Her smile opened up suddenly, a dazzling full-lipped smile that made whole flocks of birds take off and careen round my stomach. “Oh, it’s my pleasure,” she murmured as I motioned to the chair and watched her settle into it, “anything for science, hey?”
I offered her a cigarette — she chose a Lucky — lit it for her and wished it were nine in the evening rather than nine in the morning so we could both have a drink. A drink would have gone a long way toward calming my case of nerves.
“Good,” I said, poised over the interview sheet, pencil in hand. “So, Mrs. Foshay, perhaps you’d like to tell me something of yourself—”
“Alice, call me Alice.”
“Yes, Alice. You’ve lived here long, here in West Lafayette, I mean?”
The small talk, designed, as I’ve said, to put the subject at ease, consumed perhaps five minutes and then my brain froze up. I couldn’t help noticing how Mrs. Foshay’s breasts filled out the material of her blouse — filled it to the point of strain — and how silken her legs looked in a pair of sheer stockings. A moment of silence passed like a freight train. “All right, then,” I said, “so. And you lived in Trenton, you say, until what age?”
I did manage to get into the rhythm of things as we moved along through the factual data (number of brothers, sisters, twin status, sorority membership, frequency of attending motion pictures, et cetera) keeping it in a simple question-response mode, and even the early sequential questions about onset of puberty came off well, but I’m afraid I broke down a bit when we got to the more sensitive areas. “When did you first begin to masturbate?” I asked, lighting a cigarette myself.
“I must have been eleven,” she said, drawing at her Lucky. “Or maybe it was twelve.” She threw her head back and exhaled, no more concerned than if she were at the hairdresser’s or conferring with a girlfriend on the telephone. “We were living in Newark still, and I remember the curtains — my mother had made them for me when I was a child, very colorful, decorated with little figures out of nursery rhymes, Mother Goose, that sort of thing. My sister Jean — she’s a year older than I — she showed me the technique.”
I set down the cigarette, made a notation in the proper square. “Yes? And what was that technique?”
She tried to look away, but I held onto her with my eyes. I didn’t blink. Didn’t move.
“Well, you might find this odd or maybe hard to believe …”
“No,” I said, and my voice was so pinched I could barely get it out, “no, not at all — there is no activity we haven’t recorded, and certainly, as Prok—Dr. Kinsey, that is — outlined in the lecture last night, we make no judgments …”
She seemed encouraged. She patted her hair, which was piled up and pinned at the crown in a roll, with the bangs brushed into an exaggerated pompadour, reminiscent of the way Dolly Dawn used to wear her hair, and most people I think will remember her from George Hall’s band (“It’s a Sin to Tell a Lie” should ring a bell, or, at the very least, “Yellow Basket”). “Well,” she said, “I’m double-jointed. So’s Jean. And my brother Charlie.”
“Yes?” I said, pencil poised.
“We — Jean and I — would get up on the bed, side by side, and do a kind of back flip, you know, the sort of things acrobats do at the circus? Only we would hold it there and then, well, because of being double-jointed, we would lick ourselves.”
The term that came into my head was “auto-cunnilingus.” Prok hadn’t yet devised a box or code for that one, so I made a spontaneous notation. I was probably blushing. Certainly I was hard.
We forged on.
Was this her first marriage? Yes. Had she experienced deep kissing prior to the time she was married? Yes. Had she experienced petting? Yes. Had she fondled the male genitalia, experienced mouth-to-genital contact, engaged in coitus? Yes, yes and yes. How many partners had she had, excluding her husband? Somewhere, she guessed, around twenty. “Twenty?” I repeated, trying to keep my voice neutral. She couldn’t say, really, it might have been a few less or even as many as twenty-five, and her eyes went dreamy a moment as she tried to recollect. And what about orgasm: When was the first time she was aware of having experienced an orgasm? Had she been able to bring herself to orgasm through masturbation, petting, intercourse? When had she most recently experienced an orgasm?
And here was where I found myself in deep water again, because I asked this conventionally pretty and very likely pampered professor’s wife, this elegant blond jewel of a woman dressed in impeccable taste, the next question in the sequence, that is: “How many orgasms do you experience on average?”
She was on her fifth cigarette, and if she’d been relaxed from the outset, now she was as warm and enthusiastic as any individual I’d yet interviewed. She looked at me. Gave a little smile. I had been continuously — and unprofessionally — hard for the better part of two hours now. “Oh, I would guess maybe ten or twelve.”
My face must have shown my surprise, because few even of our highest-rating individuals would have approached that numerical category. “Per week?” I asked. And then, stupidly, “Or is that a monthly approximation?”
Now it was her turn to blush, just the faintest reddening of the flesh under both cheekbones and around the flanges of her nostrils. “Oh, no,” she said. “No. I’m afraid that would be daily.”
If Iris was at all miffed that I wasn’t there to greet her and Tommy and help drag her steamer trunk up three flights of stairs at the women’s dorm, she didn’t show it. Prok and I returned to Bloomington early on the morning of the fourth day, as planned — he still had his teaching schedule to work around in those days — and I went straight to the office to transcribe the coded sheets and add incrementally to our burgeoning data on human sexual behavior, and I should say that this was always exciting, in the way, I suppose, of a hunter returning from a successful expedition with his bag limit of the usual birds and perhaps a few of the exotic as well. (Further to the above interview, incidentally: please don’t think that all the interviewees had such a rich and extensive sex life as that young faculty wife. Much more typical, of the females especially, was a record of sexual repression, guilt and limited experience, both in number of partners and activities. I should add too, just to close out the anecdote, that the moment the door shut behind her — Mrs. Foshay — I couldn’t help relieving the pressure in my groin, though if Prok had heard of it he would have skinned me alive — professionalism, professionalism was the key word, at least on the surface. At least in the beginning. I came to orgasm in record time, the stale room still redolent with her perfume and the heat of her presence, and I barely had time to mop up with my handkerchief and tuck myself away before the next knock came at the door and the acne-stippled face of a nineteen-year-old sociology student, who wouldn’t have recognized the female genitalia if they’d been displayed for him on a gynecologist’s examining table, appeared in the doorway. He gave me a steady look, then said — or rather, croaked—“Am I in the right place?”)
But Iris. Immediately after work I rushed across campus to the dorm. Earlier, when it looked as if Prok and I wouldn’t be finished till seven or so, I’d left a telephone message with the RA to the effect that I would come straight from work and take her to dinner (Iris, that is, not the RA), so she should hold off eating. And, though it was the RA I was talking with and so couldn’t really express much of what I was feeling, I added that I was looking forward to seeing her. After such a long time, that is. Very much. Very much so.