The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  It was then that the lavatory door swung open and Vivian Aubrey stepped out to join the party. Her hair—blond, with a natural wave—had been freshly brushed, and she’d reapplied her lipstick, a blood-red dab of which was in evidence on one of her incisors when she smiled her way back into the room. She was elegant in the way of my first female subject—the soigné faculty wife who seemed as out of place in Indiana as a tropical bird, and who’d made me blush—and she’d come straight to us from the rarefied atmosphere of the East Coast. She was confident. Shining. Light-years ahead of any of us in terms of sophistication and savoir-vivre. “Oh, hi, John,” she said, gliding up to me and taking my hand in a firm, frank grip, “I wasn’t sure you’d make it, what with the baby and your mother-in-law—your mother-in-law’s still in town, isn’t that right?”

  Every possibility seethed within me. My voice was a croak. “My mother.”

  She’d bent now to light a cigarette, ignoring Prok’s acid look—she was on stage here and she could do what she liked. I watched her throw her head back and exhale. “Oh, yes, right: your mother.”

  I don’t really think I have to go into the details of the filming that night, because, as I’ve said, the novelty quickly wears off and the process of filming, observing, even participating, loses its initial frisson with time and repetition—one act is very like another, whether it’s observed in the flesh or preserved on celluloid. What was different about that night, though—what makes me recollect it now even after all the activity, and trials, that have succeeded it—was what Vivian said to me next. She said, “I hear we’re going to be partners tonight, you and I.”

  I probably stammered. Or, no, I certainly stammered. “I, well, nobody’s really, I mean, Prok hasn’t said—”

  She’d eased down on the arm of the chair so that the overlay of her hip was parallel with my face, then leaned in to bring her eyes closer to mine, and I could smell her, perfume, soap, yes, but something else too, something raw and primitive that can’t be feigned and will never come in a bottle. “What’s the matter,” she said, “don’t you like me?”

  If you haven’t guessed, I’d been filmed already—I was one of the one thousand males recorded masturbating on the sheet in Aspinall’s studio, as were Corcoran and Rutledge. Prok saved twelve dollars there, and why not? If I’d felt self-conscious about it at first, there were the other 999 men to buck me up, and the thought of that, as much as anything, stimulated me to the point of response: I performed, wiped up and moved off like any of them.

  Vivian Aubrey’s hair hung loose, the tug of gravity easing it from her shoulders in a thick shimmering panel. I glanced across the room at Betty—she was watching me, something almost mocking in her expression. Or maybe it was hunger, maybe that was it. I turned back to Vivian Aubrey, the light of her eyes, the single flaming slash of color fixed on the ridge of her tooth, and whispered, “Oh, yes, I do. I like you a lot.”

  She straightened up then, and let a hand drift to my shoulder for balance. One more puff from the cigarette. A short, trilling laugh. “Anything for science, huh?” she said, and I wondered where I’d heard that before.

  I don’t know if I’ve got the dates right here, or even the year (the volume of Prok’s travels during the five-year period between publication of the male edition in ’48 and the female in ’53 would have dwarfed any statesman’s), but to the best of my recollection it was sometime early in the following year that Prok, Mac, Corcoran and I entrained for the Pacific Coast, that is, for San Quentin and Berkeley both. Mac spent most of her travel time knitting and staring out the window, silently watching the countryside scroll past, but she came to life for meals in the dining car and the occasional late-night game of pinochle, and it was a real pleasure to have her there, just for companionship, just for that. As for Corcoran and me, Prok put us to work, of course, interviewing travelers, computing data, meeting daily with him in the club car to talk over our strategy for history-taking at San Quentin and the volume on sex offenders he was even then projecting as a successor to Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. The prospect was exciting, but we were all a little anxious about taking histories in the prison—this wasn’t the Indiana State Penal Farm, but a maximum-security lockup replete with a gas chamber and its own Death Row to feed it, and to be confined in a cell one-on-one with a rapist or murderer was daunting, to say the least.

  We took a car across the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog seething below us as if the ocean were heated to a rolling boil, none of us saying much, not even Prok. I remember the look of the prison still, humped and low against a battery of treeless hills, a clustered stone beehive of a place with slits for windows and a medieval funk hanging over it, as if it had been there before Columbus, before laws and juries and judges. It was a place of confinement. Of penitence. And if any of the inmates went from penitence to resentment to rage and violence, we would be on our own. As the guard searched our car at the gate and my palms sweated and my throat went dry, I couldn’t help wishing I’d chosen another profession. Or at the very least begged off just this once to stay home with Iris and the baby.

