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The
Inner Circle by T.C. Boyle Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Loveless I’ve
read and enjoyed the novels and stories of T.C. Boyle, and recommend his
latest novel, The Inner
Circle. Boyle presents an image of Indiana University Professor Alfred
Kinsey, called “Prok,” through the eyes of his
first research assistant, John Milk. Thanks to Boyle’s talent, we watch as Prok becomes increasingly more passionate and obsessed
with his research and personal sexual practices, as Milk moves from naivete through loyalty to a sense of nothingness in a
progression of intertwined relationships. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter 10, pp. 170-177: Given what I’ve already revealed about myself, I
suppose it will come as no surprise if I tell you that the first chance I got
(when Prok was away on his own, lecturing to a
civic group in Elkhart, and, incidentally, taking Violet Corcoran’s sex
history in neighboring South Bend), I went straight to the files to look up
two histories of special interest—Corcoran’s and my wife’s. Can I tell you
too that I didn’t feel the slightest guilt or compunction? Not this time. Not
anymore. Prok was away, and it was only his
intervention that would have stopped me, and nothing short of it. I broke Prok’s new ironclad code within the hour, pulled the
files and spread them out side by side on the desk before me. It
was just before the holidays, the whole country whipped into a froth of
martial hysteria and Prok already fretting over the
rumored rationing of gasoline, tires and the rest, insisting we’d have to
take the train more now, the train and the bus. Everyone was distracted,
shocked, ~ outraged, so caught up in the events of December seventh that even
Christmas itself seemed inconsequential—who could
think of Santa Claus when Tojo and Hitler were
loose in the world? As I remember, we were having a cold snap, the sky the
color of shell casings, snow flurries predicted for later in the day, and I
was in the office early, with a number of tasks ahead of me. There was the
endless tabulation of data, the~ drawing up of tables and graphs, and
correspondence too, though of course the volume was nothing like what we—Prok mostly—had to contend with after publication of our
findings in ‘48. By that time, Prok was receiving thousands of letters
a year from absolute strangers seeking advice or adjustments of their sexual
problems, offering up their services as friends of the research, sending on
explicit photos and sex diaries, erotic art, dildos, chains, whips and the
like. I remember one letter in particular, from an attorney representing a
client who had been charged with “knowing a pig carnally by the anus,” and
requesting Prok’s expert testimony as to the
overall frequency of such acts with animals (six percent of the general
population; seventeen percent of the single rural population). Prok declined. Politely. At any rate, there I was, bent over the
desk, a Christmas carol infesting some part of my brain (Iris and I had
attended a choral concert the night before), one of Prok’s
colleagues clearing his throat or blowing his nose down the hail somewhere
while secretaries in heels clacked on by as if so many miniature locomotives
were running over the rails of a miniature train set. I turned to Iris’s
history first, and there were no surprises there, just as I’d assumed. She
hadn’t even known what the term “masturbation” meant until she was seventeen
and already in college, and then she was too consumed with her own
inhibitions to try it more than two or three times, and never to the point of
orgasm; she’d experienced both manual and oral stimulation of her breasts on
the part of men— boys—other than me, but no petting and no coitus until the
time of her engagement and marriage. She’d had limited experience with her
own sex, and that at a very young age, no animal contacts, few fantasies.
She’d never employed foreign objects, never (till now) taken the male
genitalia into her mouth. There was nothing there I hadn’t seen a
hundred times already, and I wondered why she’d been so reluctant to give up
her history—truly, it was as pedestrian as could be—and then I wondered if
that wasn’t it, that she was ashamed of having so little to offer us, as if
all we cared about were the extreme cases, the sexual athletes, the
promiscuous and jaded, the individuals who dropped off the end of the bell
curve. Could that have been it? Or was it something deeper, some resistance
to the tenor of the study itself? To Prok? To me?
