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.”