The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  I saw that she’d made a casserole—tuna and macaroni, with layers of American cheese spread atop it—and left the morning’s dishes to dry in the rack, and that was fine, nothing out of the ordinary there, but where could she be? Had she forgotten something at the store, some essential ingredient—coffee, margarine, a cake mix for dessert? Perhaps she’d just stepped out for a minute to go round the corner to the grocer’s. Or maybe it was some sort of emergency. Maybe she’d cut herself or fallen—or it might have been one of the neighbors. I thought of the old lady upstairs who’d been the special friend of Mrs. Lorber’s sister. Mrs. Valentine. She was so frail—so winnowed and reduced—that she could have gone at any moment and no one would have been surprised. But it wasn’t anything to concern myself over. If something had happened, there was nothing I could do about it. I would hear in due time, so why worry? The casserole was in the oven, the bourbon on the shelf. I poured myself a drink and went to the radio to see what was on.

  I was on my third drink and the top layer of the casserole had developed a color and texture I’d never before seen in a baked dish, not that I’m much of a cook, when I began to feel concerned (about Iris, that is; for all I cared the casserole could find its way into the trashcan and we’d make do with sandwiches and three fingers of bourbon). I’d listened to Vic and Sade, then a program of war news and Kate Smith singing “God Bless America,” and now I began to pace round the room and peek out through the curtains every time I thought I heard someone coming. Could she have gone to the office to surprise me? Was I supposed to have met her somewhere? Did we have concert tickets for the student-faculty orchestra? Were we dining out? But no, there was the casserole, irrefutable evidence to the contrary. I decided to go back to campus, to the office, just to check if she was there, to see if I’d somehow managed to get my signals crossed, and so I shrugged into my coat and hat and started out the door.

  The light had faded from the sky and the streets were pretty well deserted. I had the bourbon to fuel me, and, as I say, I kept myself in tiptop shape, so I was able to make the ten blocks to campus in what must have been record time, though I wasn’t running or even jogging, but moving along expeditiously for all that. I climbed the familiar steps of Biology Hall, went in through the unlocked door and mounted the stairs. I found the office dark, the building silent. Perhaps I rattled the knob of the office door a time or two—I could have used my key, but what was the sense?—and then turned and went back down the stairs. I thought about another drink, about stopping somewhere, but I didn’t.

  All the way back, I kept thinking how odd this was, how unlike Iris. She was taking classes still, of course—this was her last semester—and that involved research papers, library work and such, but she’d always taken care of that sort of thing during the day so we could be together at night. I set a brisk pace on the way back, because I was concerned now, frustrated in the way I got on the rare occasions when I misplaced something and wound up endlessly retracing my steps, running round in circles till I either found it or gave up on it altogether. My pen, for instance. I had a sleek silver Parker pen Iris had given me for my birthday, and one afternoon after lunch I couldn’t seem to find it. Up and down from my desk I went, back and forth to the filing cabinets, the bookshelves, the anteroom, till Prok lifted his head from his work and asked in an irritated voice what exactly I thought I was doing. I told him, and he gave me a long wondering frown before going back to his papers, but I was up and down all afternoon until finally, on my sixth or seventh trip, I found the pen in the men’s washroom, on the metal tray above the sink, where I’d scrawled a note to myself after washing up. It was a bit neurotic, I suppose, but when I felt that things were out of my control, that something was wrong, that I’d fouled up somehow, I had difficulty breathing and I’m sure my blood pressure shot up. Jittery. I felt jittery, as if I’d consumed one too many cups of coffee. That was how I felt now, coming up the final block in the dark, when I should have been home with my wife and a casserole.

  A car door slammed up ahead, I saw the red flash of the taillights like cigarette burns in the dark garment of the night, and the car—it was light-colored—passed under the streetlight and disappeared at the far end of the block. Was there a figure there, a shade against the shade, moving up the walk of one of the houses on our side of the street? It was dark. I couldn’t be sure. Two minutes later, I came through the door and Iris was there, bent over the oven.