For a minute I felt my heart would break—it hadn’t been easy for her, and
she’d done it for me, for me alone, and if it weren’t for that she’d never
have offered herself up to the project. It just wasn’t in her nature. I might
have taken a moment then to stare out the window into the sealed gray crypt
of the sky, might have spoken her name aloud: Iris. Just that: Iris. She
was so nervous the day she came in, so tightly wound, so shy and soft and
beautiful. “Dr. Kinsey’ she said in a voice that was barely audible, “hello.
And hello, John?’ I’d known she was coming, and I’d been in a state
myself—all day, in fact. Every time I heard a footfall in the corridor, and
never mind that it was hours still until her appointment, I couldn’t help
shifting in my seat and stealing a glance at the door. I thought I was ready
for her, ready to put this thing behind us as if it were the last in a series
of marital rites, like an inoculation or the VD test required for the
license, and yet still, though I’d been watching the clock and there was an
ache in the pit of my stomach as if I hadn’t eaten in a week, when it came to
it I was almost surprised to see her there. I’d been working on a calculation
that was a bit over my head (standard deviation from the mean in a sample of
men reporting nocturnal emissions) and she’d come in noiselessly, as
soft-footed as a cat. I looked up and there she was,
stoop-shouldered, waiflike, sunk into her coat like a child, her gloved
hands, the hat, the quickest, fleeting, agitated smile on her lips. Prok and I rose simultaneously to greet her. “Iris,
come in, come in:’ Prok was saying, all the
mellifluous inflection of his smoothest interviewer’s tones pouring out of
him like syrup, “here, let me help you off with your coat—bitter out there,
isn’t it?” Iris
said that it was. She gave me a smile as she shrugged out of her coat and Prok bustled round her, hot on the scent of yet another
history. Did she look tentative, even a bit dazed? I suppose so. But I didn’t
really have much time to think about it one way or the other because Prok immediately turned to me and said, “I expect you’ll
want to go home a bit early this afternoon, Milk? Or better yet, perhaps
you’d like to take your work down to the library—?” And
then there was Corcoran’s history. But
Corcoran’s history—and it was, as I’ve said, extensive, the most active
single file we’d yet come across—isn’t perhaps as important at this juncture
as sketching in the denouement of that scene with Iris on the steps of the
dorm, because that has more than a little bearing on all of this, and all
that was to come She called me a liar Slammed the door. Left me in the cold.
As I stood there in the unrelenting wind, undergraduates and their dates
slipping round me like phantoms, I was faced with two incontrovertible facts:
Mac had told her everything, and she’d known about it all this time, through
our reconciliation, our wedding and honeymoon and the dawdling intimate
Sunday afternoons of summer and on into the fall, and she’d never said a
word. She’d just watched me, like a spy, awaiting her opening. Well, now she
had it. The door slammed behind her, the dorm swallowed her up and I
staggered across campus like an invalid till I found a pay phone and rang her
number. The RA answered. “Bridget?” I said.
“It’s John Milk. Can you get Iris for me?” “Yes, sure’ she said, but her voice was
distant and cold, and I wondered how much she knew. The phone hit the table
with a hard slap, as of flesh on flesh, and then I was listening to the buzz
of static. After a moment, the usual sounds came through: the scuffing of
feet in the background, a giggle, a man’s voice. “Good night’ somebody said,
another man, and then a girl’s voice: “One more kiss?’ When Iris finally came on the line—it
might have been two minutes later or ten, I couldn’t say—she sounded as if
she were speaking to a stranger, an unsolicited caller, somebody selling
something. “What do you want?” she demanded. “I just, well, I just wanted to, well, talk—that
is, if, if—” “What did you think you were doing?”
