The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  Then they were on the bed, kissing even more passionately now, and Corcoran was unfastening the buttons that ran up the back of her dress, and as soon as her back was exposed he unclipped her brassiere and in a single movement jerked her arms away from the clothes so that she was peeled to the waist and her breasts fell free. Her hands became more animated, tugging at his shirt, tearing loose the buttons, a kind of frenzy building till they were both naked and Corcoran was on his knees, spreading her legs and performing cunnilingus on her while she snatched at his hair and ears and tugged as if she would pull him into her. After a moment they switched positions and she returned the favor, making a Popsicle of him, and then Corcoran lifted her back onto the bed and climbed atop her.

  Prok was wearing his mask of impassivity, but Rutledge looked as if he were about to explode. He was aroused—his trousers were tented in the crotch—and though he tried to be surreptitious about it, tried to remain focused and detached, he began to move his hands in his lap. For my part, I fought to act neutral, for Prok’s sake and Rutledge’s too—no one there, but for Corcoran, seemed to know what was expected, and Prok, Prok, of course—but I don’t think it will come as any surprise if I tell you that I’d never yet been so aroused in my life and that the psychological factors and the setting and company certainly played into it. This was Corcoran—my colleague and friend, Corcoran who’d done just this with Iris, with my wife, this movement of the head and tongue, this sliding in and out of the female orifice with the slick rhythm and balance of a seal riding a wave ashore—and it was a spur to me, I won’t deny it, and I won’t deny that spurs draw blood either. I felt choked. I could barely breathe.

  All at once Prok was out of the chair and he had Rutledge by the arm, dragging him forward till they were hovering over the scene. “You see, Rutledge, how invaluable this is?” he was saying, bending close now as Corcoran pumped and the girl heaved and snatched at his shoulders and sang out. “You see that?” Prok demanded. “Right there, see?” He was pointing an empirical finger to the girl’s left breast. “Do you see how the aureole has swollen and enlarged in arousal—and the tumescence of the erectile tissue of the nipples in both female and male? And see here—even the alae, the soft parts of the nose, have become engorged in the female …”

  Prok was inches away, bent close, using his index finger as a pointer, and in a soft voice he asked Corcoran if he might turn the girl over in order better to study the physiologic metamorphoses in her rectal and genital areas. Corcoran complied. There was a confusion of limbs, a certain awkwardness, and then the girl was on top, the silver cross swaying rhythmically with the drive of her hips, and Prok lecturing and Rutledge hovering and the whole performance coming to its ineluctable climax.

  Later—it must have been past one in the morning—I slipped the key in the lock, pushed open the front door, and found Iris sitting up over a book, waiting for me. She was sunk into the couch, her bare legs tucked neatly beneath the folds of her nightgown, and she set the book down as I came through the door. “You’re late,” she said.

  I came to her and bent for a kiss, then straightened up and gave her a theatrical stretch and a thespian’s yawn. And a shrug to show how pedestrian it all was. “Yes,” I sighed.

  She hadn’t moved. “Poor John,” she said, “I don’t envy you. It’s all work, work, work, isn’t it?”

  I was treading delicate ground here. Was that a sardonic edge to her voice? How much to tell her? “The usual,” I said. “The endless dinner, then over to Prok’s to sit around and jaw—he really put Rutledge through his paces.” I was standing over her still, gazing down into the deep draught of her eyes, studying the weave of her hair, the shadow between her breasts where the collar of her nightgown fell open. “He got the job, by the way. Rutledge, that is.”

  She didn’t say anything for a moment, but her eyes seemed to reach out to me, opening wider and wider, round as globes, worlds unto themselves, that color of the sea and all the mystery and strangeness invested there. Iris. My wife. Something was up, but what was it? “That’s good,” she said finally. “Good that it’s settled, I mean. He seems fine. I’m sure he’ll be fine, and you’ll have less pressure on you now, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess so.”

