It would have been fitting for a thunderclap to shake the house then, but it didn’t come. Or maybe it did. Maybe I’m misremembering.
“And there’s another thing. And I don’t care what you say.” She brought her face to mine, closing the gap over the cat and the hand that was stroking him instead of me, her eyes hovering, her lips, her teeth, the sweet scent of her breath. “I want a baby, John. I’ve made up my mind.”
And now it came—Boom! — and everything rattled, right on down to the dishes in the cupboard and the knives in the drawer.
3
Things settled down for a while after that — or settled into a routine, at any rate. We traveled a bit less frequently that fall, as a threesome, that is, Prok and Corcoran going off on two separate jaunts to New York and Philadelphia, making contacts and bagging histories along the way, and in their absence I punched the clock and focused on the affairs of the Institute. I didn’t mind. It was good to be home and spending more time with Iris, though of course I was still on the road a great deal and when I wasn’t, I have to confess I did miss the excitement of the chase. In some ways, I suppose, a habituation to routine and the quiet, ordered life was suited to my temperament, but there was another part of me altogether that yearned for the road, for adventure, and once Prok had opened up that world to me I could never get enough of it.
As for the Institute, though we wouldn’t incorporate for three years yet, we were growing in prestige and autonomy both, and along with our full-time secretary — the formidable Mrs. Bella Matthews — we’d taken on part-time clerical help as well, and this necessitated shifting things around to fit another desk in the offices, Mrs. Matthews going into the anteroom and the part-timers finding space alongside Corcoran. The library, all of it acquired at Prok’s personal expense and already running to some five thousand items — books in the field, photographs, artwork, sex diaries and the like — had taken over every available inch of space in the inner office and a locked, windowless spare room down the hall that once had been used to store lab equipment. To say that we were cramped for space would be an understatement. Even more pressing was the need for “more hands,” as Prok put it — that is, another researcher to assist in collecting the new and astonishing figure of one hundred thousand histories he was now determined to record.
To that end, we had begun to send out feelers to various academic institutions — and Prok tirelessly canvassed his colleagues around the country in an attempt to attract a candidate who would reflect well on our research. At that point, I had only a baccalaureate to my name, and Corcoran his Master’s, and so Prok had his sights set on an older man — in his thirties, that is — with a Ph.D. in the social sciences or psychology, and from a prestigious university. He himself, of course, was a Harvard man, and though he never said as much in an effort to spare our feelings, he was looking for someone whose credentials and affiliation could balance out our rather pedestrian state university degrees. As I recall, we did conduct some interviews through the fall and into the spring of the following year—1945—but the response wasn’t what we’d hoped for. The war was still in progress, after all, and the vast majority of the workforce still employed by Uncle Sam.
On the home front — the personal home front, that is, in the kitchen, living room and bedroom of the apartment Iris and I shared at 619 Elm Street — things began to even out as well. Every marriage experiences growing pains, and certainly we’d had ours, but now I was home, or home more frequently than I had been, and I was determined to make up for past mistakes. I made a real effort to be there on time for dinner each night, even if it meant getting to the office earlier in the morning in order to accommodate the workload; I tried to talk more about literature, art, current events, and less about Prok and sex; I gave up going to the tavern after work and attempted to help around the house as much as I could, though I have to admit I was no paragon here — but I was trying, at least I was trying. Over time, I even began to tolerate the cat. And if I balked initially over the issue of having a child (the usual excuses: we were too young, we couldn’t afford it, a cat was one thing and a baby another), I recalled my moment of clarity at the Fillmore School, children, children everywhere, and it wasn’t long before I began to come round to Iris’s way of thinking.
That first night was a trial, though, and I don’t mind admitting it. We didn’t seem to be communicating, not at all, and I should have been more sympathetic, but I was exhausted, both physically and mentally, and I wasn’t at my best. Far from it. Just as she was softening, at the very moment I was about to dig the bracelet out of my suitcase and make everything right again, the cat came between us and somehow the cat managed to metamorphose into a hypothetical child. “I want a baby, John,” she said, and I didn’t even think, didn’t hesitate or bother with the emotional calculus, just said no. And Iris, with the pot rattling on the stove and I don’t know how much gin in her, not to mention the residue of an afternoon’s gossip with Violet Corcoran, threw it back at me. “Fine,” she said, “if that’s how you feel you can sleep right here on the couch then, because you’re not coming near me, not even for a touch, a kiss, nothing. You hear me?”
And that was it, the end of our joyful reunion. She took the cat into the bedroom and slammed the door and I went out to the nearest bar and drank bourbon in a corner all by myself while people crowded around the radio and listened to news of the war and I seethed and ached and went faint with lust for her, for my own wife, five weeks away from home and no sex, no affection, nothing but rancor and a cat. I was furious. Heartbroken. Disgusted with myself and with her too — with marriage, the whole corrupt and coercive institution. Prok was right: man was pansexual, and it was only convention — law, custom, the church — that kept him from expressing himself with any partner that came along, of whatever sex or species. Marriage was a ball and chain. It was slavery. And it sanctioned nothing but acrimony. I walked home in the rain, haunted by lust, slept on the couch and woke with a hangover. I was gone before she got up.
At work, I tried to solicit Prok’s advice, but he was moving at light speed, flying from his desk to mine and Corcoran’s and Mrs. Matthews’s and back again, five weeks of accumulated correspondence and metastasizing problems to conquer and all in a single day, because with Prok nothing could wait till tomorrow. It was late in the afternoon before I was finally able to corner him. He’d gone to the lavatory — with a file of papers in one hand and his fountain pen in the other — and I waited at the door for him. When he emerged five minutes later, chin down, shoulders squared, in his usual headlong rush, I made as if I were on the way to the lavatory myself and just happened to run into him. “Oh,” I said, “Prok, hello. But do you have a minute? I wanted to, well, have a word with you, if that’s all right, if you have time, that is—”
As I’ve said, of all the individuals I’ve ever known, Prok was the most rigorously attuned to the subconscious signals people give out when they’re distressed or angry or simply trying to cover up their feelings. He would have made a master detective. Now he just gave me a look — the sudden blue fastening of the eyes, the flash of the spectacles — and said, “Problems at home?”
“No,” I said. “Or, yes, in a way.”
A pair of biology professors — a zoologist in a lab coat and a botanist in shirtsleeves — stepped round us on their way to the lavatory and we both paused a moment to greet them. Once the door had closed, Prok turned back to me, his expression mild and receptive. “Yes,” he said, “go on.”