The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Well,” Prok said, “what do you think? Milk? Iris? A tight little ship, wouldn’t you say? And convenient to campus, never underestimate the value of that.”

  The chemistry professor, and I suppose I may as well give you an account of him, since I’ve managed to dredge up his wife from the memory banks (he was ten or twelve years older than his spouse, IV-F from the Army during the late war because of a congenital deformity—club foot—and so turgid in his speech he must have bored insensate a whole legion of aspiring chemists), averred that there was no finer house in the world and that he and his wife were deeply conflicted about having to give it up. “I’d even thought of commuting, but then, what with wear and tear on the car—”

  “Not to mention the wear and tear on yourself,” the wife put in, glancing up from her teacup with a look of acuity.

  “Yes. That’s right. And so we’ve had to put the place up for sale, but reluctantly. It’s just one of those things. Life moves on, right?”

  Prok was stationed just behind the wife’s chair, shifting impatiently from foot to foot. His coat hung open, the gloves and soft hat stuffed bulkily in the pockets on either side so that he looked as if he were expanding out of his clothes. “And the price,” he said. “Is that firm?”

  I was watching the professor’s face as it went through its permutations. “Within reason,” he supposed. “But there’s always wiggle-room”—that was the term he used, wiggle-room—“if the Milks are really interested and not just here to entertain us with their presence.” He gave a little laugh. “And we are entertained, aren’t we, Dora, to have such a delightful young couple here with us in this festive season and to think that we can be fortunate enough to give them a hand as they start out on the road ahead—?”

  “Would you consider ten and a half then?” Prok said. “With fifteen percent down?”

  That was when Iris spoke up. “I think I’d like to have a word with my husband,” she said, looking at each of us in succession before letting her eyes come to rest on mine. “If no one minds.”

  Oh, no. No, no. No one minded.

  In the vestibule, while the others sat round the table at the far end of the house, she spread her feet for balance and lashed into me. “You’re such a fool,” she snapped. “Such a sap. You’re soft, that’s all. Soft.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I despise it. And they’re manipulating you, can’t you see that? Prok, your precious Prok, and the professor and his wife, as if they can’t wait to unload this, this crackerbox. Do you really think I want to spend the rest of my life here? And you. Do you want to? This place stinks. It has no style, nil, zero, nothing. I’d rather stay where we are. Or what—move back to Michigan City, to my parents’ place, and live at the dairy. Milk cows. Anything but this.”

  “Can you keep your voice down? What if they hear?”

  “What if they do?”

  There was a moment during which we both just stood there glaring at each other while the small sounds of the house—groans, creaks, the dwindling patter of rodent feet—ticked round us. “I don’t know,” I said. “I kind of like it.”

  “Like it? You’re out of your mind. I won’t even talk to you. Forget it, hear me? Forget it.”

  The result was that Prok had to tell the professor and his wife that we would get back to them—Iris wasn’t feeling well, a difficult pregnancy, her first, and that was why she’d had to go out to the car without saying goodbye and thanking them for their kindness and hospitality—and then the two of us slammed into the front seat and Prok started in on her. She was passing up a golden opportunity. There was real value here. Yes, there were other houses in the world, plenty to look at, or some, at any rate, given the postwar housing shortage, and, yes, he had to account for differences in taste, but really, at our level—and here he gave me a significant look over the expanse of the front seat—we couldn’t expect to find anything more practical or economical.

  Iris heard him out as we sat there at the curb and Prok preached at her over his shoulder, then finally turned the key in the ignition and brought the Buick to life. And then, in a small but firm voice, she said, “I have an ad here.”

  Prok gave her his profile, the hat clamped down over the stiff brush of hair. “An ad?”

  “I clipped it from the paper. Listen: ‘Charming three-bedroom farmhouse, kitchen, dining, stone fireplace, indoor plumbing, built solid, 1887’—and it’s less than this place.”

  “Eighteen eighty-seven?” Prok was incredulous. “A farmhouse? What would you want with a farmhouse? But wait a minute—where did you say it was?”