  As it turned out, the warden was as concerned for our safety as we were (as I was, that is: once we got there, once we were actually inside the walls, Prok seemed unfazed, one subject no different from another as far as he was concerned), and he’d arranged for us to interview the elite prisoners first. These were the heads of the various gangs and cabals, the foremost Mexican, the leading Negro, the champion boxer, and so on. If we could establish our legitimacy with the inmate leaders, then we would find it relatively easy going with the others—that was the thinking. Of course, we needed absolute privacy, and to conduct interviews in the warden’s office or even the chaplain’s, where intimacies might be overheard, was out of the question. Prok finally decided on a series of disused cells dating back to the last century, deep in the prison’s subchambers. The walls were of stone, two feet thick, the doors each fashioned from a single slab of steel and with nothing but a peephole to break their lines; even so, Prok wound up draping blankets over them to be sure of muffling even the slightest sound.

  My first subject was a Negro who was entirely innocent of the crime for which he’d been convicted, viz., lying in wait in the alley behind a bar after an altercation with two of the establishment’s patrons, after which he was falsely accused of battering the two men to death with the use only of his hands and a brick wall that presented itself as a convenient, if immobile, weapon. Or so he claimed. Nearly all the prisoners we interviewed, particularly the sex offenders, harped continually on the subject of their innocence. At any rate, he was led into the cell by a guard with a disapproving face (universally, the guards thought our locking ourselves in with their charges was a bad idea, even suggesting that we wear whistles round our necks in the event we needed to summon aid), and I offered him a chair, cigarettes and a Coca-Cola out of the eight-ounce bottle, a real luxury in prison, since, for reasons that should be obvious, glass was strictly verboten.

  The Negro was thirty-one years old, short but powerfully built, with a cast in one eye and a habit of ducking his head and mumbling his responses so that I often had to stop the interview and ask him to repeat himself. As for his sex history, it was surprisingly unremarkable, very little consensual activity with the opposite sex and a burgeoning list of activities of the H-variety, owing to his long incarceration. He talked freely, seemed even to enjoy himself, the novelty of the situation appealing to him, I think, as well as the special consideration with which I treated him, the Cokes (he consumed three) and the largesse of the cigarettes (he smoked half a pack, then pocketed two others). At the very end of the interview, he leaned across the table and said, “You know, I don’t know if I should be telling you this, but I want to be straight with you, because you been straight with me, know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” I said, holding fast to my clipboard. “We try to be—that is, we pride ourselves on our, how do you say it?—our hep. Or hepness, that is.”
/>   “Well, listen: I’m not really as innocent as I might have made out.” A pause, a tap at the fresh cigarette he’d stuck for safekeeping behind the lobe of one ear. “The two of them outside in that back alley? That night?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I did croak them. My hands—know what I mean?—my hands were like when you get a piece of meat out of the butcher before he wraps it up, just like that. That was their brains, Jack, squeezing through my fingers.”

  I had no response to this. This wasn’t what we’d come to hear—this was a different kind of science altogether. My eyes were fastened on his, on the one that wasn’t rolling. There was no sound but the dry wheeze of our internal furnaces, of our lungs pumping in and out. We were in a tomb, deep down, buried deep. Was I frightened? Yes. Absolutely. I mastered myself long enough to say, “Yes? Go on.”

  He took his time, the undisciplined eye rolling like a porthole in a storm, and then he reached across the table and took hold of my wrist. “That fat fuck,” he spat.

  “Who?” Do not react, I kept telling myself. Let nothing show.

  “McGahee.”

  I was puzzled. “Who’s McGahee?”

  A look of incredulity. “The guard!” he shouted. “The fat fuck of a guard.”

  Another long pause. If I’d screamed through a megaphone no one would have heard me.

  “I’m going to croak him. Tonight.” He glanced once over his shoulder at the door and the olive-drab blanket hanging like an arras over the peephole and then pulled a sliver of honed blue steel from the waistband of his trousers, and what was it, a spoon worked to a point, the fragment of an iron bed frame, the blistered head of a meteor flung down out of the heavens? Metal, steel. He had it—here, in prison. The man held it there in the light of the freestanding lamp I’d set up along with the desk and chairs. There was an edge to that steel, and it caught the light in a quick sharp gleam of menace.

  “Going to shank him,” he breathed, and now I was in on it too, complicit, one of his soldiers, one of his gang. “The fat fuck,” he added, for emphasis, even as he rose from the table, pocketed the two unopened packs of cigarettes, and moved to the door so he could hammer the cold slab of steel with the underside of his fist and roar out to the guard at the end of the hall: “Open up down there! This here innerview is quit!”

  Of course, I bring this up because of the moral dilemma with which it presented us. I was numb through the next two interviews—I got the boxer next, and then the chief Mexican—and the minute we climbed back into the car, I opened myself up to Prok and Corcoran. The fog had closed in on us, and we sat there in the cab of our rental car as if we were prisoners ourselves, confined forever, confined to this, to these questions and this procedure, and the confidences that weighed on us like a judgment. I wanted to scream. Wanted to turn to Prok and bawl till there was no air left in my body.

  Prok sat stiffly beside me, so close our thighs were touching; Corcoran was on the other side of me, gazing out the window into the opacity of the atomized light. Prok had been about to start up the car, all business, all hurry, but he paused now, his hand arrested on the key he’d inserted in the slot of the ignition. “I see your dilemma, Milk,” he said after a moment. “But it could be a test, you realize that, don’t you? If word should get back that we’ve broken confidentiality, then we’ll be washed up here—or in any other correctional facility, for that matter.”

