T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“No,” I said, and I don’t know why I lied when the whole ethos behind the project was to bring human sexuality out of the dungeon to which the priests had confined it and to celebrate it, glory in it, experience it to the full, without prohibition or inhibition. But still, given the moment and the situation, which was fraught to say the least, I lied.

“But why not?” she said, lifting her head to give me a sidelong glance, the glance of the executioner and the hanging judge. “Isn’t that — sleeping with people, I mean — exactly what Dr. Kinsey— Prok —says is the right thing to do? Isn’t it part of the program? Sexual experimentation, I mean?”

“Well,” I said, and a gobbet of meat, soft as a sponge, seemed to have climbed back up my throat, “not exactly. He is happily married himself, you know, and he, he wants us to be too—”

Her face was flushed. The crucified pork congealed in its gravy on the table before her. I felt a draft come up, somebody opening a door somewhere, and I craned my neck to pinpoint the source of it. “Do you feel a draft?” I said.

“You’re lying to me,” she said. “I know you’ve slept with people.”

“Who?” I demanded.

She was working loose the ring I’d given her, twisting it back and forth to get the band over the bone of the finger joint. It was a diamond solitaire, and I’d borrowed twenty-five dollars from Prok, as an advance on my salary, to put a down payment on it. I had never in my life purchased anything so lavish — had never even dreamed of it. I watched her jerk it off her finger now and set it on the table between us. She was feeling around her for her jacket, all her emotions concentrated in her eyes and the unforgiving slash of the drawn-down wound of her mouth. “Mac,” she said. “Mac, that’s who.”

Talk of women’s intuition, of the subliminal signals the sex is somehow able to pick up on, in the way of the dog that knows its master is coming home when the car is still six blocks away or the cat that lifts its ears at the faintest rustle of tiny naked feet in the farthest corner of the attic. For a solid week I walked around with that ring in my pocket, and I made no attempt to contact Iris or convince her that she was wrong, other than what I told her that night at the Commons — that she was out of her mind, that Mac was a surrogate mother to me, and far too old, and married, and that I wasn’t attracted to her in any case. Iris listened, wordlessly, as if to see how far I would go before I stumbled, and then she was on her feet and stalking across the cafeteria to the door at the far end of the room. Which she slammed behind her.

This was our first tiff, the first round in a long series of preliminary bouts and featured attractions, and I was miserable over it — miserable, but not about to give in. What had I done, after all? Interviewed a couple of prostitutes? That was my job, couldn’t she see that? And if such an insignificant thing could set her off, I dreaded to think what the future would bring, when certainly we would be obliged to interview a hundred more prostitutes, not to mention whole busloads of sex offenders of all stripes. I wanted to call my mother and tell her the engagement was off, but, as I say, I’d always had difficulty confiding in her because she never seemed to see things my way — she would take Iris’s side, I was sure of it, and lay me open like a whitefish she was filleting for the pan. In the end, I went to Mac.

I chose a time when I knew Prok would be in class and the children at school. I made my way down the familiar street, the sun in my face, leaves unfurling on the trees, the world gone green with the April rains. The garden was coming along nicely, just as Prok had said it would, though we were devoting less time to it this spring because of the accelerating schedule of our travels, and I might have lingered over the flowerbeds for a moment or two before I screwed up the courage to ring the bell. All I could think of was Iris and what I could do to extricate myself from the sheath of lies I’d constructed around me — a marriage counselor, I needed a marriage counselor even before I was married — and I was more than a little tentative with regard to Mac too. She’d given us her blessing, just as Prok had, and she couldn’t have been more excited if one of her own children were getting married. I wondered how I could turn around now and tell her that it was all off — off because of what we’d done between us, in the garden, on the bentwood sofa in the living room and on the marital bed in the room upstairs. So I stood there, vaguely aware of the life seething around me, the insects descending on the flowers and the sparrows squalling from their nests in the eaves, took a deep breath and put my finger to the bell.

Mac came to the door in her khaki shorts and the matching blouse with the GSA insignia over the breast pocket, but she was wearing a cardigan too. (The house was cold this time of year because Prok, always frugal, shut down the furnace on the first of April, no matter what the weather — a habit I’ve taken up myself, by the way. Why waste fuel when the body makes its own heat?) She’d been in the kitchen, fixing a pot of vegetable soup and bologna sandwiches for the children’s lunch, and she was expecting the postman, one of the neighbors, a traveling salesman — anybody but me. I saw it in her eyes, a moment of recognition, and then calculation — how much time did she have before the children came tramping up the path? Enough to pull me in and wrestle off my clothes? Enough for a quick rush to climax with her shorts at her knees and the blouse shoved up to her throat?

“Hello,” I said, and my face must have been heavy because the kittenish look went right out of her eyes. “Have you — may I come in for a minute?”

She said my name as if she were sleepwalking, then pulled back the door to admit me. “What’s wrong?” she said. “What is it?”

I stood there, shaking my head. I don’t think I’d ever felt so hopeless as I did in that moment.

Mac knew just what to do. She led me to the kitchen, sat me down at the table with a cup of tea and set about feeding me what she could spare of the children’s lunch. I watched her glide round the kitchen, from stove to counter to icebox and back, a whole ballet of domestic tranquillity, and I began to let it all out of me. I remember there was a sound of hammering from the yard two houses over where they were putting up a garage and it seemed to underscore the urgency of the situation — and the hopelessness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” I said, and the hammer thumped dully, then beat a frantic tattoo.

To this point, Mac hadn’t offered much, other than the odd phrase—“And then what?” or “Do you take mustard, John?”—and I had the sudden intimation that she was jealous somehow, jealous of Iris and what she meant to me. Mac was masterful at inhabiting her role — dutiful wife of the scientist, selfless helpmeet, hostess, cook and mother — but I wondered how she really felt about things. About me, that is, and our relationship and how this would affect it — how it already had.

“Should I–I mean, do you think I should be the one to, to—?” I wanted her to tell me to go to Iris and make it up, to say that honesty was the best policy, to let the truth come out and we’d all be the better for it, but, as usual, I fumbled round the issue.

Mac pulled out the chair across from me and sat at the table, her own cup of tea in hand. She leaned forward to blow the steam off the cup, then sat up and stirred the dark liquid with a spoon. “You do love her, John,” she said. “You’re sure of it?”

I did, I was sure I did, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’d confessed it to Mac, but now, sitting in the gently percolating, sun-grazed kitchen where we’d copulated on the linoleum tiles in front of the stove — the two of us, Mac and I — it felt awkward to admit it.