  “Jesus, Iris,” I said, “where’ve you been? I was, well, I was here and I turned off the casserole—”

  She looked flushed, as if she’d been running laps or springing up off the trampoline at the gymnasium, an exercise she loved, incidentally, and I’d watched her at it, the tight focus of her concentration, her arms flapping as if she were about to take wing and her hair rising straight up off her head in defiance of gravity. The casserole was in her two hands, the red pot holders climbing up over the handles. She set it down on the counter and gave me a smile that faded as soon as it bloomed. “That was the right thing to do,” she said. “Because it would have burned.”

  I was in the kitchen now, the bead curtains rattling behind me like a swarm of angry insects. “But where were you? I was worried. I, well, I went all the way back to the office, just to see if, you, well, if you were there.”

  “I’m sorry, John. I didn’t expect you so early.” She was opening a can of peas, her back to me so I couldn’t read her face, brisk movements, the pot, the flame, and then to the table to set out the plates and cutlery. “Do you want milk with this tonight—or will water do? Or juice?”

  “What was it?” I said. “Studying? Didn’t you just have an exam last week?”

  She was in motion, brushing by me, the beads rattling, to the table and back. She wasn’t looking at me, her eyes fixed on anything but me—the table, the icebox, the floor. “Studying,” she said, “that’s right. I was studying.”

  “Where? At the library? Because I was in the bio library all afternoon, and you should’ve—but you needed the main, right? For what, for Huntley’s class?”

  The casserole had gone to the trivet in the center of the table and she’d poured me a glass of milk, staunch and white, the glass standing beside the plate in a still-life representation of the ordinary. She looked harried. Looked unhappy.

  “What is it?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

  She held herself right there, the peas in a slotted spoon, the hot pan balanced at the edge of the table. “Oh, John, I’m not good at this. I’m just not.”

  This was the fever, this was it, the moment that had my heart pounding. I didn’t say a word.

  Two scoops of peas, one on each plate. “You might as well know—I was with Purvis. I—I went to the office, looking for you, to surprise you, and he was just locking up …”

  “That was his car? Just now, when I came up the street?”

  She nodded.

  “Well,” I said. “And so? Did he give you a lift home, did you go out with him for a drink or what?”

  “No,” she said, her eyes dodging mine. “Or, yes, he gave me a lift home.”

  I shrugged. He’d given her a lift. Case closed.

  She was still holding the pot of peas, still hovering over the table. “But I’m not going to lie to you, John, neither one of us is. I’m not that sort of person, and I think you know that.” There was a pause then, and I suppose somewhere in the world ships were passing in the night, freighters foundering, the ice narrowing in the narrow passages. “We—we had a relationship.”

  I just stared at her.

  “In the office. On the desk.”

  “In the office,” I repeated.

  “Purvis and I.” Her eyes went cold a moment. “It’s nothing to worry over,” she said, and the pot found its way to the table even as she wiped her trembling hands on the apron at her hips. “You know, John,” she said. “The human animal.”

  It was around this time that we began to conduct our first interviews with chil
dren, which, as most people will know, served not only to break a long-standing taboo but to lay the foundation for the many studies into childhood sexuality that were to follow. In fact, in trying to reconstruct events, I’m almost certain that our initial foray into the field must have come just after that unnerving scene with Iris—the very next morning—because I remember distinctly how unsettled I was, turning the situation over and over again in my mind as if it were a sharp-edged object I could worry until it was as smooth as fired clay. It was odd. As I sat beside Prok in the front seat of the Buick on our way to the Fillmore School in Indianapolis, listening to him chatter on about infantile sexuality and the preadolescent awakening of desire, I couldn’t help feel that my emotions were on a collision course with my objectivity. I kept telling myself that I was a researcher and that sentiment had no place in the scientific ledger, no quantifiable value at all. It was a negative, a disqualifier, a weakness that had to be conquered. Prok had indoctrinated me well, and I was getting there, almost over the hump, but I kept slipping back. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Are you all right?” Prok asked, giving me one of his hooded, searching looks.

