The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  The next day Prok was back, a volcano of energy, whistling a Hugo Wolf song under his breath, bustling about the office in a running pantomime of quick, jerky movements, up from his desk and back again, a glance into one of the Schmitt boxes, then the files, a cursory check of a two-years’-dormant gall that had suddenly begun to hatch out and then a shout from the microscope—“A new genus, here, Milk, I believe, a new genus altogether!” When I’d first come in he gave me half a moment to settle myself and then, with a grin, he laid a compact folder on my desk. “Eighteen histories,” he said, showing his teeth. “And thirty-six more promised. I was up till two in the morning just to record them.”

  “Wonderful news,” I said, sharing the grin with him.

  “Any difficulties while I was away?”

  I fought to keep my face straight. Don’t shift your eyes, I told myself, don’t. “No,” I said, shifting my eyes, “no, everything was fine.”

  He was looking at me curiously. I opened the folder in the hope of distracting him, but it didn’t work. Actually, I don’t think there was ever a person born on this earth more attuned to the nuances of human behavior than Prok, no one more sensitive to facial expression and what we’ve come to call body language—he was a bloodhound of the emotions, and he never missed a thing. “Everything?” he prodded.

  I wanted to confess in that moment, but I didn’t. I murmured something in the affirmative, and, further to distract him, said, “Do you want me to transcribe these right away?”

  He seemed absent, and didn’t answer immediately. He was always young-looking for his age—in those days people routinely took him for five to ten years younger than he actually was—but I saw the lines in his face then, the first faint tracings of the finished composition he would take to his grave with him. But he must be exhausted, I thought, pushing himself to collect his histories, driving all that way in his rattling old Nash, up late, up early, nobody to help him. “You know,” he said after a moment, and it was almost as if he were reading my mind, “I’ve been thinking how convenient it would be—how essential—for me to train another interviewer, someone I could trust to collect the data along with me, a person who might not necessarily have any scientific training but who could immerse himself in the technique I’ve developed and apply it rigorously. A quick study, John. Somebody like you.” A pause. “What do you say?”

  I was so taken by surprise—and so consumed with guilt over my invasion of the files—that I fumbled this one badly. “I—well, of course,” I began. “Well, certainly, you know, I would—and I do have to graduate yet …”

  “English,” he said, and the noun came off his tongue like something distasteful, something chewed over and spat out again. “I never quite understood the application of that—as a field, that is.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. He was watching me still, watching me with a preternatural intentness. “I thought I might like to maybe teach. Someday, I mean.”

  He sighed. For all his qualities, patience wasn’t one of them. Nor did he take disappointment well. “Just think about it, John, that’s all I ask. No need to decide right this minute—let’s talk over dinner, and we are expecting you tonight, six sharp, that is, unless you have other plans?”

  “Sex research? Are you nuts?”

  Paul was stretched across his bed as if he’d been washed up there by a tide just recently receded. He was chewing gum and idly bouncing a tennis ball up off the racquet propped on his chest. Half a dozen books were scattered across the floor, face-down, another kind of flotsam. I didn’t feel like explaining it to him—he wouldn’t have understood anyway.

  “At least it’s a job,” I said, pulling the sweater up over my head as carefully as I could so as not to disarrange my hair. I was changing for the Kinseys (they didn’t stand on ceremony, as Mac had said—behind closed doors they were even what might have been considered bohemian—but I felt that a dinner invitation, no matter how frequent or informal, required a jacket and tie, and I still feel that way).

  Paul let the ball dribble off the racquet and fall to the floor, where it took three or four reduced hops and disappeared under my desk. “But the sort of questions he asks—it’s embarrassing. You’re not going to—?” he caught himself, then saw it in my face. “You are, aren’t you?”

  I was knotting my tie in the mirror, studying my eyes, the way the hair clung slick to the sides of my head. “You didn’t seem to have any objections at the time, if I recall—you said, in fact, that you found the experience unique. Wasn’t that the word you used, ‘unique’?”

