The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  The second woman—she was older, thirty or thirty-five, and she had a white annealed scar tracing the line of her jawbone on the right side of her face—came to the door the minute the first girl had left. This second woman had a belligerent look about her—a striated pinching of the lips, the weather report of her brow, the prove-it-to-me stance of her legs as she stood there arms akimbo at the door—and before she stepped into the room she demanded the dollar we were paying out to each of our subjects that night. I dug around in my pockets and came up empty—Prok had the billfold of crisp green singles he’d withdrawn from the bank the previous afternoon and he’d neglected, in the confusion of sorting things out vis-à-vis appropriate interviewing venues, to give me more than the one I’d handed to the first girl. “I, well, I’m sorry,” I said, “I guess I’ll have to, well—”

  “Yeah, sure, you’re sorry,” she said, her brow contorted, “and so am I.” She let out a curse. “And after I’ve went and dragged my sweet ass all the way over here in the rain too—”

  “No,” I said, “no, you don’t understand.”

  “You just some schemer,” she said, “like all the rest. Somethin’ for nothin’, ain’t that about right?”

  It took all my powers of persuasion, which, believe me, weren’t much more than marginally developed at that point, to convince her to have a seat on the bed while I made a mad dash down the stairs, out into the street and back along the two blocks to where Prok sat in the Nash, interviewing his own colored prostitute. He wouldn’t be thrilled over the interruption. It was a rule, hard and fast, that all interviews must be conducted straight through in a controlled and private location, without any distractions whatever that might compromise the rapport established with the subject, no telephones ringing, no third parties hovering in the background, no emergencies of any sort. I knew this. And I knew what Prok’s impatience—and his wrath—could be like. Still, I had no choice. I ran hard all the way, afraid that my subject would get fed up and leave, and I rounded the corner by Shorty’s in full stride, the dark hump of the Nash rising up out of the black nullity of the pavement like something deposited there by the retreating glaciers. There was a light on inside—Prok’s flashlight—and the silhouettes of a pair of heads caught behind the windshield. Out of breath, I skidded to a halt on the wet sidewalk, took half a second to compose myself, and rapped gently at the driver’s-side window.

  That was the precise moment when the police cruiser rounded the corner behind me and the lights began to flash.

  I had never in my life been in trouble with the law and had no reason to expect anything but courtesy and neighborly assistance from the two peace officers who emerged from the cruiser, thinking absurdly that they’d come to help us contact as many prostitutes as possible so as to make it easier for us to line up our interviews. Events proved otherwise. Events, in fact, moved so swiftly from that moment on that I didn’t really have a chance to make sense of them until much later. The two patrolmen, both short and stocky, with the barrel chests and bandy-legged gait of rugby players, converged on me where I stood arrested at the window of the Nash. The first of them—he looked to be Prok’s age, with a pug nose and inflamed features—strode directly up to me, and without saying a thing took hold of both my arms, jerked them round behind me and clapped two conjoined discs of metal over my wrists. In a word, handcuffs.

  “But, but what are you doing?” I demanded. Or rather, stuttered. The rain was in my face, soaking the sleeves and shoulders of my jacket and infiltrating the pomaded weave of my hair, which sprang loose now in a sad barbaric tangle (in my urgency, I’d left both hat and overcoat in the room). “No, no, no, this is all wrong. You see, you, well, you don’t understand what—”

  The second policeman—he was fair-haired, with pale eyebrows and a little mustache that vanished like Paul Sehorn’s when the lights of the patrol car illuminated his face—had taken up my position at Prok’s window. His rapping, with the business end of a nightstick, was more insistent than mine had been. The window rolled down and I saw Prok’s astonished face framed there a moment, and then the policeman had his hand on the door and was jerking it open. “Okay,” he said, “out of the car.”

  All the way to the station house, as we sat wedged in on either side of the prostitute (Verleen Loy, five foot five, one hundred twenty-seven pounds, D.O.B. 3/17/24), Prok remonstrated with the patrolmen in his precise, wrathful tones. Did they know who he was? Did they know that the NRC, the Rockefeller Foundation and Indiana University supported his research? Were they aware that they were holding up vital progress toward understanding one of the most significant behavioral patterns of the human animal?

