The Inner Circle (52 page)

Everything was ready for us, camera, lights, mise-en-scène and a cast of hundreds, the young blond hustler at the head of the line awaiting the signal even as he chatted up those immediately behind him. “First, first,” he kept insisting, as we squeezed our way into the room, “I do first, and then I go out and bring more custom, ja?”

Prok gave him a judicious look. Then he separated two bills from the wad of singles he extracted from his pocket and handed them over. “Yes,” he told him, “yes, good thinking,” and the eyes of the men in the hallway fastened on us as if to memorialize the transaction: this was for real, and so was the money.

Roy and Aspinall had pushed the furniture back against the wall and
created a stage in the center of the room by means of spreading a sheet over the carpet and positioning the lights and camera above it—the idea was for each subject to disrobe, lie on his back on the floor and consummate his business as expeditiously as possible, and the photographers had provided a small mountain of pornographic magazines, both of the homosexual and heterosexual variety, as a stimulus. Aspinall hovered in his trench coat and dark glasses, fidgeting over the equipment, while Roy escorted us to the three chairs he'd set up just out of camera range, and then the filming began.

We'd budgeted five minutes per man, one after the other coming in, removing his clothes and taking his position on the floor even as the man before him vacated it, a kind of assembly line, but it soon became apparent that we would have to find some means of speeding things up because there were the inevitable delays, subjects unable to perform for the camera, those who needed extra time, a trip to the bathroom and so on. After the first couple of hours we came to realize that just the undressing itself was taking too much time—thirty seconds, forty, a minute—and Prok asked Roy if he wouldn't have the next several men in line undress in the hallway, distribute the magazines and prepare themselves, as much as possible, beforehand. Corcoran had maintained that it didn't make much difference whether the men were clothed or not—all that mattered, really, was the penis, the hand and the ejaculation—and I tended to agree, but Prok, accusing us of undermining the project, insisted on full-frontal nudity. “We want everything, technique, facial expression, the works,” he said in a tense whisper, even as the fiftieth or sixtieth subject was going at it on the increasingly soiled sheet, “because all of it is relevant—or will be relevant—in the long run. Jackknifing, for instance.”

“Jackknifing?” I said aloud, the man before us in the shaft of light pounding at himself as if he meant to tear the organ right out of his body, his expression hateful and cold, hair all over him, bunched on the backs of his knuckles and toes, creeping up over his shoulders and continuous from neck to hairline, an ape of a man, a chimpanzee, a gorilla, and if you think sex research is stimulating, believe me, after the initial
jolt—whether it be living sex or captured on film—a debilitating sameness sets in. We might as well have been counting salmon going upriver to spawn. It was past midnight. I stifled a yawn.

“Yes, of course. At orgasm. One percent of our sample reports it, and I should say, Milk, that you, of all people, should be aware of that fact. Very common in some of the lower animals. Rabbit, guinea pig.” Prok looked bored himself. Looked testy. He glanced at the man grunting on the floor, leaned over and said, in a soft voice, “If you could please just come now—”

We were there ten days in all, and toward the end we tried doubling up the sessions for the sake of expediency, and finally tripling them, Aspinall expertly maneuvering the camera from one subject to the other without once missing the climactic moment. I don't think any of us, no matter our degree of dedication, had even the slightest inclination to observe masturbation in the human male ever again, but Prok did finally get his one thousand subjects on film and was able, on the basis of it, to settle once and for all the question of the physiology of ejaculation. It was a job well done, if tedious—and expensive, coming to just over four thousand dollars in fees to the subjects and the little blond hustler, who must have been the best-heeled teenager in New York by the time we left—and we were in a mutually congratulatory mood in the train on the way back. I remember Prok springing for drinks as the dining car trawled the night and presented us with fleeting visions of dimly lit waystations and farmhouses saturated in loneliness. I had the fish, Prok the macaroni
au fromage,
and Corcoran the porterhouse steak. We grinned at each other throughout the meal, and Prok retired early to his berth to write up his observations while Corcoran and I sat up over cards in the club car, drinking cocktails and smoking cigars. I slept like one of the dead.

