The Inner Circle (29 page)

I came up on Corcoran and my wife from behind, having made a detour past the lavatory in the event that Prok and Wells were watching, and I seemed to have startled them. Whatever they'd been talking about so intently just a moment before fell off a conversational cliff and the two of them looked up at me in confusion. I wanted to say something blithe like, “Am I interrupting anything here?” but when I saw the looks on their faces the words died in my throat. “Hello,” was the best I could manage.

Corcoran treated me to a smile. “Oh, hi, John. We were just discussing the way Prok seems to have taken charge of our president.” He gave a sidelong glance to where the two of them stood in the corner still, Prok lecturing, Wells stifling a yawn.

Iris said, “He never misses an opportunity, does he?”

I was angry suddenly, or testy, I suppose—testy would be a better word. “He has every right,” I said, staring her in the face, and I wasn't smiling, wasn't keeping it blithe and light. “Because you'd be amazed how much each department has to fight for funding. And we've got the prospect of expanding our grant base, which in turn should help convince Wells—or the university, I mean—to give us more for salary, materials, travel expenses and the like.”

Iris was wearing a little smile of amusement. “So?” she said.

“So don't go accusing Prok, of, of—
pandering
—or whatever you want to call it, because if it weren't for him we'd be—”

“Up shit's creek without a paddle,” Corcoran said, expanding his smile. He had a glass of mauve-colored punch in his hand and he was rotating it against his palm as if he were about to snatch up three or four others and start juggling them to break the ice and get the party rolling, irrespective of Prok and Wells and the high tone of the evening. But then he laid a hand on my arm. “It's okay, John,” he said, and Iris warmed up her smile too, “we're on your side. We're all in this together, aren't we?”

I suppose that was when I first began to have my suspicions—Corcoran, the sexual Olympian on the loose, and Iris, the love of my life, stinging still over what I'd done in bed with Mac and with Prok—but I was paralyzed. I wanted to believe that there was nothing between them beyond the usual goodwill that existed between one colleague and the spouse of another, and I was afraid of any sort of confrontation with Iris, because I knew she'd throw it back at me, every phrase, every excuse and rationale, every occasion on which I'd ever spoken of our animal nature and sex as a function divorced from emotion of any kind, no different from hunger or thirst. Of course, I dropped hints. Put out probes, as it were. I came home from work, complimented the aroma of whatever was cooking, poured a drink, sat with her and reviewed my day, and of course my day included Corcoran—I dropped his name whenever I could, scanning her face for a reaction. There was nothing there.
But what did she think of him? I pressed. Oh, he was nice enough, she said. Better than she'd thought. She really did think he was going to work out, and she was sorry if at first she'd seemed negative about him. “Yes,” I said, “I told you, didn't I?” And then a smile, as if it were all a joke, “And what about his bird dog propensities?”

She was busy suddenly—a pot was boiling over on the stove, there was an onion to be peeled. It was a joke, sure it was, and she just laughed. “He's like that with all women,” she said. “And men too. But you would know better than I, John.”

If I were a turtle—one of Darwin's Galápagos tortoises Prok was always talking about—I could have pulled all my exposed parts back into my shell, and I suppose, in a metaphorical way, that was what I did do. We went to Indianapolis, the three of us, colleagues on a mission, and Corcoran and I sat across the table from each other exchanging our own private signals while Prok informed us that we were going to do something illegal, if not immoral, despite the testimonial letters from Dean Briscoe, President Henry B. Wells and Robert M. Yerkes: for this night, anyway, we were going to be Peeping Toms.

