The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  “Yes, but”—a cigarette to the lips, a distracted wave at the ashtray—“underneath all that, I mean. The man. The man himself? Certainly he must have some sort of oddities or quirks, irritating habits—I hear he can be pretty short sometimes, isn’t that right?”

  “Listen,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I see a friend over there—an acquaintance, a friend of the research, actually—and really, I have to”—I was pushing myself away from the bar, patting down my pockets for cigarettes—“but thanks for the drinks, thank you, nice meeting you.”

  The girl—Betty—watched the entire transaction, the nod in her direction, the dual handshakes, the fading expressions of Elster and Skittering, even as her friend turned to look over her shoulder and I weaved my way across the room to her, glass in hand. I didn’t know what I was doing really, just that I was extricating myself from an awkward situation, and that, as much as anything, impelled me toward her. “Hello,” I said, sweeping the hair away from my forehead with my free hand as I swayed over her, “remember me?”

  Her smile was glossy, her lips pulled back tightly over her teeth, and forgive me if I couldn’t help picturing those lips as they stretched wide to receive Corcoran, that heroic motion, in and out, and the tissue there glistening with fluids. “Yeah, sure,” she said, and she slid over and patted the seat beside her. “Here, take a load off. Come on.”

  I eased in beside her, a quick glance for Elster and his companion, who were fixed on me like birds of prey, and the olfactory memory of her came back to me in a rush, that perfume, the heat of her body, the smell of her hair.

  “This is Marsha,” she said, indicating the friend across the narrow table (spaniel eyes, the face of Stan Laurel, a frizz of apricot-colored hair), “and what was your name again?”

  My name was John. And I gave it to her. And I gave her her smile back too.

  The waitress was there and she asked if we wanted to see a menu. The girls’ martini glasses were empty. Betty wanted another drink and she thought looking at the menu might be a good idea. The friend claimed that the one drink had gone to her head, and she didn’t know, but sure, what the hey, she’d have another. That was fine by me, though I didn’t have a whole lot of cash on me, because I’d planned on a couple of drinks, a bite to eat, and then a five-point-two-mile hike, and nothing more. Iris was at home, big as a house. The house was at home, bigger than a house. I ordered another beer and Betty told the waitress to bring her a porterhouse steak—“rare to bloody”—with fries and a house salad with Thousand Island dressing.

  After that the three of us beamed at one another for a while and we talked about Bloomington, how endlessly, hopelessly, stuporifically dull it was, and we talked about movie stars—John Garfield, wasn’t he disgusting, or raw or whatever you wanted to call it?—and our travels, such as they were. Both girls were mad for New York, though as it turned out neither had been there, and I suppose it was only natural that I should play up my experiences there and maybe even embroider them a bit. Then the steak came and the friend left—she had to be up early in the morning—and when I glanced over my shoulder Elster and Skittering were gone too.

  “So are you married?” the girl said.

  “No.”

  “Then what’s that on your finger?”

  “This?”

  “Yeah, that.”

  “It’s a wedding ring.”

  She dropped her eyes to the plate a moment, the knife, the fork, cut a wedge of steak and looked up again as she tucked it between her lips. “Divorced?”

  “Does it matter?”

  She shrugged, dropped her eyes to the plate again.

  “What about you,” I said. “Are you—and please don’t take this the wrong way—are you, well, a professional?”

  She was chewing thoughtfully, slowly, her eyes reemerging now to lock on mine. “What is this—another interview?”

  “You mean you already—?” I made a mental note to go to the files in the morning and violate our code of anonymity yet again. “Who was it, Corcoran?”

  “Yeah,” she said, “Purvis. He’s a great friend of mine, you know that, don’t you?”

  I wasn’t very good at this, but the liquor was in my veins and liquor always made me feel unbeatable. “I gathered that,” I said. “From the last time I saw you.”

  She ignored me. Went for the steak again. Picked up a french fry and licked the salt from it with quick pink stabs of her tongue before folding it into her mouth. “No,” she said, “in answer to your question. I’m not a professional, whatever that means. I don’t take money for it, if that’s what you’re asking, and that’s down on the interview sheet too.”

