The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  For all that, the party went off as well as could be expected. Or better, even. Dick and Ezra and the two girls—let’s call them Mary Jane and Mary Ellen—were pretty well lit when they arrived and I don’t think they would have noticed or cared if we’d served the lamb on a skewer. As it was, I carved the meat at the stove and arranged the slices on an ordinary dinner plate, after Iris had made sure that everyone had a chance to admire it in the pan, that is, and by the time the pie and coffee were served we were laughing over the lost platter and the inept husband who couldn’t be trusted in the kitchen. Mary Ellen, seated on my right, gave me a playful cuff on the shoulder and called me “butterfingers.” “You butterfingers, you,” she said, and both sisters let out a scream of laughter.

  I brought out the bourbon to spike our coffee and Ezra poured his cup full to the brim and bolted the whole business while it was still too hot for anyone else even to sip, and then asked for more. A vacant look came into his eyes after that, but he sat there happily, one redolent arm thrust over Mary Jane’s shoulder while his free hand maneuvered his fork round a second piece of cobbler. He and Dick, who’d stayed on through the fall for graduate school and a teaching assistantship in the Engineering Department, were leaving in the morning for basic training. This was their last night of freedom, their last fling, and I wanted—Iris and I wanted—to make it memorable for them. There was beer left still, and when we moved away from the table and into the sitting room, Dick poured a fresh round of gin and tonics for himself and the girls.

  At some point, and I didn’t really recall too much of it the following morning, let alone what I can summon up at this juncture, the conversation turned away from the war and how Dick and Ezra were sure to turn the tide, whip Hitler with one hand tied behind their backs and come steaming home triumphant by fall, to me and my situation. Dick was sunk into the couch, his arm fastened round Mary Ellen and his hand resting lightly on her left breast. The radio was on, the volume turned down low out of respect for the neighbors, something moody and blue seeping in out of the airwaves. “Kinsey really did get you that deferment, huh?” he said.

  “Kinsey?” Mary Ellen said. “You mean Professor Kinsey? Dr. Sex?”

  Mary Jane, who’d been locked in an embrace with Ezra in the easy chair, lifted her head a moment to let out a giggle.

  “That’s right,” I said. “Yes. Dr. Kinsey. I work for him.”

  “Doing research,” Iris put in. “He’s terrific with statistics, he does all the figures—”

  Ezra let out a snort. “I’ll bet he does—but what do you do with all those figures, huh, John?” And he and Dick shared a lascivious laugh.

  Mary Ellen was slow to form the next thought, but I watched her compose her features and struggle with the notion till she got it out. “You mean … you, you’re a sex researcher?”

  I was seated on one of the hard-backed kitchen chairs I’d dragged into the sitting room to make space for everyone. As I’ve said, I had no qualms whatever about the work—I was Prok’s right-hand man, his disciple in everything—but I didn’t like having to defend it, not in mixed company, not in my own living room. I looked into Mary Ellen’s eyes—she had nice eyes, her best feature, along with her consequential figure—and just nodded.

  She made a cooing noise, turned to Dick and kissed him full on the mouth. When she came up for air she treated us to a coy smile and said that sex was the most fascinating subject she could think of. “I love sex,” she said, cooing still. “I love men, I’m sorry, but that’s just who I am.” A pause. “Do you get to watch? I mean, when people are …when they’re”—she looked to Iris to see how far she could go—“you know, doing it?”

  I was long past the stage of coloring, but I felt the heat in that room and my wife’s eyes on me, and Dick’s and Ezra’s too. “No,” I said, raising a hand to smooth back my hair, “no, we just—”

  “They just ask questions,” Iris answered for me. She gave me a look I couldn’t fathom. “Isn’t that right, John?”

  Mary Jane had come back to consciousness, sprawled in Ezra’s lap and with her lipstick smeared in broad ovals at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dull with drink and the lateness of the hour. The faint wail of a saxophone rose from the radio like the cry of a strangled soul, then faded out again. “Questions?” she said. “What kind of questions?”

