The Inner Circle (37 page)

I gave her a smile. I was nervous—I'd never done anything like this before, my new colleague's wife, Violet Corcoran, the devouring eyes, the lips, the smile, the unholy shape of her—and I was trying to project a kind of casual interest in the event that I was misreading her, that she'd come to talk only and that I was on the verge of embarrassing myself. Now it was my turn to shrug. “I don't know,” I said.

“You know what I think?”

“No,” I said, leaning closer, the smile frozen to my face.

“I think we should just enjoy ourselves.”

The summer came on that year with a tympanic burst of thunderstorms, Iris graduated with honors and worked full-time at the five and-dime till fall, when she accepted a teaching position in one of the local elementary schools, and then fall gave way to winter and winter to spring and we went on as usual, collecting and tabulating data, Corcoran, Prok and I hurtling down back roads and potholed highways in the stalwart shell of the Buick, our only limitation the rationing coupon—and if it weren't for that, for rationing, you would never know from anything Prok said or did that there was a war going on out there in the wider world. Prok wasn't interested in international affairs or politics either. I suppose he must have deplored the Nazis and the Fascists and the Imperial Japanese as much as anyone, but he certainly kept it private—in fact, if he caught Corcoran and me discussing Midway or Guadalcanal or even the latest scrap drive, he invariably changed the subject. Never, in all my years with him, did he mention current events, not even in passing—we detonated the A-bomb, the war ended, the Korean conflict flared up and died—and Prok talked only of the latest sex diary he'd acquired or his need to duplicate Dickinson's experiments on the gripping power of the levator ani muscles when a wax phallus is inserted in the vagina. He was dedicated, no doubt about it. Perhaps even single-minded to a fault. But you could say that of practically any great man.

It was during this period—it might have been as late as 1944, now that I come to think of it—that we were finally able to induce the sexual champion I mentioned earlier to sit for an interview. Prok had been courting him for some time now, and the man had been cagey, feeding us portions of his sex diaries by mail, but expressing his reluctance to meet because of the criminal nature of so many of his sexual contacts. Certainly, what he'd sent us—photographs, penis measurements, case histories and written records of various sex acts with every sort of partner, male, female, nonhuman, preadolescents and even infants—was provocative, perhaps even offensive, but invaluable to our understanding of human sexuality. And, as Prok put it so well, we were scientists, not moralists—our duty was to observe and record, not to pass judgment.

At any rate, Prok knew instinctively that this subject—let's call him Mr. X, as we have done in our files in order to afford him absolute anonymity—could be cajoled into contributing his history through an appeal to his vanity. Mr. X had devoted his life to sex—he was insatiable—and was, I suppose, a sort of sexologist in his own right, and so Prok from the very beginning treated him as a learned colleague, praising him repeatedly in his correspondence (“Certainly you have very much more material than we have in our records” and “This is one of the most valuable things we have ever gotten, and I want to thank you most abundantly for the time you put into it and for your willingness to cooperate”) and wooing him with the prospect of legitimating his findings by recording them for posterity. He even offered to pay Mr. X's expenses if he would come to Bloomington, but Mr. X declined—he would meet with us, he said finally, but only if we came to him and only if we were to rendezvous in a small town some hundred miles from where he lived, so as not to attract any notice.

When Prok received the letter he was overjoyed, practically dancing round the office. “Pack your bags, Milk,” he cried, leaping up from his desk and striding past me to poke his head into the inner office, “and you too, Corcoran. We're going on a field trip!”

That night, after dinner, I told Iris I'd be taking an extended trip, and
she barely glanced up. “Actually,” I said, getting up to help with the dishes, “I'm excited about this one.”

She was standing at the sink. I went to her, slipped the dishes into the suds, put an arm round her waist and touched my cheek to hers. “Oh?” she said. “And why is that?”

“It's Mr. X. You know, the one whose diaries take him right off the scale?”

Her hands were lifting and dipping in the sink, the hot tap open full. Her voice was flat. “The pedophile?”

“Yes, but—”

“The one who—let me see if I've got this right—the one who masturbates infants in the cradle and rapes little boys and girls? That Mr. X?”

