The Inner Circle (33 page)

I just nodded and we walked to his car in silence. As soon as we'd slammed the doors, Corcoran turned over the engine and the radio came to life, blaring out a popular dance tune, and it was that, as much as anything, that made my anger rush to the surface—I had to hold tight to the doorframe to keep from doing something I might have regretted for the rest of my professional career.

Corcoran had put the car in gear and we were moving slowly down the street, but I was so wrought up I barely registered the movement. After a moment, he said, “What about the tavern? How's a drink sound? It's on me.”

There was a clarinet solo in that tune—the band was famous for its clarinetist—and we both listened as the instrument went slipping and eliding through its paces. “I never realized how much I hate the clarinet,” I said, “not till now, anyway.”

Corcoran reached out a cuff-linked wrist to flick off the radio. He seemed to decide something then, swinging the wheel hard to the right
to nose the car in at the curb. “Listen,” he said, “John, I hope you're not going to take this the wrong way, because it can get awkward for all of us, and there's no reason—”

Was I glaring at him? I don't know. All of a sudden, and this was the foremost thing in my mind, grown there full-blown like an instantaneous cancer, I was overcome with a fear of embarrassing myself, of showing my hand—of being petty, hidebound, of being the cuckold. “No,” I said, turning away from him, and I didn't know what proposition or argument I was dismissing.

“It doesn't mean anything. Not a thing. Not between us.” He was turned to me, studying me in profile, and I could feel him there, feel the heat of his breath against the carved wooden mask of my face. “Look, before I did anything I consulted Prok—”

At first I thought I hadn't heard him right—Prok? What did Prok have to do with this?—and then the single curt syllable began to reverberate in my head like a pinball ringing up the score. Maybe my ears reddened. Still I didn't turn to him, but just sat there staring out the window, fighting for control.

“Well, of course I did. You don't think I would just—hey, I might have an overactive libido, I admit to it, but I wouldn't do a thing without Prok's go-ahead, not anymore, not now, not with the situation out there in the world like it is. That'd be nuts, that'd be suicide.”

Prok. He'd consulted Prok—Prok, but not me. As if—but I couldn't finish the thought, because Prok had known all along, Prok had approved, given him the green light and his blessing too, all for one and one for all. And I'd sat there stolidly through the morning while Prok loomed over me dictating letters, my fingers hammering away at the keys of the typewriter as if I were some obsequious little clerk in a Dickens novel. Letter after letter, and never a word about Iris or me. First there were the letters to the parents, then to the principal, the superintendent, the minister and the gas station attendant, and finally, the children.

Dear Suzy: Uncle Milk and I wanted you to have a very special letter all your own that the mailman will bring to the box just for you. We will
write a special letter to your sister, Katie, too, and the mailman will bring it just for her so that she can have one as well. What we want to say, most of all, is how much we enjoyed meeting such a sweet and intelligent girl as yourself and how proud you should be for helping us with our science. Yours Truly, Uncle Kinsey

“And I think you know how he feels when it comes to the inner circle—we have no secrets, we're bonded, each of us, together. John, listen, he encouraged me—for your good and mine. And Iris's, don't forget Iris.”

I hadn't forgotten her, not for an instant.

Corcoran's face hung there in the car as if dissociated from his body, the last light of the day laminating his features at the far blurring edge of my peripheral vision, and still I was staring straight ahead. I wouldn't look at him. I couldn't. There was a picket fence two doors up, fresh white paint peerless against the unfolding copper-green leaves of the climbing roses that were just then starting to take hold of it. “And there's Violet, don't forget Violet. She's a very passionate woman, John, believe me. And she'll be here sooner than you know.”

In my hurt—in my hurt and my refusal to acknowledge it to Corcoran, Prok or Iris or anyone else—I went to Mac. I telephoned beforehand to let her know I was coming—it was Saturday morning, Iris behind the cash register at the five-and-dime, Prok lecturing his biology students on gametes and zygotes or the sex life of the fruit fly or I don't know what, nest robbers, parasitic wasps, the cowbird and the cuckoo—and she was waiting for me at the door in a light sweater and her walking shorts. “I thought you might want to go for a walk,” she said, her eyes searching mine.

