The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  The room itself was a shambles, but that’s about all I remember of it. Except that it had a high ceiling and a big, walk-in closet that had once been an anteroom of some sort and was now separated from the bedsit by a finger-greased quilt stretched across the doorway on a wire. Ginger’s dresses—a dozen or more, smelling of her underarms and the cologne she used to mask the smell of her tricks, one from the other—hung on wire hangers in the forefront of the closet, while her shoes and undergarments were scattered underfoot. “Here it is,” she said in a high, fluting voice that could have belonged to a woman half her size, to a child, and she held out her hand, palm up, to receive the dollar Prok had promised.

  “Swell,” Prok said, reverting to the vernacular. “Just grand.” He’d swept back the quilt to inspect the arrangements and the grin he gave her was almost ghoulish—the light was bad, yellowed and corrupt, issuing from a lamp at the bedside over which Ginger had laid a saffron scarf for effect, and it made his whole face seem to sag under the weight of his satisfaction. I glanced at Corcoran. He looked like a ghoul too. I wondered what my own face looked like. “This is just the ticket,” Prok said, laying the dollar bill across Ginger’s palm while we looked on as if we’d never seen money exchanged before, “but I wonder if you could do me a favor, Ginger? Just a tiny little one?”

  She’d turned her back to secrete the money somewhere on her person, and now she swung back round suspiciously. “Depends what it is.”

  “Would you mind if I”—Prok crossed the room and lifted the scarf from the lamp—“just removed this for the evening? Unless you’re really stuck on it—”

  A slow smile crept over her face. “Yeah,” she said, “yeah, sure. You’re the doctor.”

  When she’d gone off in search of her first trick (and I don’t know if I’ve explained this previously, but “trick” was the term prostitutes used then to describe their johns, and, of course, it’s still in current usage, though in those days only our lower-level subjects would have been conversant with it), we did what we could to make the closet comfortable, shifting some of Ginger’s underthings from the floor and moving the room’s only chair into the closet with us. We agreed to take shifts in the chair, so as to relieve the tedium of standing—this was going to be a long night, and we couldn’t afford to give ourselves away by any stretching or cracking of joints, let alone the fatal cough or sneeze. We talked in whispers now, all three of us keyed up with anticipation. What was it like? Like the juvenile thrill of hide-and-seek, I suppose, only with the delicious adult taint of the verboten layered over it. Living sex. We were about to witness living sex.

  It didn’t take long. There was the sound of footsteps on the porch, a low murmur of voices, then the click of the doorknob, and the three of us froze in place. The way Prok had arranged the quilt—and we’d all examined it from the outside to make sure we were completely hidden—gave us two points of access. Corcoran was at one end of the closet, peeping through the slit there, and Prok and I at the other. Prok was in the chair, perched at the very edge of it, as motionless as a fakir on a bed of nails, and I was hovering over him, so close we were practically conjoined. Movement, voices. I felt him tense. I didn’t dare breathe. From where we were stationed, we had a view of the now brightly lit bed, but we couldn’t see the door or what was happening there as Ginger and her john apparently embraced, clothes rustling, the allision of their shoes on the floorboards, and then the sudden startling basso of the man’s voice. “Shit, is this it?” he said, and the voice thrilled me, resonating from the cerebral cortex that registered it all the way down to the soles of my feet. “Well, shit,” he said again, movement now, and there they were—there he was—not five feet from us. I’d like to report that the man was some sort of bruiser, a tattooed sailor stranded ashore, a specimen, but that wasn’t the case. He was slight of build, average height, average in every way, with skin that seemed granulated under the harsh accounting of the light. Ginger was there, looming, the meat of her rump, her breasts. “You going to blow me,” he said, “or what?”

  “Anything you want, honey,” she said, bending to run her hand up the crotch of his pants. “You’re the doctor.”