  They weren’t aware of it, no. In fact, one of them—the red-faced policeman who had handcuffed me and subsequently shoved me up against the brick wall at my back for no earthly reason—swung round in his seat at this point and addressed the prostitute in a tone I could only think was both crude and offensive. “Hey, Verleen,” he said, grinning wide, “are we holding up progress here?”

  The passing aura of a streetlight caught her face then. She had battered-looking eyes, teeth that seemed to have been sharpened to points. Her voice was reduced, hardly audible over the swish of the tires on the wet pavement. “You ain’t holdin’ up nothin’,” she said.

  At the station house, things seemed to take a turn for the better. The night captain, though he was deeply skeptical, was impressed by Prok’s manner and his dress (and I think he took pity on me too, with my disarranged hair and hangdog look). After determining that Prok was who he claimed to be, the night captain allowed him to put a call through to H.T. Briscoe, Dean of the Faculties at IU. I stood there looking on, the handcuffs digging at my wrists, as Prok recited the number from memory and the night captain conveyed it to the operator.

  It was past two in the morning. Verleen had been taken off and locked up in a cell somewhere, and I could hear the occasional shout or whimper emanating from the men’s cell block in the rear. I was frightened, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I wasn’t yet twenty-three, I’d seen little or nothing of the world, and here I was, on the wrong side of the law and facing some sort of convoluted morals charge that would blemish my record forever, and I was already frantic over what I would tell my mother—what I would tell Iris, for that matter. Solicitation. Wasn’t that what they charged you with? What about Sodomy? Fornication? Corrupting the morals of a minor? I saw myself at the work farm, in prison stripes, shuffling out to rake the yard.

  But then I heard Prok’s cool, collected tones as he explained the situation to Dean Briscoe, rudely awakened from his bed in a cozy room in a comfortable house back in the very Eden of Bloomington, and then I watched the night captain’s face as Prok handed him the phone and Dean Briscoe delivered his authoritative testimonial on the other end of the line, and it was only then that I knew the crisis had passed. Unfortunately, I never did recover my overcoat and hat, and we managed only six interviews on that trip, but on the positive side, it taught us a lesson—from then on, Prok never went anywhere without a letter from Dean Briscoe explaining his project and its validation by the highest authorities of Indiana University, said letter to be produced “in the event that the nature of his research takes him into localities where the purpose of what he is doing might not be clearly understood.”

  Back safe in Bloomington, I gave Iris a truncated version of our little contretemps, tried to make a joke of it, in fact, though my psychic wounds were still open and festering, but Iris didn’t find the story amusing, not at all. We were taking dinner together at the Commons (the roast pork with brown gravy, fitfully mashed potatoes and wax beans cooked to the consistency of cud), and she’d innocently asked how the trip had gone. I told her, glossing over some of the seamier details, and winding up with an extended lament over the loss of my hat and overcoat (for which Prok would make allowance in my next paycheck, incidentally).

  “Prostitutes, huh?” she said.

  I nodded. The overhead ligh
ting made a gargoyle’s mask of my face (I know because I was staring into my own reflection in a long dirty strip of mirror on the wall behind Iris). Outside, it was raining, a local manifestation of the same pandemic storm that had dogged us in Gary.

  Iris’s face was very pale and her mouth drawn tight. She laid her knife and fork carefully across her plate, though she’d barely touched her food. When she spoke, her voice was thick with emotion. “Do you often go with prostitutes?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “Of course not. That goes without saying.”

  “Do you ever—do you sleep with them?”

  I didn’t like the implied accusation, didn’t like the criticism—or belittling—of my professionalism and my work. And I was especially annoyed after what I’d been through the previous night. She couldn’t begin to imagine. “No,” I snapped. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Did you ever?”

  “Iris. Please. What do you think I am?”

  “Did you?”

