by T. C. Boyle
Her voice seemed to come to me out of nowhere, out of some place in my head, and my eyelids, blue-veined, pulsing with the sleepy drift of floating bodies, snapped open. “John,” she was saying, “John, listen, I know how you feel. I do. But you can’t let it get to you, because that way of thinking—jealousy, recrimination, whatever you want to call it—is wrong. And it’s destructive, John. It is.”
She closed her hand over mine. The light was stark, flaming all around her as if she were on the apron of a stage, her pupils shrunk to pinpoints, a splay of lines radiating out from the corners of her eyes as if the skin there had been fractured or worked with a sharp tool—she was old, getting old, and the visible signs of it, the apprehension of it, made something shift inside me. “I’ll tell you,” she said, dropping her voice, “it wasn’t easy for me in the beginning. You’re not the first, you know. There was Ralph Voris—has Prok ever mentioned him?”
“Yes.”
“And there were graduate students too, casual affairs—things with women.”
I said nothing, but I may have flushed, thinking of the day I’d broken the code and pulled his file. And hers.
“He’s highly sexed, Prok, and to be away so often, for so long—you don’t know. It was before your time, ten years ago and more. He went to Mexico for three months, collecting galls with three healthy young men—and he was a healthy young man himself. Was I hurt? Did I complain? Did I resent being all but abandoned? Do I resent it now?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do you?”
She removed her hand, lifted both arms to pat her hair in place, and then she smoothed down her blouse and shifted position in the dry leaves at the base of the rock. “No,” she said, “I don’t think so. Not anymore. You see,” and she moved in closer to me, so that I could feel the warmth of her hip sliding in against mine, “I love him, love him more than anybody else in the world, and that’s all that matters.”
The moment hung there between us, and Prok was proportional to it, each of us trying to fit him in and work around him at the same time. Then I leaned forward and kissed her and she brought both her hands to my chest and slipped them inside my shirt and ran them down the long muscles at my sides. We breathed in unison, and then she released me. “And I believe in him,” she said, “believe in his work and everything he does—and so do you. I know you do.”
That evening, when I went to pick up Iris at work, she wasn’t there. I was right on time—six o’clock on the dot—and I’d got good at that, adopting the model of Prok’s punctuality along with so many other things. The girl behind the counter said that Iris had left early, half an hour before, to make some urgent appointment—“Maybe with the doctor,” the girl offered after studying the look on my face. “Yeah, I think she said the doctor,” she added, and what did it matter if no doctor in the whole state of Indiana was keeping hours at six o’clock on a Saturday evening?
I went home then, to see if I’d somehow missed her, and I sat there brooding till seven. When the bell in the church tower two blocks over struck the hour I pushed myself up and walked the ten blocks to the office, and this time I used my key in the door. I hit the light switch and the shadows fled into the corners. It was very still. I stood there a moment in the doorway, and then I couldn’t help but go to my desk and examine it—I bent down and sniffed it, actually sniffed the surface of my own desk as if I could somehow detect the residue of vaginal lubricants there, as if I were a bloodhound, as if I were some petty and heartbroken cuckolded fool stooping so low as to drop off the chart of humiliation, even—and I examined Corcoran’s desk too, shuffling through his things, probing into his drawers, looking for something, anything, that would give me a clue as to who he really was and what he might want. And how did I feel then, standing there in the lamp-lit office rifling my colleague’s desk while the sky closed down over the campus and couples were strolling out hand-in-hand to the dance, the pictures, dinner? Devastated. Devastated, certainly, but it was worse than that: I felt as if I’d somehow failed Iris, as if I were the one at fault. More than anything, and I hate even to remember it, I felt inadequate.
Our research would show that some twenty-six percent of women and fifty percent of men would engage in extramarital intercourse—I myself drew up the accumulative incidence curve on page 417 of the female volume—and we would conclude, in Prok’s words, that “Extramarital coitus had attracted some of the participants because of the variety of experience it afforded them with new and sometimes superior sexual partners.” Exactly. And yet the female volume was still a decade in the future—we’d only begun to accumulate the data at this point—and so my attitude was purely intuitive. I’d been with Mac. I could still smell her on my fingertips. But that didn’t matter a whit, not now—all that mattered now was Iris, Iris and Corcoran.
I went back home—eight o’clock and no sign of her—and I poured a drink and brooded some more. When eight-thirty came and she still hadn’t appeared or even called, I copied out a poem, or a fragment of a poem, from her anthology, and left it on her pillow in the bedroom, then took the long walk to Corcoran’s to see if his car was parked out front, if his windows were lit, if there was movement there, a silhouette on the shade, anything. The night had grown cold and I watched it stream from my mouth as I walked, my shoulders tense, all my emotions—rage, despair, scorn, vengefulness—wadded up like a bolus in the pit of my stomach. There was no yellow convertible drawn up to the curb outside Corcoran’s apartment, and there was no sign of life inside. I stood there for two hours and more, then I turned away and went home, defeated.