  She wasn’t wearing underpants—stockings, yes, supported by black garters at the swollen midpoint of her thighs—and she was reluctant to fully undress, though that was what we wanted, as Prok had made clear beforehand. (From her point of view, removing her dress and brassiere was both a bother and a waste of time, an impediment to moving her johns in an efficient conga line in and out of the room, but from ours it was essential, if we were to observe the way the female corpus responds to sexual stimulation.) The man—the trick, the john—let her undo his fly while she was still fully dressed, and he massaged her scalp, squeezed her head as if it were a bowling ball he was about to pluck up and fling down the alley, as she fellated him. Her lips shone with the viscous fluid released by the Cowper’s glands by way of lubrication, and she took the whole thing into her mouth—and this was amazing—his entire phallus, right down to the root, as if she were a sword-swallower performing at the carnival. We were later to discover, incidentally, that among the many physiological modifications occurring during sexual activity, suspension of the gag reflex occurs in a high percentage of both women and men, thus demonstrating the adaptive role of the oral component in sexual response. But all that aside, can I tell you how amazed I was? How—unprofessionally—titillated?

  He pulled away from her before he reached orgasm, and only then did he begin to tug down his trousers. “On the bed, sister,” he told her, “because if you think you’re getting off that easy, you’re nuts. I paid for a fuck, didn’t I?”

  Ginger stretched out on the bed in compliance, hiking her skirts to display her nakedness, but then she seemed to remember her mission—we were in the closet, her auxiliary johns, and we’d paid for our fuck too—and she sat up again, took his penis in her hand and caressed it a moment, then pulled the dress up over her head and reached behind her to release the snaps of the brassiere and let her breasts fall free. Immediately he was on her, stimulating her nipples both with his fingers and tongue even as she guided him into her, but then, suddenly, he stopped in mid-thrust. “The light,” he said. “What gives with the fucking light? Don’t you know nothing about romance, sweetheart?”

  She did. Or at least apparently she did. Because until the moment he pulled out of her and snatched for the light, she’d been moaning and singing out to him as if there were no man better in the world and no moment richer than this. “Leave it on, honey,” she said. A theatrical pause, one finger stuck in the corner of her mouth. “I want to see every inch of you.”

  12

  The first thing I did when we got back to Bloomington three days later was go straight to Iris. It was past two in the morning, I was dirty, exhausted, hungry—famished, actually, since we hadn’t stopped to eat—and I could still feel the throb of the Buick’s engine like a permanent dislocation in the back of my skull. I’d personally recorded eight histories, including Gerald’s and Ginger’s, and I’d watched from the closet with Prok and Corcoran as Ginger entertained sixteen different men over the course of the three nights we spent in her company. Surprisingly, there really wasn’t all that much variety, and while I admit to being in a state of permanent sexual excitation throughout the entire time we were there, the novelty did tend to wear off after a while. The men were hirsute, glabrous, tall, short, fat, thin, they wore long johns, boxer shorts, sports coats and flannel shirts, galoshes, boots, tennis shoes. They had moles, birthmarks, tattoos, they were circumcised and uncircumcised, their penises angled to the left or the right or straight up, and they folded their clothes neatly atop the bureau or threw them on the floor in a twisted heap. As for the sex, it was entirely conventional, beginning with a brief period of fellatio in about half the cases and a certain degree of fumbling, licking and squeezing in the others, followed by penetration, the pumping of the naked white buttocks that were variously flaccid or tight wi
th the strain of the gluteal muscles, Ginger’s increasingly theatrical simulation of orgasmic ecstasy, and then the decline and fall and the absolute lack of interest in the female’s nudity, her exposed genitalia or even her face and eyes as the clothes were silently gathered up and hurriedly pulled back on and the door swung open and shut again.

