“Church?” I’d said.
“That’s right.”
“But why? What are you thinking? You know that I don’t, well—I’ve got better things to do with my day off, don’t you think?”
“Because I miss it, that’s why. Shouldn’t that be enough? Can’t you do anything for me, just for me, just once? And for John Jr.?” We were at the kitchen table, the aforementioned boy nearly four years old now and perched on the edge of his booster seat, making an improvisatory scramble out of his own eggs. She paused to wipe his chin, the cheerful yellow splotch there, and then came back to me. “He’s growing up a pagan. Doesn’t that bother you?”
“No,” I said, “not at all.”
“You know what the other mothers say? The other children?”
It would have been useless to point out that I didn’t care in the least what the other mothers might say or that Prok would have a fit if he knew that I’d been within fifty feet of a church, temple, tabernacle or mosque—he hated them all, all religions, with equal fervor. Religion was antithetical to science. The religious simply couldn’t face the facts. They were living in the Dark Ages, et cetera. I couldn’t have agreed with him more, but Iris wanted to go to church, and that was all that mattered.
I will say that the experience was at least mildly interesting from a sociological perspective. The women had their heads covered, most with spring hats, but a good number with simple black or white scarves knotted under the chin, and the men—and the children too—were turned out in their best in deference to the God they’d come to worship. There was the smell Iris had spoken of—some sort of herb or aromatic gum reduced over hot coals, a holdover no doubt from the days when the devotees went largely unwashed and it was thought that contagion was bred spontaneously out of the miasma of foul air—and a whole panoply of ritual that Iris performed with a simple grace that stirred me more deeply than I wanted to admit. I watched her kneel, cross herself, dip her fingers in the holy water and let her lips move along with the priest’s in the ventriloquism of rapture, even while John Jr. gurgled and writhed at her side and she turned to hush him. In a way, the whole thing was quite beautiful, not that it meant anything and not that we’ve been back since—or not that I’ve been back—but it was like being at a concert, I suppose, when you’re free to let your mind empty itself and wander where it will.
Yes, and then we went to the park and John Jr. ran wild with the release of it, like a puppy let off the leash, and we had a picnic, though the wind made its presence felt whenever the clouds obscured the sun, which they did, off and on, all afternoon. We’d bought a box kite and assembled it at home, despite the fact that studying directions on a sheet of paper and translating them into action wasn’t my strong suit, and when I ran with it twirling and twisting above my head, my son let out a whoop of the purest, elemental joy. I paid out the line and felt the tug of nature on the other end, and it goes without saying that the sensation brought me back to my own childhood. “I want,” my son said. “Give me, Daddy. Me, me!” And I sat myself down in the naked grass with John Jr. in my lap and together we held tight to the string.
It might have been that day when he lost hold of the kite, or maybe it was another occasion, another day, another year. But I remember being confident enough to let him take it himself, to feel that mysterious suspensory tug all on his own and master it, and he ran with the thing, giggling like a maniac, paying out string, getting cockier by the minute—and that was good, all to the good—until there was no string left. Before I could reach him, before I could leap forward and snatch at it, the thing was gone, receding in the sky on its bellying tether as if we’d never had hold of it at all.
Then there was dinner, a roast turkey Iris had put in the oven before we went out, the smell of it heavy on the air as we came in the door, and the fire I made to take the chill out of our fingers and toes. We dropped John Jr. at the sitter’s—Were we going to be late? she wanted to know. No, we didn’t think so, not too late—and then drove over to Prok’s.
