“I did, yes. Of course I did. My mother — I mean, she, and then I saw you around campus, of course—”
“I hear you’re engaged.”
I didn’t know what to say to this — I certainly wouldn’t want it getting back to my mother in any way, shape or form — so I dipped my head and took a sip of coffee.
Iris’s smile faded. “She’s very pretty,” she murmured. “Laura Feeney.”
“Yes,” I said, my gaze fixed on the cup. “But I’m not really — we’re not …” I looked up at her. Off on the periphery of my vision the woman at the cash register rang up a coffee and cruller as if she were moving underwater, and I saw the balding head and narrow shoulders of my literature professor, his coat dusted with snow. “That is, it was a pretense, you know. For the marriage course.”
I watched her grapple with this ever so briefly before the smile came back. “You mean, you — faked it? Just to—? God,” she said, and she let her posture go, slouching back in the seat, all limbs and jangling, nervous hands, “I hear it was really dirty …”
2
I took exams, wrote papers (“Duality in John Donne’s Love Poems”; “Malinowski’s Melanesia”), took a bus home to Michigan City for Christmas break and gave my mother a set of bath oils and scented soaps carved in the shape of fishes and mermaids. Some of my old high school friends came round — Tommy McAuliffe, in particular, who was now assistant manager at the grocery — and what a surprise that he’d thought to bring his kid sister Iris along, and did I know that she was a sophomore at IU now? There she was, standing on the doorstep beside him, and though I barely knew her I began to appreciate that here was the kind of girl who understood what she wanted and always got it — always, no matter what. I told Tommy I’d just seen her on campus — on the day of the snowfall, wasn’t it? — while she looked on with her big ever-widening sea-struck eyes as if she’d forgotten all about it. We ate pfefferneuse cookies in front of the fireplace and sneaked drinks of brandy every time my mother went back out to the kitchen to check on her pies. Just before New Year’s I thought of asking Iris to the pictures or maybe to go skating — on a date, that is — but I never got around to it. Then I was back at school and the days closed down on the bleak dark kernel of mid-January.
One night I was at the library, reshelving books in the second-floor stacks, when I glanced up at the aisle directly across from me and there was Prok — Dr. Kinsey — down on one knee, scanning the titles on the bottom shelf. He was a tumult of motion, grasping the spine of one book or another and at the same time shoving it back in place, all the while scooting back and forth on the fulcrum of his knee. It was strange to see him there — or not strange so much as unexpected — and I froze up for a moment. I didn’t know what to do — should I say hello, ignore him, grab an armload of books and duck round the corner? Even if I did say hello, would he remember me? He had hundreds of students, and though he’d conducted private interviews — like mine — with all of them, or practically all of them, how could he be expected to recall any one individual? I watched him out of the corner of my eye. He seemed to be muttering to himself — was it a call number he was repeating? — and then he found what he was looking for, slipped it from the shelf and sprang to his feet, all in one motion. That was when he brought his eyes forward and saw me there.
It took a moment. I watched his neutral expression broaden into recognition, and then he came down the aisle and extended his hand. “Milk,” he said, “well, hello. Good to see you.”
“Hello, sir. I’m — I didn’t think you’d remember me, what with all your, well, students—”
“Don’t be foolish. Of course I remember you. John Milk, out of Michigan City, born October two, nineteen eighteen.” He gave me a smile, one of his patented ones, pulling his lip back from his upper teeth and letting the two vertical laugh lines tug at his jowls so that his whole face opened up in a kind of riotous glee. “Five foot ten, one hundred eighty pounds. But you haven’t lost any weight, have you?”
“Hardly,” I said, my smile a weak imitation of his, and I was thinking of those other measurements, the ones I’d inscribed on a postcard and sent him in the mail. And beyond that, my secrets, and my shame, and all it implied. “My mother’s cooking, you know. Over the holidays.”
“Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, of course. Nothing like a mother’s cooking, eh?” He was still smiling, smiling even wider now, if that was possible. “Or a mother’s love, for that matter.”
I had to agree. I nodded my head in affirmation, and then the moment detached itself and hung there, lit from above with the faint gilding of the electric lights. I became aware of the muted stirring of library patrons among the stacks, a book dropped somewhere, a whisper.
“You’re working here, I presume?”
I told him I was, though they’d cut my hours recently and I could barely make ends meet. “Reshelving, mostly. Once we close the doors, I sweep up, empty the wastebaskets, make sure everything’s in order.”
He was standing there watching me, rocking up off the balls of his feet and back again. I couldn’t help glancing at the title of the book: Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, by Hans Licht. “Late nights, eh? Isn’t that a bit tough on your studies?”
I shrugged. “We all do the best we can.”
He was silent a moment, as if he were deciding something, his eyes all the while fixed on mine. “Do you know, Milk — John,” he said softly, almost musingly, “I have a garden out at my place. Mrs. Kinsey and I do. Clara, that is. In season, it’s the pride of Bloomington, a regular botanical garden on two and a half fertile acres — I grow daylilies, irises, we’re planning a lily pond. You should see it, you really should.”
I wasn’t following him. I’d been keeping late hours and I was pretty well exhausted. For lack of a better option, I gave him my fawning student look.
“What I mean is, I’ve been thinking for some time of hiring somebody to help me with it — of course, it’s nothing but husks and frozen earth at this juncture — but in the spring, well, that’s when we’ll really bring it to life. And until then — and beyond that, in addition, as well — we’re going to need some help in the biology library. What do you say?”
A week later I was working in Biology Hall, with expanded hours and no late nights. The biology collection was considerably smaller than that of the main library and the patronage proportionately reduced in size, so that I found I had more time to myself at work, time I could apply fruitfully to my own studies (and to be honest, to daydreaming — I spent a disproportionate amount of time that semester staring out into the intermediate distance, as if all the answers I needed in life were written there in a very cramped and faint script). I didn’t see much of Prok — he kept to himself for the most part, in his office on the second floor — and as the sex survey was then in its incipient stages, he didn’t yet need anyone to help him with the interviewing or tabulating of results. He was, as you no doubt know, one of the world’s leading authorities on Cynipids — gall wasps — and he was still at that time busy collecting galls from oak trees all over the country, employing his assistants (three undergraduate women) exclusively in helping to record his measurements of individual wasps and mount them in the Schmitt boxes reserved for them. Taxonomy — that was his forte, both as an entomologist and a compiler of human sexual practices.
At any rate, the job was something of a plum for me, and for the first week or two I snapped out of the funk that seemed to have descended on me, exhilarated by the free nights and the extra change in my pocket. I went bowling with Paul and his girlfriend Betsy, and then insisted on treating them to cheeseburgers and I don’t know how many pitchers of beer after Paul took me aside and told me they wanted me to be the first to know they were engaged to be married. The jukebox played “Oh, Johnny” over and over, Betsy kept saying, “You’re next, John-Johnny-John, you’re next,” and I barely flinched when Laura Feeney and Jim Willard sauntered in and took a booth in the back. We stayed up late that night, Paul and I, pouring out water glasses of bourbon smuggled upstairs right under Mrs. Lorber’s nose, and though I overslept the next morning, I woke feeling glad for Paul and hopeful for myself.