The Inner Circle

1

I don’t think any of us — not Prok, my fellow members of the inner circle, President Wells, the NRC or even the W.B. Saunders Company, Philadelphia, the book’s publisher — was quite prepared for the furor that greeted publication of the male volume in January of 1948. Prok had chosen Saunders, a staid and colorless publisher of medical texts, over the big commercial houses in New York (and believe me, once word was out, they all came knocking), in a conscious effort to avoid any sort of misguided marketing effort or sanguine publicity that might cheapen or sensationalize our findings. Above all, what we wanted was to be regarded as scientists, to legitimize the field of sex research and elevate it to its proper place among the behavioral sciences, and yet at the same time there was a real reformer’s zeal in Prok that made him want to deliver up our results to the widest possible audience. And so, yes, he did arrange for press interviews — press conferences, actually — so that the word would get out, but in a sober, rational and controlled way. And he chose Saunders to produce the book in a plain, no-nonsense hardcover volume that was indistinguishable from any other scientific or medical compendium sitting forgotten on the back shelves of bookstores, libraries and physicians’ offices. It sold for $6.50, or more than twice what the average book retailed for at the time. There were 804 pages, including appendices, tables, bibliography and index. And it was dedicated, soberly enough, “To the twelve thousand persons who have contributed to these data and to the eighty-eight thousand more who, someday, will help complete this study.”

“Sober,” “staid,” “clinical”—no matter what adjective you want to use, the press wasn’t having it. Every magazine and newspaper in the country exploded with sensational headlines—“50 % OF MARRIED MEN UNFAITHFUL!” “PREMARITAL INTERCOURSE RAMPANT!” “KINSEY SAYS MEN REACH PEAK TEN YEARS AHEAD OF WOMEN!”—and that sort of thing, always in caps and tailed by the flogging exclamation point. The book began to fly out of the shops, 40,000 copies in the first two weeks, and it was soon topping bestseller lists across the country. By March, there were 100,000 copies in print, and by June 150,000. Time magazine called it the biggest thing since Gone With the Wind. And Prok, who’d authored every last word of it, was suddenly ubiquitous, his face staring out from the pages of every publication you could imagine, and his words — his statistics, our statistics — on everybody’s lips. In fact, things grew so out of control that we could barely get in and out of the offices without a press of reporters, admirers and sensation seekers trying to run us down, and work on the project came to a decided halt for those first few months. (And can anyone forget those jukebox ditties, Martha Raye with her “Ooh, Dr. Kinsey,” and Julie Wilson with “The Kinsey Report,” and worst of all, “The Kinsey Boogie”?)

For me, it was nothing short of hellish. I’ve never been comfortable in front of a camera and while I do think I can hold my own as an interviewer on the job, as an interviewee I’m afraid I’m a bust. (“You’re just shy, John,” Iris would tell me, “not sex shy, just plain shy.”) It was hard on Mac too. While the reporters tried to corner me and Corcoran — and Rutledge, because he’d joined us by this time — we were able to present a united front, and in the eyes of the press we were subsidiary in any case, mere sidemen to Prok’s bandleader, but Mac was left exposed. If Sexual Behavior in the Human Male revealed men for what they were — human animals engaging in a whole range of activities, from anal intercourse to extramarital affairs and relations with nonhuman animals — then what was it like to live with the man who routinely quantified and correlated all this behavior? What was the woman’s perspective on it?

In interview after interview, Mac bore up under the pressure and scrutiny as if she’d been born to it, but I knew different. It wasn’t that she was reticent, like me, but simply that she’d always seen her role as an accommodator, as Prok’s helpmeet, and she felt that the reward for all his tireless work and the genius of his conception should be entirely his, all the glory and the limelight, and that she should stand in the background and let him have his due. But they wouldn’t let her. The women’s magazines especially—McCall’s, Redbook, Cosmopolitan. They were mad to feast on the details, to get in under her skin, poking and probing and hoping against hope to turn up something odd and out of the ordinary, something outré their readers could latch on to in order to put all this male business in perspective. He counted orgasms and he had a wife. Who was she? Who was she really?

Mac invited them into the house, one and all, to let them answer the question for themselves — she was just an ordinary housewife, that was all, no different from any of their readers, except that her husband went off to the Sex Institute every morning while theirs packed lunches for the factory or the downtown office — and she baked the journalists cookies and persimmon tarts and sat knitting in her rocker by way of demonstration. When they asked if her lifestyle wasn’t about to change, if she wouldn’t soon become wealthy off the royalties from the book and start swathing herself in furs and hiring maids to do the cooking and cleaning and child-rearing, she pointed out, dourly, that all proceeds from Sexual Behavior in the Human Male were pumped back into the Institute and that they never saw a penny of it, that, in fact, the book had cost them money because the writing of it had prevented Prok from revising his biology textbook, which at least would have brought them a small yearly something. Just take a look at Prok’s wardrobe, she told them — he’s only got one decent suit to his name. Rich? They were anything but. In fact, Mac projected exactly what Prok expected her to: a kind of safe and sterile warmth that would keep the critics at bay and the housewives of America satisfied to the point at which some of them might even begin to feel a little superior. It was a bravura performance.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Why I bring it up at this juncture is to impress on you how vital it was for us to keep our activities secret — for all of us — and never to let slip even the faintest hint of impropriety or behavior that anyone could fasten on as deviating from the norm in any way. Thus, we were all married, and to all appearances happily married, and we all had children. We had to present an unimpeachable front to the public — we were the sex researchers and we were absolutely and rigorously normal, no prurience here, no wife-swapping or sadomasochism or sodomy on our platters — but as the years went by, and the public scrutiny intensified, it became ever more problematic. And Prok. Prok seemed to enlarge into his role, to try ever increasingly and recklessly to push the boundaries both personally and professionally, and in the later years we were all waiting for the roof to fall in, for Prok to be arrested and shackled and hauled off to the flash of photographers’ cameras for soliciting sex in a public restroom or engaging in immoral acts at one of the bath houses he increasingly frequented on our field trips. It never happened. I suppose a part of it can be attributed to luck, but he was cautious for the most part, never admitting anyone into the inner circle unless he was absolutely sure of him, and on top of that there was the impregnability of the persona he presented to the public. He was Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, father of three, contentedly married, above suspicion or even rumor. He built a fortress around us, data compacted into stone, stone piled atop stone, and we all climbed up hand-over-hand to man the battlements.

And so, when Violet Corcoran did come to town and she and the girls had had a chance to settle in, Prok made a point of hosting a small gathering at Bryan Park for just the six of us and the children — it was his way, I think, of smoothing over any potential situation that might arise among us and of reinforcing our bond as well. That was one of the things about working with Prok, about being his protégé—he always managed to make each of us feel a vital part of the enterprise, wives included, as if we were members of a secret society, which, in some respect, I suppose we were. And the children were a part of it too — they might not have understood what was going on among the adults, but they did, I’m sure, appreciate that they were bound up in something unique.

There was an easygoing, friendly feel to our outdoor gatherings, a familial current that was prominently, but never artificially, on display. We had children, just like anyone else — Prok’s and the Corcorans’, and later the Rutledges’ and John Jr. — and if our neighbors should see us gathered there in public over a smoking grill, the older children kicking a ball while the younger picked buttercups or climbed trees, we were recognized as performers in the rite of the familiar and all was understood and all forgiven. People might say, Oh, look there’s Dr. Sex with his wife and children and his colleagues and their children too, roasting wieners on a stick like anybody else, and the children have their bicycles with them, look at that, and I’ll bet the ants’ll have a high old time of it, don’t you? We picnicked a lot in those days.

But back to that particular gathering, at Bryan Park, the first to include the Corcorans en famille. Iris didn’t want to go. She categorically refused, in fact, at least at first. Prok had guillotined her affair. He’d talked to her behind closed doors — lectured her, berated her — and she’d listened to him only because it meant my job if she didn’t, but she was resentful, and though I don’t like to think about it even now, she was in love. Still. With Corcoran. I woke up early that Saturday and went to the grocer’s while our biggest pot rattled on the stove with the tumbling diced wedges of the potatoes I’d peeled the night before, and another, smaller pot seethed with eggs cooking hard in their shells, and yet I can’t say I was looking forward to the picnic myself. I’d been tentative around Iris ever since the confrontation at the office, and I felt we were just beginning to make progress, to appreciate each other again in a tender and loving way, and I didn’t want to do anything to threaten it.

When I got back from the store she was still in her dressing gown, the Victrola turned up too loud and Billie Holiday annihilating all hope, phrase by phrase, bar by bar, with her unfathomable lisping sorrow. I heard that voice and I felt like pulling out a gun and shooting myself, but Iris was at the table, slicing egg and chopping onion, and when I came through the door she looked up and gave me a rueful smile. I didn’t say anything for fear of breaking the spell, just set the bag on the table — mayonnaise, in the twelve-ounce jar, paprika, apple cider vinegar — and went into the bedroom to dig out an old blanket to spread on the grass. We’d talked the night before about the practical importance of accepting the invitation — Prok wanted us there and we were going to have to go, it was part of the job, part of the commitment — and I could see that Iris was softening. Yes, it would be awkward, we both admitted that, and, yes, Violet Corcoran would be there, but we had to move forward, get it over with, get it out of our systems, didn’t we?

I’d been sitting at the foot of the bed, idly plucking at the raised pattern of the bedspread while Iris lay propped against the headboard, her feet splayed before her, beautiful feet, high-arched and bobby-socked, feet that I loved as I loved every part of her. I wanted to make amends, wanted her back, fully, in body and soul both.

“We’re above all this, Iris,” I argued, “we are. Truly. Sex is one thing and marriage another. Commitment. Love. That’s what we have. There’s just no room for raw emotion in this business, and you know it as well as I. We’re professionals. We have to be.” I’d paused then, studying her face, but she was staring down at the book in her lap and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Besides,” I said, “if anyone should get, well, emotionally upset, you’d think it would be me — and Violet. What about her? Shouldn’t she be the injured party? Because, if — well, you know what I mean.”

She’d looked up then, the outflow of her eyes, the faintest ripples of irony at the corners of her mouth. “Yes, John,” she said, “you’re the injured party, you, always you.”

“That’s not fair,” I said, “and you know it.”

She shifted her weight to draw her legs up to her chest, as if to protect herself. She gave me a long look, then dropped her eyes. I could have said more, could have made accusations, but there was no point.

“That’s not fair,” I repeated.

It took her a moment, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “I know it,” she said.

But now she was chopping onion and preparing to anoint the diced potatoes with vinegar and mayonnaise, and when that was done and the potato salad crowned with sliced egg and a dusting of paprika, she was going to stride into the bedroom and put on a pair of shorts and a blouse and we were going to heft the picnic basket and amble down the street together, like lovers. From the bedroom, I heard Billie Holiday parsing her misery.

Prok was in a high state of excitement that day — he’d been communicating with a man in his sixties whose serial sexual feats dwarfed even the most prodigious we’d encountered for variety and continuity both and the man had indicated that he might be amenable to an interview — and he radiated his delight all over Iris, giving her his biggest Prok-smile, bending from the waist like a mock courtier to kiss her hand, and he clapped my shoulder and called me John and avowed that we were on to great things now, great things and getting greater. Mac and Iris embraced gingerly, in the way of war veterans, as if they were afraid of tearing open each other’s wounds, and then we turned to the fire, which Prok had already built to a controlled inferno, thinking, in his ever-efficient way, of the coals it would furnish when it was time to lay the chops and bratwurst on the grill.

I was watching Iris when the yellow convertible pulled up on the street across from the park. Corcoran was at the wheel, smiling like an ambassador, already waving, Violet regal beside him, and the two girls, Daphne and Lucy, emerging from the car in identical pink dresses and with the perfectly composed faces of the innocent. Iris might have been paler than usual, might have seemed thinner and smaller, as if she’d been reduced inside her clothes, but when Violet had made her way across the expanse of the field, her shoulders thrust back and her breasts pointing the way, Iris took her hand and smiled and made small talk without missing a beat. And Corcoran. She looked him right in the face, gave him her brightest, fullest, most rigidly unwavering smile and small-talked him too, and before long we were all sitting on the blanket listening to Prok and sipping punch while the sun graced us and the Corcorans’ girls played decorously in the distance.

Prok, as I’ve said, was a great camper, and he took delight in squatting before the fire and looking to the slow incineration of the various cuts of meat he’d laid out on the grill (little of which he’d eat himself — he hated any foods he considered dry, and that included steaks and chops which were overcooked, and, I’m sorry to say, when he was at the grill everything was overcooked). The scent of the open fire brought me back to our honeymoon and the first meals Iris and I had prepared together, and back even further, to my boyhood and the woods behind the house, and maybe the others were having similar thoughts, the day lazy and serene and the smoke drifting out over the lawn in running tatters. Any small tensions we might have felt seemed to dissipate, everyone gradually unwinding as the afternoon wore on, and I was able to help there because I’d secreted a bottle of bourbon in the depths of our picnic basket, and when Prok wasn’t looking I poured stiff little pick-me-ups into everyone’s cups, except his, because he wouldn’t have approved of our drinking in public with the family gathered.

Violet, especially, seemed to relax into the day, both hands cradled behind her head as she stretched out her abbreviated but extremely robust body on the blanket, and Corcoran was his usual insouciant self, entertaining us with jokes and quips as he pulled at his cup and sucked the bourbon and fruit juice from his upper lip. Iris didn’t get drunk — or not that it showed — but she did seem to climb down the ladder from a kind of edgy animation to an enveloping quiet that might have been interpreted as contentment or surfeit, and she too stretched out in the sun on her own corner of the blanket while Prok chattered on and Corcoran and I bantered in quiet tones and Mac pulled out her knitting and mutely counted stitches in a dapple of shade. As for me, I was beginning to think that the world that had so recently seemed skewed away from its axis had all at once come back into alignment. My colleagues were taking their ease and so was I. I felt the sun like a benediction on my face. All was well.

Until we’d eaten, that is, and the first clouds — both actual and metaphorical — closed over the day. With the cloud cover came a slight chill, and we slipped into sweaters and jackets (all except for Prok, who was bare-chested and — footed and barely contained by his khaki hiking shorts). Violet called her daughters to her to help them into matching knit pullovers while Prok’s children said their goodbyes and walked off in the direction of home. The other cloud fell over us after we’d split into two groups on either side of the fire, which Prok had built up again for the sake of warmth and the little girls’ delectation in the toasting of marshmallows. Mac, Iris and Corcoran were seated on one side of the fire, their faces distorted by the thermal currents rising from the flames, and Prok, Violet and I were on the other.

The afternoon was getting on, shadows lengthening, the sun tugging itself toward the horizon as if there were something urgent about the process. Prok sat cross-legged, poking at the fire. He was talking about Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, the psychiatrist and author of A Research in Marriage, and how courageous the man was, but how flawed the results of his sex surveys (too small and selected a sample, results compromised by the researcher’s own preconceptions, moralizing, psychologizing, et cetera), when he suddenly fell silent and looked from me to Violet Corcoran and back again, as if he’d just remembered something. Violet was leaning back on her elbows now, her bare legs stretched out before her and crossed neatly at the ankle. I was sitting up, Indian-style, in unconscious imitation of Prok. Birds had begun to settle in the trees. From across the street came the crack of a baseball and the cries of several small boys racing after it.

Prok lowered his voice and leaned forward. “Do you know,” he said, “I was hoping you two might become better acquainted, for your own pleasure, of course”—a pause—“but don’t you agree that it would bring a kind of symmetry to our inter-relationships, that is, in light of your wife, John, and your husband, Violet, having enjoyed themselves together?”

He looked to me, then let his gaze rest on Violet. My heart began to misfire. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. My first thought was Has he gone crazy? but then almost immediately I began to understand that what he was proposing wasn’t crazy at all. Far from it.

Violet’s eyes were dark, nearly as dark as her hair, and they dominated her face. She was attractive, as I’ve said, if not particularly pretty, but there was something carnal in the way she held herself, the way she smiled and continually readjusted the set of her shoulders and breasts, almost as if it were a tic. I thought she might laugh or try to deflect the comment with a joke, but she surprised me. “Are you suggesting a liaison? Is that it, Prok?”

Prok never waffled, never vacillated — nothing embarrassed him, and he was continually pushing the limits so as to break those limits down; that was his crusade and he was a crusader at heart. “Yes,” he said, “that’s exactly it.”

I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at Violet. There was an old, familiar stirring in the crotch of my pants. I wanted to slow things down, hold the moment in abeyance—Had he actually said that? Was he pimping for me? — and I got my wish.

The two girls had been off playing tag in the field, their shouts riding high on the cooling air, but all at once they were right on top of us, their faces alive with hope, crying “Mommy, Mommy, can we toast marshmallows now? Can we?”

“Sure, honey,” Violet murmured to Lucy, the eldest, “but you’ll have to cut two green sticks — and sharpen the ends. Can you do that? And help your sister?”

Lucy’s face took on a sober look. “Yes,” she said, “I can do that. C’mon,” she said, turning to her sister, barely able to suppress the excitement in her voice, “let’s go find sticks!”

I stole a glance at Iris. She was smiling at something Mac was saying, and now Corcoran put his two cents in and she turned to him, oblivious, even as the wind shifted and the flames fanned and broke apart in a ragged ascending trail and the two little girls darted off into the trees.

Violet leaned away from the drift of smoke, propping herself up on one elbow to redistribute her weight. Her voice was soft and relaxed, and we might have been talking about a rubber of bridge or a swimming party. “It’s nothing to me,” she said, looking first to Prok — a long, slow, languid look — and then to me. “But I’m game if John is.”

It wasn’t long after — and I don’t recall when or how this came about exactly — that I was working late at the office on a series of new charts and tables incorporating updated data that Prok was eager to have. This was work that I especially enjoyed. I’d found that I had a talent for drawing, for squaring off the orthogonal angles and gently rising curves of our graphs, and as the new Hollerith calculating machine made tabulating data so much easier and our new secretary had assumed the lion’s share of the clerical duties, I had more time to devote to it. It must have been eight or so. The building was deserted. Insects of some sort — Prok would have known in an instant what they were — kept battering at the glass of the window, attracted by my light. I was in a state of suspension, so tightly focused on my work that I’d forgotten all about dinner and about Iris too — but she would have been busy cramming for her final exams in any case. My ruler framed the sheet before me, my pencil ticked off the figures. All was still.

On some level, I suppose, I might have been aware of the footsteps approaching from the far end of the hall, but that’s neither here nor there, because the first I knew that I was no longer alone was when I glanced up from my work and saw Violet Corcoran standing there in the doorway. She was wearing a stylish dress — belted, with an off-white front and collar and the back and sleeves a very dark navy — and she’d spent some time in the sun, deepening the color of her legs till it seemed as if she were wearing nylons (this was during the war, remember, and nylons were all but impossible to come by, and so women had taken to baby oil and to drawing that ersatz seam up the backs of their legs, from ankle to hemline, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first man to wonder just how much higher along the incline of the thigh that line was meant to reach). Her makeup was designed to accentuate the appeal of her out-sized eyes. She was short, Italian, busty. She came into the room without a word and perched herself on the edge of the desk.

“Oh, hello,” I said, glancing up from the page before me, expecting Iris, or maybe Prok dashing in for something he’d forgotten, and I had some trouble getting her name out, “hello … Violet.”

“Hi,” she breathed, and she threw her eyes to the ceiling and back again, as if the effort of the greeting had exhausted her. She brought her purse into view, clicked it open, and began fishing for cigarette and lighter, and I almost expected her to present me with a silver cigarette case, as if this were a scene out of the pictures, William Powell and Myrna Loy, or Bacall warming to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She took her time with the ritual of the tobacco, and I made a stab at small talk—“Going to rain tonight, isn’t that what they say?”—but I was hard already, hard instantaneously.

“Want one?” she asked, and I did, and she leaned in to light it for me.

For a moment, we just sat there, inhaling, exhaling, nicotine seeping through our veins and capillaries in the way of a shared secret. I knew what was coming — I’d pictured it since the afternoon of the picnic — but now that it was here, I felt tentative and unsure of myself.

“Listen,” she said, “John, I wanted to talk to you.” I watched her throw back her head and exhale, just like Bacall, and I realized she was as much aware of rehearsing a role as I was. A pulse of excitement leapt from my eyes to my groin.

“About Purvis,” she said. “He’s a free spirit, but I guess you already know that.” Her voice was pitched low. It had a soft, lulling quality, as if nothing were at stake here, as if we routinely shared the little wooden ship of my desk and sailed it out to sea in every sort of weather. “So am I — we both are. But we are married, and we intend to stay that way.” A pause, the manipulation of the cigarette, that tic with the shoulders and breasts. “I don’t know if Iris — if she fully appreciates that.”

“No,” I said, “I think she does, I think that’s all worked out now.”

“Because to be honest with you,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard me, “Purvis is worried about her — and so is Prok. Which is why I’m here.”

I set down the pencil — again, unconsciously — but I suppose it was so I could get a firmer grip on the edge of the desk. She was six years older than I. She had beautiful lips, lips and teeth — I’d never noticed that before — a beautiful smile. Her eyebrows were thick and unplucked, Italian eyebrows, and she was perched on the edge of my desk and the office was deserted. Motives didn’t interest me. I wasn’t suspicious. I wasn’t concerned about Iris or Corcoran or the quid pro quo that was being offered here — all I wanted was to watch her and absorb the soft purr of her voice and I didn’t care what the subject was. “So what do you think?” I said finally.

She gave a minute shrug, leaned over to tap the ash from her cigarette in the wastebasket beside the desk. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, straightening up now and adjusting her shoulders, “what do you think?”

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?”

2

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.

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.”

The room was dim, stifling, and Iris was there, seated on the sofa with another woman, the radio turned up loud and a dance band keeping the beat. There was cigarette smoke, there were cocktails, and as I set down the suitcase I saw that the other woman was Violet Corcoran, in a pair of shorts and a blouse that left her midriff bare.

“John?” Iris called, and her voice was slurred with drink, or maybe that was my imagination. “John? Is that you?” She was up out of the couch now, barefooted, in a pair of white shorts, and she ran to me and threw herself into my arms. “My God, I thought you’d never get here!” We kissed, hurriedly, frantically, and I tasted the alcohol on her tongue — gin — and the heat and surprise and exultation. “Violet,” she called, swinging away from me, “look who’s here!”

I don’t know if this is the time to mention it, but I should say that my relationship with Violet Corcoran, begun on that night in the office at Prok’s instigation, was never anything more than merely satisfactory. We came together — she had me inside of her practically before I could get my trousers down — and afterward we had a drink and I walked her home, and then we met in a motor court outside of town three or four times, but it all felt scripted and cold, and gradually we both came to understand that there was no need to pursue things further. I liked her. Truly, I did. She was effusive and genuine and I was glad to see her there keeping Iris company.

“The return of the wanderers,” Violet said, or something like it. She’d risen from the couch and was already gathering up her things. “I guess this means I’d better hightail it home for Purvis — and oh, God, the babysitter — but hi, John, and goodbye.” She gave a wink. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way of anything here—”

The screen door slammed behind her and we both turned to watch her skip down the walk even as a flash of lightning lit the room, followed by a dull rumble of thunder. It took me a moment to realize the radio was still on — static crackled from the speaker, followed by three quick incinerating bursts that were like a rudimentary code — and then the program went dead and everything was still. I could smell the edge of the wetness on the air, as if a swamp had been dredged and everything that had lain seething there had been drawn up into the atmosphere, fish, newts, turtles and tadpoles, the muck itself, and every plant left naked to the root. Nothing moved. The light was like poured metal. I turned to Iris, but she seemed strange to me, a dark and pretty stranger with bare feet and painted toenails staring out through the rusted grid of the screen door. The moment lengthened, stretched to the breaking point, and I have to admit I felt awkward there in my own house with my own wife, as if I were a stranger to her too. Finally, she turned to me, hands on her hips now — more body language — and said, “I guess you want a drink, huh? Or dinner. You want dinner?”

“Sure,” I said. “A drink would be nice. But we already, well, we stopped along the way, and — well, I missed you. I did. It was — I never expected it would be so long. It was Prok, you know that.”

Her eyes were moist — but they were more than moist, they were wet, overflowing. The breeze stirred the trees and rushed the door. “I feel like a war bride,” she said, letting her hands drop to her sides. “I might as well be. And you. You might as well be a soldier. On Tarawa or someplace. You might as well be dead.”

I said her name, softly, and I drew her to me and put my arms around her. I held her a moment, rocking with her in my arms, and then it all came out of her. She was crying — sobbing, actually — and I could feel the tug and release of emotion running through her like a new kind of heartbeat geared to some other system altogether. “I missed you too,” she whispered.

Ten minutes later we were nestled on the couch, watching the rain sweep the street and bow the trees. The smell of rot faded as soon as the storm broke, replaced now with an astringent freshness out of the north, clear pellets dropping down from the troposphere to beat tinnily at the gutters and saturate the patch of lawn out front. Iris had made me a bourbon and water and another gin and tonic for herself. We were celebrating — drinking to my return — but it didn’t feel like a celebration. It felt sad and unformed, and I wanted to take her into the bedroom and show her in the most elemental way how much I’d missed her, but that wouldn’t have been right, not yet. First we had to talk things out.

“He was disgusting, wasn’t he?”

“Who?”

“Your Mr. X.”

I had to give her this. I sipped my drink and nodded slowly. She’d put something on the stove for me, out of duty, I suppose, though I’d reiterated that I wasn’t hungry — at least not for food — and the lid of the pot rattled as whatever it was came to a boil. “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose.”

“I’ll bet Prok loved him.”

“Prok doesn’t make those judgments, you know that.”

She said nothing, and we both stared out at the rain. “Tortillas,” she said after a while, enunciating a hard l where she should have elided, “they’re Mexican, is that it?”

“Tortee-yas,” I said. “Yes, that’s right. They have them in Texas. New Mexico too.”

“What are they like, pancakes?”

“A little, I guess. They’re flat. Like unleavened bread. They make them out of flour or cornmeal, pat them with their hands — the Indians and Mexicans — and then they put a filling inside or use them to scoop up beans and rice and whatnot.”

She was silent a moment, sipping at her drink. “Pretty exotic, huh? You’re not going to turn Mexican on me, are you? With what — a serape, isn’t that what they call them, and a sombrero? What do I call you, Don John? Or Don Juan, would that be better?”

I leaned in to kiss her. “Don Juan will do nicely. But I wish you were there to taste them, and the frijoles and salsa too. And these things they call tamales, wrapped up in corn husks. You’d like them. You would.”

She shrugged. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure I would. If I ever got to go anyplace.”

“You will,” I said. “I promise.”

“When? We can’t afford a vacation. It’s a joke. And my mother — just to visit her, just the bus fare puts a strain on the budget. No, John, you can keep your tortee-yas.”

The rain seemed to intensify then, a crashing fall that silenced everything. I didn’t want to bicker, didn’t want anything to interfere with the unalloyed pleasure of seeing her again and the prospect of sex, marital relations, the two of us in bed together after five long weeks of enforced abstinence, and I was on fire to touch her, undress her, put my tongue in her mouth and lose my fingers in her hair. I leaned forward to light a cigarette, trying to figure what I could do to defuse the situation. She was bitter, I could understand that. She felt deserted, felt that life was passing her by while I was off experiencing it to the full — which wasn’t true, not by a long shot, as I think I’ve made clear here. The problem wasn’t unique. Any man who traveled for a living, whether he was in the service or in sales or meteorology or the railroad industry, had of necessity to leave his wife behind for long stretches at a time — that was just the nature of certain professions.

Mac had the same problem, and she’d found a way to deal with it. Though she never let it slip in public, I knew she was frustrated — she wanted to be included too, but Prok made a fraternity of his research and she turned to the children and her knitting and the Girl Scouts in compensation. The closest she ever came to criticism, to my knowledge, was a phrase she let slip in one of the women’s magazines after the male volume had come out. She’d been asked about Prok and his travels and if his devotion to research didn’t make things hard on her, and her answer was telling: “I hardly see him at night since he took up sex.” Everyone had laughed — Clara Kinsey had come up with a bon mot — but I saw the truth of it.

One time — and this was after Rutledge had joined us and the Kinsey children were grown and out of the house — Mac came along with us on one of our expeditions, just to participate, to do something other than housework for a change. I can’t recall now where it was, some uninspiring midwestern college town, no doubt, a place little different from Bloomington, and it was probably winter too, so that even the scenery was unrelieved. We checked into a hotel, the usual arrangement, and got two adjoining rooms, Prok, Mac, Rutledge and I, Corcoran having stayed behind to man the fort at the Institute. Mac entertained herself as best she could while we recorded our interviews — she might have gone to the snowbound park or poked in at the library or a thrift shop, I don’t know. Afterward, we had a late supper and went up to the rooms, where I assumed Prok and Mac would retire and leave Rutledge and me to fend for ourselves. But Prok was especially keyed up that night, pacing round the floor and going on about his enemies — their legions had grown over the years — and some of the oddities that had come up in the interviews that day. And films. He was just then pioneering the use of film in recording the mating habits of various species of animal, and I remember he was particularly excited about the work of a Professer Shadle at the University of Buffalo, who had apparently documented the reproductive behavior of captive porcupines. “Porcupines!” Prok kept exclaiming. “Can you imagine that? With all that defensive armor? And yet they still, of course, manage coitus, or where would the species be?”

Mac was right there with him, never shy about expressing her views, and Rutledge was fully engaged too, interjecting opinions, pulling his chin over this thought or that, waving his hands in expostulation; I was content to sit back with a Coca-Cola and listen, though I wished I could have lit up a cigarette. (About Rutledge: he was a Princeton Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, thirty-eight years old, a neat, limber man with a slight stoop and a sardonic grin who wore a wire-thin mustache in homage to his Iberian ancestry on his mother’s side, and maybe even to Duke Ellington too. For what it’s worth, incidentally, Prok detested all facial hair, arguing that only someone with something to hide would want to mask his features.) After a while, the subject turned from porcupine sex to human sex and Prok’s usual gloss on the mores of the day — we were all too inhibited, he insisted, even those of us in the highest ranks of sex research, those of us right there in that very room. “Oh, really?” Rutledge put in, rising to the bait. “How so?”

“Take Mac, for instance,” Prok said, catching himself up in midstride. “Here’s an engaging, desirable woman sitting right here with us as we jaw on about sex, and we haven’t given a thought to taking advantage of the situation, now have we?”

“What do you mean?” Rutledge was leaning against the far wall, an empty soft-drink bottle and a half-eaten hamburger sandwich on the bureau beside him. Two quick nervous fingers went to his mustache.

