T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

That was in the beginning, and that was what our life was like through every day and every night. It’s called happiness, and we had it in spades, as they say. The war loomed over us, of course, as it loomed over everyone in those days and months after Pearl Harbor, but Prok was good to his word and did finally manage to get me an occupational deferment, using the full arsenal of his rhetoric and all the weight of his position to bring the draft board around to the view that our research was crucial to the war effort. For her part, Iris was determined to finish out her final semester and get her degree in elementary education, but she did take a part-time job at the five-and-dime, and the money she earned there, along with the raise Prok gave me, helped lend us as much a sense of security as anyone could expect under the circumstances. Which is not to say that we didn’t have to budget pretty strictly, and I cut back on smoking, we did our drinking at home and rationed ourselves to one picture a week.

Was it all idyllic? No, of course not. There was still the unresolved business of our relationship with Prok and Mac — they invited us for dinner and musicales on a regular basis, and, of course, I traveled with Prok much more than Iris would have liked, a sore point that seemed to get sorer and sorer as the years went on — and beyond that there was Iris’s growing disenchantment with the project itself. “We’re at war,” she would say. “The whole world hangs in the balance, and you’re out there somewhere in the hinterlands measuring orgasms — I mean, doesn’t that strike you as trivial?”

“But you never wanted me to go, don’t you remember?” I countered. “You were the one. You were adamant — you could have been Lindbergh’s speechwriter, for Christ’s sake. ‘I will not let you go,’ you said. ‘It’s not our war.’ Remember?”

She had a way of curling her underlip, as if she’d just been poisoned, had just set down the vial and was about to turn on her perpetrator — me — with all the moribund strength left in her. “Don’t give me that crap, John. I might have been against it, but that was before the Japs came into it. Now it’s almost as if, as if — I don’t want to say it, John. But orgasms. I mean, what could be more ridiculous?”

I remember a night from that period, sometime in the winter or early spring, when we had our first dinner party, and Ezra and Dick Martone, who were quitting school to enlist, came to the apartment with two girls and three tall bulging sacks of beer — and gin, which was Dick’s drink of choice. Gin, in a silver bottle, with a seltzer squirter full of tonic. The girls were plain, with dead-looking hair and acne scars — they were sisters, I think, maybe even twins — and their chief attraction, aside from the lushness of their figures, was their unabashed carnality. They talked dirty, drank like sponges and had “given out” to half the men on campus. What they especially liked, being patriotic girls, was uniforms.

At any rate, we had a going-away party and Iris made a leg of lamb with pan-roasted potatoes, carrots and creamed corn, hot-from-the-oven biscuits, and a homemade peach cobbler for dessert. I spent the afternoon — it was a Saturday — running a carpet sweeper over the rug, peeling vegetables and dashing out to the store for mint jelly, cloves of garlic, a pound of margarine and whatever else she discovered she needed at the last minute. I told her it was no big deal, that it was only Dick and Ezra and their dates, a couple of girls we’d never see again and who were there for one purpose only, but Iris had worked herself into a state. “It’s our first dinner party, John,” she said, busy at the sink, her back to me. “The first time we’ve ever entertained people in our own home.”

The water was running, steam rising, the heady fragrance of the roasting lamb infusing every corner of our three rooms and bath with a richness and prodigality that made me feel like a robber baron, like a sultan lounging on his multicolored carpets while the exotic smells of dinner wafted up from the royal kitchens below. I put my hands on her hips, kissed the back of her ear. “I know you,” I said, leaning into her, pressing my groin into the swell of her buttocks, “you just want to show off.”

She stiffened, her shoulders gone rigid, the dishes in the sink flying from the suds to the rinse pan and off to the dish rack as if an automaton were at work. “You could help,” she said, without turning around. “You could dry. Because we’re going to need these dishes for the table and our guests are going to be here in less than an hour.”

“Sure,” I said, “sure,” and I picked up the dish towel and moved in beside her. “But really, you don’t have to make such a production of it, not for Dick and Ezra—”

She turned to me in half-profile, showing me the underlip and a quick darting leap of her eyes. “And so what if I want to show the place off — and my husband too. I’m proud of it. Aren’t you?”

I told her that I was and I tried to embrace her with a wet platter in my hand, and I suppose I was a bit awkward — not drunk yet, not by any means, but I will admit to having had a nip or two in anticipation of the party — and somehow the platter wound up on the floor. In pieces. We both stood stock-still a moment, staring down at the wreckage. This was the only platter we had, the platter on which the lamb was to have been served, and the crisis of the moment proved too much for Iris. She gave me a savage look, plunged through the bead curtains and stalked down the hallway to the bedroom, where she slammed the door behind her with an excess of force. I wanted to go to her and apologize — or no, I was angry suddenly and I wanted to kick the door, rattle the knob and shout at her, because it wasn’t the end of the world, it was only an accident, and why take it out on me? Why don’t you just tear the goddamned thing off its hinges, huh? That was what I wanted to say, what I wanted to scream. But I didn’t. I got as far as the door, but the door was locked. “Iris,” I said. “Iris, come on.” I listened for a moment — was she crying? — then went back to the kitchen, poured another drink and got down on my knees to pick up the pieces.

For all that, the party went off as well as could be expected. Or better, even. Dick and Ezra and the two girls — let’s call them Mary Jane and Mary Ellen — were pretty well lit when they arrived and I don’t think they would have noticed or cared if we’d served the lamb on a skewer. As it was, I carved the meat at the stove and arranged the slices on an ordinary dinner plate, after Iris had made sure that everyone had a chance to admire it in the pan, that is, and by the time the pie and coffee were served we were laughing over the lost platter and the inept husband who couldn’t be trusted in the kitchen. Mary Ellen, seated on my right, gave me a playful cuff on the shoulder and called me “butterfingers.” “You butterfingers, you,” she said, and both sisters let out a scream of laughter.

I brought out the bourbon to spike our coffee and Ezra poured his cup full to the brim and bolted the whole business while it was still too hot for anyone else even to sip, and then asked for more. A vacant look came into his eyes after that, but he sat there happily, one redolent arm thrust over Mary Jane’s shoulder while his free hand maneuvered his fork round a second piece of cobbler. He and Dick, who’d stayed on through the fall for graduate school and a teaching assistantship in the Engineering Department, were leaving in the morning for basic training. This was their last night of freedom, their last fling, and I wanted — Iris and I wanted — to make it memorable for them. There was beer left still, and when we moved away from the table and into the sitting room, Dick poured a fresh round of gin and tonics for himself and the girls.