  But I went to Iris. Went directly up the walk from the backseat of Prok’s car and into the apartment, which was utterly still and dark now but for the light leaching in from the streetlamp and the moon that hung over the town with all its symbolic heft. I went straight into the bedroom. She was asleep. Bundled in the blankets against the cold, her hair splayed out on the pillow, one eye winking open as I switched on the light beside the bed and the clock glowing and no sound anywhere in the bottomless cavern of the night. I was stripping off my clothes, jacket, shirt, trousers, and the light was on. I wanted her to see me, wanted her to admire me and the souvenir I’d held on to for her through three grueling days in a whore’s closet in Indianapolis. “John?” she murmured. “John? What time is it?”

  There was the smell of her, a smell I can’t describe, her own personal fragrance that was like no other, a compound of body heat, the emollients she used on her face and hands, the traces of her shampoo and her perfume and the natural oils of her scalp. “Shhhh,” I said, and I waited for her to acknowledge me, to see what I’d brought her, and yes, I know that our published research has shown that the majority of females are unaffected by a display of the erect phallus and that a portion are even offended by it, but it didn’t matter a whit that night. I was stimulated to the point of bursting and I wanted her to see that, to know it and feel it. “Shhhh,” I repeated, and I threw back the covers, all that warmth, the sight of her naked feet and ankles, her face turned to me now and her arms spreading wide in invitation. I slipped between the covers and lifted her nightgown and we never did shut the light off, not till morning.

  One night in a thousand nights, in five thousand nights, a man and his wife—a sex researcher and his wife—gratifying each other’s needs. It was the most ordinary thing in the world—or no, it was celebratory, celebratory still because we had the license of our own apartment and no John Jr. to worry over or anything else. We had intercourse six or seven times a week. We experimented with extended foreplay, with teasing, strip poker, with all the coital positions we could imagine. And all the while the project went forward, gained momentum, and Corcoran and I became ever more deeply involved—as friends, as colleagues—even as we jockeyed for position with Prok.

  Corcoran offered me a ride home after work one evening, and we wound up stopping off at a tavern for a drink. I thought of calling Iris, to tell her I’d be late, but there was no need really—the hours were never regular when you worked for Prok, and there was no telling when I’d be home on a given evening, but it was rarely earlier than seven. The tavern was the same student hangout I frequented senior year, the place where I’d sat breathless and palpitating with Laura Feeney and her friends in the wake of Prok’s arresting slide show. I remember smiling at the memory. It had seemed like a hundred years ago—and it was, in terms of what I’d learned and experienced since. Corcoran laid a bill on the bar and asked me what was so amusing.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s this place, I guess. I used to come here as a student.”

  At that moment, both of us, as if we were being manipulated by a force beyond our control, turned to watch a coed in a pair of slacks saunter by on the arm of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. “What a waste,” Corcoran said.

  I was grinning. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “yeah. A real waste.”

  He was staring off into the distance now, idly tapping a knuckle on the bartop. “I could relate to her,” he said. “Couldn’t you?”

  I said that I could, and then the bartender appeared and we both ordered martinis, up, with a twist, though I didn’t really care all that much for gin—Corcoran ordered first, that was all, and he made it sound good, so I said, “Second that.”

  What did we talk about that night through three martinis and a kind of delirium that made my head feel as if it were a pan full of sloshing water? Sex, certainly. The project. Prok. The immediate future, as in our next trip, scheduled for two days later. At some point, there was a pause, and he leaned forward to light a cigarette. “How do you feel about that, the trips, I mean?” he said, shaking out the match. “Is it—I don’t know—difficult at all? With Iris?”

  I looked out over the room a moment, caught the gaze of the coed we’d tracked earlier, and immediately dropped my eyes. “Well, yes, sure.” The third martini had lost its chill. The roof of my mouth felt as numb as if I’d been given an anesthetic at the dentist’s—gin, I didn’t like gin, and I didn’t know why I was drinking it. “But it’s part of the job. She understands that. We both do.” I lifted the thin-stemmed glass to my lips, conscious all at once of its fragility. “But what about you? You don’t, well—what about your wife?”