she said then, and she sounded better now, sounded like herself—furious, but
in some way resigned. “Did you think I was stupid or something? Or blind? Was
that it?” “No, it wasn’t that. It was just that,
well, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but I didn’t want to upset you
in any way, that was all. It’s the project. It’s the human animal. There’s
nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all?’ She was silent. I listened to the
blitzkrieg of static over the line and she might have been a thousand miles
away instead of just across the quad. “Listen, Iris’ I said, “you’re going to
have to try to overcome these antiquated notions about, well, relations between
consenting adults—this is the modern age and we’re scientists, or we mean to
be, and all this superstition and fear and blame and finger-pointing is
holding us back, as a society, I mean. Can’t you see that?” Her voice came back at me as if she
hadn’t heard what I was saying at all, a small voice, quavering around the
edges: “And Prok?” “What about him?” I said. “You and Prok?” I was in a phone booth, bathed in
yellow light. It was cold. The wind rattled the door, seeped through the
cracks where the hinges folded inward. I was shivering, I’m sure, but this
was my wife, this was Iris, and I had to get everything out in the open, had
to be straightforward and honest from here on out or we were doomed, I could
see that now. “Yes:’ I said. What came next was a surprise. She
didn’t throw it back at me, didn’t shout “How could you?” or demand to know
the occasions and the number of times or ask me if I loved him or he me or
where she and Mac fit into all of this, and she didn’t use any of those
hateful epithets people are so quick to make use of, invert, tribad, fag. She just said, “I see?’ What did I feel? Shame? A little.
Relief? Yes, certainly, but it was as tenuous as the connection that fed our
voices through the superstructure of the night. “I love you:’ I said. “You, and nobody else. The rest is all—” “A bodily function?” “Iris, listen. I love you. I want to
see you face-to-face, because this isn’t—we shouldn’t, not over the phone—” “Mac:’ she said, and I couldn’t be
sure—the connection was bad— but there was a knife edge of sorrow to her
voice, a slicing away from the moment that made me feel she was about to
break down in tears. “Mac and I talked. She’s like a mother, but you know
that, don’t you? She, she told me the same thing you did. It doesn’t mean
anything, not a thing, it’s just—just what? Animals rubbing their parts
together?’ “Iris,” I said. “I love you?’ There was a long silence. When she
finally spoke, her voice was reduced to nothing. “What about me and Prok then?” she whispered. “Is that what you want?” I might have been carved of cellulose,
absolutely wooden, the effigy of John Milk propped up inside a phone booth on
the far side of the quad on the IU campus on a blustery autumn night. Hammer
nails into me, temper me, whittle away with every tool at your disposal: I
was insensate. “No:’ I said. “No, I don’t want—that’s not..
.
You don’t have to do
anything you don’t want to do.” “But I’m giving up my history, aren’t
I? Why not give up the rest of me too?” A pause. The wind rattled the booth.
“It doesn’t mean anything, does it?” I was made of wood. I couldn’t speak. “John? John, are you still there?” “I’m here?’ “Your—what should I call him? Your
colleague—Corcoran,” and now a new tone came into her voice, a tone I didn’t
like at all. “He certainly seemed interested. Did you see him tonight? Did
you? He was on me like a bird dog?’ And so I went for Corcoran’s history.
After things had settled down, that is—after Iris and I had talked it out a
hundred times, after we’d reaffirmed the vows we’d taken before the justice
of the peace and loved each other in the backseat of the Nash and scraped our
money together to put down a deposit on our first apartment because this was
intolerable, this separation, this yearning, these misunderstandings, and
it was all right, it was going to be all right as far as I could tell on that
hollowed-out December morning when Prok was away
and I went to the files and saw what Corcoran was. What can I say? I sat
there under the lamp and ran my finger down the interview sheet, noting acts,
ages, frequencies, reconstructing an ever-expanding scenario of experimentation
and sexual derring-do. Corcoran, in fact, was very nearly my diametrical
opposite so far as experience was concerned. He’d matured early and taken advantage
of it, precisely the type of individual we would later label as “high
raters:’ who consistently, throughout their lives, experienced more sex with
more partners than the average, and far more than the “low raters” on the
other end of the scale. Corcoran was raised in Lake Forest, the
son of a professor who later (when Corcoran was fourteen) moved the family to
South Bend in order to accept a position at Notre Dame University. His father
was Catholic, but only minimally involved in the church, and his mother was
Unitarian, and something of a free spirit. There was nudity in the household,
