“Oh, hello,” I said, glancing up from the page before me, expecting Iris, or maybe Prok dashing in for something he’d forgotten, and I had some trouble getting her name out, “hello … Violet.”
“Hi,” she breathed, and she threw her eyes to the ceiling and back again, as if the effort of the greeting had exhausted her. She brought her purse into view, clicked it open, and began fishing for cigarette and lighter, and I almost expected her to present me with a silver cigarette case, as if this were a scene out of the pictures, William Powell and Myrna Loy, or Bacall warming to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She took her time with the ritual of the tobacco, and I made a stab at small talk—“Going to rain tonight, isn’t that what they say?”—but I was hard already, hard instantaneously.
“Want one?” she asked, and I did, and she leaned in to light it for me.
For a moment, we just sat there, inhaling, exhaling, nicotine seeping through our veins and capillaries in the way of a shared secret. I knew what was coming — I’d pictured it since the afternoon of the picnic — but now that it was here, I felt tentative and unsure of myself.
“Listen,” she said, “John, I wanted to talk to you.” I watched her throw back her head and exhale, just like Bacall, and I realized she was as much aware of rehearsing a role as I was. A pulse of excitement leapt from my eyes to my groin.
“About Purvis,” she said. “He’s a free spirit, but I guess you already know that.” Her voice was pitched low. It had a soft, lulling quality, as if nothing were at stake here, as if we routinely shared the little wooden ship of my desk and sailed it out to sea in every sort of weather. “So am I — we both are. But we are married, and we intend to stay that way.” A pause, the manipulation of the cigarette, that tic with the shoulders and breasts. “I don’t know if Iris — if she fully appreciates that.”
“No,” I said, “I think she does, I think that’s all worked out now.”
“Because to be honest with you,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard me, “Purvis is worried about her — and so is Prok. Which is why I’m here.”
I set down the pencil — again, unconsciously — but I suppose it was so I could get a firmer grip on the edge of the desk. She was six years older than I. She had beautiful lips, lips and teeth — I’d never noticed that before — a beautiful smile. Her eyebrows were thick and unplucked, Italian eyebrows, and she was perched on the edge of my desk and the office was deserted. Motives didn’t interest me. I wasn’t suspicious. I wasn’t concerned about Iris or Corcoran or the quid pro quo that was being offered here — all I wanted was to watch her and absorb the soft purr of her voice and I didn’t care what the subject was. “So what do you think?” I said finally.
She gave a minute shrug, leaned over to tap the ash from her cigarette in the wastebasket beside the desk. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, straightening up now and adjusting her shoulders, “what do you think?”
I gave her a smile. I was nervous — I’d never done anything like this before, my new colleague’s wife, Violet Corcoran, the devouring eyes, the lips, the smile, the unholy shape of her — and I was trying to project a kind of casual interest in the event that I was misreading her, that she’d come to talk only and that I was on the verge of embarrassing myself. Now it was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know,” I said.
“You know what I think?”
“No,” I said, leaning closer, the smile frozen to my face.
“I think we should just enjoy ourselves.”
The summer came on that year with a tympanic burst of thunderstorms, Iris graduated with honors and worked full-time at the five and-dime till fall, when she accepted a teaching position in one of the local elementary schools, and then fall gave way to winter and winter to spring and we went on as usual, collecting and tabulating data, Corcoran, Prok and I hurtling down back roads and potholed highways in the stalwart shell of the Buick, our only limitation the rationing coupon — and if it weren’t for that, for rationing, you would never know from anything Prok said or did that there was a war going on out there in the wider world. Prok wasn’t interested in international affairs or politics either. I suppose he must have deplored the Nazis and the Fascists and the Imperial Japanese as much as anyone, but he certainly kept it private — in fact, if he caught Corcoran and me discussing Midway or Guadalcanal or even the latest scrap drive, he invariably changed the subject. Never, in all my years with him, did he mention current events, not even in passing — we detonated the A-bomb, the war ended, the Korean conflict flared up and died — and Prok talked only of the latest sex diary he’d acquired or his need to duplicate Dickinson’s experiments on the gripping power of the levator ani muscles when a wax phallus is inserted in the vagina. He was dedicated, no doubt about it. Perhaps even single-minded to a fault. But you could say that of practically any great man.
It was during this period — it might have been as late as 1944, now that I come to think of it — that we were finally able to induce the sexual champion I mentioned earlier to sit for an interview. Prok had been courting him for some time now, and the man had been cagey, feeding us portions of his sex diaries by mail, but expressing his reluctance to meet because of the criminal nature of so many of his sexual contacts. Certainly, what he’d sent us — photographs, penis measurements, case histories and written records of various sex acts with every sort of partner, male, female, nonhuman, preadolescents and even infants — was provocative, perhaps even offensive, but invaluable to our understanding of human sexuality. And, as Prok put it so well, we were scientists, not moralists — our duty was to observe and record, not to pass judgment.
At any rate, Prok knew instinctively that this subject — let’s call him Mr. X, as we have done in our files in order to afford him absolute anonymity — could be cajoled into contributing his history through an appeal to his vanity. Mr. X had devoted his life to sex — he was insatiable — and was, I suppose, a sort of sexologist in his own right, and so Prok from the very beginning treated him as a learned colleague, praising him repeatedly in his correspondence (“Certainly you have very much more material than we have in our records” and “This is one of the most valuable things we have ever gotten, and I want to thank you most abundantly for the time you put into it and for your willingness to cooperate”) and wooing him with the prospect of legitimating his findings by recording them for posterity. He even offered to pay Mr. X’s expenses if he would come to Bloomington, but Mr. X declined — he would meet with us, he said finally, but only if we came to him and only if we were to rendezvous in a small town some hundred miles from where he lived, so as not to attract any notice.
When Prok received the letter he was overjoyed, practically dancing round the office. “Pack your bags, Milk,” he cried, leaping up from his desk and striding past me to poke his head into the inner office, “and you too, Corcoran. We’re going on a field trip!”
That night, after dinner, I told Iris I’d be taking an extended trip, and she barely glanced up. “Actually,” I said, getting up to help with the dishes, “I’m excited about this one.”
She was standing at the sink. I went to her, slipped the dishes into the suds, put an arm round her waist and touched my cheek to hers. “Oh?” she said. “And why is that?”