“To enjoy ourselves with her, obviously. You’re willing, aren’t you, Mac?”

Mac, seated in the armchair with her knitting, glanced up sharply, then looked away. She murmured something that sounded like assent, and I felt myself go numb. I couldn’t look at her. I wanted to get up out of the chair, push through the door and go out into the dark streets of a city I didn’t know and didn’t care about and just walk till my legs gave out. It wasn’t jealousy I was feeling, but something else altogether, something I couldn’t have put in words if you’d asked me.

“Oh, but that hardly proves anything — that’s just convention.”

Prok’s eyes were glowing. “My point exactly.”

There was some further debate, Mac’s opinion solicited, mine, the ball going back and forth between Rutledge and Prok, but ultimately Prok made a challenge of it: either we expressed ourselves sexually, without inhibition, or we proved his point. “Actions speak louder than words, wouldn’t you agree?”

Was she enthusiastic? I couldn’t read her, but all traces of her girlishness had vanished and she’d put on her objective face — this wasn’t what she’d come for, wasn’t what she’d expected. Rutledge — he was married, the father of two — seemed nonplussed. “But go ahead,” Prok insisted, “enjoy yourselves — Rutledge, you’re the new man, why don’t you go first?”

What I’m trying to indicate here is that Iris’s feelings were by no means unique, though I understood and wanted only to placate her, to love and support her and give her everything I had to offer, emotionally and physically both. “Iris,” I said, “come on. Let’s not fight.”

“Keep them,” she said, even as the thunder rattled the windows and drummed at the walls, “and all the rest of your Mexican delicacies.” Her face was featureless in the dimming light. “I can eat meat loaf.”

“Are you listening to yourself? That’s ridiculous. You don’t have to—”

“Or salt pork. Or hardtack,” she said, and she was smiling now, her beautiful smile, enriched with softness and sympathy. “Give me hardtack any day.”

I reached out and stroked the back of her hand. “Okay, point taken. I’ll never mention tortillas again.”

Before she could respond there came a plaintive choked cry from the kitchen, something very like a cat’s mewing, followed by the thump of a compact body springing from sink to floor, and in the next moment the bead curtains parted and I found myself staring into the unblinking yellow gaze of the biggest tomcat I’d ever seen. “What’s that?” I asked stupidly.

“A cat. His name’s Addison.”

“You’re kidding,” I said.

She ignored me. “Here, Addison. Come here, boy,” she cooed, and the cat, which had frozen at the sight of me, began to inch across the carpet on its abdomen. When it reached the couch it sprang up with a practiced leap and settled down in her lap.

“But we can’t have a cat. You know I’m allergic, and its food — it’s an expense. I mean, who’s going to pay for the food?”

The cat had begun to purr, a ratchety shifting of breath from nostrils to larynx to lungs and back again. She was stroking the thing. “I need company, John.”

I said nothing. The rain drooled from the gutters.

“If you’re not going to be here, that is — and I don’t think you have anything to say about it, not being gone, what, thirty-four days? In a row? Without so much as a phone call?”

It would have been fitting for a thunderclap to shake the house then, but it didn’t come. Or maybe it did. Maybe I’m misremembering.

“And there’s another thing. And I don’t care what you say.” She brought her face to mine, closing the gap over the cat and the hand that was stroking him instead of me, her eyes hovering, her lips, her teeth, the sweet scent of her breath. “I want a baby, John. I’ve made up my mind.”

And now it came—Boom! — and everything rattled, right on down to the dishes in the cupboard and the knives in the drawer.

3

Things settled down for a while after that — or settled into a routine, at any rate. We traveled a bit less frequently that fall, as a threesome, that is, Prok and Corcoran going off on two separate jaunts to New York and Philadelphia, making contacts and bagging histories along the way, and in their absence I punched the clock and focused on the affairs of the Institute. I didn’t mind. It was good to be home and spending more time with Iris, though of course I was still on the road a great deal and when I wasn’t, I have to confess I did miss the excitement of the chase. In some ways, I suppose, a habituation to routine and the quiet, ordered life was suited to my temperament, but there was another part of me altogether that yearned for the road, for adventure, and once Prok had opened up that world to me I could never get enough of it.

As for the Institute, though we wouldn’t incorporate for three years yet, we were growing in prestige and autonomy both, and along with our full-time secretary — the formidable Mrs. Bella Matthews — we’d taken on part-time clerical help as well, and this necessitated shifting things around to fit another desk in the offices, Mrs. Matthews going into the anteroom and the part-timers finding space alongside Corcoran. The library, all of it acquired at Prok’s personal expense and already running to some five thousand items — books in the field, photographs, artwork, sex diaries and the like — had taken over every available inch of space in the inner office and a locked, windowless spare room down the hall that once had been used to store lab equipment. To say that we were cramped for space would be an understatement. Even more pressing was the need for “more hands,” as Prok put it — that is, another researcher to assist in collecting the new and astonishing figure of one hundred thousand histories he was now determined to record.

To that end, we had begun to send out feelers to various academic institutions — and Prok tirelessly canvassed his colleagues around the country in an attempt to attract a candidate who would reflect well on our research. At that point, I had only a baccalaureate to my name, and Corcoran his Master’s, and so Prok had his sights set on an older man — in his thirties, that is — with a Ph.D. in the social sciences or psychology, and from a prestigious university. He himself, of course, was a Harvard man, and though he never said as much in an effort to spare our feelings, he was looking for someone whose credentials and affiliation could balance out our rather pedestrian state university degrees. As I recall, we did conduct some interviews through the fall and into the spring of the following year—1945—but the response wasn’t what we’d hoped for. The war was still in progress, after all, and the vast majority of the workforce still employed by Uncle Sam.

On the home front — the personal home front, that is, in the kitchen, living room and bedroom of the apartment Iris and I shared at 619 Elm Street — things began to even out as well. Every marriage experiences growing pains, and certainly we’d had ours, but now I was home, or home more frequently than I had been, and I was determined to make up for past mistakes. I made a real effort to be there on time for dinner each night, even if it meant getting to the office earlier in the morning in order to accommodate the workload; I tried to talk more about literature, art, current events, and less about Prok and sex; I gave up going to the tavern after work and attempted to help around the house as much as I could, though I have to admit I was no paragon here — but I was trying, at least I was trying. Over time, I even began to tolerate the cat. And if I balked initially over the issue of having a child (the usual excuses: we were too young, we couldn’t afford it, a cat was one thing and a baby another), I recalled my moment of clarity at the Fillmore School, children, children everywhere, and it wasn’t long before I began to come round to Iris’s way of thinking.

That first night was a trial, though, and I don’t mind admitting it. We didn’t seem to be communicating, not at all, and I should have been more sympathetic, but I was exhausted, both physically and mentally, and I wasn’t at my best. Far from it. Just as she was softening, at the very moment I was about to dig the bracelet out of my suitcase and make everything right again, the cat came between us and somehow the cat managed to metamorphose into a hypothetical child. “I want a baby, John,” she said, and I didn’t even think, didn’t hesitate or bother with the emotional calculus, just said no. And Iris, with the pot rattling on the stove and I don’t know how much gin in her, not to mention the residue of an afternoon’s gossip with Violet Corcoran, threw it back at me. “Fine,” she said, “if that’s how you feel you can sleep right here on the couch then, because you’re not coming near me, not even for a touch, a kiss, nothing. You hear me?”

And that was it, the end of our joyful reunion. She took the cat into the bedroom and slammed the door and I went out to the nearest bar and drank bourbon in a corner all by myself while people crowded around the radio and listened to news of the war and I seethed and ached and went faint with lust for her, for my own wife, five weeks away from home and no sex, no affection, nothing but rancor and a cat. I was furious. Heartbroken. Disgusted with myself and with her too — with marriage, the whole corrupt and coercive institution. Prok was right: man was pansexual, and it was only convention — law, custom, the church — that kept him from expressing himself with any partner that came along, of whatever sex or species. Marriage was a ball and chain. It was slavery. And it sanctioned nothing but acrimony. I walked home in the rain, haunted by lust, slept on the couch and woke with a hangover. I was gone before she got up.

At work, I tried to solicit Prok’s advice, but he was moving at light speed, flying from his desk to mine and Corcoran’s and Mrs. Matthews’s and back again, five weeks of accumulated correspondence and metastasizing problems to conquer and all in a single day, because with Prok nothing could wait till tomorrow. It was late in the afternoon before I was finally able to corner him. He’d gone to the lavatory — with a file of papers in one hand and his fountain pen in the other — and I waited at the door for him. When he emerged five minutes later, chin down, shoulders squared, in his usual headlong rush, I made as if I were on the way to the lavatory myself and just happened to run into him. “Oh,” I said, “Prok, hello. But do you have a minute? I wanted to, well, have a word with you, if that’s all right, if you have time, that is—”

As I’ve said, of all the individuals I’ve ever known, Prok was the most rigorously attuned to the subconscious signals people give out when they’re distressed or angry or simply trying to cover up their feelings. He would have made a master detective. Now he just gave me a look — the sudden blue fastening of the eyes, the flash of the spectacles — and said, “Problems at home?”

“No,” I said. “Or, yes, in a way.”

A pair of biology professors — a zoologist in a lab coat and a botanist in shirtsleeves — stepped round us on their way to the lavatory and we both paused a moment to greet them. Once the door had closed, Prok turned back to me, his expression mild and receptive. “Yes,” he said, “go on.”

“Iris wants a baby.”

He lifted his eyebrows. The grin — the famous grin — sprang to his lips. “That’s marvelous news,” he said. “Simply marvelous. Is she pregnant?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “No, no. She just — last night, I mean.”

“I understand,” he said, taking me by the hand. “It’s a big step. But it’s all part of the natural progression, John, nothing to worry over. Children are a joy, you’ll see. And if it’s money you’re worried about, I’m sure we can make some sort of arrangement when the time comes.”

“It’s not that. It’s more the principle. I slept on the couch last night.”

He said nothing to this, just held my eyes, awaiting the sequel, as if I were one of his interviewees.

“It was because of our trip, that we extended it, that is. She got a cat — for company, she claims — and now she brings up this other issue.”

“Of a child.”

“Yes. But I resent it. I’m not ready to take on the responsibility, Prok, and even if I was, she’s making it a demand, and she says she won’t, well, she won’t sleep with me until I give in. That’s what she said.”

Prok took a moment to remove his spectacles and polish them on his handkerchief, the file tucked under one arm. He let out a sigh. “There’s give and take in every marriage,” he said, replacing the spectacles on the bridge of his nose and neatly folding up the handkerchief, square by square, “but my advice is to reclaim your rightful place in the marital bed. I’m not going to tell you to rush into anything, but a child might be just what you need at this juncture, as a maturing factor. I’ve been more than pleased with your work, you know that, but there’s always room for improvement and I can’t help but think that fatherhood — the direct experience of it, reproduction, John, your genes passed on to another generation — will make you an even more sympathetic interviewer, in the long run, that is. Don’t you agree?”

All the way home, I rehearsed a little speech for Iris. I was going to tell her what Prok had said — that he’d all but given his blessing — but not right off. My mind was far from made up, and the first thing I expected from her was an apology. I worked as hard as anyone on this earth and whether she wanted to admit it or not the trip had put a real strain on me and she had no right whatever to deliver an ultimatum like that. Parenthood was a shared decision, something both spouses had to agree on, without resort to threats or blackmail. She didn’t really want to bring a child into the world under a cloud of resentment, did she? Would that be good for the kid? Would that be healthy? No, we would just have to wait — think things over, talk it out — until we were both ready.

There was music playing when I came in the door, something muted and tender that put me in mind of the dances we used to go to, the sort of number the band played at the very end of the last set when they brought the tempo down and the couples just stood there and swayed in place. The table was set for dinner — with flowers in a vase and cloth napkins — and on the end table beside the couch a tall bourbon and water stood perspiring on a coaster. I glanced through the bead curtains to the kitchen and saw a pot on the stove and beside it a frying pan with the pink firm slab of a beefsteak stretched across it, and that was something, beefsteak in those days, really something. I just stood there a moment, taking it all in. This is more like it, I was thinking, and I went for the drink, lifted it to my lips and let the alcohol take away the heat of the day and the last lingering vestiges of my hangover from the night before. But where was she? In the bedroom, no doubt, fussing with her lipstick, dressing to please me, to make it up to me — she was wrong and she knew it. I could forget the speeches.

It was then that I noticed that the curtains were drawn. The day had been clear and therapeutically hot, the diligent Indiana sun burning off the residuum of the previous night’s storm and saturating the air with humidity till the least movement made you break out in a sweat, and she should have had the curtains open, if only for a little circulation. I was puzzled. And sweating already, just from the effort of lifting the glass from the table. I called out her name: “Iris? Iris, I’m home!”

Her voice came from the back room—“Give me a minute”—and I took another long pull at the drink, set the glass down on the coaster and went to the window to let some air in. Just as I was reaching for the curtains, I became aware of the sudden swish and click of wooden beads behind me and Iris saying, “Don’t.”

I turned around and there she was, standing just my side of the dark undulating wave of suspended beads, the room half-lit, the music drifting out of the phonograph. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. Nothing at all. Her feet were spread and her hands poised on her hips. I saw that she’d made up her eyes and applied lipstick and done her nails, but all that was inconsequential before the single illuminating gesture of her nudity. Iris was private in her habits and modest about her body, nothing like the exhibitionist Violet Corcoran was, and she’d never posed nude for me before, or if she had it was only in the way of foreplay, in the permissive confines of the bed. “Leave them closed,” she murmured. “I don’t want any of the neighbors to see.”

I came to her as if I were on a leash and she allowed me one kiss, my hands on her breasts, her abdomen, the familiar territory, before she pushed me away. “But John,” she said, and this was the very definition of coyness, “what are you doing? You know we can’t have relations — aren’t you afraid I’ll get pregnant? Wouldn’t that be a tragedy? Wouldn’t it? Hmm?”

She was at the stove now, her back to me, lighting the gas under the pan, the beads rattling, the cat nowhere to be seen. I could taste the bourbon in the crook of my throat. The room was hotter than any sauna. And can I tell you that I took her right there on the kitchen floor, without a thought for Mac or Violet Corcoran or any other woman in the world, and that the condoms stayed right where they were, in the back corner of the cheap peeling laminated drawer of the nightstand in the bedroom?

I’d like to report that John Jr. was conceived that night, but it wasn’t to be. Months went by, then the year, the war ended, Prok, Corcoran and I were traveling at an accelerated pace and collecting histories more assiduously than ever, and despite our best efforts — Iris’s and mine — her menses came as regularly as before. We consulted the literature, employed the recommended coital positions and dutifully coupled during the most fertile period of the monthly cycle, but all for naught. Iris took hot baths, cold baths, rubbed herself with oleomargarine, consumed nothing but eggs for an entire month. Nothing seemed to work. I talked it over with Prok, who sent me to a specialist he knew in Indianapolis. I had a thoroughgoing physical, and the doctor even invited me into the back room to study my semen under the microscope in order to reassure me that there was nothing amiss. Prok and I began to suspect Iris, and she was examined too — by a gynecologist Prok recommended, the very man who’d helped Mac with her adhesion problem twenty years earlier — and he pronounced her both normal and fit. So what was the problem? What were we doing wrong? Neither of us had a clue, but Prok did, and he was typically blunt about it.

After reviewing the results — we were in the office and he’d been pacing back and forth in front of his desk with a puzzled frown, murmuring to himself — he motioned me to him. It might have been raining that day, I don’t remember, but rain would have been appropriate — as a symbol of hope and fertility. I needed something positive, because I’d been down on myself, feeling inadequate, impotent, a failure even at this. We stood together at the window a moment, gazing out on the campus. “You just have to account for the aleatory factor here, that’s all,” he said finally.

“I’m sorry?”

“Each of the millions of your spermatozoa fighting for purchase in the uterus and Fallopian tubes, an ovum descended or not, as the case may be, natural selection at work, that is, in the microcosm of one woman’s womb—”

I gave him a puzzled look.

“Chance, John, chance. Keep trying, that’s all I can say.”

In the meanwhile, our larger quest — for new blood at the Institute — had begun to turn up a number of qualified candidates now that the war was over, and we started interviewing in earnest. Each man was invited to campus, with his wife and family — the wives, in particular, had to be scrutinized, not only to determine if they were in any measure sex shy, but if they were discreet and reliable as well — and Prok gave them a tour of the facilities, arranged a picnic or musicale in their honor, took their histories and had Corcoran and me vet them for any irregularities. (Typically, Prok would have us take the candidate out on the town afterward, sans wife, in order to loosen him up and catch him off guard, and if that required a certain outpouring of liquor and a given number of Havana cigars drawn on the Institute coffers, it was nothing more than a practical business expenditure by Prok’s accounting.) Obviously, nearly all the candidates had one flaw or another, and Prok, perfectionist that he was, rejected them wholesale despite his almost desperate need for another man.

I remember one candidate by the name of Birdbright. He was forty-five, happily married, father of a well-adjusted and grown daughter, just decommissioned from the Navy and in the process of submitting his doctoral thesis at Harvard in the field of Physical Anthropology. He came to campus and Prok quizzed him late into the night. Corcoran and I took him on the rounds of the taverns, and though he seemed a bit stiff — his military bearing, I suppose, or perhaps it was just academic rigor — we could find nothing to disqualify him. He was a scotch man, smoked Camels, hated sports. He wasn’t particularly easy to draw out in conversation, but he wasn’t sex shy either and seemed to have few biases against any number of sexual behaviors that were, technically speaking, against the law. The day after his visit the three of us sat down to compare notes. “I find nothing objectionable in the man,” Prok said, the candidate’s file spread open on the desk before him, and Corcoran and I had to agree. There was a pause. “Yet I don’t sense any real enthusiasm either.” Prok gently closed the folder and let his eyes roll back in his head. “But Birdbright—is anybody going to want to disclose sensitive information to a man with a name like that?” He let out a short, chiming laugh. “Birdbright, really!”

There was another man disqualified along similar lines. Again, he was unobjectionable, if not particularly exciting, and he did have an acceptable wife and the proper academic background, but he was burdened with a long, hyphenated name — Theodore Lavushkin-Esterhazy — that set Prok to fretting. Prok put it to him directly: Would he consider shortening his name to the less imposing Theodore Esterhazy, or even, for the purposes of interviewing lower-level subjects, simply Ted Ester-hazy? The candidate replied that his was a venerable family name of several centuries’ standing and that under no condition would he consider editing it. That was the term he used, “editing.” Prok tented his hands on the desk before him, gave the candidate a long tunneled look, and thanked him for his time.

Yes. And there was one other man rejected because of his wife, who had a drinking problem, as we learned through inquiries among the staff at his previous place of employ and discovered firsthand at a Bryan Park picnic held in his honor. The wife was loud, sexually showy, with muscular calves and protuberant breasts, and she hung on one man after another, quaffing Planter’s Punch as if it were carrot juice. She didn’t create a scene, not exactly, but it was enough to warn us off. Prok had no use for drunks because drunks were unreliable and couldn’t be trusted to keep their mouths shut (and he was to lecture me about my own alcohol consumption on more than one occasion, but that’s not relevant here, or at least not at this juncture). This is not to say, incidentally, that he was ruthless, as the rumormongers might have you believe, nor that he chose the members of his team based on his ability to control and dominate them, but only that he was preternaturally sensitive to the needs of the project. There were secrets to keep. There was work to be done. Who could blame him for being particular?

Rutledge, of course, as the whole world knows, was the man we finally settled on. We all liked him from the start. Despite his Ivy League credentials and a sheaf of laudatory letters from some of the biggest names in the field, Robert M. Yerkes among them, he seemed down to earth, equally at ease with President Wells and Prok’s colleagues in the Zoology Department as he was with the waiter who brought us our chops at Murchison’s or the barman who mixed us highballs at the tavern, and from the start he treated Corcoran and me as his colleagues and equals. His wife, Hilda, was a tall asthenic blonde who talked out of the corner of her mouth as if everything she said was a wisecrack — and more often than not it was. She was relaxed and informal, a breath of fresh air after the wives of the majority of the other candidates, who might as well have been auditioning for a part in one of those robot pictures that seem to be infesting the theaters these days. Another plus, to my mind, at least: she took to Iris right off. Prok arranged for us all to have drinks with the Rutledges one afternoon — the Corcorans, the Milks and the Kinseys — and before Prok had even handed me my first Zombie cocktail, she and Iris had their heads together. And the children, never forget the children, because as Prok says they’re perhaps the best reflection of the parents, in this case two solemn boys of eight and nine, who seemed well-adjusted and polite enough.

After the preliminary round of interviews, Rutledge was the sole candidate we invited back for a follow-up, and if he passed muster this time, it was understood that Prok was prepared to offer him the job. I met him at the bus station and together we walked up to the Institute. It was autumn — the autumn of ’46 now, and I remember distinctly for reasons that will soon become apparent — and the day was unseasonably warm, a taste of Indian summer before the cold weather set in and the leaves turned and the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun for yet another long season of contrition. Rutledge was wearing a tweed jacket over a long-sleeved shirt, he’d pushed his hat back to get a little air on his brow and loosened his tie so that it canted away from his open collar like a lolling tongue. He had a briefcase in one hand and a traveling bag in the other, his raincoat thrown carelessly over his shoulder. I asked if I could give him a hand with anything, and he broke into a smile. “Sure, John,” he said, “that would be kind of you,” and passed me the traveling bag.

We walked on in silence a moment. The sidewalks had been dampened by a fleeting rain, and every yard we passed seemed well tended and tranquil, with picket fences, overspilling flowerbeds and glistening lawns. Butterflies drifted over the blooms, birds soliloquized in the trees. “You know, I really do like this town,” he said. “It has character. And charm too. It’s not quite Princeton, maybe, but it’s got plenty to offer as far as I can see. What do you think? You like it here?”

“Well, yes,” I said, “sure. It’s quiet, of course, but we make our own society.”

“With Dr. Kinsey?”

We were stopped at a corner, waiting for a bus to move off across the intersection. I was conscious of Rutledge’s eyes on me. He was sounding me out, and that was all right with me — it wasn’t as if he were asking me to reveal anything he didn’t already know. It just meant that he was confident Prok would offer him the job — and further, that he was leaning toward taking it. “Prok’s a big part of it,” I admitted.

“You’re very close, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said, “we are.”

He let that rest a moment and then the bus moved on and we crossed the street. His gait was easy, the briefcase swinging, tie stirring in the breeze our progress generated, and we fell into step, in rhythm, and I felt a kind of communion with him then, as if we were two athletes moving across the field of play. “You were his student, weren’t you?”

I told him that I was, or had been, and then I laughed. “But I guess you’d have to say I still am, because with Prok the learning process goes on every minute of every day.”

“He certainly has energy, Prok,” Rutledge said.

“Yes, he does. I’ve never met anyone like him.”

“But I like that. I like the whole project, what you and he and Purvis are doing here. It’s very exciting. Groundbreaking, really.”

We were striding right along, a block from the university now. It felt good to be out of the office and under the sun, if only for half an hour, and I was glad Prok had appointed me to be the one to go to the station. I didn’t get out enough. None of us did. I made a mental note to see if Iris might not like to go for a picnic over the weekend before the weather turned.

“I’d like to be part of it, I would,” Rutledge went on, as if I’d been contradicting him. “And I love this town, did I mention that? Seems like a terrific place to raise kids.”

I had nothing to say to this, but he was just talking to hear himself in any case. There was a proposition on the table — should he or shouldn’t he? — and he was trying very hard to convince himself that he should. “By the way,” he said, just as we were coming up on the campus, “do you and Iris have any kids?”

“No,” I said, “but we’d like to. We’re, well, we’re trying, that is.”

He gave me a grin. “Trying, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said, and I grinned back.

“When you come down to it”—two fingers went to his mustache—“it’s all just another facet of the research, isn’t it?”

Prok spent most of the day cloistered with him, then we had dinner at a restaurant — just the four of us, spouses not invited — and Prok must have peppered Rutledge with a thousand questions, and this after both he and his wife had given up their histories. There was drinking, though Prok abstained, and Rutledge, either out of temperance or calculation — he knew he was still on trial here — stopped after two highballs and tucked into his dinner with real appetite, Prok’s third degree notwithstanding. I had enough to drink so that I could feel myself drifting out of my body for whole seconds at a time, but nothing excessive, nothing that would draw attention to myself, and Corcoran, who could hold his liquor as well as anyone I’d ever met, imbibed pretty steadily throughout the meal, almost as if he were conditioning himself for some test of endurance. Which, as it turned out, he was.

No one had clued me in, but I could guess from Prok’s expression that there was to be some further test or demonstration yet to come, and when Corcoran excused himself before dessert with a wink for the company and the promise that he’d see us in just a bit, my suspicions were confirmed. “Well,” Prok said, as we spooned up ice cream and sponge cake and the waitress lurked in the background, “it’s been quite an evening. Quite a day, in fact, and I hope you’ve enjoyed it, Oscar”—and here he used Rutledge’s given name for the first time, a clue that something was afoot, because he made a point of addressing his team by surname only—“as much as I have. And, I’m sure, Milk has. Haven’t you, Milk?”

I answered in the affirmative, as did Rutledge. “It’s been grand,” he said, “and I have to say I’m impressed, Dr. Kinsey, with everything you’ve showed me here—”

Prok had set down his spoon and was staring across the table at Rutledge over the bridge of his intertwined fingers. His face showed nothing — Prok the impassive, Prok the interviewer, the open and accessible and nonjudgmental — but his eyes flashed with excitement. “Call me Prok,” he said.

Rutledge ducked his head, put a hand to the back of his neck and came up smiling. “Yes, sure,” he said. “It’ll be a pleasure. Prok.”

“Good, good, good,” Prok murmured, and he called for the check then and spent the next several minutes looking it over and carefully counting out the exact change plus a three-percent tip, while Rutledge and I exchanged small talk in a collegial way. “All right,” Prok said finally, pushing the neat pile of bills and coins away from him, “and now let’s just retire to my place for some more talk and some good strong coffee, if you think you can stand it at this hour”—he paused, grinning now—“because I’ve got something arranged for your benefit, Rutledge, and yours too, Milk, a demonstration, actually, that should prove more than interesting. Shall we?”

When we turned in at the familiar winding path to Prok’s house, there were two figures waiting for us on the porch, their silhouettes visible against the glow from within. One of them was Corcoran, quickly withdrawing a cigarette from his mouth and grinding it under his heel; the other was a young woman I’d never seen before. Introductions were made on the porch—“This is Betty, Prok, the girl I was telling you about? Betty, Dr. Kinsey. John Milk. Oscar Rutledge”—and then we were in the vestibule, Prok singing out “Mac, we’re here!”

I barely had time to steal a glance at the young woman — she was a tall brunette with girlish features, high cheekbones and dark darting eyes that all but vanished when she smiled, and she was smiling now, nervously, her teeth sharp-edged and vaguely predatory — before Mac was on us. Mac must have been waiting just behind the kitchen door, because there she was, in a plain shift, barefooted, with a tray of coffee accessories and a plate of oatmeal cookies she’d baked fresh for the occasion. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick or makeup and though she’d brushed her hair the curl didn’t seem to want to hold. She looked tired. Looked old. “But come in, come in,” she urged, ushering us into the living room even as Prok excused himself and disappeared through the door to the kitchen. I wondered about that for a moment — he seemed preternaturally excited, like a boy on the eve of his birthday, and what was he up to? — until he came hustling back into the room a moment later with the coffeepot and his tray of liqueurs.

We took seats around the coffee table and chatted about this and that while Mac poured coffee and Prok offered the liqueurs to each of us in turn. Aside from the hesitant murmurs of our conversation—Care for cream? Yes, thank you—it was very still. Moths threw themselves at the screens in soft, arthropodal explosions. From the yard, there was the sound of crickets, dense and sustaining. The girl, I noticed, selected one of the least palatable of the liqueurs and downed it in a single gulp as if she were standing at the rail in some back-alley bar, and Prok immediately poured her another. She was wearing a thin silver chain at her throat, and when she threw her head back to drain the second glass, I saw a flash of silver and the miniature cross with its miniature Jesus riding up her breastbone.

Prok took a seat in the armchair beside the girl, his elegant, tapered fingers gripping and releasing the bright black loops of the bentwood as he eased himself down. “Splendid,” he said. “Isn’t this splendid?” But he was too excited to sit back and relax, and he leaned forward almost immediately, hands splayed across his knees. “Betty,” he said, dropping one shoulder and leaning in confidentially, “I can’t begin to tell you how pleased we are — pleased and honored — that you’ve agreed to this.”

The girl looked to Corcoran as if she were lost, then bowed her head and offered a demurrer, sotto voce. “It’s nothing, really.”

“But you are discreet — at least that’s what Corcoran told me. You are, aren’t you?”

She began to say yes in a voice that got lost in her throat, and then she repeated herself, in a firmer tone. “Yes,” she said. “I’m discreet.”

“We can rely on you, can’t we?” Prok was giving her his sternest look. “What happens here in this house is strictly between those of us present, is that understood? And that no gossip, no mention of your assistance here with the research tonight is ever, ever, I repeat, to go any further than these rooms?”

“She’s all right, Prok,” Corcoran put in.

Rutledge, all but forgotten — wasn’t he the main attraction here? — sat over his urine-colored liqueur and tried for an anything-goes sort of smile that withered on his lips. He was nervous suddenly. And, frankly, so was I.

“But I want to hear it from Betty’s lips. Betty?”

“I understand,” she said, and her eyes dodged away from Prok’s to fix on Corcoran. “But are we going to sit here and gab all night? Because if we are—” She got to her feet then, a tall girl, anything but frail, the lineaments of her figure discernible in a sudden sweep and release of movement beneath her clothes. She never finished the thought, or threat or whatever it was, but just stood there glaring at us now, as if she’d thrown down a challenge we were loath to accept.

Prok rose now too. “You’re quite right, Betty,” he said, “and while it’s been pleasant to sit here and have a little chat, we do have business to get to, don’t we?” And here a look to Corcoran, then to Rutledge (a significant pause) and finally to me. “Well, shall we?” His voice faded into an echoing hollow, and I saw in that moment that he was anxious too. We all got to our feet. “Corcoran, why don’t you show Miss—Betty—upstairs?”

