T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“Sure,” I said, giving a shrug she couldn’t see because it was fully dark now. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

We were silent a moment and I opened the car door for her and then leaned in and pressed my lips to hers. My hands found her shoulders, the silken flesh of her upper arms, and I smoothed back her hair and kissed her throat. We held the pose for a long moment because we were young still, still in love, and John Jr. was with the babysitter and this was what couples did when they were free of responsibility and the night opened up above them into the dark avenues of the universe that had no reason or end. “Mmm,” she said finally, her lips brushing mine, “maybe we should watch the porcupines going at it more often. You think Professor Shadle would mind coming over to the house for a command performance?”

“No,” I whispered, “we don’t need the learned professor or his porcupines either,” and then the door of the house swung open behind us — a parallelogram of yellow light painted on the walk — and there was the sound of voices, footsteps, high heels rapping at the pavement. I backed out of the car, shut the door on Iris, and circled round to the driver’s side. “We don’t need anybody,” I said, sliding into the seat and laying a hand on her knee before letting it ride up her thigh under the thin summer dress.

“No,” she said, “not even Prok.”

That was when the Corcorans emerged from the front yard, their voices twined in murmurous oblivion, and we sat in the darkness of the cab and watched them turn up the walk, arm in arm. I reached for the keys then, to start up the car and take us home, but Iris stopped me. Her hand was on mine, and she guided me back to her, to her naked thighs and the pushed-up rumple of her dress. “You don’t mean — not here?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “Here. Right here.”

Film was the new medium, we all saw that, and we understood from the beginning — from that night at Prok’s with Professor Shadle and those indelible images of his amorous porcupines — that it would revolutionize the course of our research. Whereas before we’d been able to observe sexual activity in the flesh, first with Ginger and her clients and then, much more transparently, with Betty and Corcoran, now we had a means to record it so that the sequence of events — from passivity to arousal, engorgement and penetration — could be studied over and over for the details that might have escaped notice in the heat of the moment. And it was especially valuable at this juncture because we were now beginning to turn our attention to sexual behavior in the female. Not only did we have to make sense of a mountain of data, we needed to observe and record physiologic reaction as well, so that we could, for instance, determine individual variation in the amount of fluid secreted by the Bartholin’s glands or settle once and for all the debate Freud initiated over the question of the vaginal versus clitoral orgasm.

It was almost as if the public anticipated us. If we were inundated with mail — letters seeking advice, hastily scrawled notes criticizing our methods, morals and sanity, offers of every sort of sexual adventure imaginable — we also began to receive films. Some of them, of the mating behavior of rats, pigeons and mink, came from a coterie of animal behaviorists Prok had cultivated over the years (the mink were magnificent, as close to sadomasochists as you could find in a state of nature, both partners rendered bloody by the time the affair was consummated), while others — crudely shot on eight-millimeter black-and-white film — were from friends of the research and they depicted human sex. I remember the first of them quite distinctly. We’d just come out of a staff meeting — it must have been a Friday, our regular meeting day — to find Mrs. Matthews at her desk in the anteroom, sorting through the morning’s mail. “Dr. Kinsey,” she called as we emerged from the back room, “you might want to have a look at this.”

The letter that accompanied the film was from a young couple in Florida who lavishly praised our research efforts (“It’s about time someone had the courage to stand up and lead this puritanical society out of the sexual Dark Ages”) and expressed, at considerable length (something like twenty-two pages, if memory serves), their own somewhat garbled but libertine philosophy with regard to sex. In essence, they felt that sex was one of the grounding pleasures of life and should be appreciated without constraint, and as they were both highly sexed, they’d enjoyed relations two or three times a day since their marriage six years earlier and claimed to be all the healthier for it, both mentally and physically. The enclosed film, they hoped, would not only demonstrate the unbridled joy they took in the activity, but also provide a valuable addition to our research archives. “Use it freely,” they concluded, “and show it widely,” and signed themselves “Blissful in West Palm Beach.” They included a return address and a telephone number, in the event we’d like to contact them for a live demonstration.

We’d all gravitated to our desks, but we couldn’t help keeping an eye on Prok as he read through the letter. At first, there was no reaction, his expression dour and preoccupied, the glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose, but he began to smile and even chuckle to himself as he went on. “Listen to this,” he called out, the old enthusiasm firing his voice, and he began to quote from the letter until he wound up reading the whole of the last two pages aloud. When he’d finished, he lifted the film canister from his desk and held it up so that we could all see it, and it might have been an exhibit in a court of law, he the judge and we the jury. He was smiling, grinning wide — it was the old grin, the one that had been missing lately, seductive, boyish, devil-may-care, quintessential Prok. “You know,” he said, and even Mrs. Matthews paused in her furious assault on the typewriter keys, “I do think it might just behoove us to stay past five this evening and arrange a private screening here in the offices. What do you say — Corcoran? Rutledge? Milk? Am I stepping on any toes here?”

No one objected.

“Good,” he said. “Good. We’ll just call our wives and delay dinner a bit, then.” The grin was gone now, no hint of it left, even in his eyes. “In the interest of science, that is,” he said, and turned back to his work.

I telephoned Iris and told her I’d be late — something had come up, yes, another nature film Prok was hot on — and then watched the clock till the hour struck five and Mrs. Matthews tidied up her desk, pulled the vinyl cover over her typewriter and left for the day. Prok never glanced up. He was busy, head down, charging through an opinion on a court case that had been consuming him lately — a man in Pennsylvania, victim of a barbarously antiquated statute, was being tried for performing oral sex on his own wife — and he didn’t want to appear overeager to view the film, though I could see from certain characteristic gestures, the tapping of a pencil on the spine of the text before him, a repetitive running of his fingers through his hair, that he was as anxious over the film as we were.

We worked in silence for another quarter hour, exchanging glances among ourselves, till finally Corcoran pushed himself up from his desk with a sigh and made a conspicuous show of stretching. “Well,” he said, “Oscar, John, what do you think — isn’t it getting to be that time?”

Prok looked up from his work, then stole a quick glance at his watch.

“Prok? What do you say?”

The film was of surprisingly good quality, and since both participants were present throughout, that brought up the rather interesting question of who might have been behind the camera for what proved to be as unexpurgated and varied a performance as the one we’d all witnessed in the flesh on the night Corcoran introduced us to Betty. But this was different, very different. I’m no student of film and doubtless this has been observed many times before, but there was something about the distance and anonymity of the viewer that made the performance all the more stimulating. In the raw — with Corcoran and Betty, that is, with Ginger and her clients — there was always a sense of uneasiness, of fragility, as in a theater production when a single gesture or comment from the audience could break the spell and bring the whole thing down.