  She was silent again, but she never took her eyes off me. I heard the distant sound of a phonograph, a single faint violin rising up out of the declension of the hour and then fading away again, and I remember being transported in that moment to another place, an apartment down the block, people gathered there, the last cocktail of the night, the low incestuous buzz of voices. “I have news too,” she said.

  My mouth tried to close round the words, but my mind was already leaping ahead. “You, that’s right, you went to the, the—”

  “The doctor,” she murmured, and she was smiling like all the angels in heaven.

  4

  Prok was already at his desk when I got to work the following morning, and he lifted his eyebrows as I came in, ten minutes late. To Prok, every second lost was a second the project was delayed, and if he’d kept us all out till one in the morning, it was hardly an excuse to get lax about our responsibilities. Mrs. Matthews was there in the anteroom, punctual as a banker, her back arched and chin up, typing. Corcoran was at his desk too, and Rutledge, who’d be going back to Princeton that afternoon to begin making his personal arrangements, was in the corner, head down, perusing one of the volumes Prok had given him so that he could keep abreast of the literature in the field. Ten past eight in the morning and the office was humming along as usual. With the exception of me, that is. I wasn’t at my best—hungover, depleted, and late on top of it—but I was ringing like a bell with the news.

  Iris and I had stayed up to celebrate—I broke out a bottle of I.W. Harper I’d been saving for the occasion and touched glasses with her, though she was confining herself to ginger ale, already concerned for the baby’s welfare—and then we went to bed and I let my excitement spill into her, closing my eyes against the shadows playing across the wall and fighting down the image of the brunette and Corcoran, my wife in my arms and nobody but. My fertile wife. My pregnant wife. Two years of trying and I have to admit I was beginning to think it would never happen, that we were cursed somehow, and as I saw the child denied me I wanted it all the more, no matter the cost or the inconvenience or anything else. Prok wanted it too. And Iris’s mother—she wanted it—and Tommy wanted it and my own mother and just about everybody else we knew or came into contact with, from the butcher to the greengrocer. When are you two going to settle down and start a family?—that was what they wanted to know, what with every woman in America pregnant or pushing an infant in a stroller while an ex-serviceman strutted at her side.

  “Sorry I’m late, Prok,” I said, snagging my hat and trench coat on the clothes tree behind my desk. The coat was wet—the temperature had dropped twenty degrees overnight and it was spattering rain—and my heel prints left gleaming arcs on the linoleum tiles. “But I had to stop by Iris’s school and tell them she wasn’t coming in today.”

  Prok glanced up sharply. We were working on the text of the male volume now, and he was driving himself through sixteen- and seventeen-hour days, puzzling over the figures, pushing through organization to interpretation, and he’d become increasingly rigid under the pressure of it. He’d been up till one himself, and though he must have been feeling elated over the finalizing of the Rutledge situation and the success of the previous night’s demonstration, he might have been just the smallest bit under the weather too. “You’re holding up the project, Milk,” was all he said, and he gave me a sour look.

  Normally I would have been mortified—I hated for anyone to question my devotion and loyalty, especially Prok, to whom I owed everything, and he was in the right, of course: I was late, I was irresponsible, I was holding up the project—but I felt an almost otherworldly sense of well-being, as if nothing could touch me, not fear or disease or recrimination. No reply w
as called for, but I had one at the ready, and I held it a moment to tease out the pleasure of it. I didn’t move. Just stood there at my desk, gazing out over the sanctuary of the office, the golden pools of lamplight, the galls, Prok. Iris was home in bed, too sick to go in and minister to her seven-year-olds. I’d listened to her retching over the toilet. I’d held her hand and wrapped her in a quilt and put her back to bed with dry toast and a glass of leftover ginger ale. “I have news, Prok,” I said. “Good news, great news.”

  He’d already dropped his eyes to the page, and now they came up again, searching and hard. The pulsing arrhythmic din of Mrs. Matthews’s typewriter choked off on the downstroke. Corcoran looked up from his desk.