  She gave the address.

  “But that’s got to be eight or ten miles out of town. At least. You’d need a car.”

  “John’s wanted a car all his life. Don’t you think, at twenty-eight, he deserves one?”

  I kept mum. The heat vent beneath the dash began to hiss and the exhaust roped back in the wind and tied itself in knots outside my window.

  “That’s not at issue, Iris. That’s not it at all. You have to think of economy, that’s what I’m saying. A car is just one more expense, the gasoline, oil, upkeep. And the project, our collecting trips—do you really want to be left way out there in the country all by yourself? And with a baby to care for, no less?”

  Iris’s voice, the stubborn little nugget of it: “We can at least look, can’t we?”

  The farmhouse, by Prok’s odometer, turned out to be 5.2 miles beyond the town limits, just off the Harrodsburg road. There was no farm attached to it—the farm had failed during the Depression—but there was the acre of land the house sat on and a small orchard of fruit trees out back, apple, peach and pear. The owner was an old man, bowed in the back and with hands like baseball mitts, a widower who was planning to move in with his son’s family in Heltonville. Iris liked the fireplace in the main room, a massive thing that had once been used for cooking, and she liked the scuffed oak floors and the gentle warp underfoot that rolled you down through the glade of the parlor and into the valley of the kitchen. She’d never seen anything sturdier than the stone foundation and the hand-hewn planks of the front porch—or the well, the well was a thing of beauty in itself. Prok hated the place. It was impractical, a headache in the making, and he appealed to me—“Do you really want to spend all your free time at home with a hammer in one hand and a paint brush in the other?”—but I had already begun to see what Iris was talking about, already begun to envision what she could do with the place given her taste and her resourcefulness, and so I said nothing.

  On the way back in the car, while Iris and I were buzzing over the possibilities—“That room under the stairs, it’s perfect for a study, John, your own study”—Prok pulled his trump card. He’d been uncharacteristically silent as the frozen fields rolled by and the tires snatched at the piebald pavement between humps of ice and compacted snow, and suddenly he raised his voice and said, “I really don’t know if I can see my way to making this loan under the circumstances—that is, John,” and he snatched his eyes from the road to give me a sidelong look—“if I don’t approve of the property, and I most emphatically do not, because I do have to protect my investment, you understand.”

  Iris came right back at him, more sharply than I would have liked, but she was right, and I had to admit it. “We appreciate everything you’ve done for us,” she said, biting off her words as if she were paying by the syllable, “but you have to understand that we’ll be living in that house, not you. It’s our decision, not yours. And if we have to overex-tend ourselves, if I have to get a second job, scrub floors, anything, we’ll make it, with or without your help.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, fighting to control his voice.

  “Iris,” I said.

  “No, John, let me have my say.”

  The Buick sailed over the road like a ship at sea, Prok’s hands tightening on the wheel as the tires fought for purchase and slipped again on a rolling white patch of ice.

  �
�Listen, Prok,” she said, leaning into the front seat now, her hands clamped to the fabric on either side of his head, leaning in close so he wouldn’t mistake her, “if you think I’m going to be dictated to or bullied or blackmailed, then you don’t know me very well.” There was a bump, and then the long soft shush of the ice. “No,” she said, “you don’t know me at all.”

  5

  Escrow closed at the end of January, and though Prok was a bit brusque when I asked, he gave me the day off and the use of the Nash (veering and uncertain, but still running and still capable of hauling a load) to facilitate the move. Both Corcoran and Rutledge had volunteered to help, but as time was running out on the male volume and Prok growing increasingly edgy, they couldn’t be spared, and so I hired a man for the day and together we dismantled the bed, removed the legs from the kitchen table and shouldered the couch and armchair out the door. The Nash, which Prok had modified into a kind of van, took the larger items, and my own car—the 1938 Dodge D8 Coupe I’d gone out and purchased for two hundred fifty dollars the day after we made an offer on the house, because what was the sense of saving for a rainy day when the deluge was already on us—ferried the boxes of clothes, dishes, records, books, cosmetics, silverware, mops, brushes, tools, pots, pans, foodstuffs and all the rest of the accumulated and husbanded necessities of an American household at the midpoint of the twentieth century, and it was amazing to contemplate how much we’d managed to acquire during our five years in the apartment.

