T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Michigan City.”

“And your parents?”

“My mother teaches elementary school back at home. My father’s dead. He was killed in an accident on the lake — or, actually, no one really knows what went wrong. There was — they weren’t able to recover the body.”

Prok never took his eyes from mine, but he was making notations on a single sheet of paper that lay on the desk before him. Without my knowing it, the interview had already begun, but he paused now to express his sympathy. He asked how old I was at the time of my father’s death — I was nine, not quite out of school for the summer, and my father had gone mad for sailing, sanding and varnishing the boat all winter and into the spring, and now it had been launched and all I could think of was the long irradiated days ahead when we would coast unencumbered over the chop like the God who made the water and the son who came to walk on it — and then he said that he too had had to make do without a father’s guidance, at least once he went to college and broke free of a stifling paternal influence. His father had seen him as an engineer — could I imagine that? — but he himself had preferred biology. Biology was his passion. And he made a casual gesture to the cramped office behind him, and the great standing racks of insects pinned in trays. “Did you know,” he added, “that I’ve identified sixteen new species of gall wasp?” And he let out a chuckle. “If it was up to my father they’d be unknown today.” His eyes were shining. “Poor things.”

Our conversation — it was just that — had developed its own logic and rhythm. It was uncanny. The longer we spoke, and it was almost like speaking with your inner self or confiding in the family doctor behind closed doors, the more he seemed to know what I was thinking and feeling. And it wasn’t simply that he was a master at what he was doing, but that you felt he really and truly sympathized, that when your heart was breaking, so was his.

Which brings us to the real content of the interview: my sex history. We talked for perhaps fifteen minutes before the first question insinuated itself, as casually as if it were no more charged than a reflection on one’s parents or upbringing. We’d been talking about my playmates when I was a boy, and I was lost in nostalgic recollection, faces and places and names drifting like gauze through my brain, when Dr. Kinsey, in his softest, most dispassionate tones, asked, “How old were you when you first became aware of the anatomical differences between girls and boys?”

“I don’t know. Early on, I suppose. Five? Six?”

“Was there nudity in your home when you were a child? On the part of your parents or yourself?”

I took a moment, trying to recollect. “No,” I said, “no, I don’t think so.”

“Did your parents make you put your clothes on when you appeared naked?”

“Yes. But again, this would have been at a very early age, probably two or three. Or no, later. There was one incident — I must have been five, five at least, because it was before we’d moved to the house on Cherry Street — a hot day, bathing with my mother at the lake, and I came out of the water and removed my wet trunks. She was angry with me, and I remember I couldn’t understand why.”

“Were you reprimanded then?”

“Yes.”

“Physically?”

“I must have been. Not the first time, though.”

“What were the other occasions?”

Each question followed logically from the one previous, and they were very much rapid-fire: as soon as Prok got and recorded his response, he was on to the next, and yet you never felt as if you were being interrogated, but rather were part of an ongoing conversation focused on the most fascinating subject in the world: yourself. And the questions were always formulated so as to achieve the most precise — and unambiguous — answer. So it was not “Have you ever masturbated?” but rather “When did you first masturbate?” and “How old were you when you first saw the naked genitalia of your own sex? Of the opposite sex?” All the while, as the interviewee progressed in recollected age, so too did the questions delve ever more deeply into his sexual practices, going from the relatively innocuous data-based queries (“How old were you when you first began to sprout pubic hair?”) and calculations of your height, weight and handedness, to “When did you first experience coitus?”

My nose was dripping — I too had contracted the cold that held the campus in its thrall — and I was on my fourth cigarette and entirely unaware of where or even who I was by the time this last question came up. Dr. Kinsey studied my reaction, my face, his eyes locked on mine, his pencil poised over the sheet of paper. It’s all right, he seemed to say, whatever it is, it’s all right. You can confide in me. And further: You must confide in me.

I hesitated, and that hesitation told him everything. “Never,” I said. “Or, that is, not yet, I mean.”

Unbeknownst to me, there were a series of questions — twelve of them, to be exact — that gave an indication of one’s predilection toward same-sex behavior, or, as Prok liked to call it so as not to alarm or prejudice anyone, the H-history. It was at this point that he shifted in his chair and cleared his voice. “Backtracking now,” he said, “you were how old when you first saw the naked genitalia of a person of your own sex?”

I gave him the answer, which he quickly checked against my previous response.

“And when did you first see another individual’s erect penis?”

I gave him the answer.

And then the questions proceeded in what we would come to call our “steamroller” fashion, one hard on the heels of the next. “When did you first touch the genitals of a person of your own sex? When did you first bring to orgasm a person of your own sex? When was the first time you brought a person of your own sex to orgasm orally?”

I looked away and he broke off the interview a moment. There was a silence. I became aware of the bells tolling six on the clock tower across campus. “Milk,” he said, “John — let me remind you that there is nothing, nothing whatever, to be ashamed of. There is no sexual act between consenting parties that is in any way qualitatively different from any other, no matter what the prevailing ethos of a given society may be. If it will interest you to know, my own sex history was very much similar to yours when I was your age — and even later.”

But perhaps this would be a judicious time to bring up the 0–6 scale Prok devised to measure an individual’s sexual preferences — a scale that seeks to chart the entire range of human sexual proclivities, from the purely opposite-sex context (0) to the purely homosexual (6). You see, Prok believed — and I’ve come to believe too — that man in a state of nature is pansexual, and that only the strictures of society, especially societies under the dominion of the Judeo-Christian and Mohammedan codes, prevent people from expressing their needs and desires openly, and that thus, whole legions suffer from various sexual maladjustments. But I get ahead of myself.

That day, in that room, with a handkerchief pressed to my dripping nose and Prok’s presence guiding me, I began to know myself in a way I’d never thought possible. What I’d seen as a source of shame became usual — Prok himself had had similar experiences as a boy and had masturbated continually — and if I could say I rated perhaps a 1 or 2 on the 0–6 scale, then that was something, something momentous. And I hungered for experience, like anyone else, that was all. I’d been awkward with girls, terrified of them — I’d placed them on a pedestal and never saw them as sexual beings just like me, who had the same needs and desires as I, and that it had been perfectly natural to experiment with the only partners available to me, with boys, because as Prok says, we all need outlets. Or perhaps I didn’t realize all this on that late afternoon in Prok’s office, but I did think of Laura Feeney sitting there before me — in the very chair — and how Prok would have asked her at what age she began to masturbate and when she’d first seen the naked genitalia of the opposite sex, and when she’d first seen the phallus erect and first brought the opposite sex to orgasm, and I felt like Columbus spying land on the horizon.