  “It’s Iris,” I said, and I felt inflated, bigger than life, the actor, the hero, the marathoner at the tape. I knew what they must have thought of me. I was the youngest, the least-trained, Prok’s puppet, unable even to perform the most elemental biological function of them all, but that was all behind me now. Now I was anybody’s equal. I was a man, and wasn’t this the very definition of it? “She’s, well, we’re going to have a baby,” I said. “She’s pregnant.”

  Prok let out a low whistle. Mrs. Matthews—she was in her fifties, a grandmother and a widow—gave me a melting look. And Corcoran, from his desk in the back room, put two hands together in a smatter of applause, which brought Rutledge’s head up out of his book in time to give me a quizzical glance.

  “We found out last night. Yesterday, I mean. When I got home, after the, the—”

  Prok had already crossed the room, grinning wide. He seized both my arms and held me in his grip till the familiar scent of him—of soap, astringents, the faintest whiff of witch hazel—penetrated me. “But you’ll need advice—you’ll need Mac,” he was saying, looking beyond me to the clock on the wall as if the baby were due in the next fifteen minutes. “And a good obstetrician. Whom did you say she was seeing? Because I have just the man—”

  Unfortunately, as it turned out, I was away with the team much of that fall and winter, and as often as not Iris had to endure her bouts of morning sickness alone. She wasn’t due till June, and so we both agreed that she would fulfill her obligations at the elementary school as long as she could—it was the right thing to do, of course, but we were also in need of the money because now we would have to move to a bigger place, and my raise at the Institute had yet to come through, though I was sure it would once the grant situation was ironed out. When I was home I did my best to help out around the house, preparing meals at night, washing up, laying out her clothes for the morning. She was brave about it, never once complaining over my schedule—it was a fact of life at this stage, a fait accompli—and I remember the way she pushed herself up stiffly from the table in the mornings, her face clenched as she tried to keep down half a soft-boiled egg and three sips of coffee.

  I felt bad about it. And I would have been happy to stay home with her, to help see her through it, to be with her and share the wonder of the transformation going on inside her, but this was a crucial time for the project. We’d managed to reach a milestone the year before—ten thousand histories in the books—and yet Prok kept pushing frantically for more as he got deeper into the writing up of the results, afraid of having the figures attacked for being skewed in one direction or another (“We have five hundred and five female alcoholics,” he would mutter, “but a paltry smattering of upper-level blacks and virtually nothing on ministers, rabbis and the like, not to mention drug addicts and traveling salesmen”). To complicate matters, we were still working shorthanded, as Rutledge wouldn’t complete his dissertation and join us till just before the holidays, so while Iris put on weight and felt her breasts grow tender and her feet leaden, we were bouncing from city to city, Prok lecturing nearly every day, and the three of us staying up into the wee hours recording histories. We went to Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington and any number of smaller municipalities along the way, and we were in residence at the Astor Hotel in New York for nearly three weeks in December, interviewing a succession of male hustlers and female prostitutes.

  In the meanwhile, I wrote Iris regularly, if only a line or two, and made sure to telephone her at least every other day, no matter the cost. I owed her those phone calls, and before long I found that I needed them as much as she did. The sound of her voice became an itch in my head as I showered, breakfasted, climbed aboard the train or slid into the Buick beside Prok and Corcoran, her soft tentative “hello” whispering to me over the thump of the rails and the measured beat of the tires. She was subdued on the phone, shy of it, and I’m afraid we didn’t communicate very effectively. Still, the important thing was that we did talk. I told her I loved her. Couldn’t wait to be home with her—and the baby. Was the baby kicking yet? No? Too early? Well, the baby would kick, wouldn’t it? Eventually? Yes, she assured me, the baby would kick. Christmas, I told her, Christmas would be our time together.

