The Inner Circle (46 page)

“Don't,” I said. “Just don't.”

The fire chased shadows across the walls. The cat, which had been padding tirelessly round the place all day long, in search of mice or the scent of mice, trotted across the room and disappeared in the darkened hallway that led to the kitchen. I got up then and poured myself another drink, the bottle shaped perfectly to my hand as if it were the most familiar thing in this new environment, more comforting than the transposed furniture and the Aphrodite or even Iris with her accusatory eyes and tragic underlip. “You know, it's a shame you can't take a drink,” I said. “I think a drink would really help loosen you up a bit. You should be happy—aren't you happy? Iris?”

She said nothing, but her eyes had begun to roam the room again.

“He did loan us the money,” I said. “You've got to give him credit for that.”

The next day was Saturday, and we worked all that day and Sunday too, putting up wallpaper, painting the ceiling in the living room an expansive high-flown white two shades removed from pure and generally scrubbing and rearranging things till we were both exhausted. Our first formal meal in the house had nothing of the celebratory quality of the meat loaf dinner Iris had prepared for me that first day in the apartment (I seem to remember a chicken of questionable age and tenderness, roasted with potatoes and carrots in a single pan, sans stuffing, gravy or greens, in the interest of keeping it simple) but it was a home-cooked meal nonetheless, cooked in our own home. Our son (“Or daughter,” as Iris kept reminding me) wouldn't grow up in a rental, and he'd have his own yard in which to play ball and ride high on the swing set we planned to erect and maybe help his mother in the vegetable patch and just amble outside and pick an apple or peach or pear anytime he felt like it. Despite the smell of paste and paint fumes and the twin draughts that seemed to slice across the living room at six inches and six feet respectively, we were in heaven.

But then it was Monday, and I listened to Iris retch in the new toilet (or rather, the old toilet in the new house) and then I drove her to school and went into the office myself, and the routine started in again. Prok looked as if he'd been at work for hours when I got there at eight, his head bowed, skin drained of color under the distorting glare of the lamp. He glanced up and nodded a curt greeting as I came in, and it was as if he were wearing a mask—suddenly, in that moment, from that angle and in that light, he looked ancient, lines of fatigue cut under his eyes and radiating like parentheses from his pursed lips, his forehead scored, a series of vertical trenches delineating the jointure of his upper jaw and ear. There was gray in his hair, gray threaded through the boyish pompadour like blighted stalks in a field of wheat. And how old was he? I did the calculation in my head as I unwound the scarf from my
throat and shrugged out of my coat: in June he would be fifty-three, in the prime of life. But the look of him, just then, gave me a stab of alarm. He was pushing himself too hard, I thought, pushing against a weakened heart and an immovable world, and all his power and magnetism and his unflagging energy couldn't save him, couldn't save anybody. I sat there a moment, sobered, and then I called across the room to him. “Prok, can I get you anything? Coffee maybe? A doughnut?”

He lifted his head and gave me a steady look, as if he were trying to place me, and gradually, the old familiar Prok began to settle back into his features. “No thanks, Milk, but I will need those charts on marital intercourse by educational level this morning, and we're going to have to convene a special staff meeting too.” He paused, removed his glasses to pinch his eyes shut a moment. “Something's come up.”

Corcoran and Rutledge strode in together then, sharing a private joke, and Mrs. Matthews began machine-gunning away at the typewriter. “Morning, Prok, John,” my colleagues chimed, Corcoran's lips clamped round the pipe Prok wouldn't let him light in the offices, Rutledge already sliding out of his coat. “How's the house coming, John?” Corcoran wanted to know, and he bent over the desk to take my hand in his own and give my fingernails a mock inspection. “White for the ceilings, I guess, huh? Or is that the picket fence?”

In the confusion, I didn't get a chance to ask Prok what the problem was—he was already gliding into the back room, conferring with Rutledge over something—and I forgot all about it till he rounded us up an hour later and gathered us in the inner office. We didn't yet have a conference table—or room for one—and so we just pulled up chairs and settled in. Prok took a seat too, but he didn't stay seated for long. He had a newspaper in hand, and he fanned it twice and then held it up for us to see: it was a small-town paper, the
Star Gazette
or
Journal Standard
or some such. “Remember this place?” he asked, and he was on his feet now, giving us a withering look.

