The Inner Circle (38 page)

At any rate, the following morning we took the cold shower Prok always insisted upon when we were traveling, winter or summer, outdoors or in-, toweled ourselves vigorously, sat down to an anticipatory breakfast at the local diner, and went back to the room to await Mr. X's arrival. Sitting there in the unmodulated glare of the morning, our fingers tapping idly at the scuffed furniture while we belched softly over our scrambled eggs and waffles, pencils sharpened and ready, we couldn't help speculating about the man. He was sixty-three, yes, but a sexual giant for all that, and we pictured an individual of imposing build, broad-shouldered, with big, work-hardened hands and catapulting arms, a man with the strength and tenacity to put all our other high raters into another category altogether, a kind of Paul Bunyan of sex, towering over
the field. But of course expectations are meant to be defeated and looks can be deceiving.

Mr. X was five feet five inches tall, one hundred twenty-two pounds. He walked with a limp, hunched his shoulders forward and appeared, if anything, older than his years. Anyone over forty seemed ancient to me in those days—aside from Prok, of course—but this man, Mr. X, might have told us he was eighty and I wouldn't have been surprised. The flesh beneath his chin hung in folds, and his hands were maculated with liver spots. He was almost entirely bald (a sign of virility, Prok maintained, if you excepted the three of us present and the legend of Samson and Delilah), and his face was cross-hatched with infinitely fine lines and the deeper gouges of age and experience. When he first came to the door I thought there must be some mistake, but Prok never missed a beat. “Welcome,” he said, holding the door open for him, “we've been expecting you.”

Our subject stood there expressionless in the doorway, a cordovan suitcase at his feet, his eyes glittering like flecks of glass in a dry riverbed. He looked round the room a moment, took note of Corcoran and me, then lifted his upper lip in the simulacrum of a grin. Something shrewd came into his eyes. “Dr. Kinsey, I presume?” he said with a mock bow, and let out a low, hoarse laugh.

“Yes,” Prok returned, taking his hand, “Alfred C. Kinsey. It's a great pleasure. And these are my colleagues, Purvis Corcoran and John Milk. But can I get you anything? Coffee? Juice? Perhaps a rum cocktail, if it's not too early?”

In the suitcase were the remaining volumes of his sex diaries, which included detailed descriptions of all the omnifarious encounters he'd ever had, as well as measurements of the various penises and clitorises with which he'd personally come into contact over the course of his long career; photographs he'd taken of sex acts with a whole variety of individuals, in many of which he himself appeared, first as a young man, then middle-aged and finally elderly; a selection of sex aids and lubricants; and, puzzlingly, a single carpenter's drill fitted with a half-inch bit. After shaking hands with Corcoran and me, Mr. X unceremoniously
flung the suitcase on the bed, flipped the twin latches, and began passing the artifacts round the room as if they were holy relics.

The photographs—there were a hundred or more—had the most immediate effect. I remember one in particular, which showed only the hand of an adult, with its outsized fingers, manipulating the genitalia of an infant—a boy, with a tiny, twig-like erection—and the look on the infant's face, its eyes unfocused, mouth open, hands groping at nothing, and the sensation it gave me. I felt myself go cold all over, as if I were still in the bathtub, standing rigid beneath the icy shower. I glanced at Corcoran, whose face showed nothing, and then at Prok, who studied the photograph a moment and pronounced it “Very interesting, very interesting indeed.” He leaned in close to me to point out the detail, and said, “You see, Milk, here is definitive proof of infantile sexuality, and whether it's an anomaly or not, of course, is yet to be demonstrated statistically—”

Still bent over the open suitcase, shuffling through his trove, our subject let out a soft whistle. “Believe me,” he said, “it's no anomaly.”

We let that hang in the air a moment, and then Prok said, “But the drill—what's the significance of that?”

“Oh, this?” the little man murmured, extracting the thing from the suitcase with a bemused grin, and all I could think of was some extreme form of sadomasochism, disfigurement, torture. I felt my stomach sink. Despite myself, I'd begun to feel distinctly uncomfortable, and I glanced at Prok for reassurance, but Prok was fixated on the instrument in the man's hand, utterly absorbed.