The idea of it, I have to admit, made my blood race. I think we all have the capacity for voyeurism, we all burn to see how other people live through their private moments so that we can hold them up against our own and thrill with a feeling of superiority, or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, feel the sharp awakening slap of inadequacy.
So that's how it's done,
we think.
I could do it that way. Or could I? Yes, sure I could, and I could do it better too. I'd like to be doing it right now—but look at her, look how she clings to him, how she rises to meet him, how
—

Beyond that, of course, we were scientists, and we convinced ourselves that we had a duty to the research that rated above all other considerations. We needed to do fieldwork, like any other investigators, needed to engage in direct observation of sexual experience in all its varieties, else how could we presume to call ourselves experts? How could our data have the kind of validity we sought if it were paper data only? If you think of it, everything we were attempting to accomplish, every close observation, every measurement, should have been rendered redundant
by a hundred studies that had come before us. But there weren't a hundred studies, there weren't fifty—there wasn't even one. We'd built our civilization, gone to war, delved into the smallest things, the microbe and the atom, and still the hypocrites and the lily-whites were there to shout us down: sex is dirty, they said. Sex is shameful, private, obscene, unfit for examination. Well. We got up from the table, paid the check and walked out into the night to prove them wrong.

This time it wasn't raining, wasn't even all that cold, considering the season. Prok wasn't wearing an overcoat, though the streets were damp from a series of rainstorms the previous week and he'd pulled a pair of rubbers on over his shoes. Corcoran was wearing his tan fedora and a pale camel trench coat, as if he'd just stepped off the set of a picture about foreign agents and the assignations of war. For my part, I was dressed as usual, coat and tie, no hat, and my feet—in a pair of fresh-polished cordovans—would just have to get wet if I wasn't absolutely vigilant about the puddles in the street. “All right,” Prok said, gathering us to him on a street corner, “I think it's this way, down this street and one block over to the left—and the contact, incidentally, is a young woman, a redhead by the name of Ginger.”

We found Ginger without any trouble, dressed in a cheap imitation fur and sipping a soft drink through a straw on a bench in the back of the local pool hall. There was a man slouched beside her, a sharp dresser with a flashy tie and elephantine pants that concealed the boniness of his legs, till he leaned back to light a cigarette and crossed his ankles, that is. He regarded the three of us with suspicion—he was the pimp, and his name was Gerald—till Prok won him over with a brief speech in the vernacular and a contribution of three dollars to the support of his staff and a dollar more for each history he brought us, including his own. Ginger was a big girl, five eight or five nine, twenty-two years old, with a solid, thick-fleshed physique that would sink her in fat by the time she was thirty and the milky coloring of a natural redhead. She didn't make a move. Just sucked at the straw within the red bow of her mouth and watched her pimp fold Prok's bills and tuck them away in the voluminous pockets of his trousers. “Okay,” Gerald said then, “okay,”
and he smiled to reveal a set of hopeless teeth, variously colored. He looked to Ginger and the smile vanished. “So what you waitin' for? Go peddle your goods—and take these gennemen with you.”

Then we were outside, dodging puddles, Prok at Ginger's side as if he were escorting her to a cotillion that would miraculously appear round the next corner in a pure white outflowing of light, Corcoran and I bringing up the rear. It was an awkward scenario, none of us—even Prok—inclined to say much, Ginger leading us on with a hypnotic shake and roll of her hips, faces appearing out of the dark to dodge away again, slatted eyes assessing us as potential johns or mugging victims. Ginger had a ground-floor room, convenient to the street, in a house from the Victorian era that was in serious need of repair and paint too, and she separated herself from Prok and strolled right in through the unlocked door without turning around to invite us in or even to see if we were still there.

The room itself was a shambles, but that's about all I remember of it. Except that it had a high ceiling and a big, walk-in closet that had once been an anteroom of some sort and was now separated from the bedsit by a finger-greased quilt stretched across the doorway on a wire. Ginger's dresses—a dozen or more, smelling of her underarms and the cologne she used to mask the smell of her tricks, one from the other—hung on wire hangers in the forefront of the closet, while her shoes and undergarments were scattered underfoot. “Here it is,” she said in a high, fluting voice that could have belonged to a woman half her size, to a child, and she held out her hand, palm up, to receive the dollar Prok had promised.

