One night in a thousand nights, in five thousand nights, a man and his wife — a sex researcher and his wife — gratifying each other’s needs. It was the most ordinary thing in the world — or no, it was celebratory, celebratory still because we had the license of our own apartment and no John Jr. to worry over or anything else. We had intercourse six or seven times a week. We experimented with extended foreplay, with teasing, strip poker, with all the coital positions we could imagine. And all the while the project went forward, gained momentum, and Corcoran and I became ever more deeply involved — as friends, as colleagues — even as we jockeyed for position with Prok.
Corcoran offered me a ride home after work one evening, and we wound up stopping off at a tavern for a drink. I thought of calling Iris, to tell her I’d be late, but there was no need really — the hours were never regular when you worked for Prok, and there was no telling when I’d be home on a given evening, but it was rarely earlier than seven. The tavern was the same student hangout I frequented senior year, the place where I’d sat breathless and palpitating with Laura Feeney and her friends in the wake of Prok’s arresting slide show. I remember smiling at the memory. It had seemed like a hundred years ago — and it was, in terms of what I’d learned and experienced since. Corcoran laid a bill on the bar and asked me what was so amusing.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s this place, I guess. I used to come here as a student.”
At that moment, both of us, as if we were being manipulated by a force beyond our control, turned to watch a coed in a pair of slacks saunter by on the arm of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. “What a waste,” Corcoran said.
I was grinning. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “yeah. A real waste.”
He was staring off into the distance now, idly tapping a knuckle on the bartop. “I could relate to her,” he said. “Couldn’t you?”
I said that I could, and then the bartender appeared and we both ordered martinis, up, with a twist, though I didn’t really care all that much for gin — Corcoran ordered first, that was all, and he made it sound good, so I said, “Second that.”
What did we talk about that night through three martinis and a kind of delirium that made my head feel as if it were a pan full of sloshing water? Sex, certainly. The project. Prok. The immediate future, as in our next trip, scheduled for two days later. At some point, there was a pause, and he leaned forward to light a cigarette. “How do you feel about that, the trips, I mean?” he said, shaking out the match. “Is it — I don’t know — difficult at all? With Iris?”
I looked out over the room a moment, caught the gaze of the coed we’d tracked earlier, and immediately dropped my eyes. “Well, yes, sure.” The third martini had lost its chill. The roof of my mouth felt as numb as if I’d been given an anesthetic at the dentist’s — gin, I didn’t like gin, and I didn’t know why I was drinking it. “But it’s part of the job. She understands that. We both do.” I lifted the thin-stemmed glass to my lips, conscious all at once of its fragility. “But what about you? You don’t, well — what about your wife?”
Corcoran turned a bland face to me. There were golden highlights in his hair. He gave an elaborate shrug that began in his upper arms, migrated to his shoulders and finally to his neck and the rotating ball of his head. “It’s hard, but Violet’s got to keep the kids in school till June — we couldn’t very well uproot them. And when I do manage to see her — you remember I drove up there weekend before last? — when we do get together, believe me, the sex is terrific, red-hot, like you wouldn’t believe.”
I didn’t know what to say. To this point I’d laid eyes on Violet Corcoran just once, when she’d come to town on the bus one weekend to get her bearings and help motivate her husband to find a suitable place for the long term. She was attractive, certainly — of Italian descent, with skin the color of olive oil, very dark eyes and a mouth that turned up in a natural pout, even at rest — but she was nothing compared to Iris. Maybe I was prejudiced — of course I was — but to my mind Iris was a true natural beauty and Violet Corcoran wasn’t in that category at all. I tried to picture her with her clothes off, picture her in bed with Corcoran, but the image flickered and vanished before I could get hold of it. Finally I said something like, “I guess there are some advantages, then, hmm?” And tried for a complicitous smile.
There was traffic in and out of the bar, the high whinny of a laugh, the squeak and shuffle of men’s shoes. The jukebox was playing something I didn’t recognize. Corcoran squinted against the smoke rising from his cigarette, and I couldn’t help thinking he should be the one to give Prok his lessons in savoir faire. “Yeah,” he said finally, “but there are other advantages too, if you know what I mean.”
“No,” I said, “what?”
He drew at the cigarette, exhaled, set it down carefully in the corner of the ashtray and picked up a hard-boiled egg, which he began delicately tapping against the surface of the bar. I watched him for a moment as he peeled back the shell and the membrane beneath it, salted the slick white surface and took the entire thing into his mouth. “You know, batching it,” he said, chewing around his words. “Opportunities arise. Not that they wouldn’t if I were back home in South Bend — and you know I never let convention stand in my way — but it’s just that it’s, well, easier if you’re off on your own. Less complicated, you know?”
I thought about that a moment, thought about him and Iris at the musicale, thick as thieves. I had nothing to add.
“But you,” he said, turning to me, his face as bland and ineluctably handsome as any movie star’s, “don’t you … get out a bit yourself?”
As I’ve said, I was past the stage of reddening — that sort of emotional report card was strictly for adolescents — but I did feel my heart pound out of synchronization for just a moment even as the lie flew to my lips. “No,” I said, thinking of that dark groping encounter in the hallway of my own apartment, “no, not really.”
Then there came a night when I did get home early — just past six — and Iris wasn’t there. I’d been in the biology library all afternoon, sequestered in a back corner working on a series of tables (Accumulative Incidence: Pre-Adolescent Orgasm From Any Source, By Educational Level; Active Incidence and Percentage of Outlet: Petting to Orgasm, By Decade of Birth) in support of our grant proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, my head down, minding my own business, while Elster stalked back and forth and glared at me from his desk as if the scratch of my pencil or the setting down of my ruler and T square were exploding the bibliographical calm of the place. I tried my best to ignore him, but whenever he came into my range of vision with an armload of papers or a cart of books, I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t been called up to fight our enemies in Europe, Africa or the Pacific. But then I studied him for a moment when he was busy at his desk — the slack posture, fleshless limbs, the glowing bald spot on the crown of his head that was like the stamp of early senescence — and came up with the answer to my own question: he was IV-F, IV-F without a doubt.
And what was I doing in the library in the first place? Simple. Prok had evicted me for the afternoon so that he and Corcoran could conduct simultaneous interviews of a cohort of southern Indiana psychologists who were attending a conference on campus. I’d interviewed two of them already that morning and early afternoon, and now Prok was putting Corcoran to the test, checking Corcoran’s position sheet against his own the minute the subject had left. And so I got home early, and Iris wasn’t there.