  “How much do you masturbate?” Iris said, and she was still looking at me. “How many men you’ve been with, how many orgasms you have, how often you fellate your boyfriends. That sort of thing.”

  There was a silence. Dick lifted his head as if he hadn’t heard a thing we’d said for the past five minutes. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I guess you’ve got a wife and all that, so I can’t blame you for taking the deferment, I really can’t.”

  Another silence. The comment just sat there crouching over the evening, and no one wanted to touch it, least of all me. The announcer came on then to inform us that the station was signing off for the night, and we all stared at the radio till the fuzz of static replaced the broadcast and I began to think it was time to turn in. Finally Mary Jane roused herself again long enough to ask, “What’s fellate?”

  Iris and I had agreed beforehand that we would retire early and let the two couples have the benefit of the couch and easy chair and the equable temperature produced by the furnace rather than having to make do in a frigid hallway somewhere or the backseat of a borrowed car, and so we went to bed not long after that and left our guests in the front room. I was fairly well gone at that point, and so was Iris, and I don’t think I even got around to brushing my teeth before I fell into the bed as if I were plummeting from a high dive. Instantly, I was asleep.

  I woke sometime in the night with a dry throat, a condition that often afflicts me when I’ve been drinking. I was having a dream about walking into the drugstore and ordering a chocolate phosphate that magically turned into a Coca-Cola on ice with beads of condensation standing out on the glass that was like a cold compress in my hand, and then I was up and out of bed and heading toward the bathroom in my bare feet. But it wasn’t just my feet that were bare. I’ve always slept in the nude, at least ever since puberty when my mother stopped looking in on me at night, and in the disorientation of waking I’d forgotten entirely that there were guests in the house. The truth of it was, I was still drunk. Even so, something alerted me to the situation—a scent, the sound of a furtive movement, the faint trembling light of the candle Iris had left burning in the main room.

  It took me a moment, fumbling my way down the hall step by faltering step, to realize that I was not alone. There was someone else there, a deepening shadow that seemed to concentrate the darkness against the wall just in front of me. I reached out a hand and felt flesh, a woman’s flesh, two complicit breasts to linger over, the heat of her skin, of her tongue, and a whisper: “I was looking for the bathroom …”

  What would the proper host have done? Escorted her to the lavatory, I suppose. Provided her with fresh towels, a bar of soap, eau de cologne. I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t even have time to think, really—one minute I was asleep, and the next I was making tactile contact with the smooth hot inflammatory skin of a strange naked woman in my own hallway even while the sounds of distant snoring and the ticking, somewhere, of a clock, came to me. Her nipples were hard, her vagina was wet. Instantly, we were inseparable, and I don’t blame myself, not in the least, because it was the natural impulse of the moment, uncomplicated, salubrious, research on the fly, as it were.

  I never did discover whether the friend of the research that night was Mary Ellen or Mary Jane, not that it mattered.

  11

  Automobiles were on my mind that winter, even as rationing went into effect and the auto assembly lines switched over to war production. In December, just before the Japanese struck, Prok had turned his considerable investigative energies to seeking out a second car, reasoning that it was unfair to deprive Mac and the children of transportation for such lon
g stretches when we were out on the road lecturing and collecting histories. After having examined a dozen or more vehicles for sale around town, he finally settled on a late-model Buick that featured almost-new tires and an unblemished finish in a shade of blue so deep it was almost black. The car had belonged to one of his colleagues at IU, an elderly music professor who had passed on the year before and left the car garaged with his widow, who’d never learned to drive it. Prok sat down with the widow over tea one afternoon and collected not only the car (at a rock-bottom price), but her sex history as well. I was there, at the house on First Street, with Iris and Mac and the children, all of us waiting on pins and needles to see if Prok could pull it off, and I remember the celebratory flash of the sun catching the windshield as he swung into the driveway and the look of naked triumph on his face. Ostensibly, by the way, this was to be Mac’s car, while we continued to rely on the wheezing, unsteady Nash for our peregrinations, but in fact, from the day Prok motored into the driveway with it, the Buick was ours.