  Iris was in her glory. I didn’t want her fatiguing herself—she was in her fourth month now and just beginning to show, if you looked at her in the right light, that is—but there was no stopping her. She’d been busy packing for weeks, making lists, discarding various objects and procuring others, doubling brown paper bags and reinforcing cardboard boxes with masking tape. On the day of the move, she wrapped a kerchief round her head, vomited for the last time in the old toilet on Elm Street, and had me take her and a full carload out to the new place before the sun was up. While the hired man and I wrestled the furniture out the door of the apartment she was busy lining the shelves at the house, and by the time we’d got down to arranging the couch and chairs in the new place (as per her very explicit directions), every box and brown paper bag was empty, the drawers were filled with neatly folded shirts, socks and underwear, the pantry stocked and the statue of Aphrodite cum ashtray occupying a position of honor on the mantelpiece.

  We had hamburger sandwiches and french fries out of a greasy paper sack that night, washed down with Cokes, and for me, two or three hard-earned bourbons and water. I found a heap of scrapwood in a shed out back and got a good blaze going in the fireplace, and we sat on the newly unscrolled carpet and ate in front of it. For a long while we just sat staring into the flames, content to be there together, enjoying our first meal in our new house. “God, I love a fire,” she said, looking around for something to wipe her hands on. There was a sheen of hamburger grease on her lips. Behind her, propped against the side of the couch, were the four prints that had graced the wall of the apartment and a much bigger framed reproduction of Modigliani’s Nude on a Blue Cushion, a housewarming gift from Prok and Mac.

  “Me too,” I said, and I handed her the empty hamburger sack to use as a napkin, because neither of us felt like getting up.

  “The wallpaper has to go though,” she said. “We need something lighter, to brighten the place up. The smoke darkens things too, you know—years of it, the little bit that drifts back into the room? But that’s why I haven’t even thought about hanging the pictures yet—new wallpaper, that’s a must. And the furniture. I’m not sure about the furniture yet either. You think the couch looks strange there, out in the middle of the room like that? I thought it would help divide up the space—”

  I watched her ball up the grease-spotted bag and toss it into the fire, the flames rising and falling back again, and then I shrugged. “Looks fine to me. But whatever you want. You just tell me when you’re ready to pick out the paper.”

  “I don’t know,” she said, running her gaze around the room. “I’ll look at patterns tomorrow, because I really didn’t want to do anything till we were actually in the house—you have to live in a place before you can get a feel for it, my mother always said that, but the walls are too dark, much too dark. We don’t want people to think we’re living in a cave, do we?” She paused, biting her underlip, looking right through me. “But that nude. I don’t know about that nude.”

  “What? The Modigliani? It’s a famous painting, a great work of art. I think it’d look nice, maybe on that wall there, by the staircase. Or maybe over by the window?”

  “I don’t know. A nude. What kind of statement does that make?”

  “It doesn’t make any statement. It’s just art, that’s all. Just a painting.”

  “Oh, come off it, John—four woodcuts of Emily Brontë scenes and a two-and-a-half-by-three-foot nude?”

  “But what about Prok? He’ll, well, he’ll expect—”

  “Yeah,” she said, and her eyes were focused now, flaring up and then settling on me like a pair of flamethrowers, “Prok, Prok, Prok.”

  Outside it was windy, with temperatures in the teens. The windows shook and we listened to the sounds of the house a moment, alien sounds that would grow increasingly familiar, day by day, till they provided the sound track for the rest of our lives. “Let’s not spoil this,” I said. “Hang it anywhere you want, I don’t care.”