My heart was hammering. I’d already guessed at what was coming, but then I couldn’t be sure because we’d never done anything like this before, or to this degree, that is, not as a demonstration certainly, not live, not in public, and I couldn’t believe Prok was prepared to go this far. Watching a prostitute from a closet was one thing, but — but my gaze was fixed on Betty’s hips and rump as she ascended the stairs, her calves flexing and releasing as the hem of her dress rose and fell above them. I could smell her perfume, something I didn’t recognize, rose water, lilac, and it went right to my groin. “Yes,” Prok was saying, “just up at the top there, that door to the left, Corcoran, that’s right — we really haven’t done much to the attic, a bit warm up there, I’m afraid, but it’s cozy. And private. You’ll have to admit that.”

And then we were all milling round the attic room, all but Mac, that is — she’d elected to stay downstairs, to “tidy up,” as she put it. The room was stuffy and there was a smell of sawdust and varnish, as if the carpenters hadn’t got round to completing what they’d begun, the ceiling low and unfinished, the walls constructed of pine boards indifferently nailed to the studs. It hadn’t changed much from the first time I’d been there, just after Prok took me on — there was the single bed up against the wall under the slant of the roofline, the fishing rod in the corner and the children’s outgrown toys and athletic equipment. The only difference, as far as I could see, was that the Ping-Pong table had been removed and replaced by half a dozen wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle facing the bed.

There was an awkward moment, the girl’s presence overwhelming us all, even Prok, till Corcoran took charge. He was in a light summer suit, sportily cut, and he’d loosened his tie against the heat. His hair had been bleached by the summer sun — he was a great one for tennis, and, when he could find the time, for golf too — and his face was deeply tanned. He looked good. Very good. Almost as if he’d stepped out of a Hollywood picture about polo-playing swells or playboys cruising the Riviera. “Why don’t you all just have a seat and make yourselves comfortable,” he said, taking the girl by the hand, “while Betty and I get down to business.” And to the girl: “Are you ready?”

Rutledge gave me a look that was meant to convey perplexity, but I could see what his surmise had led him to and that he was excited. There was a scraping of chair legs as we sat — Prok, Rutledge and I — and adjusted the position of our seats and crossed our legs, trying to act casually and failing, all three of us. Corcoran, in the meanwhile, had begun kissing the girl, deep kissing, tongue to tongue, and he let his hands roam over her body, descending to her buttocks and rising again to massage her breasts, and she gave back in kind. Her hands moved like quick white animals over the terrain of his jacket and trousers.

Then they were on the bed, kissing even more passionately now, and Corcoran was unfastening the buttons that ran up the back of her dress, and as soon as her back was exposed he unclipped her brassiere and in a single movement jerked her arms away from the clothes so that she was peeled to the waist and her breasts fell free. Her hands became more animated, tugging at his shirt, tearing loose the buttons, a kind of frenzy building till they were both naked and Corcoran was on his knees, spreading her legs and performing cunnilingus on her while she snatched at his hair and ears and tugged as if she would pull him into her. After a moment they switched positions and she returned the favor, making a Popsicle of him, and then Corcoran lifted her back onto the bed and climbed atop her.

Prok was wearing his mask of impassivity, but Rutledge looked as if he were about to explode. He was aroused — his trousers were tented in the crotch — and though he tried to be surreptitious about it, tried to remain focused and detached, he began to move his hands in his lap. For my part, I fought to act neutral, for Prok’s sake and Rutledge’s too — no one there, but for Corcoran, seemed to know what was expected, and Prok, Prok, of course — but I don’t think it will come as any surprise if I tell you that I’d never yet been so aroused in my life and that the psychological factors and the setting and company certainly played into it. This was Corcoran — my colleague and friend, Corcoran who’d done just this with Iris, with my wife, this movement of the head and tongue, this sliding in and out of the female orifice with the slick rhythm and balance of a seal riding a wave ashore — and it was a spur to me, I won’t deny it, and I won’t deny that spurs draw blood either. I felt choked. I could barely breathe.

All at once Prok was out of the chair and he had Rutledge by the arm, dragging him forward till they were hovering over the scene. “You see, Rutledge, how invaluable this is?” he was saying, bending close now as Corcoran pumped and the girl heaved and snatched at his shoulders and sang out. “You see that?” Prok demanded. “Right there, see?” He was pointing an empirical finger to the girl’s left breast. “Do you see how the aureole has swollen and enlarged in arousal — and the tumescence of the erectile tissue of the nipples in both female and male? And see here — even the alae, the soft parts of the nose, have become engorged in the female …”

Prok was inches away, bent close, using his index finger as a pointer, and in a soft voice he asked Corcoran if he might turn the girl over in order better to study the physiologic metamorphoses in her rectal and genital areas. Corcoran complied. There was a confusion of limbs, a certain awkwardness, and then the girl was on top, the silver cross swaying rhythmically with the drive of her hips, and Prok lecturing and Rutledge hovering and the whole performance coming to its ineluctable climax.

Later — it must have been past one in the morning — I slipped the key in the lock, pushed open the front door, and found Iris sitting up over a book, waiting for me. She was sunk into the couch, her bare legs tucked neatly beneath the folds of her nightgown, and she set the book down as I came through the door. “You’re late,” she said.

I came to her and bent for a kiss, then straightened up and gave her a theatrical stretch and a thespian’s yawn. And a shrug to show how pedestrian it all was. “Yes,” I sighed.

She hadn’t moved. “Poor John,” she said, “I don’t envy you. It’s all work, work, work, isn’t it?”

I was treading delicate ground here. Was that a sardonic edge to her voice? How much to tell her? “The usual,” I said. “The endless dinner, then over to Prok’s to sit around and jaw — he really put Rutledge through his paces.” I was standing over her still, gazing down into the deep draught of her eyes, studying the weave of her hair, the shadow between her breasts where the collar of her nightgown fell open. “He got the job, by the way. Rutledge, that is.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment, but her eyes seemed to reach out to me, opening wider and wider, round as globes, worlds unto themselves, that color of the sea and all the mystery and strangeness invested there. Iris. My wife. Something was up, but what was it? “That’s good,” she said finally. “Good that it’s settled, I mean. He seems fine. I’m sure he’ll be fine, and you’ll have less pressure on you now, don’t you think?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.”

She was silent again, but she never took her eyes off me. I heard the distant sound of a phonograph, a single faint violin rising up out of the declension of the hour and then fading away again, and I remember being transported in that moment to another place, an apartment down the block, people gathered there, the last cocktail of the night, the low incestuous buzz of voices. “I have news too,” she said.

My mouth tried to close round the words, but my mind was already leaping ahead. “You, that’s right, you went to the, the—”

“The doctor,” she murmured, and she was smiling like all the angels in heaven.

4

Prok was already at his desk when I got to work the following morning, and he lifted his eyebrows as I came in, ten minutes late. To Prok, every second lost was a second the project was delayed, and if he’d kept us all out till one in the morning, it was hardly an excuse to get lax about our responsibilities. Mrs. Matthews was there in the anteroom, punctual as a banker, her back arched and chin up, typing. Corcoran was at his desk too, and Rutledge, who’d be going back to Princeton that afternoon to begin making his personal arrangements, was in the corner, head down, perusing one of the volumes Prok had given him so that he could keep abreast of the literature in the field. Ten past eight in the morning and the office was humming along as usual. With the exception of me, that is. I wasn’t at my best — hungover, depleted, and late on top of it — but I was ringing like a bell with the news.

Iris and I had stayed up to celebrate — I broke out a bottle of I.W. Harper I’d been saving for the occasion and touched glasses with her, though she was confining herself to ginger ale, already concerned for the baby’s welfare — and then we went to bed and I let my excitement spill into her, closing my eyes against the shadows playing across the wall and fighting down the image of the brunette and Corcoran, my wife in my arms and nobody but. My fertile wife. My pregnant wife. Two years of trying and I have to admit I was beginning to think it would never happen, that we were cursed somehow, and as I saw the child denied me I wanted it all the more, no matter the cost or the inconvenience or anything else. Prok wanted it too. And Iris’s mother — she wanted it — and Tommy wanted it and my own mother and just about everybody else we knew or came into contact with, from the butcher to the greengrocer. When are you two going to settle down and start a family? — that was what they wanted to know, what with every woman in America pregnant or pushing an infant in a stroller while an ex-serviceman strutted at her side.

“Sorry I’m late, Prok,” I said, snagging my hat and trench coat on the clothes tree behind my desk. The coat was wet — the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight and it was spattering rain — and my heel prints left gleaming arcs on the linoleum tiles. “But I had to stop by Iris’s school and tell them she wasn’t coming in today.”

Prok glanced up sharply. We were working on the text of the male volume now, and he was driving himself through sixteen- and seventeen-hour days, puzzling over the figures, pushing through organization to interpretation, and he’d become increasingly rigid under the pressure of it. He’d been up till one himself, and though he must have been feeling elated over the finalizing of the Rutledge situation and the success of the previous night’s demonstration, he might have been just the smallest bit under the weather too. “You’re holding up the project, Milk,” was all he said, and he gave me a sour look.

Normally I would have been mortified — I hated for anyone to question my devotion and loyalty, especially Prok, to whom I owed everything, and he was in the right, of course: I was late, I was irresponsible, I was holding up the project — but I felt an almost otherworldly sense of well-being, as if nothing could touch me, not fear or disease or recrimination. No reply was called for, but I had one at the ready, and I held it a moment to tease out the pleasure of it. I didn’t move. Just stood there at my desk, gazing out over the sanctuary of the office, the golden pools of lamplight, the galls, Prok. Iris was home in bed, too sick to go in and minister to her seven-year-olds. I’d listened to her retching over the toilet. I’d held her hand and wrapped her in a quilt and put her back to bed with dry toast and a glass of leftover ginger ale. “I have news, Prok,” I said. “Good news, great news.”

He’d already dropped his eyes to the page, and now they came up again, searching and hard. The pulsing arrhythmic din of Mrs. Matthews’s typewriter choked off on the downstroke. Corcoran looked up from his desk.

“It’s Iris,” I said, and I felt inflated, bigger than life, the actor, the hero, the marathoner at the tape. I knew what they must have thought of me. I was the youngest, the least-trained, Prok’s puppet, unable even to perform the most elemental biological function of them all, but that was all behind me now. Now I was anybody’s equal. I was a man, and wasn’t this the very definition of it? “She’s, well, we’re going to have a baby,” I said. “She’s pregnant.”

Prok let out a low whistle. Mrs. Matthews — she was in her fifties, a grandmother and a widow — gave me a melting look. And Corcoran, from his desk in the back room, put two hands together in a smatter of applause, which brought Rutledge’s head up out of his book in time to give me a quizzical glance.

“We found out last night. Yesterday, I mean. When I got home, after the, the—”

Prok had already crossed the room, grinning wide. He seized both my arms and held me in his grip till the familiar scent of him — of soap, astringents, the faintest whiff of witch hazel — penetrated me. “But you’ll need advice — you’ll need Mac,” he was saying, looking beyond me to the clock on the wall as if the baby were due in the next fifteen minutes. “And a good obstetrician. Whom did you say she was seeing? Because I have just the man—”

Unfortunately, as it turned out, I was away with the team much of that fall and winter, and as often as not Iris had to endure her bouts of morning sickness alone. She wasn’t due till June, and so we both agreed that she would fulfill her obligations at the elementary school as long as she could — it was the right thing to do, of course, but we were also in need of the money because now we would have to move to a bigger place, and my raise at the Institute had yet to come through, though I was sure it would once the grant situation was ironed out. When I was home I did my best to help out around the house, preparing meals at night, washing up, laying out her clothes for the morning. She was brave about it, never once complaining over my schedule — it was a fact of life at this stage, a fait accompli — and I remember the way she pushed herself up stiffly from the table in the mornings, her face clenched as she tried to keep down half a soft-boiled egg and three sips of coffee.

I felt bad about it. And I would have been happy to stay home with her, to help see her through it, to be with her and share the wonder of the transformation going on inside her, but this was a crucial time for the project. We’d managed to reach a milestone the year before — ten thousand histories in the books — and yet Prok kept pushing frantically for more as he got deeper into the writing up of the results, afraid of having the figures attacked for being skewed in one direction or another (“We have five hundred and five female alcoholics,” he would mutter, “but a paltry smattering of upper-level blacks and virtually nothing on ministers, rabbis and the like, not to mention drug addicts and traveling salesmen”). To complicate matters, we were still working shorthanded, as Rutledge wouldn’t complete his dissertation and join us till just before the holidays, so while Iris put on weight and felt her breasts grow tender and her feet leaden, we were bouncing from city to city, Prok lecturing nearly every day, and the three of us staying up into the wee hours recording histories. We went to Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington and any number of smaller municipalities along the way, and we were in residence at the Astor Hotel in New York for nearly three weeks in December, interviewing a succession of male hustlers and female prostitutes.

In the meanwhile, I wrote Iris regularly, if only a line or two, and made sure to telephone her at least every other day, no matter the cost. I owed her those phone calls, and before long I found that I needed them as much as she did. The sound of her voice became an itch in my head as I showered, breakfasted, climbed aboard the train or slid into the Buick beside Prok and Corcoran, her soft tentative “hello” whispering to me over the thump of the rails and the measured beat of the tires. She was subdued on the phone, shy of it, and I’m afraid we didn’t communicate very effectively. Still, the important thing was that we did talk. I told her I loved her. Couldn’t wait to be home with her — and the baby. Was the baby kicking yet? No? Too early? Well, the baby would kick, wouldn’t it? Eventually? Yes, she assured me, the baby would kick. Christmas, I told her, Christmas would be our time together.

A word here about the Astor Hotel, incidentally. This was, in its time, an open gathering place for homosexuals — the long black oval bar on the ground floor was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with men till all hours of the night every day of the week — and it was ideal for our purposes in securing H-histories, our chief purpose on that particular trip (though, as I say, we were also interviewing female prostitutes as well as a number of young college and career women, most of whom were brought to us by Vivian Aubrey, a sexually prodigious graduate of Columbia University whose history Corcoran had first taken on our last foray to New York, and more on her later). Most important, at the Astor, no one asked any questions. And this was significant, because we’d been requested to leave the Lincoln Hotel the previous year (that is, we were thrown out), an incident Prok was always able to recount with equanimity, though he was furious at the time.

None of us had seemed to notice anything amiss, but for one reason or another — prudery, antiquated notions of respectability — our activities began to attract notice. We’d been interviewing at the Lincoln for some days, a whole succession of ragtag hustlers, underage boys and effeminates parading through the lobby, where Prok, Corcoran and I would meet them and escort them upstairs to our rooms, when the manager rang Prok and demanded to speak with him. Prok was in the middle of an interview and put the man off till there was a break in the schedule, at which point he summoned Corcoran and me for reinforcements and went down to confront him.

The manager was a very proper-looking character with swept-back hair, silvered sideburns and the trace of an Italian accent — a real swell, as we used to say, pompous and self-important. “We can’t have this,” he said.

Prok folded his arms and leveled his gaze on him. He knew what was coming. “Have what?”

“All this sex,” the man spat. “Fags and streetwalkers. Whores. I can’t have you undressing these people in my hotel.”

“But I’ve explained to you — this is a scientific survey we’re conducting. You know perfectly well we’re not undressing anybody.”

“Oh, no? Maybe not their clothes, but you’re undressing their minds, and I won’t have it, not in my hotel.”

But this time, at the Astor, there were no such problems. The management looked the other way and everything went smoothly and professionally, except in one instance that still manages to disturb me, though I don’t know why. The subject was a young man not long removed from the war and missing the lower portion of his right arm. He was my last interview of a long night, I’d been drinking and smoking with the previous subjects, and I guess I was feeling pretty wrung out. I met him in the lobby, there was a brief contretemps with the handshake — he offered his left and it took me a moment to follow suit — and then we rode the elevator up to the room Prok had reserved for interviews. The subject had been with the Navy, and though his tan had faded he might have been a modern Billy Budd, with his fair hair parted just to the left of center and the cocky gait and rigid musculature of his class. He was nineteen. He’d been educated to the eighth grade, had parents living in Oklahoma City, and he’d been earning his living as a male hustler since he got out of the hospital. I gave him the dollar we’d agreed upon, he took the bed and I the armchair, and we began to chat.

The preliminaries went well enough, but it soon became apparent that he was wound up on something — Benzedrine, as it turned out, which he obtained by dismantling nasal inhalers and swallowing the drug-soaked pads within. He became loquacious, overly so, each question provoking a breathless running interminable response that went so far afield I began to forget what I was doing there with him in the first place. We’d been trained in the rapid-fire technique I described earlier, and to interrupt and interject where necessary in order to steer the subject back to the matter at hand, but this man — this sailor — just wouldn’t yield. At one point, in the middle of a reminiscence about the fifty-three varieties of plants in the hothouse where his first homosexual contact, an older man, had worked, I became so exasperated that I got up out of the armchair and began pacing the floor.

He stopped in mid-sentence and gave me a curious look — an aggressive look, actually. “What,” he said, “you’re not interested? Because I thought you said we agreed you wanted information, right, the story of my life and all like that for a buck? But what? Is it something else?” He held my eyes. “You want more than just a story?”

“No, not at all. I just wish you would — well, don’t take this the wrong way because I don’t mean to sound impolite or guide your response in any way — but I wish you’d just stick to the format of the interview or we’ll be here all night.”

“So what’s so bad about that?” He’d risen from the couch and he was giving me what I suppose he assumed was a seductive smile, his bathhouse smile, the smile he used at the urinals at Grand Central Station or downstairs at the Astor bar. “You don’t want to get rid of me, do you? Already?”

“Of course not,” I said. “But the whole survey becomes suspect if we can’t finish out an interview, you understand that, don’t you?”

He didn’t say anything, just crossed the room to me, the right sleeve of his velour shirt dangling empty, and pressed himself to me. His hand went to the crotch of my trousers, and I froze — that was what we were trained to do in such cases, to remain impassive and reject all advances. He tried to kiss me then, but I turned my face away and his lips grazed my cheek. “Come on,” he murmured, his voice low and furred with lust or its counterfeit, “you know you want it. Drop the charade, why don’t you? Science. You’re no more a scientist than I am.”

I pushed away from him and sank back into the chair, all business — this was business, after all — and assured him I was there for one purpose only, all the while cursing myself for having left the chair in the first place. It was unprofessional, it had broken the spell and given him the wrong impression. “And your second contact,” I said, trying to regain control of my voice. “Do you recall that? How old you were? Was it just after your experience with the hothouse man?”

He didn’t answer. For the first time since he’d entered the room he had nothing to say, as if the drug were a freight train driving through his veins and it had hopped a curve and derailed all of a sudden. He stood there a moment, weaving from foot to foot. His good hand clenched and released and I could hear the erosive friction of his teeth grinding, molar to molar. “Listen,” he said finally, “don’t you find me attractive? Is it because of this?” He held up the arm, with its dangle of empty sleeve.

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

“Oh, yeah? Well, I just felt you. I just had your prick in my hand.”

“What about women?” I said, because you can never let the subject distract you, not if you’re going to be a professional. “When was the first time you saw a naked female?”

“I’ll suck you for a buck,” he said, and he was leaning over the chair now, staring into my eyes.

“I’ve told you, I’m not here for that. Now answer the question. Please.”

He leaned forward and tried to kiss me again, but I pushed him firmly away, or as firmly as I could while remaining seated. He slowly straightened up and stood there over me, swaying his hips and grinding his teeth. “You aren’t fooling anybody,” he said.

The point of all this, I suppose, is that I got the interview, one more set of data to feed into the Hollerith machine, and that I always got the interview, just as my colleagues did. Unfailingly. We persisted against all odds, and isn’t that something to be proud of? At any rate, we were up early the following day, the cold shower, the stale hotel breakfast, and conducted interviews till about noon, after which we packed up and wandered round the city streets in anticipation of boarding the Spirit of St. Louis at 6:05 p.m., arriving in Indianapolis at 8:45 the following morning. It was December twentieth, the air was thin with the cold, and there were Santas and bell-ringers on every corner, pigeons bobbing underfoot, the smell of charcoal and chestnuts blowing across the afternoon like the charred odor of history, Christmas in Manhattan, and every storefront shimmering with elaborate seasonal displays, toys, foodstuffs, liquor, lingerie, hats, furs, jewels. Prok had already bought something for Mac, and Corcoran had found a crystal brooch with matching clip earrings for Violet — she loved jeweled pins, wore them over her left breast in the way men wore handkerchiefs or boutonnieres — but I had yet to find anything for Iris.

I went off on my own then, trailing a flurry of admonitions from Prok (Don’t be late, don’t get lost, look both ways and watch out for sharps and con men and keep a firm grip on your wallet), who strode up Broadway with Corcoran to look into the peep shows and the more circumspect establishments that specialized in erotica, thinking to add to the library’s collection. I didn’t know the city very well at all — we rarely saw anything of it but Times Square, the four walls of the hotel room and the railway stations — and I don’t mind admitting that the whole time I was afraid of getting lost and missing my train. Was I a bit of a rube? I suppose I was, a Hoosier at large in the big polymorphous city, looking for the one article among ten million that would make his wife happy on Christmas Day.

I don’t remember much of the trip back, except that Prok sat up late interviewing strangers on the train while I fell into my berth as if I’d been gang-tackled and slept without waking until Prok fetched me for breakfast. What I do remember, though, is what I got Iris for Christmas that year. I found it in an out-of-the-way shop that advertised ANTIQUES & ARTIFACTS behind a dirty pane of glass illuminated by a single fitfully winking strand of red and green bulbs. There were two other customers in the place, both of whom managed to look as if they’d always been there, poised and silent, heads down, hands behind their backs, bending ruefully to inspect the merchandise. Though it was the middle of the afternoon and the sun still palely shining beyond the windows, inside it was crepuscular and nearly as cold as it was out on the street. But everybody has been to this place, or a place just like it: the proprietor a stick figure in a yarmulke, worn carpets of the oriental variety, tortuous paths through walls of heavy carved furniture piled high with the hoarded bric-a-brac of old Europe, a smell of silver polish and death. What I fixed on, finally, with the help of the proprietor, who assured me it was worth twice what I paid, was an ashtray fashioned from a conch shell with a six-inch bronze figurine of a naked Aphrodite, her hair marcelled and her breasts taut, rising from its mouth. I had him gift-wrap it and hurried off to find the train.

We were to go out again just after the New Year — more lectures, more histories, the pace ever more frenetic — but Christmas was a real occasion, replete with a surprise overnight snowfall and a festive dinner at the house on First Street for all the team and the children too. Mac was her usual gracious self, Iris, Violet and Hilda prepared the entremets at home and brought them in covered dishes, and Prok concocted a hot rum punch and carved a twenty-pound turkey with all the flair of a master chef. The team had chipped in to buy him a gift — a pair of gold cuff links which he proclaimed too lavish — and then Prok handed out gifts to each of us in return.

I should say here that while Prok was regarded in some circles as a bit of a penny-pincher (and he was excessively frugal, even miserly at times, because every cent he ever made had to be pumped back into the project), he was never so generous and expansive as he was at Christmas. All his staff — the clerical help, the janitor, even the undergraduate girls he used to employ in cataloguing his gall wasp collection — received holiday bonuses, and I was no exception. In fact, as the first member of the team, as his confidant and aide-de-camp, I was often the recipient of his largesse, but that Christmas was even more extraordinary than I could have hoped for.

After dinner and a mini-musicale, after we’d gone back to the table to feast on mince and pumpkin pies and allow the general conversation to stretch for whole minutes at a time beyond the subject of sex research, Prok motioned for me to follow him into the kitchen. My first thought was that he needed help with the tray of liqueurs or with some further treat for the children, but that wasn’t it at all. As soon as the door had shut behind us, he spun round on his heels, took me in his arms and pulled me to him for an embrace. It was awkward, but I held to him, the stiff fabric of his bow tie stabbing at my collar, his cheek a rough bristle against my own. I could feel the electricity of him through his clothes as he patted me across the shoulders with both hands and murmured, “I’m proud of you, John, very proud.” Then he released me and turned on his smile. “Fatherhood, eh?” he said. “No problems, I take it? Everything normal?”

I nodded. Gave him back his smile. Inside, I was glowing.

“Well, you’re going to need a bit more space now, don’t you think? Something permanent, as befits your position?” The smile opened into a grin. “A house, John. I’m talking about a house.”

“But I can’t, we can’t afford—”

He folded his arms across his chest, watching me, grinning wide. “I’m increasing your salary as of today by ten dollars a week, and I’m prepared to make you a personal loan — out of my own pocket and at a fraction of the interest rate you’d expect to pay at any of the banks downtown — in the amount of two thousand dollars. How does that sound?”

For a moment, I was unable to muster a response. I was stunned. Moved. Deeply moved. To think that he was looking out for me still, me, John Milk, nobody really, a former student, the least of his employees, and willing to sacrifice his own finances into the bargain — it was just too much. My father was dead, my mother remote. But Prok, Prok was there for me, anticipating my needs — our needs, Iris’s and mine — as if I were his own flesh and blood. I was so overwhelmed I thought I might break down right there in front of him. “That’s, well, that’s grand,” I said, all my emotion caught in the back of my throat, “but you don’t have to … what about the grants, the NRC? How will we, the project, I mean—?”

He moved toward the sideboard and the enameled tray that was already laden with the little glasses and the varicolored bottles. “The grants are in for the year, have been in for some time now, so don’t you worry.” (In fact, as I was later to learn, the National Research Council, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, had ratified the significance of our work with a $40,000 grant for each of the next three years, nearly doubling their previous commitment.) I listened a moment to the music of the little glasses as he rearranged them on the tray. “And there’s more on the way, you can be sure of it. So come here, come to me here and say thank you in a proper way—”

I embraced him again, and we kissed, but just for a moment — the quickest brushing of the lips — before I pulled away. I wanted to find Iris, tell her the news, ring up every real-estate agent in the county. “Can I tell Iris?” I said. “Can I give her the good news?”

“Go,” he said, and I couldn’t read his face. I was halfway to the door when he called me back. “But wait, wait, I didn’t tell you the best part,” and he’d recovered himself now, all smiles. “I found the prettiest little place, not six blocks from here.”

“I’ve got to tell Iris,” I said, so excited I could barely breathe. I was at the door now, no thought of holding it open for him and his liqueurs, only to push through, to find my wife before I burst with the news. “But thank you,” I called over my shoulder, “thank you a thousand times over,” and then the door swung open and the noise of the party hit me and I heard him cry out, “And it’s got a big yard for the boy!”

Next morning, early, there was a knock at the door. I was sitting at the kitchen table, reading about the upcoming Bowl games in the newspaper and spooning up cornflakes and milk, heavily sugared. It was seven-fifteen by the clock on the stove. Iris was still asleep. I couldn’t imagine who it could be — it was the day after Christmas, the world snowbound, nothing moving, no sound anywhere — and I pushed myself up from the table and went to the door. Prok was standing there on the doorstep, blowing steam through his nostrils. He was in his belted winter coat, galoshes, knit gloves and the old drooping southwester he favored in inclement weather. “Glad to see you’re up, Milk,” he said, “but it’s cold, isn’t it? The thermometer read minus three Fahrenheit when I left the house.” Behind him, at the curb, the Buick sent up discontinuous plumes of blue smoke.

I was in my robe and pajamas still, a pair of new felt-lined slippers — a Christmas present from Iris — on my feet. I don’t mind admitting I was a bit befuddled, my head still thick with the residue of all that Christmas cheer. I tried to read his expression. Had I forgotten something? Were we scheduled to leave on a field trip? Was that it? “Yes,” I said, “well, yes, very cold, but please come in, because, well—”

“You’re going to have to get dressed,” he said, pausing to kick the snow off his galoshes before striding through the door. “We’ve got an eight o’clock appointment. And Iris — where’s Iris?”

I don’t think Prok had been inside the apartment more than once or twice before, and then only briefly. He glanced round him as if he were entering one of our lusterless hotel rooms, his eyes appraising and keen. And then he was pacing the undersized front room in his brisk, long-legged way, snatching off his hat and gloves in two quick jerks and pushing through the bead curtains to cast a suspicious glance round the kitchen as if he were a building inspector come to assess the quality of the plumbing. I felt a surge of shame. The place was small, though as I’ve said Iris had a real knack for interior decoration, and it was — or had been — sufficient to our needs, but with Prok there, looming over the furniture, everything seemed shabby suddenly, and I felt I’d somehow failed him, as if I should have risen to something grander at this stage of my life.

“Interesting piece on the coffee table there — the Aphrodite,” he said. “Is that the thing you picked up for Iris in New York?”

“Yes. At that shop I was telling you about.”

“Mother of Eros, sexuality unfettered. Nobody could call the Greeks sex shy, now could they?”

“No,” I said, “I guess not.”

“Very nice. I’d say your taste is improving, Milk, definitely improving.”

I was just standing there in my robe, three feet from him, in the confines of the kitchen that might have been cleaner, brighter, grander, and I didn’t know what to say or do. I thought of offering him coffee, of settling him down in the armchair for a moment, of waking Iris and getting dressed, but then I found myself numbly echoing what he’d said a moment earlier, as if it had just managed to sink in: “Appointment? What appointment?”

He was frowning at the cupboard, pulling open each door in succession till he found himself a cup, and then he lifted the coffeepot from the stove, giving it an experimental shake. “With the realtor,” he said, pouring, “or actually the owner. I spoke with him myself, at half past six this morning. Iris is up, isn’t she?”

The house was conveniently located, as advertised, two blocks closer to campus than Prok’s own, but in a neighborhood that was struggling to keep up appearances while the grander homes spread in a formal march to the south and east. Which was fine with me. I didn’t expect a palace, and if there was a heavy concentration of boardinghouses and student rentals there, that was testimony to the desirability of the location. Iris wasn’t so sure. Prok and I had sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and nibbling at a fruit cake Hilda Rutledge had given us the day before while we listened to the muted call and response of Iris’s gagging and the cascade of the toilet, Prok tapping his foot impatiently and checking his watch every two minutes, but she’d emerged from the bedroom at ten of eight, in her best dress and with the hair brushed back from her brow in a black silken wave. She was pale, though, and didn’t have much to say as I eased her into the backseat of the Buick while Prok and I climbed in up front.

The first thing she did say, beyond the usual pleasantries, was when we pulled up at the curb in front of the place. “It looks odd somehow,” she said, and I could tell already that she wasn’t going to like it. “Out of balance. Too narrow across the front.”

Prok shut down the ignition and turned to look over his shoulder. “Built to fit a narrow lot,” he said. “But it goes quite a bit deeper, as you’ll see, to make up for it.”

“And the color,” she said, her breath steaming the window, her face drawn down to nothing round the critical oval of her mouth. “Who would ever paint a house mauve — that is mauve, isn’t it?”

“Looks more brown to me,” Prok put in.

