T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Prok was already seated at his desk. His head was down, and he was shuffling through his papers. “Splendid,” he said. “Couldn’t have been better. We got some fourteen juvenile histories, very interesting, very significant, and it just confirms in me the resolve to get more. Isn’t that right, Milk?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was, uh, a real experience.”

Corcoran was watching me closely. “Oh?” he said. “How so?”

Prok’s head rose as he glanced up to monitor my answer.

“I don’t know,” I said, reaching for the coffee cup to cover myself. “It was — I guess you’d have to call it an awakening. Of sorts.”

Corcoran was smiling, always smiling. He was so at ease I could have killed him, could have leapt up from the desk and strangled him right there in the middle of the linoleum floor and never thought twice about it. I think he was about to press it further, ask for some clarification — because this was interesting, it was. He might have been about to say, What do you mean? Or turn it into a joke: But how long were you asleep, then?

Prok got there first. “Good,” he said. “Well put. I felt it myself, and this is a new avenue — one we have to tread a whole lot more in future, but cautiously of course.” There was a silence as we all three contemplated just what that caution entailed, and then Prok, in his briskest voice, said, “I’m going to need you to take some dictation, Milk — follow-up letters, and not just to the parents, but to the children as well.” He glanced up sharply, as if I were about to demur. “Because, you understand, we have to be absolutely aboveboard here, and the parents will see the letters — follow-up, that is, and I can’t stress how vital this is. And should be. My feeling is that if a volunteer goes out of his way to be a friend of the research, no matter how young or old, we are in that person’s debt and should acknowledge it at the very first opportunity.”

I should point out that these were still the early days of the Institute for Sex Research and we didn’t yet have a full-time secretary or even adequate office space, though with the arrival of Corcoran, Prok had convinced the administration to incorporate the classroom next door into what was now a little suite of offices. A door had been carved out of a wall of the original office, giving onto this new space, and Corcoran’s desk was located in there, as well as the overflow from our files and the ever-increasing library of material in the field that Prok had begun to amass (including the erotica collection so much has been made of recently). But truly, from humble beginnings …

In any case, I mention it only because of what came next — just to locate you in situ — so you can appreciate where all three of us were in relation to one another. The pleasantries were over, and Prok was the last to tolerate any procrastination — work was what he wanted and work was what we were there for — and yet still Corcoran hadn’t moved. “John,” he said, dropping his voice, “listen, I wonder if you and I could have a few words, later, after work, I mean. We must talk.”

Prok lifted an eyebrow, shot us both a look. “That would be splendid, Corcoran,” he said, “but I assure you I’ll be more than happy to fill you in on the details of what we’ve learned, and what we hope to learn. Fascinating, really.”

Corcoran’s smile was fading. “No, it was another matter, Prok.”

“Oh?”

For all my will power, I felt the color rising to my face. I stared into the coffee mug.

“A private matter,” Corcoran said.

Prok’s eyebrow lifted a degree higher. “Oh?”

“It’s nothing, really. Just — well, just something between colleagues, isn’t that right, John?”

What could I say? I’d been shot through the shoulder blades, brought down at a gallop on the high plains, hooves kicking futilely in the air. I felt the shaft of the arrow emerging under my breastbone, the hot sharp little tip of the skewer. “Yeah,” I said. “Or, yes, I mean. Yes, that’s right.”

I don’t suppose it will come as a surprise if I told you I had trouble concentrating on my work that day. As much as I tried to fight them down, I was prey to my emotions — stupidly, I know. Falsely. Anachronistically. I kept telling myself I was a sexologist, that I had a career and a future and a new outlook altogether, that I was liberated from all those petty, Judeo-Christian constraints that had done such damage over the centuries, but it was no good. I was hurt. I was jealous. I presented my ordinary face to Prok and, through the doorway and across the expanse of the inner room, to Corcoran, but I was seething inside, burning, violent and deranged with the gall of my own inadequacy and failure — my own sins —and I kept seeing the stooped demeaning figure of the cuckold in the commedia dell’arte no matter how hard I tried to dismiss it. I stared at Corcoran when he wasn’t looking. I studied the way he scratched at his chin or tapped the pencil idly on the surface of the blotting pad as if he were knocking out the drumbeat to some private rhapsody. Kill him! a voice screamed in my head. Get up now and kill him!

Then we were locking up, the three of us gathered there at the front door of the office while Prok turned the key and we chatted, in a valedictory way, about the business of sex. Prok had his umbrella with him, and his galoshes, but no overcoat — it was too mild and he was the sort who could endure anything, in any case — and he made some comment about the two of us, Corcoran and I, needing to better attune ourselves to the weather as neither of us had any protection at all, save for sports coat and tie, and then he bade us good night and headed off down the hall. “Well,” Corcoran breathed, hesitating, “shall we — do you want to take the car?”

I just nodded and we walked to his car in silence. As soon as we’d slammed the doors, Corcoran turned over the engine and the radio came to life, blaring out a popular dance tune, and it was that, as much as anything, that made my anger rush to the surface — I had to hold tight to the doorframe to keep from doing something I might have regretted for the rest of my professional career.

Corcoran had put the car in gear and we were moving slowly down the street, but I was so wrought up I barely registered the movement. After a moment, he said, “What about the tavern? How’s a drink sound? It’s on me.”

There was a clarinet solo in that tune — the band was famous for its clarinetist — and we both listened as the instrument went slipping and eliding through its paces. “I never realized how much I hate the clarinet,” I said, “not till now, anyway.”

Corcoran reached out a cuff-linked wrist to flick off the radio. He seemed to decide something then, swinging the wheel hard to the right to nose the car in at the curb. “Listen,” he said, “John, I hope you’re not going to take this the wrong way, because it can get awkward for all of us, and there’s no reason—”

Was I glaring at him? I don’t know. All of a sudden, and this was the foremost thing in my mind, grown there full-blown like an instantaneous cancer, I was overcome with a fear of embarrassing myself, of showing my hand — of being petty, hidebound, of being the cuckold. “No,” I said, turning away from him, and I didn’t know what proposition or argument I was dismissing.

“It doesn’t mean anything. Not a thing. Not between us.” He was turned to me, studying me in profile, and I could feel him there, feel the heat of his breath against the carved wooden mask of my face. “Look, before I did anything I consulted Prok—”

At first I thought I hadn’t heard him right — Prok? What did Prok have to do with this? — and then the single curt syllable began to reverberate in my head like a pinball ringing up the score. Maybe my ears reddened. Still I didn’t turn to him, but just sat there staring out the window, fighting for control.