Need I say that Iris wasn’t there? The poem was where I’d left it, though, untouched, and it might have remained there all night and into the next day, for all I knew. I had no idea when she came home that night or if she came home at all because I bundled up some things in a suitcase—a change of clothes, toiletry articles, bedding—and dragged myself back to the office to sleep on the floor while the abandoned building, one of the oldest on campus, ticked and settled round me in a state of decline that couldn’t help recalling my own. I wasn’t yet twenty-four and already my life was over. I should have enlisted, I told myself. Should have gone to fight and kill and be killed, because anything was better than this.
The poem, incidentally, was from Hardy, bile-bitter and as grim as it gets. I suppose now it looks a bit sophomoric—the sentiments expressed, the whole gesture—but then it seemed to strike right to the heart of what I was feeling. It’s called “Neutral Tones,” and the speaker is looking back on the bleak day by a frozen pond when the smile on his lover’s lips went dead. I left her with the last four lines:
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
I slept in the office for two nights, never venturing within ten blocks of the apartment, because if she could make me suffer I could make her suffer too. Let her stew, that was what I thought, let her stew until she’s as sick at stomach as I am. But where was Corcoran? I waited for him that first morning with a dry throat and a pounding in my temples that was calibrated to a recurrent hormonal rush, and then eight o’clock slipped by, and eight-ten, and I put it to Prok as casually as I could, Where is he? Prok barely glanced up. It had slipped his mind, but he’d neglected to tell me that he’d given our colleague two days off to see to a personal matter, and that was where it ended—Prok barely lifted his head from his work all the rest of the day. There was no chatter, no humor, and the only relief from routine came when we interviewed two young women for the position of full-time secretary, and subsequently, one-on-one, took their histories.
At the end of the second day, having heard nothing from Iris, I went back to the apartment, but warily, looking for signs, coming up the walk and approaching the front steps with the slow deliberation of a sapper, as if the place had been mined and booby-trapped by the
retreating forces. The first thing I noticed was the milk—there they were, two bottles, nestled side by side in the insulated box on the porch, undisturbed. There was no sound of the radio, no lights left burning. Everything sank in me. I turned my key in the lock and came in to a smell of nothing, of a tomb, of a place that was empty and had been empty and might never be inhabited again. It was as if the people who’d lived here had disappeared, that nice young couple, as if they’d been kidnapped and held for ransom and no one could tell if the sum would ever be raised.
Her clothes were there still, hanging in the wardrobe, her brushes and toilet things, her shampoo—it was all there. It probably took me fifteen minutes, a good quarter hour of poking through things in a kind of mind-numbing despair, until I noticed that the poem was gone, replaced by a few lines in her own hand, and I still don’t know where she got them from:
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly.…
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.
I couldn’t breathe. I had to pour a drink and ease myself down in the armchair, so weak suddenly my legs wouldn’t support me. Gone? I shall be gone? And what was that supposed to mean? I couldn’t fathom it—was she saying she would leave me, that she didn’t want me anymore, that Corcoran had taken my place and negated everything between us in the course of what, a week? Sane? No, it was insane. I loved her, she loved me. How could anything ever change that?
If I thought that was the low point, exchanging bitter poems, warfare by proxy, the drink and the chair and the empty apartment, I was wrong. Because even as I sat there in the armchair, the glass in one hand and the sheet of paper she’d inscribed in the other (and I’d sniffed that too, holding it to my nose and breathing deep in the hope of catching the remotest fleeting scent of her), there was the sound of her heels on the steps and her key turning in the lock, and in the next instant I had to look her in the face and listen to her tell me that she was in love.
There she was, flush with it, her hair disheveled and her clothes looking as if they’d been slept in (and they had, or no, they hadn’t, and I didn’t want to think about that either). She came straight into the room, threw down her purse and her coat, and told me she was sorry, but that was how it was, she was in love.
I don’t get angry. I suppress my anger, drink it down like Angostura bitters, digest it, let it run through the bowels, shit it out—my mother taught me that. Do what I say. Mind your manners. Live for me. “We haven’t even been married a year yet,” I said.
She was frantic, she couldn’t sit down, pacing back and forth while I clung to the chair as if the ship had gone down and this was all that was left to me. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to hurt you—I’ll always love you, and you’re my first love, you know that—but this is something bigger than that, and I just can’t help it. I can’t.”
“He’s married,” I said, and my voice was flat and toneless. The faucet was dripping in the sink, one thunderous drop after another hitting the greased porcelain of the unwashed plates and cups and saucers. “He doesn’t love you. It’s just sex—he told me that. Just sex, Iris. He’s a sex researcher.”
All the intensity of her face drew down to the frozen eyelet of her mouth and for a second I thought she was going to spit at me. “Is that what you call it—research?” She was trembling, lit up with the ecstasy of the moment, her eyes gone clear and hard. “Well, I don’t care, I love him and it doesn’t matter what happens. I can do research too. You’ll see. You just wait and see.”
