The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Or salt pork. Or hardtack,” she said, and she was smiling now, her beautiful smile, enriched with softness and sympathy. “Give me hardtack any day.”

  I reached out and stroked the back of her hand. “Okay, point taken. I’ll never mention tortillas again.”

  Before she could respond there came a plaintive choked cry from the kitchen, something very like a cat’s mewing, followed by the thump of a compact body springing from sink to floor, and in the next moment the bead curtains parted and I found myself staring into the unblinking yellow gaze of the biggest tomcat I’d ever seen. “What’s that?” I asked stupidly.

  “A cat. His name’s Addison.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  She ignored me. “Here, Addison. Come here, boy,” she cooed, and the cat, which had frozen at the sight of me, began to inch across the carpet on its abdomen. When it reached the couch it sprang up with a practiced leap and settled down in her lap.

  “But we can’t have a cat. You know I’m allergic, and its food—it’s an expense. I mean, who’s going to pay for the food?”

  The cat had begun to purr, a ratchety shifting of breath from nostrils to larynx to lungs and back again. She was stroking the thing. “I need company, John.”

  I said nothing. The rain drooled from the gutters.

  “If you’re not going to be here, that is—and I don’t think you have anything to say about it, not being gone, what, thirty-four days? In a row? Without so much as a phone call?”

  It would have been fitting for a thunderclap to shake the house then, but it didn’t come. Or maybe it did. Maybe I’m misremembering.

  “And there’s another thing. And I don’t care what you say.” She brought her face to mine, closing the gap over the cat and the hand that was stroking him instead of me, her eyes hovering, her lips, her teeth, the sweet scent of her breath. “I want a baby, John. I’ve made up my mind.”

  And now it came—Boom!—and everything rattled, right on down to the dishes in the cupboard and the knives in the drawer.

  3

  Things settled down for a while after that—or settled into a routine, at any rate. We traveled a bit less frequently that fall, as a threesome, that is, Prok and Corcoran going off on two separate jaunts to New York and Philadelphia, making contacts and bagging histories along the way, and in their absence I punched the clock and focused on the affairs of the Institute. I didn’t mind. It was good to be home and spending more time with Iris, though of course I was still on the road a great deal and when I wasn’t, I have to confess I did miss the excitement of the chase. In some ways, I suppose, a habituation to routine and the quiet, ordered life was suited to my temperament, but there was another part of me altogether that yearned for the road, for adventure, and once Prok had opened up that world to me I could never get enough of it.

  As for the Institute, though we wouldn’t incorporate for three years yet, we were growing in prestige and autonomy both, and along with our full-time secretary—the formidable Mrs. Bella Matthews—we’d taken on part-time clerical help as well, and this necessitated shifting things around to fit another desk in the offices, Mrs. Matthews going into the anteroom and the part-timers finding space alongside Corcoran. The library, all of it acquired at Prok’s personal expense and already running to some five thousand items—books in the field, photographs, artwork, sex diaries and the like—had taken over every available inch of space in the inner office and a locked, windowless spare room down the hall that once had been used to store lab equipment. To say that we were cramped for space would be an understatement. Even more pressing was the need for “more hands,” as Prok put it—that is, another researcher to assist in collecting the new and astonishing figure of one hundred thousand histories he was now determined to record.

  To that end, we had begun to send out feelers to various academic institutions—and Prok tirelessly canvassed his colleagues around the country in an attempt to attract a candidate who would reflect well on our research. At that point, I had only a baccalaureate to my name, and Corcoran his Master’s, and so Prok had his sights set on an older man—in his thirties, that is—with a Ph.D. in the social sciences or psychology, and from a prestigious university. He himself, of course, was a Harvard man, and though he never said as much in an effort to spare our feelings, he was looking for someone whose credentials and affiliation could balance out our rather pedestrian state university degrees. As I recall, we did conduct some interviews through the fall and into the spring of the following year—1945—but the response wasn’t what we’d hoped for. The war was still in progress, after all, and the vast majority of the workforce still employed by Uncle Sam.

