“Well, yes, I mean — certainly, I would be—” I fumbled, trying to recover myself. “But what could I do, in any material way, that is—?”
“Very simple,” he said, shifting his legs on the rug. “Just poll the men in your rooming house — you say there are fourteen of them in addition to yourself?”
“That’s right,” I said. “Yes. Fourteen.”
“Just poll them and convince them to come on into my office to give up their histories — you’ve got a potential one-hundred-percent group, there, John, do you realize that?”
I wasn’t the sort who fraternized easily — I think I’ve made that much clear here — and the prospect was daunting, but I found myself nodding my head in assent, because, as I say, you just didn’t say no to Prok.
And yet, even as I sat there conspiring with him like a favored son, somewhere in the back of my mind, obscured for the moment, was a dull but persistent sense of guilt over Iris. You see, it wasn’t simply my indecision over the cheese that had made me late that evening, but the fact that I’d left Iris — or the Iris situation, I should say — to the last minute. I don’t know why that was — I’m not a procrastinator, or not normally, else I wouldn’t have accomplished what I had at school or would come to achieve in later years with Prok — but every time I thought of phoning Iris my heart began to pound so violently I was afraid I was having a seizure, until finally I realized I had to see her in person, if only to explain myself and try to patch things as best I could. I did want to go out with her, very much so — I’d begun to think about her at odd moments, picturing her the way she was that day in the library or that afternoon at my mother’s, swinging her legs beneath the chair like a little girl, gesticulating to make a point, her eyes boiling up like cataracts over any issue at all, over parasites or poetry or the plight of the Lithuanians — but the longer I put off breaking our date the worse it was.
Finally it was Saturday, and I still hadn’t mounted the courage to see her. I woke to a burst of Paul’s blunt, ratcheting snores and a gray scrim of ice on the window, thinking Iris, thinking I had to go to her dorm right that minute and ask her to breakfast so I could look into her eyes over fried eggs and muffins and coffee and tell her I’d take her out the following Saturday, without fail, that I was looking forward to it, that there was nothing I’d rather do (and maybe, since I’d already bought the tickets for tonight she might want to go with a friend?), but that she had to understand, and I was sorry, more than sorry — distraught — and could she ever forgive me? But I didn’t go to her dorm. It was too early. Seven. It was only seven, or just past, and she wouldn’t be up for hours, or so I told myself. Instead, I took my books to breakfast alone at the Commons and read the first six stanzas of Milton’s “Il Penseroso” over and over till I couldn’t take it anymore (“Hence vain deluding Joys,/The brood of Folly without father bred,” et cetera), pushed myself up from the table and slammed out the door before I knew what I was doing.
The clock tower was ringing eight; the cold leached through the soles of my shoes. One of Laura Feeney’s discarded lettermen, vastly overfed and with feet like snowshoes, limped past me on his way to the gym, even as I cut through a patch of woods and made diagonally across a dead brown strip of lawn for Iris’s dorm. Inside, there was a smell of artificial fragrance, as if I’d somehow been transposed to the Coty counter at Marshall Field’s, and the resident assistant — a girl of twenty with bad skin and a limp blond pageboy — looked up at me as if I’d come to ravish every coed on the premises. “Hello,” I said, moving briskly across the room and trying to keep my head of steam up, because it was now or never, “I was wondering if, by any chance, well, if Iris McAuliffe is in. If she’s up yet, I mean.”
She gave me a stricken look, her features reduced to the essentials.
“I’m John,” I said. “John Milk. Would you tell her John Milk is here? Please?”
“She’s not in.”
“What do mean she’s not in? At eight o’clock in the morning? On a Saturday?”
But the RA wasn’t forthcoming. She simply repeated herself in a long, drawn-out sigh of exasperation, as if I’d spent every morning of my life in the reception hall of the girls’ dorm, pestering her: “She’s not in.”
I looked to the door at the far end of the lounge, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum beyond, and at that moment it swung open and two girls emerged, buttoning up their coats and adjusting their hats for the plunge through the outer doors and into the concrete clasp of the morning. They gave me a look of amusement — what man in his right mind would be calling for a girl at this hour? — and passed out of doors in a flurry of giggles. “All right, then,” I said, taking the coward’s way out, “can I leave her a note?”
But now I was with Prok, in front of the fire, agreeing to take my first unambiguous step on the road to a career in sex research, and who would have guessed? Who even knew there was such a thing? Ask a boy what he wants to be and he’ll answer cowboy, fireman, detective. Ask an undergraduate and he’ll say he intends to go into the law or medicine or that he wants to teach or study business or engineering. But no one chooses sex research.
I watched Prok work at his rag rug, pulling tight a six-inch strand of cloth, then interweaving it with another, the whole business spread now like a skirt over his sprawled legs. He was talking about his H-histories, how he’d been to the penal farm at Putnamville on his own and begun taking histories among the prisoners—“And they are very extensive histories, Milk, make no doubt about it”—and how one man in particular had offered to introduce him into the homosexual underworld of Chicago, and how significant that was, as H-histories were every bit as vital to assessing the larger picture as heterosexual histories, as I, no doubt, could appreciate. And then he paused a moment to offer a clarification, his eyes seeking mine and holding to them with that unwavering gaze he must have mastered by staring down his own image in the mirror for whole hours at a time. His voice softened, dropped. “That is, John, I believe you, of all people, should be especially attuned to the issue—”
I might have colored. I don’t know. But I do remember his embrace that night as he stood at the door thanking me for coming, thanking me for the cheese and my insights and offering all sorts of Prok-advice and admonishments about the cold, the icy streets, incompetent drivers and the like. “Goodnight, Milk,” he said, and took me in his arms and pressed me to him so that I could feel the ripple and contraction of his muscles and the warmth of him and breathe in the scent of his hair oil, his musk, the hot sweet invitation of his breath.
He let me go. The door pulled shut. I walked off into the darkness.
3
“So, paul, please, you’re going to have to reiterate it for me, because I must be missing something here. You’re opposed to science, is that it? To data collection? Honestly, I just don’t get it.”
We were in our room, waiting to go over to dinner, the day shutting down around the last pale fissures of a lusterless sun. It was cold. And not only outside: Mrs. Lorber must have had the furnace running on fumes. Paul — and I realize I haven’t yet described him, and you’ll forgive me, I hope, because I’m a novice at this — Paul was lying diagonally across his unmade bed, his head propped against the wall behind him, a comforter drawn up to his chin. He was almost a full year older than I and he wore a very thin, obsessively manicured mustache of the Ronald Colman variety, but his natural hair color was so pale and rinsed-out that you could barely detect it, even close up. His eyes were blue, but again, so weak a shade as to be almost transparent. He had two ears, a nose, a mouth, a chin — and a pair of thin colorless lips that always seemed to be clamping down on something, due, I think, to a congenital overbite. What else? His parents were English, from Yorkshire, he loved chess, Lucky Strikes and The Lone Ranger, and, of course, Betsy. With whom he’d gone all the way, though they were yet to be married — or rather, with whom he went all the way all the time. How did I know? He’d described it to me — coitus with Betsy — in the kind of detail that would have gratified Prok, if only I could get him to sit for an interview.