Free The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle Page A

could tell in an instant if the subject was hedging, almost as if he were hooked up to him like a human lie detector. She would have had to tell him everything, and he would know her secrets, as he knew mine. I saw, with a sudden thrill, thepower of that knowledge. To give up your history was to give up your soul, and to possess it was the ultimate aggrandizement, like the cannibal growing ever greater with the subsumed spirit of each of his successive victims.
    At dinner, the conversation was exclusively of sex. Prok went on about his project, how he could develop a taxonomy of human sexual behavior in the way he was able to classify wasps according to variations within the species. We were eating a stew of some sort—goulash, Prok called it—which he’d prepared himself. He served milk rather than beer or wine, pouring it out of a glass pitcher and making one of his rare stabs at wit (“Care for some milk,
Milk?
”), and there were just the three of us at table. The children had apparently been fed earlier, so that, as Prok put it, “We can get to know one another without having to divide our attention,” and every time Prok drew a breath, which was rarely, Mac put in her two cents on the subject. And that surprised me, because she was every bit as informed as he—and every bit as capable of dropping terms like “cunnilingus” and “fellatio” into the dinner conversation.
    For my part, I luxuriated in the attention. I’d never thought of myself as anything other than ordinary, even when I made A’s in my course work or managed to score a touchdown on a broken play in a high school football game, and here were two vibrant, intelligent, worldly people—two adults—soliciting my opinions and treating me as an equal. It was heady, and I felt I never wanted to leave that table or that sofa by the fireplace where we settled in after dinner with bowls of vanilla ice cream while Prok lectured in his high tireless voice and Mac knitted with perfect articulation. Nine o’clock came and went, and then ten. Mac disappeared at one point to be sure the children were in bed (two girls of fourteen and sixteen, and a boy of eleven), and there was an awkward moment during which I expressed my concern over the lateness of the hour, but Prok dismissed me with a wave. Far from being exhausted, he shifted into a higher gear.
    He poked at the fire, then eased himself down on the floor with the cloth braids he was fashioning into a new rug (“Very economical, Milk—you should take it up. Any discards, old clothes, sheets and thelike, plus strips of muslin dyed in whatever color you prefer, and you’d be surprised how durable such a rug can be. Why this one, the one beneath me here? I wove this as an assistant professor in our quaint little rental back in 1921, our first home, in fact, after we were married”) and in the quiet broken only by the snap and hiss of the fire, he opened up to me all his hopes and aspirations for the project. Ten thousand interviews, that was what he wanted—at a minimum—and the interviews had to be conducted face-to-face to assure accuracy, unlike the printed questionnaires or subjective analyses previous researchers had favored. Only then could
we
(he was already including the young neophyte before him) have the data to drive down the hidebound superstitions that had ruined so many lives. Take masturbation, for instance. Did I know that reputable people—doctors, ministers and the like—had actually promoted the egregious notion that masturbation leads to insanity?
    He turned to me, his spectacles giving back twin images of the fire eating at a split oak log so that the reflection dissolved into his eyes. “Why, masturbation is the most natural and harmless outlet the species has acquired for release of sexual tension. It is purely positive, a veritable benefit to the species and to the society at large, and any