  I was getting the defiant look now, the look she’d given us all when we were milling around Prok’s living room trying to summon the courage to get on with what we’d come for. “I like men,” she said. “Is that a crime?”

  “No,” I said, “that’s no crime at all.”

  And then we were both laughing, laughing to beat the band, as they say, and in the throes of it she put a hand on my thigh to steady herself. The jukebox—I wasn’t even aware to this point that it had fallen silent—roared back to life with something that had plenty of jump to it and we let the laughter trail off even as we began to feel the beat vibrating through the tabletop and the glasses in our hands and the seat of the bench we were sharing. People around us got up to dance and my fingers, independent of thought, began to tap out the rhythm. I was thinking I should ask her to dance, though I wasn’t much good at it, but instead I said, “So what do you do—for a living, I mean?”

  She turned her face to me, a blue sheen of neon caught in her hair. “I’m a nurse,” she said.

  “Oh, really? Well, that’s—that’s terrific. It really is. A nurse, huh? That must be—interesting.”

  “You’d be surprised,” she said, looking out over the room before her eyes came back to mine. “But you know what?”

  “What?”

  “You know what I really like? After a good meal?” She leaned in close, so that her forehead was nearly touching mine and I could smell the gin and her perfume and the meat on her lips.

  “No,” I said, “what?”

  “You can’t guess?”

  Iris went into labor on June the twentieth, just after dinner. She’d experienced mild contractions the day before, and there had been blood in her vaginal secretions that morning, followed by a discharge of bloody mucus, normal precursors to the rupturing of the amniotic sac and the imminent birth of the child. Though I’d been unconscionably ignorant of the whole process (witness my question about the kicking of the baby, which even the most untutored or oblivious should know doesn’t occur until the sixteenth week), Prok had encouraged me to educate myself, not only for “my own benefit in apprehending the life process,” as he put it, but in improving my ability to relate to our female subjects as well. And he was right: now I knew what they went through, what they were afraid of, how the pleasure of the act was followed by the pain of disclosure, abortion, the throes of birth. Though he’d never been busier or more harassed, Prok took the time to quiz me each week on Iris’s condition—the swelling of her breasts, the appearance of the linea nigra drawn like a dark chalk mark over the hump of her abdomen, the dropping of the fetus, the widening of the cervix—and made a little lecture of it every step of the way. Terms like “blastocyst” and “human chorionic gonadotrophin,” “endometrium” and “progesterone,” which I’d probably copied into a notebook somewhere in Intro to Biology and promptly forgotten, became as familiar to me as the baseball scores in the morning paper.

  We were lucky, really. We had not only the benefit of the literature on the subject (including an excellent and very thorough new book by Benjamin Spock, a Columbia University M.D.) and the experience of Dr. Bergstrom, but the advice of Iris’s mother as whispered through the long-distance lines and all the support Prok and Mac could give us, Mac especially, who spent hours at the house, knitting, baking and just c
hatting away with Iris in her soft glutinous tones as if Iris were one of her daughters and the baby out of her own bloodline. My own enthusiasm, as I’ve said, tended to vary day to day, but there was something of the inevitable in the process and I found myself submitting to the pull of it. And I was informed. At least there was that.

  As the due date approached, I made sure that the car—with its rebuilt transmission—was in good running order and the gas tank topped off, ready for the dash to the hospital. The twentieth fell on a Friday, and I hadn’t wanted to leave Iris to go into work, but she had assured me she’d be fine—I should stick close to the phone, that was all. As it was, I was hardly able to concentrate through the long, tediously unmomentous morning and into the crux of the slow-grinding afternoon, and I left work early—How was she? No change—to make us a light dinner of macaroni salad and canned fruit, and then we’d sat in the living room listening to the radio and waiting. She’d gotten up to rinse her cup in the sink when I noticed that her dressing gown was stuck wet to her legs. I looked at her in alarm. “Iris,” I said, “you’re wet, do you know that?”