I gave her nothing back, just nodded, and we went off empty-handed down the street and through the familiar fields and into the woods beyond. It was coming on to high spring in southern Indiana, the wet black furrows spread open under the sun, wildflowers in the clearings, a smell of mud and ferment under the trees, birds everywhere. And gnats.
We swatted them as we moved along, ducking away from one swarm only to walk headlong into another. It was warm where the sun hit us, cool, even a little chilly, in the shade. Mac went out of her way to make small talk—if Prok knew, then she knew—and I give her credit for that, trying to defuse the situation in the way Corcoran had, nothing amiss here, life as usual, the study of sex and the free and unencumbered practice of it inextricably linked, and where were the grounds for complaint? We found a spot in one of the clearings where the sun invested a spike of weather-worn rock with its heat, and made ourselves comfortable.

For a long while I just sat there, my back against the rock, and let Mac do the talking. She wasn't saying much, nothing of substance, that is, and I knew what she was doing (“Isn't that a bluebird over there, on that branch just above the stump, right there, see? They're getting rare, aren't they, ever since the starlings invaded, anyway, but don't you love the smell of the outdoors, especially this time of year? I do. I can't get enough of it. When I was a girl, oh, no older than eight or nine—have I ever told you this?”) but I didn't care, it was conversation as anodyne, and I let it wash over me. Gratefully. I don't know how long this went on—ten minutes, twenty—but eventually she fell silent. I leaned back, closed my eyes and let the sun probe my face. I wanted her, and we'd come here to engage in sex, but I was in no hurry—or maybe I was fooling myself, maybe I didn't want her at all.

Her voice seemed to come to me out of nowhere, out of some place in my head, and my eyelids, blue-veined, pulsing with the sleepy drift of floating bodies, snapped open. “John,” she was saying, “John, listen, I know how you feel. I do. But you can't let it get to you, because that way of thinking—jealousy, recrimination, whatever you want to call it—is wrong. And it's destructive, John. It is.”

She closed her hand over mine. The light was stark, flaming all around her as if she were on the apron of a stage, her pupils shrunk to pinpoints, a splay of lines radiating out from the corners of her eyes as if the skin there had been fractured or worked with a sharp tool—she was old, getting old, and the visible signs of it, the apprehension of it,
made something shift inside me. “I'll tell you,” she said, dropping her voice, “it wasn't easy for me in the beginning. You're not the first, you know. There was Ralph Voris—has Prok ever mentioned him?”

“Yes.”

“And there were graduate students too, casual affairs—things with women.”

I said nothing, but I may have flushed, thinking of the day I'd broken the code and pulled his file. And hers.

“He's highly sexed, Prok, and to be away so often, for so long—you don't know. It was before your time, ten years ago and more. He went to Mexico for three months, collecting galls with three healthy young men—and he was a healthy young man himself. Was I hurt? Did I complain? Did I resent being all but abandoned? Do I resent it now?”

“I don't know,” I said. “Do you?”

She removed her hand, lifted both arms to pat her hair in place, and then she smoothed down her blouse and shifted position in the dry leaves at the base of the rock. “No,” she said, “I don't think so. Not anymore. You see,” and she moved in closer to me, so that I could feel the warmth of her hip sliding in against mine, “I love him, love him more than anybody else in the world, and that's all that matters.”

The moment hung there between us, and Prok was proportional to it, each of us trying to fit him in and work around him at the same time. Then I leaned forward and kissed her and she brought both her hands to my chest and slipped them inside my shirt and ran them down the long muscles at my sides. We breathed in unison, and then she released me. “And I believe in him,” she said, “believe in his work and everything he does—and so do you. I know you do.”

That evening, when I went to pick up Iris at work, she wasn't there. I was right on time—six o'clock on the dot—and I'd got good at that, adopting the model of Prok's punctuality along with so many other things. The girl behind the counter said that Iris had left early, half an hour before, to make some urgent appointment—“Maybe with the doctor,” the girl offered after studying the look on my face. “Yeah, I think
she said the doctor,” she added, and what did it matter if no doctor in the whole state of Indiana was keeping hours at six o'clock on a Saturday evening?