  “Look, John, I might be all wet about this, but don’t you think it takes kind of an unusual sort of person to be poking into people’s dirty underwear all the time?”

  I gave him a look that projected from the mirror all the way across the room, and there he was, diminished on the bed, diminished and growing smaller by the moment. I didn’t say anything.

  “I wouldn’t want to call the professor an odd duck or a pervert or anything, but don’t you realize everyone’s going to think of you that way? And what about your mother? You think she’s going to approve—as a career choice, I mean?”

  “I’ve told you a thousand times,” I said, slipping into my jacket now, “it’s science, research, just like anything else. Like Lister discovering antiseptic or what’s his name with the mold on the bread. Why shouldn’t we know as much as we possibly can about everything the human animal does?” I was at the door now, on my way out, but I paused to give him his chance to reply.

  “The human animal? You sound just like him, John, you realize that? That’s what he says. But what about human beings, made in the image of God? What about us? What about the soul?”

  I was irritated suddenly. “There is no God. And no soul either. You know what’s wrong with you?”

  He never moved from the bed, never even lifted his head. “No, but I guess you’re going to tell me.”

  “You just have a narrow mind, that’s all,” I informed him, and I let the door punctuate the truth of it on my way out.

  Mrs. Lorber nodded to me from her post in the rocking chair and I gave her a strained smile in return, and then I was out in the street, the pussy willows at the corner in bloom, the tight pale buds firing on the trees, a warm breeze coming up out of the south freighted with the promise of the season to come. My eyes followed a trim dark girl as I crossed Atwater in front of the campus, her legs bare and thrilling as she receded down the avenue of trees, and I thought of Iris. I hadn’t seen her in over a month, since I’d stood her up, that is, and I felt bad about it—and, of course, the longer I put off facing her the worse it was.

  A car rolled slowly up the street, so slowly I thought the driver meant to pull up to the curb and park. He was an old man, his face drawn and anxious, and he gripped the wheel as if he were afraid someone was about to snatch it away from him. I watched him a moment, long enough to see a pair of bicyclists overtake him, and he never looked right or left or gave any sign he noticed them or anything else, and I found myself daydreaming about getting a car of my own someday and just taking off up over the hills and out of town until the road spooled out beneath me and I could be anywhere. Students drifted by in both directions. A pair of boxer dogs sat on their haunches and regarded me steadily from behind a picket fence.

  As I turned onto First, I encountered a couple just ahead of me, the girl leaning into the man till they were a single entity, strolling along on four synchronized limbs, and I crossed to the far side of the street to avoid having to overtake them; seeing them there, seeing the way they made each other complete, made me think of Iris again. What I’d done was inexcusable, and I told myself I was going to call her the very next day—just steel myself and do it—and if she told me to get lost, drop dead, dry up and blow away, well, at least the situation would be resolved. And there was no denying I deserved it.

  So I walked. And if I noticed the various operations of nature in its season of renewal—if I smelled the scent of
the forsythias or watched the birds ascend to the trees with bits of straw or twig clamped transversely in their beaks—I don’t know if I really remarked them, at least not consciously. It was spring, that was all, and I was on First Street, going to the Kinseys’. For dinner.

  Prok himself met me at the door. He was dressed in his gardening shorts and nothing else, his legs lean and muscled, his bare toes gripping the long polished boards of the sweet-gum floor. His hair, as always, looked as if it had been freshly barbered. “Ah, Milk,” he said, ushering me in, “I’ve just been spreading a little humus on the irises—and the lilies too. Couldn’t resist it, the weather’s so agreeable.”