  A word here about the Astor Hotel, incidentally. This was, in its time, an open gathering place for homosexuals—the long black oval bar on the ground floor was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with men till all hours of the night every day of the week—and it was ideal for our purposes in securing H-histories, our chief purpose on that particular trip (though, as I say, we were also interviewing female prostitutes as well as a number of young college and career women, most of whom were brought to us by Vivian Aubrey, a sexually prodigious graduate of Columbia University whose history Corcoran had first taken on our last foray to New York, and more on her later). Most important, at the Astor, no one asked any questions. And this was significant, because we’d been requested to leave the Lincoln Hotel the previous year (that is, we were thrown out), an incident Prok was always able to recount with equanimity, though he was furious at the time.

  None of us had seemed to notice anything amiss, but for one reason or another—prudery, antiquated notions of respectability—our activities began to attract notice. We’d been interviewing at the Lincoln for some days, a whole succession of ragtag hustlers, underage boys and effeminates parading through the lobby, where Prok, Corcoran and I would meet them and escort them upstairs to our rooms, when the manager rang Prok and demanded to speak with him. Prok was in the middle of an interview and put the man off till there was a break in the schedule, at which point he summoned Corcoran and me for reinforcements and went down to confront him.

  The manager was a very proper-looking character with swept-back hair, silvered sideburns and the trace of an Italian accent—a real swell, as we used to say, pompous and self-important. “We can’t have this,” he said.

  Prok folded his arms and leveled his gaze on him. He knew what was coming. “Have what?”

  “All this sex,” the man spat. “Fags and streetwalkers. Whores. I can’t have you undressing these people in my hotel.”

  “But I’ve explained to you—this is a scientific survey we’re conducting. You know perfectly well we’re not undressing anybody.”

  “Oh, no? Maybe not their clothes, but you’re undressing their minds, and I won’t have it, not in my hotel.”

  But this time, at the Astor, there were no such problems. The management looked the other way and everything went smoothly and professionally, except in one instance that still manages to disturb me, though I don’t know why. The subject was a young man not long removed from the war and missing the lower portion of his right arm. He was my last interview of a long night, I’d been drinking and smoking with the previous subjects, and I guess I was feeling pretty wrung out. I met him in the lobby, there was a brief contretemps with the handshake—he offered his left and it took me a moment to follow suit—and then we rode the elevator up to the room Prok had reserved for interviews. The subject had been with the Navy, and though his tan had faded he might have been a modern Billy Budd, with his fair hair parted just to the left of center and the cocky gait and rigid musculature of his class. He was nineteen. He’d been educated to the eighth grade, had parents living in Oklahoma City
, and he’d been earning his living as a male hustler since he got out of the hospital. I gave him the dollar we’d agreed upon, he took the bed and I the armchair, and we began to chat.

  The preliminaries went well enough, but it soon became apparent that he was wound up on something—Benzedrine, as it turned out, which he obtained by dismantling nasal inhalers and swallowing the drug-soaked pads within. He became loquacious, overly so, each question provoking a breathless running interminable response that went so far afield I began to forget what I was doing there with him in the first place. We’d been trained in the rapid-fire technique I described earlier, and to interrupt and interject where necessary in order to steer the subject back to the matter at hand, but this man—this sailor—just wouldn’t yield. At one point, in the middle of a reminiscence about the fifty-three varieties of plants in the hothouse where his first homosexual contact, an older man, had worked, I became so exasperated that I got up out of the armchair and began pacing the floor.

  He stopped in mid-sentence and gave me a curious look—an aggressive look, actually. “What,” he said, “you’re not interested? Because I thought you said we agreed you wanted information, right, the story of my life and all like that for a buck? But what? Is it something else?” He held my eyes. “You want more than just a story?”

  “No, not at all. I just wish you would—well, don’t take this the wrong way because I don’t mean to sound impolite or guide your response in any way—but I wish you’d just stick to the format of the interview or we’ll be here all night.”