I went home then, to see if I'd somehow missed her, and I sat there brooding till seven. When the bell in the church tower two blocks over struck the hour I pushed myself up and walked the ten blocks to the office, and this time I used my key in the door. I hit the light switch and the shadows fled into the corners. It was very still. I stood there a moment in the doorway, and then I couldn't help but go to my desk and examine it—I bent down and sniffed it, actually sniffed the surface of my own desk as if I could somehow detect the residue of vaginal lubricants there, as if I were a bloodhound, as if I were some petty and heartbroken cuckolded fool stooping so low as to drop off the chart of humiliation, even—and I examined Corcoran's desk too, shuffling through his things, probing into his drawers, looking for something, anything, that would give me a clue as to who he really was and what he might want. And how did I feel then, standing there in the lamp-lit office rifling my colleague's desk while the sky closed down over the campus and couples were strolling out hand-in-hand to the dance, the pictures, dinner? Devastated. Devastated, certainly, but it was worse than that: I felt as if I'd somehow failed Iris, as if I were the one at fault. More than anything, and I hate even to remember it, I felt inadequate.

Our research would show that some twenty-six percent of women and fifty percent of men would engage in extramarital intercourse—I myself drew up the accumulative incidence curve on page 417 of the female volume—and we would conclude, in Prok's words, that “Extramarital coitus had attracted some of the participants because of the variety of experience it afforded them with new and sometimes superior sexual partners.” Exactly. And yet the female volume was still a decade in the future—we'd only begun to accumulate the data at this point—and so my attitude was purely intuitive. I'd been with Mac. I could still smell her on my fingertips. But that didn't matter a whit, not now—all that mattered now was Iris, Iris and Corcoran.

I went back home—eight o'clock and no sign of her—and I poured a drink and brooded some more. When eight-thirty came and she still
hadn't appeared or even called, I copied out a poem, or a fragment of a poem, from her anthology, and left it on her pillow in the bedroom, then took the long walk to Corcoran's to see if his car was parked out front, if his windows were lit, if there was movement there, a silhouette on the shade, anything. The night had grown cold and I watched it stream from my mouth as I walked, my shoulders tense, all my emotions—rage, despair, scorn, vengefulness—wadded up like a bolus in the pit of my stomach. There was no yellow convertible drawn up to the curb outside Corcoran's apartment, and there was no sign of life inside. I stood there for two hours and more, then I turned away and went home, defeated.

Need I say that Iris wasn't there? The poem was where I'd left it, though, untouched, and it might have remained there all night and into the next day, for all I knew. I had no idea when she came home that night or if she came home at all because I bundled up some things in a suitcase—a change of clothes, toiletry articles, bedding—and dragged myself back to the office to sleep on the floor while the abandoned building, one of the oldest on campus, ticked and settled round me in a state of decline that couldn't help recalling my own. I wasn't yet twenty-four and already my life was over. I should have enlisted, I told myself. Should have gone to fight and kill and be killed, because anything was better than this.

The poem, incidentally, was from Hardy, bile-bitter and as grim as it gets. I suppose now it looks a bit sophomoric—the sentiments expressed, the whole gesture—but then it seemed to strike right to the heart of what I was feeling. It's called “Neutral Tones,” and the speaker is looking back on the bleak day by a frozen pond when the smile on his lover's lips went dead. I left her with the last four lines:

Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst sun, and a tree,

And a pond edged with grayish leaves.

I slept in the office for two nights, never venturing within ten blocks of the apartment, because if she could make me suffer I could make her
suffer too. Let her stew, that was what I thought, let her stew until she's as sick at stomach as I am. But where was Corcoran? I waited for him that first morning with a dry throat and a pounding in my temples that was calibrated to a recurrent hormonal rush, and then eight o'clock slipped by, and eight-ten, and I put it to Prok as casually as I could,
Where is he?
Prok barely glanced up. It had slipped his mind, but he'd neglected to tell me that he'd given our colleague two days off to see to a personal matter, and that was where it ended—Prok barely lifted his head from his work all the rest of the day. There was no chatter, no humor, and the only relief from routine came when we interviewed two young women for the position of full-time secretary, and subsequently, one-on-one, took their histories.