Mr. X took his time. He shrugged. Looked at each of us in succession, then dropped his eyes, and you could see he was a man who enjoyed an audience. “It's for drilling.”

Prok gave him a look. He was being his most patient self, smiling along with the little man, encouraging and respectful, without the least hint of condescension. He'd revealed to me the night before that he'd felt a real sense of urgency in coming here to collect Mr. X's history because the man was in ill health and could die at any moment and be lost forever to science, and he'd made no bones about it: this was our most significant interview to date. “Yes?” he said. “And to what purpose?”

“Well, of course, you know my work—aside from sex, I mean?”

We did. The man worked for a government agency, which necessitated a great deal of travel and overnight accommodations in various cities around the country.

“I observe,” he said.

Prok wasn't following him. “Observe?”

“That's right,” he said in his soft, guttural tones, and he moved to the far wall to demonstrate. He put his ear to the paneling for a moment, and then, satisfied that the room was unoccupied—or that the occupants were either asleep or out of the room—he went down on one knee and with a quick noiseless rotation of his right hand and shoulder made a neat peephole just above the baseboard. “Here,” he said, “here, have a look”—and we did, each in turn—“because you'd be surprised what you might see, and how much.” He paused to collect his breath. “Because people—well, you know, when they're in a hotel room, safe from observation and the routine of their lives, they tend to do things they might not do otherwise. Oh, yeah. I've seen it all. Whores, monkeys, midgets. Everything. You'd be surprised.”

What came next was even more startling—we'd been voyeurs ourselves, after all, and the notion of observing a private act unseen was within the realm of our experience—but this man, this dynamo, had much more to offer us. Somehow the conversation turned to masturbation and masturbatory technique, even before we'd formally begun the interview. “You know, Dr. Kinsey,” the little man was saying, comfortable now in the armchair by the window, a cigarette in one hand, a mug of coffee in the other, “I am the most highly sexed individual you will ever come across. Number one. Numero uno. There's nobody like me. Nobody.”

Prok, accommodating but empirically skeptical: “Is that so?”

“Oh, yes. As for masturbation, even now, at my age, I probably—what term do you like to use? Beat off?—beat off three or four times a day. And I can go from nothing to orgasm in ten seconds flat, and tell me if that isn't a record?”

Corcoran, seated on the bed, one leg crossed at the knee, and his pencil poised over the position sheet—we would be simultaneously recording
this interview—said casually, “That's very impressive. But shouldn't we begin now? To get all this for the record, I mean?”

“You don't believe me?”

“Of course we believe you,” Prok put in.

“Just watch.” And before anyone could demur, Mr. X had his trousers down. “Anyone have a second hand on their watch? You?” he said, pointing to me. “What was your name?”

“Milk,” I said. “John Milk.”

“Well, do you?” His pubic hair was white and his penis lay shriveled in the nest of it. He was an old man, shrunken and old, and I wanted to look away, but I didn't.

“Yes,” I said. “Well, yes. I think so.”

“Okay,” he said, “you tell me when,” and I looked to Prok and Prok nodded and I said, “When,” and this dried-up little homunculus of a man actually did it—went from flaccid to hard to orgasm in just ten seconds. It was amazing. Simply amazing. None of us had ever seen anything like it. There was a moment of suspension and release, and I almost thought Corcoran was going to burst into applause.

A few years later, famously, we would film some one thousand men in the process of masturbating in order to reach a determination as to whether the majority spurted or dribbled (seventy-three percent dribbled, incidentally, myself included), but to this point we'd never observed—or requested—a demonstration. It took us a moment to recover ourselves as Mr. X mopped up and wriggled back into his trousers, and then Corcoran lit a cigarette despite a sharp glance from Prok, and we sat down to record the history—all three of us, simultaneously, barely taking time to break for the bathroom, or for food and drink, for that matter.

As it turned out, Mr. X had almost perfect recall. He slouched in the armchair, smoking one cigarette after another, and brought us back to his childhood, to his father and grandmother and his siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles, and then on through his adolescence and adulthood, through boys and girls, women and men, dogs and sheep and even, in one case, a parrot, and it took two and a half days to record it all. I listened
to that voice, that soft hitching rasp of breath, the tireless recitation, act after act, partner after partner, and I couldn't help thinking of Iris, of what she'd said, but I put on my professional face nonetheless and bent over the position sheet and did what I'd come halfway across the country to do.

