The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Hello, sir. I’m—I didn’t think you’d remember me, what with all your, well, students—”

  “Don’t be foolish. Of course I remember you. John Milk, out of Michigan City, born October two, nineteen eighteen.” He gave me a smile, one of his patented ones, pulling his lip back from his upper teeth and letting the two vertical laugh lines tug at his jowls so that his whole face opened up in a kind of riotous glee. “Five foot ten, one hundred eighty pounds. But you haven’t lost any weight, have you?”

  “Hardly,” I said, my smile a weak imitation of his, and I was thinking of those other measurements, the ones I’d inscribed on a postcard and sent him in the mail. And beyond that, my secrets, and my shame, and all it implied. “My mother’s cooking, you know. Over the holidays.”

  “Yes,” he said, “yes, yes, of course. Nothing like a mother’s cooking, eh?” He was still smiling, smiling even wider now, if that was possible. “Or a mother’s love, for that matter.”

  I had to agree. I nodded my head in affirmation, and then the moment detached itself and hung there, lit from above with the faint gilding of the electric lights. I became aware of the muted stirring of library patrons among the stacks, a book dropped somewhere, a whisper.

  “You’re working here, I presume?”

  I told him I was, though they’d cut my hours recently and I could barely make ends meet. “Reshelving, mostly. Once we close the doors, I sweep up, empty the wastebaskets, make sure everything’s in order.”

  He was standing there watching me, rocking up off the balls of his feet and back again. I couldn’t help glancing at the title of the book: Sexual Life in Ancient Greece, by Hans Licht. “Late nights, eh? Isn’t that a bit tough on your studies?”

  I shrugged. “We all do the best we can.”

  He was silent a moment, as if he were deciding something, his eyes all the while fixed on mine. “Do you know, Milk—John,” he said softly, almost musingly, “I have a garden out at my place. Mrs. Kinsey and I do. Clara, that is. In season, it’s the pride of Bloomington, a regular botanical garden on two and a half fertile acres—I grow daylilies, irises, we’re planning a lily pond. You should see it, you really should.”

  I wasn’t following him. I’d been keeping late hours and I was pretty well exhausted. For lack of a better option, I gave him my fawning student look.

  “What I mean is, I’ve been thinking for some time of hiring somebody to help me with it—of course, it’s nothing but husks and frozen earth at this juncture—but in the spring, well, that’s when we’ll really bring it to life. And until then—and beyond that, in addition, as well—we’re going to need some help in the biology library. What do you say?”

  A week later I was working in Biology Hall, with expanded hours and no late nights. The biology collection was considerably smaller than that of the main library and the patronage proportionately reduced in size, so that I found I had more time to myself at work, time I could apply fruitfully to my own studies (and to be honest, to daydreaming—I spent a disproportionate amount of time that semester staring out into the intermediate distance, as if all the answers I needed in life were written there in a very cramped and faint script). I didn’t see much of Prok—he kept to himself for the most part, in his office on the second floor—and as the sex survey was then in its incipient stages, he didn’t yet need anyone to help him with the interviewing or tabulating of results. He was, as you no doubt know, one of the world’s leading authorities on Cynipids—gall wasps—and he was still at that time busy collecting galls from oak trees all over the country, employing his assistants (three undergraduate women) exclusively in helping to record his measurements of individual wasps and mount them in the Schmitt boxes reserved for them. Taxonomy—that was his forte, both as an entomologist and a compiler of human sexual practices.

  At any rate, the job was something of a plum for me, and for the first week or two I snapped out of the funk that seemed to have descended on me, exhilarated by the free nights and the extra change in my pocket. I went bowling with Paul and his girlfriend Betsy, and then insisted on treating them to cheeseburgers and I don’t know how many pitchers of beer after Paul took me aside and told me they wanted me to be the first to know they were engaged to be married. The jukebox played “Oh, Johnny” over and over, Betsy kept saying, “You’re next, John-Johnny-John, you’re next,” and I barely flinched when Laura Feeney and Jim Willard sauntered in and took a booth in the back. We stayed up late that night, Paul and I, pouring out water glasses of bourbon smuggled upstairs right under Mrs. Lorber’s nose, and though I overslept the next morning, I woke feeling glad for Paul and hopeful for myself.

