“Is this alcoholic?” Aspinall was saying. He was stalled at the punch bowl, his shoulders slumped and head hanging, as if he were afraid of breaking something. “Ted?” Mac glided across the room to him. “Did you need some help? What about you, John?” she called. “Punch? Or something lighter — a soft drink maybe?”
And then I was clutching a cup of warm yuletide cheer, pressing it to the yielding strip of cartilage at the base of my nose until the alcoholic fumes began to soften the passageways there and the distinct voices of the room came clear to me. Prok was talking about San Quentin, the prison in California — we’d been invited to interview the prisoner population there, and he’d managed to set up some lectures at Berkeley as well. His voice was straining for modulation, riding up and down the emotional ladder — clearly he was excited at the prospect of going into a maximum-security prison to delve into the histories of some of the most dangerous men our society had to offer, the ne plus ultra of extreme cases, but shouldn’t we have been investigating the monasteries too? I smiled at the thought. Prok in a monastery. Imagine that. Mac’s voice came to me then, fluting and soft — the weather, that was her subject — and the buzz of Aspinall’s high-pitched rasp wrapping itself around it. I couldn’t hear what Betty and Corcoran were talking about, but I heard Betty’s laugh, the whole trajectory of it, rising up to fly out over the room like a dart descending to the bull’s-eye painted across my brow. We were going to witness living sex again, and we were going to film it. That was what was going on here. Corcoran and Betty. And why him? Why not me? What was wrong with me?
It was then that the lavatory door swung open and Vivian Aubrey stepped out to join the party. Her hair — blond, with a natural wave — had been freshly brushed, and she’d reapplied her lipstick, a blood-red dab of which was in evidence on one of her incisors when she smiled her way back into the room. She was elegant in the way of my first female subject — the soigné faculty wife who seemed as out of place in Indiana as a tropical bird, and who’d made me blush — and she’d come straight to us from the rarefied atmosphere of the East Coast. She was confident. Shining. Light-years ahead of any of us in terms of sophistication and savoir-vivre. “Oh, hi, John,” she said, gliding up to me and taking my hand in a firm, frank grip, “I wasn’t sure you’d make it, what with the baby and your mother-in-law — your mother-in-law’s still in town, isn’t that right?”
Every possibility seethed within me. My voice was a croak. “My mother.”
She’d bent now to light a cigarette, ignoring Prok’s acid look — she was on stage here and she could do what she liked. I watched her throw her head back and exhale. “Oh, yes, right: your mother.”
I don’t really think I have to go into the details of the filming that night, because, as I’ve said, the novelty quickly wears off and the process of filming, observing, even participating, loses its initial frisson with time and repetition — one act is very like another, whether it’s observed in the flesh or preserved on celluloid. What was different about that night, though — what makes me recollect it now even after all the activity, and trials, that have succeeded it — was what Vivian said to me next. She said, “I hear we’re going to be partners tonight, you and I.”
I probably stammered. Or, no, I certainly stammered. “I, well, nobody’s really, I mean, Prok hasn’t said—”
She’d eased down on the arm of the chair so that the overlay of her hip was parallel with my face, then leaned in to bring her eyes closer to mine, and I could smell her, perfume, soap, yes, but something else too, something raw and primitive that can’t be feigned and will never come in a bottle. “What’s the matter,” she said, “don’t you like me?”
If you haven’t guessed, I’d been filmed already — I was one of the one thousand males recorded masturbating on the sheet in Aspinall’s studio, as were Corcoran and Rutledge. Prok saved twelve dollars there, and why not? If I’d felt self-conscious about it at first, there were the other 999 men to buck me up, and the thought of that, as much as anything, stimulated me to the point of response: I performed, wiped up and moved off like any of them.
Vivian Aubrey’s hair hung loose, the tug of gravity easing it from her shoulders in a thick shimmering panel. I glanced across the room at Betty — she was watching me, something almost mocking in her expression. Or maybe it was hunger, maybe that was it. I turned back to Vivian Aubrey, the light of her eyes, the single flaming slash of color fixed on the ridge of her tooth, and whispered, “Oh, yes, I do. I like you a lot.”
She straightened up then, and let a hand drift to my shoulder for balance. One more puff from the cigarette. A short, trilling laugh. “Anything for science, huh?” she said, and I wondered where I’d heard that before.
I don’t know if I’ve got the dates right here, or even the year (the volume of Prok’s travels during the five-year period between publication of the male edition in ’48 and the female in ’53 would have dwarfed any statesman’s), but to the best of my recollection it was sometime early in the following year that Prok, Mac, Corcoran and I entrained for the Pacific Coast, that is, for San Quentin and Berkeley both. Mac spent most of her travel time knitting and staring out the window, silently watching the countryside scroll past, but she came to life for meals in the dining car and the occasional late-night game of pinochle, and it was a real pleasure to have her there, just for companionship, just for that. As for Corcoran and me, Prok put us to work, of course, interviewing travelers, computing data, meeting daily with him in the club car to talk over our strategy for history-taking at San Quentin and the volume on sex offenders he was even then projecting as a successor to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The prospect was exciting, but we were all a little anxious about taking histories in the prison — this wasn’t the Indiana State Penal Farm, but a maximum-security lockup replete with a gas chamber and its own Death Row to feed it, and to be confined in a cell one-on-one with a rapist or murderer was daunting, to say the least.
We took a car across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog seething below us as if the ocean were heated to a rolling boil, none of us saying much, not even Prok. I remember the look of the prison still, humped and low against a battery of treeless hills, a clustered stone beehive of a place with slits for windows and a medieval funk hanging over it, as if it had been there before Columbus, before laws and juries and judges. It was a place of confinement. Of penitence. And if any of the inmates went from penitence to resentment to rage and violence, we would be on our own. As the guard searched our car at the gate and my palms sweated and my throat went dry, I couldn’t help wishing I’d chosen another profession. Or at the very least begged off just this once to stay home with Iris and the baby.
As it turned out, the warden was as concerned for our safety as we were (as I was, that is: once we got there, once we were actually inside the walls, Prok seemed unfazed, one subject no different from another as far as he was concerned), and he’d arranged for us to interview the elite prisoners first. These were the heads of the various gangs and cabals, the foremost Mexican, the leading Negro, the champion boxer, and so on. If we could establish our legitimacy with the inmate leaders, then we would find it relatively easy going with the others — that was the thinking. Of course, we needed absolute privacy, and to conduct interviews in the warden’s office or even the chaplain’s, where intimacies might be overheard, was out of the question. Prok finally decided on a series of disused cells dating back to the last century, deep in the prison’s subchambers. The walls were of stone, two feet thick, the doors each fashioned from a single slab of steel and with nothing but a peephole to break their lines; even so, Prok wound up draping blankets over them to be sure of muffling even the slightest sound.