  I must have been twisting in my seat, jittering a knee, lifting my chin to the flicker of roadside light as if I were on my way to martyrdom, but at least I didn’t have to face Corcoran, not yet anyway—Prok had given him three days off to see to his affairs and attend his daughters’ Easter pageant back in South Bend.

  “Milk?” Prok said. “Milk, did you hear me? I said are you all right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  The motor hummed beneath the floorboards. Scenery flitted by. Prok cocked his head and shot me another glance. “Getting enough sleep? Because really, Milk, you look like one of the living dead—”

  “No, I—well, not last night, I guess.”

  He went off on a mini-lecture about the vital importance to health of the three telling factors—diet, exercise and sleep—and was in the middle of one of his long, artfully congested sentences when he suddenly caught himself. “But, John,” he said. “Are you—do you have something caught in your eye?”

  I told him that I was allergic, that was all. “Hay fever,” I said.

  He was silent a moment. Then he turned his face to me, his eyes shifting focus briefly and then darting ahead to the road. “A bit early in the season, isn’t it?”

  In the end, I hadn’t confronted Iris—how could I? How could I have said anything without looking like a hypocrite? We’d eaten our dinner in silence, listening to the radio. She had a text—Modern British Poetry, my old marked-up copy—spread out on the table beside her plate, and she never lifted her eyes from it, though I didn’t see her turn the page, not once. When we were finished, I tried to get up and clear off the dishes, but she wouldn’t let me. “No, no,” she said, taking the dirty plate from my hand—I’d eaten nothing, the macaroni like sodden cardboard, though I’d chewed as if my jaw would break—“let me do it. You must be tired.”

  Her face was bloodless, her hair hanging limp, and I didn’t want to think of what had happened to the curl she spent so much effort on every night and worked so hard to bring to perfection each morning. I was tired. So tired I could barely lift my arms from the table. “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

  I made it as far as the couch and just lay there with one hand laid flat across my forehead while the radio spat and crackled and the water ran in the sink. For a long while I listened to her move about the kitchen, the cabinets opening and closing, the hiss of the water, the clink of glass and crockery, and then I lit a cigarette and studied the ceiling. There was band music from somewhere, a variety show, the Chiquita banana jingle—I must have heard that ten times over. Finally, she came to me. I felt her there, standing over the couch, but I never turned my head. “John,” she said, “John, please,” and I could hear the emotion saturating her voice, the plea for absolution that made me stiffen and harden all the more—mineralizing, I was mineralizing like a stick of wood buried over the eons in the deepest layer of sediment. I said nothing. She made a speech then, tearful, punctuated by sobs—she didn’t mean to, it wasn’t anything, the madness of the moment and somehow she couldn’t resist him, Purvis, because he was so persuasive—but I never moved. After a while she went into the bedroom and shut the door.

  Can I tell you now that I felt as if a stake had been driven through my heart? I knew why she’d done what she had—it didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure that out. She’d had one man in her life, just one, and I’d had Mac and Prok and she could only guess whom else. The whole project, the whole regime, demanded that she acquire experience—we looked up to the high raters, didn’t we, no matter how unbiased we tried to appear? I knew where the guilt lay. I knew who was at fault. But if I believed in what I preached, if I believed in my work—and I did, and still do, fervently—then I had no right to say J’accuse.

  I went to bed late that night, so late there was the sound of birds stirring in the bushes outside the windows and a slow gray seep of light infiltrating the curtains. She was awake still. I saw her there in the bed and all the sadness of the world came to lodge in my throat, acidic and unforgiving, until I steeled myself and swallowed it down. What I wanted more than anything in that moment was to have her, to throw back the blankets, strip off her nightgown and bury myself in her.

