Inner Circle

PROLOGUE Bloomington, Indiana August 25, 1956 Looking back on it now, I don't think I was ever actually ?sex shy? (to use one of Prok's pet phrases), but I'll admit I was pretty naive when I first came to him, not to mention hopelessly dull and conventional. I don't know what he saw in me, really'or perhaps I do. If you'll forgive me a moment of vanity, my wife, Iris, claims I was something of a heartthrob on campus, though I would have been the last to know of it because I wasn't dating and had always been uncomfortable with the sort of small talk that leads up to the casual inquiry about after-class plans or what you might or might not be doing on Saturday after the game. I had a pretty fair physique in those days, with a matching set of fullback's shoulders and a thirty-inch waist (I was first string on my high school team till I suffered a concussion midway through my junior season and my mother put a premature end to my career), and unlike most men at college, I was conscientious about keeping myself in trim?I still am'but that's neither here nor there. To complete the portrait, because already I've managed to get myself out on a limb here, I was blessed with what Iris calls ?sensitive? eyes, whatever that might mean, and a thatch of wheat-colored hair with a natural curl that defeated any cream or pomade I'd ever come across. As for sex, I was eager but inexperienced, and shy in the usual way'unsure of myself and just about as uninformed as anyone you could imagine.In fact, the first time I developed anything more than a theoretical grasp of what coitus involved'the mechanics of the act, that is'was during my senior year at IU, in the fall of 1939, when I found myself sitting in a lecture hall jammed to the rafters with silent, dry-mouthed students of both sexes as Prok's color slides played hugely across the screen. I was there at the instigation of a girl named Laura Feeney, one of the campus femmes fatales who never seemed to go anywhere without an arm looped through some letterman's. Laura had the reputation of being ?fast,? though I can assure you I was never the beneficiary of her sexual largesse (if, in fact, the rumors were true: as I was later to learn, the most provocative-looking women often have the most repressed sex lives, and vice versa). I remember being distinctly flattered when she stopped me in the corridor one day during fall registration, took hold of my arm at the muscle and pecked a kiss on my cheek. ?Oh, hi, John,? she breathed, ?I was just thinking about you. How was your summer? My summer had been spent back home in Michigan City, stocking shelves and bagging groceries, and if I had five minutes to myself my mother had me pruning the trees, reshingling the roof and pulling weeds in the vegetable garden. I was lonely, bored to tears, masturbating twice a day in my attic room that was like a sweatbox in a penal institution. My only relief derived from books. I came under the spell of John Donne and Andrew Marvell that summer, and I reread Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stellathree times in preparation for an English literature course I was looking forward to in the fall. But I couldn't tell Laura Feeney all this'or any of it. She would have thought me a washout. Which I was. So I just shrugged and said, ?All right, I guess.' Voices reverberated in the stairwell, boomed in the corners and fled all the way down the corridor to where the registration tables had been set up in the gymnasium. ?Yeah,? Laura said, and her smile went cold a moment, ?I know how you feel. With me it was work, work, work'my father owns a lunch counter in Fort Wayne, did you know that? I didn't know. I shook my head and felt a whole shining loop of my hair fall loose, though I must have used half a bottle of creme oil on it. I was wearing one of the stiff new Arrow shirts my grandmother had sent me from Chicago and a glenBoyle, T. C. is the author of 'Inner Circle', published 2004 under ISBN 9780670033447 and ISBN 0670033448.