T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“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.”

Prok was standing there rigid, the fingers of his right hand arrested in the act of running through his hair. He gave me an acerbic look, a look that pinned and measured me as if I were one of his errant gall wasps. “Don’t be childish,” he said. “This isn’t the time for levity, nor the place either.”

Mac was at his side, one hand on his arm, just above the joint. “Prok,” she murmured, “now calm yourself,” but he snatched his arm away.

He was still focused on me, his jaws clamped in fury, and there was a minute twitching of his lips, as if he’d tasted something bitter. “That is precisely the sort of thoughtless remark that undermines the entire project — that has been undermining the project for as long as I’ve known you. Your work is retrograde, Milk — is, was, and always will be. Do you hear me?”

The crowd breathed as one. The building quaked. I bowed my head. “I was just, I, that is — it was only a joke.”

“And stop stuttering, for God’s sake. Speak up like a man!”

“Prok,” Mac said, interceding for me. “Prok, please. He was only trying to—”

“I don’t give two figs for what he was trying! He should know, of all people, that I don’t need his assistance”—and now a look for Mac—“or anybody else’s, for that matter, when I prepare to address a gathering …”

Mac’s voice was reduced. “Perhaps you’d like us to leave, then?”

It was at that moment that Corcoran, the fair-haired boy, appeared in the doorway with a glass of water, the vast percolating intensity of the crowd arriving with him in a wave that rolled through the room and crested against the trophy-laden bookcases. “Yes,” Prok snapped, stepping forward briskly to snatch the glass from Corcoran’s hand, “yes, I’d like you to leave. Most emphatically. And take him”—the accusatory finger pointed at Corcoran now—“with you.”

By the time we’d found the seats reserved for us in the front row, I’d already forgotten — and forgiven — the incident. It was nerves, that was all. Prok was under intense pressure to perform, and though I’d never seen him waver in any of the hundreds of lectures for which I’d been present, this one was special. There had never been a crowd like this, and he would have been less than human if he didn’t have a case of nerves. At any rate, the vice president — that generic face and figure, the academic, the bureaucrat — made his own stab at levity in his introductory remarks, and the students in the audience let out a collective titter. Shuffling through his notes and gazing up myopically at that mass of humanity, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m pleased to see so many faculty here today, and faculty wives, in attendance at a university meeting. Of course, most of us must view the subject to be discussed largely in retrospect.” There was a pause, as if the audience hadn’t heard him right, and then the titters ran through the stacked tiers of chairs and benches like a motif out of Die Walküre.

Then there was Prok. He strode out of the wings, chest thrust forward, spectacles flinging light, and mounted the podium to an avalanche of applause, which suddenly died to nothing as he raised a hand to adjust the microphone. As usual he began speaking extemporaneously, without notes or props of any kind, his voice low and unmodulated, adopting the matter-of-fact tone that had served him so well through the years. He started off with variation and how the extremes at both ends of a given behavior define the norm, an old theme. Listing the various outlets available to the human animal from puberty on — masturbation, petting, coitus, the oral component — he went on to discuss frequency, and here the crowd, which had been slowly awakening to what he was saying, nearly got away from him. “There are those, for instance, who require no more than a single orgasm a month or even a year, and others who require several per week, or even per day.”

At this, there was a low sustained whistle from the row behind me, what was known to us then as a “wolf whistle.” The crowd jumped on it as if it were a rallying cry, the whole interconnected organism stirring again with that sound as of the wind in the trees, but Prok came right back with a barb that stopped them dead. “And then there are some,” he went on, unfazed, “whose output is as low as that of the man who just whistled.”

Nervous laughter, and then silence. He had them. And he never let go of them for the next sixty minutes, every last one of those nine thousand souls intent and focused on Prok, that erect figure on the podium, the celebrity of sex, the reformer, the pioneer, the preacher and spellbinder. I watched him from the front row, Mac on one side, Corcoran on the other, and though I’d heard the speech so often I could have recited it verbatim, right on down to the statistics and the pregnant pauses, the intensity of it in that setting on that afternoon gave me a chill. This was the apex, the moment of glory, Prok at his height. The students held their breath, the professors’ wives leaned forward. There wasn’t a sound, not a cough or murmur. No one stirred, no one left early. He concluded with his usual plea for tolerance, then took a step back and ducked his head in acknowledgment of the audience — it wasn’t a bow, exactly, but it had that effect.

And oh, they roared. They roared.

When we got back I found that Elster had been named official librarian of the Institute and that Iris had taken up the clarinet again, the hollow doleful sound of it greeting me even as I came up the drive and assessed the state of disrepair in the house and yard. The car (I’d left it for her, Corcoran having given me a lift home) was listing over a flat tire on the driver’s side front, and there was a raw new crease in the rear bumper. Because it was very still and clear and cold, the sound of the clarinet carried to me from deep inside the house, and it took me a moment to realize what it was — at first I’d thought some wounded animal was moaning out its final agony behind the toolshed. But no, it was Iris. Playing her instrument, the instrument in the little black velvet-lined case she’d kept untouched in the lower right-hand drawer of the dresser all these years.

Imagine that, I thought, and that was the extent of my thinking. The car was undrivable, half a dozen other failures leapt to my attention as I came up the front steps, and it didn’t really affect me one way or the other. I was beyond caring. The place could fall down for all it mattered to me, the car could go up in flames — I was tired, deeply tired, and there was no way in the world I could continue to travel with Prok and fit neatly into the role of house-husband like one of those cool unflappable fathers grinning out at us from the television these days.

As I stepped through the door, John Jr. leapt up from the welter of his toys and bolted across the room to throw his arms round my knees, and I set down my suitcase to lift him high and greet him with a kiss. Iris had her back to me. She was seated on the sofa before the fire (she had a fire going, at least, but I saw that she’d used the wrong wood, the stuff I’d reserved for kindling only and had begged her at least a hundred times to use sparingly), her legs splayed in front of her, the instrument at her lips. The sound it produced was pitched low and mournful, a groaning, creaking reverberation that put me in mind of the freighters plying the fog on Lake Michigan. I felt depressed suddenly, seeing her there with her distended cheeks and splayed legs, her hair in disarray, her eyes shut tight in concentration, Iris, my Iris, and she might have been anybody, a girl in the marching band, a prodigy of practice and desire working toward something I couldn’t begin to imagine. For just a moment, before I set down my son (gently, gently, the miniature grasping limbs, the uprush of the carpet) and called her name, I felt I was losing her. Or, no: that I’d already lost her.