  She might have said my name, I don’t know, I don’t remember. But I remember this: we came together without preliminaries, without words, and I drove at her in an ecstasy of release and she responded in kind, fighting me, thrashing at me, furious with the sting of her guilt and the pleasure too, and all the while I was thinking she hadn’t run the tub, hadn’t washed Corcoran out of her, and he was right there with us, grinning like an actor.

  Yes, and it felt odd too to be returning to Indianapolis, this time to sit with children from the local elementary school instead of some jaded prostitute and her string of faceless johns, and in the pure efflorescent light of day instead of in the shadows of the night. Prok had arranged the session with the principal and one of the kindergarten teachers, both of whom were friends of the research, and we’d modified the standard procedure to accommodate the children’s level of apprehension. Also, we were careful to get the parents’ consent beforehand—and the parents’ histories, as well—and we conducted the interviews in tandem and with at least one parent present so that there could be no hint of impropriety.

  We arrived early, the children still in their classes, the stiff, hacked grass of the athletic field greening round the edges and the sun hanging bright over the playground and its idle swings and seesaws and the rigid superstructure of the monkey bars. The school’s principal—a Mr. McGuiniss, whose comfortingly unremarkable history we’d taken on our last trip during the diurnal hours when Ginger was unavailable—met us at the door and led us into his office. There was a flag, a stuffed owl, the crude, curiously mobile abstract paintings of very small children decorating the walls, and a window that gave onto the playground. “Dr. Kinsey,” McGuiniss said—he was small, bald, his fingertips stained with nicotine—“and Mr. Milk, welcome, and thank you for coming. We have, as you know, several students who’ve volunteered, and their mothers are here as well. Everyone is very excited.”

  We began with two sisters, aged seven and five. The principal made his office available to us—he’d already furnished it with a few playthings and picture books to put the children at ease—and the girls’ mother ushered them into the room. She was a tall brunette, not unattractive, with prominent cheekbones and a mass of healthy-looking hair swept up atop her head and held in place with a pair of mother-of-pearl barrettes. I knew her age—twenty-nine—because I’d taken her history myself on our previous visit. (She was monogamous, married eight years, eager to experiment with coital positions and oral-genital contacts, but as yet very much a novice and fighting her husband’s resistance—he was a devout Catholic and typically repressed, and he was the only one of this particular cohort
who’d declined to be interviewed himself.)

  Prok and I rose to greet her, even as McGuiniss bowed out of the room with a sheaf of papers under one arm. “Mrs. Perrault,” Prok cried, taking her hand and flashing his smile, “so nice of you to come. You know my associate, Mr. Milk, of course. And now”—turning to the girls and giving a formal bow that was calculated to charm them—“who are these beautiful young ladies?”

  The girls—Suzy was the younger, Katie the elder—both had their mother’s coloring and her outsized liquid eyes. They gave us prim little smiles, pleased to be the centers of attention, and yet they seemed a bit flustered too, uncertain as to what was expected of them. “I’m Katie,” the seven-year-old said. “And this is my sister.”

  “Suzy,” the sister put in, swaying back and forth over the pivot of one foot. “My name’s Suzy.”

  “Ah,” Prok said, and he was still bent at the waist, his face at a level with theirs, “so you’re not princesses, then? I thought you were princesses for sure.”

  A giggle. More swaying. “No,” the little one said, and they both burst out in laughter.

  “And what do you think of having the principal’s office all to ourselves? Pretty special, isn’t it? Well, this is a special afternoon for some very special little girls. I’m Uncle Kinsey, and this”—indicating me, and I smiled as genuinely as I could to show everyone concerned how harmless I was—“is Uncle Milk.”

  Both girls gave me a brief examination, their smiles flickering uncertainly and then coming back to life again as Prok went on in his most facetious and whimsical tones: “And what of Mr. Owl—you see Mr. Owl up there? He’s going to play a part too, because the game I’ve thought up for us is a camping game—do your mommy and daddy ever take you girls camping?”

  Oh, yes, yes, they did. And where had they gone camping? A look to their mother and back again. “In the woods,” Katie said.