The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “That’s not fair,” I repeated.

  It took her a moment, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “I know it,” she said.

  But now she was chopping onion and preparing to anoint the diced potatoes with vinegar and mayonnaise, and when that was done and the potato salad crowned with sliced egg and a dusting of paprika, she was going to stride into the bedroom and put on a pair of shorts and a blouse and we were going to heft the picnic basket and amble down the street together, like lovers. From the bedroom, I heard Billie Holiday parsing her misery.

  Prok was in a high state of excitement that day—he’d been communicating with a man in his sixties whose serial sexual feats dwarfed even the most prodigious we’d encountered for variety and continuity both and the man had indicated that he might be amenable to an interview—and he radiated his delight all over Iris, giving her his biggest Prok-smile, bending from the waist like a mock courtier to kiss her hand, and he clapped my shoulder and called me John and avowed that we were on to great things now, great things and getting greater. Mac and Iris embraced gingerly, in the way of war veterans, as if they were afraid of tearing open each other’s wounds, and then we turned to the fire, which Prok had already built to a controlled inferno, thinking, in his ever-efficient way, of the coals it would furnish when it was time to lay the chops and bratwurst on the grill.

  I was watching Iris when the yellow convertible pulled up on the street across from the park. Corcoran was at the wheel, smiling like an ambassador, already waving, Violet regal beside him, and the two girls, Daphne and Lucy, emerging from the car in identical pink dresses and with the perfectly composed faces of the innocent. Iris might have been paler than usual, might have seemed thinner and smaller, as if she’d been reduced inside her clothes, but when Violet had made her way across the expanse of the field, her shoulders thrust back and her breasts pointing the way, Iris took her hand and smiled and made small talk without missing a beat. And Corcoran. She looked him right in the face, gave him her brightest, fullest, most rigidly unwavering smile and small-talked him too, and before long we were all sitting on the blanket listening to Prok and sipping punch while the sun graced us and the Corcorans’ girls played decorously in the distance.

  Prok, as I’ve said, was a great camper, and he took delight in squatting before the fire and looking to the slow incineration of the various cuts of meat he’d laid out on the grill (little of which he’d eat himself—he hated any foods he considered dry, and that included steaks and chops which were overcooked, and, I’m sorry to say, when he was at the grill everything was overcooked). The scent of the open fire brought me back to our honeymoon and the first meals Iris and I had prepared together, and back even further, to my boyhood and the woods behind the house, and maybe the others were having similar thoughts, the day lazy and serene and the smoke drifting out over the lawn in running tatters. Any small tensions we might have felt seemed to dissipate, everyone gradually unwinding as the afternoon wore on, and I was able to help there because I’d secreted a bottle of bourbon in the depths of our picnic basket, and when Prok wasn’t looking I poured stiff little pick-me-ups into everyone’s cups, except his, because he wouldn’t have approved of our drinking in public with the family gathered.

  Violet, especially, seemed to relax into the day, both hands cradled behind her head as she stretched out her abbreviated but extremely robust body on the blanket, and Corcoran was his usual insouciant self, entertaining us with jokes and quips as he pulled at his cup and sucked the bourbon and fruit juice from his upper lip. Iris didn’t get drunk—or not that it showed—but she did seem to climb down the ladder from a kind of edgy animation to an enveloping quiet that might have been interpreted as contentment or surfeit, and she too stretched out in the sun on her own corner of the blanket while Prok chattered on and Corcoran and I bantered in quiet tones and Mac pulled out her knitting and mutely counted stitches in a dapple of shade. As for me, I was beginning to think that the world that had so recently seemed skewed away from its axis had all at once come back into alignment. My colleagues were taking their ease and so was I. I felt the sun like a benediction on my face. All was well.

