The Inner Circle (28 page)

Corcoran was oblivious, as he so often was—this was one of his talents, as I was soon to learn. He coasted through life on greased wings, and he took what he wanted and gave what he liked in return. If the situation was oppressive or difficult in any way—and as the project took off and the public descended on us there were any number of occasions that caused me to squirm, to say the least—he simply ignored it. I don't think it was because he was insensitive, quite the contrary, but just that he didn't care. He was blithe. He was insouciant. He was Corcoran—and the world had better look out. All he said to Prok now was: “V-8 engine, Prok, runs like a dream. And does it have
power.
”

I managed to fit the suitcase in the space behind Prok's seat, and then Prok gave my hand a pat and said, “Go on back up to the office, Milk—I'm just going to take a few minutes here to settle Corcoran in at his apartment, just to get it over with. We'll be back inside of an hour, and then”—with a glance for Corcoran—“then we'll get some real work done.”

Corcoran put the car in gear, revved the engine and took off with a squeal, Prok already beginning to gesticulate, no doubt giving him the first in an unending series of driving instructions. I stood there and
watched the car recede down the block, then I turned round and went back up to the office in Biology Hall, the errand—whatever it was—all but forgotten.

There was a dinner party that Saturday evening, then a musicale the following Sunday for a select group of Prok's colleagues, including the Briscoes and President Wells (Prok was showing off his newest acquisition, this handsome, shining, confident young man with the yellow convertible, and that was only to be expected), and then the three of us were off on our first collective trip in the streamlined shell of the Buick. Prok drove, Corcoran in the passenger's seat beside him, while I sat in back and gazed out on the countryside. As usual, Prok never stopped chattering from the moment he and Corcoran swung by the apartment to pick me up till we arrived at our destination, Corcoran, as new man, doing his best to punctuate some of Prok's fluent observations with thoughts of his own, and I just leaning back with half-closed eyes and letting it all drift over me. Was I disillusioned over having my place so immediately and completely usurped? Yes, of course I was, at least at first. But I quickly began to see the advantage in it—I now had someone to divide Prok's attention, absorb some of his excess energy as well as his criticism, his rigidity and, not least, his sexual needs. And so, as I sat back against the seat in the relative luxury of the Buick, half-listening to the conversation up front and replying with a nod or grunt when I was directly drawn into it, I began to feel that things were definitely looking up and that some of the pressure I'd been under was bound to lift.

Because I
had
been tense. In the weeks before Corcoran's arrival Prok and I had been working on our grant proposals as well as pushing ourselves to travel and collect as many histories as we could before rationing went into effect, and Prok had become increasingly demanding under the sway of his own pressures. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of the times (he never said a word about the war, never followed developments or mentioned world events except as they related to the research, and yet it was clear that he was increasingly concerned over the potential damage to the project), and perhaps too it was that he felt me drawing
away from him emotionally since I'd moved in with Iris. He wanted sexual relations and I acquiesced, but there was no joy in it, and he must have felt that. I remember one night in a motor court outside Carbondale when he came to me naked and erect after a long day's driving and interviewing and all I wanted was to turn over and go to sleep, and I told him as much. “What's the matter,” he said, easing down on the bed beside me, “you're not getting sex shy on me, are you?”

“No,” I told him, “no, I'm just tired,” but I did what he wanted, and all the time I was thinking of Iris, back at home, waiting for me.

