The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  The walk home was—well, I suppose you’d call it stimulating. Not in a sexual sense (as I said, we didn’t have the luxury of being sexually stimulated that night), but in an emotional one. For the first minute or so we fussed with the buttons of our coats, pulled our collars up against the breeze and leaned into each other as we hurried down the street, not a word exchanged between us. There was a premonitory scent of winter on the air, of the cold rock-strewn Canadian wastes and the stiffened fur of all the hundreds of thousands of beasts creeping across the tundra up there, and the sky was open overhead, the stars splashed from horizon to horizon like the white blood of the night. I felt like going out somewhere for a nightcap, but I knew Iris would refuse—absurdly, though she was a married woman, she was still under jurisdiction of the dorm, the RA and curfew—so I found myself instead saying the first thing that came into my head. “So what about Corcoran,” I said. “What did you think of him?”

  Her head was down, her shoulders slumped, one hand at the collar of her coat. She was moving along at a brisk pace—we both were. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “He seems all right.”

  “All right? Is that all?”

  My hands were cold—I hadn’t thought of gloves; it was too early in the season—and I’d looped my arm through hers and forced my right hand into the pocket of my coat. The left I stuffed down into my trousers pocket and kept it there, though I found it awkward to walk off-balance like that. Leaves scuttered before us. There was the sound of a car backfiring up the street behind us, where the other guests were leaving Prok’s party. “I don’t know,” she said again. “Persuasive, I guess.”

  “Persuasive? What do you mean?”

  “He’s a good talker. Smooth. He’ll make a sterling interviewer, I’m sure.”

  “Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

  She turned her face to me, a cold pale oval of reflected light, then looked down at her feet again. “No, not at all,” she said. “I’m just being practical. He’s a perfect fit. He’ll take your place without so much as a ripple—”

  “He’s not going to take my place.”

  “Did you see the way Kinsey looked at him?”

  I was shivering, I suppose, my coat too light, the wind knifing at my trousers. A chill went through me. I saw Corcoran’s face then, saw Prok hovering over him throughout the evening, as proud as if he’d given birth to him himself, and I knew in that moment what there was between them—the same thing Prok and I had together. I couldn’t help myself. I was angry suddenly. Jealous. “So what?” I said. “What’s it to me? I keep telling you, we need more hands.”

  Iris said nothing. The leaves crunched underfoot. After a moment, she said: “But he is persuasive.”

  “Really,” I said, and I wasn’t thinking, not at all. “What did he persuade you of? I’d like to know. I really would.”

  We were at the end of the block now, turning right, toward campus. The wind came naked round the corner. A pair of automobiles, one following so closely on the other they might have been tethered, slammed over a branch the wind had thrust in the street and the sound was like a burst of sudden explosions. “To give my history,” Iris said, but I thought I hadn’t heard her right, and so I said, “What?”

  “To give my history. To Kinsey.”

  I was dumbfounded. I’d been nagging her for months, and here this new man—this persuader, this Corcoran—had won her over in what, ten minutes’ time? “Good,” I said, numb all over. “That’s good. But how—I mean, why listen to him if your own, well, your own husband can’t convince you, and after all this time?”

  The taillights of the two cars receded up ahead of us. They both turned right on Atwater, in front of the campus, and were gone. “He just seemed to make sense,” she said, “that was all. For the good of the project, like you’ve been saying. His wife’s already arranged to give her history on your next trip to South Bend—maybe you’ll get to take it, John, and wouldn’t that be just swell, keep it in the family, huh?”

  “And so, what’s your point? I see nothing wrong with—”

  “Kinsey said he’d get him a deferment.”

  We walked on in silence. Of course Prok would get him a deferment—he was going to get me a deferment too, for the sake of the project, and it had absolutely nothing to do with whether our wives gave their histories or not. I should have been gratified, Corcoran’s first day on the scene and he’d convinced Iris to join in for the sake of team spirit, and that was wonderful, terrific news, hallelujah to the heavens, but I wasn’t gratified, I was rankled. “That has nothing to do with it,” I said.

  The campus loomed up before us, the odd office lit in a random grid against the backdrop of the night, the frost-killed lawn underfoot, more leaves and the advancing crunch of our footsteps. “What about Mac?” she said then.

  “Mac?” I echoed. I wasn’t following her. “What do you mean, Mac? Was Mac in on it? Did she persuade you too—or help persuade you? Is that what you mean?”

  “No. Mac as a wife. As part of the inner circle. Now it’ll be three husbands and three wives—if I give my history to Prok, that is, and if he goes to the draft board.”

  “He will,” I said, simply to say something, to keep it going. “He has, I mean. He’s trying his best.”

  “But what about Mac?” she repeated. We were crossing the quad to the women’s dorm, figures gathered there by the vault of the door, couples in the shadows, the rooms overhead radiating light as if all the life of the campus were concentrated there. And it was. At least at this hour.

  “What about her?”