  Unfortunately, the mood didn’t last. It struck me that my room-mate—a man of my own age and inclinations—was going to be married and that he already had a job lined up with his father’s feed-distribution company, while I had to look at myself in the mirror every morning and admit I had no idea what was to become of me. I was at loose ends, as most seniors are, I suppose, worrying over my course work and facing June graduation without a single notion of what I was going to do in life—or even what I was going to do for gainful employment. All I knew was that I’d rather be sent to Devil’s Island as underassistant to the assistant chef in the soup kitchen than go back to Michigan City and another summer with my mother. And as if that weren’t enough, looming over it all was the prospect of war in Europe and talk of conscription.

  So I was feeling blue, the weather going from bad to worse, Paul always off with Betsy somewhere till I’d begun to forget what he looked like, and the books on the library cart growing progressively heavier (I felt like a bibliographic Sisyphus, the task unending, each shelved volume replaced by another and yet another). And then two things happened. The first had to do with Iris, as you might have guessed. Though she was an English major, like me, she showed up at the biology library one afternoon in desperate need of information on the life cycle of the Plasmodium parasite for a required introductory course in biology she was taking from Professor Kinsey himself. “We have to cite at least three scientific journals,” she told me, still breathless from her dash across campus in the face of a steady wind, “and I have to write it all up by tomorrow, for class.”

  I’d been filling out catalogue cards for the new arrivals when she came up to the desk and took me by surprise. Before I could even think to smile, a hand went to my hair, smoothing it down where the rebellious curl was forever dangling. “I’d be—sure,” I said. “I’m not really—it’s the librarian you want, Mr. Elster, but I could—I’ll do my best, certainly.” And then I found my smile. “For you, of course.”

  Her voice went soft. “I wouldn’t want to be any trouble—I’m sure you have better things to do. But if you could just point me in the right direction—”

  I got to my feet and shot a glance across the room to where Elster sat at his own desk, partly obscured by a varnished deal partition. He was a short, thin, embittered little man, not yet out of his twenties, and, as he was quick to remind me, it wasn’t my job to take queries or assist the patrons—that was his function, and he guarded it jealously. For the moment, however, he seemed oblivious, absorbed in paperwork—or one of the crossword puzzles he was forever fussing over. When I responded, my voice was soft too—this was a library, after all, and there was no reason to draw attention to ourselves. “Current issues of the journals are alphabetized along the back wall, but what you’ll want are the indexes, and they’re—well, why don’t I just get them for you?”

  She was smiling up at me as if I’d already found the relevant citations, written them up for her and submitted the paper all on my own, and her eyes twitched and roved over my face in a way we would later identify as one of the subliminal signals of availability (readiness to engage in sexual activities, that is, in kissing, petting, genital manipulation and coitus), though at the time I could only think I must have something caught between my teeth or that my hair needed another dose of Wildroot. “Have you heard from y
our mother?” she asked, abruptly changing the subject.

  “Yes,” I said. “Or, no. I mean, why do you ask, has something—?”

  “Oh, no, no,” she said, “no. I just wanted to know how she was doing, because I never did get to thank her for that lovely afternoon and her hospitality. And yours. We had a really memorable time, Tommy and I.”

  “They were terrific cookies,” I said stupidly. “My grandmother’s recipe, actually. They’re a family tradition.”

  For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to respond and I stood there self-consciously at the desk, fumbling in my mind for the key to the next level of small talk—her mother, shouldn’t I ask about her mother, though I barely knew her?—but then she said something so softly I didn’t quite catch it.

  “What?”

  “They were, I said.” I must have looked puzzled, because she added, “The cookies. I was agreeing with you.”