The next morning, after driving down from the station at Indianapolis (we'd taken my car so as to leave the Buick and Cadillac free for Mac and Violet, respectively), I dropped off Prok at the Institute and Corcoran at his place, then drove out to the farmhouse. I'd thought of
picking up a little gift for Iris—flowers, a box of candy, perfume—but hadn't got round to it, so I stopped at the market and wandered the aisles till I found something I thought she might like, and it represented a bit of an extravagance for us: a two-pound sack of California pistachios, salted and roasted in the shell. I was all the way up to the counter before I remembered John Jr., and I had to go back and dig a pint of Neapolitan ice cream out of the freezer, and then I wondered if Iris might not have run out of coffee or bread or eggs while I was gone, so I wound up getting some basic supplies too.

I pulled in under the canopy of the weeping willow out front, its remnant of yellowed branches hanging in a skeletal curtain, and already felt my mood sour. It was always this way. As much as I looked forward to seeing Iris and my son, as much as I held their faces before me as a kind of talisman during the tedious hours of travel and history-taking, the minute I pulled into the drive I saw a host of things that had been neglected in my absence, the trashcan overflowing at the rear of the house, the door to the basement left gaping, the tarp blown clear of the fire-wood. And more: she'd left the porch light burning, no doubt for the whole ten days, and that kind of waste just infuriated me. I bundled the groceries in one arm and took the suitcase in the other, and the first thing I did on mounting the steps was kick the deliquescing remains of a jack-o'-lantern off the corner of the porch. Which made a mess of my shoe. And then I had to fumble with the door, almost dropping the groceries in the process.

Inside, it was worse. She must have had the thermostat set at a hundred—more waste—and the chemical reek of ammonia from the cat's litter pan hit me like a fist in the face, and whose job was it to change
that
? There were toys and infant's clothes scattered round the living room, newspapers, spine-sprung books, knitting—and food, a smear of it, in two shades of apricot, on the new-painted, or recently painted, wall. I didn't say anything, didn't call out her name, just dropped the suitcase at the door, trudged out to the kitchen and set the groceries on the counter. And, of course, the kitchen was a story in itself. I tried to stay calm. I was tired, that was all—irritable, maybe a bit
hungry—and Iris had had her hands full, stuck out here all by herself, John Jr. in his roaming phase, getting into everything, needful, always needful. I tried, but even as I mounted the stairs to the bedroom, I could feel a dark knot of irascibility beating at my temples like something shoved under the skin, like a splinter and the hot needle to chase it down.

Iris was in bed, asleep, curled round the prow of her hip and the sharp terminus of her folded knees; John Jr. stood silently in the playpen at the foot of the bed, clutching the bars and staring at me as if I were a visitation out of the universal unconscious. He had Iris's eyes exactly. “Hey, champ,” I said, and I squatted down to poke my face in his, “Daddy's home.”

My son gave me a smile of sudden stunned recognition, followed by a gurgle of infantile transport, baby joy naked and unfeigned, and I took him under the arms and swung him out of the playpen even as the fecal odor swamped the room: he needed to be changed, had needed to be changed for some time. “Yes,” I cooed, “that's the boy,” and set him back on his feet behind the wooden slats of his gaudy prison. At which point, he began to wail.

“What?” Iris pushed herself up, struggling to focus. There were two parallel indentations on her cheek where her face had creased the pillow, red stripes that might have been wounds. She was in her nightgown still, though it was nearly noon. “John? Oh, God, you scared me.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I scare myself sometimes too.” I made no move toward her. John Jr. began to outdo himself, each shriek building on its predecessor like waves crashing in a storm.

“Here,” she said, holding out her arms, “give him here.”

I lifted the squalling bundle of him from the playpen, careful to avoid the wet spot at the crotch of his playsuit.
Playpen, playsuit, playmate, playtime:
more euphemisms. “He needs to be changed,” I said.

I watched her fussing over him, the shrieks subsiding into disconnected wails that were like the sound of shingles falling off a roof. The walls closed in on me. Everything was a mess, everything stank. “What,” I said, “are you sick?”

No, she wasn't sick, she wasn't sick at all. She'd never felt better—physically, that is.

So what was the problem?

She was depressed.

“
You're
depressed?” I loomed over the bed. Her face was small, a nugget, sidelong and averted. “What about me? I'm the one who had to sit in some rancid overheated room for ten days and watch a thousand men jerk off. You think that's fun? You think I like it?”