  She’d put a hand out to steady herself against the sink, and there was dripping now, and I was up off the couch and taking hold of her under the arms as if she were on the edge of a dark yawning gulf and in danger of slipping away from me. The terminology rang in my head—amniotic sac, cervical dilation, oxytocin—but I felt helpless all the same. She gave me a weak smile, dead weight in my arms, and murmured, “Yes, I think it’s time.”

  6

  There was the usual rush to the hospital, the wife’s face drawn and bloodless, the prospective father’s hand trembling on the gearshift, a litany of all the things that could go wrong jamming the airwaves in his head—Catherine Barkley dead in the rain and the infant too, the forceps child down the block with the pinched features like an unfinished painting, the crippled, the retarded, the hopeless, the stillborn—and then there was the wheelchair waiting at the emergency entrance and the two of them sitting in Admissions answering inane questions and filling out forms till the prospective father wanted to get the nurse in a stranglehold and force her to reveal the whereabouts of Dr. Bergstrom, the obstetrician, and where was he? Didn’t he realize what was going on here?

  I didn’t say anything, though. Didn’t make a move. Just sat there in the crucible of the chair and held Iris’s hand while the nurse nattered on and the ink made its way from the pen to the printed forms and the world went maddeningly on as if nothing at all were out of the ordinary. Iris looked bilious, bleached to the roots of her hair, her eyebrows painted stroke by stroke over the void of her eyes. She was sunk down in the chair, slumped under the terrible weight of the ball she was carrying around with her, teeth clenched, limbs dangling. The hands of the wall clock crept round as expected. Clouds bobbed in the sky beyond the window. All at once, Iris let out a sharply aspirated cry and the nurse smiled. Then they finally came for her, two orderlies with a gurney, and took her up to Obstetrics, and nothing happened, absolutely nothing.

  After an hour or so they let me in to sit with her, pulling the curtain around the bed to give us some privacy. Her eyelids were closed, her hands prone beside her. There was no color to her, none, and she might have been dead already, laid out on a slab in the funeral parlor. I took her hand then—out of passion and fear and because I felt so reduced and helpless in that moment—and her eyes snapped open. “John?” she said.

  “It’s me,” I said. “I’m right here.” It was movie dialogue, and I kept seeing Helen Hayes’s face superimposed over hers, and where was the “Liebestod” to carry us away? “What are the contractions like? Coming faster now? Did he say how long it’s going to be?”

  They’d given her something for the pain and her voice was drowsy with it. “It’s going to be a while, John,” she murmured. “It’s just one of those things, you know? Sometimes, with your first—”

  An unseen woman cried out from across the room then—or no, she shrieked, actually, as if a torturer were at work on her with his hot pliers and his electrodes. There was a silence, and then she shrieked again. I felt chastened, helpless, full of remorse and tenderness. The only thing I could think to do was squeeze my wife’s hand. “Should I find Bergstrom? Talk to him, I mean?”

  Her voice dropped away. “Only if you want to. But don’t”—the woman shrieked again, stone on glass—“get yourself in a lather. I’m okay. I am. Everything’s going to be fine, you’ll see.”

  In the end, of course, she was right—everything was fine, and John Jr., at seven pounds six ounces and twenty-one inches in length, was the result. But Iris’s was a protracted labor, and Friday night became Saturday morning, the progress of the clock as tedious as anything I’d ever endured, Sunday sermons, a visit to the dentist, Prok in the sixth hour of a Buick-bound lecture, and then the sun was up and Bergstrom back on the job advising me to go home and shower and catch some sleep because she was barely dilated and it would be a while yet. I didn’t take his advice. I slumped in the chair at Iris’s bedside, listened to the furtive comings and goings of the ward, might even have heard the odd wail of a newborn from the delivery room across the hall. Coffee fueled me, and something greasy from the cafeteria—chili con carne, fried chicken and dumplings—till my stomach was a vat of acid. When Saturday afternoon melded into Saturday evening, and still nothing had happened, I turned to my flask for solace.