In all, we were gone just short of five weeks. Prok was clearly enjoying himself, exulting in the season and the freedom of the road as he hadn't in a long while, this trip reminiscent for him of the gall wasp expeditions he'd made a decade earlier, fieldwork, getting out from behind the desk, that sort of thing, and he kept coming up with excuses to prolong the journey. He made a point of seeking out college towns along the route, and we would drive in unannounced and park in front of the administration building, Corcoran and I sitting in the car having a surreptitious smoke while Prok chatted up the dean or the provost. As likely as not we would be invited to stay on and collect histories, Prok, in most cases, being called upon to give an impromptu lecture to concerned faculty or a local civics group. We could have traveled like that for the rest of the year if we'd wanted to—for the rest of our lives, I suppose, gypsy scholars, men of science on the prowl—but of course it was problematic, not only for the cohesion of the project and the correlation of our data toward the ultimate goal of publication, but for our domestic lives as well.

I wrote Iris every day for the first week, postcards featuring pastel cowboys in chaps or an oil rig set against a backdrop of tumbleweed and cactus, and though I was full of enthusiasm I tried to keep my tone neutral and even somewhat regretful, playing down the sheer adventure of it so as to avoid stirring up any feelings of jealousy or resentment on her part. By the second week, I was writing her every other day, three-sentence descriptions of a meal—
frijoles
and
tortillas,
with a hot sauce made of chopped green tomatoes and chilies, a wonder of a thing, like nothing I'd ever tasted—or a depiction of a town or landscape. And then it was every third or fourth day, or when I remembered, guiltily, that she was home alone, in the constricted world of the apartment and
the grid of repetitive streets and not even her job to sustain her because it was summer recess now and what was she doing with the long unraveling thread of her days? Finally, in the end, I wrote simply to tell her I missed her.

In Tucumcari, I found a shop that sold silver-and-turquoise jewelry, and I bought her a heavy silver bracelet in what the woman behind the counter described as an Aztec flower pattern, and then in Amarillo I found her a basket made of the tanned skin of an armadillo looped tail to snout. She didn't write back, of course. She couldn't. We were in no place longer than a day or two at a time, and our progress was haphazard in any case. There were telephones, but long distance was cripplingly expensive, not to mention unreliable. I could have wired her, I suppose, and she could have wired back. But I didn't. I promised myself I'd make it up to her when we got back.

By the time we did finally pull into Bloomington, I was as homesick as I'd ever been in my life. All the novelty of travel, the excitement of the wide-open spaces and the long-horned steers and all the rest faded during that last week, and I missed my wife, longed for her with an inconsolable ache that kept me awake in the cramped confines of the tent or the anonymous bed in one or another of the string of motor courts and cheap hotels we checked into every third or fourth night, missed the simple routine of going off to work in the morning and coming home to her in the evening, of feeling the reassuring pressure of her hand in mine as we strolled down the leaf-hung avenue for a beer at the tavern or a night out at the picture show. I'd never been away from home, from Indiana, for so long before, and when we crossed the state line at Jeffersonville, I felt my heart soar.

It was late in the afternoon when Prok dropped me off in front of the apartment, and I was out the door with my suitcase before he'd come to a complete stop, yes, thank you, so long, see you at work in the morning, and I remember how intoxicating the smell of the grass was, the dahlias along the walk, the geraniums in the window box. I was perspiring under the arms and the shirt was stuck to my back, but I hardly felt it. The soles of my shoes pulsed with radiant energy as I came up the walk, my
heart pounding, no thought but for Iris and how I was going to surprise her and give her the bracelet and the basket and tell her how much I'd missed her and how I was never going to go on a collecting trip again, never, or at least not for a long while to come. A sudden flash of lightning fractured the sky over the elm then, and as I reached the porch the light shaded from copper to silver and a breeze came up out of the south. That was when I heard the music sifting through the screen in the front window, and the sound of laughter, of women's laughter, two voices clenched round the pith of a joke, and I pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Iris?” I called. “Iris, I'm home.”