On this particular trip—the first of a hundred or more the three of us would make together over the years—we were on our way to Indianapolis, where we were planning to interview prostitutes and, if possible, their johns, Corcoran looking on in the role of apprentice till he could acquire the necessary skills to join in. Prok was in high spirits, more talkative even than usual, and though he drove erratically, also as usual, and tried to maintain an even speed so as to conserve on fuel, we made good time and got to our hotel early enough to have a collegial dinner before going out on the streets. I'd wanted a highball before the meal, and so had Corcoran, but Prok wouldn't hear of it—we'd be in and out of bars till all hours, and as that would almost certainly involve the consumption of a certain unavoidable quantity of alcohol there was no reason to start now; the last thing he wanted was an inebriated interviewer. Didn't we agree? Yes, of course we did, albeit reluctantly, and after the waiter took our menus, Corcoran and I exchanged a glance over our glasses of virgin soda water and I thought I'd found an ally. We were under Prok's thumb—always, and willingly—but we could rebel too, in our own quiet, complicit way, and that made me feel ever so slightly wicked, as if I'd found an elder brother to kick under the table when our father's back was turned.

So we sipped soda water while Prok had a Coca-Cola (“I don't really like the taste of the stuff,” he claimed, though his sweet tooth was legendary, “but it's good for the caffeine, keeps me alert, you know”) and outlined our plan of attack for the evening. “Actually,” he said, pausing to look round him at the nearly deserted hotel dining room, “I have no doubt but that we'll pick up some excellent data tonight, the sort of
high-rating, lower-level histories we're always seeking for balance—and you remember Gary, Milk, and how rich an arena that was—but I've been thinking that it's not enough.”

The hotel was in the low- to mid-price range, and its restaurant was nothing to write home about (again, Prok's thinking was, Why waste project funds on some fleeting luxury?), and he set his knife and fork down carefully beside the salad plate, on which three slices of pickled beet remained in a gory pool beside a brownish fragment of lettuce.

“What do you mean?” Corcoran asked. “No one's ever accumulated data as accurate and complete as what you've showed me, you and John, I mean.”

Prok shot another glance round the room to make sure no one was listening, then leaned in over his plate. “What I'm thinking is this: while it's all well and good to record direct accounts of sexual activity—while it's essential, the backbone of everything we're trying to accomplish—nevertheless we could be doing more, much more.”

Corcoran's eyes jumped to mine and I gave him the faintest shrug of my shoulders. I couldn't imagine what Prok was getting after.

“I've arranged something a little different for tonight,” Prok said, picking up his fork as if he'd never before seen a utensil, then setting it down again as if he couldn't guess at its function. “Let me put it this way,” he went on, “while we have been able, as a species, to domesticate animals and breed them into their many varieties—to observe and manipulate, as it were, their sexual activity—we've never had the opportunity to do the same with human beings. To observe, that is.”

“Yes, of course,” Corcoran said, jumping on the notion, “because while we all participate, we're never exactly watching, are we? Or even wearing our scientist's hat—isn't that right, John?”

“Well,” I said, “yes, sure,” and I gave him a grin. “In the heat of the moment, you're not thinking in scientific terms; no one is—”

“Right. And where's your objectivity?” Corcoran's face was lit with pleasure. He was on the trail of something. The moment was his. “When you're with a woman, in the throes of passion, everything else, every other consideration, goes right out the window, and at a certain point you don't even care what she looks like, just as long as—”

“Exactly.” Prok gave us a satisfied look, the blue claws of his eyes pulling us to him even as he paused at the approach of the waiter and the three of us sat in silence as the steaming plates appeared before us. The waiter hovered expectantly—Could he bring us anything else?—and Prok waved him off. When the man had retreated to the far side of the room, Prok took a moment to poke at his entrée—corned beef and cabbage, sans potatoes, one of his alimentary prohibitions. “Tonight we're going to do what no one in the field has even so much as dared before, at least as far as I know—that is, we're going to observe the act itself, in commission. It's all been arranged.”

We waited in a kind of palpitating silence, till he added: “With one of the young women, that is. We'll be secreted in the room—in the closet, actually—when she entertains her tricks.”

“You mean”—I couldn't help myself—“we'll be peeping then, as if we were, well … you mean, like Peeping Toms?”

“Voyeurs,” Corcoran pronounced with a faint smile.

Prok gave each of us a look. “Yes,” he said. “That's it exactly.”