  Sunday morning came, the small hours revisited, and I went out to the car and slept, and when I woke the sun was high overhead and making a furnace of the Dodge, the windows of which I’d rolled up in order to defeat the mosquitoes. I’d sweated through to my underwear, and I’m afraid that I must have been a walking wall of unpleasant odors and secretions. My mouth was dry, but I took the precaution of refilling the flask before I shuffled back through the hospital, looked in on Iris—still nothing—and made my way into the men’s room to throw some water on my face and pat down my underarms with hand soap and paper towels. It was past noon by the time I had a sandwich in the cafeteria, and then I sat through the long afternoon and into the evening with my wife, and it was as if we’d never been anyplace else in the world but here, behind the white curtains, while expectant mothers climbed into the beds on either side of us, cried out their pain, and were wheeled into the delivery room to gratify their husbands and their doctors. I was reading to her from the paper when the sun went down for the third time.

  Then it was night, ten o’clock, ten-thirty, eleven, and yet still nothing, though the contractions were coming faster now and Dr. Bergstrom was on the case, poking his head between the curtains every few minutes, inspecting Iris’s cervix for dilation and making encouraging noises. I should say, incidentally, that I’d been given permission to be with my wife throughout the process and to witness the birth itself, something Prok had encouraged me to do. He’d been present for the delivery of all three of his children, and he spoke very passionately both to me and Dr. Bergstrom about the significance of the experience from a scientific point of view, and I think he himself would have liked to be there with us if it wouldn’t have looked odd in the eyes of the community. Odd enough that the husband should be present, let alone another male, no matter how closely connected and how purely objective he might have been. And of course Iris would have refused him in any case. This was her show. Absolutely.

  And then it occurred to me, as eleven o’clock slipped by and my stomach broiled and the bourbon lit me from within and all of my fears came rising to the surface like the corpses of the drowned, that there was actually something serendipitous in the delay, that something extraordinary was occurring here—if Iris held out another forty-five minutes by my watch, John Jr. would share a birthday with Prok. I told myself that everything was happening for a reason, that was all it was, and I couldn’t imagine anything more perfect. Or auspicious. John Jr. and Prok. I saw a succession of birthday parties stretching on over the years, balloons, flowers, the cutting of the cake, Prok lifting my son to his
shoulders and parading round the room with him, uncle, godfather, mentor.

  I took a pull at the flask and glanced down at Iris. She lay there like a stone. They’d given her an epidural for the pain and Dr. Bergstrom had begun to talk about inducing labor or even operating because there was the danger now of an infection setting in, and the nurses had begun to bustle a bit because one way or the other the moment was coming. “Iris,” I said, and I suppose I was half-drunk at the time, the flask doing wonders for my jangled nerves, and I didn’t want to think about the delay and the consequences and the fatality that hung over the bed like a palpable nightmare, because I was going to look on the bright side of things, I was going to buck her up as best I could. “Iris, you know what?”

  She was exhausted, drained, all her energy and her optimism gone. She barely lifted her eyes.

  “Looks like John Jr.—or Madeline—is going to share a famous birthday.”

  Nothing.

  “With Prok. In forty-five minutes it’s Prok’s birthday, June the twenty-third, did you realize that? Isn’t it amazing?”

  She let out a sudden gasp, as if a bottle of champagne had been unstoppered, and then, seconds later, another, and then another, and the curtains flew back and the nurse was wheeling the gurney into the delivery room, and as I sat there in surgical mask and scrubs and tried to contain the hammering of my heart, I watched my son come into the world at 11:56 p.m. on June 22, 1947.

  I’d like to say that we gave birth to the male volume at the same time—and we should have, according to the schedule Prok had laid out for himself—but the parturition of the text was a bit more difficult and protracted than any of us could have imagined. As the summer broiled around us and we darted off for abbreviated field trips to this venue or that, Prok worked ever more furiously on the manuscript, writing everywhere—in the car, on the train, at home before work and in the office after the doors had been shut, composing the latter chapters even as the early ones came back to us in galleys from W.B. Saunders. He was putting in eighteen-hour days, sleep a luxury, food nothing more than fuel for the engine, Mac, Mrs. Matthews, Corcoran, Rutledge and I coopted into reading proofs, our offices a blizzard of paper, graphs and spread-eagled texts, always another chart to complete or a fact to check. The absolute final date for completed copy was September 15, and as late as the end of August there were five chapters yet to finish.