“But I wouldn’t want to inconvenience you — or Mac.”
“No inconvenience at all — we never use the car at night anyway. In fact, what I’ll do is simply leave the key under that loose brick we never got around to repairing last summer — you know, out back in the low wall round the persimmon tree? You know the one I mean?”
And so, for the first time in my life I had an automobile to do with as I liked, though of course I would have to be especially cautious since it represented the project’s single biggest nonhuman asset, and where would we have been without it? At any rate, when we got back from the trip I went straight to Iris — I caught her in the quad as she was going between classes — and informed her I’d be picking her up in style that night.
“In style?” she said. She gave me a knowing smile. The wind lifted the brim of her hat and then set it fluttering like a bird’s wing.
“That’s right,” I said. “Your own limousine, at your service, mademoiselle.”
“Kinsey’s car,” she said. “The bug buggy. The wasp wagon.”
“I’m taking you out of town. To a roadhouse. To celebrate.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Kinsey’s car?”
“It’s better than nothing.” I felt as if I’d been transposed to one of Shakespeare’s comedies, trading quips with Rosalind or Beatrice in the forest of Arden or a sunny piazza in Messina. Only this was Indiana and it was winter and Iris was letting me dangle. Just for fun.
“Do you know any roadhouses? Have you ever been to one?”
“Sure,” I lied. “Sure, dozens of times.”
“And then what?” she asked, fixing me with a teasing look.
“We eat, drink and make merry.”
“And then?”
“And then,” I said, leaning into her, the wind tearing at my collar, a flurry of students hurrying by with pale numb faces, “then afterwards we can drive off into some quiet, dark lane and, well, and have some real privacy.”
Despite everything, despite all the thought I’d put into getting Iris alone in a private setting, not to mention the fantasies I’d indulged, I was all nerves that night. The roadhouse was anything but romantic, a smoky, ill-lit den ranged round with leering, drunken faces that offered up the kind of cuisine that gave Hoosier cooking a bad name. I had a bowl of what purported to be beef stew with at least half an inch of melted tallow floating atop it and a packet of stale saltines to help soak it up. Iris pushed something called a Salisbury steak around her plate until finally she gave up and mashed the peas that accompanied it into a kind of paste and ate that on the crumbling saltines. We each had two beers.
I was watching her over the second one, trying to gauge her mood. I’d made a number of passing references to what I hoped the evening would bring, and she’d seemed amenable, or at least resigned. “Hurry up and finish that beer,” I said.
She gave me a smoldering look — or maybe that was just my imagination; more likely its intention was satiric. She did love to clown. “Oh, and why? Have you got something planned for the rest of the evening? There’s a meeting of the Backgammon Club on campus, you know. And there’s a group sing at the Presbyterian church. Do you feel like a good sing, John — wouldn’t that be swell?”
My hand found her knee beneath the table. “You know what I want,” I said.
“No,” she said, all innocence. “Whatever could that be?”
The night was cold — arctic, in fact — and the Nash’s heater didn’t really amount to much. I’d heard of a couple who’d kept the car running inside the garage (it was the girl’s father’s car, three in the morning, her parents asleep upstairs in the house) and wound up asphyxiating themselves, only to be discovered half-undressed and rigid as ice sculptures the next morning, and I was aware of the dangers. Still, we were outside and the wind — the implacable, unrelenting, stern and disapproving wind — would at least fan the exhaust away from the cab, and, more important, the backseat. For a long while we sat there in front, necking and watching the stars, and then something seemed to give in her, a sense of release, as if all the old strictures and prohibitions had suddenly fallen away. She let me pull open her jacket, and then her blouse, and after a moment I tugged her brassiere down so that her breasts fell free and I began to stimulate them orally. She responded and that encouraged me. I was petting her now, petting her furiously, kissing her deeply, massaging her bare breasts and working the nipples between my fingertips, absolutely aflame, when I murmured, “Shall we — the backseat, I mean?”
She didn’t say anything, so I took that for a yes, and after an awkward moment we were over the seat and into the back, my body stretched full atop hers, the engine eructating beneath us, the heater fighting down the onslaught of the cold. I was thinking of Mac, thinking of our first time in the garden and how receptive she was, how natural and pleasurable and easy it had been, when suddenly Iris clamped her legs together on the fulcrum of my right hand.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
Her face was faint and ghostly in the light of the stars that seeped in through the trees. I smelled the heat of her, her breath commingled with mine, the perfume she’d dabbed behind her ears that was all but dissipated now. “You don’t think I’m going to go all the way, do you?”
I was stretched out atop her. My trousers were down at my knees. She’d had her hand on my penis and her tongue in my mouth. Suddenly I became eloquent. “Yes, of course,” I said. “You know it’s the most natural thing in the world, and it’s only convention — superstition, priests, ministers, bogeymen — that keeps people from expressing themselves to the full. Sexually, I mean. Come on, Iris. Come on, it’s nothing. You’ll like it, you will.”
She was silent. She hadn’t moved. Her face was inches from mine, floating there in the dark of the car like a husked shell on a midnight sea.
“You know what we’re discovering?” I whispered.
“No,” she whispered back. “What?”
“Well, that premarital sex is actually beneficial, that people who have it — premarital sex, that is — are much better, well, adjusted than those who don’t. And it carries over into their married sex life as well. They’re happier, Iris. Happier. And that’s the long and short of it, I swear.”
She was silent again. I could feel myself shrinking, the blood ticking along the length of the shaft and ever so slowly draining away. The wind buffeted the car and we both tensed a moment, and then it passed, and the silence deepened. “Premarital,” she murmured after a moment. “Pre,” she said, holding it a beat, and then releasing it, “marital. Isn’t that what you said, John?”
“Yes,” I said, eager now, not quite taking her point. “Premarital. Sex before, well, marriage.”
Another silence, but I could feel the change coming over her, communicated along the length of her body, through the nerve endings of her skin, directly to mine. She was grinning, I knew it, though it was too dark to read her face. “So,” she said, “I take it you’re proposing to me, then?”
In the end, President Wells did deliver the ultimatum Prok had been expecting, but Prok surprised him and the Board of Trustees too. They had assumed he’d choose the marriage course over the research, the teaching to which he’d devoted himself and at which he’d excelled for the past twenty years rather than what they must have seen as a new and perhaps passing enthusiasm, but they didn’t know him very well. It hurt him, it outraged him, it made him more determined than ever to overturn the cant and hypocrisy of the guardians of the status quo, of the Rices, the Hoenigs and all the rest, but he gave up the marriage course — eventually gave up teaching across the board — in order to pursue the new and great goal of his life. Soon, very soon, the Institute for Sex Research would be born and the inner circle would expand by three.