“Or blue,” I said.

“I don’t know, I was hoping for something older,” she said, even as Prok was sliding out of the car to pull open the rear door for her. “Made of stone or brick maybe, and with more of a porch.”

“Older? This was built in ’24,” Prok said, “and that’s plenty old enough. Believe me, you do want the modern conveniences. Some of these antique houses, while they may look charming from the street, are nothing but a headache for the homeowner, substandard plumbing, antiquated electric, all sorts of structural problems, buckled floors and the like. No, what you want is something newer, like this. Take my word for it.”

But Iris wouldn’t take his word for it. She was as strong-willed as he was, and while she’d come to feel a real kinship for Mac she never really warmed to Prok, though she was always, or almost always, polite enough, out of her own innate civility and an awareness of the awkwardness of my position, but deep down I think she resented the influence he had over me. Over us. And, of course, there was Corcoran, the whole sad humiliating affair that lay between them like an open wound, Corcoran, always Corcoran.

The owner was an assistant professor in the Chemistry Department who’d been offered a promotion at DePauw and was pulling up his roots. He met us at the door, along with his wife, exchanged a cryptic look with Prok, and invited us in. I saw a gleaming oak staircase and handsome wallpaper in a floral pattern; Iris saw a cramped vestibule and a house aching in its ribs, with rooms like freight cars and windows that opened up on the place next door like a claustrophobe’s nightmare. She wore her disapproving face (eyes sunk back in her head, brow locked in a rigid V, teeth and lips poised as if to spit out some bit of refuse) through the entire circuit of the place, including the lecture in the basement during which Prok and the chemistry professor took turns extolling the virtues of the furnace, and the culinary tête-à-tête with the lady of the house at the narrow table in the tunnel of the kitchen. Prok, the professor and I came back from a tour of the yard and potting shed to find her drinking tea and staring blankly at a platter of gingerbread cookies while the professor’s wife (late twenties, styleless, childless, her face a scroll of anxiety) nattered on about Iris’s condition and what a blessing children were. Or must be.

“Well,” Prok said, “what do you think? Milk? Iris? A tight little ship, wouldn’t you say? And convenient to campus, never underestimate the value of that.”

The chemistry professor, and I suppose I may as well give you an account of him, since I’ve managed to dredge up his wife from the memory banks (he was ten or twelve years older than his spouse, IV-F from the Army during the late war because of a congenital deformity — club foot — and so turgid in his speech he must have bored insensate a whole legion of aspiring chemists), averred that there was no finer house in the world and that he and his wife were deeply conflicted about having to give it up. “I’d even thought of commuting, but then, what with wear and tear on the car—”

“Not to mention the wear and tear on yourself,” the wife put in, glancing up from her teacup with a look of acuity.

“Yes. That’s right. And so we’ve had to put the place up for sale, but reluctantly. It’s just one of those things. Life moves on, right?”

Prok was stationed just behind the wife’s chair, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. His coat hung open, the gloves and soft hat stuffed bulkily in the pockets on either side so that he looked as if he were expanding out of his clothes. “And the price,” he said. “Is that firm?”

I was watching the professor’s face as it went through its permutations. “Within reason,” he supposed. “But there’s always wiggle-room”—that was the term he used, wiggle-room—“if the Milks are really interested and not just here to entertain us with their presence.” He gave a little laugh. “And we are entertained, aren’t we, Dora, to have such a delightful young couple here with us in this festive season and to think that we can be fortunate enough to give them a hand as they start out on the road ahead—?”

“Would you consider ten and a half then?” Prok said. “With fifteen percent down?”

That was when Iris spoke up. “I think I’d like to have a word with my husband,” she said, looking at each of us in succession before letting her eyes come to rest on mine. “If no one minds.”

Oh, no. No, no. No one minded.

In the vestibule, while the others sat round the table at the far end of the house, she spread her feet for balance and lashed into me. “You’re such a fool,” she snapped. “Such a sap. You’re soft, that’s all. Soft.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I despise it. And they’re manipulating you, can’t you see that? Prok, your precious Prok, and the professor and his wife, as if they can’t wait to unload this, this crackerbox. Do you really think I want to spend the rest of my life here? And you. Do you want to? This place stinks. It has no style, nil, zero, nothing. I’d rather stay where we are. Or what — move back to Michigan City, to my parents’ place, and live at the dairy. Milk cows. Anything but this.”

“Can you keep your voice down? What if they hear?”

“What if they do?”

There was a moment during which we both just stood there glaring at each other while the small sounds of the house — groans, creaks, the dwindling patter of rodent feet — ticked round us. “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of like it.”

“Like it? You’re out of your mind. I won’t even talk to you. Forget it, hear me? Forget it.”

The result was that Prok had to tell the professor and his wife that we would get back to them — Iris wasn’t feeling well, a difficult pregnancy, her first, and that was why she’d had to go out to the car without saying goodbye and thanking them for their kindness and hospitality — and then the two of us slammed into the front seat and Prok started in on her. She was passing up a golden opportunity. There was real value here. Yes, there were other houses in the world, plenty to look at, or some, at any rate, given the postwar housing shortage, and, yes, he had to account for differences in taste, but really, at our level — and here he gave me a significant look over the expanse of the front seat — we couldn’t expect to find anything more practical or economical.

Iris heard him out as we sat there at the curb and Prok preached at her over his shoulder, then finally turned the key in the ignition and brought the Buick to life. And then, in a small but firm voice, she said, “I have an ad here.”

Prok gave her his profile, the hat clamped down over the stiff brush of hair. “An ad?”

“I clipped it from the paper. Listen: ‘Charming three-bedroom farmhouse, kitchen, dining, stone fireplace, indoor plumbing, built solid, 1887’—and it’s less than this place.”

“Eighteen eighty-seven?” Prok was incredulous. “A farmhouse? What would you want with a farmhouse? But wait a minute — where did you say it was?”

She gave the address.

“But that’s got to be eight or ten miles out of town. At least. You’d need a car.”

“John’s wanted a car all his life. Don’t you think, at twenty-eight, he deserves one?”

I kept mum. The heat vent beneath the dash began to hiss and the exhaust roped back in the wind and tied itself in knots outside my window.

“That’s not at issue, Iris. That’s not it at all. You have to think of economy, that’s what I’m saying. A car is just one more expense, the gasoline, oil, upkeep. And the project, our collecting trips — do you really want to be left way out there in the country all by yourself? And with a baby to care for, no less?”

Iris’s voice, the stubborn little nugget of it: “We can at least look, can’t we?”

The farmhouse, by Prok’s odometer, turned out to be 5.2 miles beyond the town limits, just off the Harrodsburg road. There was no farm attached to it — the farm had failed during the Depression — but there was the acre of land the house sat on and a small orchard of fruit trees out back, apple, peach and pear. The owner was an old man, bowed in the back and with hands like baseball mitts, a widower who was planning to move in with his son’s family in Heltonville. Iris liked the fireplace in the main room, a massive thing that had once been used for cooking, and she liked the scuffed oak floors and the gentle warp underfoot that rolled you down through the glade of the parlor and into the valley of the kitchen. She’d never seen anything sturdier than the stone foundation and the hand-hewn planks of the front porch — or the well, the well was a thing of beauty in itself. Prok hated the place. It was impractical, a headache in the making, and he appealed to me—“Do you really want to spend all your free time at home with a hammer in one hand and a paint brush in the other?”—but I had already begun to see what Iris was talking about, already begun to envision what she could do with the place given her taste and her resourcefulness, and so I said nothing.

On the way back in the car, while Iris and I were buzzing over the possibilities—“That room under the stairs, it’s perfect for a study, John, your own study”—Prok pulled his trump card. He’d been uncharacteristically silent as the frozen fields rolled by and the tires snatched at the piebald pavement between humps of ice and compacted snow, and suddenly he raised his voice and said, “I really don’t know if I can see my way to making this loan under the circumstances — that is, John,” and he snatched his eyes from the road to give me a sidelong look—“if I don’t approve of the property, and I most emphatically do not, because I do have to protect my investment, you understand.”

Iris came right back at him, more sharply than I would have liked, but she was right, and I had to admit it. “We appreciate everything you’ve done for us,” she said, biting off her words as if she were paying by the syllable, “but you have to understand that we’ll be living in that house, not you. It’s our decision, not yours. And if we have to overex-tend ourselves, if I have to get a second job, scrub floors, anything, we’ll make it, with or without your help.”

“I don’t think so,” he said, fighting to control his voice.

“Iris,” I said.

“No, John, let me have my say.”

The Buick sailed over the road like a ship at sea, Prok’s hands tightening on the wheel as the tires fought for purchase and slipped again on a rolling white patch of ice.

“Listen, Prok,” she said, leaning into the front seat now, her hands clamped to the fabric on either side of his head, leaning in close so he wouldn’t mistake her, “if you think I’m going to be dictated to or bullied or blackmailed, then you don’t know me very well.” There was a bump, and then the long soft shush of the ice. “No,” she said, “you don’t know me at all.”

5

Escrow closed at the end of January, and though Prok was a bit brusque when I asked, he gave me the day off and the use of the Nash (veering and uncertain, but still running and still capable of hauling a load) to facilitate the move. Both Corcoran and Rutledge had volunteered to help, but as time was running out on the male volume and Prok growing increasingly edgy, they couldn’t be spared, and so I hired a man for the day and together we dismantled the bed, removed the legs from the kitchen table and shouldered the couch and armchair out the door. The Nash, which Prok had modified into a kind of van, took the larger items, and my own car — the 1938 Dodge D8 Coupe I’d gone out and purchased for two hundred fifty dollars the day after we made an offer on the house, because what was the sense of saving for a rainy day when the deluge was already on us — ferried the boxes of clothes, dishes, records, books, cosmetics, silverware, mops, brushes, tools, pots, pans, foodstuffs and all the rest of the accumulated and husbanded necessities of an American household at the midpoint of the twentieth century, and it was amazing to contemplate how much we’d managed to acquire during our five years in the apartment.

Iris was in her glory. I didn’t want her fatiguing herself — she was in her fourth month now and just beginning to show, if you looked at her in the right light, that is — but there was no stopping her. She’d been busy packing for weeks, making lists, discarding various objects and procuring others, doubling brown paper bags and reinforcing cardboard boxes with masking tape. On the day of the move, she wrapped a kerchief round her head, vomited for the last time in the old toilet on Elm Street, and had me take her and a full carload out to the new place before the sun was up. While the hired man and I wrestled the furniture out the door of the apartment she was busy lining the shelves at the house, and by the time we’d got down to arranging the couch and chairs in the new place (as per her very explicit directions), every box and brown paper bag was empty, the drawers were filled with neatly folded shirts, socks and underwear, the pantry stocked and the statue of Aphrodite cum ashtray occupying a position of honor on the mantelpiece.

We had hamburger sandwiches and french fries out of a greasy paper sack that night, washed down with Cokes, and for me, two or three hard-earned bourbons and water. I found a heap of scrapwood in a shed out back and got a good blaze going in the fireplace, and we sat on the newly unscrolled carpet and ate in front of it. For a long while we just sat staring into the flames, content to be there together, enjoying our first meal in our new house. “God, I love a fire,” she said, looking around for something to wipe her hands on. There was a sheen of hamburger grease on her lips. Behind her, propped against the side of the couch, were the four prints that had graced the wall of the apartment and a much bigger framed reproduction of Modigliani’s Nude on a Blue Cushion, a housewarming gift from Prok and Mac.

“Me too,” I said, and I handed her the empty hamburger sack to use as a napkin, because neither of us felt like getting up.

“The wallpaper has to go though,” she said. “We need something lighter, to brighten the place up. The smoke darkens things too, you know — years of it, the little bit that drifts back into the room? But that’s why I haven’t even thought about hanging the pictures yet — new wallpaper, that’s a must. And the furniture. I’m not sure about the furniture yet either. You think the couch looks strange there, out in the middle of the room like that? I thought it would help divide up the space—”

I watched her ball up the grease-spotted bag and toss it into the fire, the flames rising and falling back again, and then I shrugged. “Looks fine to me. But whatever you want. You just tell me when you’re ready to pick out the paper.”

“I don’t know,” she said, running her gaze around the room. “I’ll look at patterns tomorrow, because I really didn’t want to do anything till we were actually in the house — you have to live in a place before you can get a feel for it, my mother always said that, but the walls are too dark, much too dark. We don’t want people to think we’re living in a cave, do we?” She paused, biting her underlip, looking right through me. “But that nude. I don’t know about that nude.”

“What? The Modigliani? It’s a famous painting, a great work of art. I think it’d look nice, maybe on that wall there, by the staircase. Or maybe over by the window?”

“I don’t know. A nude. What kind of statement does that make?”

“It doesn’t make any statement. It’s just art, that’s all. Just a painting.”

“Oh, come off it, John — four woodcuts of Emily Brontë scenes and a two-and-a-half-by-three-foot nude?”

“But what about Prok? He’ll, well, he’ll expect—”

“Yeah,” she said, and her eyes were focused now, flaring up and then settling on me like a pair of flamethrowers, “Prok, Prok, Prok.”

Outside it was windy, with temperatures in the teens. The windows shook and we listened to the sounds of the house a moment, alien sounds that would grow increasingly familiar, day by day, till they provided the sound track for the rest of our lives. “Let’s not spoil this,” I said. “Hang it anywhere you want, I don’t care.”

“That’s nice, John,” she said. “Very magnanimous. How about the toolshed? Will that do? Think a nude’ll liven it up and remind us how we make our bread and butter here every time we need a crosscut saw or a what, a monkey wrench?”

“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?

“That’s all right, John,” she said after a moment. “You need a break, don’t you? I understand. Go out and have a couple of drinks, but be careful if you do wind up driving home.” There was a click over the line, and I thought she’d hung up, but then her voice came back: “Did Mike say how much the car was going to be?”

“I don’t know. Fifty dollars, maybe sixty, seventy. Who knows?”

“Oh, John.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

There was no one I recognized at the tavern, a new crop of students, two men my age at the end of the bar who might have been lecturers or assistant lecturers, a smattering of women sitting with men in shirtsleeves, the jukebox going, the bartender presiding with his swollen, tenderized face. It was hot and the ceiling fan wasn’t doing much to improve the situation. I settled in with a beer and bourbon chaser and lost myself in the newspaper. After a while — I might have been on my second round, I suppose — I became aware of movement to my right, of someone hovering there on the periphery, and I looked up absently into the face of Richard Elster. He was smiling, as if he were glad to see me, and there was another man with him — tall, thin-faced, in a dark wool suit that looked expensive and much too heavy for the place and the season — and he was smiling too, as if we were old acquaintances. “Hi, John,” Elster said, “nice to see you. This is Fred Skittering. Fred, John.”

We shook hands, and then Fred Skittering said something about how hot it was and he reached up to pull his tie loose and unfasten the top button of his shirt collar. “No reason to stand on formality here, is there?” he said. “We are in Indiana, after all, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I said, “that we are.”

Elster’s grin was of the canned variety, and there was something in his eyes I should have been alert to. Years had gone by since I’d worked as his underling and we saw each other almost daily in the corridors of Biology Hall, and yet there had always been a coldness between us. As I’ve said, he was the petty sort, and though Prok had put him in charge of that part of our library that remained on the shelves — that is, the tamer books in the field — he never forgave me my elevation above him. Generally, he passed me in the hall or on the walk out front of the building without so much as a nod — and now, here he was, elbowing in beside me at the bar, all smiles, with his sliver-faced friend in the big-city suit. Warning bells should have gone off in my head, but I was preoccupied and I was drinking and I just looked from Elster to his friend and back again, chasing round a smile myself. I suppose, in my mood, I was glad for the company.

I watched them order, light cigarettes, watched the bartender move heavily from the tap and set down two beers on the counter before them. Fred Skittering drained his in a gulp, while Elster raised the glass to his lips with both hands, like a priest with the chalice, and took a delicate sip. Both of them set down their glasses with a sigh of satisfaction, and then Elster leaned in confidentially and asked, “Everything going all right with Iris? It’s her first, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know what to say. This was the first I knew that he was even aware I was married, let alone that my wife was pregnant.

“You know, Claudette’s expecting too — in three weeks, actually. This’ll be our third — we’ve got one of each now, and she wants a girl, but I’m hoping for another boy.” He bent to his beer. Skittering held on to his smile. “They have the same obstetrician,” Elster went on, “the one Prok recommended. He did recommend Bergstrom to you, didn’t he?”

Again, I was astonished. Prok? He was calling Kinsey Prok? “You — I didn’t know, well, that you — and Prok, that is—”

“Oh, yes, yes. We’ve been conferring on the library quite a bit, you know. Space, that’s what we’re looking for, more space.”

Skittering flagged down the bartender. “Another round,” he said, and what I heard in his voice was New York, cab drivers, alleyways, nightclubs. “And buy one for John here too,” he said. “On me.”

The beers came, and a shot of bourbon with each of them. I thanked Skittering and we made small talk awhile. What did he do for a living? Oh, he traveled. For a company. Nothing exciting really. “And what about you?” he asked.

I told him I worked with Dr. Kinsey.

“The sex researcher?”

“I’m part of his staff.” I drank off the bourbon and chased it with a long pull at the beer. “The first person he took on, actually,” I said, and I couldn’t help the pride from creeping into my voice. “I’ve been with him since the beginning.”

“Really?” he said. “Well, that’s certainly interesting.” And he tipped his head back to drain the shot glass while Elster, his grin still in place, toyed with his own. “But uh, sex research — how exactly do you go about that, I mean, you can’t just burst into people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, can you? Say, barkeep,” he called and made a circular motion with one hand to indicate that another round was in order. “What is it, surveys and the like?”

I’m sure you’ve already anticipated me, of course — I was being played here, and by a past master. Fred Skittering, as it turned out, had been a war correspondent and had made something of a name for himself in the European Theater, a name I might have recognized in another connection. But here, in Bloomington, in the neighborhood tavern I’d been frequenting since my student days, it went right by me. He was working for the Associated Press even as he stood there at the bar, though I didn’t yet know it and I’d already taken the bait. “Surveys?” I gave a disdainful shrug. “Surveys are all but useless. Think of it: where’s the control? You get a survey in the mail and either you fill it out or you don’t, either you’re honest and forthcoming or not, and who’s to know the difference? No, our methods”—I lowered my voice—“our methods are as scientific and statistically reliable as you could ever hope to get.”

A period of time went by. People drifted in and out of the bar. Beyond the windows, at the far end of the street where the trees gave out, lightning snaked across the horizon. I was never particularly loquacious, never one to run off at the mouth, as our lower-level subjects might have put it, but I just couldn’t seem to stop talking that night. Maybe it was my mood. The weather. Iris. Maybe it was just shop talk — I was inordinately proud of what we were accomplishing, Prok, Corcoran, Rutledge and I, four against the world, and yet I was frustrated too because to this point we’d kept it all so close. Here was a sympathetic ear. Here was Elster — and this stranger — and who would have guessed?

What saved me was Betty. I was on the verge of compromising the project, undermining Prok’s faith in me, embarrassing myself in the deepest, most hopeless way, the way of the apostate, the quisling, the dupe, when Betty appeared. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since she’d played the female lead in the previous fall’s demonstration in Prok’s attic — I didn’t even remember her name actually. But there she was, ducking through the door with another young woman, both of them dressed casually, in skirt and blouse, as if they were students — or wanted to be taken for students. I looked up and we exchanged a glance, and then she was slipping into a booth at the far end of the room in a single graceful movement, one hand going to the back of her thighs to smooth out her skirt as she slid over the slick wooden surface of the bench. Skittering was saying something about another sex survey he’d heard of — in Denmark, he thought it was — while Elster (his shill? his Judas?) leaned over his elbows and concentrated on my face.

I saw the girl—Betty, and her name came to me in a flash — glance up at me again as the waitress set two martinis down on the table. She gave me a smile when she saw that I’d recognized her, the child’s eyes fading into the woman’s face, the prominent cheekbones, the sharp teeth, her hair pinned up at the crown and spilling into a complex of curls at her shoulders. I smiled back even as Skittering said, “But Kinsey, the man, I mean, what’s it like working with him?” and because I was drunk, I raised my glass and saluted her across the room.

And then I was back in the moment, regarding Elster’s face — the face of a saboteur, not a friend or well-wisher — in a whole new light. I took a moment, studying Skittering now, and all at once I understood. Skittering had got to Elster, and Elster had got to me, and what they were after wasn’t statistics, but something deeper, more dangerous. I shrugged. “He’s a genius,” I said. “A great man. The greatest man I’ve ever known.”

“Yes, but”—a cigarette to the lips, a distracted wave at the ashtray—“underneath all that, I mean. The man. The man himself? Certainly he must have some sort of oddities or quirks, irritating habits — I hear he can be pretty short sometimes, isn’t that right?”

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I see a friend over there — an acquaintance, a friend of the research, actually — and really, I have to”—I was pushing myself away from the bar, patting down my pockets for cigarettes—“but thanks for the drinks, thank you, nice meeting you.”

The girl — Betty — watched the entire transaction, the nod in her direction, the dual handshakes, the fading expressions of Elster and Skittering, even as her friend turned to look over her shoulder and I weaved my way across the room to her, glass in hand. I didn’t know what I was doing really, just that I was extricating myself from an awkward situation, and that, as much as anything, impelled me toward her. “Hello,” I said, sweeping the hair away from my forehead with my free hand as I swayed over her, “remember me?”

Her smile was glossy, her lips pulled back tightly over her teeth, and forgive me if I couldn’t help picturing those lips as they stretched wide to receive Corcoran, that heroic motion, in and out, and the tissue there glistening with fluids. “Yeah, sure,” she said, and she slid over and patted the seat beside her. “Here, take a load off. Come on.”

I eased in beside her, a quick glance for Elster and his companion, who were fixed on me like birds of prey, and the olfactory memory of her came back to me in a rush, that perfume, the heat of her body, the smell of her hair.

“This is Marsha,” she said, indicating the friend across the narrow table (spaniel eyes, the face of Stan Laurel, a frizz of apricot-colored hair), “and what was your name again?”

My name was John. And I gave it to her. And I gave her her smile back too.

The waitress was there and she asked if we wanted to see a menu. The girls’ martini glasses were empty. Betty wanted another drink and she thought looking at the menu might be a good idea. The friend claimed that the one drink had gone to her head, and she didn’t know, but sure, what the hey, she’d have another. That was fine by me, though I didn’t have a whole lot of cash on me, because I’d planned on a couple of drinks, a bite to eat, and then a five-point-two-mile hike, and nothing more. Iris was at home, big as a house. The house was at home, bigger than a house. I ordered another beer and Betty told the waitress to bring her a porterhouse steak—“rare to bloody”—with fries and a house salad with Thousand Island dressing.

After that the three of us beamed at one another for a while and we talked about Bloomington, how endlessly, hopelessly, stuporifically dull it was, and we talked about movie stars — John Garfield, wasn’t he disgusting, or raw or whatever you wanted to call it? — and our travels, such as they were. Both girls were mad for New York, though as it turned out neither had been there, and I suppose it was only natural that I should play up my experiences there and maybe even embroider them a bit. Then the steak came and the friend left — she had to be up early in the morning — and when I glanced over my shoulder Elster and Skittering were gone too.

“So are you married?” the girl said.

“No.”

“Then what’s that on your finger?”

“This?”

“Yeah, that.”

“It’s a wedding ring.”

She dropped her eyes to the plate a moment, the knife, the fork, cut a wedge of steak and looked up again as she tucked it between her lips. “Divorced?”

“Does it matter?”

She shrugged, dropped her eyes to the plate again.

“What about you,” I said. “Are you — and please don’t take this the wrong way — are you, well, a professional?”

She was chewing thoughtfully, slowly, her eyes reemerging now to lock on mine. “What is this — another interview?”

“You mean you already—?” I made a mental note to go to the files in the morning and violate our code of anonymity yet again. “Who was it, Corcoran?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Purvis. He’s a great friend of mine, you know that, don’t you?”

I wasn’t very good at this, but the liquor was in my veins and liquor always made me feel unbeatable. “I gathered that,” I said. “From the last time I saw you.”

She ignored me. Went for the steak again. Picked up a french fry and licked the salt from it with quick pink stabs of her tongue before folding it into her mouth. “No,” she said, “in answer to your question. I’m not a professional, whatever that means. I don’t take money for it, if that’s what you’re asking, and that’s down on the interview sheet too.”

I was getting the defiant look now, the look she’d given us all when we were milling around Prok’s living room trying to summon the courage to get on with what we’d come for. “I like men,” she said. “Is that a crime?”

“No,” I said, “that’s no crime at all.”

And then we were both laughing, laughing to beat the band, as they say, and in the throes of it she put a hand on my thigh to steady herself. The jukebox — I wasn’t even aware to this point that it had fallen silent — roared back to life with something that had plenty of jump to it and we let the laughter trail off even as we began to feel the beat vibrating through the tabletop and the glasses in our hands and the seat of the bench we were sharing. People around us got up to dance and my fingers, independent of thought, began to tap out the rhythm. I was thinking I should ask her to dance, though I wasn’t much good at it, but instead I said, “So what do you do — for a living, I mean?”

She turned her face to me, a blue sheen of neon caught in her hair. “I’m a nurse,” she said.

“Oh, really? Well, that’s — that’s terrific. It really is. A nurse, huh? That must be — interesting.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said, looking out over the room before her eyes came back to mine. “But you know what?”

“What?”

“You know what I really like? After a good meal?” She leaned in close, so that her forehead was nearly touching mine and I could smell the gin and her perfume and the meat on her lips.

“No,” I said, “what?”

“You can’t guess?”

Iris went into labor on June the twentieth, just after dinner. She’d experienced mild contractions the day before, and there had been blood in her vaginal secretions that morning, followed by a discharge of bloody mucus, normal precursors to the rupturing of the amniotic sac and the imminent birth of the child. Though I’d been unconscionably ignorant of the whole process (witness my question about the kicking of the baby, which even the most untutored or oblivious should know doesn’t occur until the sixteenth week), Prok had encouraged me to educate myself, not only for “my own benefit in apprehending the life process,” as he put it, but in improving my ability to relate to our female subjects as well. And he was right: now I knew what they went through, what they were afraid of, how the pleasure of the act was followed by the pain of disclosure, abortion, the throes of birth. Though he’d never been busier or more harassed, Prok took the time to quiz me each week on Iris’s condition — the swelling of her breasts, the appearance of the linea nigra drawn like a dark chalk mark over the hump of her abdomen, the dropping of the fetus, the widening of the cervix — and made a little lecture of it every step of the way. Terms like “blastocyst” and “human chorionic gonadotrophin,” “endometrium” and “progesterone,” which I’d probably copied into a notebook somewhere in Intro to Biology and promptly forgotten, became as familiar to me as the baseball scores in the morning paper.

We were lucky, really. We had not only the benefit of the literature on the subject (including an excellent and very thorough new book by Benjamin Spock, a Columbia University M.D.) and the experience of Dr. Bergstrom, but the advice of Iris’s mother as whispered through the long-distance lines and all the support Prok and Mac could give us, Mac especially, who spent hours at the house, knitting, baking and just chatting away with Iris in her soft glutinous tones as if Iris were one of her daughters and the baby out of her own bloodline. My own enthusiasm, as I’ve said, tended to vary day to day, but there was something of the inevitable in the process and I found myself submitting to the pull of it. And I was informed. At least there was that.

As the due date approached, I made sure that the car — with its rebuilt transmission — was in good running order and the gas tank topped off, ready for the dash to the hospital. The twentieth fell on a Friday, and I hadn’t wanted to leave Iris to go into work, but she had assured me she’d be fine — I should stick close to the phone, that was all. As it was, I was hardly able to concentrate through the long, tediously unmomentous morning and into the crux of the slow-grinding afternoon, and I left work early — How was she? No change — to make us a light dinner of macaroni salad and canned fruit, and then we’d sat in the living room listening to the radio and waiting. She’d gotten up to rinse her cup in the sink when I noticed that her dressing gown was stuck wet to her legs. I looked at her in alarm. “Iris,” I said, “you’re wet, do you know that?”

She’d put a hand out to steady herself against the sink, and there was dripping now, and I was up off the couch and taking hold of her under the arms as if she were on the edge of a dark yawning gulf and in danger of slipping away from me. The terminology rang in my head—amniotic sac, cervical dilation, oxytocin—but I felt helpless all the same. She gave me a weak smile, dead weight in my arms, and murmured, “Yes, I think it’s time.”

6

There was the usual rush to the hospital, the wife’s face drawn and bloodless, the prospective father’s hand trembling on the gearshift, a litany of all the things that could go wrong jamming the airwaves in his head — Catherine Barkley dead in the rain and the infant too, the forceps child down the block with the pinched features like an unfinished painting, the crippled, the retarded, the hopeless, the stillborn — and then there was the wheelchair waiting at the emergency entrance and the two of them sitting in Admissions answering inane questions and filling out forms till the prospective father wanted to get the nurse in a stranglehold and force her to reveal the whereabouts of Dr. Bergstrom, the obstetrician, and where was he? Didn’t he realize what was going on here?

I didn’t say anything, though. Didn’t make a move. Just sat there in the crucible of the chair and held Iris’s hand while the nurse nattered on and the ink made its way from the pen to the printed forms and the world went maddeningly on as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. Iris looked bilious, bleached to the roots of her hair, her eyebrows painted stroke by stroke over the void of her eyes. She was sunk down in the chair, slumped under the terrible weight of the ball she was carrying around with her, teeth clenched, limbs dangling. The hands of the wall clock crept round as expected. Clouds bobbed in the sky beyond the window. All at once, Iris let out a sharply aspirated cry and the nurse smiled. Then they finally came for her, two orderlies with a gurney, and took her up to Obstetrics, and nothing happened, absolutely nothing.

After an hour or so they let me in to sit with her, pulling the curtain around the bed to give us some privacy. Her eyelids were closed, her hands prone beside her. There was no color to her, none, and she might have been dead already, laid out on a slab in the funeral parlor. I took her hand then — out of passion and fear and because I felt so reduced and helpless in that moment — and her eyes snapped open. “John?” she said.

“It’s me,” I said. “I’m right here.” It was movie dialogue, and I kept seeing Helen Hayes’s face superimposed over hers, and where was the “Liebestod” to carry us away? “What are the contractions like? Coming faster now? Did he say how long it’s going to be?”