  Iris suddenly jerked her arm away from my mine and quickened her pace. “You slept with her,” she said. “She told me all about it.” The light from the high bank of windows was on her face now, on her hair, silvering the shoulders of her coat and the dark crenellations of her hat. “She told me,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice, an amalgam of rage and despair strangling the words in her throat, “and you lied to me.” She swung round suddenly and planted herself right there in front of the building. “You,” she said. “You, John Milk. My husband.”

  I didn’t know what to say. It would have required a speech, would have required hours, days, would have required a whole heterogeneous philosophy delivered and debated point by excruciating point, and we had ten diminishing minutes till curfew. “I didn’t want to, to surprise you,” I said, and that was the best I could come up with. “Or, or hurt you, if, I mean, if—”

  “Liar.” She spat it at me. Heads turned. The lovers in the shadows came out of their clinches for one hard instant. “You’re a liar,” she said, then swung round, went up the steps and into the arena of light even as I stood there and watched her jerk open the door and slam it behind her.

  A week later, Iris made an appointment with Prok and gave up her history. As I remember it, there was an unusual amount of rain that fall, and then an early snow. Everything was locked in, the weeks seemed to conflate, and then Corcoran sent word that he was accepting Prok’s offer and the Japanese climbed into their planes in the hour before dawn and descended on Pearl Harbor. And nothing was ever the same again.

  10

  Given what I’ve already revealed about myself, I suppose it will come as no surprise if I tell you that the first chance I got (when Prok was away on his own, lecturing to a civic group in Elkhart, and, incidentally, taking Violet Corcoran’s sex history in neighboring South Bend), I went straight to the files to look up two histories of special interest—Corcoran’s and my wife’s. Can I tell you too that I didn’t feel the slightest guilt or compunction? Not this time. Not anymore. Prok was away, and it was only his intervention that would have stopped me, and nothing short of it. I broke Prok’s new ironclad code within the hour, pulled the files and spread them out side by side on the desk before me.

  It was just before the holidays, the whole country whipped into a froth of martial hysteria and Prok already fretting over the rumored rationing of gasoline, tires and the re
st, insisting we’d have to take the train more now, the train and the bus. Everyone was distracted, shocked, outraged, so caught up in the events of December seventh that even Christmas itself seemed inconsequential—who could think of Santa Claus when Tojo and Hitler were loose in the world? As I remember, we were having a cold snap, the sky the color of shell casings, snow flurries predicted for later in the day, and I was in the office early, with a number of tasks ahead of me. There was the endless tabulation of data, the drawing up of tables and graphs, and correspondence too, though of course the volume was nothing like what we—Prok mostly—had to contend with after publication of our findings in ’48. By that time, Prok was receiving thousands of letters a year from absolute strangers seeking advice or adjustments of their sexual problems, offering up their services as friends of the research, sending on explicit photos and sex diaries, erotic art, dildos, chains, whips and the like. I remember one letter in particular, from an attorney representing a client who had been charged with “knowing a pig carnally by the anus,” and requesting Prok’s expert testimony as to the overall frequency of such acts with animals (six percent of the general population; seventeen percent of the single rural population). Prok declined. Politely.

  At any rate, there I was, bent over the desk, a Christmas carol infesting some part of my brain (Iris and I had attended a choral concert the night before), one of Prok’s colleagues clearing his throat or blowing his nose down the hall somewhere while secretaries in heels clacked on by as if so many miniature locomotives were running over the rails of a miniature train set. I turned to Iris’s history first, and there were no surprises there, just as I’d assumed. She hadn’t even known what the term “masturbation” meant until she was seventeen and already in college, and then she was too consumed with her own inhibitions to try it more than two or three times, and never to the point of orgasm; she’d experienced both manual and oral stimulation of her breasts on the part of men—boys—other than me, but no petting and no coitus until the time of her engagement and marriage. She’d had limited experience with her own sex, and that at a very young age, no animal contacts, few fantasies. She’d never employed foreign objects, never (till now) taken the male genitalia into her mouth.

  There was nothing there I hadn’t seen a hundred times already, and I wondered why she’d been so reluctant to give up her history—truly, it was as pedestrian as could be—and then I wondered if that wasn’t it, that she was ashamed of having so little to offer us, as if all we cared about were the extreme cases, the sexual athletes, the promiscuous and jaded, the individuals who dropped off the end of the bell curve. Could that have been it? Or was it something deeper, some resistance to the tenor of the study itself? To Prok? To me? For a minute I felt my heart would break—it hadn’t been easy for her, and she’d done it for me, for me alone, and if it weren’t for that she’d never have offered herself up to the project. It just wasn’t in her nature. I might have taken a moment then to stare out the window into the sealed gray crypt of the sky, might have spoken her name aloud: Iris. Just that: Iris.

