T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Prok, accommodating but empirically skeptical: “Is that so?”

“Oh, yes. As for masturbation, even now, at my age, I probably — what term do you like to use? Beat off? — beat off three or four times a day. And I can go from nothing to orgasm in ten seconds flat, and tell me if that isn’t a record?”

Corcoran, seated on the bed, one leg crossed at the knee, and his pencil poised over the position sheet — we would be simultaneously recording this interview — said casually, “That’s very impressive. But shouldn’t we begin now? To get all this for the record, I mean?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Of course we believe you,” Prok put in.

“Just watch.” And before anyone could demur, Mr. X had his trousers down. “Anyone have a second hand on their watch? You?” he said, pointing to me. “What was your name?”

“Milk,” I said. “John Milk.”

“Well, do you?” His pubic hair was white and his penis lay shriveled in the nest of it. He was an old man, shrunken and old, and I wanted to look away, but I didn’t.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, yes. I think so.”

“Okay,” he said, “you tell me when,” and I looked to Prok and Prok nodded and I said, “When,” and this dried-up little homunculus of a man actually did it — went from flaccid to hard to orgasm in just ten seconds. It was amazing. Simply amazing. None of us had ever seen anything like it. There was a moment of suspension and release, and I almost thought Corcoran was going to burst into applause.

A few years later, famously, we would film some one thousand men in the process of masturbating in order to reach a determination as to whether the majority spurted or dribbled (seventy-three percent dribbled, incidentally, myself included), but to this point we’d never observed — or requested — a demonstration. It took us a moment to recover ourselves as Mr. X mopped up and wriggled back into his trousers, and then Corcoran lit a cigarette despite a sharp glance from Prok, and we sat down to record the history — all three of us, simultaneously, barely taking time to break for the bathroom, or for food and drink, for that matter.

As it turned out, Mr. X had almost perfect recall. He slouched in the armchair, smoking one cigarette after another, and brought us back to his childhood, to his father and grandmother and his siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles, and then on through his adolescence and adulthood, through boys and girls, women and men, dogs and sheep and even, in one case, a parrot, and it took two and a half days to record it all. I listened to that voice, that soft hitching rasp of breath, the tireless recitation, act after act, partner after partner, and I couldn’t help thinking of Iris, of what she’d said, but I put on my professional face nonetheless and bent over the position sheet and did what I’d come halfway across the country to do.

In all, we were gone just short of five weeks. Prok was clearly enjoying himself, exulting in the season and the freedom of the road as he hadn’t in a long while, this trip reminiscent for him of the gall wasp expeditions he’d made a decade earlier, fieldwork, getting out from behind the desk, that sort of thing, and he kept coming up with excuses to prolong the journey. He made a point of seeking out college towns along the route, and we would drive in unannounced and park in front of the administration building, Corcoran and I sitting in the car having a surreptitious smoke while Prok chatted up the dean or the provost. As likely as not we would be invited to stay on and collect histories, Prok, in most cases, being called upon to give an impromptu lecture to concerned faculty or a local civics group. We could have traveled like that for the rest of the year if we’d wanted to — for the rest of our lives, I suppose, gypsy scholars, men of science on the prowl — but of course it was problematic, not only for the cohesion of the project and the correlation of our data toward the ultimate goal of publication, but for our domestic lives as well.

I wrote Iris every day for the first week, postcards featuring pastel cowboys in chaps or an oil rig set against a backdrop of tumbleweed and cactus, and though I was full of enthusiasm I tried to keep my tone neutral and even somewhat regretful, playing down the sheer adventure of it so as to avoid stirring up any feelings of jealousy or resentment on her part. By the second week, I was writing her every other day, three-sentence descriptions of a meal— frijoles and tortillas, with a hot sauce made of chopped green tomatoes and chilies, a wonder of a thing, like nothing I’d ever tasted — or a depiction of a town or landscape. And then it was every third or fourth day, or when I remembered, guiltily, that she was home alone, in the constricted world of the apartment and the grid of repetitive streets and not even her job to sustain her because it was summer recess now and what was she doing with the long unraveling thread of her days? Finally, in the end, I wrote simply to tell her I missed her.

In Tucumcari, I found a shop that sold silver-and-turquoise jewelry, and I bought her a heavy silver bracelet in what the woman behind the counter described as an Aztec flower pattern, and then in Amarillo I found her a basket made of the tanned skin of an armadillo looped tail to snout. She didn’t write back, of course. She couldn’t. We were in no place longer than a day or two at a time, and our progress was haphazard in any case. There were telephones, but long distance was cripplingly expensive, not to mention unreliable. I could have wired her, I suppose, and she could have wired back. But I didn’t. I promised myself I’d make it up to her when we got back.

By the time we did finally pull into Bloomington, I was as homesick as I’d ever been in my life. All the novelty of travel, the excitement of the wide-open spaces and the long-horned steers and all the rest faded during that last week, and I missed my wife, longed for her with an inconsolable ache that kept me awake in the cramped confines of the tent or the anonymous bed in one or another of the string of motor courts and cheap hotels we checked into every third or fourth night, missed the simple routine of going off to work in the morning and coming home to her in the evening, of feeling the reassuring pressure of her hand in mine as we strolled down the leaf-hung avenue for a beer at the tavern or a night out at the picture show. I’d never been away from home, from Indiana, for so long before, and when we crossed the state line at Jeffersonville, I felt my heart soar.

It was late in the afternoon when Prok dropped me off in front of the apartment, and I was out the door with my suitcase before he’d come to a complete stop, yes, thank you, so long, see you at work in the morning, and I remember how intoxicating the smell of the grass was, the dahlias along the walk, the geraniums in the window box. I was perspiring under the arms and the shirt was stuck to my back, but I hardly felt it. The soles of my shoes pulsed with radiant energy as I came up the walk, my heart pounding, no thought but for Iris and how I was going to surprise her and give her the bracelet and the basket and tell her how much I’d missed her and how I was never going to go on a collecting trip again, never, or at least not for a long while to come. A sudden flash of lightning fractured the sky over the elm then, and as I reached the porch the light shaded from copper to silver and a breeze came up out of the south. That was when I heard the music sifting through the screen in the front window, and the sound of laughter, of women’s laughter, two voices clenched round the pith of a joke, and I pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Iris?” I called. “Iris, I’m home.”

The room was dim, stifling, and Iris was there, seated on the sofa with another woman, the radio turned up loud and a dance band keeping the beat. There was cigarette smoke, there were cocktails, and as I set down the suitcase I saw that the other woman was Violet Corcoran, in a pair of shorts and a blouse that left her midriff bare.