We did remember it, if only vaguely. It was one of the comatose Midwestern towns we'd invaded sometime in the past six months, and it might have had a factory or foundry, a grain elevator, a small Lutheran
college maybe, and Prok had addressed the League of Women Voters or the Lions Club or the Intercollegiate Anthropological Society's Annual Convocation. It hardly mattered to us: we'd got our data and moved on.

“Isn't that that place in Minnesota?” Corcoran was straddling his chair backward, the dead pipe in his mouth. “The one where we went on that wild-goose chase after the farmer with the giant penis? Or the ostensible giant penis?”

I had a glimmer of recognition. Prok had heard of a man in northern Minnesota whose penis reportedly measured an extraordinary twelve and a quarter inches flaccid—the local M.D. had written him an account of it—and we'd arranged a lecture trip in the vicinity in order to record the measurements. And if it sounds faintly ridiculous to go off in search of some random individual's rumored appendage, please remember that this is precisely what a taxonomist does, recording the entire range of variety in a given species, from the smallest features to the largest. And further, if you'd expect such an individual to have a name like “Long John” or some such and be famed throughout his community, then you'd be disappointed: these unusual specimens, whether they exhibited extremes at the top or bottom of the scale, were unassuming and all but unknown. As I recall, in fact, we never were able to verify any measurement greater than nine inches, and this particular individual—the farmer—always seemed to be out in some distant field when we came round to investigate.

“No,” Prok said, his mouth tightening, “not actually. This town”—a finger stabbing at the paper's masthead—“is in Ohio, in point of fact. But that's not the issue, whether you remember the venue or not. What matters—what's alarming, actually—is this article here in the lower left-hand corner of the front page.” He handed the paper first to Rutledge, who scanned the article, then passed it on to Corcoran, who finally gave it to me. The piece seemed innocuous enough—of the who, where, when variety of Journalism 101, describing Prok's lecture to “a packed house eager to hear the findings of the noted sex researcher” at St. Agnes College—but Prok was incensed by it.

“I've spoken with the president of St. Agnes, with the editor of the
newspaper and the journalist involved, and I've let them know in no uncertain terms that this article stands in breach of our verbal agreement that our figures were not to be published, that no specifics whatsoever were to be revealed.” His voice was metallic, laminated with a thin layer of outrage, and he was using the precise diction that became ever more honed and formal when he felt himself pushed into a corner. “And that further, I am considering legal action in that such leakages of our material can be expected to adversely affect the reception of our inaugural volume early next year. What I mean is, if our findings are broadcast now, even by some, some—” He paused, searching for the word.

“Podunk,” Corcoran offered.

“—inconsequential rag in a town far off the beaten path, then we are in real trouble, and if you think this is a laughing matter, Corcoran—or you, Milk—then you are as much enemies of the project as this so-called
journalist.
”

The smile died on Corcoran's lips. I dropped my eyes.

“If this should get out to the news magazines—to
Time, Newsweek,
any of them—it will bury us before we get started.”

There was a silence. I became aware of the heat clanking on somewhere in the depths of the building. Rutledge was the first to speak up. “But, Prok, as far as I can see from a quick scan, there really isn't much in the way of figures here—”

“Oh, no?” Prok waved the paper as if it had caught fire. “What about this then—‘Because of the unrealistic and proscriptive nature of existing sex laws, Dr. Kinsey asserted, the general populace is driven to what is now branded criminal activity; in his home state of Indiana, population three million, five hundred thousand, the Indiana University zoologist estimates that there are some ninety million nonmarital sexual acts performed annually'?”

Rutledge was sitting ramrod straight in his chair. He lifted a hand to stroke his mustache, then thought better of it. “Well, yes, Prok, I see what you mean, but that hardly qualifies as tipping our hand, if that's what you're afraid of—this is one statistic out of a thousand. Ten thousand.”