  On the home front—the personal home front, that is, in the kitchen, living room and bedroom of the apartment Iris and I shared at 619 Elm Street—things began to even out as well. Every marriage experiences growing pains, and certainly we’d had ours, but now I was home, or home more frequently than I had been, and I was determined to make up for past mistakes. I made a real effort to be there on time for dinner each night, even if it meant getting to the office earlier in the morning in order to accommodate the workload; I tried to talk more about literature, art, current events, and less about Prok and sex; I gave up going to the tavern after work and attempted to help around the house as much as I could, though I have to admit I was no paragon here—but I was trying, at least I was trying. Over time, I even began to tolerate the cat. And if I balked initially over the issue of having a child (the usual excuses: we were too young, we couldn’t afford it, a cat was one thing and a baby another), I recalled my moment of clarity at the Fillmore School, children, children everywhere, and it wasn’t long before I began to come round to Iris’s way of thinking.

  That first night was a trial, though, and I don’t mind admitting it. We didn’t seem to be communicating, not at all, and I should have been more sympathetic, but I was exhausted, both physically and mentally, and I wasn’t at my best. Far from it. Just as she was softening, at the very moment I was about to dig the bracelet out of my suitcase and make everything right again, the cat came between us and somehow the cat managed to metamorphose into a hypothetical child. “I want a baby, John,” she said, and I didn’t even think, didn’t hesitate or bother with the emotional calculus, just said no. And Iris, with the pot rattling on the stove and I don’t know how much gin in her, not to mention the residue of an afternoon’s gossip with Violet Corcoran, threw it back at me. “Fine,” she said, “if that’s how you feel you can sleep right here on the couch then, because you’re not coming near me, not even for a touch, a kiss, nothing. You hear me?”

  And that was it, the end of our joyful reunion. She took the cat into the bedroom and slammed the door and I went out to the nearest bar and drank bourbon in a corner all by myself while people crowded around the radio and listened to news of the war and I seethed and ached and went faint with lust for her, for my own wife, five weeks away from home and no sex, no affection, nothing but rancor and a cat. I was furious. Heartbroken. Disgusted with myself and with her too—with marriage, the whole corrupt and coercive institution. Prok was right: man was pansexual, and it was only convention—law, custom, the church—that kept him from expressing himself with any partner that came along, of whatever sex or species. Marriage was a ball and chain. It was slavery. And it sanctioned nothing but acrimony. I walked home in the rain, haunted by lust, slept on the couch and woke with a hangover. I was gone before she got up.

  At work, I tried to solicit Prok’s advice, but he was moving at light speed, flying from his desk to mine and Corcoran’s and Mrs. Matthews’s and back again, five weeks of accumulated correspondence and metastasizing problems to conquer and all in a single day, because with Prok nothing could wait till tomorrow. It was late in the afternoon before I was finally able to corner him. He’d gone to the lavatory—with a file of papers in one hand and his fountain pen in the other—and I waited at the door for him. When he emerged five minutes later, chin d
own, shoulders squared, in his usual headlong rush, I made as if I were on the way to the lavatory myself and just happened to run into him. “Oh,” I said, “Prok, hello. But do you have a minute? I wanted to, well, have a word with you, if that’s all right, if you have time, that is—”

  As I’ve said, of all the individuals I’ve ever known, Prok was the most rigorously attuned to the subconscious signals people give out when they’re distressed or angry or simply trying to cover up their feelings. He would have made a master detective. Now he just gave me a look—the sudden blue fastening of the eyes, the flash of the spectacles—and said, “Problems at home?”

  “No,” I said. “Or, yes, in a way.”

  A pair of biology professors—a zoologist in a lab coat and a botanist in shirtsleeves—stepped round us on their way to the lavatory and we both paused a moment to greet them. Once the door had closed, Prok turned back to me, his expression mild and receptive. “Yes,” he said, “go on.”

