I would stay awake nights waiting for him to come home so we could lie smoking in the dark while he went on in his soft hoarse tones about how he’d maneuvered her against the wall in the hallway of the campus heating plant or pinned her beneath him on the backseat of a borrowed car, the heater going full, and how willing she was, how hot, how she only wore skirts now and no underwear, just to facilitate things, and how they longed to be married so they could do it in a bed, with sheets and blankets and no worries of the police or the night watchman or anybody else …
“But why should I?” he said. “Why should I waste an hour and a half — or what, two hours? — on some stranger I’ve never met and might not even like? What’s in it for me?”
“Science,” I said. “The advancement of knowledge. Did you ever stop to consider that if there were more men like Dr. Kinsey maybe you wouldn’t have to sneak in and out of the heating plant with your fiancée, because premarital sexual relations would be sanctioned, even encouraged?”
He was silent a moment. The window had gone gray and I got up to switch on the lamp before wrapping myself in a blanket and easing back down on my bed. Shadows infested the corners. I could see my breath hanging atomized in the air. “I don’t know,” he said, “it’s too personal.”
“Too personal?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “How can you say that to me, of all people, when you give me a running description of everything you and Betsy do seven nights of the week, whether I want to hear it or not—”
“Aah,” he said, and his hand rose and fell like a pulsing vein beneath the skin of the comforter, “you’re just a sad sack. You don’t even know where it goes, do you? You can’t imagine, for all your marriage course, how sweet it is, how hot and sweet, and I guess I’m going to have to help you find it the first time, huh, with what’s her name, Iris?”
“Screw you, Paul. I resent that. I do. Just because you got lucky with Betsy, found somebody, I mean, that doesn’t—”
“Okay,” he said, “all right. Keep your pants on. I’ll do it. Okay? You happy now?”
It took me a moment, the breath congealing under my nose, the blanket drawn tight at my throat. “Yes,” I said finally, and I tried to sound mollified, above it all, but he’d hurt me, he had — I was inexperienced and I knew it, but was that a crime? Did he have to rub it in? Didn’t he think I wanted love — love and sex — as much as anybody else?
He was thinking. He kicked absently at the fringe of the comforter to better wrap it round his stocking feet. Two fingers licked over the shadow of his mustache. “So where do I go? Are you signing people up, or what?”
I was up off the bed and at the desk now, the blanket trailing across the floor, notebook in hand. “I’ve got his schedule right here,” I said.
Before the month was out, I was promoted from library underling to special assistant to Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, Professor of Zoology, and when I chanced to pass Elster in the hallway or on the steps of the biology building, he looked right through me as if I didn’t exist. I suppose there must have been some resentment among a faction of the biology majors as well — I had no training whatever in the field, aside from the introductory course I’d taken from Professor Eigenmann in my second year, and here I’d been rewarded with what might be considered one of the department’s plum positions — but what Prok was looking for above all was someone to whom he could relate, someone who could share in his enthusiasm for the inchoate project that would ultimately produce the two seminal works in the history of sex research. That person could have been anyone, regardless of discipline. That it was I, that I was elected to be the first of Prok’s inner circle, is something for which I will be forever grateful. And proud. To this day, I thank Laura Feeney for it.
At any rate, Prok installed me at a desk in the back corner of the office, where I was wedged between towering gunmetal-gray bookcases and enjoyed a forward view of the windows, which were piled high with galls wrapped in mesh sacks to contain any insects that might hatch from them, and these galls might have been collected in the Sierra Madre Oriental or Prescott, Arizona, or even in the Appenines or the rugged hills outside Hokkaido (interested parties were sending Prok samples from all over the world). There was an indefinable smell to the office, not unpleasant, exactly, but curious, arising from and connected only to that constructed and confined space on the second floor of Biology Hall. The wasps had something to do with it, of course, but a gall — this is the woody excrescence found on oaks and rose bushes, the growth of which is promoted by the larvae of the wasps living within it — really has a bit of a pleasant smell, a smell of bark and tannin, I suppose. (Break one from a tree next time you’re out in the woods and hold it to your nose a moment and you’ll see what I mean.) And the wasps themselves had no discernible odor, so far as I could detect. There were the lingering traces of the cigarette smoke Prok’s subjects exhaled in dense blue clouds as they gave up their histories, and the smell of Prok himself — bristling and spanked clean; he was a great one for the cold plunge each morning and almost obsessive about soap. Finally, into the mix went the perfume of the three female assistants, who shared the desk with me and rotated shifts round my schedule, plus the usual odors of a working office: ink, pencil shavings, the machine oil of the typewriters and (in this case) the chemical used to discourage a minute species of beetle that routinely wreaks havoc on entomological collections round the world.
On my first day, Prok helped me settle in and gave me my initial lessons in deciphering his secret code and translating the results to his files. He was very precise, a model of efficiency, and if his longhand was somewhat artistic, full of flourishes and great slashing loops, his printing, like mine, was an almost mechanical marshaling of block letters so uniform it might be mistaken at a glance for typescript. Looking over my shoulder, rocking from foot to foot, his energy barely contained, he would cluck over my writing, seize my hand impatiently or snatch the paper out of my hands and ball it up as a reject. This went on for hours that first day, he pacing back and forth from his own desk to mine, until finally, when he felt I’d got the hang of it, he eased one haunch down on the corner of my desk and said, “You know, Milk, you’re really doing quite well. And I have to confess that I’m pleased.”
I looked up at him and murmured something in reply, trying to indicate my pleasure for the praise but at the same time not sound too obsequious — Prok may have been firmly in charge, always in charge, a born leader, but he never demanded obsequiousness, no matter what you might have heard from other sources.
A moment slipped by. Then he said, “You’ve noticed the galls, of course.”
He moved easily up off the corner of the desk, went to the bookcase and lifted down a massive, bulbous, many-faceted thing that looked like the preserved head of some extinct beast, then laid it on the wooden surface before me. “Biggest known gall extant,” he said. “Twelve chambers, fifteen point nine ounces. Collected it myself in the Appalachians.”