  I floundered over this for a minute—as I told you, I wasn’t much with regard to small talk, not unless I had a couple of drinks in me, anyway—and then she let out a giggle and I joined her, my eyes flicking nervously to Elster’s desk and back. “Well,” I said finally, “why don’t you find a seat and I’ll, well—the indexes …”

  She settled herself at one of the big yellow-oak tables, laying out her purse, her book bag, her gloves, coat and hat as if they were on display at a rummage sale, and I brought her the journal indexes that might have been most promising, then retreated to my work at the main desk. The room was warm—overheated, actually—and smelled, as most libraries do, of dust and floor wax and the furtive bodily odors of the patrons. A shaft of winter sunlight colored the wall behind her. It was very still. I tried to focus on what I was doing, writing out the entries in my neatest block printing, but I kept looking up at her, amazed at the vitality she brought to that sterile atmosphere. She was wearing a long skirt, dark stockings, a tight wool sweater that showed off her contours and complemented her eyes, and I watched her head dip and rise over her work—first the journal, then her notebook, and back again—as if she were some exotic wild creature dipping water from a stream in a pastoral tale.

  But she wasn’t wild, not at all—she was as domestic as they come. And, as she later admitted, she’d brought herself to the library that day for the express purpose of reminding me that she was still alive and viable, that she had lips that could be kissed and hands that yearned to be held. In truth, she’d already written up her notes on the nasty little parasites that cause malaria—already had everything she needed—and was there at the desk with her hair shining and her head dipping and rising for my delectation alone. She had, as my mother knew long before I did, set her cap for me, and she was determined to allow me to discover that fact in my own groping way. Before she went home we had another little chat and I’d somehow managed to ask her out for Saturday evening to attend a student production of a popular Broadway play.

  The other thing that happened involved Prok, and I suppose it was emblematic of all that was to unfold between us—that is, between Prok and me on the one hand, and me and Iris on the other. It was the same week Iris had come to the library—perhaps even the same day; I can’t really remember now. I was just leaving work when I heard someone call out my name and turned to see Prok coming down the steps at the front of the building. “Milk, hold up a minute, will you?” he called, and then he was at my side, peeling off one glove to take my hand in his. “So how is it, then? The new position suitable?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m very much—it’s interesting.” My words hung in the air as if no one had spoken them. I felt for my cigarettes inside my jacket pocket, then realized I must have left them back at my desk.

  “But let’s walk,” he said. “You going my way?”

  “I live over on Kirkwood.”

  “Ah. Well. Wrong direction, then. But indulge me—a young fellow like you ought to be able to stand a two-block detour I would expect, no?”

  And then we were walking—in the direction of his house on First Street—the campus trees arrayed around us like statuary, lights riding high in the windows of the big pale buildings under a darkening sky. The air was tense with the cold, stretched thin over the skin of the evening, but it felt good to be out in it after the confinement of the library. There were patches of ice in the street. Trashcans stood at the curb. Prok was just slightly ahead of me, chopping along in his usual two-for-one stride (for Prok everything was competitive, even walking) and speaking over his shoulder so that his words came to me wrapped in an envelope of frozen carbon dioxide.

  “I was just remarking to Clara what an interesting person you are and how much you impressed me, and she said, ‘Well, why not have him over for dinner, then?’ and I thought that would be just fine because I expect you don’t get all that much home cooking, do you? You know, as we were saying the other week, the mother’s touch?”

  “No,” I said, “you’re absolutely right. It’s either the Commons or the diner, I’m afraid.” I was aglow with the compliment—I’d impressed him—and the words came easily.

  “Plenty of grease and gristle to fuel those expanding brain cells.” He’d swung his big head round to smile at me.

  “And of course we’re not allowed to cook for ourselves—”

  “Rooming house, eh?”

  I nodded. We were on one of the side streets now, across from the university. There was very little traffic.

  “Well,” he said, pulling up short and swinging round on me, “so how about it? Shall we say Saturday, six p.m.?”

