that?”

“Oh, this?” the little man murmured, extracting the thing from the suitcase with a bemused grin, and all I could think of was some extreme form of sadomasochism, disfigurement, torture. I felt my stomach sink. Despite myself, I’d begun to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and I glanced at Prok for reassurance, but Prok was fixated on the instrument in the man’s hand, utterly absorbed.

Mr. X took his time. He shrugged. Looked at each of us in succession, then dropped his eyes, and you could see he was a man who enjoyed an audience. “It’s for drilling.”

Prok gave him a look. He was being his most patient self, smiling along with the little man, encouraging and respectful, without the least hint of condescension. He’d revealed to me the night before that he’d felt a real sense of urgency in coming here to collect Mr. X’s history because the man was in ill health and could die at any moment and be lost forever to science, and he’d made no bones about it: this was our most significant interview to date. “Yes?” he said. “And to what purpose?”

“Well, of course, you know my work — aside from sex, I mean?”

We did. The man worked for a government agency, which necessitated a great deal of travel and overnight accommodations in various cities around the country.

“I observe,” he said.

Prok wasn’t following him. “Observe?”

“That’s right,” he said in his soft, guttural tones, and he moved to the far wall to demonstrate. He put his ear to the paneling for a moment, and then, satisfied that the room was unoccupied — or that the occupants were either asleep or out of the room — he went down on one knee and with a quick noiseless rotation of his right hand and shoulder made a neat peephole just above the baseboard. “Here,” he said, “here, have a look”—and we did, each in turn—“because you’d be surprised what you might see, and how much.” He paused to collect his breath. “Because people — well, you know, when they’re in a hotel room, safe from observation and the routine of their lives, they tend to do things they might not do otherwise. Oh, yeah. I’ve seen it all. Whores, monkeys, midgets. Everything. You’d be surprised.”

What came next was even more startling — we’d been voyeurs ourselves, after all, and the notion of observing a private act unseen was within the realm of our experience — but this man, this dynamo, had much more to offer us. Somehow the conversation turned to masturbation and masturbatory technique, even before we’d formally begun the interview. “You know, Dr. Kinsey,” the little man was saying, comfortable now in the armchair by the window, a cigarette in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other, “I am the most highly sexed individual you will ever come across. Number one. Numero uno. There’s nobody like me. Nobody.”