  Of course, since Iris and I were to set up our household a few weeks later, our need for a car wasn’t quite as urgent as it once was, but still I think I wanted an automobile of my own at that time as much as I’d ever wanted anything. On Sunday afternoons Iris and I would bundle up and walk across town—and sometimes even out into the nether areas where the houses gave way to farms and open land—just to have a look at this or the other ancient collapsing Tin Lizzie we couldn’t have afforded in any case. But we looked, because you never knew. Every time I saw an ad—“1929 Model A, good tires, needs work, best offer; 1934 Chevy, clean”—I built something in my mind, and every time, without fail, I was disappointed. I wasn’t a mechanic. Didn’t, in fact, know the first thing about spark plugs or flywheels or transmission oil. I had hope, though. I was looking for something reliable, something cheap and efficient, with a sound engine and rust-free chassis, and I didn’t care about make, model or year. Because, as I’ve said, the road out of town always beckoned to me and I sometimes felt—as both student and married man—that I was stranded in Bloomington, surrounded and given up for dead. There were buses, the train and my trips with Prok, sure, but if I had four wheels under me I could be my own master and go where I liked, when I liked.

  It must have been toward the end of February, and I can’t really recall whether it was before or after our little farewell party for Dick and Ezra, when Corcoran came to Bloomington to stay. There had been a break in the weather—clear skies and daytime temperatures that climbed up into the forties—and I remember I was just leaving Biology Hall to run an errand for Prok when a horn tooted and a car pulled up to the curb in front of me. It was a yellow Cadillac La Salle convertible with crisp whitewall tires and chrome hubcaps, and the top was down. At the wheel, in a tweed jacket and with a pipe clenched in the corner of his mouth, was Corcoran. He thrust both arms up over his head and waved them in transect as if he were lost at sea. “John,” he called, “hey, John! I’ve arrived!”

  I don’t know what I said to him in response, something about the car, I suppose. It was the sort of thing you came across in magazines, hands down the sportiest vehicle Bloomington had yet to see.

  “You like it?” he crowed, sliding out the door and pumping my hand. “Just got it a week ago. And you should have seen the thing cruise on the way down here, my hand on the horn the whole way because all you cows and you farmers in your hay wagons, just look out, here I come.”

  I made admiring noises, traffic passing by on the pavement, students pausing to gawk, the barren trees jammed into the ground up and down the street like so many gibbets. There was a suitcase on the passenger’s seat and a new tan fedora atop it. I was wondering how Corcoran could have afforded such a car on a social worker’s salary (his wife’s people had money, as I was later to learn), and wondering too how much Prok had offered him to come work with us—more than I was getting, that was for sure—when he looked from me to the suitcase and back again and said, “You think this’ll be okay here? The suitcase, I mean. Just for a minute?”

  “Well,” I said, “I guess, well, sure—”

  “You wouldn’t want to keep an eye on it, just for a minute, would you? See, I wanted to dash up and let Prok know I’m here—the apartment I can find afterward, that’s no problem … and by the way, I wanted to thank you, and Prok, I guess, for finding me the place.”

  This was the first I’d heard of it, and my face must have showed my confusion, because he added, “Or whoever was responsible. It was kind. It really was. See, I’ll need the next couple of months, while I’m batching it, to find something suitable for Violet and the kids, and this is really—well, I know how hard it is to find something in the middle of the semester…”

  As it turned out, I must have stood there at the curb for half an hour while flocks of students, townspeople and the odd professor ambled by, watching over the car and maybe even pretending it was mine. I did inspect the thing pretty thoroughly, even looked into the engine compartment and the trunk (tennis racket, a set of golf clubs, a pair of two-tone shoes and another suitcase), and toward the end of my little wait I sat at the wheel, just to get the feel of it. I was beginning to feel a bit uneasy—Prok would be wondering where I was—when I saw Corcoran and Prok emerge from Biology Hall and start up the walk toward me. Prok was moving along at his usual stiff pace, and Corcoran was keeping right up with him, stride for stride. They were both smiling, gesturing, deep in running conversation. Guiltily (though I don’t know why I should have felt guilty—I had been asked the favor of minding the car and suitcase, after all), I slid out from behind the wheel and eased the door shut. When they got to the car—to me, that is—both men looked up as if surprised to see me there, and Prok went immediately to the passenger’s side, lifted out the suitcase and handed it to me. He climbed in and shut the door without a word, then looked up at me and said, “See if you can fit that in down behind the seat, Milk, will you?” And then to Corcoran: “Very impressive, Corcoran, I must say. But a bit flashy, isn’t it?”