  Until we’d eaten, that is, and the first clouds—both actual and metaphorical—closed over the day. With the cloud cover came a slight chill, and we slipped into sweaters and jackets (all except for Prok, who was bare-chested and -footed and barely contained by his khaki hiking shorts). Violet called her daughters to her to help them into matching knit pullovers while Prok’s children said their goodbyes and walked off in the direction of home. The other cloud fell over us after we’d split into two groups on either side of the fire, which Prok had built up again for the sake of warmth and the little girls’ delectation in the toasting of marshmallows. Mac, Iris and Corcoran were seated on one side of the fire, their faces distorted by the thermal currents rising from the flames, and Prok, Violet and I were on the other.

  The afternoon was getting on, shadows lengthening, the sun tugging itself toward the horizon as if there were something urgent about the process. Prok sat cross-legged, poking at the fire. He was talking about Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, the psychiatrist and author of A Research in Marriage, and how courageous the man was, but how flawed the results of his sex surveys (too small and selected a sample, results compromised by the researcher’s own preconceptions, moralizing, psychologizing, et cetera), when he suddenly fell silent and looked from me to Violet Corcoran and back again, as if he’d just remembered something. Violet was leaning back on her elbows now, her bare legs stretched out before her and crossed neatly at the ankle. I was sitting up, Indian-style, in unconscious imitation of Prok. Birds had begun to settle in the trees. From across the street came the crack of a baseball and the cries of several small boys racing after it.

  Prok lowered his voice and leaned forward. “Do you know,” he said, “I was hoping you two might become better acquainted, for your own pleasure, of course”—a pause—“but don’t you agree that it would bring a kind of symmetry to our inter-relationships, that is, in light of your wife, John, and your husband, Violet, having enjoyed themselves together?”

  He looked to me, then let his gaze rest on Violet. My heart began to misfire. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. My first thought was Has he gone crazy? but then almost immediately I began to understand that what he was proposing wasn’t crazy at all. Far from it.

  Violet’s eyes were dark, nearly as dark as her hair, and they dominated her face. She was attractive, as I’ve said, if not particularly pretty, but there was something carnal in the way she held herself, the way she smiled and continually readjusted the set of her shoulders and breasts, almost as if it were a tic. I thought she might laugh or try to deflect the comment with a joke, but she surprised me. “Are you suggesting a liaison? Is that it, Prok?”

  Prok never waffled, never vacillated—nothing embarrassed him, and he was continually pushing the limits so as to break those limits down; that was his crusade and he was a crusader at heart. “Yes,” he said, “that’s exactly it.”

  I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at Violet. There was an old, familiar stirring in the crotch of my pants. I wanted to slow things down, hold the moment in abeyance—Had he actually said that? Was he pimping for me?—and I got my wish.

  The two girls had been off playing tag in the field, their shouts riding high on the cooling air, but all at once they were right on top of us, their faces alive with hope, crying “Mommy, Mommy, can we toast marshmallows now? Can we?”

  “Sure, honey,” Violet murmured to Lucy, the eldest, “but you’ll have to cut two green sticks—and sharpen the ends. Can you do that? And help your sister?”

  Lucy’s face took on a sober look. “Yes,” she said, “I can do that. C’mon,” she said, turning to her sister, barely able to suppress the excitement in her voice, “let’s go find sticks!”

  I stole a glance at Iris. She was smiling at something Mac was saying, and now Corcoran put his tw
o cents in and she turned to him, oblivious, even as the wind shifted and the flames fanned and broke apart in a ragged ascending trail and the two little girls darted off into the trees.

  Violet leaned away from the drift of smoke, propping herself up on one elbow to redistribute her weight. Her voice was soft and relaxed, and we might have been talking about a rubber of bridge or a swimming party. “It’s nothing to me,” she said, looking first to Prok—a long, slow, languid look—and then to me. “But I’m game if John is.”