  He put on a short-sleeved shirt for dinner, but no shoes and no socks. Mac too was dressed more informally than she’d been on any of the previous occasions I’d come to dinner, in her own pair of shorts and a pale blue cotton blouse that showed off her throat and the delicate line of her clavicle. She seemed to have cut her hair as well, and it was as short now—nearly, that is—as a man’s. I felt a bit foolish in my coat and tie, but both Prok and Mac reassured me: they were just rushing the season a bit, that was all.

  After dinner the children dispersed, and Prok, Mac and I sat in the front room awhile, chatting. Prok was at his rug, Mac at her knitting. Prok had been talking excitedly about the premature return of some sort of bird—I forget which—and how it portended an early summer, when he broke off abruptly and turned to me. “Milk,” he said, “John. Have you thought about what I said this afternoon?”

  Mac’s needles flashed. She was studying me out of her soft brown eyes, a maternal smile fixed at the corners of her lips.

  I told him—told them—that I had. “It would be, well,” I said, “an honor. And I want to say how much, that is—that you can be so generous to a young man, a student, who, uh—”

  “Good,” Prok said, in his honeyed tones, “very good. We’ll see about increasing your hours, then, and as soon as the semester is out, you’ll come on with me full-time. Salary to continue as current. And of course we’ll be working together in the garden as well.”

  The evening went on in that vein—a congratulatory vein, in a relaxed and amiable atmosphere—until Mac excused herself and Prok and I were left alone. I had no qualms about the work he was offering—it was important, exciting, noble even—and I was deeply grateful to have been offered steady employment at a time when the global situation was anything but settled, yet I did have one reservation. Or rather scruple, I suppose I should say. I didn’t feel right about what I’d done in the office behind his back. Here he was, going out of his way to make something of me, to invest in me and my future in the most concrete way, and I had let him down, cheated him, betrayed his trust in me. He was talking about the school in Indianapolis—the Porter School, it was called—describing some of the details of the more intriguing histories, especially of two of the male faculty, who were hiding their extensive H-histories from the administration and the community too, when I interrupted him.

  “Professor Kinsey,” I said. “Prok. Listen, I, well, I must tell you something.”

  He stopped what he was doing—his long nimble fingers arrested on the fringe of the making rug—to focus his gaze on me. “Yes,” he said. “What is it, Milk?”

  There seemed to be a ringing in my ears, some sort of tocsin repeating itself there, and I must have raised my voice to be heard over it. “I have a confession to make.”

  For once, Prok had nothing to say. He receded into his interview mode, all ears.

  “Well, I—when you were away I broke the code. The secondary code, that is. I—I’m afraid I went through your desk.”

  His first response was disbelief. “Impossible,” he said.

  I held his gaze unflinchingly, the bells ringing in my ears, his eyes fading in and out of focus till they were like twin blue planets floating in the ether. “I looked up only two histories, that’s all, and I know it’s unforgivable but I just couldn’t help myself …”

  One word only: “Whose?”

  Something flew at the window then, beating toward the light of the lamp, a bat, I suppose, or a bird disoriented in the shadows of the fallen night. There was a dull thump of wings against the glass, and then it was gone. “Yours,” I said, the voice strangled in my throat. “And Mac’s.”

  He let me dangle a moment, then said, “You broke the code?”

  “Yes,” I murmured.

  “I never imagined anyone could break my code, even if they did somehow get access to it. You realize I’ll now have to devise a new one?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that it will have to be infinitely more complex?”

  I said nothing, thinking of the work it would entail, the waste of his irretrievable time, my own idle curiosity and how I’d set back the project before I’d even had a chance to contribute to it. I was angry with myself. And ashamed.

  Prok got up, crossed to the mantel and spent a moment rearranging the framed photos there. I studied him from the rear, the long tapering range of him, the narrowed shoulders, the bristle of hair. He went next to the window, peered out into the darkness, then came back across the room and settled on the sofa before reaching up to flick off the lamp. Shadows stole out to enclose the room, the only light emanating from a lamp in the hallway. “So,” he said finally, “you know my history, then? But here”—patting the place beside him on the sofa—“come here and sit.”