  “No. And if you want to know the truth I never laid eyes on a prostitute in my life till last night and I wouldn’t treat them, prostitutes, that is, any different from anybody else. As far as interviews are concerned. You know perfectly well that for the project to succeed we need everybody’s history, from as wide a range of people as we can manage to contact, ministers’ wives, Daughters of the American Revolution, Girl Scout leaders”—and here the image of Mac, naked, flitted quickly through my brain like one of the flecks and blotches on the screen when the projector first flicks on—“and, yes, prostitutes too.”

  She looked away, caught in profile, her hair a small conflagration of shadow and light. “Did you ever sleep with anybody?” She spoke to the wall, her voice a whisper. “Besides me?”

  “No,” I said, and I don’t know why I lied when the whole ethos behind the project was to bring human sexuality out of the dungeon to which the priests had confined it and to celebrate it, glory in it, experience it to the full, without prohibition or inhibition. But still, given the moment and the situation, which was fraught to say the least, I lied.

  “But why not?” she said, lifting her head to give me a sidelong glance, the glance of the executioner and the hanging judge. “Isn’t that—sleeping with people, I mean—exactly what Dr. Kinsey—Prok—says is the right thing to do? Isn’t it part of the program? Sexual experimentation, I mean?”

  “Well,” I said, and a gobbet of meat, soft as a sponge, seemed to have climbed back up my throat, “not exactly. He is happily married himself, you know, and he, he wants us to be too—”

  Her face was flushed. The crucified pork congealed in its gravy on the table before her. I felt a draft come up, somebody opening a door somewhere, and I craned my neck to pinpoint the source of it. “Do you feel a draft?” I said.

  “You’re lying to me,” she said. “I know you’ve slept with people.”

  “Who?” I demanded.

  She was working loose the ring I’d given her, twisting it back and forth to get the band over the bone of the finger joint. It was a diamond solitaire, and I’d borrowed twenty-five dollars from Prok, as an advance on my salary, to put a down payment on it. I had never in my life purchased anything so lavish—had never even dreamed of it. I watched her jerk it off her finger now and set it on the table between us. She was feeling around her for her jacket, all her emotions concentrated in her eyes and the unforgiving slash of the drawn-down wound of her mouth. “Mac,” she said. “Mac, that’s who.”

  8

  Talk of women’s intuition, of the subliminal signals the sex is somehow able to pick up on, in the way of the dog that knows its master is coming home when the car is still six blocks away or the cat that lifts its ears at the faintest rustle of tiny naked feet in the farthest corner of the attic. For a solid week I walked around with that ring in my pocket, and I made no attempt to contact Iris or convince her that she was wrong, other than what I told her that night at the Commons—that she was out of her mind, that Mac was a surrogate mother to me, and far too old, and married, and that I wasn’t attracted to her in any case. Iris listened, wordlessly, as if to see how far I would go before I stumbled, and then she was on her feet and stalking across the cafeteria to the door at the far end of the room. Which she slammed behind her.

  This was our first tiff, the first round in a long series of preliminary bouts and featured attractions, and I was miserable over it—miserable, but not about to give in. What had I done, after all? Interviewed a couple of prostitutes? That was my job, couldn’t she see that? And if such an insignificant thing could set her off, I dreaded to think what the future would bring, when certainly we would be obliged to interview a hundred more prostitutes, not to mention whole busloads of sex offenders of all stripes. I wanted to call my mother and tell her the engagement was off, but, as I say, I’d always had difficulty confiding in her because she never seemed to see things my way—she would take Iris’s side, I was sure of it, and lay me open like a whitefish she was filleting for the pan. In the end, I went to Mac.