  It wasn’t long after—and I don’t recall when or how this came about exactly—that I was working late at the office on a series of new charts and tables incorporating updated data that Prok was eager to have. This was work that I especially enjoyed. I’d found that I had a talent for drawing, for squaring off the orthogonal angles and gently rising curves of our graphs, and as the new Hollerith calculating machine made tabulating data so much easier and our new secretary had assumed the lion’s share of the clerical duties, I had more time to devote to it. It must have been eight or so. The building was deserted. Insects of some sort—Prok would have known in an instant what they were—kept battering at the glass of the window, attracted by my light. I was in a state of suspension, so tightly focused on my work that I’d forgotten all about dinner and about Iris too—but she would have been busy cramming for her final exams in any case. My ruler framed the sheet before me, my pencil ticked off the figures. All was still.

  On some level, I suppose, I might have been aware of the footsteps approaching from the far end of the hall, but that’s neither here nor there, because the first I knew that I was no longer alone was when I glanced up from my work and saw Violet Corcoran standing there in the doorway. She was wearing a stylish dress—belted, with an off-white front and collar and the back and sleeves a very dark navy—and she’d spent some time in the sun, deepening the color of her legs till it seemed as if she were wearing nylons (this was during the war, remember, and nylons were all but impossible to come by, and so women had taken to baby oil and to drawing that ersatz seam up the backs of their legs, from ankle to hemline, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first man to wonder just how much higher along the incline of the thigh that line was meant to reach). Her makeup was designed to accentuate the appeal of her out-sized eyes. She was short, Italian, busty. She came into the room without a word and perched herself on the edge of the desk.

  “Oh, hello,” I said, glancing up from the page before me, expecting Iris, or maybe Prok dashing in for something he’d forgotten, and I had some trouble getting her name out, “hello … Violet.”

  “Hi,” she breathed, and she threw her eyes to the ceiling and back again, as if the effort of the greeting had exhausted her. She brought her purse into view, clicked it open, and began fishing for cigarette and lighter, and I almost expected her to present me with a silver cigarette case, as if this were a scene out of the pictures, William Powell and Myrna Loy, or Bacall warming to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She took her time with the ritual of the tobacco, and I made a stab at small talk—“Going to rain tonight, isn’t that what they say?”—but I was hard already, hard instantaneously.

  “Want one?” she asked, and I did, and she leaned in to light it for me.

  For a moment, we just sat there, inhaling, exhaling, nicotine seeping through our veins and capillaries in the way of a shared secret. I knew what was coming—I’d pictured it since the afternoon of the picnic—but now that it was here, I felt tentative and unsure of myself.

  “Listen,” she said, “John, I wanted to talk to you.” I watched her throw back her head and exhale, just like Bacall, and I realized she was as much aware of rehearsing a role as I was. A pulse of excitement leapt from my eyes to my groin.

  “About Purvis,” she said. “He’s a free spirit, but I guess you already know that.” Her voice was pitched low. It had a soft, lulling quality, as if nothing were at stake here, as if we routinely shared the little wooden ship of my desk and sailed it out to sea in every sort of weather. “So am I—we both are. But we are married, and we intend to stay that way.” A pause, the manipulation of the cigarette, that tic with the shoulders and breasts. “I don’t know if Iris—if she fully appreciates that.”

  “No,” I said, “I think she does, I think that’s all worked out now.”

  “Because to be honest with you,” she went on as if she hadn’t heard me, “Purvis is worried about her—and so is Prok. Which is why I’m here.”

  I set down the pencil—again, unconsciously—but I suppose it was so I could get a firmer grip on the edge of the desk. She was six years older than I. She had beautiful lips, lips and teeth—I’d never noticed that before—a beautiful smile. Her eyebrows were thick and unplucked, Italian eyebrows, and she was perched on the edge of my desk and the office was deserted. Motives didn’t interest me. I wasn’t suspicious. I wasn’t concerned about Iris or Corcoran or the quid pro quo that was being offered here—all I wanted was to watch her and absorb the soft purr of her voice and I didn’t care what the subject was. “So what do you think?” I said finally.

  She gave a minute shrug, leaned over to tap the ash from her cigarette in the wastebasket beside the desk. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, straightening up now and adjusting her shoulders, “what do you think?”