“He's right, Prok,” Corcoran put in. “Or you're both right. They shouldn't have printed that, shouldn't have printed anything other than maybe a general description of the talk, but I think you're blowing it out of proportion, I mean, this is just some podunk—”

“And that's where you're wrong, Corcoran, categorically. Any slippage weakens us. And you, Rutledge, with your experience in the military, you above all should appreciate this—‘loose lips,' eh? Wasn't that the motto?” Prok was pacing now, working himself up, alternately brandishing the paper and balling his fist. “The interest is building out there, you know it is. Once they get a whiff of it, they'll come after us like hounds, and they'll take our figures out of context and make us out to be charlatans or cranks along the order of the Nudists or Vegetarians or the Anti-Vivisection Society. Imagine what they'll do with a table like the one John drew up for us contrasting the peak age of sexual activity for male and female? Or the prevalence of H-activity? Or extramarital relations?”

No one said a word.

“Well you'd better imagine it. And you'd better brace yourselves. Because the invasion is coming.”

That was the beginning of paranoia, and throughout the year, as Prok struggled through the writing of the first volume and we punched data cards and produced the calculations and traveled as a team to collect histories while he lectured across the Midwest and in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, we were never clear of it. Prok had given over a thousand lectures in the past five years, and the ground rules for every last one of them were the same: no publication of specifics, no statistics, no sensationalizing. Since he'd never charged a fee for his public lectures (and wouldn't begin to do so until after the male volume was published and the expenses of the Institute demanded it), at the very least he expected civility, probity and discretion from his auditors and sponsors. For the most part, he got it. But there were leaks, as with the paper from the little town in Ohio, and as
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
neared completion and was set in (closely guarded) proofs, the press went mad after the scent of it, trying one gambit after another to pry loose information from us. We got letters, wires, telephone
calls, people showed up at the door from places as far afield as Oregon, Florida and Maine, and in one case, Lugano, Italy, and Prok was polite but firm with them all: there would be no exclusives, no excerpts, no information whatever dispensed prior to publication for fear of sensationalizing a very sensitive subject. And, of course, the more we denied them, the more eager they were.

Even I was drawn into it. I recall an incident from later that year—it must have been late May or early June, Iris big as a house, the weather turned brooding and muggy. I was overworked, keyed up, feeling the stress of Prok's ceaseless push to produce—and the sting of his temper too, as nothing I nor anyone else did seemed to be quite up to his standards—and after a long day of calculating correlation coefficients, medians, means and standard deviations from the mean, I wasn't ready to go home. I felt—blue, I guess you would call it. The house, as Prok had predicted, was in need of more attention than I could give it—a windstorm had taken the gutters and half the shingles off the roof over the bedroom, for one thing, and the pipes were so rusty our drinking water looked as if it had been distilled and bonded over the state line in Kentucky, and that was just the start of it, termites in the floor joists, mice in the walls, dry rot behind the tub—and the Dodge, my pride and joy, the one possession I truly loved, was up on the lift at Mike Martin's garage with a frozen transmission. Five point two miles each way, a real trek, and Prok had been right there too. Corcoran had swung by for me that morning and Prok had offered to give me a lift home, but I didn't want to impose, and as I say, I wasn't going home. I called Iris and told her I was planning to head over to the garage to see about the car, and then, if it wasn't ready, I'd probably have a couple drinks and catch a ride home later.

“And if it is?” she said, her voice small and distant.

“I don't know,” I said. “But don't wait dinner for me.”

There was a pause. We hadn't been getting on as well as we might have, and that was my fault, I admit it, what with the pressures of work and her moods—you would have thought no woman had ever been pregnant in the history of the world before. As she put on weight, as
she settled into the awkwardness of pregnancy, flat-footed, distended, sloppy in her personal habits, I began to have second thoughts about this baby, this child, and I suppose every father goes through that sort of thing—one day you're ecstatic, and the next you think your life is over. Or maybe I had it worse. Maybe I wasn't ready, after all. Did I resent the child? Did I resent the fact that my wife was in her eighth month and we weren't having marital relations anymore and that just the night before she'd declined to satisfy me with her mouth or even her hand?