A silence. The tragic underlip. “Yes, John,” she said finally, her eyes fixed on mine, “I think you do. You do it with Prok, don't you? And Purvis? And half the tramps and male hustlers in, in—go ahead, hit me. Will that make you feel like a big man, huh, will it?”

I didn't hit her. I've never hit her and never will. And when I spoke earlier in pugilistic terms, of bouts and rounds, you have to understand that it was meant metaphorically, strictly metaphorically. Certainly we had our disagreements, like anyone else, but violence had no place in them, at least not physical violence. I just turned my back on her and stalked out the door. I might have kicked something against the wall in the living room, a teddy bear or a toy dump truck, I don't remember, and then I went out in the yard to have a smoke and let the dead gray November sky feed my mood.

Later, when we'd both cooled off, she got up and dressed and changed the baby. She made a real effort to tidy up the place—it just wasn't in her nature to let the housekeeping go, at least not for long—and she went out of her way to make a nice meal that night. I'd gone in to the Institute to put in half a day, and when I got back I must have dozed off, because I remember waking to the smell of something in the oven, and then Iris padded into the room—the living room; I was on the couch—and deposited a bathed and talcum-scented toddler in my lap, along with a glass of beer.

I played with John Jr. a moment, and then he got down and staggered off across the room to rummage among his dump trucks and steam shovels. “Listen, Iris,” I said, lifting my eyes to hers, “I'm sorry about this morning. I didn't mean—I was tired, that's all.”

Iris had her own glass of beer. She was wearing a gingham house-dress, blue and white, and her hair was up. “You were in a pretty foul mood,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm sorry.” I was thinking of the calculus of a relationship, how sex equals love equals babies, mortgages and cellar doors left ajar, and how love itself is nothing more than a hormonal function, purely chemical, like rage and hate. But I had a beer in my hand and a roof over my head, and my son was there, and my wife, and what more could anyone want? Other wives, other sons, other roofs? I felt charitable. Felt content. “But, hey,” I suggested, “how about if I build a fire? Would you like that?”

“Sure, that would be nice.” She was propped on the arm of the chair, one leg dangling, her pretty leg, her ankle, her foot in its trim felt slipper. “But, John, there's something I wanted to say to you—and don't give me that look because it's nothing like that. It's—well, I want you to teach me how to drive. Violet and Hilda drive everywhere—Violet says she'd be lost without her car—and even Mac, Mac drives, and if you're going to be gone all the time—”

“I'm not, I'm not gone all the time—and I'm not going to be.”

“—leaving me alone way out here for how long? Weeks at a time?”

“Ten days.”

“Okay, ten days. But I'm stuck here. What if the baby needs something? What if I run out of flour—which I did—or, I don't know, what if I just feel bored? Don't you know I get bored out here—don't you realize that?”

“You're the one who wanted the place.”

“You wanted it too.”

I stared into the black pit of the hearth. Cold ash there, the butt ends of charred sticks poking through like bones at the crematorium. Across the room, John Jr. was talking to his toy trucks. “Bad boy,” he was saying, over and over, “bad!” The ice cream was in the freezer, the pistachios still in the bag on the counter. I looked up at my wife. “When do you want your first lesson?”

If I was reluctant at first—forced into something I had neither the time nor the patience for—it took only one lesson for me to realize my mistake. I can't speak for Iris, but for me the next few weeks were some of the best times we'd ever had, John Jr. in my lap, Iris at my side, focused
and intent, her hands locked on the wheel even as she negotiated the perdurable mysteries of clutch and accelerator. We memorized the back roads, watched the hills roll at us, one after another, like waves on a concrete sea, and we went where the mood took us, stopping for a milkshake or a hot dog or just to wander up a streambed and share a sandwich on a fallen log. Then it was back in the car, the clutch, the accelerator, jerk forward and stall, grind the ignition, the clutch, the accelerator, jerk forward and stall again. I don't know what it was, something to do with her fragility, I suppose, with her very narrow and specific need and my ability to direct it—“Turn left,” I would say, “stop here; third gear; put it in reverse”—but I cherished that time. I never lost my temper, never raised my voice, not even when she swerved off the road to avoid a hell-bent squirrel and put three long gouges in the right front fender.