  “That’s nice, John,” she said. “Very magnanimous. How about the toolshed? Will that do? Think a nude’ll liven it up and remind us how we make our bread and butter here every time we need a crosscut saw or a what, a monkey wrench?”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Just don’t.”

  The fire chased shadows across the walls. The cat, which had been padding tirelessly round the place all day long, in search of mice or the scent of mice, trotted across the room and disappeared in the darkened hallway that led to the kitchen. I got up then and poured myself another drink, the bottle shaped perfectly to my hand as if it were the most familiar thing in this new environment, more comforting than the transposed furniture and the Aphrodite or even Iris with her accusatory eyes and tragic underlip. “You know, it’s a shame you can’t take a drink,” I said. “I think a drink would really help loosen you up a bit. You should be happy—aren’t you happy? Iris?”

  She said nothing, but her eyes had begun to roam the room again.

  “He did loan us the money,” I said. “You’ve got to give him credit for that.”

  The next day was Saturday, and we worked all that day and Sunday too, putting up wallpaper, painting the ceiling in the living room an expansive high-flown white two shades removed from pure and generally scrubbing and rearranging things till we were both exhausted. Our first formal meal in the house had nothing of the celebratory quality of the meat loaf dinner Iris had prepared for me that first day in the apartment (I seem to remember a chicken of questionable age and tenderness, roasted with potatoes and carrots in a single pan, sans stuffing, gravy or greens, in the interest of keeping it simple) but it was a home-cooked meal nonetheless, cooked in our own home. Our son (“Or daughter,” as Iris kept reminding me) wouldn’t grow up in a rental, and he’d have his own yard in which to play ball and ride high on the swing set we planned to erect and maybe help his mother in the vegetable patch and just amble outside and pick an apple or peach or pear anytime he felt like it. Despite the smell of paste and paint fumes and the twin draughts that seemed to slice across the living room at six inches and six feet respectively, we were in heaven.

  But then it was Monday, and I listened to Iris retch in the new toilet (or rather, the old toilet in the new house) and then I drove her to school and went into the office myself, and the routine started in again. Prok looked as if he’d been at work for hours when I got there at eight, his head bowed, skin drained of color under the distorting glare of the lamp. He glanced up and nodded a curt greeting as I came in, and it
was as if he were wearing a mask—suddenly, in that moment, from that angle and in that light, he looked ancient, lines of fatigue cut under his eyes and radiating like parentheses from his pursed lips, his forehead scored, a series of vertical trenches delineating the jointure of his upper jaw and ear. There was gray in his hair, gray threaded through the boyish pompadour like blighted stalks in a field of wheat. And how old was he? I did the calculation in my head as I unwound the scarf from my throat and shrugged out of my coat: in June he would be fifty-three, in the prime of life. But the look of him, just then, gave me a stab of alarm. He was pushing himself too hard, I thought, pushing against a weakened heart and an immovable world, and all his power and magnetism and his unflagging energy couldn’t save him, couldn’t save anybody. I sat there a moment, sobered, and then I called across the room to him. “Prok, can I get you anything? Coffee maybe? A doughnut?”

  He lifted his head and gave me a steady look, as if he were trying to place me, and gradually, the old familiar Prok began to settle back into his features. “No thanks, Milk, but I will need those charts on marital intercourse by educational level this morning, and we’re going to have to convene a special staff meeting too.” He paused, removed his glasses to pinch his eyes shut a moment. “Something’s come up.”

  Corcoran and Rutledge strode in together then, sharing a private joke, and Mrs. Matthews began machine-gunning away at the typewriter. “Morning, Prok, John,” my colleagues chimed, Corcoran’s lips clamped round the pipe Prok wouldn’t let him light in the offices, Rutledge already sliding out of his coat. “How’s the house coming, John?” Corcoran wanted to know, and he bent over the desk to take my hand in his own and give my fingernails a mock inspection. “White for the ceilings, I guess, huh? Or is that the picket fence?”