All the way to the station house, as we sat wedged in on either side of the prostitute (Verleen Loy, five foot five, one hundred twenty-seven pounds, D.O.B. 3/17/24), Prok remonstrated with the patrolmen in his precise, wrathful tones. Did they know who he was? Did they know that the NRC, the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University supported his research? Were they aware that they were holding up vital progress toward understanding one of the most significant behavioral patterns of the human animal?
They weren’t aware of it, no. In fact, one of them — the red-faced policeman who had handcuffed me and subsequently shoved me up against the brick wall at my back for no earthly reason — swung round in his seat at this point and addressed the prostitute in a tone I could only think was both crude and offensive. “Hey, Verleen,” he said, grinning wide, “are we holding up progress here?”
The passing aura of a streetlight caught her face then. She had battered-looking eyes, teeth that seemed to have been sharpened to points. Her voice was reduced, hardly audible over the swish of the tires on the wet pavement. “You ain’t holdin’ up nothin’,” she said.
At the station house, things seemed to take a turn for the better. The night captain, though he was deeply skeptical, was impressed by Prok’s manner and his dress (and I think he took pity on me too, with my disarranged hair and hangdog look). After determining that Prok was who he claimed to be, the night captain allowed him to put a call through to H.T. Briscoe, Dean of the Faculties at IU. I stood there looking on, the handcuffs digging at my wrists, as Prok recited the number from memory and the night captain conveyed it to the operator.
It was past two in the morning. Verleen had been taken off and locked up in a cell somewhere, and I could hear the occasional shout or whimper emanating from the men’s cell block in the rear. I was frightened, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wasn’t yet twenty-three, I’d seen little or nothing of the world, and here I was, on the wrong side of the law and facing some sort of convoluted morals charge that would blemish my record forever, and I was already frantic over what I would tell my mother — what I would tell Iris, for that matter. Solicitation. Wasn’t that what they charged you with? What about Sodomy? Fornication? Corrupting the morals of a minor? I saw myself at the work farm, in prison stripes, shuffling out to rake the yard.
But then I heard Prok’s cool, collected tones as he explained the situation to Dean Briscoe, rudely awakened from his bed in a cozy room in a comfortable house back in the very Eden of Bloomington, and then I watched the night captain’s face as Prok handed him the phone and Dean Briscoe delivered his authoritative testimonial on the other end of the line, and it was only then that I knew the crisis had passed. Unfortunately, I never did recover my overcoat and hat, and we managed only six interviews on that trip, but on the positive side, it taught us a lesson — from then on, Prok never went anywhere without a letter from Dean Briscoe explaining his project and its validation by the highest authorities of Indiana University, said letter to be produced “in the event that the nature of his research takes him into localities where the purpose of what he is doing might not be clearly understood.”
Back safe in Bloomington, I gave Iris a truncated version of our little contretemps, tried to make a joke of it, in fact, though my psychic wounds were still open and festering, but Iris didn’t find the story amusing, not at all. We were taking dinner together at the Commons (the roast pork with brown gravy, fitfully mashed potatoes and wax beans cooked to the consistency of cud), and she’d innocently asked how the trip had gone. I told her, glossing over some of the seamier details, and winding up with an extended lament over the loss of my hat and overcoat (for which Prok would make allowance in my next paycheck, incidentally).
“Prostitutes, huh?” she said.
I nodded. The overhead lighting made a gargoyle’s mask of my face (I know because I was staring into my own reflection in a long dirty strip of mirror on the wall behind Iris). Outside, it was raining, a local manifestation of the same pandemic storm that had dogged us in Gary.
Iris’s face was very pale and her mouth drawn tight. She laid her knife and fork carefully across her plate, though she’d barely touched her food. When she spoke, her voice was thick with emotion. “Do you often go with prostitutes?”
“Well, no,” I said. “Of course not. That goes without saying.”
“Do you ever — do you sleep with them?”
I didn’t like the implied accusation, didn’t like the criticism — or belittling — of my professionalism and my work. And I was especially annoyed after what I’d been through the previous night. She couldn’t begin to imagine. “No,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Did you ever?”
“Iris. Please. What do you think I am?”
“Did you?”
“No. And if you want to know the truth I never laid eyes on a prostitute in my life till last night and I wouldn’t treat them, prostitutes, that is, any different from anybody else. As far as interviews are concerned. You know perfectly well that for the project to succeed we need everybody’s history, from as wide a range of people as we can manage to contact, ministers’ wives, Daughters of the American Revolution, Girl Scout leaders”—and here the image of Mac, naked, flitted quickly through my brain like one of the flecks and blotches on the screen when the projector first flicks on—“and, yes, prostitutes too.”
She looked away, caught in profile, her hair a small conflagration of shadow and light. “Did you ever sleep with anybody?” She spoke to the wall, her voice a whisper. “Besides me?”
“No,” I said, and I don’t know why I lied when the whole ethos behind the project was to bring human sexuality out of the dungeon to which the priests had confined it and to celebrate it, glory in it, experience it to the full, without prohibition or inhibition. But still, given the moment and the situation, which was fraught to say the least, I lied.
“But why not?” she said, lifting her head to give me a sidelong glance, the glance of the executioner and the hanging judge. “Isn’t that — sleeping with people, I mean — exactly what Dr. Kinsey—Prok—says is the right thing to do? Isn’t it part of the program? Sexual experimentation, I mean?”
“Well,” I said, and a gobbet of meat, soft as a sponge, seemed to have climbed back up my throat, “not exactly. He is happily married himself, you know, and he, he wants us to be too—”
Her face was flushed. The crucified pork congealed in its gravy on the table before her. I felt a draft come up, somebody opening a door somewhere, and I craned my neck to pinpoint the source of it. “Do you feel a draft?” I said.
“You’re lying to me,” she said. “I know you’ve slept with people.”
“Who?” I demanded.
She was working loose the ring I’d given her, twisting it back and forth to get the band over the bone of the finger joint. It was a diamond solitaire, and I’d borrowed twenty-five dollars from Prok, as an advance on my salary, to put a down payment on it. I had never in my life purchased anything so lavish — had never even dreamed of it. I watched her jerk it off her finger now and set it on the table between us. She was feeling around her for her jacket, all her emotions concentrated in her eyes and the unforgiving slash of the drawn-down wound of her mouth. “Mac,” she said. “Mac, that’s who.”