T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“God,” Laura snorted, making a drawn-out bleat of it, “my mother would’ve gone through the roof.” She’d lit a cigarette too, and it smoldered now in the ashtray, the white of the paper flecked red from the touch of her lips. She picked it up distractedly, took a quick puff, exhaled. “Because we never, in my family, I mean never, discussed, you know, where little boys and girls come from.”

Sally raised a confidential hand to her mouth. “They call him ‘Dr. Sex,’ did you know that?”

“Who does?” I felt as if I were floating above the table, all my tethers cut and the ground fast fading below me. This was heady stuff, naughty, wicked, like when a child first learns the verboten words Dr. Kinsey had pronounced so distinctly and disinterestedly for us just an hour before.

Sally raised her eyebrows till they met the brim of her hat. “People. Around campus.”

“Not to mention town,” Bill put in. He dropped his voice. “He makes you do interviews, you know. About your sex life”—he laughed—“or lack of it.”

“I would hate that,” Sally said. “It’s so … personal. And it’s not as if he’s a medical doctor. Or a minister even.”

I felt overheated suddenly, though the place was as dank as the dripping alley out back. “Histories,” I said, surprising myself. “Case histories. He’s explained all that — how else are we going to know what people—”

“The human animal, you mean,” Laura said.

“—what people do when they, when they mate, if we don’t look at it scientifically? And frankly, I don’t know about you, but I applaud what Kinsey’s doing, and if it’s shocking, I think we should ask ourselves why, because isn’t a, a … a function as universal as reproductive behavior just as logical a cause for study as the circulation of the blood or the way the cornea works or any other medical knowledge we’ve accumulated over the centuries?” It might have been the bourbon talking, but there I was defending Prok before I ever even knew him.

“Yes, but,” Bill said, and we all leaned into the table and talked till our glasses were empty, and then we filled them and emptied them again, the rain tracing patterns in the dirt of the window, then the window going dark and the tide of undergraduates ebbing and flowing as people went home to dinner and their books. It was seven o’clock. I was out of money. My head throbbed but I’d never been so excited in my life. When Bill and Sally excused themselves and shrugged out the door and into the wafting dampness of the night, I lingered a moment, half-drunk, and put an arm round Laura’s shoulders. “So we’re still engaged, aren’t we?” I murmured.

Her smile spread softly from her lips to her eyes. She plucked the maraschino cherry from her glass and rotated it between her fingers before gently pressing it into my mouth. “Sure,” she said.

“Then shouldn’t we — or don’t we have an obligation, to, to—”

“Sure,” she said, and she leaned forward and gave me a kiss, a kiss that was sweetened by the syrup of the cherry and the smell of her perfume and the proximity of her body that was warm now and languid. It was a long kiss, the longest I’d ever experienced, and it was deepened and complicated by what we’d seen up there on the screen in the lecture hall, by the visual memory of those corresponding organs designed for sensory gratification and the reproduction of the species, mutually receptive, self-lubricated, cohesive and natural. I came up for air encouraged, emboldened, and though there was nothing between us and we both knew it, I whispered, “Come home with me.”

The look of Laura’s face transformed suddenly. Her eyes sharpened and her features came into focus as if I’d never really seen them before, as if this wasn’t the girl I’d just kissed in a moment of sweet oblivion. We were both absolutely still, our breath commingling, hands poised at the edge of the table as if we didn’t know what to do with them, till she turned away from me and began to gather up her purse, her raincoat, her hat. I became aware of the voices at the bar then, someone singing in a creaking baritone, the hiss of a newly tapped keg. “I don’t know what you’re thinking, John,” she said, and I was getting to my feet now too, rattled suddenly, flushing red for all I knew. “I’m not that kind of agirl.”

But let me step back a moment, because I don’t want to get off on the wrong foot — this isn’t about me, this is about Prok, and Prok is dead, and I’m sitting here in my study, the key turned in the lock, the sorry tepid remains of a Zombie cocktail at my elbow, trying to talk into this machine and sort out my thoughts while Iris paces up and down the hall in her heels, stopping on every third revolution to rattle the doorknob and remind me in a muffled shout that we’re going to be late. Late for what, I’d like to know. Late for tramping through the funeral home with a mob of newspaper reporters and the rest of the curiosity seekers? Late to show our support? Or dedication? Is it going to do Mac any good? Or the children? Or Corcoran, Rutledge, or even my own son, John Jr., who locked himself in his room at the top of the stairs two hours ago because he’s had enough of death and sorrow and mourning, because unlike the ghouls and the carrion sniffers and all the rest he hasn’t the faintest desire to look on the empty husk of greatness? The corpse, that is. The mortal remains. Prok in his casket, propped up like a wax effigy, drained and flushed and pumped full of formaldehyde, the man who had no illusions, the scientist, the empiricist, the evolutionist, Prok. Prok is dead, is dead, is dead, and nothing else matters.

“John, goddamn you, will you open this door?” Iris is abusing the doorknob, she’s pounding with a balled-up fist at the oak panels of the door I myself stripped and varnished. And who took us to look at this house, who loaned us the money for it? Who gave us everything we have?

“Okay, okay!” I shout, and then I’m up from the desk, forcing down the dregs of the joyless drink and shuffling across the carpet to twist the key in the lock and fling open the door.

Iris is there, her face blotted with anger, with exasperation, stalking into the room in her black dress, her black stockings and heels, the hat and the veil. My wife. Thirty-six years old, the mother of my son, as slim and dark and wide-eyed and beautiful as the day I met her. And angry. Deeply, intensely angry. “What are you doing?” she demands, crowding into me, her hands windmilling in my face. “Don’t you realize we’re twenty minutes late already ?” And then, catching sight of the glass in my hand: “Are you drinking? At two o’clock in the afternoon? Jesus, you make me sick. He wasn’t God, you know.”

I’m feeling hollow, a cane with all the pith gnawed out of it. I don’t need prodding, don’t need anything but to be left alone. “Easy for you to say.”

I don’t know what I expect, the baring of the talons, the first superficial swipes of the marital row that has been going on here now for the past fifteen years, and then the rending of the deeper wounds, the ones that fester. I’m ready for it, ready to fight and throw it all back at her, because she’s wrong and we both know it, but she surprises me. Her hands go to her hips, then drop to her side, and I watch her take the time to compose her face. “No, John,” she says finally, and she puts all the bruising power of the years into the sad low hopeless cadence of her voice, “it’s not easy. It’s never been easy. You know what I wish?”

I won’t answer, won’t give her the satisfaction.

“I wish I’d never met him, never heard of him. I wish he’d never been born.”

I can hear our son moving around in his room overhead, the dull reverberation of his feet like distant thunder. Iris’s jaw is set, her shoulders thrown back in full martial display, and she’s already dismissed me, moving toward the door now in her brisk chopping strides. “Get your tie on,” she snaps over her shoulder, and she’s gone. But no. She’s back suddenly, on the rebound, her head framed in the doorway, her eyes slicing from me to the tape recorder and back again. “And shut that damn thing off, will you?”