I was so taken by surprise — and so consumed with guilt over my invasion of the files — that I fumbled this one badly. “I — well, of course,” I began. “Well, certainly, you know, I would — and I do have to graduate yet …”
“English,” he said, and the noun came off his tongue like something distasteful, something chewed over and spat out again. “I never quite understood the application of that — as a field, that is.”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged. He was watching me still, watching me with a preternatural intentness. “I thought I might like to maybe teach. Someday, I mean.”
He sighed. For all his qualities, patience wasn’t one of them. Nor did he take disappointment well. “Just think about it, John, that’s all I ask. No need to decide right this minute — let’s talk over dinner, and we are expecting you tonight, six sharp, that is, unless you have other plans?”
“Sex research? Are you nuts?”
Paul was stretched across his bed as if he’d been washed up there by a tide just recently receded. He was chewing gum and idly bouncing a tennis ball up off the racquet propped on his chest. Half a dozen books were scattered across the floor, face-down, another kind of flotsam. I didn’t feel like explaining it to him — he wouldn’t have understood anyway.
“At least it’s a job,” I said, pulling the sweater up over my head as carefully as I could so as not to disarrange my hair. I was changing for the Kinseys (they didn’t stand on ceremony, as Mac had said — behind closed doors they were even what might have been considered bohemian — but I felt that a dinner invitation, no matter how frequent or informal, required a jacket and tie, and I still feel that way).
Paul let the ball dribble off the racquet and fall to the floor, where it took three or four reduced hops and disappeared under my desk. “But the sort of questions he asks — it’s embarrassing. You’re not going to—?” he caught himself, then saw it in my face. “You are, aren’t you?”
I was knotting my tie in the mirror, studying my eyes, the way the hair clung slick to the sides of my head. “You didn’t seem to have any objections at the time, if I recall — you said, in fact, that you found the experience unique. Wasn’t that the word you used, ‘unique’?”
“Look, John, I might be all wet about this, but don’t you think it takes kind of an unusual sort of person to be poking into people’s dirty underwear all the time?”
I gave him a look that projected from the mirror all the way across the room, and there he was, diminished on the bed, diminished and growing smaller by the moment. I didn’t say anything.
“I wouldn’t want to call the professor an odd duck or a pervert or anything, but don’t you realize everyone’s going to think of you that way? And what about your mother? You think she’s going to approve — as a career choice, I mean?”
“I’ve told you a thousand times,” I said, slipping into my jacket now, “it’s science, research, just like anything else. Like Lister discovering antiseptic or what’s his name with the mold on the bread. Why shouldn’t we know as much as we possibly can about everything the human animal does?” I was at the door now, on my way out, but I paused to give him his chance to reply.
“The human animal? You sound just like him, John, you realize that? That’s what he says. But what about human beings, made in the image of God? What about us? What about the soul?”
I was irritated suddenly. “There is no God. And no soul either. You know what’s wrong with you?”
He never moved from the bed, never even lifted his head. “No, but I guess you’re going to tell me.”
“You just have a narrow mind, that’s all,” I informed him, and I let the door punctuate the truth of it on my way out.
Mrs. Lorber nodded to me from her post in the rocking chair and I gave her a strained smile in return, and then I was out in the street, the pussy willows at the corner in bloom, the tight pale buds firing on the trees, a warm breeze coming up out of the south freighted with the promise of the season to come. My eyes followed a trim dark girl as I crossed Atwater in front of the campus, her legs bare and thrilling as she receded down the avenue of trees, and I thought of Iris. I hadn’t seen her in over a month, since I’d stood her up, that is, and I felt bad about it — and, of course, the longer I put off facing her the worse it was.
A car rolled slowly up the street, so slowly I thought the driver meant to pull up to the curb and park. He was an old man, his face drawn and anxious, and he gripped the wheel as if he were afraid someone was about to snatch it away from him. I watched him a moment, long enough to see a pair of bicyclists overtake him, and he never looked right or left or gave any sign he noticed them or anything else, and I found myself daydreaming about getting a car of my own someday and just taking off up over the hills and out of town until the road spooled out beneath me and I could be anywhere. Students drifted by in both directions. A pair of boxer dogs sat on their haunches and regarded me steadily from behind a picket fence.
As I turned onto First, I encountered a couple just ahead of me, the girl leaning into the man till they were a single entity, strolling along on four synchronized limbs, and I crossed to the far side of the street to avoid having to overtake them; seeing them there, seeing the way they made each other complete, made me think of Iris again. What I’d done was inexcusable, and I told myself I was going to call her the very next day — just steel myself and do it — and if she told me to get lost, drop dead, dry up and blow away, well, at least the situation would be resolved. And there was no denying I deserved it.
So I walked. And if I noticed the various operations of nature in its season of renewal — if I smelled the scent of the forsythias or watched the birds ascend to the trees with bits of straw or twig clamped transversely in their beaks — I don’t know if I really remarked them, at least not consciously. It was spring, that was all, and I was on First Street, going to the Kinseys’. For dinner.
Prok himself met me at the door. He was dressed in his gardening shorts and nothing else, his legs lean and muscled, his bare toes gripping the long polished boards of the sweet-gum floor. His hair, as always, looked as if it had been freshly barbered. “Ah, Milk,” he said, ushering me in, “I’ve just been spreading a little humus on the irises — and the lilies too. Couldn’t resist it, the weather’s so agreeable.”
He put on a short-sleeved shirt for dinner, but no shoes and no socks. Mac too was dressed more informally than she’d been on any of the previous occasions I’d come to dinner, in her own pair of shorts and a pale blue cotton blouse that showed off her throat and the delicate line of her clavicle. She seemed to have cut her hair as well, and it was as short now — nearly, that is — as a man’s. I felt a bit foolish in my coat and tie, but both Prok and Mac reassured me: they were just rushing the season a bit, that was all.
After dinner the children dispersed, and Prok, Mac and I sat in the front room awhile, chatting. Prok was at his rug, Mac at her knitting. Prok had been talking excitedly about the premature return of some sort of bird — I forget which — and how it portended an early summer, when he broke off abruptly and turned to me. “Milk,” he said, “John. Have you thought about what I said this afternoon?”