  I chose a time when I knew Prok would be in class and the children at school. I made my way down the familiar street, the sun in my face, leaves unfurling on the trees, the world gone green with the April rains. The garden was coming along nicely, just as Prok had said it would, though we were devoting less time to it this spring because of the accelerating schedule of our travels, and I might have lingered over the flowerbeds for a moment or two before I screwed up the courage to ring the bell. All I could think of was Iris and what I could do to extricate myself from the sheath of lies I’d constructed around me—a marriage counselor, I needed a marriage counselor even before I was married—and I was more than a little tentative with regard to Mac too. She’d given us her blessing, just as Prok had, and she couldn’t have been more excited if one of her own children were getting married. I wondered how I could turn around now and tell her that it was all off—off because of what we’d done between us, in the garden, on the bentwood sofa in the living room and on the marital bed in the room upstairs. So I stood there, vaguely aware of the life seething around me, the insects descending on the flowers and the sparrows squalling from their nests in the eaves, took a deep breath and put my finger to the bell.

  Mac came to the door in her khaki shorts and the matching blouse with the GSA insignia over the breast pocket, but she was wearing a cardigan too. (The house was cold this time of year because Prok, always frugal, shut down the furnace on the first of April, no matter what the weather—a habit I’ve taken up myself, by the way. Why waste fuel when the body makes its own heat?) She’d been in the kitchen, fixing a pot of vegetable soup and bologna sandwiches for the children’s lunch, and she was expecting the postman, one of the neighbors, a traveling salesman—anybody but me. I saw it in her eyes, a moment of recognition, and then calculation—how much time did she have before the children came tramping up the path? Enough to pull me in and wrestle off my clothes? Enough for a quick rush to climax with her shorts at her knees and the blouse shoved up to her throat?

  “Hello,” I said, and my face must have been heavy because the kittenish look went right out of her eyes. “Have you—may I come in for a minute?”

  She said my name as if she were sleepwalking, then pulled back the door to admit me. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What is it?”

  I stood there, shaking my head. I don’t think I’d ever felt so hopeless as I did in that moment.

  Mac knew just what to do. She led me to the kitchen, sat me down at the table with a cup of tea and set about feeding me what she could spare of the children’s lunch. I watched her glide round the kitchen, from stove to counter to icebox and back, a whole ballet of domestic tranquillity, and I began to let it all out of me. I remember there was a sound of hammering from the yard two houses over where they were putting up a garage and it seemed to underscore the urgency of the situation—and the hopelessness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, and the hammer thumped dully, then beat a f
rantic tattoo.

  To this point, Mac hadn’t offered much, other than the odd phrase—“And then what?” or “Do you take mustard, John?”—and I had the sudden intimation that she was jealous somehow, jealous of Iris and what she meant to me. Mac was masterful at inhabiting her role—dutiful wife of the scientist, selfless helpmeet, hostess, cook and mother—but I wondered how she really felt about things. About me, that is, and our relationship and how this would affect it—how it already had.

  “Should I—I mean, do you think I should be the one to, to—?” I wanted her to tell me to go to Iris and make it up, to say that honesty was the best policy, to let the truth come out and we’d all be the better for it, but, as usual, I fumbled round the issue.

  Mac pulled out the chair across from me and sat at the table, her own cup of tea in hand. She leaned forward to blow the steam off the cup, then sat up and stirred the dark liquid with a spoon. “You do love her, John,” she said. “You’re sure of it?”

  I did, I was sure I did, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d confessed it to Mac, but now, sitting in the gently percolating, sun-grazed kitchen where we’d copulated on the linoleum tiles in front of the stove—the two of us, Mac and I—it felt awkward to admit it.

  “Yes,” I said, and the hammer came down twice. “I’m sure.”

  She took a long while over it, blowing at her tea with pursed lips, then lifting the cup to her mouth and watching me over the edge of the ceramic rim. Her hands were beautiful, her eyes, the imbricate waves of her hair. I was in love with her too—with Mac—and I’d been fooling myself to think it was purely biological. And what had Prok said to his critics, to the Thurman B. Rices and all the rest who accused him of taking the spiritual essence out of sex, of regarding it in a purely mechanistic way? They’ve had three thousand years to go on about love, now give science a chance. I’d agreed with him, taken it as a credo and worn the credo as a badge. It was us against them, the forces of inquiry and science against the treacle you heard on the radio or saw on the screen. But now I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything. I set down my sandwich, too upset—too confused—to eat.