  Corcoran turned a bland face to me. There were golden highlights in his hair. He gave an elaborate shrug that began in his upper arms, migrated to his shoulders and finally to his neck and the rotating ball of his head. “It’s hard, but Violet’s got to keep the kids in school till June—we couldn’t very well uproot them. And when I do manage to see her—you remember I drove up there weekend before last?—when we do get together, believe me, the sex is terrific, red-hot, like you wouldn’t believe.”

  I didn’t know what to say. To this point I’d laid eyes on Violet Corcoran just once, when she’d come to town on the bus one weekend to get her bearings and help motivate her husband to find a suitable place for the long term. She was attractive, certainly—of Italian descent, with skin the color of olive oil, very dark eyes and a mouth that turned up in a natural pout, even at rest—but she was nothing compared to Iris. Maybe I was prejudiced—of course I was—but to my mind Iris was a true natural beauty and Violet Corcoran wasn’t in that category at all. I tried to picture her with her clothes off, picture her in bed with Corcoran, but the image flickered and vanished before I could get hold of it. Finally I said something like, “I guess there are some advantages, then, hmm?” And tried for a complicitous smile.

  There was traffic in and out of the bar, the high whinny of a laugh, the squeak and shuffle of men’s shoes. The jukebox was playing something I didn’t recognize. Corcoran squinted against the smoke rising from his cigarette, and I couldn’t help thinking he should be the one to give Prok his lessons in savoir faire. “Yeah,” he said finally, “but there are other advantages too, if you know what I mean.”

  “No,” I said, “what?”

  He drew at the cigarette, exhaled, set it down carefully in the corner of the ashtray and picked up a hard-boiled egg, which he began delicately tapping against the surface of the bar. I watched him for a moment as he peeled back the shell and the membrane beneath it, salted the slick white surface and took the entire thing into his mouth. “You know, batching it,” he said, chewing around his words. “Opportunities arise. Not that they wouldn’t if I were back home in South Bend—and you know I never let convention stand in my way—but it’s just that it’s, well, easier if you’re off on your own. Less complicated, you know?”

  I thought about that a moment, thought about him and Iris at the musicale, thick as thieves. I had nothing to add.

  “But you,” he said, turning to me, his face as bland and ineluctably handsome as any movie star’s, “don’t you … get out a bit yourself?”

  As I’ve said, I was past the stage of reddening—that sort of emotional report card was strictly for adolescents—but I did feel my heart pound out of synchronization for just a moment even as the lie flew to my lips. “No,” I said, thinking of that dark groping encounter in the hallway of my own apartment, “no, not really.”

  Then there came a night when I did get home early—just past six—and Iris wasn’t there. I’d been in the biology library all afternoon, sequestered in a b
ack corner working on a series of tables (Accumulative Incidence: Pre-Adolescent Orgasm From Any Source, By Educational Level; Active Incidence and Percentage of Outlet: Petting to Orgasm, By Decade of Birth) in support of our grant proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, my head down, minding my own business, while Elster stalked back and forth and glared at me from his desk as if the scratch of my pencil or the setting down of my ruler and T square were exploding the bibliographical calm of the place. I tried my best to ignore him, but whenever he came into my range of vision with an armload of papers or a cart of books, I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t been called up to fight our enemies in Europe, Africa or the Pacific. But then I studied him for a moment when he was busy at his desk—the slack posture, fleshless limbs, the glowing bald spot on the crown of his head that was like the stamp of early senescence—and came up with the answer to my own question: he was IV-F, IV-F without a doubt.

  And what was I doing in the library in the first place? Simple. Prok had evicted me for the afternoon so that he and Corcoran could conduct simultaneous interviews of a cohort of southern Indiana psychologists who were attending a conference on campus. I’d interviewed two of them already that morning and early afternoon, and now Prok was putting Corcoran to the test, checking Corcoran’s position sheet against his own the minute the subject had left. And so I got home early, and Iris wasn’t there.