As it turned out, we were the first to arrive, which was unusual in itself. Mac took our coats, and Prok, absorbed in mixing cocktails—we were having Zombies, I saw—called out a brusque greeting from the chair he’d pulled up to the coffee table in the inner room. There was no fire that night, and yet the house was warm, bearing the faint olfactory traces of radiated heat, of the furnace in the basement and its conduit of pipes and radiators, and that was odd, given Prok’s Spartan tastes. He rose to greet us as we came into the room, a peck to the cheek for Iris and a handclasp and his famous smile for me, and it was like coming home all over again, arriving at a foreordained destination, the place I was meant to inhabit in my fatherless transit of the planet. Prok’s house. Prok and Mac’s. A wave of emotion swept through me, and I can’t say why or what it was about that particular moment that moved me so, though it had to do with continuity, I think, and with my sudden apprehension of it. I suppose Prok would have classified it as a chemical reaction, a fluctuation in the hormonal levels originating in the endocrine glands. Just that, and nothing more.
“Zombie cocktail?” he offered, thrusting the tall cold glasses into our hands before we’d had a chance to respond.
I noticed then that there were no chairs set up for the musicale, that the light over the phonograph was switched off and the records were still in their jackets on the shelves. Iris must have noticed it too, because she took a long pull at her drink and then asked about it in a voice that might have sounded just a shade too conciliatory: “Do you need any help with the chairs, Prok? For the musicale, I mean? We are having a musicale, aren’t we?”
Prok was finished with the cocktails now—or the first batch of them, four frosted glasses standing on the tray atop the low table, awaiting the remaining guests. He rose from his seat, warming his hands together as if at the conclusion of a job well done. “No,” he said, focusing on Iris, “I’m afraid we’ve decided to do something else altogether tonight—”
That was when Aspinall slammed the door that led to the attic and came clumping down the stairs. We all turned to watch him as he slouched across the room in his dark glasses and belted coat. The heat seemed stifling suddenly—I had to reach up and jerk loose the knot of my tie—and I wondered how he could stand it.
“Everything all set up there?” Prok asked, and I felt the first faint quickening of my blood.
Aspinall shuffled up to us and ducked his head to peer over his glasses and give Iris and me a nod of greeting before answering. “Oh, yeah, we’re good to go. But the lights, of course—”
“Right,” Prok said.
“No sense in wasting electricity—”
“Right.”
I’d never noticed before how pale Aspinall was, how bloodless and colorless, as if all those hours in the darkroom had bled him dry, and I couldn’t help asking if he felt all right—“Ted, are you coming down with something?”—instead of turning to Prok and demanding an answer to the question that was kicking and twitching like a newborn in my brain: What were we planning to film, and if we were filming, then why had the wives been invited?
Ted let out a little laugh and nodded to Iris again. His face was neutral, but the corners of his mouth turned up slightly, so that even in repose he looked as if he were smiling over some private joke. “My mother used to ask me that all the time,” he said. “Teddy, you need to get out and play with the other boys, play ball, get some sun, but I’m just a night owl, I guess. Hell, in the Village nobody gets up before noon—and those are the early risers.”
“I could sleep all day myself,” Iris said, and we all three looked at her. “And I think I would if it wasn’t for John Jr. But then you know how it is with a three-year-old, going on four—”
Aspinall didn’t know. His eyes were faintly visible behind the smoked lenses, half circles rinsed of light, like lunar bodies in eclipse. I noticed that Prok didn’t offer him a drink.
But then there was a knock at the door, and the Rutl
edges and Corcorans arrived together, Violet in a fur coat over a low-cut dress that showed off her breasts, Hilda in a pink spring jacket and beltless frock that might have been a nightgown but for the Jacquard pattern of it, Rutledge his usual sleek self, and Corcoran in a camel coat and his snappy shoes. Their faces were flushed with the chill and they stamped around the entryway a moment, divesting themselves of their outer garments, their voices intertwining excitedly in a recitative of arrival. Prok hurried everyone in, all business suddenly, dispensed the drinks in the tropical fug of the front room, and immediately set to making a second batch. Iris was already showing the effects of the first drink, her eyes shining and her lips ever so slightly parted as if she were trying to catch her breath or remember the words to a tune no one else could hear. I heard her say something to Hilda, something about the clarinet, and her words dragged in a stately adagio. She was standing with her legs spread for balance, and when I caught her eye she gave me a conspiratorial smile—we’d escaped the onus of a musicale, and here we were, in the midst of a party. With friends. Good friends. Our best friends. I should have taken her arm then, should have led her out the door and into the car, should have taken her home, but I didn’t.