They’d given her something for the pain and her voice was drowsy with it. “It’s going to be a while, John,” she murmured. “It’s just one of those things, you know? Sometimes, with your first—”

An unseen woman cried out from across the room then — or no, she shrieked, actually, as if a torturer were at work on her with his hot pliers and his electrodes. There was a silence, and then she shrieked again. I felt chastened, helpless, full of remorse and tenderness. The only thing I could think to do was squeeze my wife’s hand. “Should I find Bergstrom? Talk to him, I mean?”

Her voice dropped away. “Only if you want to. But don’t”—the woman shrieked again, stone on glass—“get yourself in a lather. I’m okay. I am. Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”

In the end, of course, she was right — everything was fine, and John Jr., at seven pounds six ounces and twenty-one inches in length, was the result. But Iris’s was a protracted labor, and Friday night became Saturday morning, the progress of the clock as tedious as anything I’d ever endured, Sunday sermons, a visit to the dentist, Prok in the sixth hour of a Buick-bound lecture, and then the sun was up and Bergstrom back on the job advising me to go home and shower and catch some sleep because she was barely dilated and it would be a while yet. I didn’t take his advice. I slumped in the chair at Iris’s bedside, listened to the furtive comings and goings of the ward, might even have heard the odd wail of a newborn from the delivery room across the hall. Coffee fueled me, and something greasy from the cafeteria — chili con carne, fried chicken and dumplings — till my stomach was a vat of acid. When Saturday afternoon melded into Saturday evening, and still nothing had happened, I turned to my flask for solace.

Sunday morning came, the small hours revisited, and I went out to the car and slept, and when I woke the sun was high overhead and making a furnace of the Dodge, the windows of which I’d rolled up in order to defeat the mosquitoes. I’d sweated through to my underwear, and I’m afraid that I must have been a walking wall of unpleasant odors and secretions. My mouth was dry, but I took the precaution of refilling the flask before I shuffled back through the hospital, looked in on Iris — still nothing — and made my way into the men’s room to throw some water on my face and pat down my underarms with hand soap and paper towels. It was past noon by the time I had a sandwich in the cafeteria, and then I sat through the long afternoon and into the evening with my wife, and it was as if we’d never been anyplace else in the world but here, behind the white curtains, while expectant mothers climbed into the beds on either side of us, cried out their pain, and were wheeled into the delivery room to gratify their husbands and their doctors. I was reading to her from the paper when the sun went down for the third time.

Then it was night, ten o’clock, ten-thirty, eleven, and yet still nothing, though the contractions were coming faster now and Dr. Bergstrom was on the case, poking his head between the curtains every few minutes, inspecting Iris’s cervix for dilation and making encouraging noises. I should say, incidentally, that I’d been given permission to be with my wife throughout the process and to witness the birth itself, something Prok had encouraged me to do. He’d been present for the delivery of all three of his children, and he spoke very passionately both to me and Dr. Bergstrom about the significance of the experience from a scientific point of view, and I think he himself would have liked to be there with us if it wouldn’t have looked odd in the eyes of the community. Odd enough that the husband should be present, let alone another male, no matter how closely connected and how purely objective he might have been. And of course Iris would have refused him in any case. This was her show. Absolutely.

And then it occurred to me, as eleven o’clock slipped by and my stomach broiled and the bourbon lit me from within and all of my fears came rising to the surface like the corpses of the drowned, that there was actually something serendipitous in the delay, that something extraordinary was occurring here — if Iris held out another forty-five minutes by my watch, John Jr. would share a birthday with Prok. I told myself that everything was happening for a reason, that was all it was, and I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Or auspicious. John Jr. and Prok. I saw a succession of birthday parties stretching on over the years, balloons, flowers, the cutting of the cake, Prok lifting my son to his shoulders and parading round the room with him, uncle, godfather, mentor.

I took a pull at the flask and glanced down at Iris. She lay there like a stone. They’d given her an epidural for the pain and Dr. Bergstrom had begun to talk about inducing labor or even operating because there was the danger now of an infection setting in, and the nurses had begun to bustle a bit because one way or the other the moment was coming. “Iris,” I said, and I suppose I was half-drunk at the time, the flask doing wonders for my jangled nerves, and I didn’t want to think about the delay and the consequences and the fatality that hung over the bed like a palpable nightmare, because I was going to look on the bright side of things, I was going to buck her up as best I could. “Iris, you know what?”

She was exhausted, drained, all her energy and her optimism gone. She barely lifted her eyes.

“Looks like John Jr. — or Madeline — is going to share a famous birthday.”

Nothing.

“With Prok. In forty-five minutes it’s Prok’s birthday, June the twenty-third, did you realize that? Isn’t it amazing?”

She let out a sudden gasp, as if a bottle of champagne had been unstoppered, and then, seconds later, another, and then another, and the curtains flew back and the nurse was wheeling the gurney into the delivery room, and as I sat there in surgical mask and scrubs and tried to contain the hammering of my heart, I watched my son come into the world at 11:56 p.m. on June 22, 1947.

I’d like to say that we gave birth to the male volume at the same time — and we should have, according to the schedule Prok had laid out for himself — but the parturition of the text was a bit more difficult and protracted than any of us could have imagined. As the summer broiled around us and we darted off for abbreviated field trips to this venue or that, Prok worked ever more furiously on the manuscript, writing everywhere — in the car, on the train, at home before work and in the office after the doors had been shut, composing the latter chapters even as the early ones came back to us in galleys from W.B. Saunders. He was putting in eighteen-hour days, sleep a luxury, food nothing more than fuel for the engine, Mac, Mrs. Matthews, Corcoran, Rutledge and I coopted into reading proofs, our offices a blizzard of paper, graphs and spread-eagled texts, always another chart to complete or a fact to check. The absolute final date for completed copy was September 15, and as late as the end of August there were five chapters yet to finish.

I’d never been so busy in my life, nor had Prok ever been so demanding — or short-tempered — and when I wasn’t at work there was the nonstop turmoil of the house, diapers in the laundry, boiling away on the stove, strung up like miniature flags of surrender on the line out back, bottles everywhere and the smell of formula hanging over the bedroom and kitchen till I began to think the walls themselves were lactating. There were late-night feedings, John Jr.’s symphony of shrieks, yowls and sputters, the aching quiet of the house at three a.m. and Iris’s maternal calm. And her mother, her mother, of course. Her mother was there for the first month, a sponge clamped in each hand, wiping down every horizontal surface till it shone, carting in groceries, sweeping like a robot and forever cooking up vats of lamb stew or succotash or four-inch pans of macaroni and cheese with hunks of sliced frankfurter spread like gun emplacements across the top.

I was neutral toward her. She was like Iris, only older, independent-minded, contentious, and she could never bring herself to address me directly, instead referring to me in the third person, as, for instance, “Is he hungry? Does he sit here?” But she took some of the pressure off me and kept Iris company and that was fine by me, because, as I’ve indicated, this was the busiest and most critical time the project had ever seen. Once she did leave, though, to go back home to Michigan City, the onus fell on me, and the timing couldn’t have been worse. I tried my best. Iris still hadn’t recovered her usual level of energy, and I did what I could to help out, picking up groceries, doing a load of laundry, that sort of thing, but naturally things began to slip and I couldn’t help feeling overburdened and resentful.

And yet I don’t mean to sound negative, because a kind of miracle grew out of it all: I got to know my son. To this point he’d been bundled and diapered and whisked from one room to the other, from my mother-in-law’s arms to Iris’s, and if I got more than a peek at the reddened amorphous little face that was saying a lot, but as soon as her mother left — as we came up the walk on our way back from the bus station, in fact — Iris just handed him to me as if he were a sack of groceries she was tired of shifting from one hip to the other. “Go ahead, hold him, John,” she’d said, and there he was, the surprisingly dense bundle of him, thrust into my arms. I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid of dropping him, of failing to properly support his neck, afraid of his weight and his movements and the way he had of effortlessly sucking in air and letting it out again in a maddened inconsolable shriek. He was a time bomb. He was made of lead. He had the lungs of Aeolus. “It’s just a baby, John, that’s all — he won’t bite. He doesn’t even have any teeth.” She looked at me, at the expression on my face, and burst out laughing.

I wasn’t laughing. I was in awe. He was my son. I held him in my arms, felt the weight of him, the vitality, and something moved inside me. John Jr. The wedding of the chromosomes. This was what we’d worked for, the end result, and it was research no longer.

But the book. The project. That was the focus of the summer of 1947, and if our domestic lives intruded on it — Corcoran’s, Rutledge’s, Iris’s and mine, even Mrs. Matthews’s — Prok was there to remind us of our priorities. As he became more demanding, he became more anxious as well, and the press did nothing to assuage his fears, the reporters becoming more importunate and ingenious as the summer went on. I’d escaped Skittering, but there were dozens of others hot on the trail of the story, each of them looking to be the first to reveal our findings to the public. We were besieged with letters, wires, telephone calls, and not just from the plebeian ranks, but from editors and editors-in-chief and even, in some cases, the distinguished owners of various media outlets themselves. Never underestimate the power of sex to incite the public. We were interested in science, but the press was interested in commerce and commerce alone. They wanted to sell copies because copies sold ads and ads sold product and product bought more ads, and none of us of the inner circle had any doubt that they would twist our work in any way they saw fit.

Ultimately, it was Prok who came up with the solution. He’d been feeling increasingly harassed, and one reporter in particular — very persistent, wouldn’t take no for an answer — provided the catalyst. Every day, for a period of more than a month, we received a wire from this gentleman (or pest, as Prok called him), begging for an interview, Prok firmly refusing him time and again till one morning he showed up in the anteroom, hat in hand, trying to wheedle his way past Mrs. Matthews. We were working away at our desks when at some point we became aware of a duel of voices from the anteroom, the closer’s sanguine inflections and Mrs. Matthews’s deft parries, and I remember Prok, in exasperation, raising his head from his work. “Who is that, Mrs. Matthews?” he snapped.

We all saw him there through the open doorway, a slope-shouldered man of middle age in a humble brown suit, looking wounded and lost. “Ralph Becker,” he bleated. “Of the Magazine of the Year? I wired you.”

“Oh, yes,” Prok rumbled, “yes, you’ve wired us all right, and we’ve wired you back. Repeatedly.” Prok was up from his desk suddenly, curt and angry, striding through the doorway to confront the man in the brown suit while we looked on sheepishly. “But perhaps you have difficulty with the written word?”

The man stammered out an apology, all but melting into his shoes, but he never stopped wheedling. “As long as I’m here, I wonder if you might just — oh, just the smallest tour of the place. That’s all I ask. And the tiniest glimmer of what you hope to accomplish. From all I hear you’re fantastically dedicated, rigorous, really rigorous”—and here he looked beyond Prok to where we sat riveted at our desks—“and you’ve got a real crackerjack staff too. A minute? Just a minute of your time?”

Prok was impassive, hiding behind his interviewer’s façade, and if you didn’t know him you wouldn’t have guessed at how close to snapping he was. His voice gave him away, throttled in the back of his throat, a kind of articulate croak: “I’ve explained all that a hundred times already, explained it till I’m exasperated beyond the point of civility, and I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave our offices—”

“But I wouldn’t be in the way — I’d just want to get a feel for it, for your work.”

“—and not set foot on these premises again till you’re expressly invited.” Prok waved his hand impatiently, as if dissipating a swarm of gnats. “Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? If you people don’t stop pestering me there won’t be a volume to review.”

The journalist must have detected the same despairing crack in Prok’s voice I did, because he immediately tried to hammer a piton into it and hoist his way up: “‘Invited,’ did you say? You mean you’re going to open up, then? Good, good. But why wait? I’m here now. Think how useful I can be, spreading the word — that’s what you want, isn’t it? To spread the gospel? Right?”

The light from the hallway liquefied Prok’s spectacles. He hesitated. He did want to spread the word, but not piecemeal, and not in a way that would cheapen and undermine everything we were hoping to accomplish. “All right,” he said finally, “I appreciate your interest, and this is what I’ve decided on — what we’ve decided on, my colleagues and I — as a matter of policy.” He took a moment to glance over his shoulder at us, and we did our best to support him, though we were as eager as the man in the brown suit to hear what he’d come up with. “We’ll be issuing invitations to all the major newspapers and magazines to come here to the Institute, have a tour of the facilities, record your sex histories and receive full access to the page proofs — once those proofs are completed, that is. And I have to emphasize that: Completed. Finished. Ready to go. Now, do you understand?”

“I’ll be the first?”

“You’ll be one of them.”

There was a pause. The man shifted his weight from one scuffed brown shoe to the other. His face was shrewd, narrow, the face of an extortionist, a second-story man. He’d come to rob us, just as surely as Skittering had. “You don’t mean you’re going to make me traipse all the way out here again — look, here I am. Can’t you just make an exception, just in this one case?”

I almost got up — I was on the verge of it — because why should Prok, with so much on his shoulders, have to deal with this too? I could have ushered the man out the door, could have broken him in two if it came to that, but Prok was in charge here, always in charge, and Prok never wavered.

“Both you and I know that wouldn’t be fair, now don’t we?” he said. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see Prok’s expression, but I could have guessed at it, Prok looming over the little brown man, in absolute control — the steely look, the mask of indifference — and subtle, so subtle. “But I take your point. You are here, aren’t you, and as long as you are we may as well get your sex history and save us all the trouble when you return.” Prok turned to me then, Mrs. Matthews gone back to her typing, Corcoran trying to suppress a grin, Rutledge fidgeting in his chair. “Milk, would you mind doing the honors?”

And so it was. Prok brought the reporters on in two waves, the magazine writers first — in August — and then the newspapermen in September, even as he was putting the finishing touches to the manuscript. We set up a conference table in the office across the hall, from which we’d evicted one of Prok’s colleagues in the Zoology Department (above his protests, but with the blessing — and imprimatur — of President Wells), and Prok packed the reporters in as if they were so many shot-putters and pole-vaulters crowding onto the team bus. First he lectured them on our findings and the boon they represented for mankind, then gave them a tour of the facilities and an opportunity to talk individually with us, his shining and punctilious staff, finally making a plea to each of them to give up his history not simply in the service of the project but for the practical purpose of gaining insight into our methods. Better than fifty percent of the journalists took him up on it, and that kept us busy, all of us, frantically recording sex histories even as the rest of them snooped around town, looking to unveil a little local color. As you might imagine, there was a real run on the bars.

Before they left, Prok gave them each a set of proofs, and then — this was pure genius — had them sign a thirteen-point contract vowing not to publish their stories or release any of our figures prior to the December issue of their respective publications and to submit all articles to us in advance so that we could vet them for errors. Of course, the effect was to stifle any criticism and at the same time harness the press to the service of our own ends — there was an outpouring of highly favorable articles, and all in that crucial period leading up to the book’s release. We endured the sensationalized headlines as a matter of course, because there was really nothing to be done there, but by and large the articles themselves were more than we could have hoped for. Suddenly the whole nation — the whole world — was listening.

The rest is history.

All well and good. We’d achieved celebrity — or at least Prok had — but if before we’d been able to work in relative obscurity, now everything we did was magnified. And if Prok had been able to relax into his work in the past, into his gardening, his gall collecting, the meandering field trips to seek out taxonomic marvels and acquire histories, now he was driven and manipulated by his own success, pulled in a hundred directions at once. There were mobs of visitors all of a sudden, many of them quite prominent, travel and lecture requests, nonstop interviews, and letters — thousands of them — pouring in from all over the world, each more heartbreaking than the next. Prok was a guru now, and gurus had to sit at their desks from sunrise to sunset, tending to the needs of the faithful.

Dear Dr. Kinsy: My husbend wants to do unnatural things with me in bed like kissing me in my private parts but I think such things are unattracktive and sinful and I was hopping you could write to him or make a call and tell him to leave me alone. Yrs. Sinceerly, Mrs. Hildegard Dolenz

Dear Professor: Twelve years ago I met the woman of my dreams, Martha, and married her on the spot. She is a woman like no other and I am satisfied with her as a good mother to our six sons and a good cook and etc., but for the fact that she is no longer interested in marital relations and I don’t know why. Is this natural in a woman of her age (38)? If so, can you tell me what the cure is or if I should look for relief in other quarters, because I have become friendly with a widow of 54 years of age who seems truly more interested in relations than my own wife. Very Truly Yours, Stephen Hawley, Long Beach Island, New Jersey

Dear Dr. Kinsey: Can you tell me why our servicemen, after liberating France and defeating Nazi Germany, have to spend all these months away from home living with the enemy? Because my husband of seventeen years never wrote me once until he came home on leave two weeks ago and told me that he was moving out of our house that we slaved for together because of some if you’ll pardon the expression ex-Nazi floozy who’s only idea is to pray on lonely servicemen in her foreign country. I love him. I want him back. But he says he loves her. Thank you and God bless. Mrs. Thomas Tuttle, Yuma, Arizona

Dear Doctor: I am a young teenaged girl and I like to play with myself and with two other girls in my class and I don’t really think there’s anything wrong with that, do you? Anonymous in Chicago.

Dear Dr. Kinsey: My father was my first lovver and he had a brother I never liked and he was my second I am a young Mulatto girl of mixed race because my father is White and my mother from Trinidad (Black) and my ex-husband Horace wants me to turn tricks in a furnished room and I still love him but my boyfriend Naaman says he will kill me first and I don’t know what to “do” can you help me please with any advise? — May

Of course, with all the other pressures on him, Prok nonetheless took it upon himself to answer each letter personally, and sometimes in great detail, though after a while even he became inured to this outpouring of heartbreak and ignorance and either referred his correspondents to the relevant chapters of the male volume or advised them to seek counseling from professionals in their own hometowns (I regret to say that we are not clinicians, and that while we are interested to hear of your dilemma, we can do no more than to point you toward professional help). Still, the sheer volume of the correspondence, coupled with the travel and interviews and the desire to move forward with the female text, all began to take their toll.

Prok’s first collapse had come some three years earlier, in the spring of 1945, after a hectic round of lecturing at the Menninger Clinic and then at a conference for some of the leading lights of the military, during which he bent over backward trying to convince them that no sexual behavior was deviant (H-behavior, specifically, the old martial bugbear) and that even if it were it would pose no threat to military discipline. You can only imagine the sort of reception he must have met with, the hidebound officers and the tight-lipped military bureaucrats, and the energy he must have expended in the process. I was the one who picked him up at the station in Indianapolis, and I remember the look of him, his pallor that extended even to the dulled irises of his eyes, his slouch, the deadness of his voice. “It’s just a cold,” he told me, but it was more than that. It was his heart, enlarged and arrhythmic, the legacy of his childhood bout with rheumatic fever, the thing that would kill him, though none of us could imagine it then — other people had coronary problems, other people died, but not Prok. Prok was a pillar. He was indefatigable. He was our leader, our mentor, and we couldn’t do without him, couldn’t even conceive of it.

The doctor called it nervous exhaustion and ordered three weeks’ bed rest, but Prok was back in action within the week, taking histories at the Indiana State Penal Farm, and then the whirlwind descended again and I forgot all about it, even in the face of the evidence. And now, under the weight of his sudden celebrity, he’d begun to flag once more, and I tried to protect him — and so did Mac, we all did — but it was impossible. He was wound tight, and there was nothing that could loosen him but for sex, and sex, for all its meliorating effects, only lasted through excitation to orgasm.

It was Professor Shadle who stepped into the breach. He was, as you might recall, one of the pioneers in the recording of animal sexual behavior on film, the man who first photographed coitus in the porcupine and other unlikely creatures. Prok had met him at the University of Buffalo when we’d gone there some years earlier to lecture and collect histories, and ever since had pursued him over the subject of his films, which would be an invaluable addition to our library. Finally, after a lengthy exchange of letters, Shadle had agreed to leave his porcupines for a week and come out to Bloomington with his films. As usual, I was the one delegated to meet the professor at the train, and I brought Iris and the baby along for the ride. It was late summer, the male volume still riding high on the bestseller lists, “The Kinsey Boogie” paralyzing the airwaves, the southern Indiana heat like a living thing attaching itself to your pores in order to suck all the minerals and fluids from your body. We were early for the train and I bought Iris an ice cream and watched her lick the cone round the edges and bend to the baby as he tried to suck and kiss his way through this new medium, this dense stuff that was sweet and wintry at the same time, the idea of it fastening in his infantile brain in the place where the pleasure centers take their stimulus: ice cream. Ice cream. It was an exquisite moment. And what would his first words be, as the gift of language descended on him right there on the platform under the gaze of the Indiana sun?

“Did you hear that?” Iris was bent over the stroller, vanilla ice cream running like white blood over her fingers, our son’s hands jerking in clonic display, and the train just pulling into the station with a long attenuated shriek of the brakes.

“What?”

“The baby. He just said ‘ice cream’ clear as day.”

“No,” I said, “did he?”

“His first words, John. ‘Ice cream.’ I heard him.”

I have a picture of that moment in my head, Iris squatting over the baby, her hair in a ponytail, shoulders bare and freckled with the sun, her shorts riding up her thighs, her sandals and painted toenails and the shining arches of her feet, and the train standing there like an illusion, a moving wall, abracadabra. I bent to my son, one eye on the passenger cars as the doors wheezed open. “Ice cream,” I said. “Ice cream, Johnnie.”

A jerk of the fleshy arms, the glutinous hands clapping together in accidental percussion. And the reduced gurgling glissade of sound: “Iiiice,” John Jr. said. “Iiiice.”

When I looked up, Professor Shadle was standing there with his suitcase in hand. He was in his mid-sixties, short — very short, almost dwarfish — with a pronounced midsection and clumps of white hair that might have been cotton balls stuck randomly to his skull. “Beautiful baby,” he murmured.

“Oh, excuse me,” I said, rising to my feet to take his damp dwarfish hand in my own. “Professor Shadle, welcome. To, well, to Indiana. We met in Buffalo, you remember?”

“Yes,” he said, in a lisping rasp, his eyes ducking away from mine. “Of course.”

“And this is my wife, Iris. And our son, John Jr.”

“He just said his first words,” Iris put in. She was beaming. “Aside from ‘mama’ and ‘dada,’ I mean.”

The professor lifted his eyebrows. “Really? And what were these momentous words?”

“Ice cream,” we said in unison, and then there was the echo of the little voice beneath us, John Jr. mute no more. Two words, thin as wire: Iiiice keen.

“Beautiful,” the professor breathed. “Just beautiful.” And he left it at that.

In the evening there was a dinner in Professor Shadle’s honor at the house on First Street, Prok having whipped up one of his goulashes with a side of homemade coleslaw (“For the cooling effect”), after which we retired to the living room to watch the films on equipment Prok had borrowed from the audiovisual department at the university. Shadle had eight films in all, each sequestered in a round tin, and he chattered happily with Prok as he meticulously threaded the first of them through the projector. We were all there, all of us of the inner circle, and the atmosphere was relaxed and convivial — in fact there was a real air of pleasurable anticipation, as if we’d all gone to the picture show and were sitting there in the dark awaiting the first flickers of light to illuminate the screen.

“All we need is popcorn,” Hilda Rutledge said out of the corner of her mouth.

“And Jujubes,” Iris said, “don’t forget Jujubes.”

“You like those — Jujubes? Really?” Violet Corcoran was sitting on the floor, on the rag rug, her elbows propped up on the chair behind her. “They practically pull the fillings out of your teeth. Dots,” she said. “Give me Dots anytime.”

“What about jawbreakers?” This was Corcoran, leaning in, hands clasped over his knees. “That’s what we had as kids. Last the whole movie, double feature even.”

“Sure,” Iris said, “if you don’t suck or swallow — or use your teeth. Use your teeth and they’re gone in no time. We used to go through a whole bag of jawbreakers in a double feature. Remember that, John — that candy store across from the movie theater? Laura Hutchins and I used to buy the stuff there and smuggle it in.”

I gave her a smile. I was happy, feeling relaxed and tranquil, and for once alcohol had nothing to do with it. “At about half the price they charged in the theater.”

“Captive audience,” Corcoran said with a shrug. “You can’t blame them for trying to make a good Yankee dollar.”

“No,” Iris said, “but you can save a good Yankee nickel if you think ahead, but of course most kids don’t.”

“Licorice whips,” Hilda said.

Iris’s eyes went distant. “Oh, yeah,” she said, “licorice whips. Yeah. But the red ones, only the red ones—”

The women were in summer dresses, their shoulders bare, their limbs fluid, poured like liquid, bare flesh, the hovering light, and Prok at the shades now, closing down the fading sun while Professor Shadle worked at the projector. We were in shirtsleeves — Rutledge, Corcoran and I, and Corcoran was even sporting a pair of shorts in a bright madras pattern — but Prok was wearing his jacket and bow tie still, and I wondered about that until it occurred to me that he was putting on a show of formality for his colleague from Buffalo. Shadle had no such scruples. He’d come to dinner in a voluminous Hawaiian shirt, through which he sweated steadily as he bent to the projector. “You’ll be seeing Dannie — he’s a year younger — and Peterkin,” he said, in a voice that lifted away from his conversation with Prok to address us all. “They were wed last year, or at least that’s the way I like to put it. But you’ll see, in just a”—he paused to focus on pulling the last loop of film through the projector and attaching it to the take-up reel—“in just a minute.”

Prok said nothing. He’d completed his round of the windows, and the room was illuminated now only by the lamp that stood behind the projector. It was noticeably hotter with the shades drawn, and there was an aggregate smell of us, of the inner circle, the gently perspiring odor of our humanity, friends and colleagues all, casually gathered on yet another social occasion. Prok said nothing, but I knew what he was thinking — he was thinking that “wed” was just a euphemism, a convenience, and that Professor Shadle, despite his training as a biologist, was dangerously close to falling into the category of the sex shy. I wondered if we had his history.

But then, just as Shadle straightened up and flicked on the projector, the door from the kitchen swung open and Mac appeared, her thin white arms bowed before her under the weight of the biggest ceramic bowl in the house, and the scent of fresh-popped corn, invested liberally with butter and salt, filled the room. “Well,” she laughed, setting the bowl down on the coffee table, “I thought since we are having a picture show,” and there was a corresponding whoop from Hilda.

“Perfect,” Hilda exclaimed, “perfect.” She drew up her legs and leaned forward to dip her hand in the bowl. “Did you know we were just reminiscing about the movies, and here we are, with popcorn and everything?”

And then the lamp snapped off and the projector began to click and groan and the first flickers of substance illuminated the silica granules of the screen Prok had set up at the far end of the room. I saw a patch of grass, wavering and dark, the camera jumping in the next frame to the pocked gray trunks of a grove of pine trees surrounded by a hurricane fence, and then we were in the enclosure and the creatures were there, two dense clots of life rising up out of the backdrop till they filled the screen and the camera drew back. The animals’ quills were combed down like the densest of beards, only their eyes and the occasional glimpse of their teeth shining through. They seemed to sniff at each other, nose to nose, like dogs meeting for the first time, and then, to the prompting of Shadle’s narration (“Now watch, this is precious”), they rose up simultaneously on their hind legs and embraced, their black-lipped mouths coming together as if for a kiss. The whole operation was slow and stately, a kind of porcupine minuet.

Prok let out a low chuckle of delight. “Foreplay,” he said, in a wondering voice, “they’re engaging in foreplay.”

And so they were. Beasts, mere beasts, and they might have been human, philosophers in their long coats, coming together in the tenderest way, taking their time, enjoying themselves.

Hilda Rutledge made a clicking noise, tongue to palate, and said, “Aren’t they cute?”

“Which one’s the girl?” Iris wanted to know.

“That’s Peterkin on the right,” Shadle whispered, and it was as if we were in a church, kneeling in the pews. “She’s never been bred before — or Dannie either.”

“So this is their first date?” Hilda’s voice floated up out of the darkness, making a joke of it.

No one answered her.

Now, up on the screen, the animals slowly descended to all fours and the male began to press on the female’s haunches until suddenly she opened up to him, the barbed quills magically unfolding to reveal the place of entry. The male nosed her there a moment, then entered her with a series of rapid thrusts before withdrawing to lick his penis clean. And that was it. It was over. Someone — I think it was Corcoran — began to clap, and then we all applauded, Prok among the loudest, and I remember his laughter too. He took the purest, most uncomplicated delight in these films, and the films that were to come, not only of the lower animals but of the human animal too, and that delight, as much as anything, helped to keep him going.

But already Shadle was hushing us, because the camera was again hovering over the animals, the light different — brighter now, another day — and the courtship went on again and again, through eight full reels.

Later, as we strolled out to the car, I asked Iris what she’d thought of it all. She’d been in a giddy mood all night, girlish and quick to laugh, the business with Corcoran and Violet long behind us now, and I had a sense that she’d enjoyed herself, really enjoyed herself, for the first time in a long while. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was better than I thought it would be, I guess.”

“Yeah, it was really something, wasn’t it? I didn’t know what to expect really, but it was nice, don’t you think? Charming. They were charming. Almost like—”

“People?”

I let out a laugh. “Exactly.”

The night was still. Fireflies traced perforated lines over the flowerbeds and up into the trees as if they were all working in concert on some elaborate design we could only guess at. There was a powerful smell of the chicken manure Prok and I had spread on the flowerbeds the previous weekend, and something else too, a scent of the earth itself, worked and reworked under Prok’s tireless spade. “But isn’t that the point?” she said. “That we’re really no better than — what are they, rodents? They mate and so do we, right?”

“Sure,” I said, giving a shrug she couldn’t see because it was fully dark now. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”

We were silent a moment and I opened the car door for her and then leaned in and pressed my lips to hers. My hands found her shoulders, the silken flesh of her upper arms, and I smoothed back her hair and kissed her throat. We held the pose for a long moment because we were young still, still in love, and John Jr. was with the babysitter and this was what couples did when they were free of responsibility and the night opened up above them into the dark avenues of the universe that had no reason or end. “Mmm,” she said finally, her lips brushing mine, “maybe we should watch the porcupines going at it more often. You think Professor Shadle would mind coming over to the house for a command performance?”

“No,” I whispered, “we don’t need the learned professor or his porcupines either,” and then the door of the house swung open behind us — a parallelogram of yellow light painted on the walk — and there was the sound of voices, footsteps, high heels rapping at the pavement. I backed out of the car, shut the door on Iris, and circled round to the driver’s side. “We don’t need anybody,” I said, sliding into the seat and laying a hand on her knee before letting it ride up her thigh under the thin summer dress.

“No,” she said, “not even Prok.”

That was when the Corcorans emerged from the front yard, their voices twined in murmurous oblivion, and we sat in the darkness of the cab and watched them turn up the walk, arm in arm. I reached for the keys then, to start up the car and take us home, but Iris stopped me. Her hand was on mine, and she guided me back to her, to her naked thighs and the pushed-up rumple of her dress. “You don’t mean — not here?” I whispered.

“Yes,” she said. “Here. Right here.”