both parents having been involved at one time with the Nudist Movement, a
fact his father took pains to conceal from his superiors at the university,
just as Prok had to keep his own private affairs
sub rosa in the IU community. Corcoran could
remember having experienced erections in childhood, and his mother assured
him that he’d had them in infancy even—she used to joke about it, in fact,
saying he was like a little tin soldier, poking right up at her every time
she went to change his diaper—and while this is unusual, our research into
childhood sexuality has shown that it is not at all anomalous, especially
among high-rating individuals. When he was eleven, he had his first orgasm,
after which he participated enthusiastically in what in the ~ vernacular
would be called “circle jerks” with other neighborhood boys, first in Lake
Forest and then in South Bend, where it seems he was the initiator of a whole
range of sexual activities involving both boys and girls. First coitus came at the age of
fourteen, at a summer cottage on one of the lakes in the upper Michigan
peninsula. There were, apparently, a number of like-minded individuals taking
summer cabins in the region—nudists, that is—and he and his two sisters went
without clothing throughout the summer, “tanned,” as he later put it, “in
every crevice.” It was his aunt—his mother’s sister—who first initiated and
from there he went on to the sixteen-year-old daughter of one oft other
campers, with whom he pursued every means of gratification I could think of.
He found, as he liked to say, that he had a talent for SL., that he enjoyed it more than
any other activity he’d ever discovered, and before long he’d lost all interest
in the boyish pastimes of baseball, trot fishing, picture shows and adventure
novels, devoting himself wholly to satisfying his urges in as many ways and
with as many partners as he could. He met his wife, Violet, in college, and
she was, from the beginning, a sexual enthusiast as well (at this juncture I
could only configure her in my imagination, and I have to confess that I
found myself becoming stimulated at the thought of transcribing her
interview for our records). They had two children, both girls, of seven and
nine years of age respectively. On occasion, they entertained other couples,
Corcoran himself indiscriminate as to whether he had sex with the men or the
women or both (he rated himself no higher than a 3 on Prok’s
0—6 scale
and thought of himself as fully bi-sexual). Finally, and this was to endear
him to Prok and provide an ever-accumulating source
of data for our files, he kept a little black book of his conquests, which
ran, at this point, into the hundreds. Of course, much of what I’ve related
here is what I’ve gleaned from my personal knowledge of the man—we’ve been
colleagues for fourteen years now and certainly we’ve kept no secrets from
each other— and yet the basic information was there in the files when on that
December morning a week before the uncertain Christmas of 1941 I violated Prok’s
proscription for the second (but not the last) time. I can remember sitting
there among the dried-out galls, my heart racing as I scanned the flue of my
prospective colleague, “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” banging around in my
head, the fading tramp of students’ feet trailing down the corridor. How
could I ever hope to match him?—that was what I was thinking. I was sure
suddenly that I’d been fooling myself all along, that Iris had been right—Corcoran
was here to displace me, here to take my desk and my salary and my
interviews, to unseat me in the hierarchy of the project I’d been the first
to sign on for. A kind of panic took hold of me and I had to get up and pace
round the room to calm myself. I made a mental list of my own
virtues—loyalty, affability, a knowledge of the research second only to Prok’s, my seniority on the job—and yet, no matter how I
turned it over in my mind, I had to admit that Corcoran was my superior in
every way, at least on paper: eight years older, the father of two, holder of
an advanced degree and so high a rater he’d wind up at the top of any number
of our graphs and charts. Guilty now—self-accused and suddenly ashamed—I
slipped the file back in the cabinet and turned the key in the lock. The
revelations of the Kinsey Reports in the 1950s shocked Americans. The Inner
Circle will probably not shock, but will place the research in a fictional
and realistic context that will lead readers to think about our own
intertwined or obsessive relationships. Moviegoers may be stuck on the image
of Liam Neeson playing Kinsey in an unrelated movie
released around the same time as The Inner
Circle. Both media present images of a very complex Professor Kinsey that
will entertain. Steve
Hopkins, November 26, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the December 2004
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The
Inner Circle.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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