For those who don’t know it, incidentally, I should say that the Zombie is an especially potent drink. It’s served in a tall glass—and the glass needs to be tall in order to incorporate all the booze the concoction contains, that is, two ounces of light rum, an ounce each of dark rum and apricot brandy, with pineapple juice and simple syrup to meliorate the bite of the spirits, and a float of one-hundred-fifty-one-proof rum to top it off—and just a single one of them was enough to make me feel that familiar tingling in my extremities that lets me know I’ve already begun to descend the long glassy slope of inebriation. And what was Prok doing? He was getting us drunk, his inner circle, his intimates, and once we were drunk and our inhibitions were down, we were going to go upstairs. To the attic.
We were all watching one another, at least the men were, because we knew what was coming, and we were frightened of it and exhilarated too. Rutledge was sitting in one of the hickory chairs at the far end of the table, leaning in over his knees to banter with Violet Corcoran and Mac as if nothing in the world were the matter, his Portuguese eyes glittering at me even while Corcoran flashed me a triumphant look and led the room in a short sharp explosion of laughter. The cocktail shaker went round. I heard the clock in the hallway strike the hour—what hour I didn’t know. And then Prok was tapping the long silver cocktail spoon against the side of the shaker. “May I have your attention, please?” he said, and the conversation trailed off with a whinnying laugh from Hilda Rutledge in response to something Violet had said.
Prok was dressed as usual in his standard dark suit, white shirt and bow tie, though I couldn’t help thinking the flesh-colored shorts would have been more appropriate to the occasion. His head—the massiveness of it, the solidity, the shock of hair, immitigable features, the hard cold empirical eyes—seemed like a sculpture cast in bronze. He was a giant among pygmies. I would have followed him anywhere. “We have a surprise for you, Mac, Aspinall and I, a surprise that’s long overdue, and if you would just go along with Ted here”—a gesture for Aspinall, who slouched against the near wall, shoulders slumped, dark glasses drinking up the light—“all will be revealed.”
I don’t know what I was thinking, but I followed the group up the stairs like a child on a field trip, Iris just ahead of me, the women’s perfume concentrated in the stairwell till it was like an intoxicant, as if I needed anything more. The steps creaked and shifted under our weight. Prok said something I didn’t catch, and Mac was there too, right at his side, an interplay of shadows, Corcoran two steps above him and joking in a low voice even as Ted Aspinall led us into the room and flicked on the lights. My heart was pounding, blowing out of my body. It was as hot as midsummer. I was sweating through my clothes. And what did I expect—that Iris would enjoy it? That it was time she saw what my real work was? That watching Corcoran and who—Violet?—go at it would somehow stimulate her, disarm her, at the very least make her an ally in all this? Or maybe I was getting ahead of myself. Maybe Prok had something entirely different in mind, another animal film, beavers, hamsters, chinchillas. But there was no projector. And the lights were fierce.
“All right,” Prok said, sidling round to shut the door behind us with a definitive click, “this is good. Very good. Now, if you would all please make yourselves comfortable—”
The bed in the corner was lit like a stage, as it had been the last time we’d filmed in the attic, but the chairs had been removed and a number of mattresses laid out on the floor in their stead. I was thinking of gym class in high school, the way the coach would have us unfurl the mats for wrestling and make us sit up against the walls, tense as wire, until he selected two boys at random and had them grapple for three interminable minutes, from the initial takedown to the writhing, sweaty denouement. We eased ourselves down, silent now, unconsciously pairing off as couples, aside from Mac, who settled in beside Iris and me with a soft smile on her lips. Rutledge gave me a look, and it was the same look he’d worn on the night Corcoran and Betty had performed for us the very first time—he was aroused, and so, despite myself, was I.
