T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

In the meanwhile, I wrote Iris regularly, if only a line or two, and made sure to telephone her at least every other day, no matter the cost. I owed her those phone calls, and before long I found that I needed them as much as she did. The sound of her voice became an itch in my head as I showered, breakfasted, climbed aboard the train or slid into the Buick beside Prok and Corcoran, her soft tentative “hello” whispering to me over the thump of the rails and the measured beat of the tires. She was subdued on the phone, shy of it, and I’m afraid we didn’t communicate very effectively. Still, the important thing was that we did talk. I told her I loved her. Couldn’t wait to be home with her — and the baby. Was the baby kicking yet? No? Too early? Well, the baby would kick, wouldn’t it? Eventually? Yes, she assured me, the baby would kick. Christmas, I told her, Christmas would be our time together.

A word here about the Astor Hotel, incidentally. This was, in its time, an open gathering place for homosexuals — the long black oval bar on the ground floor was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with men till all hours of the night every day of the week — and it was ideal for our purposes in securing H-histories, our chief purpose on that particular trip (though, as I say, we were also interviewing female prostitutes as well as a number of young college and career women, most of whom were brought to us by Vivian Aubrey, a sexually prodigious graduate of Columbia University whose history Corcoran had first taken on our last foray to New York, and more on her later). Most important, at the Astor, no one asked any questions. And this was significant, because we’d been requested to leave the Lincoln Hotel the previous year (that is, we were thrown out), an incident Prok was always able to recount with equanimity, though he was furious at the time.

None of us had seemed to notice anything amiss, but for one reason or another — prudery, antiquated notions of respectability — our activities began to attract notice. We’d been interviewing at the Lincoln for some days, a whole succession of ragtag hustlers, underage boys and effeminates parading through the lobby, where Prok, Corcoran and I would meet them and escort them upstairs to our rooms, when the manager rang Prok and demanded to speak with him. Prok was in the middle of an interview and put the man off till there was a break in the schedule, at which point he summoned Corcoran and me for reinforcements and went down to confront him.

The manager was a very proper-looking character with swept-back hair, silvered sideburns and the trace of an Italian accent — a real swell, as we used to say, pompous and self-important. “We can’t have this,” he said.

Prok folded his arms and leveled his gaze on him. He knew what was coming. “Have what?”

“All this sex,” the man spat. “Fags and streetwalkers. Whores. I can’t have you undressing these people in my hotel.”

“But I’ve explained to you — this is a scientific survey we’re conducting. You know perfectly well we’re not undressing anybody.”

“Oh, no? Maybe not their clothes, but you’re undressing their minds, and I won’t have it, not in my hotel.”

But this time, at the Astor, there were no such problems. The management looked the other way and everything went smoothly and professionally, except in one instance that still manages to disturb me, though I don’t know why. The subject was a young man not long removed from the war and missing the lower portion of his right arm. He was my last interview of a long night, I’d been drinking and smoking with the previous subjects, and I guess I was feeling pretty wrung out. I met him in the lobby, there was a brief contretemps with the handshake — he offered his left and it took me a moment to follow suit — and then we rode the elevator up to the room Prok had reserved for interviews. The subject had been with the Navy, and though his tan had faded he might have been a modern Billy Budd, with his fair hair parted just to the left of center and the cocky gait and rigid musculature of his class. He was nineteen. He’d been educated to the eighth grade, had parents living in Oklahoma City, and he’d been earning his living as a male hustler since he got out of the hospital. I gave him the dollar we’d agreed upon, he took the bed and I the armchair, and we began to chat.

The preliminaries went well enough, but it soon became apparent that he was wound up on something — Benzedrine, as it turned out, which he obtained by dismantling nasal inhalers and swallowing the drug-soaked pads within. He became loquacious, overly so, each question provoking a breathless running interminable response that went so far afield I began to forget what I was doing there with him in the first place. We’d been trained in the rapid-fire technique I described earlier, and to interrupt and interject where necessary in order to steer the subject back to the matter at hand, but this man — this sailor — just wouldn’t yield. At one point, in the middle of a reminiscence about the fifty-three varieties of plants in the hothouse where his first homosexual contact, an older man, had worked, I became so exasperated that I got up out of the armchair and began pacing the floor.

He stopped in mid-sentence and gave me a curious look — an aggressive look, actually. “What,” he said, “you’re not interested? Because I thought you said we agreed you wanted information, right, the story of my life and all like that for a buck? But what? Is it something else?” He held my eyes. “You want more than just a story?”

“No, not at all. I just wish you would — well, don’t take this the wrong way because I don’t mean to sound impolite or guide your response in any way — but I wish you’d just stick to the format of the interview or we’ll be here all night.”

“So what’s so bad about that?” He’d risen from the couch and he was giving me what I suppose he assumed was a seductive smile, his bathhouse smile, the smile he used at the urinals at Grand Central Station or downstairs at the Astor bar. “You don’t want to get rid of me, do you? Already?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But the whole survey becomes suspect if we can’t finish out an interview, you understand that, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything, just crossed the room to me, the right sleeve of his velour shirt dangling empty, and pressed himself to me. His hand went to the crotch of my trousers, and I froze — that was what we were trained to do in such cases, to remain impassive and reject all advances. He tried to kiss me then, but I turned my face away and his lips grazed my cheek. “Come on,” he murmured, his voice low and furred with lust or its counterfeit, “you know you want it. Drop the charade, why don’t you? Science. You’re no more a scientist than I am.”

I pushed away from him and sank back into the chair, all business — this was business, after all — and assured him I was there for one purpose only, all the while cursing myself for having left the chair in the first place. It was unprofessional, it had broken the spell and given him the wrong impression. “And your second contact,” I said, trying to regain control of my voice. “Do you recall that? How old you were? Was it just after your experience with the hothouse man?”

He didn’t answer. For the first time since he’d entered the room he had nothing to say, as if the drug were a freight train driving through his veins and it had hopped a curve and derailed all of a sudden. He stood there a moment, weaving from foot to foot. His good hand clenched and released and I could hear the erosive friction of his teeth grinding, molar to molar. “Listen,” he said finally, “don’t you find me attractive? Is it because of this?” He held up the arm, with its dangle of empty sleeve.