  I gave her a smile. I was nervous—I’d never done anything like this before, my new colleague’s wife, Violet Corcoran, the devouring eyes, the lips, the smile, the unholy shape of her—and I was trying to project a kind of casual interest in the event that I was misreading her, that she’d come to talk only and that I was on the verge of embarrassing myself. Now it was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know,” I said.

  “You know what I think?”

  “No,” I said, leaning closer, the smile frozen to my face.

  “I think we should just enjoy ourselves.”

  The summer came on that year with a tympanic burst of thunderstorms, Iris graduated with honors and worked full-time at the five and-dime till fall, when she accepted a teaching position in one of the local elementary schools, and then fall gave way to winter and winter to spring and we went on as usual, collecting and tabulating data, Corcoran, Prok and I hurtling down back roads and potholed highways in the stalwart shell of the Buick, our only limitation the rationing coupon—and if it weren’t for that, for rationing, you would never know from anything Prok said or did that there was a war going on out there in the wider world. Prok wasn’t interested in international affairs or politics either. I suppose he must have deplored the Nazis and the Fascists and the Imperial Japanese as much as anyone, but he certainly kept it private—in fact, if he caught Corcoran and me discussing Midway or Guadalcanal or even the latest scrap drive, he invariably changed the subject. Never, in all my years with him, did he mention current events, not even in passing—we detonated the A-bomb, the war ended, the Korean conflict flared up and died—and Prok talked only of the latest sex diary he’d acquired or his need to duplicate Dickinson’s experiments on the gripping power of the levator ani muscles when a wax phallus is inserted in the vagina. He was dedicated, no doubt about it. Perhaps even single-minded to a fault. But you could say that of practically any great man.

  It was during this period—it might have been as late as 1944, now that I come to think of it—that we were finally able to induce the sexual champion I mentioned earlier to sit for an interview. Prok had been courting him for some time now, and the man had been cagey, feeding us portions of his sex diaries by mail, but expressing his reluctance to meet because of the criminal nature of so many of his sexual contacts. Certainly, what he’d sent us—photographs, penis measurements, case histories and written records of various sex acts with every sort of partner, male, female, nonhuman, preadolescents and even infants—was provocative, perhaps even offensive, but invaluable to our understanding of human sexuality. And, as Prok put it so well, we were scientists, not moralists—our duty was to observe and record, not to pass judgment.

  At
any rate, Prok knew instinctively that this subject—let’s call him Mr. X, as we have done in our files in order to afford him absolute anonymity—could be cajoled into contributing his history through an appeal to his vanity. Mr. X had devoted his life to sex—he was insatiable—and was, I suppose, a sort of sexologist in his own right, and so Prok from the very beginning treated him as a learned colleague, praising him repeatedly in his correspondence (“Certainly you have very much more material than we have in our records” and “This is one of the most valuable things we have ever gotten, and I want to thank you most abundantly for the time you put into it and for your willingness to cooperate”) and wooing him with the prospect of legitimating his findings by recording them for posterity. He even offered to pay Mr. X’s expenses if he would come to Bloomington, but Mr. X declined—he would meet with us, he said finally, but only if we came to him and only if we were to rendezvous in a small town some hundred miles from where he lived, so as not to attract any notice.

  When Prok received the letter he was overjoyed, practically dancing round the office. “Pack your bags, Milk,” he cried, leaping up from his desk and striding past me to poke his head into the inner office, “and you too, Corcoran. We’re going on a field trip!”

  That night, after dinner, I told Iris I’d be taking an extended trip, and she barely glanced up. “Actually,” I said, getting up to help with the dishes, “I’m excited about this one.”

  She was standing at the sink. I went to her, slipped the dishes into the suds, put an arm round her waist and touched my cheek to hers. “Oh?” she said. “And why is that?”

  “It’s Mr. X. You know, the one whose diaries take him right off the scale?”

  Her hands were lifting and dipping in the sink, the hot tap open full. Her voice was flat. “The pedophile?”