No one objected.
“Good,” he said. “Good. We’ll just call our wives and delay dinner a bit, then.” The grin was gone now, no hint of it left, even in his eyes. “In the interest of science, that is,” he said, and turned back to his work.
I telephoned Iris and told her I’d be late — something had come up, yes, another nature film Prok was hot on — and then watched the clock till the hour struck five and Mrs. Matthews tidied up her desk, pulled the vinyl cover over her typewriter and left for the day. Prok never glanced up. He was busy, head down, charging through an opinion on a court case that had been consuming him lately — a man in Pennsylvania, victim of a barbarously antiquated statute, was being tried for performing oral sex on his own wife — and he didn’t want to appear overeager to view the film, though I could see from certain characteristic gestures, the tapping of a pencil on the spine of the text before him, a repetitive running of his fingers through his hair, that he was as anxious over the film as we were.
We worked in silence for another quarter hour, exchanging glances among ourselves, till finally Corcoran pushed himself up from his desk with a sigh and made a conspicuous show of stretching. “Well,” he said, “Oscar, John, what do you think — isn’t it getting to be that time?”
Prok looked up from his work, then stole a quick glance at his watch.
“Prok? What do you say?”
The film was of surprisingly good quality, and since both participants were present throughout, that brought up the rather interesting question of who might have been behind the camera for what proved to be as unexpurgated and varied a performance as the one we’d all witnessed in the flesh on the night Corcoran introduced us to Betty. But this was different, very different. I’m no student of film and doubtless this has been observed many times before, but there was something about the distance and anonymity of the viewer that made the performance all the more stimulating. In the raw — with Corcoran and Betty, that is, with Ginger and her clients — there was always a sense of uneasiness, of fragility, as in a theater production when a single gesture or comment from the audience could break the spell and bring the whole thing down.
That wasn’t the case here. I didn’t really discuss it with my colleagues, but for my part the sense of standing outside of the action only heightened my response, which was, to say the least, unprofessional. I was aroused, and no doubt about it. The woman — the female — was slim and dark, with perfectly symmetrical breasts, and she wore her hair the way Iris did, the brushed-out curls balling at her throat and shoulder blades as she went through her repertoire; the male was of medium build, his penis uncircumcised and about average in length and breadth (all those penny postcards came to mind, all those measurements duly recorded and addressed to Professor Alfred C. Kinsey, Zoology Department, University of Indiana) and there was something winning in his face, a sense of naïveté or insouciance, as if he weren’t performing a role at all, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to have sex with your wife while a third party ran film through a camera. Both of them were attractive. Very attractive. And I’m sorry, because that shouldn’t make an iota of difference to a scientist concerned with individual variation, the homely, overweight and poorly favored every bit as significant as the Venuses and Adonises, but it did. My mouth was dry. My palms were sweating. And the rest — well, the rest of the physiological response should be obvious.
Immediately, as the film began, the couple were naked, no foreplay or teasing as in the peep shows, the female seated atop the male on a couch, both of them facing the camera. His phallus was visible between her thighs, and she was manipulating it in her fingers and at the same time turning back over her shoulder to lap at his tongue. The scene held a moment, and then they shifted position, she going down to fellate him before he entered her and they went through the usual motions until finally rolling over so that she was atop him, her face to the camera, absolutely rapt, the eyes open and glaring, the mouth slack — almost grimacing — even as the shudder of orgasm ran through her.
“There,” Prok cried. “See there? That is the expression of female orgasm, precisely, and it cannot be faked. The wife who smiles during coitus or the prostitute with her crying out and all the rest of her theatrics, should see this — every woman should see it.”
We sat in silence, listening to the ratcheting of the film, contemplating the proposition.
“Really,” Prok said, even as a second scene presented itself — they were in the kitchen now, she on the counter at waist-level, her legs spread, he visible only as a pair of tensed white buttocks until the camera shifted to show his erection—“this is first-rate work. Should we give them a special citation as friends of the research? What do you think, gentlemen?” Prok was making a joke, or coming as close to it as he was constitutionally able.
“But seriously,” he added after a moment, “perhaps we should look them up next time we’re in — where was it, Florida?” He glanced round at us, the flicker of the film playing off his face. “I can’t help thinking how this might be improved with a little direct lighting, that is, and perhaps a more adept cameraman — or — woman.”
Things moved swiftly after that. Prok was already campaigning for more space — new quarters, as befitted our success, with soundproofed interview rooms, individual offices, clerical space, a separate library to house the erotica collection — and the need for a photographic laboratory only added fuel to his argument. Ever since he’d joined the staff, Rutledge, an amateur photographer, had been taking photos of erotic drawings and art objects on loan to us from their owners around the world, and Prok had set up a primitive darkroom in the basement of the house on First Street to assist him here, but now we all saw how inadequate that was. Prok went into high gear. Royalties from the male volume were pouring into the Institute, and he resolved to acquire the finest photographic and cinematic equipment available and to take on a full-time staff photographer as well. That photographer — Ted Aspinall — would become the final member of the inner circle, privy to our deepest secrets and a participant in all that was to come.
Aspinall was in his early thirties at the time, private, unmarried, rating perhaps a 3 on the 0–6 scale, and he was earning his living as a commercial photographer in Manhattan. Physically, he was somewhat imposing, six feet tall and blocky, with big squared-off hands and a massive bone structure, and yet his manner was anything but — he had the reticent, knowing air of the Greenwich Village hipster, he wore dark glasses even at night and never removed his tan trench coat except, presumably, to go to bed. When the male volume came out, he read it through twice, then telephoned Prok out of the blue to tell him how much it had affected him, and the two of them immediately hit it off. We met him when we were in New York, and then he took up Prok on his invitation to visit the Institute and things progressed from there.