“I say this is long overdue,” Prok began. He was standing just outside the curtain of light, bent stiffly toward us, one hand gesturing, and the effect was to darken his face even as his silhouette burned with a crackling electrical radiance, as with an actor stepping out of the scene to deliver a soliloquy. And who would he have been in that moment? Iago? Richard III? Prospero? “Because the foundation of what we’re accomplishing here relies on our commitment to the project—it relies on us, on my staff and the wives who stand behind them. None of us can afford to be the least bit sex shy—or even accused of it—because of the irreparable damage it would do not only to the project, but to the principles behind it.”
He paused to look round the room, the light gathering and bunching as he swung his head to take us in. “I’m sorry to say it, but we’re nothing better than hypocrites if we can’t practice what we preach—if we can’t be uninhibited with one another, all of us, because we are the pioneers here and make no mistake about it. Of course, a survey, no matter how scrupulous, can never get at the facts in the way of direct observation, so as most of you know we have for some time now been engaged in observing and filming sexual activity right here in this room, and I see no reason”—and here he looked directly at Iris—“for any of you to be kept in the dark about it. This is science. It is objective and impersonal. And necessary, never forget that.”
Iris’s hand felt for mine and I squeezed it and leaned in to touch her ear with my lips. She was sweating too—the room was like a furnace—and I could smell it on her, her own individual odor, private and furtive, the smell of Iris and Iris alone.
“Now,” Prok was saying, “what I’d like you all to do, initially, is to remove your clothing”—there was a titter from Hilda Rutledge, who was seated on the mattress across from me, beside her husband—“without constraint or self-consciousness. We are all adults here,” he said, his voice dipping as he bent to remove his shoes and socks, “and what’s more, unlike so many of the sad, repressed cases we hear from daily, we’re enlightened and fully attuned to the enjoyment of what we were made for—that is, sexual relations, of every kind and without inhibition or prohibition.”
In a moment he was naked, looming over us with his veiny muscular legs, the slight stoop and the revelation of a middle-aged pot, the breath whistling through his teeth as he spoke. “Come on,” he said, “off with your clothes, all of you—that’s right, good.”
There was a rustling as we stretched our limbs, leaned this way or that to release zippers and work at buttons, and I was aware of Mac beside me slipping out of her clothes as easily as she might have shed water after a bath. Iris looked to me then, the light like a shield hammered round the bed in the corner, and I had my jacket off,
my shirt unbuttoned. Her eyes were luminous, cat’s eyes, fixed unwaveringly on me, and for a moment she didn’t react, just watched me as I unbuckled my belt and worked the trousers down my legs. Then she reached behind her for the buttons to her dress—she was wearing black, her color, the color she’d worn to the musicale all those years before when Corcoran came into our lives, a simple black dress with white trim and puffed sleeves, pearls in a single strand, flat shoes, stockings, white brassiere, white panties. I was naked before she was and she could see the state I was in, the state all of us were in—the men—but she never hesitated. She dropped the brassiere behind her and leaned back against the wall on the fulcrum of her hips to slip the panties down her legs.
Prok was working at himself—masturbating, proud of his technique and his endowment, a bit of a show-off, really—and I should say here, because there’s no point in holding anything back and there’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all, that ever since puberty he had often incorporated the pleasure-pain principle in his sexual activity. He enjoyed urethral insertions, enlarging himself over the years to employ an object as big as a toothbrush to this end, and now he did just that—inserted the toothbrush—as if he were a magician performing a trick. The lights caught him in profile as he worked it in, and he even managed a mini-lecture on the subject as we all watched in rapt silence, maybe even in awe.
He didn’t come to climax, though—he was saving that for the filming. After a moment he removed the insertion, and, in a low voice, invited me to join him on the bed. “Milk, would you like to be first in the filming tonight, to show the others some of the techniques we’ve acquired?”
The Inner Circle Page 44