7

Film was the new medium, we all saw that, and we understood from the beginning — from that night at Prok’s with Professor Shadle and those indelible images of his amorous porcupines — that it would revolutionize the course of our research. Whereas before we’d been able to observe sexual activity in the flesh, first with Ginger and her clients and then, much more transparently, with Betty and Corcoran, now we had a means to record it so that the sequence of events — from passivity to arousal, engorgement and penetration — could be studied over and over for the details that might have escaped notice in the heat of the moment. And it was especially valuable at this juncture because we were now beginning to turn our attention to sexual behavior in the female. Not only did we have to make sense of a mountain of data, we needed to observe and record physiologic reaction as well, so that we could, for instance, determine individual variation in the amount of fluid secreted by the Bartholin’s glands or settle once and for all the debate Freud initiated over the question of the vaginal versus clitoral orgasm.

It was almost as if the public anticipated us. If we were inundated with mail — letters seeking advice, hastily scrawled notes criticizing our methods, morals and sanity, offers of every sort of sexual adventure imaginable — we also began to receive films. Some of them, of the mating behavior of rats, pigeons and mink, came from a coterie of animal behaviorists Prok had cultivated over the years (the mink were magnificent, as close to sadomasochists as you could find in a state of nature, both partners rendered bloody by the time the affair was consummated), while others — crudely shot on eight-millimeter black-and-white film — were from friends of the research and they depicted human sex. I remember the first of them quite distinctly. We’d just come out of a staff meeting — it must have been a Friday, our regular meeting day — to find Mrs. Matthews at her desk in the anteroom, sorting through the morning’s mail. “Dr. Kinsey,” she called as we emerged from the back room, “you might want to have a look at this.”

The letter that accompanied the film was from a young couple in Florida who lavishly praised our research efforts (“It’s about time someone had the courage to stand up and lead this puritanical society out of the sexual Dark Ages”) and expressed, at considerable length (something like twenty-two pages, if memory serves), their own somewhat garbled but libertine philosophy with regard to sex. In essence, they felt that sex was one of the grounding pleasures of life and should be appreciated without constraint, and as they were both highly sexed, they’d enjoyed relations two or three times a day since their marriage six years earlier and claimed to be all the healthier for it, both mentally and physically. The enclosed film, they hoped, would not only demonstrate the unbridled joy they took in the activity, but also provide a valuable addition to our research archives. “Use it freely,” they concluded, “and show it widely,” and signed themselves “Blissful in West Palm Beach.” They included a return address and a telephone number, in the event we’d like to contact them for a live demonstration.

We’d all gravitated to our desks, but we couldn’t help keeping an eye on Prok as he read through the letter. At first, there was no reaction, his expression dour and preoccupied, the glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose, but he began to smile and even chuckle to himself as he went on. “Listen to this,” he called out, the old enthusiasm firing his voice, and he began to quote from the letter until he wound up reading the whole of the last two pages aloud. When he’d finished, he lifted the film canister from his desk and held it up so that we could all see it, and it might have been an exhibit in a court of law, he the judge and we the jury. He was smiling, grinning wide — it was the old grin, the one that had been missing lately, seductive, boyish, devil-may-care, quintessential Prok. “You know,” he said, and even Mrs. Matthews paused in her furious assault on the typewriter keys, “I do think it might just behoove us to stay past five this evening and arrange a private screening here in the offices. What do you say — Corcoran? Rutledge? Milk? Am I stepping on any toes here?”

No one objected.

“Good,” he said. “Good. We’ll just call our wives and delay dinner a bit, then.” The grin was gone now, no hint of it left, even in his eyes. “In the interest of science, that is,” he said, and turned back to his work.

I telephoned Iris and told her I’d be late — something had come up, yes, another nature film Prok was hot on — and then watched the clock till the hour struck five and Mrs. Matthews tidied up her desk, pulled the vinyl cover over her typewriter and left for the day. Prok never glanced up. He was busy, head down, charging through an opinion on a court case that had been consuming him lately — a man in Pennsylvania, victim of a barbarously antiquated statute, was being tried for performing oral sex on his own wife — and he didn’t want to appear overeager to view the film, though I could see from certain characteristic gestures, the tapping of a pencil on the spine of the text before him, a repetitive running of his fingers through his hair, that he was as anxious over the film as we were.

We worked in silence for another quarter hour, exchanging glances among ourselves, till finally Corcoran pushed himself up from his desk with a sigh and made a conspicuous show of stretching. “Well,” he said, “Oscar, John, what do you think — isn’t it getting to be that time?”

Prok looked up from his work, then stole a quick glance at his watch.

“Prok? What do you say?”

The film was of surprisingly good quality, and since both participants were present throughout, that brought up the rather interesting question of who might have been behind the camera for what proved to be as unexpurgated and varied a performance as the one we’d all witnessed in the flesh on the night Corcoran introduced us to Betty. But this was different, very different. I’m no student of film and doubtless this has been observed many times before, but there was something about the distance and anonymity of the viewer that made the performance all the more stimulating. In the raw — with Corcoran and Betty, that is, with Ginger and her clients — there was always a sense of uneasiness, of fragility, as in a theater production when a single gesture or comment from the audience could break the spell and bring the whole thing down.

That wasn’t the case here. I didn’t really discuss it with my colleagues, but for my part the sense of standing outside of the action only heightened my response, which was, to say the least, unprofessional. I was aroused, and no doubt about it. The woman — the female — was slim and dark, with perfectly symmetrical breasts, and she wore her hair the way Iris did, the brushed-out curls balling at her throat and shoulder blades as she went through her repertoire; the male was of medium build, his penis uncircumcised and about average in length and breadth (all those penny postcards came to mind, all those measurements duly recorded and addressed to Professor Alfred C. Kinsey, Zoology Department, University of Indiana) and there was something winning in his face, a sense of naïveté or insouciance, as if he weren’t performing a role at all, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have sex with your wife while a third party ran film through a camera. Both of them were attractive. Very attractive. And I’m sorry, because that shouldn’t make an iota of difference to a scientist concerned with individual variation, the homely, overweight and poorly favored every bit as significant as the Venuses and Adonises, but it did. My mouth was dry. My palms were sweating. And the rest — well, the rest of the physiological response should be obvious.

Immediately, as the film began, the couple were naked, no foreplay or teasing as in the peep shows, the female seated atop the male on a couch, both of them facing the camera. His phallus was visible between her thighs, and she was manipulating it in her fingers and at the same time turning back over her shoulder to lap at his tongue. The scene held a moment, and then they shifted position, she going down to fellate him before he entered her and they went through the usual motions until finally rolling over so that she was atop him, her face to the camera, absolutely rapt, the eyes open and glaring, the mouth slack — almost grimacing — even as the shudder of orgasm ran through her.

“There,” Prok cried. “See there? That is the expression of female orgasm, precisely, and it cannot be faked. The wife who smiles during coitus or the prostitute with her crying out and all the rest of her theatrics, should see this — every woman should see it.”

We sat in silence, listening to the ratcheting of the film, contemplating the proposition.

“Really,” Prok said, even as a second scene presented itself — they were in the kitchen now, she on the counter at waist-level, her legs spread, he visible only as a pair of tensed white buttocks until the camera shifted to show his erection—“this is first-rate work. Should we give them a special citation as friends of the research? What do you think, gentlemen?” Prok was making a joke, or coming as close to it as he was constitutionally able.

“But seriously,” he added after a moment, “perhaps we should look them up next time we’re in — where was it, Florida?” He glanced round at us, the flicker of the film playing off his face. “I can’t help thinking how this might be improved with a little direct lighting, that is, and perhaps a more adept cameraman — or — woman.”

Things moved swiftly after that. Prok was already campaigning for more space — new quarters, as befitted our success, with soundproofed interview rooms, individual offices, clerical space, a separate library to house the erotica collection — and the need for a photographic laboratory only added fuel to his argument. Ever since he’d joined the staff, Rutledge, an amateur photographer, had been taking photos of erotic drawings and art objects on loan to us from their owners around the world, and Prok had set up a primitive darkroom in the basement of the house on First Street to assist him here, but now we all saw how inadequate that was. Prok went into high gear. Royalties from the male volume were pouring into the Institute, and he resolved to acquire the finest photographic and cinematic equipment available and to take on a full-time staff photographer as well. That photographer — Ted Aspinall — would become the final member of the inner circle, privy to our deepest secrets and a participant in all that was to come.

Aspinall was in his early thirties at the time, private, unmarried, rating perhaps a 3 on the 0–6 scale, and he was earning his living as a commercial photographer in Manhattan. Physically, he was somewhat imposing, six feet tall and blocky, with big squared-off hands and a massive bone structure, and yet his manner was anything but — he had the reticent, knowing air of the Greenwich Village hipster, he wore dark glasses even at night and never removed his tan trench coat except, presumably, to go to bed. When the male volume came out, he read it through twice, then telephoned Prok out of the blue to tell him how much it had affected him, and the two of them immediately hit it off. We met him when we were in New York, and then he took up Prok on his invitation to visit the Institute and things progressed from there.

His first assignment for us was the aforementioned study of the means of sperm emission in the human male, because this was essential to our understanding of conception in the female. The medical literature of the time maintained that it was necessary for sperm to spurt out under pressure in order for fertilization to occur, but our data showed that the majority of males did not spurt but rather dribbled. And so Prok determined on a trial. We went to New York that fall (of 1948, that is, and I recall the date because the trip caused me to miss John Jr.’s first Halloween celebration — Iris dressed him as Tigger from the Winnie the Pooh books, in a costume she’d sewed herself from a pattern, and she was furious with me) and booked rooms, as usual, at the Astor. Aspinall showed up with his business partner, a man around my age whose name escapes me now — let’s call him “Roy,” for convenience’s sake — and Roy, who had extensive H-contacts, assured us he could get us the one thousand volunteers Prok had decided on for a definitive sample.

Prok was skeptical at first. “One thousand?” he repeated. “Are you sure? Quite sure? Because anything less would be a waste of our time.” We were in our room on the fifteenth floor, looking out over the crush of humanity in the square below. The curtains were open wide — Prok favored light — and the furnishings were what you’d expect from a hotel in the low- to mid-priced range.

Roy — struck wire, amphetamine-fueled, a little man waving his arms — let his voice ride up the register. “No, no, no,” he said, “you don’t understand. I know this boy, he’s a genius. He’s beautiful. Seventeen years old, perfect skin, hair like Karo syrup, he’s a German refugee, or Austrian maybe, with just a trace of that accent to spice things up, if you know what I mean. Right now he’s the hottest thing on the street, at least in this neighborhood. It’s two dollars for each volunteer, right? And two dollars for the kid for every one he brings in?”

Prok, frowning, showed him his wallet.

“Okay,” Roy said, “okay,” and Aspinall gave us a nod of assurance. “Tomorrow night, five p.m., at our studio, right?”

The following night, Prok, Corcoran and I turned the corner onto the block where Aspinall and his partner ran their photographic business out of the ground floor of a brownstone, and my first thought was that there had been an accident, a fire, people evacuating the building and the hook and ladder on the way. It took me a moment to realize that the line of people stretching the entire block — the line of men, exclusively men — wasn’t leaving the building, but entering it. A number of them recognized Prok as we ducked through the crowd, calling out his name, pressing in for autographs, but Prok gave them his dispassionate face and reminded them that they were participants in a scientific experiment, not a radio quiz program. A hundred hands shot out to touch him notwithstanding, and he shook as many as he could, his grin fixed like a politician’s, as we climbed the stairs and strode through the open door of the studio.

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.

Indulge me a moment, because this is important — not to Prok, maybe, but to me. It was the day after Thanksgiving, the sun stripped of color, Iris gaining in confidence, the wheels firm on the road and my attention drifting into another realm altogether, when suddenly the squirrel made his dash across the pavement and my free hand got to the wheel an instant too late. There was the shock of the impact, a screech of stone on metal, and then the car stalled. Startled, John Jr. began to pipe and then the piping grew in fullness and volume till he was bawling at the top of his lungs though there wasn’t a mark on him — on any of us. She hadn’t been going more than twenty miles an hour.

Iris’s voice rode a thin tube of air up out of her constricted throat, even as John Jr. began to hit his stride. “Oh, God, I’ve ruined it. I wrecked the car, I wrecked it, wrecked it!”

“It’s all right,” I told her, though I knew it wasn’t.

“I don’t want to do this, I don’t, I can’t.”

I remember feeling expansive, feeling calm despite myself. I got out of the car, John Jr. still clutched tightly to me, calmly assessed the damage — heartbroken, my first car, my pride and joy — and then leaned in the window to reassure her. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a scratch. Nothing a little rubbing compound won’t cure, and maybe a tap or two with the hammer. Really, Iris, it’s okay.”

She sat there rigid, eyes shut, forehead pressed to the wheel. Her shoulders began to quake. Her fingers trembled. She couldn’t seem to breathe. I saw her humbled in that moment, defeated and brought low, and felt everything a man is supposed to feel for a woman. I wanted to protect her, save her, comfort her, and I eased back into the car and took her in my arms, John Jr. reaching out for her at the same time till the three of us just sat there and held the embrace as if there were nothing more to life.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t hold. Three days later — on the Monday — Prok, Aspinall, Corcoran, Rutledge and I took the train for Oregon, where we would shoot nearly four thousand feet of film exhibiting H-behavior among bulls at an agricultural station there. “You see,” Prok would exclaim excitedly as one animal mounted another, “it’s just what I’ve said all along — all our behaviors have their antecedents in nature.”

8

It was a little over a year later, in February of 1950, that we moved into our new quarters in Wylie Hall, another of the venerable old buildings on campus. This time we were given an entire floor to ourselves, albeit the basement, though in all fairness I should say that the basement was partially above ground, so that at least we could stare up into the opaque wire-reinforced glass of the windows and speculate as to whether it was morning, afternoon or evening. Prok oversaw all the details in his usual obsessive way, of course, insisting on the highest standards of fireproofing in order to protect our records and the rapidly accumulating stock of the library, as well as air-conditioning so that we could seal the place off during the hellish Hoosier summers, and sheets of soundproofing to ensure absolute privacy in our interviewing. Each of us had an office to himself now, there was a file room, a darkroom, and for the first time space enough to consolidate the library in one place (with additional room for visiting scholars to consult our holdings without disturbing the workings of the Institute). None of this was particularly grand — we were in a basement, after all, with long, close corridors and exposed pipes running overhead — but Prok would have revolted against anything that smacked in the least of luxury. Still, the university deemed the project enough of a success to sink seventy thousand dollars into the remodeling of the space, and finally, at long last, we had a place of our own, where we could pursue our research as we saw fit, without worry or interference of any kind.

What do I remember most of that time? Boxes. Cardboard boxes stuffed full of books, files and correspondence. For two solid weeks, during the worst an Indiana winter could offer, I traipsed up and down the stairs at Biology Hall, staggered across campus with my arms straining at the sockets, and deposited said boxes in the commodious basement of Wylie. Anyone else would have hired movers, or at the very least, students, but not Prok. He insisted that our records were far too sensitive to entrust to anyone but the senior members of the staff, and somehow the gall wasp collection, the filing cabinets and even our desks, chairs and coat racks fell under that designation too. Corcoran, Rutledge and I packed, moved, unpacked and reordered everything we possessed, and then we stood back and marveled at all the empty space yet to fill.

Ted Aspinall had joined us the previous year, but he was excluded from any of the heavy lifting by virtue of his speciality — he was an artist first, a technician second, and his province was the film laboratory. He moved permanently to Bloomington around this time, arriving with a suitcase of clothes and two trunks of photographic equipment, and immediately set up shop in our new offices (or “laboratories,” as Prok preferred to call them). He’d never been outside of New York City before in his life, and he did seem a bit lost at times, wandering the streets of Bloomington in his dark glasses and trench coat as if he’d gone to sleep on the subway and got off at the wrong stop, but Prok had made him an attractive offer (he came in at a higher salary than I was making, but there was nothing new there, low man on the totem pole as I was and always will be) and his commercial photography — the eternal weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation ceremonies, the unvarying frozen portraits of grandparents, uncles, cousins, even dogs — had begun to grate on him. He came to Bloomington to stay, and the whole tenor of the project changed to accommodate him. We were no longer an earnest if underfunded seat-of-the-pants operation working out of a warren of cramped dismal offices in the biology building, but a shining enterprise with international recognition, a ready influx of cash and our own full-time staff photographer.

Aspinall didn’t waste any time. Prok budgeted some eight thousand dollars to the purchase of the newest movie-making, processing and editing equipment, and Ted went through the lion’s share of it in a week. Prok was busy everywhere — furiously busy, lecturing, taking histories, posing for photos and sitting for interviews, overseeing the move and the reshelving of the library’s holdings and at the same time puzzling over the data for what would become the revolutionary female volume — and yet he found time to hide away in the darkroom and consult with Aspinall over every last piece of photographic equipment. Film — the rapid frame-by-frame encryption and exposure of animal behavior, from the porcupine to the erotically charged bull to the uninhibited couple in their Florida apartment — this was Prok’s new obsession, and Aspinall was his purveyor.

And, yes, I’m aware of the evolutionary progression here. Aware that the lower animals are one thing, the recording of their habits uncontroversial, educational, salutary even, and the human animal quite another. Perhaps we did go too far. Perhaps some of the critics of what the public was calling The Kinsey Report had a valid point, though none of us saw it at the time. What was it Margaret Mead had said of the male volume? Something along the lines of accusing Prok of being a reductionist, too dour, too scientific — all those statistics and not a single mention of fun, and that was the term she used: “fun.” As if “fun” could be measured or catalogued. And Lionel Trilling, Lawrence Kubie and the rest, denouncing Prok — and by extension, us, me—as championing a mechanistic view of human relations over the spiritual and emotional. I see now what they were getting at, if only narrowly, but still I stand by everything we did — if we hadn’t been rigorously scientific, consummately professional, the whole thing would have been a sham. In any case, I saw the criticism as nothing but a goad, narrow-minded, puritanical, anti-scientific, and to move forward — to progress — we had to ignore it. And so it was only logical that we began to film human sexual behavior.

But let me backtrack a moment here. It wasn’t solely the arrival of Aspinall and the acquisition of all that equipment that pushed us in the direction of live filming, nor simply the evolutionary progression of the project either, but a third factor played into it as well: the ready availability of subjects. For one thing, Betty was in town still, and still willing. I saw her occasionally, driving down the street in a late-model convertible, pushing a basket up the aisles of the supermarket in the starched white nurse’s uniform she’d tailored to fit her lush proportions, and occasionally I stopped to chat with her — we were friends. She was a friend of the research and I a friend of — well, friendly relations. And then there was Vivian Aubrey, the former Columbia student who’d been such a prodigious help to us during our early visits to New York. She was in Bloomington increasingly now, attracted by the aura of Prok’s fame, as were a number of other women (another Vivian, the multiorgasmic Vivian Brundage, comes to mind, a sixty-year-old Philadelphia gynecologist we were to film a number of times with various partners) and men. Always men. Because more and more, Prok craved men.

The first film we made — of Corcoran and Betty, reprising their earlier roles — was the one I remember best. It was late in the year — the holidays were nearly on us, Prok dusting off his Santa Claus whiskers, Vivian Aubrey preparing to go off and visit her parents in Florida, my own mother appearing out of the blue to spend some time with her grandson — when Prok, with a hint of mystery in his voice, asked us to gather at his house that evening, sans wives, on Institute business. My mother didn’t understand. All through dinner she’d quizzed me about the project and Prok — When was she going to see Prok again? Such a nice man. So dedicated. What had I thought of his picture in such-and-such magazine? And Mac. Didn’t that photograph flatter her, because God knows she’s no beauty. I sliced meat and dipped the tines of my fork into a mound of mashed potatoes and assured her that Prok hadn’t changed at all (a lie) and that he talked of her often and fondly (another lie) and we’d see him at the Institute tomorrow, but that tonight’s meeting was strictly business and bound to be a bore.

Iris concurred. “You don’t want to go, Irene, believe me. It’ll just be Prok and his boys, heads down, worrying over the female orgasm.”

My mother gave me a look across the table, then turned to Iris. “But you’re not being fair, Iris, he’s such a—”

“—sweet and generous man?”

“That’s not what I was going to say, but, yes, I think he is. And a great man too. And John should feel privileged to be part of the whole undertaking. I’m very proud of you, John, I am.”

Iris dabbed at a blackish smear of strained spinach that had somehow migrated from John Jr.’s bib to his forehead. “Oh, yes, I know,” she said, her voice weary and saturated with sarcasm. “I count my blessings every day.”

And then it was off in the cold, the Dodge wheezing to life on the third try, headlights drilling the road all the way into town and out to Prok’s house, where the faerie cottage glittered with Christmas lights. I slammed out of the car, huddled against the cold, and hurried up the path to the house, hardly noticing the dark humps of the frost-killed flowerbeds and the forest of saplings that had begun to take hold in the neglected yard. I stood on the familiar doorstep and rang the bell.

Mac answered the door with a welcoming smile, and she was dressed up — and made up — as if she were going out to a concert or the theater, in a dress I’d never seen before and earrings in the shape of miniature jeweled Christmas trees. Her hair was newly permed. She was wearing lipstick. “John,” she breathed, “come in and welcome,” and I felt bad that I had nothing to offer her, not flowers or candy, not even a cheese.

“I don’t, well, I didn’t know this was a formal gathering, or I would have brought a cheese, at least.”

This was an old joke between us, and she laughed to show her delight in it. “No need for cheeses tonight. Prok’s made a Barbados punch specially for the occasion.” A pause. “And your mother — she’s well? And Iris? Good. Well, send them my love. And we’ll have them out to the house over the weekend, just us, just the girls. Will you tell them?”

She held my hand a moment too long, and I felt the pulse of all that had passed between us, the slow, sweet, soft heartbeat of those times, and then she led me into the living room.

The others were already gathered there, the erratic light of the fire distorting their features so that they looked like strangers in a crowded waiting room till I came close and all was familiar again, Hello, John. Good evening. Cold out there? A lamp was lit in the corner. The Christmas lights at the window winked on and off, fixed to a timer. There was a smell of woodsmoke, the oak and apple wood Prok liked to burn, and of the scented white candles Mac had set on the mantelpiece, everything cozy and festive. I greeted everyone in turn, but when I saw that Betty was there, lounging in the far corner and chatting casually with Corcoran, it gave me a jolt — something was up, and my interest was piqued, no doubt about it — so that I wound up presenting her with an awkward nod and a puzzled little half-formed smile before settling into a chair beside Rutledge and Prok. Betty acknowledged me with a smile that flickered across her lips and vacated her eyes before turning back to Corcoran, and I wondered what that meant. Did I feel a stab of jealousy, as ridiculous as that might seem? What had she said that night at the tavern—Purvis is a great friend of mine, you know that, don’t you? But wasn’t I a great friend of hers too?

“Is this alcoholic?” Aspinall was saying. He was stalled at the punch bowl, his shoulders slumped and head hanging, as if he were afraid of breaking something. “Ted?” Mac glided across the room to him. “Did you need some help? What about you, John?” she called. “Punch? Or something lighter — a soft drink maybe?”

And then I was clutching a cup of warm yuletide cheer, pressing it to the yielding strip of cartilage at the base of my nose until the alcoholic fumes began to soften the passageways there and the distinct voices of the room came clear to me. Prok was talking about San Quentin, the prison in California — we’d been invited to interview the prisoner population there, and he’d managed to set up some lectures at Berkeley as well. His voice was straining for modulation, riding up and down the emotional ladder — clearly he was excited at the prospect of going into a maximum-security prison to delve into the histories of some of the most dangerous men our society had to offer, the ne plus ultra of extreme cases, but shouldn’t we have been investigating the monasteries too? I smiled at the thought. Prok in a monastery. Imagine that. Mac’s voice came to me then, fluting and soft — the weather, that was her subject — and the buzz of Aspinall’s high-pitched rasp wrapping itself around it. I couldn’t hear what Betty and Corcoran were talking about, but I heard Betty’s laugh, the whole trajectory of it, rising up to fly out over the room like a dart descending to the bull’s-eye painted across my brow. We were going to witness living sex again, and we were going to film it. That was what was going on here. Corcoran and Betty. And why him? Why not me? What was wrong with me?

It was then that the lavatory door swung open and Vivian Aubrey stepped out to join the party. Her hair — blond, with a natural wave — had been freshly brushed, and she’d reapplied her lipstick, a blood-red dab of which was in evidence on one of her incisors when she smiled her way back into the room. She was elegant in the way of my first female subject — the soigné faculty wife who seemed as out of place in Indiana as a tropical bird, and who’d made me blush — and she’d come straight to us from the rarefied atmosphere of the East Coast. She was confident. Shining. Light-years ahead of any of us in terms of sophistication and savoir-vivre. “Oh, hi, John,” she said, gliding up to me and taking my hand in a firm, frank grip, “I wasn’t sure you’d make it, what with the baby and your mother-in-law — your mother-in-law’s still in town, isn’t that right?”

Every possibility seethed within me. My voice was a croak. “My mother.”

She’d bent now to light a cigarette, ignoring Prok’s acid look — she was on stage here and she could do what she liked. I watched her throw her head back and exhale. “Oh, yes, right: your mother.”

I don’t really think I have to go into the details of the filming that night, because, as I’ve said, the novelty quickly wears off and the process of filming, observing, even participating, loses its initial frisson with time and repetition — one act is very like another, whether it’s observed in the flesh or preserved on celluloid. What was different about that night, though — what makes me recollect it now even after all the activity, and trials, that have succeeded it — was what Vivian said to me next. She said, “I hear we’re going to be partners tonight, you and I.”

I probably stammered. Or, no, I certainly stammered. “I, well, nobody’s really, I mean, Prok hasn’t said—”

She’d eased down on the arm of the chair so that the overlay of her hip was parallel with my face, then leaned in to bring her eyes closer to mine, and I could smell her, perfume, soap, yes, but something else too, something raw and primitive that can’t be feigned and will never come in a bottle. “What’s the matter,” she said, “don’t you like me?”

If you haven’t guessed, I’d been filmed already — I was one of the one thousand males recorded masturbating on the sheet in Aspinall’s studio, as were Corcoran and Rutledge. Prok saved twelve dollars there, and why not? If I’d felt self-conscious about it at first, there were the other 999 men to buck me up, and the thought of that, as much as anything, stimulated me to the point of response: I performed, wiped up and moved off like any of them.

Vivian Aubrey’s hair hung loose, the tug of gravity easing it from her shoulders in a thick shimmering panel. I glanced across the room at Betty — she was watching me, something almost mocking in her expression. Or maybe it was hunger, maybe that was it. I turned back to Vivian Aubrey, the light of her eyes, the single flaming slash of color fixed on the ridge of her tooth, and whispered, “Oh, yes, I do. I like you a lot.”

She straightened up then, and let a hand drift to my shoulder for balance. One more puff from the cigarette. A short, trilling laugh. “Anything for science, huh?” she said, and I wondered where I’d heard that before.

I don’t know if I’ve got the dates right here, or even the year (the volume of Prok’s travels during the five-year period between publication of the male edition in ’48 and the female in ’53 would have dwarfed any statesman’s), but to the best of my recollection it was sometime early in the following year that Prok, Mac, Corcoran and I entrained for the Pacific Coast, that is, for San Quentin and Berkeley both. Mac spent most of her travel time knitting and staring out the window, silently watching the countryside scroll past, but she came to life for meals in the dining car and the occasional late-night game of pinochle, and it was a real pleasure to have her there, just for companionship, just for that. As for Corcoran and me, Prok put us to work, of course, interviewing travelers, computing data, meeting daily with him in the club car to talk over our strategy for history-taking at San Quentin and the volume on sex offenders he was even then projecting as a successor to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The prospect was exciting, but we were all a little anxious about taking histories in the prison — this wasn’t the Indiana State Penal Farm, but a maximum-security lockup replete with a gas chamber and its own Death Row to feed it, and to be confined in a cell one-on-one with a rapist or murderer was daunting, to say the least.

We took a car across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog seething below us as if the ocean were heated to a rolling boil, none of us saying much, not even Prok. I remember the look of the prison still, humped and low against a battery of treeless hills, a clustered stone beehive of a place with slits for windows and a medieval funk hanging over it, as if it had been there before Columbus, before laws and juries and judges. It was a place of confinement. Of penitence. And if any of the inmates went from penitence to resentment to rage and violence, we would be on our own. As the guard searched our car at the gate and my palms sweated and my throat went dry, I couldn’t help wishing I’d chosen another profession. Or at the very least begged off just this once to stay home with Iris and the baby.

As it turned out, the warden was as concerned for our safety as we were (as I was, that is: once we got there, once we were actually inside the walls, Prok seemed unfazed, one subject no different from another as far as he was concerned), and he’d arranged for us to interview the elite prisoners first. These were the heads of the various gangs and cabals, the foremost Mexican, the leading Negro, the champion boxer, and so on. If we could establish our legitimacy with the inmate leaders, then we would find it relatively easy going with the others — that was the thinking. Of course, we needed absolute privacy, and to conduct interviews in the warden’s office or even the chaplain’s, where intimacies might be overheard, was out of the question. Prok finally decided on a series of disused cells dating back to the last century, deep in the prison’s subchambers. The walls were of stone, two feet thick, the doors each fashioned from a single slab of steel and with nothing but a peephole to break their lines; even so, Prok wound up draping blankets over them to be sure of muffling even the slightest sound.

My first subject was a Negro who was entirely innocent of the crime for which he’d been convicted, viz., lying in wait in the alley behind a bar after an altercation with two of the establishment’s patrons, after which he was falsely accused of battering the two men to death with the use only of his hands and a brick wall that presented itself as a convenient, if immobile, weapon. Or so he claimed. Nearly all the prisoners we interviewed, particularly the sex offenders, harped continually on the subject of their innocence. At any rate, he was led into the cell by a guard with a disapproving face (universally, the guards thought our locking ourselves in with their charges was a bad idea, even suggesting that we wear whistles round our necks in the event we needed to summon aid), and I offered him a chair, cigarettes and a Coca-Cola out of the eight-ounce bottle, a real luxury in prison, since, for reasons that should be obvious, glass was strictly verboten.

