T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

I remember his legs, his massive hardened arterial legs, as he rose then and tugged at her wrist till she was standing too, her breasts exposed, all of her, and how she pulled back against him, how she said, “I would die first,” and then I was in motion and it was just like that wrestling match, like the football field. I don’t know what came over me — or I do, I do — but Prok was on his back in the middle of the floor and everybody was rising now, even as Iris bent to snatch up her clothes and run.

We were very late with the babysitter that night — or at least I was, because Iris wasn’t in the car and she wasn’t at home or on any of the dark windswept streets I roamed till the sky went light and the sitter thrust her furious face at me through the gap of the door and John Jr. went heavy in my waiting arms.

I didn’t go into work the next day. I saw to the needs of my son and sat by the phone, waiting for it to ring. After lunch — I boiled franks and opened a can of pork and beans — I put John Jr. in the car and drove the streets in a slow repetitive pattern, as if I were one of those geriatric cases looking for something I couldn’t name. But I could name it: Iris. And what did I expect — that she’d be bouncing down the sidewalk somewhere, her hair flying in the wind, going shopping? I stopped in at the elementary school where she’d worked till our son was born, on the off-chance that she was filling in for an absent teacher, but, no, she wasn’t there — in fact, the secretary in the main office, a new employee apparently, couldn’t quite grasp who I was talking about. John Jr. chattered away at me for the first half hour or so, and he fooled with the buttons on the radio till he fell asleep in a haze of static, the car creeping along on its own while I stared through the windshield and let my mind race. At one point, desperate, I drove out to the quarry where in more innocent times we used to park and neck, and found myself scrambling over the stepped white rock and peering down into the darkening waters as if I could detect the slow wheeling drift of a suicide there.

After dinner — more franks, more beans — I sat numbed in the armchair in front of the cold fire and read The House at Pooh Corner aloud till I had it memorized and still John Jr. wanted me to go on. Couldn’t we listen to the radio? I wondered. “No, read,” he said. And he interrupted me in the middle of the windy-day episode to ask, in his half-formed tones, “What’s blusterous? ”

“You know, like yesterday,” I told him, “when we were flying the kite?” He sat there beside me, the foreshortened limbs, the recalcitrant thatch of his hair that was a replica of my own (unbrushed, just as his face was unwashed, because I wasn’t much at that sort of thing either), and after a moment, he said, “Where’s Mommy?” for what must have been the sixtieth time. “She went out,” I told him, and then I told him it was time for bed.

No one had called, not Mrs. Matthews to inquire if I was ill or Prok to apologize (or rather to accept my apology), not Rutledge or Corcoran or Mac. Finally, around eight, I dialed Corcoran’s number, and Violet answered.

“Violet, it’s John. Is Purvis there?”

Her voice was muted, all the familiarity washed out of it. “John,” she said, as if trying the name out. “Sure. Sure. I’ll get him.”

“Hello, John?” Corcoran came on the line, and before I could respond, he was onto me. “What was that all about last night? You can’t be — John, listen, we’re all in this together, you know that. Nothing personal, right? You don’t go shoving Prok around, nobody does. And then you don’t show up for work—?”

“Is Iris there?”

“Iris? What are you talking about?”

“My wife. Iris.”

“Isn’t she with you?”

“No,” I said, all the blood rushing to my face. “Isn’t she with you?”

“John, listen, you’re just upset right now, and it’s foolish, it really is. Don’t let this break us down, don’t throw away your whole career over, over—”

“Love?”

He came right back at me, his voice cracking with exasperation. “No,” he said, “this isn’t about love. Love has nothing to do with it. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I put John Jr. to bed as best I could, with a cursory brushing of the teeth and a minimal face-scrubbing — he objected to the washcloth for some reason, it was too rough or it wasn’t warm enough or there was too much soap on it or too little — and the next thing I knew I awoke to the sound of the car turning over in the driveway. By the time I got out the door and into the still-blustering night, the car was at the end of the drive, receding taillights, a quick angry flare of the brakes, no signal, and then the twin beams of the headlights swinging out onto the highway, and by the time I got back in the house, back to John Jr.’s room, it was too late to realize that he wasn’t there anymore.

For the next two days I was drunk. Not a pretty thing, not a rational thing, a weakness of mine, inherited in the genes from my dead father and his father before him — the Milches, from Verden, on the Aller River south of Bremen — and for all I knew there were a dozen Milch lushes there still, cousins and grand-uncles listening to tinny postwar jazz on second-rate radios and drowning their sorrows in Dinkelacker and schnapps. The first day I lay prostrate on the couch and drank what we had in the house, which consisted of a quart of beer gone flat in the refrigerator, my reserve fifth of bourbon, and finally, the contents of my flask (half-full of something that tasted like Geritol but was actually, I realized, the dregs of a pint of Southern Comfort with which I’d last filled it when Iris and I went to an IU football game the previous fall). I brought the flask to my lips — JAM, my graduation present, from Tommy, from Iris’s brother — and stared at the ceiling. Earlier, I’d called Iris’s mother in Michigan City. Was Iris there? A pause. The deep-freeze of my mother-in-law’s voice. Yes, Iris was there. Could she come to the phone? No, she couldn’t.

The second day I woke with a headache and made a shaky mess of the eggs and bacon and the rock-hard remains of Iris’s loaf. I wasn’t going into work, I wasn’t calling my wife — let her call me — and above all I wasn’t allowing myself to think about anything, not Prok, not the project or my colleagues or what had come over me in the attic three nights ago. We’d drunk Zombie cocktails, hadn’t we? Well, all right: now I was a zombie, without affect or will. Around noon, still shaky, I walked into town in the burnished sunshine of an early spring day and made for the tavern, where they would have beer in abundance and a cornucopia of backlit bottles of hard liquor to steady it on the way down. I kept my head low and my eyes on the pavement, because the last thing I wanted was to see anybody I knew.

I don’t remember having had anything to eat that afternoon. I drank, read the newspapers, went to the restroom, drank some more. It must have been about six or so when I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see Elster standing there beside me. Richard Elster, that is, newly appointed librarian of the Institute, the man in charge of what would soon become the biggest sexology — and erotica — collection in the world, bigger even than those of the British Museum and the Vatican. “Hey,” he said, “John, where’ve you been?”

I didn’t answer.

“I asked Bella, she said you were sick.”

I felt the irritation rising in me. “Who?”

“Bella. Mrs. Matthews. She said you had the flu.”

“I don’t have the flu.”

The barman intervened to ask Elster what he was having and Elster ordered a beer before turning back to me. “Everything all right? Are you sure? Because I heard a rumor, about the other night — something about you and your wife?”