  “Iris wants a baby.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. The grin—the famous grin—sprang to his lips. “That’s marvelous news,” he said. “Simply marvelous. Is she pregnant?”

  “Oh, no,” I said. “No, no. She just—last night, I mean.”

  “I understand,” he said, taking me by the hand. “It’s a big step. But it’s all part of the natural progression, John, nothing to worry over. Children are a joy, you’ll see. And if it’s money you’re worried about, I’m sure we can make some sort of arrangement when the time comes.”

  “It’s not that. It’s more the principle. I slept on the couch last night.”

  He said nothing to this, just held my eyes, awaiting the sequel, as if I were one of his interviewees.

  “It was because of our trip, that we extended it, that is. She got a cat—for company, she claims—and now she brings up this other issue.”

  “Of a child.”

  “Yes. But I resent it. I’m not ready to take on the responsibility, Prok, and even if I was, she’s making it a demand, and she says she won’t, well, she won’t sleep with me until I give in. That’s what she said.”

  Prok took a moment to remove his spectacles and polish them on his handkerchief, the file tucked under one arm. He let out a sigh. “There’s give and take in every marriage,” he said, replacing the spectacles on the bridge of his nose and neatly folding up the handkerchief, square by square, “but my advice is to reclaim your rightful place in the marital bed. I’m not going to tell you to rush into anything, but a child might be just what you need at this juncture, as a maturing factor. I’ve been more than pleased with your work, you know that, but there’s always room for improvement and I can’t help but think that fatherhood—the direct experience of it, reproduction, John, your genes passed on to another generation—will make you an even more sympathetic interviewer, in the long run, that is. Don’t you agree?”

  All the way home, I rehearsed a little speech for Iris. I was going to tell her what Prok had said—that he’d all but given his blessing—but not right off. My mind was far from made up, and the first thing I expected from her was an apology. I worked as hard as anyone on this earth and whether she wanted to admit it or not the trip had put a real strain on me and she had no right whatever to deliver an ultimatum like that. Parenthood was a shared decision, something both spouses had to agree on, without resort to threats or blackmail. She didn’t really want to bring a child into the world under a cloud of resentment, did she? Would that be good for the kid? Would that be healthy? No, we would just have to wait—think things over, talk it out—until we were both ready.

  There was music playing when I came in the door, something muted and tender that put me in mind of the dances we used to go to, the sort of number the band played at the very end of the last set when they brought the tempo down and the couples just stood there and swayed in place. The table was set for dinner—with flowers in a vase and cloth napkins—and on the end table beside the couch a tall bourbon and water stood perspiring on a coaster. I glanced through the bead curtains to the kitchen and saw a pot on the stove and beside it a frying pan with the pink firm slab of a beefsteak stretched across it, and that was something, beefsteak in those days, really something. I just stood there a moment, taking it all in. This is more like it, I was thinking, and I went for the drink, lifted it to my lips and let the alcohol take away the heat of the day and the last lingering vestiges of my hangover from the night before. But where was she? In the bedroom, no doubt, fussing with her lipstick, dressing to please me, to make it up to me—she was wrong and she knew it. I could forget the speeches.

  It was then that I noticed that the curtains were drawn. The day had been clear and therapeutically hot, the diligent Indiana sun burning off the residuum of the previous night’s storm and saturating the air with humidity till the least movement made you break out in a sweat, and she should have had the curtains open, if only for a little circulation. I was puzzled. And sweating already, just from the effort of lifting the glass from the table. I called out her name: “Iris? Iris, I’m home!”

  Her voice came from the back room—“Give me a minute”—and I took another long pull at the drink, set the glass down on the coaster and went to the window to let some air in. Just as I was reaching for the curtains, I became aware of the sudden swish and click of wooden beads behind me and Iris saying, “Don’t.”

