T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

He was fishing. He didn’t know a thing. None of us would have leaked a word, not on pain of death. I was sure of it. Absolutely. Still, I felt something clench inside of me.

“How is she, by the way? Because I wanted to tell you to tell her how well Claudette’s doing, and Sally, our little one. Did you know Claudette’s expecting again?”

“She’s fine,” I said.

There was movement at the door, comings and goings, the jukebox lurched to life with some brainless female vocalist cooing something about love nests, and I lifted a finger for the barman. “What do I owe you?” I said.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Elster’s mouth tightened around a look of disappointment and something more, belligerence. His voice went up a notch. “Because I just got here, and we’re colleagues now, right? We’re going to work together, share things, aren’t we?” He was leaning over my shoulder as I gathered up my change, too close to me, invading my space, pushing — pushing, and I didn’t know why. Then he said it: “Secrets, right? What goes on behind closed doors? I won’t breathe a word, I swear it.”

I’d been drinking all day, and now all of a sudden I was sober. I stood — he was a small man, his head at the level of my shoulders — and I think I might have jostled him, just a bit, and if I did it was purely accidental. “I’ve got to go,” I said.

“Where? To an empty house? Where’s the fire, John?”

I stood there at the bar looking down into his prodding eyes. Elster, a little man in every way, but dangerous for all that. My voice was thick. “Nowhere,” I said, and I shoved by him.

“I know you!” he called at my back. “I know what you do!”

I’m not a violent person. Just the opposite — Iris is forever saying I let people walk all over me, and I suppose she has a point. But not that night. That night was different. It was as if everything I’d ever wanted or had was suddenly at stake — Prok, Iris, my career, my son — and I couldn’t control myself. I was on my way to the door, faces gaping up at me, students, locals, women with their drinks arrested at their lips, when I swung round and grabbed Elster by the lapels of his jacket. His face whitened, his eyes sank into his head. “Hey,” the barman shouted. “Hey, cut that out!”

I could feel Elster coming up out of his shoes. My hands were trembling. “You don’t know me,” I said, my voice steady now. “And you never will.”

The next morning I went into work. Mrs. Matthews tried not to show anything, but she couldn’t help giving me a look caught midway between puzzlement and relief, and as I passed Prok’s office he glanced up and leveled a steady gaze on me for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to need those charts, Milk. As soon as it’s convenient.”

I might have said, You can stuff your charts. I might have said, I’ve had it. I’ve had enough. I quit. But all I did was return his stare just long enough so that he got the meaning of all I was feeling, and then I said, “Yes,” with a long propitiatory release of air, “I’ll get right to them.”

I worked without pause all morning. I focused on the rectilinear lines and shadings of the graphs I was drawing, the correlated figures, the means and incidences that never lied. Both Rutledge and Corcoran stuck their heads in the door to welcome me back while Prok stayed put in his office and Elster twice marched down the corridor with his shoulders thrust back and his gaze fixed on a point in the distance. The first chance I got — when I heard the telltale sounds of Prok rattling the paper bag in which he kept his lunchtime repast of sunflower seeds, nuts and chocolate bits — I went straight to his office and shut the door behind me.

“Prok,” I said, “I just wanted to, well, I wanted to—”

His elbows were splayed over his work, his eternal work. He looked worn and vitiated. His head hung there a moment as if on a tether, his shoulders slumped forward, and there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before — it wasn’t weakness, never that, but something very near to it, a mildness, an acceptance, a plea. “No need, John,” he said, and then he repeated himself in a softer, gentler tone, “no need. But sit please. I need to talk to you— we need to talk.”

I pulled up the chair reserved for interviewees and eased myself down on the cushion. Something clanked in the pipes overhead. A thin restless light roamed over the windows, clouds chasing after the sunlight and then giving it up again.

“Where do I start?” he mused, sitting back now to run a hand through his hair. “With women, I suppose. With marriage. We are studying the female of the species, after all, aren’t we, John?”

I nodded.

“Interesting how the X chromosome prevails, isn’t it — over time, that is?” He picked up a pen, set it down. “But what I mean to say is that marriage is the great and governing institution of our society, and we’re devoted to it, you and I both, devoted to our wives, to Mac and Iris. And what you did the other night — no, now just hear me out — was understandable in its context, even if it shows how little you’ve learned here all these years.” He let out a long, slow breath. “But really, I do think that as my colleague, as my co-researcher — almost my son, John, my son —you have to realize that emotions, and emotional outbursts, have no place in our research. Let it go, John. Please.”

I never took my eyes from him, that much I’d learned. I could put up a front as well as he could. I said, “I can’t.”

“You can. You will.”

“Iris—” I began, and I didn’t know what he’d heard or how much he knew. I wanted to tell him she was gone and that nothing, not the project, not him or Mac or all the charts and tables in the world, was worth that. But I couldn’t get the words out, the whole business complicated by that image of him, naked and erect and hanging over her like an animal — not a human animal, just an animal — an image that bludgeoned my sleep and festered through the waking hours. What right did he have? What right?

“She’ll come back.”

“How can you be so sure?”

He sighed, broke his own rule and gazed up at the pipes a moment before shooting me a quick sharp look of impatience. “Women have the same physiological needs as men, and our figures will show that, as you’re well aware. Especially with regard to the physiology of arousal and orgasm, the correspondence of organs and glands — the fact is, females need and respond to sex as much as males. Every bit as much. And it’s a crime to deny them or put them on some Victorian pedestal as blushing virginal brides who tolerate sex once a month in the dark in order to reproduce the species — how many interviews have you conducted, John?”

“I don’t know. Seventeen or eighteen hundred, I suppose.”

Now it was the old look, the grappling eyes, the triumphant set of the mouth: “Exactly.”

I felt myself calming, the engine slowing, and it wasn’t hypnotism — there were no tricks or carnival acts necessary, nor psychoanalysis either. It was just Prok, Prok himself, Prok in the flesh. My wife had left me, Elster was a cancer, I’d toppled my God, if only for a moment, and here I was sinking into the cushion as if I didn’t have a concern in the world.

“By the same token, and again you already know this, intuitively if not empirically,” he said, “there’s another side to the female altogether, and this is where things become problematic for so many males — for you, John. For you.” Prok was settling into his lecture mode now, getting into the rhythm of it, relishing it, and I let myself go. There was nothing I could do, nothing I could say. I embraced the chair. I listened. I suppose I should have taken notes.