Jean Sibelius—one of Prok's particular favorites—had been the focus of the previous week's musicale, and I remember having gone to Prok's without much enthusiasm only to find myself pleasantly surprised. As I've said, swing was more to my taste than classical, but the music Prok chose that night was melodic and warm—almost dreamlike—and before I knew it I'd lost all consciousness of my surroundings and let it sweep over me like some natural force. I suppose something similar happened to jitterbuggers out on the dance floor—to Iris and me when we danced before a bandstand—but all that was driven by the intoxication of the moment and the coronary thump of the bass drum. This was different. Once the record began I found myself slipping into a reverie, utterly calm and at ease, my thoughts bumping along from one repository to another without logic or connection. For the first time I began to understand what Prok saw in his music and why he was so devoted to it.

Iris and I had been on time, for a change, and I'd taken a seat in the front row, as Prok expected me to, with Iris on my right and Corcoran
seated beside her, the preliminaries this time reduced to a few minutes of strained chitchat with President Wells over a plate of stale crackers and rumless fruit punch, and I remember speculating about Wells even as he eased into the seat beside me. He was a short, energetic, rotund little man, and a great supporter of Prok against the storm of criticism, invective and innuendo that continually came our way, and yet he was unmarried in his forties, and that seemed odd—very odd—given the time and place. I made a note to myself to pull his history the first chance I got.

The room was cold that night, Prok having turned down the thermostat in the expectation that the aggregate body heat of his guests would be sufficient to warm the place up—that and the coloration of the music. There was a small fire going in the hearth, but it was dying because Prok didn't like to fuss with tending a fire when a record was on the turntable, and who could blame him? So we were cold, and I suppose I must have felt a bit sorry for the first-time guests who hadn't dressed for what might as well have been an outdoor concert, as Iris, Corcoran and I had. For all that, Prok was his usual warm and outgoing self, entertaining us with a brief lecture on the composer's career and the piece we were about to hear. He talked of Sibelius's love of his native Finland and the charm of his sylvan settings and how the majority of his symphonic poems were based on Finland's great epic, the
Kalevala.

Then the room hushed as he retreated to the gramophone, sharpened the needle and let it fall. We heard “The Swan of Tuonela” that night and selections from “Pohjola's Daughter,” and, as I say, I simply closed my eyes and let the music carry me away. There was an intermission, during which Mac served refreshments—non-alcoholic—and the guests got up and mingled, and then there were a few songs (“Was It a Dream?” and “The Maid Came from Her Lovers' Tryst,” both of which I remember distinctly because as soon as I was able I went out and purchased a recording of them, which I treasure to this day), and then the party broke up. The reason I mention all of this, is because of what happened during the intermission—or what might have happened, because I can't say for sure that that was the beginning of it, though I have my suspicions.

In any case, I was doing my best with a fistful of stale crackers and a cup of tepid punch while Prok pinned me in the corner along with President Wells, expatiating on the music we'd just heard (and on the research, of course), when I looked across the room and saw that Iris was alone with Corcoran, just as she had been on the last occasion—back in the fall—when we'd all three gathered for a musical evening. I wouldn't have paid it any attention really if it weren't for what she'd said that night over the wire while I sank miserably into the glass crevice of the phone booth:
He was on me like a bird dog.
Prok was informing President Wells and me (though I'd heard it before) that he liked to study the faces of the audience during musical performances for signs of sensual transport—one professor emeritus in his seventies had actually become physically aroused one night over Mahler's
Das Lied von der Erde
—but I was watching Iris, watching her face, watching Corcoran and how he seemed to anticipate her every movement, as if they were dancing to an imaginary orchestra. “Prok,” I said, cutting him off, “President Wells, I, just, well, if you'll excuse me, please, and I'll be right back—”

Prok gave me a wondering look, but he didn't miss a beat. As I wandered off, making sure to head in the direction of the lavatory, I heard him say, “Of course, I would never name that gentleman, for fear of embarrassing him, but really, there's absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about—”