The Negro was thirty-one years old, short but powerfully built, with a cast in one eye and a habit of ducking his head and mumbling his responses so that I often had to stop the interview and ask him to repeat himself. As for his sex history, it was surprisingly unremarkable, very little consensual activity with the opposite sex and a burgeoning list of activities of the H-variety, owing to his long incarceration. He talked freely, seemed even to enjoy himself, the novelty of the situation appealing to him, I think, as well as the special consideration with which I treated him, the Cokes (he consumed three) and the largesse of the cigarettes (he smoked half a pack, then pocketed two others). At the very end of the interview, he leaned across the table and said, “You know, I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but I want to be straight with you, because you been straight with me, know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, holding fast to my clipboard. “We try to be — that is, we pride ourselves on our, how do you say it? — our hep. Or hepness, that is.”

“Well, listen: I’m not really as innocent as I might have made out.” A pause, a tap at the fresh cigarette he’d stuck for safekeeping behind the lobe of one ear. “The two of them outside in that back alley? That night?”

I nodded.

“Well, I did croak them. My hands — know what I mean? — my hands were like when you get a piece of meat out of the butcher before he wraps it up, just like that. That was their brains, Jack, squeezing through my fingers.”

I had no response to this. This wasn’t what we’d come to hear — this was a different kind of science altogether. My eyes were fastened on his, on the one that wasn’t rolling. There was no sound but the dry wheeze of our internal furnaces, of our lungs pumping in and out. We were in a tomb, deep down, buried deep. Was I frightened? Yes. Absolutely. I mastered myself long enough to say, “Yes? Go on.”

He took his time, the undisciplined eye rolling like a porthole in a storm, and then he reached across the table and took hold of my wrist. “That fat fuck,” he spat.

“Who?” Do not react, I kept telling myself. Let nothing show.

“McGahee.”

I was puzzled. “Who’s McGahee?”

A look of incredulity. “The guard!” he shouted. “The fat fuck of a guard.”

Another long pause. If I’d screamed through a megaphone no one would have heard me.

“I’m going to croak him. Tonight.” He glanced once over his shoulder at the door and the olive-drab blanket hanging like an arras over the peephole and then pulled a sliver of honed blue steel from the waistband of his trousers, and what was it, a spoon worked to a point, the fragment of an iron bed frame, the blistered head of a meteor flung down out of the heavens? Metal, steel. He had it — here, in prison. The man held it there in the light of the freestanding lamp I’d set up along with the desk and chairs. There was an edge to that steel, and it caught the light in a quick sharp gleam of menace.

“Going to shank him,” he breathed, and now I was in on it too, complicit, one of his soldiers, one of his gang. “The fat fuck,” he added, for emphasis, even as he rose from the table, pocketed the two unopened packs of cigarettes, and moved to the door so he could hammer the cold slab of steel with the underside of his fist and roar out to the guard at the end of the hall: “Open up down there! This here innerview is quit!”

Of course, I bring this up because of the moral dilemma with which it presented us. I was numb through the next two interviews — I got the boxer next, and then the chief Mexican — and the minute we climbed back into the car, I opened myself up to Prok and Corcoran. The fog had closed in on us, and we sat there in the cab of our rental car as if we were prisoners ourselves, confined forever, confined to this, to these questions and this procedure, and the confidences that weighed on us like a judgment. I wanted to scream. Wanted to turn to Prok and bawl till there was no air left in my body.

Prok sat stiffly beside me, so close our thighs were touching; Corcoran was on the other side of me, gazing out the window into the opacity of the atomized light. Prok had been about to start up the car, all business, all hurry, but he paused now, his hand arrested on the key he’d inserted in the slot of the ignition. “I see your dilemma, Milk,” he said after a moment. “But it could be a test, you realize that, don’t you? If word should get back that we’ve broken confidentiality, then we’ll be washed up here — or in any other correctional facility, for that matter.”

“But a man’s life could be at stake — the guard.” I named him, and it was like reading a name off a tombstone: “McGahee.”

Prok had dropped his hand from the ignition. The fog breathed at the windows. “No,” he said finally, “we can’t do it, no matter whose life might be at stake. It’s regrettable, no doubt about it, and I wish it hadn’t come up at all, but we just cannot compromise the project. And, too, it may well be a test, never lose sight of that. Corcoran, you’re in agreement? Milk?”

As it turned out, no one was murdered that night. Or the next night either. To the best of my knowledge, none of the guards was assaulted in all the time we were connected with San Quentin, during that visit and subsequent ones as well. I thought of that Negro, with his dirty shaft of steel and the eye that wouldn’t hold — I think of him now — and wonder if Prok wasn’t right after all. It was a test. That’s all it was. A test.

But then we were on to Berkeley and what has to have been the single defining moment of all my years with Prok: the grand lecture in the field house, attended by no less than nine thousand souls. We were fresh from our confinement at San Quentin — one-on-one in the silent sweating depths, at a remove from everything life has to offer — and now we were on the familiar turf of a university campus, exposed to all the world, nine thousand of the unincarcerated and free-breathing, students and faculty alike hurtling over one another to have a chance to hear the world’s leading authority speak on the one subject that held more fascination than anything their books and philosophies could ever hope to reveal.

I don’t recall the weather. It might have been raining, that sheer relentless outpouring typical of the wet season in California, but that might have been another time and another place altogether. I do remember the hall, though. Or rather the field house. This was more usually the scene of intercollegiate basketball games, but now, because of the uncontainable enthusiasm for Prok, Prok the author, the celebrity, the annihilator of sexual taboos, it had been given over to us for the afternoon. All seven thousand seats had been taken some two hours before the lecture was scheduled to begin, and even as we arrived university officials were scrambling to set up an additional two thousand folding chairs in the aisles and on the floor of the basketball court itself. Can I say that excitement was high, and leave it at that?

We were escorted to one of the coaches’ offices, in a side door and down a cordoned-off hallway, where the man who was to introduce Prok — the vice president of the university, no less — urged us to make ourselves comfortable while he went off to see to the final details. “We’ll need ten minutes or so,” he said, and I have no recollection of him whatever, so I’ll assign him the shrewd narrow features and evasive eyes of the congenital bureaucrat, “and please, if there’s anything I can do for you, just holler.” And then he shut the door and left us to ourselves.

“Quite the elegant dressing room, eh?” Prok said, turning to us — to Corcoran, Mac and me. We looked round us. The room was cramped, piled high with athletic equipment, mismatched sneakers, yellowing volleyballs, bats, spikes, mitts, rackets, helmets and the like, the walls all but obscured by team photos and two towering bookcases sagging under the weight of their collective trophies. The smell — of the adjoining locker room, of the distilled and rancid sweat of the generations — brought me back to high school and a reverie I’d had after my concussion on the football field. They’d brought me into the locker room on a stretcher, my mother’s voice floating round the door like a bird battering its wings against a pane of glass, my consciousness fading and then looping back on itself till the world opened up on me like a woman’s smile, though there was no woman there, only the grim bald-headed team physician, administering smelling salts.

“Yes,” Mac said, “and you see what your celebrity gets you? Next thing they’ll be putting us up at the Ritz, Prok. Just you wait.”

We laughed, all of us, though Prok’s laugh was more of a whinny and his eyes jumped from one of us to another, as if we’d all collectively spoken. Was he nervous? Was that it?

At that moment, as if in response to my question, the building seemed to shake with the vast stirring of the crowd just beyond the door and down the corridor. Thousands of undergraduates had simultaneously stifled a yawn, shifted in their seats, elevated their voices so as to be heard over the building expectant hum of the crowd.

Mac had moved to Prok’s side, the two of them poised there in the center of the room as if listening to the rumble of distant thunder. “Can I get you anything?” she asked, her voice muted. “Coffee? A glass of water? Cola?”

He seemed to hesitate — Prok, who never hesitated, never wasted words or motion — and then, so softly I could barely hear him, he said: “Water.”

“Good,” Mac murmured. “I thought you’d be dry, Prok — you’ve got to keep your throat lubricated, you know. I hate to say it, but you’re almost like a star tenor at the Metropolitan — or a radio host.” She turned and gave Corcoran and me a look.

“I’ll go,” Corcoran said. “Just water, right? Plain water?”

The crowd shifted again, a great and vast soughing of bench, chair, muscle and sinew. It was as if all the air had been squeezed out of the field house, the corridor, the coach’s office, and then it came back again, on a wave of echoing sound. I tried for the light touch because my heart was going as if I were the one about to mount the podium: “Sounds like the natives are restless.”

Prok was standing there rigid, the fingers of his right hand arrested in the act of running through his hair. He gave me an acerbic look, a look that pinned and measured me as if I were one of his errant gall wasps. “Don’t be childish,” he said. “This isn’t the time for levity, nor the place either.”

Mac was at his side, one hand on his arm, just above the joint. “Prok,” she murmured, “now calm yourself,” but he snatched his arm away.

He was still focused on me, his jaws clamped in fury, and there was a minute twitching of his lips, as if he’d tasted something bitter. “That is precisely the sort of thoughtless remark that undermines the entire project — that has been undermining the project for as long as I’ve known you. Your work is retrograde, Milk — is, was, and always will be. Do you hear me?”

The crowd breathed as one. The building quaked. I bowed my head. “I was just, I, that is — it was only a joke.”

“And stop stuttering, for God’s sake. Speak up like a man!”

“Prok,” Mac said, interceding for me. “Prok, please. He was only trying to—”

“I don’t give two figs for what he was trying! He should know, of all people, that I don’t need his assistance”—and now a look for Mac—“or anybody else’s, for that matter, when I prepare to address a gathering …”

Mac’s voice was reduced. “Perhaps you’d like us to leave, then?”

It was at that moment that Corcoran, the fair-haired boy, appeared in the doorway with a glass of water, the vast percolating intensity of the crowd arriving with him in a wave that rolled through the room and crested against the trophy-laden bookcases. “Yes,” Prok snapped, stepping forward briskly to snatch the glass from Corcoran’s hand, “yes, I’d like you to leave. Most emphatically. And take him”—the accusatory finger pointed at Corcoran now—“with you.”

By the time we’d found the seats reserved for us in the front row, I’d already forgotten — and forgiven — the incident. It was nerves, that was all. Prok was under intense pressure to perform, and though I’d never seen him waver in any of the hundreds of lectures for which I’d been present, this one was special. There had never been a crowd like this, and he would have been less than human if he didn’t have a case of nerves. At any rate, the vice president — that generic face and figure, the academic, the bureaucrat — made his own stab at levity in his introductory remarks, and the students in the audience let out a collective titter. Shuffling through his notes and gazing up myopically at that mass of humanity, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m pleased to see so many faculty here today, and faculty wives, in attendance at a university meeting. Of course, most of us must view the subject to be discussed largely in retrospect.” There was a pause, as if the audience hadn’t heard him right, and then the titters ran through the stacked tiers of chairs and benches like a motif out of Die Walküre.

Then there was Prok. He strode out of the wings, chest thrust forward, spectacles flinging light, and mounted the podium to an avalanche of applause, which suddenly died to nothing as he raised a hand to adjust the microphone. As usual he began speaking extemporaneously, without notes or props of any kind, his voice low and unmodulated, adopting the matter-of-fact tone that had served him so well through the years. He started off with variation and how the extremes at both ends of a given behavior define the norm, an old theme. Listing the various outlets available to the human animal from puberty on — masturbation, petting, coitus, the oral component — he went on to discuss frequency, and here the crowd, which had been slowly awakening to what he was saying, nearly got away from him. “There are those, for instance, who require no more than a single orgasm a month or even a year, and others who require several per week, or even per day.”

At this, there was a low sustained whistle from the row behind me, what was known to us then as a “wolf whistle.” The crowd jumped on it as if it were a rallying cry, the whole interconnected organism stirring again with that sound as of the wind in the trees, but Prok came right back with a barb that stopped them dead. “And then there are some,” he went on, unfazed, “whose output is as low as that of the man who just whistled.”

Nervous laughter, and then silence. He had them. And he never let go of them for the next sixty minutes, every last one of those nine thousand souls intent and focused on Prok, that erect figure on the podium, the celebrity of sex, the reformer, the pioneer, the preacher and spellbinder. I watched him from the front row, Mac on one side, Corcoran on the other, and though I’d heard the speech so often I could have recited it verbatim, right on down to the statistics and the pregnant pauses, the intensity of it in that setting on that afternoon gave me a chill. This was the apex, the moment of glory, Prok at his height. The students held their breath, the professors’ wives leaned forward. There wasn’t a sound, not a cough or murmur. No one stirred, no one left early. He concluded with his usual plea for tolerance, then took a step back and ducked his head in acknowledgment of the audience — it wasn’t a bow, exactly, but it had that effect.

And oh, they roared. They roared.

9

When we got back I found that Elster had been named official librarian of the Institute and that Iris had taken up the clarinet again, the hollow doleful sound of it greeting me even as I came up the drive and assessed the state of disrepair in the house and yard. The car (I’d left it for her, Corcoran having given me a lift home) was listing over a flat tire on the driver’s side front, and there was a raw new crease in the rear bumper. Because it was very still and clear and cold, the sound of the clarinet carried to me from deep inside the house, and it took me a moment to realize what it was — at first I’d thought some wounded animal was moaning out its final agony behind the toolshed. But no, it was Iris. Playing her instrument, the instrument in the little black velvet-lined case she’d kept untouched in the lower right-hand drawer of the dresser all these years.

Imagine that, I thought, and that was the extent of my thinking. The car was undrivable, half a dozen other failures leapt to my attention as I came up the front steps, and it didn’t really affect me one way or the other. I was beyond caring. The place could fall down for all it mattered to me, the car could go up in flames — I was tired, deeply tired, and there was no way in the world I could continue to travel with Prok and fit neatly into the role of house-husband like one of those cool unflappable fathers grinning out at us from the television these days.

As I stepped through the door, John Jr. leapt up from the welter of his toys and bolted across the room to throw his arms round my knees, and I set down my suitcase to lift him high and greet him with a kiss. Iris had her back to me. She was seated on the sofa before the fire (she had a fire going, at least, but I saw that she’d used the wrong wood, the stuff I’d reserved for kindling only and had begged her at least a hundred times to use sparingly), her legs splayed in front of her, the instrument at her lips. The sound it produced was pitched low and mournful, a groaning, creaking reverberation that put me in mind of the freighters plying the fog on Lake Michigan. I felt depressed suddenly, seeing her there with her distended cheeks and splayed legs, her hair in disarray, her eyes shut tight in concentration, Iris, my Iris, and she might have been anybody, a girl in the marching band, a prodigy of practice and desire working toward something I couldn’t begin to imagine. For just a moment, before I set down my son (gently, gently, the miniature grasping limbs, the uprush of the carpet) and called her name, I felt I was losing her. Or, no: that I’d already lost her.

“Iris,” I said, “Iris, it’s me,” and she started, her eyes flashing wide, the instrument pulling away from her lips with a long filament of saliva still attached. It took her a moment, and then she smiled, and I said, “Playing the clarinet again, huh?”

“Come here,” she said, and I sat beside her and we kissed, John Jr. scrambling up into my lap and the cat appearing from nowhere to adhere to the arm of the chair. It was a sudden joyful moment, the return of the hero, and I felt my depression begin to lift. We let the moment stretch out a bit, and we said the usual things to each other, and I filled her in on the highlights of the trip, the scare at San Quentin and Prok’s mastery at Berkeley, and we had a drink together and I gave John Jr. the box of Crackerjack I’d brought back for him and dug out the lacquered nautilus shell I’d got at a seashore gift shop for Iris, and then, after a silence, I came back to the subject of the clarinet.

“So what prompted you to start playing again?”

Iris gazed up at me over the rim of her glass. She’d made herself a gin and tonic, though it was cold still and would be for some time yet. The instrument lay tucked in against her shoulder, the reed and mouthpiece wet and glistening, the keys shining, the long black tube cutting like a shadow across her arm.

“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, “something to do, I guess. You know, to pass the time.”

There was the hint of an accusation here, the old argument, and the anger came up in me. “You left the car out there with a flat. You didn’t drive on it, did you? Tell me you didn’t drive on it.”

She ignored me. The glass went to her lips and came away again. “And Hilda. She encouraged me — she plays herself, you know, and we’re planning on getting up a duet for the picnic this spring, on Memorial Day, maybe, just Hilda and me. I didn’t think I’d get my embouchure back, but I have.” The fire gave a sigh, then subsided, because it was built of twigs instead of the painstakingly split oak that was stacked up in the woodshed perhaps fifty feet from where we sat. “I wanted to surprise you.”

“I didn’t know Hilda played.” I tried to picture Rutledge’s wife, angular and airily blond, with her stingy lips and small high breasts, perched at the edge of a chair with the sheet music spread before her, taking the instrument into her mouth.

“All through college. Like me.” She smoothed her thumb over the pale glistening surface of the reed. “We’ve got to do something, what with our men gone all the time.”

“Oscar was here.”

“Yes,” she said, “that’s right. But you weren’t.”

At this point, John Jr., who’d gone back to his toys, looked up and announced that he was hungry. “Mommy, I’m hungry,” he piped, as if he’d just discovered some essential truth about the nature of existence and himself in particular.

“Maybe we should just go out,” I said.

Iris gave me a look. “Can we afford it?”

“Something cheap. Hamburgers. A pizza.”

“Pizza!” John Jr. cried, taking up the refrain. “Pizza!”

“Hush,” she said, and he’d flung himself at her legs now, burying his head in her lap. “There’s no reason why I can’t whip something up, because we really don’t have to make a celebration of it, do we? I mean, you go away and you come back. Isn’t that the way it always is?”

I had nothing to say to this, and we sat there a moment in silence, even as John Jr. tugged at her blouse and keened, “Please, Mom, please?”

“I’d have to change,” she said. “And put on some makeup. And I do want to get right back—”

I tipped my glass to her. “For what — more practice?”

She was smiling now, John Jr. all over her—Please, please—something playful in her eyes, as in all is forgiven and why wrangle when love, the love between us, between two young healthy male and female human beings, was so much more than the sum of its losses and hesitations. “No,” she said, “it was something else. A statistic you could maybe help me with because it’s been a while.”

“Yes?”

“What was the average frequency of s-e-x”—spelling it out so that our son wouldn’t make a pet word of it, as he had with “bra” and “jock”—“for couples married at least five years? Once a week, wasn’t it?”

“Oh, no,” I said, wagging my head in a professorial way, “it’s at least twice that.”

The next day, at work, Rutledge and I took a coffee break together, and that was when I learned about Elster. We’d started out on the subject of the clarinet — I’d said something like, “I hear Hilda’s rediscovered her musical inspiration”—and then we’d gone on to discuss the Pacific Coast trip and how happy he’d been to stay behind this time because he really was getting tired of conducting interviews like a hired hand (“No offense, John”) when he thought he’d been taken on to do original research. As Prok’s equal, or at least his partner. And then, casually, as if it didn’t matter a whit, he dropped the news about Elster.

I was dumbstruck. “Elster?” I repeated. “But he’s, well, he’s no friend of the research. He — did I ever tell you about Fred Skittering, that whole incident?” And I told him, at length.

Rutledge was imperturbable. That was his chief characteristic. The building could be on fire — his hair could be on fire — and he wouldn’t raise his voice or move any more precipitately than he would at a funeral. I remembered the night in the hotel room with Mac and how he’d squared his shoulders and strolled into the bedroom with her as if it were a military matter, orders given, orders received. But now, as I revealed Elster’s perfidy — or his potential for it — his face took on a new look altogether. Finally he said, “You don’t think he can be trusted then?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

He stroked his mustache, glanced down the hall to see if Prok were in sight, and lit up a cigarette. I watched him shake out the match, drop it to the floor and grind it underfoot. “Well, we’ll just have to be careful, that’s all, make a note of it, be sure Prok’s aware of the situation, because really, nobody’s in on anything here except for us, and I don’t have to tell you how the shit would hit the fan if anything, even the least tidbit, got out to the public. But look at Mrs. Matthews and the other women we’ve taken on, Laura Peterson and what’s her name. They haven’t got a clue, have they? And they’re right there with us every day in the office.”

I wasn’t convinced. Maybe I was overreacting, maybe I’d misread the man — but then there was that night at the tavern when he tried to get me to talk, and it wasn’t even for his own sake, but for some third party’s, for a journalist’s. Had he been paid off? Or was he just constitutionally a snake?

“By the way,” Rutledge said, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette and taking a sip from his coffee mug at the same time, “did you hear about the musicale Sunday?”

I held out my palms in response, and I suppose I must have looked bleak over the prospect. “Uh-uh,” I said finally. “No.” It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the opportunity to learn about classical music — as I say, I’ve really come to appreciate it, even opera — but that the musicales seemed just another extension of work, of the Institute’s tentacles. And Iris hated them. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m tired. I’ve had it up to here with musicales, if you want to know the truth.”

Rutledge was watching me steadily, his lips composed round the butt of his cigarette and the thin tracery of his mustache. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But something’s up — it’s going to be just us. And the wives.”

“Just us? That is odd. Because Prok, not to my knowledge anyway, has never given a musicale with fewer than twenty or thirty guests — that’s the whole point, to educate people.”

“And to show off.”

This seemed to suck the wind out of the conversation. I wouldn’t hear any criticism of Prok, and especially not from one of my own coworkers and colleagues, and I gave him a look to warn him off.

Rutledge shrugged, threw a furtive glance up the hall, then came back to me. “Listen, John, loyalty is one thing, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not above criticism, you know. He can be a real pompous ass at times, with his obbligato and his menuetto and largo e cantabile and all the rest of it, and then there’s that look he gets on his face, the same look he gets when he comes, like a penitent nailed to the cross.”

I felt as if I’d been slapped across the face. “Listen, Rutledge — Oscar—” I said, and my voice went cold, “I have to tell you I don’t feel comfortable with any sort of criticism or bad-mouthing of Prok, I just don’t, I’m sorry, so please, in future, if you would just keep it to yourself—”

“But you’ve seen it. You’ve seen that look on his face. You’ve been on the receiving end of it, haven’t you? Well so have I. It’s part of the job, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t want to talk about this.”

He was still watching me, holding my eyes as if he were taking my history. “And Ted, of course. Ted’ll be there,” he said. “With his camera.”

The sunday came, wind-whipped and bathed in a tentative March sunshine that hinted at better times ahead. Crocuses were blooming, pussy willows, azaleas. Townspeople were out in their yards, raking the grass, thinking about where to string the hammock, and the students were everywhere, crowding the sidewalks in clusters of three and four, their jackets open to the waist, grinning and frolicking and shouting to one another as if it were May already, as if it were June and finals were over. It was kite-flying weather, and though I hadn’t flown a kite in twenty years, Iris and I bought a cheap paper version at a novelty shop and took John Jr. to the park to launch it. All well and fine. But before we’d gone to the park we’d done something even more out of the ordinary, and I didn’t know how I felt about it or what it meant exactly. We went to church. It was Sunday, and we went to church.

As I’ve said, Iris was raised in the Roman church, but she’d given it up in college, and certainly I myself had neither the faith nor reason to enter any ecclesiastical structure of any denomination. But Iris had awakened that morning with an idea fixed in her head — we were going to church because it was Lent and because she missed the ritual of it, the mumble of Latin, the immemorial fragrance of the censers — and I couldn’t argue with her. I wouldn’t want to say that she was reverting to childish things because that wouldn’t be fair to her, and yet she’d begun to write long missives to her mother almost daily, about what I couldn’t imagine, and she had taken up the clarinet again … and baking. She told me she’d loved to bake as a girl. And now, over breakfast — eggs poached just the way I like them, lean strips of bacon, crude crumbling hunks of a homemade bread that hadn’t risen — she’d announced that we were going to church. The whole family.

“Church?” I’d said.

“That’s right.”

“But why? What are you thinking? You know that I don’t, well — I’ve got better things to do with my day off, don’t you think?”

“Because I miss it, that’s why. Shouldn’t that be enough? Can’t you do anything for me, just for me, just once? And for John Jr.?” We were at the kitchen table, the aforementioned boy nearly four years old now and perched on the edge of his booster seat, making an improvisatory scramble out of his own eggs. She paused to wipe his chin, the cheerful yellow splotch there, and then came back to me. “He’s growing up a pagan. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No,” I said, “not at all.”

“You know what the other mothers say? The other children?”

It would have been useless to point out that I didn’t care in the least what the other mothers might say or that Prok would have a fit if he knew that I’d been within fifty feet of a church, temple, tabernacle or mosque — he hated them all, all religions, with equal fervor. Religion was antithetical to science. The religious simply couldn’t face the facts. They were living in the Dark Ages, et cetera. I couldn’t have agreed with him more, but Iris wanted to go to church, and that was all that mattered.

I will say that the experience was at least mildly interesting from a sociological perspective. The women had their heads covered, most with spring hats, but a good number with simple black or white scarves knotted under the chin, and the men — and the children too — were turned out in their best in deference to the God they’d come to worship. There was the smell Iris had spoken of — some sort of herb or aromatic gum reduced over hot coals, a holdover no doubt from the days when the devotees went largely unwashed and it was thought that contagion was bred spontaneously out of the miasma of foul air — and a whole panoply of ritual that Iris performed with a simple grace that stirred me more deeply than I wanted to admit. I watched her kneel, cross herself, dip her fingers in the holy water and let her lips move along with the priest’s in the ventriloquism of rapture, even while John Jr. gurgled and writhed at her side and she turned to hush him. In a way, the whole thing was quite beautiful, not that it meant anything and not that we’ve been back since — or not that I’ve been back — but it was like being at a concert, I suppose, when you’re free to let your mind empty itself and wander where it will.

Yes, and then we went to the park and John Jr. ran wild with the release of it, like a puppy let off the leash, and we had a picnic, though the wind made its presence felt whenever the clouds obscured the sun, which they did, off and on, all afternoon. We’d bought a box kite and assembled it at home, despite the fact that studying directions on a sheet of paper and translating them into action wasn’t my strong suit, and when I ran with it twirling and twisting above my head, my son let out a whoop of the purest, elemental joy. I paid out the line and felt the tug of nature on the other end, and it goes without saying that the sensation brought me back to my own childhood. “I want,” my son said. “Give me, Daddy. Me, me!” And I sat myself down in the naked grass with John Jr. in my lap and together we held tight to the string.

It might have been that day when he lost hold of the kite, or maybe it was another occasion, another day, another year. But I remember being confident enough to let him take it himself, to feel that mysterious suspensory tug all on his own and master it, and he ran with the thing, giggling like a maniac, paying out string, getting cockier by the minute — and that was good, all to the good — until there was no string left. Before I could reach him, before I could leap forward and snatch at it, the thing was gone, receding in the sky on its bellying tether as if we’d never had hold of it at all.

Then there was dinner, a roast turkey Iris had put in the oven before we went out, the smell of it heavy on the air as we came in the door, and the fire I made to take the chill out of our fingers and toes. We dropped John Jr. at the sitter’s — Were we going to be late? she wanted to know. No, we didn’t think so, not too late — and then drove over to Prok’s.

As it turned out, we were the first to arrive, which was unusual in itself. Mac took our coats, and Prok, absorbed in mixing cocktails — we were having Zombies, I saw — called out a brusque greeting from the chair he’d pulled up to the coffee table in the inner room. There was no fire that night, and yet the house was warm, bearing the faint olfactory traces of radiated heat, of the furnace in the basement and its conduit of pipes and radiators, and that was odd, given Prok’s Spartan tastes. He rose to greet us as we came into the room, a peck to the cheek for Iris and a handclasp and his famous smile for me, and it was like coming home all over again, arriving at a foreordained destination, the place I was meant to inhabit in my fatherless transit of the planet. Prok’s house. Prok and Mac’s. A wave of emotion swept through me, and I can’t say why or what it was about that particular moment that moved me so, though it had to do with continuity, I think, and with my sudden apprehension of it. I suppose Prok would have classified it as a chemical reaction, a fluctuation in the hormonal levels originating in the endocrine glands. Just that, and nothing more.

“Zombie cocktail?” he offered, thrusting the tall cold glasses into our hands before we’d had a chance to respond.

I noticed then that there were no chairs set up for the musicale, that the light over the phonograph was switched off and the records were still in their jackets on the shelves. Iris must have noticed it too, because she took a long pull at her drink and then asked about it in a voice that might have sounded just a shade too conciliatory: “Do you need any help with the chairs, Prok? For the musicale, I mean? We are having a musicale, aren’t we?”

Prok was finished with the cocktails now — or the first batch of them, four frosted glasses standing on the tray atop the low table, awaiting the remaining guests. He rose from his seat, warming his hands together as if at the conclusion of a job well done. “No,” he said, focusing on Iris, “I’m afraid we’ve decided to do something else altogether tonight—”

That was when Aspinall slammed the door that led to the attic and came clumping down the stairs. We all turned to watch him as he slouched across the room in his dark glasses and belted coat. The heat seemed stifling suddenly — I had to reach up and jerk loose the knot of my tie — and I wondered how he could stand it.

“Everything all set up there?” Prok asked, and I felt the first faint quickening of my blood.

Aspinall shuffled up to us and ducked his head to peer over his glasses and give Iris and me a nod of greeting before answering. “Oh, yeah, we’re good to go. But the lights, of course—”

“Right,” Prok said.

“No sense in wasting electricity—”

“Right.”

I’d never noticed before how pale Aspinall was, how bloodless and colorless, as if all those hours in the darkroom had bled him dry, and I couldn’t help asking if he felt all right—“Ted, are you coming down with something?”—instead of turning to Prok and demanding an answer to the question that was kicking and twitching like a newborn in my brain: What were we planning to film, and if we were filming, then why had the wives been invited?

Ted let out a little laugh and nodded to Iris again. His face was neutral, but the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, so that even in repose he looked as if he were smiling over some private joke. “My mother used to ask me that all the time,” he said. “Teddy, you need to get out and play with the other boys, play ball, get some sun, but I’m just a night owl, I guess. Hell, in the Village nobody gets up before noon — and those are the early risers.”

“I could sleep all day myself,” Iris said, and we all three looked at her. “And I think I would if it wasn’t for John Jr. But then you know how it is with a three-year-old, going on four—”

Aspinall didn’t know. His eyes were faintly visible behind the smoked lenses, half circles rinsed of light, like lunar bodies in eclipse. I noticed that Prok didn’t offer him a drink.

But then there was a knock at the door, and the Rutledges and Corcorans arrived together, Violet in a fur coat over a low-cut dress that showed off her breasts, Hilda in a pink spring jacket and beltless frock that might have been a nightgown but for the Jacquard pattern of it, Rutledge his usual sleek self, and Corcoran in a camel coat and his snappy shoes. Their faces were flushed with the chill and they stamped around the entryway a moment, divesting themselves of their outer garments, their voices intertwining excitedly in a recitative of arrival. Prok hurried everyone in, all business suddenly, dispensed the drinks in the tropical fug of the front room, and immediately set to making a second batch. Iris was already showing the effects of the first drink, her eyes shining and her lips ever so slightly parted as if she were trying to catch her breath or remember the words to a tune no one else could hear. I heard her say something to Hilda, something about the clarinet, and her words dragged in a stately adagio. She was standing with her legs spread for balance, and when I caught her eye she gave me a conspiratorial smile — we’d escaped the onus of a musicale, and here we were, in the midst of a party. With friends. Good friends. Our best friends. I should have taken her arm then, should have led her out the door and into the car, should have taken her home, but I didn’t.