  “But a man’s life could be at stake—the guard.” I named him, and it was like reading a name off a tombstone: “McGahee.”

  Prok had dropped his hand from the ignition. The fog breathed at the windows. “No,” he said finally, “we can’t do it, no matter whose life might be at stake. It’s regrettable, no doubt about it, and I wish it hadn’t come up at all, but we just cannot compromise the project. And, too, it may well be a test, never lose sight of that. Corcoran, you’re in agreement? Milk?”

  As it turned out, no one was murdered that night. Or the next night either. To the best of my knowledge, none of the guards was assaulted in all the time we were connected with San Quentin, during that visit and subsequent ones as well. I thought of that Negro, with his dirty shaft of steel and the eye that wouldn’t hold—I think of him now—and wonder if Prok wasn’t right after all. It was a test. That’s all it was. A test.

  But then we were on to Berkeley and what has to have been the single defining moment of all my years with Prok: the grand lecture in the field house, attended by no less than nine thousand souls. We were fresh from our confinement at San Quentin—one-on-one in the silent sweating depths, at a remove from everything life has to offer—and now we were on the familiar turf of a university campus, exposed to all the world, nine thousand of the unincarcerated and free-breathing, students and faculty alike hurtling over one another to have a chance to hear the world’s leading authority speak on the one subject that held more fascination than anything their books and philosophies could ever hope to reveal.

  I don’t recall the weather. It might have been raining, that sheer relentless outpouring typical of the wet season in California, but that might have been another time and another place altogether. I do remember the hall, though. Or rather the field house. This was more usually the scene of intercollegiate basketball games, but now, because of the uncontainable enthusiasm for Prok, Prok the author, the celebrity, the annihilator of sexual taboos, it had been given over to us for the afternoon. All seven thousand seats had been taken some two hours before the lecture was scheduled to begin, and even as we arrived university officials were scrambling to set up an additional two thousand folding chairs in the aisles and on the floor of the basketball court itself. Can I say that excitement was high, and leave it at that?

  We were escorted to one of the coaches’ offices, in a side door and down a cordoned-off hallway, where the man who was to introduce Prok—the vice president of the university, no less—urged us to make ourselves comfortable while he went off to see to the final details. “We’ll need ten minutes or so,” he said, and I have no recollection of him whatever, so I’ll assign him the shrewd narrow features and evasive eyes of the congenital bureaucrat, “and please, if there’s anything I can do for you, just holler.” And then he shut the door and left us to ourselves.

  “Quite the elegant dressing room, eh?” Prok said, turning to us—to Corcoran, Mac and me. We looked round us. The room was cramped, piled high with athletic equipment, mismatched sneakers, yellowing volleyballs, bats, spikes, mitts, rackets, helmets and the like, the walls all but obscured by team photos and two towering bookcases sagging under the weight of their collective trophies. The smell—of the adjoining locker room, of the distilled and rancid sweat of the generations—brought me back to high school and a reverie I’d had after my concussion on the football field. They’d brought me into the locker room on a stretcher, my mother’s voice floating round the door like a bird battering its wings against a pane of glass, my consciousness fading and then looping back on itself till the world opened up on me like a woman’s smile, though there was no woman there, only the grim bald-headed team physician, administering smelling salts.

  “Yes,” Mac said, “and you see what your celebrity gets you? Next thing they’ll be putting us up at the Ritz, Prok. Just you wait.”

  We laughed, all of us, though Prok’s laugh was more of a whinny and his eyes jumped from one of us to another, as if we’d all collectively spoken. Was he nervous? Was that it?

  At that moment, as if in response to my question, the building seemed to shake with the vast stirring of the crowd just beyond the door and down the corridor. Thousands of undergraduates had simultaneously stifled a yawn, shifted in their seats, elevated their voices so as to be heard over the building expectant hum of the crowd.

  Mac had moved to Prok’s side, the two of them poised there in the center of the room as if listening to the rumble of distant thunder. “Can I get you anything?” she asked, her voice muted. “Coffee? A glass of water? Cola?”

  H
e seemed to hesitate—Prok, who never hesitated, never wasted words or motion—and then, so softly I could barely hear him, he said: “Water.”

  “Good,” Mac murmured. “I thought you’d be dry, Prok—you’ve got to keep your throat lubricated, you know. I hate to say it, but you’re almost like a star tenor at the Metropolitan—or a radio host.” She turned and gave Corcoran and me a look.

  “I’ll go,” Corcoran said. “Just water, right? Plain water?”

  The crowd shifted again, a great and vast soughing of bench, chair, muscle and sinew. It was as if all the air had been squeezed out of the field house, the corridor, the coach’s office, and then it came back again, on a wave of echoing sound. I tried for the light touch because my heart was going as if I were the one about to mount the podium: “Sounds like the natives are restless.”