“Oh, come on, Iris,” I said, “get off it, will you? He's an extreme example, that's all, the icing on the cake—and Prok is in heaven over it.”

We'd been over some of this ground before. Mac had been transcribing Mr. X's diaries for the files so that we could return the originals to him, and naturally, all of us were excited and had been discussing some of the revelations the diaries contained, and sure, I'm guilty of bringing home my work like so many other men, but my enthusiasm was genuine and it hurt to have Iris belittle it. Mr. X was a real find. A gem. The extreme case that gives the lie to the norm. He'd started his career when he was a child himself, having been initiated into heterosexual activity by his grandmother, and homosexual sex by his father, and, ultimately, he had sexual contact with seventeen members of his extended family. Over the course of his life—he was then sixty-three—he had had sexual relations with six hundred preadolescent males and two hundred pre-adolescent females, in addition to consummating innumerable sex acts with adults of both sexes and several species of animals. He was a prodigy, no doubt about it, and he had data—and experience—we could make use of. To me, that was all that mattered. Iris felt differently.

“Yes,” she said, turning to me as I fumbled to take the dish from her hand and rinse it under the faucet, “but I teach those kids. Second graders, John. They're seven years old. They're like puppies, like lambs, as innocent and sweet as anything you'd ever want to see, you know
that. And then you have the gall to stand there and tell me you're excited because you get to talk to some monster who's devoted his life to molesting them? I'm supposed to be happy for you? Tell me. Am I supposed to like that?”

“I'm not condoning his behavior,” I said, “it's just that I, well, I feel it's important to document it, because, well, because it's already happened, for one thing, and there's really nothing I or anyone else can do about that—”

“No? How about turning him over to the police? How about locking him up? Huh? That's what you can do. And Prok can too.”

“Listen,” I said, backing away from her now—just setting the wet plate down in the dish rack and backing away from her before I had a chance to let the resentment come up in me—“that's not the point and you know it.”

She'd swung round on me, arms folded over her breast, hands glistening with the beads of wet suds. “When are you leaving?” she asked, holding my eyes.

“Day after tomorrow.”

“Is Purvis going?”

I nodded.

“How long? Not that it matters, because being deserted week in and week out is what I've come to expect, haven't I? ‘Where's your husband?' everybody asks me. ‘Oh,' they say, ‘another business trip, then? Don't you miss him?' Well, I do, John, I do miss you.”

I dropped my chin, gave a shrug to minimize the idea of it, to show I was listening and empathizing and that it was just one of those things but I'd be back as soon as I could and that I missed her too. In reality, though, I was looking forward to leaving—not because of her, of course, because I loved her and would just as soon have been there with her—but because we were going west, way out west, and to that point in my life I'd never even crossed the Mississippi. “Well, it'll, I'm afraid—because he lives out west, in Albuquerque. New Mexico, that is …” I trailed off. Shrugged again. “Two weeks,” I said.

“Two weeks?”

“Yes, well, we have to drive—and, I don't know, it's a long ways, something like fifteen hundred miles or more. Each way.”

“And what am I supposed to do in the meanwhile? You want me to lie in there on the bed and, what do you call it,
stimulate
myself with my finger? You want me to count orgasms for you, John? Would that be helpful?”

“No,” I said, “no, I don't think so.”

“What then? Violet and me? Should we stimulate each other? And then record it for our sex diaries?”

“Iris,” I said.

“What?” she said. “What?”

As I try to place it now, I do believe it must have been the summer of 1944 when the three of us—Prok, Corcoran and I—set out on our trip west. It was hot, I remember that much, oppressively so, and it grew hotter as we swung south, toward Memphis and the network of highways and country roads that would take us west through Arkansas, Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle and on into the pale, bleached mountains of New Mexico. Prok had the windows down—he liked the feel of the air on his face, and any other arrangement would have been impossible in that steam bath of a climate, but the incessant rush of the wind made conversation difficult and brought us into intimate contact with a whole array of angry wasps, dazed moths and partially dismembered leafhoppers, katydids and the like. There were insects down my collar, in my hair, emerging from the creases of my short-sleeved shirt. “If only they were edible!” I shouted from the backseat to Prok, who was shouting over the roar to Corcoran, who was seated beside him and bobbing his head to some internal rhythm. Prok paused to glance over his shoulder and shout back, “They are!” then hit the accelerator.