For those who don’t know it, incidentally, I should say that the Zombie is an especially potent drink. It’s served in a tall glass — and the glass needs to be tall in order to incorporate all the booze the concoction contains, that is, two ounces of light rum, an ounce each of dark rum and apricot brandy, with pineapple juice and simple syrup to meliorate the bite of the spirits, and a float of one-hundred-fifty-one-proof rum to top it off — and just a single one of them was enough to make me feel that familiar tingling in my extremities that lets me know I’ve already begun to descend the long glassy slope of inebriation. And what was Prok doing? He was getting us drunk, his inner circle, his intimates, and once we were drunk and our inhibitions were down, we were going to go upstairs. To the attic.

We were all watching one another, at least the men were, because we knew what was coming, and we were frightened of it and exhilarated too. Rutledge was sitting in one of the hickory chairs at the far end of the table, leaning in over his knees to banter with Violet Corcoran and Mac as if nothing in the world were the matter, his Portuguese eyes glittering at me even while Corcoran flashed me a triumphant look and led the room in a short sharp explosion of laughter. The cocktail shaker went round. I heard the clock in the hallway strike the hour — what hour I didn’t know. And then Prok was tapping the long silver cocktail spoon against the side of the shaker. “May I have your attention, please?” he said, and the conversation trailed off with a whinnying laugh from Hilda Rutledge in response to something Violet had said.

Prok was dressed as usual in his standard dark suit, white shirt and bow tie, though I couldn’t help thinking the flesh-colored shorts would have been more appropriate to the occasion. His head — the massiveness of it, the solidity, the shock of hair, immitigable features, the hard cold empirical eyes — seemed like a sculpture cast in bronze. He was a giant among pygmies. I would have followed him anywhere. “We have a surprise for you, Mac, Aspinall and I, a surprise that’s long overdue, and if you would just go along with Ted here”—a gesture for Aspinall, who slouched against the near wall, shoulders slumped, dark glasses drinking up the light—“all will be revealed.”

I don’t know what I was thinking, but I followed the group up the stairs like a child on a field trip, Iris just ahead of me, the women’s perfume concentrated in the stairwell till it was like an intoxicant, as if I needed anything more. The steps creaked and shifted under our weight. Prok said something I didn’t catch, and Mac was there too, right at his side, an interplay of shadows, Corcoran two steps above him and joking in a low voice even as Ted Aspinall led us into the room and flicked on the lights. My heart was pounding, blowing out of my body. It was as hot as midsummer. I was sweating through my clothes. And what did I expect — that Iris would enjoy it? That it was time she saw what my real work was? That watching Corcoran and who — Violet? — go at it would somehow stimulate her, disarm her, at the very least make her an ally in all this? Or maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Maybe Prok had something entirely different in mind, another animal film, beavers, hamsters, chinchillas. But there was no projector. And the lights were fierce.

“All right,” Prok said, sidling round to shut the door behind us with a definitive click, “this is good. Very good. Now, if you would all please make yourselves comfortable—”

The bed in the corner was lit like a stage, as it had been the last time we’d filmed in the attic, but the chairs had been removed and a number of mattresses laid out on the floor in their stead. I was thinking of gym class in high school, the way the coach would have us unfurl the mats for wrestling and make us sit up against the walls, tense as wire, until he selected two boys at random and had them grapple for three interminable minutes, from the initial takedown to the writhing, sweaty denouement. We eased ourselves down, silent now, unconsciously pairing off as couples, aside from Mac, who settled in beside Iris and me with a soft smile on her lips. Rutledge gave me a look, and it was the same look he’d worn on the night Corcoran and Betty had performed for us the very first time — he was aroused, and so, despite myself, was I.

“I say this is long overdue,” Prok began. He was standing just outside the curtain of light, bent stiffly toward us, one hand gesturing, and the effect was to darken his face even as his silhouette burned with a crackling electrical radiance, as with an actor stepping out of the scene to deliver a soliloquy. And who would he have been in that moment? Iago? Richard III? Prospero? “Because the foundation of what we’re accomplishing here relies on our commitment to the project — it relies on us, on my staff and the wives who stand behind them. None of us can afford to be the least bit sex shy — or even accused of it — because of the irreparable damage it would do not only to the project, but to the principles behind it.”

He paused to look round the room, the light gathering and bunching as he swung his head to take us in. “I’m sorry to say it, but we’re nothing better than hypocrites if we can’t practice what we preach — if we can’t be uninhibited with one another, all of us, because we are the pioneers here and make no mistake about it. Of course, a survey, no matter how scrupulous, can never get at the facts in the way of direct observation, so as most of you know we have for some time now been engaged in observing and filming sexual activity right here in this room, and I see no reason”—and here he looked directly at Iris—“for any of you to be kept in the dark about it. This is science. It is objective and impersonal. And necessary, never forget that.”

Iris’s hand felt for mine and I squeezed it and leaned in to touch her ear with my lips. She was sweating too — the room was like a furnace — and I could smell it on her, her own individual odor, private and furtive, the smell of Iris and Iris alone.

“Now,” Prok was saying, “what I’d like you all to do, initially, is to remove your clothing”—there was a titter from Hilda Rutledge, who was seated on the mattress across from me, beside her husband—“without constraint or self-consciousness. We are all adults here,” he said, his voice dipping as he bent to remove his shoes and socks, “and what’s more, unlike so many of the sad, repressed cases we hear from daily, we’re enlightened and fully attuned to the enjoyment of what we were made for — that is, sexual relations, of every kind and without inhibition or prohibition.”

In a moment he was naked, looming over us with his veiny muscular legs, the slight stoop and the revelation of a middle-aged pot, the breath whistling through his teeth as he spoke. “Come on,” he said, “off with your clothes, all of you — that’s right, good.”

There was a rustling as we stretched our limbs, leaned this way or that to release zippers and work at buttons, and I was aware of Mac beside me slipping out of her clothes as easily as she might have shed water after a bath. Iris looked to me then, the light like a shield hammered round the bed in the corner, and I had my jacket off, my shirt unbuttoned. Her eyes were luminous, cat’s eyes, fixed unwaveringly on me, and for a moment she didn’t react, just watched me as I unbuckled my belt and worked the trousers down my legs. Then she reached behind her for the buttons to her dress — she was wearing black, her color, the color she’d worn to the musicale all those years before when Corcoran came into our lives, a simple black dress with white trim and puffed sleeves, pearls in a single strand, flat shoes, stockings, white brassiere, white panties. I was naked before she was and she could see the state I was in, the state all of us were in — the men — but she never hesitated. She dropped the brassiere behind her and leaned back against the wall on the fulcrum of her hips to slip the panties down her legs.

Prok was working at himself — masturbating, proud of his technique and his endowment, a bit of a show-off, really — and I should say here, because there’s no point in holding anything back and there’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all, that ever since puberty he had often incorporated the pleasure-pain principle in his sexual activity. He enjoyed urethral insertions, enlarging himself over the years to employ an object as big as a toothbrush to this end, and now he did just that — inserted the toothbrush — as if he were a magician performing a trick. The lights caught him in profile as he worked it in, and he even managed a mini-lecture on the subject as we all watched in rapt silence, maybe even in awe.

He didn’t come to climax, though — he was saving that for the filming. After a moment he removed the insertion, and, in a low voice, invited me to join him on the bed. “Milk, would you like to be first in the filming tonight, to show the others some of the techniques we’ve acquired?”

Iris sat against the wall beside me, naked and hunched over her knees, and Mac was on the other side of me, sitting Indian style, her spine erect over the carriage of her small pretty breasts. All eyes were on me. I didn’t know what to say, Iris on one side, Mac on the other, my H-history dwindling over time — dwindling right then and there — till I doubt I was even a 1 on the scale anymore.

“Milk?” Prok said. “John?”

Aspinall was at the camera, the skirts of his trench coat drooping like wings so that he was like a big carrion bird hunkered over an object of supreme interest. The film was ready to roll, the lights burned. “No,” I heard myself say, “I can’t. Or not now. Not first.”

There was a moment of silence, then Corcoran — the exhibitionist — spoke up. “I’ll go,” he said, as if this were a team sport after all, and then he and Prok broke the curtain of light and went to the bed together. Aspinall began to run the film and I felt Iris shrink beside me. Then it was the Rutledges, then Corcoran and Mac, and then — we’d been there for what seemed like hours, sweating as if we were in a sauna, afraid to speak because there was nothing to say, no words to express what we were feeling, what I was feeling — Prok rose from where he’d been sitting with Violet Corcoran and crossed the room to squat down at the edge of the mattress Iris and I were sharing. He was erect again, heavy in the gut, the cords of his knees and lower legs pulled taut over flesh that was tough as jerked meat. His head loomed. His face. “Now, Milk,” he said, “are you ready now? You and your own wife.”

I said nothing. I couldn’t look at Iris.

“You’re not getting sex shy on me, are you, Milk? Iris?”

That was when Iris spoke for the first time since we’d entered the room. She said one word only, and it went right to my heart. She said, “Purvis.”

“What was that?” Prok asked, his voice low and ominous.

She turned her head away. “I’ll do it with Purvis.”

There was a long pause, everything in freefall, the whole project — files, the interview sheets, dog-eared proofs and thick-bound volumes — poised to drop down out of the sky as if dumped from the hold of an airliner, and I could picture it, clumps of papers thick on the hedges and lawns and rooftops of America and the housewives and their harried husbands plucking at the strings of one anonymous heartbreaking secret after another till they collapsed in one another’s arms and wept for us all, us poor suffering human animals with our lusts and our hurts and our needs. And then Prok dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “No, not with Purvis. With me.”

I remember his legs, his massive hardened arterial legs, as he rose then and tugged at her wrist till she was standing too, her breasts exposed, all of her, and how she pulled back against him, how she said, “I would die first,” and then I was in motion and it was just like that wrestling match, like the football field. I don’t know what came over me — or I do, I do — but Prok was on his back in the middle of the floor and everybody was rising now, even as Iris bent to snatch up her clothes and run.

We were very late with the babysitter that night — or at least I was, because Iris wasn’t in the car and she wasn’t at home or on any of the dark windswept streets I roamed till the sky went light and the sitter thrust her furious face at me through the gap of the door and John Jr. went heavy in my waiting arms.

10

I didn’t go into work the next day. I saw to the needs of my son and sat by the phone, waiting for it to ring. After lunch — I boiled franks and opened a can of pork and beans — I put John Jr. in the car and drove the streets in a slow repetitive pattern, as if I were one of those geriatric cases looking for something I couldn’t name. But I could name it: Iris. And what did I expect — that she’d be bouncing down the sidewalk somewhere, her hair flying in the wind, going shopping? I stopped in at the elementary school where she’d worked till our son was born, on the off-chance that she was filling in for an absent teacher, but, no, she wasn’t there — in fact, the secretary in the main office, a new employee apparently, couldn’t quite grasp who I was talking about. John Jr. chattered away at me for the first half hour or so, and he fooled with the buttons on the radio till he fell asleep in a haze of static, the car creeping along on its own while I stared through the windshield and let my mind race. At one point, desperate, I drove out to the quarry where in more innocent times we used to park and neck, and found myself scrambling over the stepped white rock and peering down into the darkening waters as if I could detect the slow wheeling drift of a suicide there.

After dinner — more franks, more beans — I sat numbed in the armchair in front of the cold fire and read The House at Pooh Corner aloud till I had it memorized and still John Jr. wanted me to go on. Couldn’t we listen to the radio? I wondered. “No, read,” he said. And he interrupted me in the middle of the windy-day episode to ask, in his half-formed tones, “What’s blusterous?”

“You know, like yesterday,” I told him, “when we were flying the kite?” He sat there beside me, the foreshortened limbs, the recalcitrant thatch of his hair that was a replica of my own (unbrushed, just as his face was unwashed, because I wasn’t much at that sort of thing either), and after a moment, he said, “Where’s Mommy?” for what must have been the sixtieth time. “She went out,” I told him, and then I told him it was time for bed.

No one had called, not Mrs. Matthews to inquire if I was ill or Prok to apologize (or rather to accept my apology), not Rutledge or Corcoran or Mac. Finally, around eight, I dialed Corcoran’s number, and Violet answered.

“Violet, it’s John. Is Purvis there?”

Her voice was muted, all the familiarity washed out of it. “John,” she said, as if trying the name out. “Sure. Sure. I’ll get him.”

“Hello, John?” Corcoran came on the line, and before I could respond, he was onto me. “What was that all about last night? You can’t be — John, listen, we’re all in this together, you know that. Nothing personal, right? You don’t go shoving Prok around, nobody does. And then you don’t show up for work—?”

“Is Iris there?”

“Iris? What are you talking about?”

“My wife. Iris.”

“Isn’t she with you?”

“No,” I said, all the blood rushing to my face. “Isn’t she with you?”

“John, listen, you’re just upset right now, and it’s foolish, it really is. Don’t let this break us down, don’t throw away your whole career over, over—”

“Love?”

He came right back at me, his voice cracking with exasperation. “No,” he said, “this isn’t about love. Love has nothing to do with it. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I put John Jr. to bed as best I could, with a cursory brushing of the teeth and a minimal face-scrubbing — he objected to the washcloth for some reason, it was too rough or it wasn’t warm enough or there was too much soap on it or too little — and the next thing I knew I awoke to the sound of the car turning over in the driveway. By the time I got out the door and into the still-blustering night, the car was at the end of the drive, receding taillights, a quick angry flare of the brakes, no signal, and then the twin beams of the headlights swinging out onto the highway, and by the time I got back in the house, back to John Jr.’s room, it was too late to realize that he wasn’t there anymore.

For the next two days I was drunk. Not a pretty thing, not a rational thing, a weakness of mine, inherited in the genes from my dead father and his father before him — the Milches, from Verden, on the Aller River south of Bremen — and for all I knew there were a dozen Milch lushes there still, cousins and grand-uncles listening to tinny postwar jazz on second-rate radios and drowning their sorrows in Dinkelacker and schnapps. The first day I lay prostrate on the couch and drank what we had in the house, which consisted of a quart of beer gone flat in the refrigerator, my reserve fifth of bourbon, and finally, the contents of my flask (half-full of something that tasted like Geritol but was actually, I realized, the dregs of a pint of Southern Comfort with which I’d last filled it when Iris and I went to an IU football game the previous fall). I brought the flask to my lips — JAM, my graduation present, from Tommy, from Iris’s brother — and stared at the ceiling. Earlier, I’d called Iris’s mother in Michigan City. Was Iris there? A pause. The deep-freeze of my mother-in-law’s voice. Yes, Iris was there. Could she come to the phone? No, she couldn’t.

The second day I woke with a headache and made a shaky mess of the eggs and bacon and the rock-hard remains of Iris’s loaf. I wasn’t going into work, I wasn’t calling my wife — let her call me — and above all I wasn’t allowing myself to think about anything, not Prok, not the project or my colleagues or what had come over me in the attic three nights ago. We’d drunk Zombie cocktails, hadn’t we? Well, all right: now I was a zombie, without affect or will. Around noon, still shaky, I walked into town in the burnished sunshine of an early spring day and made for the tavern, where they would have beer in abundance and a cornucopia of backlit bottles of hard liquor to steady it on the way down. I kept my head low and my eyes on the pavement, because the last thing I wanted was to see anybody I knew.

I don’t remember having had anything to eat that afternoon. I drank, read the newspapers, went to the restroom, drank some more. It must have been about six or so when I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see Elster standing there beside me. Richard Elster, that is, newly appointed librarian of the Institute, the man in charge of what would soon become the biggest sexology — and erotica — collection in the world, bigger even than those of the British Museum and the Vatican. “Hey,” he said, “John, where’ve you been?”

I didn’t answer.

“I asked Bella, she said you were sick.”

I felt the irritation rising in me. “Who?”

“Bella. Mrs. Matthews. She said you had the flu.”

“I don’t have the flu.”

The barman intervened to ask Elster what he was having and Elster ordered a beer before turning back to me. “Everything all right? Are you sure? Because I heard a rumor, about the other night — something about you and your wife?”

He was fishing. He didn’t know a thing. None of us would have leaked a word, not on pain of death. I was sure of it. Absolutely. Still, I felt something clench inside of me.

“How is she, by the way? Because I wanted to tell you to tell her how well Claudette’s doing, and Sally, our little one. Did you know Claudette’s expecting again?”

“She’s fine,” I said.

There was movement at the door, comings and goings, the jukebox lurched to life with some brainless female vocalist cooing something about love nests, and I lifted a finger for the barman. “What do I owe you?” I said.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Elster’s mouth tightened around a look of disappointment and something more, belligerence. His voice went up a notch. “Because I just got here, and we’re colleagues now, right? We’re going to work together, share things, aren’t we?” He was leaning over my shoulder as I gathered up my change, too close to me, invading my space, pushing — pushing, and I didn’t know why. Then he said it: “Secrets, right? What goes on behind closed doors? I won’t breathe a word, I swear it.”

I’d been drinking all day, and now all of a sudden I was sober. I stood — he was a small man, his head at the level of my shoulders — and I think I might have jostled him, just a bit, and if I did it was purely accidental. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Where? To an empty house? Where’s the fire, John?”

I stood there at the bar looking down into his prodding eyes. Elster, a little man in every way, but dangerous for all that. My voice was thick. “Nowhere,” I said, and I shoved by him.

“I know you!” he called at my back. “I know what you do!”

I’m not a violent person. Just the opposite — Iris is forever saying I let people walk all over me, and I suppose she has a point. But not that night. That night was different. It was as if everything I’d ever wanted or had was suddenly at stake — Prok, Iris, my career, my son — and I couldn’t control myself. I was on my way to the door, faces gaping up at me, students, locals, women with their drinks arrested at their lips, when I swung round and grabbed Elster by the lapels of his jacket. His face whitened, his eyes sank into his head. “Hey,” the barman shouted. “Hey, cut that out!”

I could feel Elster coming up out of his shoes. My hands were trembling. “You don’t know me,” I said, my voice steady now. “And you never will.”

The next morning I went into work. Mrs. Matthews tried not to show anything, but she couldn’t help giving me a look caught midway between puzzlement and relief, and as I passed Prok’s office he glanced up and leveled a steady gaze on me for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to need those charts, Milk. As soon as it’s convenient.”

I might have said, You can stuff your charts. I might have said, I’ve had it. I’ve had enough. I quit. But all I did was return his stare just long enough so that he got the meaning of all I was feeling, and then I said, “Yes,” with a long propitiatory release of air, “I’ll get right to them.”

I worked without pause all morning. I focused on the rectilinear lines and shadings of the graphs I was drawing, the correlated figures, the means and incidences that never lied. Both Rutledge and Corcoran stuck their heads in the door to welcome me back while Prok stayed put in his office and Elster twice marched down the corridor with his shoulders thrust back and his gaze fixed on a point in the distance. The first chance I got — when I heard the telltale sounds of Prok rattling the paper bag in which he kept his lunchtime repast of sunflower seeds, nuts and chocolate bits — I went straight to his office and shut the door behind me.

“Prok,” I said, “I just wanted to, well, I wanted to—”

His elbows were splayed over his work, his eternal work. He looked worn and vitiated. His head hung there a moment as if on a tether, his shoulders slumped forward, and there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before — it wasn’t weakness, never that, but something very near to it, a mildness, an acceptance, a plea. “No need, John,” he said, and then he repeated himself in a softer, gentler tone, “no need. But sit please. I need to talk to you—we need to talk.”

I pulled up the chair reserved for interviewees and eased myself down on the cushion. Something clanked in the pipes overhead. A thin restless light roamed over the windows, clouds chasing after the sunlight and then giving it up again.

“Where do I start?” he mused, sitting back now to run a hand through his hair. “With women, I suppose. With marriage. We are studying the female of the species, after all, aren’t we, John?”

I nodded.

“Interesting how the X chromosome prevails, isn’t it — over time, that is?” He picked up a pen, set it down. “But what I mean to say is that marriage is the great and governing institution of our society, and we’re devoted to it, you and I both, devoted to our wives, to Mac and Iris. And what you did the other night — no, now just hear me out — was understandable in its context, even if it shows how little you’ve learned here all these years.” He let out a long, slow breath. “But really, I do think that as my colleague, as my co-researcher — almost my son, John, my son—you have to realize that emotions, and emotional outbursts, have no place in our research. Let it go, John. Please.”

I never took my eyes from him, that much I’d learned. I could put up a front as well as he could. I said, “I can’t.”

“You can. You will.”

“Iris—” I began, and I didn’t know what he’d heard or how much he knew. I wanted to tell him she was gone and that nothing, not the project, not him or Mac or all the charts and tables in the world, was worth that. But I couldn’t get the words out, the whole business complicated by that image of him, naked and erect and hanging over her like an animal — not a human animal, just an animal — an image that bludgeoned my sleep and festered through the waking hours. What right did he have? What right?

“She’ll come back.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He sighed, broke his own rule and gazed up at the pipes a moment before shooting me a quick sharp look of impatience. “Women have the same physiological needs as men, and our figures will show that, as you’re well aware. Especially with regard to the physiology of arousal and orgasm, the correspondence of organs and glands — the fact is, females need and respond to sex as much as males. Every bit as much. And it’s a crime to deny them or put them on some Victorian pedestal as blushing virginal brides who tolerate sex once a month in the dark in order to reproduce the species — how many interviews have you conducted, John?”

“I don’t know. Seventeen or eighteen hundred, I suppose.”

Now it was the old look, the grappling eyes, the triumphant set of the mouth: “Exactly.”

I felt myself calming, the engine slowing, and it wasn’t hypnotism — there were no tricks or carnival acts necessary, nor psychoanalysis either. It was just Prok, Prok himself, Prok in the flesh. My wife had left me, Elster was a cancer, I’d toppled my God, if only for a moment, and here I was sinking into the cushion as if I didn’t have a concern in the world.

“By the same token, and again you already know this, intuitively if not empirically,” he said, “there’s another side to the female altogether, and this is where things become problematic for so many males — for you, John. For you.” Prok was settling into his lecture mode now, getting into the rhythm of it, relishing it, and I let myself go. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say. I embraced the chair. I listened. I suppose I should have taken notes.

“Women are not the initiators of sexual activity, as you know, but rather the reactors. Once they are embraced, arousal begins. But men, on the other hand — the average man from puberty to senescence, or the climacteric, in any case — are aroused any number of times throughout each and every day of their lives. Mentally aroused. Aroused by the sight of the female form, by paintings, music, art, by the fantasies they indulge, while women, the females, are all too rarely aroused by anything other than contact itself and in most cases regard the male genitalia as ugly and loathsome. Given that, it should come as no surprise that they’ve been forced into their roles as inhibitors, as prudes, as the watchdogs of what society calls morality.” He paused, let his eyes bore into me. “Do you see? Do you see what I’m saying?”

I didn’t. But then this wasn’t a conversation, not anymore.

“John. I’m saying that you have to allow for your wife — if she remains sex shy, then that is certainly a part of her nature, but more, her acculturation, and that can be changed only if she’ll open herself up to what we’re trying to accomplish here. Like Violet Corcoran, for instance. Or Hilda, Vivian Brundage or that young woman friend of Corcoran’s — Betty, isn’t it? These things aren’t written in stone. Think of physiological response, John. Physiological.”

I was reminded of what Prok had said privately to a woman after a lecture one night in which the term “nymphomania” had come up. A nymphomaniac, he explained, is someone who has more sex than you do. Period.

I took a moment and then I told him that he was right and that I would consider it, absolutely, because Iris needed more experience, more variety, more physicality. For a moment, I was back in that attic, the women’s breasts shining with their sweat, the men hard and anxious, all my hopes and fears and inadequacies on display for everyone to see. “You’re right,” I repeated, “you are.” But then my voice cracked and I very nearly broke down right there in front of him. “Prok,” I said, miserable, absolutely miserable, as miserable as I’ve ever been in my life, “Prok, I love her.”

The word seemed to bounce off him like a pinball hitting a baffle, love, such an unlikely term to incorporate in the scientific lexicon, but give him credit: he bowed to it. “Yes,” he said dryly, “and I love Mac. And my children. And you too, John.”

He pushed himself back in his chair then and let his gaze wander, the pipes rattling overhead, the sun gracing the windows a moment and then vanishing. The interview was over. But there was something more; I could read it in his expression. He refocused his eyes on me and let just the hint of self-satisfaction creep over his features. “You know, I’ve arranged two lectures in Michigan City,” he said, “on very short notice. We’ll be taking some histories in conjunction, of course, two nights at the hotel there.” He paused, moved the pen from one corner of his desk to the other. “I thought you might like to come along.”

The drive up to Michigan City was uneventful, no different from a thousand other drives Prok and I had taken together, he at the wheel and I in the seat beside him, staring through the windshield and calling out directions because he tended to get involved in what he was saying and cruise right on by the crucial left-hand turn or miss the junction we were looking for and have to swing a U-turn a hundred yards up — at the risk of both our lives. Prok was getting older, less attentive to detail, and his driving had suffered. Of course, he would never consider asking me to get behind the wheel, not unless he’d been knocked unconscious. What else? It was spring again, another spring. The sun was unimpeded and the shoots of green things were springing up everywhere. We kept the windows down to feed on the glory of it.

We didn’t talk about Iris, but she was there with us the whole way, one more hurdle for Prok, the beginning and end of everything for me. I’d called, again and again, but she wasn’t coming to the phone and her mother’s voice could have crushed the hulls of icebreakers. I didn’t know what she expected from me. Didn’t know if this was the end or not, if we would divorce and my son would be taken from me — and my job. Because Prok wouldn’t have a divorced man on his staff — or even a remarried one. That was the rule, simple and final.

What we did talk about was Elster. “I don’t mean to say things behind anybody’s back,” I said, “but I think, well, I think it’s a mistake to hire the man. In any capacity. But especially not as our librarian, where he has access to our — well, you know what I mean.”

Prok didn’t know, and he interrogated me nearly the whole way there, his eyes gone cold and hard. He made me go over the details six times—“Fred Skittering? The reporter? And Elster put him on to you? How long ago was this?”—and he was still questioning me, still brooding over this treachery in his midst, when he pulled up to Iris’s girlhood home. It was a modest house on a street of modest houses, two stories, with rust streaks under the gutters and a battered Pontiac in the driveway. “This is it, then?” he asked, waiting for a car to pass before he backed in at the curb.

“Yes,” I said, my stomach sinking, “the white house, right here, number fourteen.”

He shut off the car and turned to face me. “What was the name of Iris’s mother again?”

“Deirdre. They’re Irish.”

“Irish. Yes. Right. And the father?”

I glanced at my watch. “Frank,” I said. “But he’ll be at work still.”

And then we were at the door, Prok running a hand through his hair while I rang the bell and the dog — a sheltie named Bug, which Iris’s father delighted in calling Bugger every chance he got — began barking at the rear of the house. There was the sound of footsteps, the scrabbling of the dog’s nails on the bare floor, more barking, and I tried to compose myself even as Iris’s mother pulled back the door and gave me a look of iron while the dog whined and leapt at my legs. “Um, well, hello,” I said, and I tried out her name, “Deirdre. Oh, yes, and this is Dr. Kinsey, my, well, my boss—”

Everything changed in that instant. Iris’s mother let her face bloom with a Kilkenny smile and the door swung wide. “Oh, yes, of course,” she said, “I would have recognized you anywhere, and please, please come in.”

I stepped through the door and froze: Iris. Where was Iris? And my son? I thought I heard the piping of a child’s voice from upstairs, from Iris’s old room, and I had to force myself to put one foot in front of the other. The dog whined and flapped about the floor and I stooped mechanically to stroke it.

I hadn’t been to the house in six months or more — we visited when we could, both Iris’s parents and my mother, but my work didn’t allow much time off, of course, as I think I’ve made clear here. At any rate, the place didn’t seem to have changed much, the same coats on the coat tree, the same umbrellas in the umbrella stand, even a pair of galoshes that looked vaguely familiar set aside in the corner. I noticed all these things with a kind of heightened perception — the dog looked shabbier, Iris’s mother older, the carpet was worn in the living room — because I was snarled up inside, twisted like wire. All I could think of was Iris. Would she talk to me? Would she see me even?

“Here, please, have a seat,” my mother-in-law was saying, “but you must be exhausted — did you drive all the way up today?”

“Yes,” Prok said, easing himself down on the sofa, “but John and I are used to it, isn’t that right, John?”

I stood there hovering over him, incapable of decision — I didn’t even know if I could sit, if the muscles would respond or the factory of my brain issue the command. “Yes,” I murmured.

Iris’s mother was transformed, as inflated as I’d ever seen her — there was a celebrity in the house, the great man himself, parked on the sofa in her living room at 14 Albion Drive. “Tea,” she said, extending her smile even to me, “would you like some tea? And sweet buns, I have sweet buns—”

Prok, at his most courtly, in the voice that had mesmerized how many thousands I couldn’t even begin to guess, said that that would be very nice indeed, a real treat, and my mother-in-law practically fell at his feet. I wondered, even in my distracted state, how long it would take before she volunteered to give up her history.

I was on the verge of breaking in, of demanding to know where my wife and son were and why she hadn’t gone to get them, first thing, when suddenly the sound of the clarinet came drifting down from above, something hesitant, broken, infinitely sad, as if all the sorrows of humankind had been distilled to the single failing breath of that melody. “That’s Wagner,” Prok said. “The ‘Liebestod,’ isn’t it? From Tristan and Isolde?”

“Honestly, I don’t know,” Iris’s mother said, throwing up her hands. “With Iris, it could be anything—”

And then I was gone, through the door and up the steps two at a time, and I didn’t care about Prok or the project or anything on this earth but her, Iris, my wife, the woman I loved and needed and wanted. I flung open the door and there was my son, sprawled out asleep in the middle of the bed as if he’d dropped down from the sky, and Iris at the window with her clarinet. She was wearing a pair of child’s slippers, fluffy and oversized, and a blouse that fed off the color of her eyes. She played two notes more, sostenuto e diminuendo, and then, very slowly, with infinite care, she laid the instrument aside and held out her arms. And can I tell you this? — I never let go of her, never once, never again.