7
“So it’s iris — the lucky girl, that is?”
Prok was at his desk, bent over his papers in a cone of light. The windows looked as if they’d been soldered over, the corridor was in shadow and the dull weight of a steady drizzle seemed to have put the entire campus into hibernation. It was our lunch hour and we were eating at our desks, as we did most days, Prok dining on his trail mix while I made the best of a disintegrating tuna sandwich from the Commons, and I’d just told him the good news, though I’d been bursting with it since I got in that morning. (If you’re wondering why I’d hesitated, it was because Prok had been even more than usually absorbed in his work all morning and I couldn’t seem to find an opportunity — he hated to be interrupted — and, if truth be told, I was uncertain how he would take the news. Yes, he’d wanted me to marry, but that was in the abstract, on another temporal plane altogether, and this was in the here and now. I knew his first thought would be for the project and how my altered status would affect it.)
“Well,” he said, looking distracted as he shuffled through his papers in search of something he’d momentarily misplaced — but that was a ruse, a ruse so he could buy time to sort out his thoughts—“she’s an attractive girl, there’s no doubt of that. And intelligent. Intelligent too.” Another moment trundled by, the wheels turning in his brain with a creak and groan I could hear all the way across the room, and then it was done. “But what am I thinking?” he shouted, and suddenly he was on his feet and striding to my desk, his hand outstretched and his face lit with the wide-angle grin he used to such effect when it suited him. “Congratulations, John. Really. This is the best news I’ve heard all week.”
I took his hand and gave him what must have been a shy but self-satisfied smile. “I’m glad, I’m really — because I didn’t know, well, how you’d feel—” I was saying, but he cut me off, already racing on ahead of me.
“When did you say the date was?”
“Well, that is, I didn’t. But we were thinking we’d like to, well, as soon as possible. March. Iris thought March would be—”
He was shaking his head. “That’ll never do. Not March. The garden, as you of all people should know, is barely worthy of the name in March. No, it will have to be May, no question about it.”
“The garden?”
He was looking directly at me — staring into my eyes — but I don’t think he was seeing me at all. He was seeing sunshine and flowers, Iris in a trailing satin gown, the justice of the peace in his ceremonial robes, the deep cerulean arc of the sky overhead. “Yes, of course. I’m offering it to you — my gift, John. And think of it, in May the irises will be at their best — irises for Iris. What could be better?”
I told him it was all right with me — I thanked him lavishly, in fact — but that Iris had already called her mother and that certain undeniable forces had been set in motion, so that I wasn’t sure if we could postpone it at this juncture. He didn’t seem to hear me. “We’ll have Mac do something special,” he said. “A persimmon wedding cake, how about that? And I’ll make up the nuptial supper, cold meats and that sort of thing, and a goulash — and champagne, of course we’ll have to have champagne …” He trailed off and seemed to become aware of me again, as if I’d ducked out of the room and left a standing effigy behind and had just now returned to inhabit its shell. “But Iris,” he said, “your intended — the sexual adjustment was satisfactory, I take it?”
I stood there in the gloom of the office, the desk between us, a numb smile adhering to my lips. I nodded.
He was grinning even more intensely now, shifting from foot to foot, squaring his shoulders and rubbing his hands as if to warm them. “Yes,” he said, “yes. Nothing like the automobile for a modern-day aphrodisiac, eh? You see what I’ve been telling you all along, how fulfilled young couples across America would be, all those frustrated undergraduates out there, the lovesick high school faction, couples too poor to marry”—his arm swept the campus and the rooftops of the town beyond—“if only they could have the privacy and freedom from prejudice to express their sexual needs when and how they choose. Of course, John,” and his eyes took hold of mine, “I hope you’re not confusing the coital experience with the sort of commitment needed to build and sustain a marriage … Or Iris. She does know that sex is — or can, and in many cases should be — independent of marriage? That she doesn’t have to marry the first—” And here he stopped himself, leaving the rest unspoken.
I was about to reassure him, to tell him that we loved each other and had been dating, as he well knew, for some time now, and that our sexual adjustment was just fine, thank you, more than adequate — terrific, even — and that we knew perfectly well what we were doing, but again he cut me off.
“But this is great news! To have you married, Milk — don’t you see what this will do for the project? You won’t be — and you’ll forgive me — so wet behind the ears, or appear to be, at any rate. A married man conducting interviews has got to inspire more confidence, especially in older subjects, and females, of course, than a bachelor. Don’t you think?”
And here I could answer him with confidence even as the image of Mrs. Foshay fought to crowd everything else out of my brain. “That goes without saying, Prok, and I have been listening, believe me, on all those occasions when you kept wishing I was older and more, well, experienced—”
“Good, good,” he said, “good,” and he’d turned to go back to his desk when he swung round on me with an afterthought. “Iris,” he said. “Do we have her history?”
Over the course of the next two months, Prok was in increasing demand as a lecturer, and we began, of necessity, to step up our travel schedule. Word had gotten around. It seemed that every civic group, private school and university in a five-hundred-mile radius wanted him to appear, and at this stage, Prok never turned down an invitation. Nor did he charge a fee, even going so far as to pay traveling expenses out of his own pocket, though his first fledgling grants from the National Research Council and the Rockefeller Foundation helped cover him here — as they did with my salary as his first full-time employee. The routine was the same as always — Prok would find himself in a hall somewhere, the crowd already gathered, and he would lecture with his usual frankness on previously taboo subjects and then ask for volunteers — friends of the research, he’d begun to call them — to step forward and have their histories taken. When we weren’t in his office, working out our tabulations, curves and correlation charts, we were off on the road, collecting data, because, as Prok said, over and over, you could never have enough data.
And how did I feel about all this? I was excited, of course, and I was infused with Prok’s enthusiasm — I believed in the project with every ounce of my being, and I still do — but the timing was a bit awkward, as you can imagine. Iris and I had just become engaged. We treasured each other’s company. We’d begun to enjoy each other sexually (though both of us were still fighting our inhibitions and it wasn’t at all the same as it was with Mac). I wanted to be with her, to stroll arm in arm round Bloomington and poke through the secondhand shops, looking for dishware, rugs and the like, pricing furniture for the household we hoped to set up come June — and we needed to find an apartment we could afford within our limited means, and that was going to take some time and footwork too. But instead I was sitting up in second-rate hotels till one and two in the morning, utterly exhausted, trying to squeeze as many histories as possible into each working day. I was drinking and smoking too much. My ears rang, my head ached, my eyes felt molten, and nothing, not even the details of the most arcane sexual practices, could arouse me from my torpor — not coprophilia, incest or sex with barnyard animals. I just nodded, held the subject’s eyes, and made my notations on the position sheet.