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.