The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle

his twenties—older than I—he never had a mature and satisfying sexual experience, and that came only after his marriage to Clara.
    And here was where his history got interesting. Though the honeymoon involved a long and arduous early-summer hiking trip through the White Mountains during which he and his bride were forced together in the close proximity of their tent each night, the marriage wasn’t consummated till some months on. The delay, as I was later to learn, was a result both of their inexperience and a slight physiological impediment with regard to Clara’s hymen, which was unusually thick(added to the fact that Prok’s penis was a good deal larger than normal). I pictured their mutual embarrassment, their prudery, their lack of knowledge or insight, envisioned them kissing and stroking and wrestling in their sleeping bags and tents, on the cots in the summer camp where they served as counselors in July and August of that year, and then back at home in their first rental in Bloomington, nothing gained but frustration. After three months of marriage, sex still remained a mystery for them—it wasn’t until a surgical procedure relieved Mac’s discomfiture that they were finally able to achieve coitus. Prok was twenty-eight at the time.
    Knowing this—uncovering it in the way an Egyptologist might have decrypted the hieroglyphs telling of the life and habits of some ancient pharaoh—gave me a strange rush of sensation. On the one hand, I couldn’t help thinking of my mentor as somewhat diminished—here he was preaching sexual liberation, at least privately—and he’d been as much a prisoner of antiquated mores, of shyness, ignorance and his own inability to act, as I was. And yet, on the other, his history gave me hope and a kind of eerie confidence that my own sexual confusion would eventually resolve itself.
    There was more. His H-history, which began with adolescent alliances, as mine had, became increasingly complex. The zoology professor, the distinguished scientist with a star beside his name in
American Men of Science,
the middle-aged father of three and happily married entomologist with the no-nonsense manner, was moving higher up the 0–6 scale, having initiated relations with several of his graduate students in the course of their long field trips and ultimately experiencing an intense and very close relationship with a male student not much older than I. And how do you suppose that made me feel? And Mac, what of her?
    My blood was racing and I suppose if anyone had looked in on me in the office that day they would have seen the color in my face. I riffled through the pages, all greedy eyes and trembling fingers, then slipped Prok’s folder back into the cabinet and took up Mac’s. Her history was more extensive than I would have guessed, and as the symbols gavethemselves up to me I couldn’t help picturing her naked, her hands, her lips, the way she walked, the cloying catch in her voice. I was aroused, I admit it, and I was already up from the desk and searching through the files for Laura Feeney’s history, for Paul’s and the Kinseys’ children’s, when I caught myself. What was I doing? This was voyeuristic, it was wrong, a violation of the trust Prok had invested in me, and here I was throwing it all over just to satisfy the tawdriest kind of curiosity. Suddenly—it was dark now, the lamps softly glowing, the galls shadowy and surreal—I felt ashamed, as deeply ashamed as I’d ever felt in my life. I could barely breathe until I’d put the files back and replaced the code under lock and key in the drawer, all the while listening for footsteps in the hall. I switched off the lights. Locked up. And when I slunk off into the corridor, I turned up my collar and averted my face like a criminal.
    The next day Prok was back, a volcano of energy, whistling a Hugo Wolf song under his breath, bustling about the