  I must have hesitated, because he added, in a different tone altogether, almost as if he were preparing to build a case, “If you’re not doing anything, of course. You don’t have any plans, do you? For Saturday?”

  I looked off down the deserted street, then came back to him. “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  Prok’s house was an easy walk from campus, but in those days it was considered somewhat off the beaten path, as First Street and the neighborhood around it hadn’t yet been developed to the extent it now is. I had the impression of the odd sprawling house bracketed by tall black spikes of forest, and somewhere in the near distance there was the sound of a brook. Though there were no streetlights this far out, the glow of the stars and a three-quarters moon was enough to guide me past the occasional dark hump of an automobile drawn up alongside the curb, and each of the houses I passed seemed to have a lamp burning in every window. I was running a bit late because I’d spent the better part of an hour deciding on what to bring the hostess—an arrangement of dried flowers and pinecones that seemed to have been sprayed with white concrete in which were set some sort of piebald bird feathers, a bottle of bonded Kentucky bourbon, or a cheese that caught my eye in the grocery window. I’d settled on the cheese finally—the dried flowers were too risky, since I didn’t know a thing about botany and I’d be entering the domain of experts, and I passed over the bourbon because I didn’t know how Prok felt about the consumption of alcoholic beverages, though I suspected he was opposed to it both as a waste of time and inimical to one’s health.

  When I did get there, at quarter past six and out of breath, I had to stop and recheck the address. I’d always been shy of social gatherings, afraid that I was in the wrong place or that I’d got the date confused or that the hosts wouldn’t recognize me or had forgotten they’d invited me to begin with. It was foolish, I know, but I’d even felt that way with my childhood friends in Michigan City, standing on a playmate’s doorstep with a catcher’s mitt or a basketball as I’d done a thousand times before and suddenly filled with the conviction that they’d turn me away, say something sharp and wounding, run me off like a stray dog. It didn’t help matters that I was out of my depth with this middle-aged professor and his wife (whoever she might turn out to be, I was terrified of her and what she might think of me, and in a state approaching panic over the thought of the other guests, who, for all I knew, might range from the town mayor to my literature professor
and the president of the university). What would I say to them? What would I do?

  So why then had I accepted the invitation in the first place? I can’t say, really. It was like that moment with Laura Feeney in the hall outside registration, a moment that seems to present itself as offering up a choice but is in actuality a confluence of circumstances that pins you to a course of action as decisively as Prok pins his Cynipids to the mounting board. Fate, I guess you would call it, though I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m making any sort of metaphysical or mystical connection here—I haven’t got a mystical bone in my body, not after spending the last sixteen years with Prok. I made my choice. I said yes, as I was to say yes to so many other invitations Prok would offer me, whether I wanted to or not. Again, looking back on it, I could see that Prok was a father figure to a young man whose own father was long dead and gone, and that he was powerful and persuasive—no one ever said no to Prok—but it went beyond that too. I was flattered by him. He’d chosen me—he was impressed by me—and I broke my first date with Iris to be there on that Saturday night in February.

  But I had to recheck the address because the house was so—what better word for it?—unusual. From the street, in the grip of the night, it looked like a gingerbread house, something out of a fairy tale, the haunt of the necromancer or the sprite. The brick path wound circuitously through clumps of vegetation (Prok’s horticultural credo: “The orthogonal line is the recourse of the city planner, the curvilinear the gardener’s delight”), and though you could see that there was an order to it and that it did indeed lead to the front door, the effect was deceptively natural. As for the house, it glowed with windows and featured a stepped, shingled roof and walls constructed of odd-shaped bricks (seconds Prok had bought for a song) with great dabs of mortar leaking over them like icing on a sagging cake. This was the house of a scientist? I couldn’t believe it. I was certain I’d got the address wrong—misheard it, transposed the numbers—but by this time I was standing on the doorstep, and I was late, so there was nothing else to do but tuck the cheese under my arm (it was a Stilton and it must have weighed ten pounds), steel myself and lift the brass knocker.