“Swell,” Prok said, reverting to the vernacular. “Just grand.” He'd swept back the quilt to inspect the arrangements and the grin he gave her was almost ghoulish—the light was bad, yellowed and corrupt, issuing from a lamp at the bedside over which Ginger had laid a saffron scarf for effect, and it made his whole face seem to sag under the weight of his satisfaction. I glanced at Corcoran. He looked like a ghoul too. I wondered what my own face looked like. “This is just the ticket,” Prok said, laying the dollar bill across Ginger's palm while we looked on as if
we'd never seen money exchanged before, “but I wonder if you could do me a favor, Ginger? Just a tiny little one?”

She'd turned her back to secrete the money somewhere on her person, and now she swung back round suspiciously. “Depends what it is.”

“Would you mind if I”—Prok crossed the room and lifted the scarf from the lamp—“just removed this for the evening? Unless you're really stuck on it—”

A slow smile crept over her face. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, sure. You're the doctor.”

When she'd gone off in search of her first trick (and I don't know if I've explained this previously, but “trick” was the term prostitutes used then to describe their johns, and, of course, it's still in current usage, though in those days only our lower-level subjects would have been conversant with it), we did what we could to make the closet comfortable, shifting some of Ginger's underthings from the floor and moving the room's only chair into the closet with us. We agreed to take shifts in the chair, so as to relieve the tedium of standing—this was going to be a long night, and we couldn't afford to give ourselves away by any stretching or cracking of joints, let alone the fatal cough or sneeze. We talked in whispers now, all three of us keyed up with anticipation. What was it like? Like the juvenile thrill of hide-and-seek, I suppose, only with the delicious adult taint of the verboten layered over it. Living sex. We were about to witness living sex.

It didn't take long. There was the sound of footsteps on the porch, a low murmur of voices, then the click of the doorknob, and the three of us froze in place. The way Prok had arranged the quilt—and we'd all examined it from the outside to make sure we were completely hidden—gave us two points of access. Corcoran was at one end of the closet, peeping through the slit there, and Prok and I at the other. Prok was in the chair, perched at the very edge of it, as motionless as a fakir on a bed of nails, and I was hovering over him, so close we were practically conjoined. Movement, voices. I felt him tense. I didn't dare breathe. From where we were stationed, we had a view of the now brightly lit bed, but we couldn't see the door or what was happening there as Ginger and her
john apparently embraced, clothes rustling, the allision of their shoes on the floorboards, and then the sudden startling basso of the man's voice. “Shit, is this it?” he said, and the voice thrilled me, resonating from the cerebral cortex that registered it all the way down to the soles of my feet. “Well, shit,” he said again, movement now, and there they were—there
he
was—not five feet from us. I'd like to report that the man was some sort of bruiser, a tattooed sailor stranded ashore, a
specimen,
but that wasn't the case. He was slight of build, average height, average in every way, with skin that seemed granulated under the harsh accounting of the light. Ginger was there, looming, the meat of her rump, her breasts. “You going to blow me,” he said, “or what?”

“Anything you want, honey,” she said, bending to run her hand up the crotch of his pants. “You're the doctor.”

She wasn't wearing underpants—stockings, yes, supported by black garters at the swollen midpoint of her thighs—and she was reluctant to fully undress, though that was what we wanted, as Prok had made clear beforehand. (From her point of view, removing her dress and brassiere was both a bother and a waste of time, an impediment to moving her johns in an efficient conga line in and out of the room, but from ours it was essential, if we were to observe the way the female corpus responds to sexual stimulation.) The man—the trick, the john—let her undo his fly while she was still fully dressed, and he massaged her scalp, squeezed her head as if it were a bowling ball he was about to pluck up and fling down the alley, as she fellated him. Her lips shone with the viscous fluid released by the Cowper's glands by way of lubrication, and she took the whole thing into her mouth—and this was amazing—his entire phallus, right down to the root, as if she were a sword-swallower performing at the carnival. We were later to discover, incidentally, that among the many physiological modifications occurring during sexual activity, suspension of the gag reflex occurs in a high percentage of both women and men, thus demonstrating the adaptive role of the oral component in sexual response. But all that aside, can I tell you how amazed I was? How—unprofessionally—titillated?