Fields cantered by, houses and barns and outbuildings in need of paint, billboards exhorting Christian fervor and advocating the consumption of snuff and chewing tobacco. The countryside smelled of silage, of rot and fresh-turned muck. There were mules everywhere, stage-struck cattle, chickens that never could seem to resist running out into the road. We stopped at small-town cafes and stared at plates of eggs and grits and fried sidemeat, barely able to muster the energy to lift the forks to our mouths. Sweetened iced tea—by the pitcherful—saved our lives.

It was an adventure, for all that—the greatest adventure of my life to
that point—and as Prok expatiated on the
Kama Sutra,
Swedish pornography, the erotic art of pre-Columbian America and a host of other subjects, and Corcoran and I swapped seats so that we could alternate stealing catnaps and providing an audience for him, I felt as if the whole world were opening up before me. I was heading west, with my colleagues, and every mile that rolled under our tires brought new sights and sensations—
Oklahoma, I thought, I'm in Oklahoma
—and though I wasn't yet twenty-six, I felt like a man of the world, an exotic, a seasoned traveler and explorer nonpareil. Other men were off at war, experiencing the camaraderie of combat, but we were here, comrades in science, watching the plains and the washes and hoodoos roll away before us in the naked glare of the morning and the beholden mystery of the night.

It took us eight days to get there, Prok forever snaking down this irresistible turning or that, collecting galls out of habit, bumping ten miles along a dirt path just to erect our tent by an unmoving brown band of water someone had once called a river. As I've said, I wasn't much for camping—and Corcoran was even worse—but Prok more than made up for us. His energy was explosive. Even after sitting behind the wheel from early morning till late in the afternoon (he insisted on doing all the driving himself), he sprang out of the car to set up camp, collect armloads of scrub oak or mesquite and cook us flapjacks and eggs or even the odd fish he'd managed to pull out of a hidden puddle in the time it took the cookfire to die down to coals. He was indefatigable, as solicitous of our comfort and welfare as a scoutmaster—or better yet, a big brother—and as genial and full of high spirits as I'd ever seen him. He educated us in the fine points of woodcraft, entertained us round the campfire with stories of his gall wasp expeditions in the Sierra Madre, allowed us the solace of my flask and the bottle of brandy Corcoran had brought along against the chill of the night, though there was no chill and Prok himself had little interest in liquor except as an agent in loosening the tongues of his subjects.

There was, as you might expect, nudity as well. Prok cooked in the nude, set up the tent in the nude, hiked and bird-watched and swam in the nude, and encouraged us to do the same. My tan came back. My
muscles hardened. And Corcoran, fair-skinned as he was, burned and burned again until he peeled like an egg and showed off the beginnings of his own tan.

And, of course, there was sex. Prok expected it—you couldn't very well hold back or risk being branded prudish or sex shy—and Corcoran and I complied, with varying levels of enthusiasm. I remember one night—we were in a motor court in Las Vegas, New Mexico, flush with the heady triumph of having arrived safe and sound and looking forward to our rendezvous with the exemplary Mr. X in the morning—when I walked in on Prok and Corcoran stretched naked across the bed. Prok glanced up, disengaged himself, and said, “Milk, come join us.”

Did I want to? Honestly? No, not then. It was too complicated, what with the auras of Iris, Violet and Mac hovering over the scene and my own limited H-history, but Prok could be extraordinarily charming and persuasive and there were no hidebound moral strictures or antiquated notions of fidelity to hold us back, not here in a New Mexico motel, not anywhere, not in Bloomington or Indianapolis or New York, and so, in the end, I acquiesced. Why? I suppose because it was just easier that way. Certainly that was part of it, but to be honest, there was more to it than that: I loved him. I did. Not in the way I loved Iris, perhaps, or even Mac, but in a deeper way, in the way a patriot loves his country or a zealot his God, and if that love meant molding my needs to his, then so be it.