T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Everything was ready for us, camera, lights, mise-en-scène and a cast of hundreds, the young blond hustler at the head of the line awaiting the signal even as he chatted up those immediately behind him. “First, first,” he kept insisting, as we squeezed our way into the room, “I do first, and then I go out and bring more custom, ja?”

Prok gave him a judicious look. Then he separated two bills from the wad of singles he extracted from his pocket and handed them over. “Yes,” he told him, “yes, good thinking,” and the eyes of the men in the hallway fastened on us as if to memorialize the transaction: this was for real, and so was the money.

Roy and Aspinall had pushed the furniture back against the wall and created a stage in the center of the room by means of spreading a sheet over the carpet and positioning the lights and camera above it — the idea was for each subject to disrobe, lie on his back on the floor and consummate his business as expeditiously as possible, and the photographers had provided a small mountain of pornographic magazines, both of the homosexual and heterosexual variety, as a stimulus. Aspinall hovered in his trench coat and dark glasses, fidgeting over the equipment, while Roy escorted us to the three chairs he’d set up just out of camera range, and then the filming began.

We’d budgeted five minutes per man, one after the other coming in, removing his clothes and taking his position on the floor even as the man before him vacated it, a kind of assembly line, but it soon became apparent that we would have to find some means of speeding things up because there were the inevitable delays, subjects unable to perform for the camera, those who needed extra time, a trip to the bathroom and so on. After the first couple of hours we came to realize that just the undressing itself was taking too much time — thirty seconds, forty, a minute — and Prok asked Roy if he wouldn’t have the next several men in line undress in the hallway, distribute the magazines and prepare themselves, as much as possible, beforehand. Corcoran had maintained that it didn’t make much difference whether the men were clothed or not — all that mattered, really, was the penis, the hand and the ejaculation — and I tended to agree, but Prok, accusing us of undermining the project, insisted on full-frontal nudity. “We want everything, technique, facial expression, the works,” he said in a tense whisper, even as the fiftieth or sixtieth subject was going at it on the increasingly soiled sheet, “because all of it is relevant — or will be relevant — in the long run. Jackknifing, for instance.”

“Jackknifing?” I said aloud, the man before us in the shaft of light pounding at himself as if he meant to tear the organ right out of his body, his expression hateful and cold, hair all over him, bunched on the backs of his knuckles and toes, creeping up over his shoulders and continuous from neck to hairline, an ape of a man, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and if you think sex research is stimulating, believe me, after the initial jolt — whether it be living sex or captured on film — a debilitating sameness sets in. We might as well have been counting salmon going upriver to spawn. It was past midnight. I stifled a yawn.

“Yes, of course. At orgasm. One percent of our sample reports it, and I should say, Milk, that you, of all people, should be aware of that fact. Very common in some of the lower animals. Rabbit, guinea pig.” Prok looked bored himself. Looked testy. He glanced at the man grunting on the floor, leaned over and said, in a soft voice, “If you could please just come now—”

We were there ten days in all, and toward the end we tried doubling up the sessions for the sake of expediency, and finally tripling them, Aspinall expertly maneuvering the camera from one subject to the other without once missing the climactic moment. I don’t think any of us, no matter our degree of dedication, had even the slightest inclination to observe masturbation in the human male ever again, but Prok did finally get his one thousand subjects on film and was able, on the basis of it, to settle once and for all the question of the physiology of ejaculation. It was a job well done, if tedious — and expensive, coming to just over four thousand dollars in fees to the subjects and the little blond hustler, who must have been the best-heeled teenager in New York by the time we left — and we were in a mutually congratulatory mood in the train on the way back. I remember Prok springing for drinks as the dining car trawled the night and presented us with fleeting visions of dimly lit waystations and farmhouses saturated in loneliness. I had the fish, Prok the macaroni au fromage, and Corcoran the porterhouse steak. We grinned at each other throughout the meal, and Prok retired early to his berth to write up his observations while Corcoran and I sat up over cards in the club car, drinking cocktails and smoking cigars. I slept like one of the dead.

The next morning, after driving down from the station at Indianapolis (we’d taken my car so as to leave the Buick and Cadillac free for Mac and Violet, respectively), I dropped off Prok at the Institute and Corcoran at his place, then drove out to the farmhouse. I’d thought of picking up a little gift for Iris — flowers, a box of candy, perfume — but hadn’t got round to it, so I stopped at the market and wandered the aisles till I found something I thought she might like, and it represented a bit of an extravagance for us: a two-pound sack of California pistachios, salted and roasted in the shell. I was all the way up to the counter before I remembered John Jr., and I had to go back and dig a pint of Neapolitan ice cream out of the freezer, and then I wondered if Iris might not have run out of coffee or bread or eggs while I was gone, so I wound up getting some basic supplies too.

I pulled in under the canopy of the weeping willow out front, its remnant of yellowed branches hanging in a skeletal curtain, and already felt my mood sour. It was always this way. As much as I looked forward to seeing Iris and my son, as much as I held their faces before me as a kind of talisman during the tedious hours of travel and history-taking, the minute I pulled into the drive I saw a host of things that had been neglected in my absence, the trashcan overflowing at the rear of the house, the door to the basement left gaping, the tarp blown clear of the fire-wood. And more: she’d left the porch light burning, no doubt for the whole ten days, and that kind of waste just infuriated me. I bundled the groceries in one arm and took the suitcase in the other, and the first thing I did on mounting the steps was kick the deliquescing remains of a jack-o’-lantern off the corner of the porch. Which made a mess of my shoe. And then I had to fumble with the door, almost dropping the groceries in the process.

Inside, it was worse. She must have had the thermostat set at a hundred — more waste — and the chemical reek of ammonia from the cat’s litter pan hit me like a fist in the face, and whose job was it to change that ? There were toys and infant’s clothes scattered round the living room, newspapers, spine-sprung books, knitting — and food, a smear of it, in two shades of apricot, on the new-painted, or recently painted, wall. I didn’t say anything, didn’t call out her name, just dropped the suitcase at the door, trudged out to the kitchen and set the groceries on the counter. And, of course, the kitchen was a story in itself. I tried to stay calm. I was tired, that was all — irritable, maybe a bit hungry — and Iris had had her hands full, stuck out here all by herself, John Jr. in his roaming phase, getting into everything, needful, always needful. I tried, but even as I mounted the stairs to the bedroom, I could feel a dark knot of irascibility beating at my temples like something shoved under the skin, like a splinter and the hot needle to chase it down.