T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s this place, I guess. I used to come here as a student.”

At that moment, both of us, as if we were being manipulated by a force beyond our control, turned to watch a coed in a pair of slacks saunter by on the arm of a boy who couldn’t have been more than eighteen. “What a waste,” Corcoran said.

I was grinning. “Oh, yeah,” I said, “yeah. A real waste.”

He was staring off into the distance now, idly tapping a knuckle on the bartop. “I could relate to her,” he said. “Couldn’t you?”

I said that I could, and then the bartender appeared and we both ordered martinis, up, with a twist, though I didn’t really care all that much for gin — Corcoran ordered first, that was all, and he made it sound good, so I said, “Second that.”

What did we talk about that night through three martinis and a kind of delirium that made my head feel as if it were a pan full of sloshing water? Sex, certainly. The project. Prok. The immediate future, as in our next trip, scheduled for two days later. At some point, there was a pause, and he leaned forward to light a cigarette. “How do you feel about that, the trips, I mean?” he said, shaking out the match. “Is it — I don’t know — difficult at all? With Iris?”

I looked out over the room a moment, caught the gaze of the coed we’d tracked earlier, and immediately dropped my eyes. “Well, yes, sure.” The third martini had lost its chill. The roof of my mouth felt as numb as if I’d been given an anesthetic at the dentist’s — gin, I didn’t like gin, and I didn’t know why I was drinking it. “But it’s part of the job. She understands that. We both do.” I lifted the thin-stemmed glass to my lips, conscious all at once of its fragility. “But what about you? You don’t, well — what about your wife?”

Corcoran turned a bland face to me. There were golden highlights in his hair. He gave an elaborate shrug that began in his upper arms, migrated to his shoulders and finally to his neck and the rotating ball of his head. “It’s hard, but Violet’s got to keep the kids in school till June — we couldn’t very well uproot them. And when I do manage to see her — you remember I drove up there weekend before last? — when we do get together, believe me, the sex is terrific, red-hot, like you wouldn’t believe.”

I didn’t know what to say. To this point I’d laid eyes on Violet Corcoran just once, when she’d come to town on the bus one weekend to get her bearings and help motivate her husband to find a suitable place for the long term. She was attractive, certainly — of Italian descent, with skin the color of olive oil, very dark eyes and a mouth that turned up in a natural pout, even at rest — but she was nothing compared to Iris. Maybe I was prejudiced — of course I was — but to my mind Iris was a true natural beauty and Violet Corcoran wasn’t in that category at all. I tried to picture her with her clothes off, picture her in bed with Corcoran, but the image flickered and vanished before I could get hold of it. Finally I said something like, “I guess there are some advantages, then, hmm?” And tried for a complicitous smile.

There was traffic in and out of the bar, the high whinny of a laugh, the squeak and shuffle of men’s shoes. The jukebox was playing something I didn’t recognize. Corcoran squinted against the smoke rising from his cigarette, and I couldn’t help thinking he should be the one to give Prok his lessons in savoir faire. “Yeah,” he said finally, “but there are other advantages too, if you know what I mean.”

“No,” I said, “what?”

He drew at the cigarette, exhaled, set it down carefully in the corner of the ashtray and picked up a hard-boiled egg, which he began delicately tapping against the surface of the bar. I watched him for a moment as he peeled back the shell and the membrane beneath it, salted the slick white surface and took the entire thing into his mouth. “You know, batching it,” he said, chewing around his words. “Opportunities arise. Not that they wouldn’t if I were back home in South Bend — and you know I never let convention stand in my way — but it’s just that it’s, well, easier if you’re off on your own. Less complicated, you know?”

I thought about that a moment, thought about him and Iris at the musicale, thick as thieves. I had nothing to add.

“But you,” he said, turning to me, his face as bland and ineluctably handsome as any movie star’s, “don’t you … get out a bit yourself?”

As I’ve said, I was past the stage of reddening — that sort of emotional report card was strictly for adolescents — but I did feel my heart pound out of synchronization for just a moment even as the lie flew to my lips. “No,” I said, thinking of that dark groping encounter in the hallway of my own apartment, “no, not really.”

Then there came a night when I did get home early — just past six — and Iris wasn’t there. I’d been in the biology library all afternoon, sequestered in a back corner working on a series of tables (Accumulative Incidence: Pre-Adolescent Orgasm From Any Source, By Educational Level; Active Incidence and Percentage of Outlet: Petting to Orgasm, By Decade of Birth) in support of our grant proposal to the Rockefeller Foundation, my head down, minding my own business, while Elster stalked back and forth and glared at me from his desk as if the scratch of my pencil or the setting down of my ruler and T square were exploding the bibliographical calm of the place. I tried my best to ignore him, but whenever he came into my range of vision with an armload of papers or a cart of books, I couldn’t help wondering why he hadn’t been called up to fight our enemies in Europe, Africa or the Pacific. But then I studied him for a moment when he was busy at his desk — the slack posture, fleshless limbs, the glowing bald spot on the crown of his head that was like the stamp of early senescence — and came up with the answer to my own question: he was IV-F, IV-F without a doubt.

And what was I doing in the library in the first place? Simple. Prok had evicted me for the afternoon so that he and Corcoran could conduct simultaneous interviews of a cohort of southern Indiana psychologists who were attending a conference on campus. I’d interviewed two of them already that morning and early afternoon, and now Prok was putting Corcoran to the test, checking Corcoran’s position sheet against his own the minute the subject had left. And so I got home early, and Iris wasn’t there.

I saw that she’d made a casserole — tuna and macaroni, with layers of American cheese spread atop it — and left the morning’s dishes to dry in the rack, and that was fine, nothing out of the ordinary there, but where could she be? Had she forgotten something at the store, some essential ingredient — coffee, margarine, a cake mix for dessert? Perhaps she’d just stepped out for a minute to go round the corner to the grocer’s. Or maybe it was some sort of emergency. Maybe she’d cut herself or fallen — or it might have been one of the neighbors. I thought of the old lady upstairs who’d been the special friend of Mrs. Lorber’s sister. Mrs. Valentine. She was so frail — so winnowed and reduced — that she could have gone at any moment and no one would have been surprised. But it wasn’t anything to concern myself over. If something had happened, there was nothing I could do about it. I would hear in due time, so why worry? The casserole was in the oven, the bourbon on the shelf. I poured myself a drink and went to the radio to see what was on.

I was on my third drink and the top layer of the casserole had developed a color and texture I’d never before seen in a baked dish, not that I’m much of a cook, when I began to feel concerned (about Iris, that is; for all I cared the casserole could find its way into the trashcan and we’d make do with sandwiches and three fingers of bourbon). I’d listened to Vic and Sade, then a program of war news and Kate Smith singing “God Bless America,” and now I began to pace round the room and peek out through the curtains every time I thought I heard someone coming. Could she have gone to the office to surprise me? Was I supposed to have met her somewhere? Did we have concert tickets for the student-faculty orchestra? Were we dining out? But no, there was the casserole, irrefutable evidence to the contrary. I decided to go back to campus, to the office, just to check if she was there, to see if I’d somehow managed to get my signals crossed, and so I shrugged into my coat and hat and started out the door.