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

minister worth his salt should be delivering sermons on that subject, believe me. Just think, Milk, just think of all the harm done by sexual repression and the guilt normal healthy adolescents are meant needlessly to feel—” I must have colored at this point, thinking of our last interview, because he changed tack suddenly and asked me point-blank if I wouldn’t help him by contributing to the project.
    â€œWell, yes, I mean—certainly, I would be—” I fumbled, trying to recover myself. “But what could I do, in any material way, that is—?”
    â€œVery 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?”
    â€œThat’s right,” I said. “Yes. Fourteen.”
    â€œJust 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,/Thebrood 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