  I obeyed. I got up from the chair and eased in beside him on the sofa.

  He put his arm round my shoulder then and drew me to him so that our faces were no more than six inches apart. “You shouldn’t have pried, John,” he whispered. “Shouldn’t have. But I tell you one thing, it was good of you to confess.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Demonstrates character. You realize that, don’t you?” He gave my shoulder a fraternal squeeze. “You’re a fine young man, John, and I appreciate your candor, I do.”

  And then something strange happened, the last thing I would have expected under the circumstances—he kissed me. Leaned in, closed his eyes and kissed me. Some period of time passed during which neither of us spoke, then he took me by the hand and led me up the stairs to the spare room in the attic, and I remember a Ping-Pong table there, children’s things, a fishing rod, an old sewing machine—and a bed. I didn’t go home that night, not until very late.

  4

  Iris was taking a Shakespeare course that semester in the same building where I was sitting in on Professor Ellis’s Modern British Poetry. I didn’t realize it at the time because I hadn’t yet got around to contacting her, though I’d meant to, so it was something of a surprise to run into her in the corridor one afternoon. As I remember it, the day was dismal, hanging like lint in the windows, the linoleum slick with wet, the whole world giving off a reek of mold and ferment. Rain had fallen steadily for the past week and there was more in the forecast. I was thinking nothing, umbrella, notebook and poetry text tucked under one arm, dripping hat in the other, making my desultory way through the mob of students in the corridor. Perhaps I was dreaming. Perhaps that was it.

  She was on me before I could prepare myself, right there in front of me, two sets of shoulders parting, a girl in a yellow mackintosh grinning and ducking out of the way, somebody calling out something. Iris. There she was. We both pulled up short. “Hi,” she said, and her smile was an education in itself.

  “Yes,” I said, “hi.”

  Her eyes seemed to drain all the available light out of the corridor, and there was nothing I could do but stare into them, fascinated. She seemed to have done something to her hair too, or maybe it was just wet. What was she wearing? A sweater six sizes too big for her, woolen skirt, ankle socks, saddle shoes. “You have Ellis this period?”

  “Modern British,” I said. “Poetry, that is. But listen, I never—did you get my note?”

  She gave me a quizzical look.

  “You know, that day—when we were supposed to go to the pla
y? I left the tickets, and you know, a note, with the girl at the desk. The RA. I just wondered if you, well, if you got them.”

  Two streams of students were making their way round us as we stood there like posts in the dank hallway. There was a buzz of talk, I saw Professor Ellis at the far end of the corridor, a hundred pairs of shoes squealed on the wet linoleum. “Please, John,” she said, her mouth drawn down to nothing, a slash, a telltale crack in the porcelain shell of her shining, martyred face, “not here. This isn’t the place.”

  I just stared at her, mortified. An overwhelming sense of guilt and loss, of a doomed and inextricable culpability, began to drum at the taut skin of me, and, yes, the back of my neck went cold and the hair prickled on my scalp. “At least hear me out,” I said.

  “You want to talk? All right. Fine. I’d be interested to hear what you have to say, I really would.” Her face was bled of color now, and she held herself absolutely rigid. “Four o’clock,” she said, her voice struggling for the right tone, “at Webster’s. You can’t miss me. I’ll be the girl at the back table, sitting all by herself.”

  I had to ask Prok to shift my hours that day, and I can’t say that he was overjoyed about it—anything that interfered with work was antithetical to his project, and so, by extension, to him—but I managed to get to Webster’s Drugstore before she did, and when she came through the door in her rain hat and made a show of shaking out her umbrella and throwing back her hair to mask whatever she was feeling, I was there. I told her I was glad she could come and then I told her how much I liked her and how sorry I was for what had happened, and my explanation probably ran to several paragraphs, but suffice it to say that I did adduce Prok and the importance of cultivating him for the sake of my job and future prospects.