  I turned around and there she was, standing just my side of the dark undulating wave of suspended beads, the room half-lit, the music drifting out of the phonograph. She wasn’t wearing any clothes. Nothing at all. Her feet were spread and her hands poised on her hips. I saw that she’d made up her eyes and applied lipstick and done her nails, but all that was inconsequential before the single illuminating gesture of her nudity. Iris was private in her habits and modest about her body, nothing like the exhibitionist Violet Corcoran was, and she’d never posed nude for me before, or if she had it was only in the way of foreplay, in the permissive confines of the bed. “Leave them closed,” she murmured. “I don’t want any of the neighbors to see.”

  I came to her as if I were on a leash and she allowed me one kiss, my hands on her breasts, her abdomen, the familiar territory, before she pushed me away. “But John,” she said, and this was the very definition of coyness, “what are you doing? You know we can’t have relations—aren’t you afraid I’ll get pregnant? Wouldn’t that be a tragedy? Wouldn’t it? Hmm?”

  She was at the stove now, her back to me, lighting the gas under the pan, the beads rattling, the cat nowhere to be seen. I could taste the bourbon in the crook of my throat. The room was hotter than any sauna. And can I tell you that I took her right there on the kitchen floor, without a thought for Mac or Violet Corcoran or any other woman in the world, and that the condoms stayed right where they were, in the back corner of the cheap peeling laminated drawer of the nightstand in the bedroom?

  I’d like to report that John Jr. was conceived that night, but it wasn’t to be. Months went by, then the year, the war ended, Prok, Corcoran and I were traveling at an accelerated pace and collecting histories more assiduously than ever, and despite our best efforts—Iris’s and mine—her menses came as regularly as before. We consulted the literature, employed the recommended coital positions and dutifully coupled during the most fertile period of the monthly cycle, but all for naught. Iris took hot baths, cold baths, rubbed herself with oleomargarine, consumed nothing but eggs for an entire month. Nothing seemed to work. I talked it over with Prok, who sent me to a specialist he knew in Indianapolis. I had a thoroughgoing physical, and the doctor even invited me into the back room to study my semen under the microscope in order to reassure me that there was nothing amiss. Prok and I began to suspect Iris, and she was examined too—by a gynecologist Prok recommended, the very man who’d helped Mac with her adhesion problem twenty years earlier—and he pronounced her both normal and fit. So what was the problem? What were we doing wrong? Neither of us had a clue, but Prok did, and he was typically blu
nt about it.

  After reviewing the results—we were in the office and he’d been pacing back and forth in front of his desk with a puzzled frown, murmuring to himself—he motioned me to him. It might have been raining that day, I don’t remember, but rain would have been appropriate—as a symbol of hope and fertility. I needed something positive, because I’d been down on myself, feeling inadequate, impotent, a failure even at this. We stood together at the window a moment, gazing out on the campus. “You just have to account for the aleatory factor here, that’s all,” he said finally.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Each of the millions of your spermatozoa fighting for purchase in the uterus and Fallopian tubes, an ovum descended or not, as the case may be, natural selection at work, that is, in the microcosm of one woman’s womb—”

  I gave him a puzzled look.

  “Chance, John, chance. Keep trying, that’s all I can say.”

  In the meanwhile, our larger quest—for new blood at the Institute—had begun to turn up a number of qualified candidates now that the war was over, and we started interviewing in earnest. Each man was invited to campus, with his wife and family—the wives, in particular, had to be scrutinized, not only to determine if they were in any measure sex shy, but if they were discreet and reliable as well—and Prok gave them a tour of the facilities, arranged a picnic or musicale in their honor, took their histories and had Corcoran and me vet them for any irregularities. (Typically, Prok would have us take the candidate out on the town afterward, sans wife, in order to loosen him up and catch him off guard, and if that required a certain outpouring of liquor and a given number of Havana cigars drawn on the Institute coffers, it was nothing more than a practical business expenditure by Prok’s accounting.) Obviously, nearly all the candidates had one flaw or another, and Prok, perfectionist that he was, rejected them wholesale despite his almost desperate need for another man.