  She was so nervous the day she came in, so tightly wound, so shy and soft and beautiful. “Dr. Kinsey,” she said in a voice that was barely audible, “hello. And hello, John.” I’d known she was coming, and I’d been in a state myself—all day, in fact. Every time I heard a footfall in the corridor, and never mind that it was hours still until her appointment, I couldn’t help shifting in my seat and stealing a glance at the door. I thought I was ready for her, ready to put this thing behind us as if it were the last in a series of marital rites, like an inoculation or the VD test required for the license, and yet still, though I’d been watching the clock and there was an ache in the pit of my stomach as if I hadn’t eaten in a week, when it came to it I was almost surprised to see her there. I’d been working on a calculation that was a bit over my head (standard deviation from the mean in a sample of men reporting nocturnal emissions) and she’d come in noiselessly, as soft-footed as a cat. I looked up and there she was, stoop-shouldered, waiflike, sunk into her coat like a child, her gloved hands, the hat, the quickest, fleeting, agitated smile on her lips. Prok and I rose simultaneously to greet her.

  “Iris, come in, come in,” Prok was saying, all the mellifluous inflection of his smoothest interviewer’s tones pouring out of him like syrup, “here, let me help you off with your coat—bitter out there, isn’t it?”

  Iris said that it was. She gave me a smile as she shrugged out of her coat and Prok bustled round her, hot on the scent of yet another history. Did she look tentative, even a bit dazed? I suppose so. But I didn’t really have much time to think about it one way or the other because Prok immediately turned to me and said, “I expect you’ll want to go home a bit early this afternoon, Milk? Or better yet, perhaps you’d like to take your work down to the library—?”

  And then there was Corcoran’s history.

  But Corcoran’s history—and it was, as I’ve said, extensive, the most active single file we’d yet come across—isn’t perhaps as important at this juncture as sketching in the denouement of that scene with Iris on the steps of the dorm, because that has more than a little bearing on all of this, and all that was to come. She called me a liar. Slammed the door. Left me in the cold. As I stood there in the unrelenting wind, undergraduates and their dates slipping round me like phantoms, I was faced with two incontrovertible facts: Mac had told her everything, and she’d known about it all this time, through our reconciliation, our wedding and honeymoon and the dawdling intimate Sunday afternoons of summer and on into the fall, and she’d never said a word. She’d just watched me, like a spy, awaiting her opening. Well, now she had it. The door slammed behind her, the dorm swallowed her up and I staggered across campus like an invalid till I found a pay phone and rang her number.

  The RA answered. “Bridget?” I said. “It’s John Milk. Can you get Iris for me?”

  “Yes, sure,” she said, but her voice was distant and cold, and I wondered how much she knew. The phone hit the table with a hard slap, as of flesh on flesh, and then I was listening to the buzz of static. After a moment, the usual sounds came through: the scuffing of feet in the background, a giggle, a man’s voice. “Good night,” somebody said, another man, and then a girl’s voice: “One more kiss.”

  When Iris finally came on the line—it might have been two minutes later or ten, I couldn’t say—she sounded as if she were speaking to a stranger, an unsolicited caller, somebody selling something. “What do you want?” she demanded.

  “I just, well, I just wanted to, well, talk —that is, if, if—”

  “What did you think you were doing?” she said then, and she sounded better now, sounded like herself—furious, but in some way resigned. “Did you think I was stupid or something? Or blind? Was that it?”

  “No, it wasn’t that. It was just that, well, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but I didn’t want to upset you in any way, that was all. It’s the project. It’s the human animal. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, nothing at all.”

  She was silent. I listened to the blitzkrieg of static over the line and she might have been a thousand miles away instead of just across the quad.

  “Listen, Iris,” I said, “you’re going to have to try to overcome these antiquated notions about, well, relations between consenting adults—this is the modern age and we’re scientists, or we mean to be, and all this superstition and fear and blame and finger-pointing is holding us back, as a society, I mean. Can’t you see that?”

  Her voice came back at me as if she hadn’t heard what I was saying at all, a small voice, quavering around the edges: “And Prok?”

  “What about him?” I said.

  “You and Prok?”

  I was in a phone booth, bathed in yellow light. It was cold. The wind rattled the door, seeped through the cracks where the hinges folded inward. I was shivering, I’m sure, but this was my wife, this was Iris, and I had to get everything out in the open, had to be straightforw
ard and honest from here on out or we were doomed, I could see that now. “Yes,” I said.

  What came next was a surprise. She didn’t throw it back at me, didn’t shout “How could you?” or demand to know the occasions and the number of times or ask me if I loved him or he me or where she and Mac fit into all of this, and she didn’t use any of those hateful epithets people are so quick to make use of, invert, tribad, fag. She just said, “I see.”

  What did I feel? Shame? A little. Relief? Yes, certainly, but it was as tenuous as the connection that fed our voices through the superstructure of the night. “I love you,” I said. “You, and nobody else. The rest is all—”

  “A bodily function?”

  “Iris, listen. I love you. I want to see you face-to-face, because this isn’t—we shouldn’t, not over the phone—”

  “Mac,” she said, and I couldn’t be sure—the connection was bad—but there was a knife edge of sorrow to her voice, a slicing away from the moment that made me feel she was about to break down in tears. “Mac and I talked. She’s like a mother, but you know that, don’t you? She, she told me the same thing you did. It doesn’t mean anything, not a thing, it’s just—just what? Animals rubbing their parts together.”