The next morning, early, while Prok was still upstairs brushing his teeth and Mac presiding over the kitchen with her whisk and bowl and a mug of coffee, I went to the house on First Street and rapped on the door till one of the children let me in. I don’t recall which one it was—it might have been Bruce, the youngest, who would have been thirteen or fourteen at the time—but the door swung open, the adolescent face registered my presence and then vanished and I was left standing there in the anteroom, unannounced, the door open wide to the street behind me. Two years earlier I would have been mortified to be put in this position, but now, as the sounds of the house percolated round me—three children preparing for school and the slap of Prok’s razor strop echoing down from above—I felt nothing but relief, blanketed by normalcy, by the regular thump of footsteps overhead and the murmurous dialogue of the girls drifting down the hall. I stood there a moment, then shut the door softly behind me. There was a smell of coffee, butter, hot grease, and I let it lead me to the kitchen, even while I tried to calm the pounding in my chest. Mac was at the stove, beating eggs for the pan, her back to me. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, her feet were bare and her hair was uncombed, and when I spoke her name she started visibly.
She turned to me, puzzled. “John?” she said, as if she couldn’t quite place me. “What are you doing here at this hour—are you and Prok off somewhere? I thought it was next week you were going back to Indianapolis?”
“No,” I said, fumbling for the words I wanted, “I just, well—I came to see Prok, is Prok in? It’s, well, it can’t wait—”
She gave me a stricken look. There was danger here, and heartbreak too, and I was out of bounds—she could see that at a glance. “Have you eaten?” she said suddenly. “Because I can just add a couple eggs—and toast, do you want toast?”
“Is he upstairs?”
She might have nodded, or maybe she said, “Go ahead,” but the permission was implicit—I belonged here, I was part of this, part of this household, this family—and in the next moment I was bounding up the stairs even as the two girls, Joan and Anne, were coming down, dressed for school. I suppose they might have given me a quizzical look and perhaps even a giggle or two (they were eighteen and sixteen respectively), but it was nothing out of the ordinary—I was there, on the staircase, and I’d been there before, John Milk, the handsome young man with the recalcitrant hair, Daddy’s friend, Daddy’s assistant, his colleague and traveling companion. I found Prok in the bathroom, standing before the mirror, shaving. The door was open, he was in his underclothes, and he’d just scraped the last of the shaving cream from his chin when he became aware of me standing there in the doorway. “Prok,” I said, “I hope you won’t—well, I didn’t know where else to turn.”
I couldn’t eat—I was too wrought up for that—but the two of them, Mac and Prok both, insisted on sitting me down at the table with a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. Throughout breakfast, Prok kept fastening on me with that intent gaze of his, as if he were trying to reduce me to my constituent parts for a physiologic study of variations in the human organism under stress, but he talked exclusively of the project. “The children were really something, weren’t they, Milk? And, Mac, you should have seen them, fully cognizant of sexual roles even at four and five years old, and by seven or eight a number of them had already seen the genitalia of the opposite sex, and there was that one girl, Milk, you remember her? The one in pigtails? She’d seen both her parents naked—saw them on a regular basis.” When we were done—I barely touched my food—he got up in his usual brisk way, squared his bow tie in the hall mirror and informed me that we’d better hurry if we were going to be at work on time.
The minute we were out of the house he asked me what the matter was.
“It’s Iris,” I told him, struggling to keep pace with him as we swung through the gate and out onto the street. I was having trouble getting it out, the words colliding in my head, and the emotions too, choking at me in some deep glandular way. Prok shot me an impatient look. “She says she’s in love with Corcoran, and that”—and here I felt myself breaking down—“that she wants to move in with him, to live with him. To, to—”
His head was down, his shoulders hunched, and he was already elongating into his no-nonsense stride, no time to
waste, no time to stand still in the street and shoot the breeze when there was work to be done. What he said was, “We can’t have that.”
No, I thought, no, of course we can’t.
“But you approved,” I said, “or that’s what Corcoran told me, that you said, well, that you gave your blessing. To the whole thing, I mean.”
The look he gave me—sidelong, over his jolting shoulder—wasn’t in the least sympathetic. It was fierce, irascible, the sort of look that came over his face when he was challenged, when the Thurman B. Rices and Dean Hoenigs of the world rose up to castigate him on whatever grounds, whether statistical or moral. “We’re adults, Milk,” he snapped. “Consenting adults. No one needs my permission to do anything.”
I was right there now, right at his shoulder, drawn up even with him, and I came as close to losing control then as I ever have—there were accusations on my lips, I know it, and I wanted to throw his words right back at him, but the best I could manage was just another reflection of my own inadequacy, a kind of bleat of agony that might have come from the lips of a child. “It’s eating me up inside,” I said, and for all my conditioning I seemed to be out of breath, my legs pumping automatically, air in, air out. “I love her. I want her back.”
We walked on in silence a moment, and I can’t tell you whether the sun was shining and the squirrels clambering up the trees or the wind blowing a gale, because I was at the breaking point and nothing of the world of appearances held any interest for me, all of it just a backdrop now to the scene I was playing out, the heartsick lover, the cuckold, the fool in motley. “You say she wants to move in with him?” he said. He gave me the snatching look.
I nodded. We were hurrying along so fast I was on the verge of breaking into a jog. “She’s been with him the past three nights and she, she came home only to get her things last night and she told me she was”—I felt ridiculous saying it, but I couldn’t stop myself—“doing research.”