T. Boyle: The Inner Circle

Bloomington, Indiana

August 25, 1956

Looking back on it now, I don’t think I was ever actually “sex shy” (to use one of Prok’s pet phrases), but I’ll admit I was pretty naïve when I first came to him, not to mention hopelessly dull and conventional. I don’t know what he saw in me, really — or perhaps I do. If you’ll forgive me a moment of vanity, my wife, Iris, claims I was something of a heartthrob on campus, though I would have been the last to know of it because I wasn’t dating and had always been uncomfortable with the sort of small talk that leads up to the casual inquiry about after-class plans or what you might or might not be doing on Saturday after the game. I had a pretty fair physique in those days, with a matching set of fullback’s shoulders and a thirty-inch waist (I was first string on my high school team till I suffered a concussion midway through my junior season and my mother put a premature end to my career), and unlike most men at college, I was conscientious about keeping myself in trim — I still am — but that’s neither here nor there. To complete the portrait, because already I’ve managed to get myself out on a limb here, I was blessed with what Iris calls “sensitive” eyes, whatever that might mean, and a thatch of wheat-colored hair with a natural curl that defeated any cream or pomade I’d ever come across. As for sex, I was eager but inexperienced, and shy in the usual way — unsure of myself and just about as uninformed as anyone you could imagine.

In fact, the first time I developed anything more than a theoretical grasp of what coitus involved — the mechanics of the act, that is — was during my senior year at IU, in the fall of 1939, when I found myself sitting in a lecture hall jammed to the rafters with silent, dry-mouthed students of both sexes as Prok’s color slides played hugely across the screen. I was there at the instigation of a girl named Laura Feeney, one of the campus femmes fatales who never seemed to go anywhere without an arm looped through some letterman’s. Laura had the reputation of being “fast,” though I can assure you I was never the beneficiary of her sexual largesse (if, in fact, the rumors were true: as I was later to learn, the most provocative-looking women often have the most repressed sex lives, and vice versa). I remember being distinctly flattered when she stopped me in the corridor one day during fall registration, took hold of my arm at the muscle and pecked a kiss on my cheek.

“Oh, hi, John,” she breathed, “I was just thinking about you. How was your summer?”

My summer had been spent back home in Michigan City, stocking shelves and bagging groceries, and if I had five minutes to myself my mother had me pruning the trees, reshingling the roof and pulling weeds in the vegetable garden. I was lonely, bored to tears, masturbating twice a day in my attic room that was like a sweatbox in a penal institution. My only relief derived from books. I came under the spell of John Donne and Andrew Marvell that summer, and I reread Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella three times in preparation for an English literature course I was looking forward to in the fall. But I couldn’t tell Laura Feeney all this — or any of it. She would have thought me a washout. Which I was. So I just shrugged and said, “All right, I guess.”

Voices reverberated in the stairwell, boomed in the corners and fled all the way down the corridor to where the registration tables had been set up in the gymnasium. “Yeah,” Laura said, and her smile went cold a moment, “I know how you feel. With me it was work, work, work — my father owns a lunch counter in Fort Wayne, did you know that?”

I didn’t know. I shook my head and felt a whole shining loop of my hair fall loose, though I must have used half a bottle of crème oil on it. I was wearing one of the stiff new Arrow shirts my grandmother had sent me from Chicago and a glen-plaid tie I think I wore to class every day that year in the hope of making a good impression, my briefcase was in one hand, a stack of library books in the other. As I’ve said, the gift of small talk eluded me. I think I said something like, “Fort Wayne, huh?”

In any event, it didn’t matter what I said, because she let her turquoise eyes go wide (she was a redhead, or a strawberry blonde, actually, with skin so white you’d think it had never seen the sun), gave my muscle a squeeze and lowered her voice. “Listen,” she said, “I just wanted to know if you’d mind getting engaged to me—”

Her words hung there between us, closing out everything else — the chatter of the group of freshmen materializing suddenly from the men’s room, the sound of an automobile horn out on the street — and I can only imagine the look I must have given her in response. This was long before Prok taught me to tuck all the loose strands of my emotions behind a mask of impassivity, and everything I was thinking routinely rushed to my face along with the blood that settled in my cheeks like a barometer of confusion.

“John, you’re not blushing, are you?”

“No,” I said, “not at all. I’m just—”

She held my eyes, enjoying the moment. “Just what?”

I shrugged. “We were out in the sun — yesterday it was, yesterday afternoon. Moving furniture. So, I guess, well—”

Someone brushed by me, an undergraduate who looked vaguely familiar — had he been in my psych class last year? — and then she let the other shoe drop. “I mean, just for the semester. For pretend.” She looked away and her hair rose and fell in an ebbing wave. When she turned back to me, she lifted her face till it was like a satellite of my own, pale and glowing in the infusion of light from the windows at the end of the corridor. “You know,” she said, “for the marriage course?”

That was the moment it all began, though I didn’t realize it at the time — how could I? How could I have foreseen that a shallow, manipulative girl I hardly knew would be the motive force that was to lead me to Prok and Mac, Corcoran, Rutledge, to the desk at which I’m now sitting, trying to get as much of this out as I can before the world goes to pieces? I said, “Yes.” I said, “Yes, all right,” and Laura Feeney smiled and before I knew it I was on my way to becoming an initiate in the science of sex, abandoning the ideal for the actual, the dream of Stella (“True, that true beauty virtue is indeed”) for anatomy, physiology and an intimate knowledge of the Bartholin’s glands and the labia minora. All of it — all the years of research, the thousands of miles traveled, the histories taken, the delving and rooting and pioneering — spun out like thread from an infinite spool held in the milk-white palm of Laura Feeney on an otherwise ordinary morning in the autumn of 1939.

But I don’t want to make too much of it — we all have our defining moments. And I don’t mean to keep you in the dark here either. The “marriage course” to which Laura Feeney was referring — Marriage and the Family, properly — was being offered by Professor Kinsey of the Zoology Department and half a dozen of his colleagues from other disciplines, and it was the sensation of the campus. The course was open only to faculty and staff, students who were married or engaged, and seniors of both sexes. There were eleven lectures in all, five of them covering the sociological, psychological, economic, legal and religious facets of marriage, these to be delivered by faculty outside of the Zoology Department, and they were to prove to be informative enough, I suppose, and necessary, but if truth be told they were nothing more than window dressing for the six unexpurgated lectures (with audiovisual aids) Prok was scheduled to give on the physiology of intramarital relations.