  I could see that Prok was getting a very high reading on his frugality monitor, not to mention his concern over any of his employees drawing undue attention to himself. The look on his face told me everything: A yellow convertible, he was thinking. And what next? No doubt too he was calculating how Corcoran’s layout for expenditure could have been more propitiously budgeted to the project, though that wouldn’t have been fair, but still —

  Corcoran was oblivious, as he so often was—this was one of his talents, as I was soon to learn. He coasted through life on greased wings, and he took what he wanted and gave what he liked in return. If the situation was oppressive or difficult in any way—and as the project took off and the public descended on us there were any number of occasions that caused me to squirm, to say the least—he simply ignored it. I don’t think it was because he was insensitive, quite the contrary, but just that he didn’t care. He was blithe. He was insouciant. He was Corcoran—and the world had better look out. All he said to Prok now was: “V-8 engine, Prok, runs like a dream. And does it have power.”

  I managed to fit the suitcase in the space behind Prok’s seat, and then Prok gave my hand a pat and said, “Go on back up to the office, Milk—I’m just going to take a few minutes here to settle Corcoran in at his apartment, just to get it over with. We’ll be back inside of an hour, and then”—with a glance for Corcoran—“then we’ll get some real work done.”

  Corcoran put the car in gear, revved the engine and took off with a squeal, Prok already beginning to gesticulate, no doubt giving him the first in an unending series of driving instructions. I stood there and watched the car recede down the block, then I turned round and went back up to the office in Biology Hall, the errand—whatever it was—all but forgotten.

  There was a dinner party that Saturday evening, then a musicale the following Sunday for a select group of Prok’s colleagues, including the Briscoes and President Wells (Prok was showing off his newest acquisition, t
his handsome, shining, confident young man with the yellow convertible, and that was only to be expected), and then the three of us were off on our first collective trip in the streamlined shell of the Buick. Prok drove, Corcoran in the passenger’s seat beside him, while I sat in back and gazed out on the countryside. As usual, Prok never stopped chattering from the moment he and Corcoran swung by the apartment to pick me up till we arrived at our destination, Corcoran, as new man, doing his best to punctuate some of Prok’s fluent observations with thoughts of his own, and I just leaning back with half-closed eyes and letting it all drift over me. Was I disillusioned over having my place so immediately and completely usurped? Yes, of course I was, at least at first. But I quickly began to see the advantage in it—I now had someone to divide Prok’s attention, absorb some of his excess energy as well as his criticism, his rigidity and, not least, his sexual needs. And so, as I sat back against the seat in the relative luxury of the Buick, half-listening to the conversation up front and replying with a nod or grunt when I was directly drawn into it, I began to feel that things were definitely looking up and that some of the pressure I’d been under was bound to lift.

  Because I had been tense. In the weeks before Corcoran’s arrival Prok and I had been working on our grant proposals as well as pushing ourselves to travel and collect as many histories as we could before rationing went into effect, and Prok had become increasingly demanding under the sway of his own pressures. Perhaps it was the uncertainty of the times (he never said a word about the war, never followed developments or mentioned world events except as they related to the research, and yet it was clear that he was increasingly concerned over the potential damage to the project), and perhaps too it was that he felt me drawing away from him emotionally since I’d moved in with Iris. He wanted sexual relations and I acquiesced, but there was no joy in it, and he must have felt that. I remember one night in a motor court outside Carbondale when he came to me naked and erect after a long day’s driving and interviewing and all I wanted was to turn over and go to sleep, and I told him as much. “What’s the matter,” he said, easing down on the bed beside me, “you’re not getting sex shy on me, are you?”