But I’m already making too much of it. Anybody, any man on the street, could have given Prok what he required — I just happened to be available, that was all. In any case, we were in the office one evening — it must have been around six or so — and I don’t think we’d exchanged a word in hours, when I heard Prok get up from his desk. I had my head down, busy with one of the preliminary graphs on sources of orgasm for single males at the college level, and so I didn’t look up, but I did register the sound of the file drawer opening and closing again, of the turning of the key in the lock, signals that Prok was getting set to shut down the office for the day. A moment later, he was standing over me.
“You know, John,” he said, “since Mac and the girls are away on this Girl Scout Jamboree, or whatever it is they call it, and my son seems to be absorbed in a school project he’s doing over at his friend’s house — the Casdens, decent people — I wonder if we shouldn’t spend the evening together—”
I thought I knew what he meant, and I no doubt did have plans — brooding over Iris would have topped the list — but I nodded in compliance. “Yes,” I said, “sure.”
He was opening up that dazzling smile, pleased, delighted — and, oddly, he reached across the desk and shook my hand as if I’d just given him the keys to the kingdom. “A bite of dinner, maybe, and perhaps we can combine that with what I had in mind, a little practice in one of the areas where I find myself sadly deficient — with an eye to improving my technique, that is.”
“Technique?”
“Interviewing, I mean.”
I gave him an astonished look and said something along the lines that he was the consummate interviewer and that I couldn’t imagine how he could expect to improve on what was already as close to flawless as anyone could hope.
“Kind of you to say,” he murmured, giving my hand a final squeeze and releasing it. “But we’re all capable of improvement, and, you know, I think, that I’m not as comfortable as I should be around revelers.”
“Revelers?”
“Where do we spend most of our time — in the field, that is?”
I didn’t have a clue as to what he was talking about.
“In taverns, Milk. In barrooms, roadhouses, beer halls, at parties and gatherings where smoking and drinking are de rigueur, and you know how I — how awkward I am, or perhaps untrained is a better word, with those particular sybaritic skills.”
I still wasn’t following him. “Yes? And?”
He laughed then, a short chopped-off laugh that began in his throat and terminated in his nose. “Well, isn’t it obvious? You’re the expert here, Milk. I’m the novice.”
“You mean you want me, to, to—?”
“That’s right. I want you to give me lessons.”
We went back to the house on First Street that night with a brown paper bag of ham sandwiches, three packs of cigarettes, two cigars, a quart of beer and a fifth each of bourbon, scotch, gin, rum and vodka, as well as the standard mixers. It may have been raining. The house was cold. Prok built up a fire in the hearth and we spread our acquisitions out on the coffee table, set ourselves up with the proper glasses, ice and ashtrays, and started in.
First came the cigarettes. “You don’t have to inhale, Prok,” I said, knowing how much he loathed the habit. “Just let the thing dangle from your lips, like this”—I demonstrated—“bend forward to light it, squelch the match with a flick of the wrist, take the smoke in your mouth, like so, hold it a moment, exhale. No, no, no — just leave the cigarette there, right there at the corner of your mouth, and let the smoke rise. That’s right. Squint your eyes a bit. But you see? Now your hands are free, and you can pick up your drink or, if you’re interviewing, go right on with your recording. Yes, yes, now you can remove it — two fingers, index and middle — and tap the ash. That’s it. Right. Very good.”
Of course, he hated it. Hated the smell, the taste, the idea, hated the smoke in his eyes and the artificial feel of the dampening paper at his lip. And on the second or third puff he inadvertently inhaled and went into a coughing fit that drained all the color from his face and swelled his eyes till I thought they would burst. The cigars were even worse. At one point he went to the mirror to examine how he looked with the sodden stub of a White Owl clenched in the corner of his mouth, and then wordlessly came back across the room and flung the thing in the fireplace. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “I just don’t. How can people derive enjoyment from burning weeds under their noses — from burning weeds anywhere? From inhaling burning weeds? And what about men with facial hair, with beards — what do they do? It’s a wonder every barroom in America hasn’t burned to the ground by now.” He was stalking back and forth across the floor. “It’s maddening is what it is. Maddening.”
We did better with alcohol. I started him off with bourbon, my drink of choice, and I tried to have him dilute it with water or soda, but he insisted on taking it straight, reasoning that if he had to choose a favorite, something he could order casually at some gin mill to help put potential subjects at ease, he ought to know what it tasted like in its unadulterated form. I watched him sniff the sepia liquid, tip back the drink, swish it around in his mouth, and then, after a moment’s deliberation, spit it back into the glass. “No,” he said, giving me a grimace, “bourbon, I’m afraid, is not—viable.”
And so on, through the other candidates (the beer, he said, had the smell of swamp gas and the taste of an old sponge that had been buried in the yard and then squeezed over a glass), until we got to the rum. He poured it, sniffed it, swirled it in his mouth and swallowed. The grimace never left his face and my impression was that the experiment had been a failure. But he leaned forward and poured a second drink, a very short one, and drank that off too. He gritted his teeth. Smacked his lips a time or two. His eyes were red behind the shining discs of his glasses. “Rum,” he said finally. “That’s the ticket. How does the song go? — ‘Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest, Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.’”
In fact, we didn’t have Iris’s history. I knew, though, almost exactly how it would tabulate — she’d been sex shy, inhibited by her upbringing and her religion; she’d masturbated guiltily while thinking of a boy in her class or some screen actor; she’d dated frequently, but not seriously, and had never, until now, allowed anything more than deep kissing and perhaps some awkward adolescent manipulation of her breasts; she’d had one sexual partner and had lost her virginity at the age of nineteen in the backseat of a Nash. And more: she loved that partner and intended to marry him. Or at least she had until a week ago.
Though he tried not to show it, Prok was irritated that we hadn’t collected her history — how would it look vis-à-vis the project if the prospective wife of his sole colleague had decided against volunteering? Bad, to say the least. Unreasonable. Hypocritical. Even worse, it would tend to undermine everything we were trying to project with regard to openness about sex on the one hand and absolute confidentiality on the other. What was Iris thinking? Was she going to wind up being a detriment to the project? And if she was, would it cost me my job?