Hilda Rutledge made a clicking noise, tongue to palate, and said, “Aren’t they cute?”
“Which one’s the girl?” Iris wanted to know.
“That’s Peterkin on the right,” Shadle whispered, and it was as if we were in a church, kneeling in the pews. “She’s never been bred before — or Dannie either.”
“So this is their first date?” Hilda’s voice floated up out of the darkness, making a joke of it.
No one answered her.
Now, up on the screen, the animals slowly descended to all fours and the male began to press on the female’s haunches until suddenly she opened up to him, the barbed quills magically unfolding to reveal the place of entry. The male nosed her there a moment, then entered her with a series of rapid thrusts before withdrawing to lick his penis clean. And that was it. It was over. Someone — I think it was Corcoran — began to clap, and then we all applauded, Prok among the loudest, and I remember his laughter too. He took the purest, most uncomplicated delight in these films, and the films that were to come, not only of the lower animals but of the human animal too, and that delight, as much as anything, helped to keep him going.
But already Shadle was hushing us, because the camera was again hovering over the animals, the light different — brighter now, another day — and the courtship went on again and again, through eight full reels.
Later, as we strolled out to the car, I asked Iris what she’d thought of it all. She’d been in a giddy mood all night, girlish and quick to laugh, the business with Corcoran and Violet long behind us now, and I had a sense that she’d enjoyed herself, really enjoyed herself, for the first time in a long while. “I don’t know,” she said. “It was better than I thought it would be, I guess.”
“Yeah, it was really something, wasn’t it? I didn’t know what to expect really, but it was nice, don’t you think? Charming. They were charming. Almost like—”
“People?”
I let out a laugh. “Exactly.”
The night was still. Fireflies traced perforated lines over the flowerbeds and up into the trees as if they were all working in concert on some elaborate design we could only guess at. There was a powerful smell of the chicken manure Prok and I had spread on the flowerbeds the previous weekend, and something else too, a scent of the earth itself, worked and reworked under Prok’s tireless spade. “But isn’t that the point?” she said. “That we’re really no better than — what are they, rodents? They mate and so do we, right?”
“Sure,” I said, giving a shrug she couldn’t see because it was fully dark now. “If that’s the way you want to look at it.”
We were silent a moment and I opened the car door for her and then leaned in and pressed my lips to hers. My hands found her shoulders, the silken flesh of her upper arms, and I smoothed back her hair and kissed her throat. We held the pose for a long moment because we were young still, still in love, and John Jr. was with the babysitter and this was what couples did when they were free of responsibility and the night opened up above them into the dark avenues of the universe that had no reason or end. “Mmm,” she said finally, her lips brushing mine, “maybe we should watch the porcupines going at it more often. You think Professor Shadle would mind coming over to the house for a command performance?”
“No,” I whispered, “we don’t need the learned professor or his porcupines either,” and then the door of the house swung open behind us — a parallelogram of yellow light painted on the walk — and there was the sound of voices, footsteps, high heels rapping at the pavement. I backed out of the car, shut the door on Iris, and circled round to the driver’s side. “We don’t need anybody,” I said, sliding into the seat and laying a hand on her knee before letting it ride up her thigh under the thin summer dress.
“No,” she said, “not even Prok.”
That was when the Corcorans emerged from the front yard, their voices twined in murmurous oblivion, and we sat in the darkness of the cab and watched them turn up the walk, arm in arm. I reached for the keys then, to start up the car and take us home, but Iris stopped me. Her hand was on mine, and she guided me back to her, to her naked thighs and the pushed-up rumple of her dress. “You don’t mean — not here?” I whispered.
“Yes,” she said. “Here. Right here.”
7
Film was the new medium, we all saw that, and we understood from the beginning — from that night at Prok’s with Professor Shadle and those indelible images of his amorous porcupines — that it would revolutionize the course of our research. Whereas before we’d been able to observe sexual activity in the flesh, first with Ginger and her clients and then, much more transparently, with Betty and Corcoran, now we had a means to record it so that the sequence of events — from passivity to arousal, engorgement and penetration — could be studied over and over for the details that might have escaped notice in the heat of the moment. And it was especially valuable at this juncture because we were now beginning to turn our attention to sexual behavior in the female. Not only did we have to make sense of a mountain of data, we needed to observe and record physiologic reaction as well, so that we could, for instance, determine individual variation in the amount of fluid secreted by the Bartholin’s glands or settle once and for all the debate Freud initiated over the question of the vaginal versus clitoral orgasm.
It was almost as if the public anticipated us. If we were inundated with mail — letters seeking advice, hastily scrawled notes criticizing our methods, morals and sanity, offers of every sort of sexual adventure imaginable — we also began to receive films. Some of them, of the mating behavior of rats, pigeons and mink, came from a coterie of animal behaviorists Prok had cultivated over the years (the mink were magnificent, as close to sadomasochists as you could find in a state of nature, both partners rendered bloody by the time the affair was consummated), while others — crudely shot on eight-millimeter black-and-white film — were from friends of the research and they depicted human sex. I remember the first of them quite distinctly. We’d just come out of a staff meeting — it must have been a Friday, our regular meeting day — to find Mrs. Matthews at her desk in the anteroom, sorting through the morning’s mail. “Dr. Kinsey,” she called as we emerged from the back room, “you might want to have a look at this.”
The letter that accompanied the film was from a young couple in Florida who lavishly praised our research efforts (“It’s about time someone had the courage to stand up and lead this puritanical society out of the sexual Dark Ages”) and expressed, at considerable length (something like twenty-two pages, if memory serves), their own somewhat garbled but libertine philosophy with regard to sex. In essence, they felt that sex was one of the grounding pleasures of life and should be appreciated without constraint, and as they were both highly sexed, they’d enjoyed relations two or three times a day since their marriage six years earlier and claimed to be all the healthier for it, both mentally and physically. The enclosed film, they hoped, would not only demonstrate the unbridled joy they took in the activity, but also provide a valuable addition to our research archives. “Use it freely,” they concluded, “and show it widely,” and signed themselves “Blissful in West Palm Beach.” They included a return address and a telephone number, in the event we’d like to contact them for a live demonstration.
We’d all gravitated to our desks, but we couldn’t help keeping an eye on Prok as he read through the letter. At first, there was no reaction, his expression dour and preoccupied, the glasses clamped to the bridge of his nose, but he began to smile and even chuckle to himself as he went on. “Listen to this,” he called out, the old enthusiasm firing his voice, and he began to quote from the letter until he wound up reading the whole of the last two pages aloud. When he’d finished, he lifted the film canister from his desk and held it up so that we could all see it, and it might have been an exhibit in a court of law, he the judge and we the jury. He was smiling, grinning wide — it was the old grin, the one that had been missing lately, seductive, boyish, devil-may-care, quintessential Prok. “You know,” he said, and even Mrs. Matthews paused in her furious assault on the typewriter keys, “I do think it might just behoove us to stay past five this evening and arrange a private screening here in the offices. What do you say — Corcoran? Rutledge? Milk? Am I stepping on any toes here?”