T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

How did I know? I could tell from the way she held herself — and from her face. I knew that face better than I knew my own, and I could see by the way she widened her eyes and pursed her lips as he spoke (and what was he telling her, what was so fascinating?) that she was fully engaged. And, too, there was a way she had of ducking her head to one side as she laughed, tugging unconsciously at her right earring and shifting her weight from foot to foot as if the floor had caught fire beneath her. Body language. I’d become a student of it, of necessity. Was I jealous? Not in the least, not yet, anyway. Why should I have been? I loved her and she loved me, there was no doubt about that — and there never has been, not to this day — and all the rest, as Prok had taught me, was nothing more than a function of the body, physiology at its root, stimulus and response. I listened politely to Professor and Mrs. Bouchon, nodding and smiling when it seemed appropriate, and then I excused myself and crossed the room to collect my wife, thank our hosts and head out into the night.

The walk home was — well, I suppose you’d call it stimulating. Not in a sexual sense (as I said, we didn’t have the luxury of being sexually stimulated that night), but in an emotional one. For the first minute or so we fussed with the buttons of our coats, pulled our collars up against the breeze and leaned into each other as we hurried down the street, not a word exchanged between us. There was a premonitory scent of winter on the air, of the cold rock-strewn Canadian wastes and the stiffened fur of all the hundreds of thousands of beasts creeping across the tundra up there, and the sky was open overhead, the stars splashed from horizon to horizon like the white blood of the night. I felt like going out somewhere for a nightcap, but I knew Iris would refuse — absurdly, though she was a married woman, she was still under jurisdiction of the dorm, the RA and curfew — so I found myself instead saying the first thing that came into my head. “So what about Corcoran,” I said. “What did you think of him?”

Her head was down, her shoulders slumped, one hand at the collar of her coat. She was moving along at a brisk pace — we both were. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “He seems all right.”

“All right? Is that all?”

My hands were cold — I hadn’t thought of gloves; it was too early in the season — and I’d looped my arm through hers and forced my right hand into the pocket of my coat. The left I stuffed down into my trousers pocket and kept it there, though I found it awkward to walk off-balance like that. Leaves scuttered before us. There was the sound of a car backfiring up the street behind us, where the other guests were leaving Prok’s party. “I don’t know,” she said again. “Persuasive, I guess.”

“Persuasive? What do you mean?”

“He’s a good talker. Smooth. He’ll make a sterling interviewer, I’m sure.”

“Do I detect a note of sarcasm?”

She turned her face to me, a cold pale oval of reflected light, then looked down at her feet again. “No, not at all,” she said. “I’m just being practical. He’s a perfect fit. He’ll take your place without so much as a ripple—”

“He’s not going to take my place.”

“Did you see the way Kinsey looked at him?”

I was shivering, I suppose, my coat too light, the wind knifing at my trousers. A chill went through me. I saw Corcoran’s face then, saw Prok hovering over him throughout the evening, as proud as if he’d given birth to him himself, and I knew in that moment what there was between them — the same thing Prok and I had together. I couldn’t help myself. I was angry suddenly. Jealous. “So what?” I said. “What’s it to me? I keep telling you, we need more hands.”

Iris said nothing. The leaves crunched underfoot. After a moment, she said: “But he is persuasive.”

“Really,” I said, and I wasn’t thinking, not at all. “What did he persuade you of? I’d like to know. I really would.”

We were at the end of the block now, turning right, toward campus. The wind came naked round the corner. A pair of automobiles, one following so closely on the other they might have been tethered, slammed over a branch the wind had thrust in the street and the sound was like a burst of sudden explosions. “To give my history,” Iris said, but I thought I hadn’t heard her right, and so I said, “What?”

“To give my history. To Kinsey.”

I was dumbfounded. I’d been nagging her for months, and here this new man — this persuader, this Corcoran —had won her over in what, ten minutes’ time? “Good,” I said, numb all over. “That’s good. But how — I mean, why listen to him if your own, well, your own husband can’t convince you, and after all this time?”

The taillights of the two cars receded up ahead of us. They both turned right on Atwater, in front of the campus, and were gone. “He just seemed to make sense,” she said, “that was all. For the good of the project, like you’ve been saying. His wife’s already arranged to give her history on your next trip to South Bend — maybe you’ll get to take it, John, and wouldn’t that be just swell, keep it in the family, huh?”

“And so, what’s your point? I see nothing wrong with—”

“Kinsey said he’d get him a deferment.”

We walked on in silence. Of course Prok would get him a deferment — he was going to get me a deferment too, for the sake of the project, and it had absolutely nothing to do with whether our wives gave their histories or not. I should have been gratified, Corcoran’s first day on the scene and he’d convinced Iris to join in for the sake of team spirit, and that was wonderful, terrific news, hallelujah to the heavens, but I wasn’t gratified, I was rankled. “That has nothing to do with it,” I said.

The campus loomed up before us, the odd office lit in a random grid against the backdrop of the night, the frost-killed lawn underfoot, more leaves and the advancing crunch of our footsteps. “What about Mac?” she said then.

“Mac?” I echoed. I wasn’t following her. “What do you mean, Mac ? Was Mac in on it? Did she persuade you too — or help persuade you? Is that what you mean?”

“No. Mac as a wife. As part of the inner circle. Now it’ll be three husbands and three wives— if I give my history to Prok, that is, and if he goes to the draft board.”

“He will,” I said, simply to say something, to keep it going. “He has, I mean. He’s trying his best.”

“But what about Mac?” she repeated. We were crossing the quad to the women’s dorm, figures gathered there by the vault of the door, couples in the shadows, the rooms overhead radiating light as if all the life of the campus were concentrated there. And it was. At least at this hour.

“What about her?”

Iris suddenly jerked her arm away from my mine and quickened her pace. “You slept with her,” she said. “She told me all about it.” The light from the high bank of windows was on her face now, on her hair, silvering the shoulders of her coat and the dark crenellations of her hat. “She told me,” she said, and there was a catch in her voice, an amalgam of rage and despair strangling the words in her throat, “and you lied to me.” She swung round suddenly and planted herself right there in front of the building. “You,” she said. “You, John Milk. My husband.”

I didn’t know what to say. It would have required a speech, would have required hours, days, would have required a whole heterogeneous philosophy delivered and debated point by excruciating point, and we had ten diminishing minutes till curfew. “I didn’t want to, to surprise you,” I said, and that was the best I could come up with. “Or, or hurt you, if, I mean, if—”