T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

I don’t get angry. I suppress my anger, drink it down like Angostura bitters, digest it, let it run through the bowels, shit it out — my mother taught me that. Do what I say. Mind your manners. Live for me. “We haven’t even been married a year yet,” I said.

She was frantic, she couldn’t sit down, pacing back and forth while I clung to the chair as if the ship had gone down and this was all that was left to me. “I don’t care,” she said. “I’m sorry, and I don’t want to hurt you — I’ll always love you, and you’re my first love, you know that — but this is something bigger than that, and I just can’t help it. I can’t.”

“He’s married,” I said, and my voice was flat and toneless. The faucet was dripping in the sink, one thunderous drop after another hitting the greased porcelain of the unwashed plates and cups and saucers. “He doesn’t love you. It’s just sex — he told me that. Just sex, Iris. He’s a sex researcher.”

All the intensity of her face drew down to the frozen eyelet of her mouth and for a second I thought she was going to spit at me. “Is that what you call it — research?” She was trembling, lit up with the ecstasy of the moment, her eyes gone clear and hard. “Well, I don’t care, I love him and it doesn’t matter what happens. I can do research too. You’ll see. You just wait and see.”

The next morning, early, while Prok was still upstairs brushing his teeth and Mac presiding over the kitchen with her whisk and bowl and a mug of coffee, I went to the house on First Street and rapped on the door till one of the children let me in. I don’t recall which one it was — it might have been Bruce, the youngest, who would have been thirteen or fourteen at the time — but the door swung open, the adolescent face registered my presence and then vanished and I was left standing there in the anteroom, unannounced, the door open wide to the street behind me. Two years earlier I would have been mortified to be put in this position, but now, as the sounds of the house percolated round me — three children preparing for school and the slap of Prok’s razor strop echoing down from above — I felt nothing but relief, blanketed by normalcy, by the regular thump of footsteps overhead and the murmurous dialogue of the girls drifting down the hall. I stood there a moment, then shut the door softly behind me. There was a smell of coffee, butter, hot grease, and I let it lead me to the kitchen, even while I tried to calm the pounding in my chest. Mac was at the stove, beating eggs for the pan, her back to me. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, her feet were bare and her hair was uncombed, and when I spoke her name she started visibly.

She turned to me, puzzled. “John?” she said, as if she couldn’t quite place me. “What are you doing here at this hour — are you and Prok off somewhere? I thought it was next week you were going back to Indianapolis?”

“No,” I said, fumbling for the words I wanted, “I just, well — I came to see Prok, is Prok in? It’s, well, it can’t wait—”

She gave me a stricken look. There was danger here, and heartbreak too, and I was out of bounds — she could see that at a glance. “Have you eaten?” she said suddenly. “Because I can just add a couple eggs — and toast, do you want toast?”

“Is he upstairs?”

She might have nodded, or maybe she said, “Go ahead,” but the permission was implicit — I belonged here, I was part of this, part of this household, this family — and in the next moment I was bounding up the stairs even as the two girls, Joan and Anne, were coming down, dressed for school. I suppose they might have given me a quizzical look and perhaps even a giggle or two (they were eighteen and sixteen respectively), but it was nothing out of the ordinary — I was there, on the staircase, and I’d been there before, John Milk, the handsome young man with the recalcitrant hair, Daddy’s friend, Daddy’s assistant, his colleague and traveling companion. I found Prok in the bathroom, standing before the mirror, shaving. The door was open, he was in his underclothes, and he’d just scraped the last of the shaving cream from his chin when he became aware of me standing there in the doorway. “Prok,” I said, “I hope you won’t — well, I didn’t know where else to turn.”

I couldn’t eat — I was too wrought up for that — but the two of them, Mac and Prok both, insisted on sitting me down at the table with a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. Throughout breakfast, Prok kept fastening on me with that intent gaze of his, as if he were trying to reduce me to my constituent parts for a physiologic study of variations in the human organism under stress, but he talked exclusively of the project. “The children were really something, weren’t they, Milk? And, Mac, you should have seen them, fully cognizant of sexual roles even at four and five years old, and by seven or eight a number of them had already seen the genitalia of the opposite sex, and there was that one girl, Milk, you remember her? The one in pigtails? She’d seen both her parents naked— saw them on a regular basis.” When we were done — I barely touched my food — he got up in his usual brisk way, squared his bow tie in the hall mirror and informed me that we’d better hurry if we were going to be at work on time.

The minute we were out of the house he asked me what the matter was.

“It’s Iris,” I told him, struggling to keep pace with him as we swung through the gate and out onto the street. I was having trouble getting it out, the words colliding in my head, and the emotions too, choking at me in some deep glandular way. Prok shot me an impatient look. “She says she’s in love with Corcoran, and that”—and here I felt myself breaking down—“that she wants to move in with him, to live with him. To, to—”

His head was down, his shoulders hunched, and he was already elongating into his no-nonsense stride, no time to waste, no time to stand still in the street and shoot the breeze when there was work to be done. What he said was, “We can’t have that.”

No, I thought, no, of course we can’t.

“But you approved,” I said, “or that’s what Corcoran told me, that you said, well, that you gave your blessing. To the whole thing, I mean.”

The look he gave me — sidelong, over his jolting shoulder — wasn’t in the least sympathetic. It was fierce, irascible, the sort of look that came over his face when he was challenged, when the Thurman B. Rices and Dean Hoenigs of the world rose up to castigate him on whatever grounds, whether statistical or moral. “We’re adults, Milk,” he snapped. “Consenting adults. No one needs my permission to do anything.”

I was right there now, right at his shoulder, drawn up even with him, and I came as close to losing control then as I ever have — there were accusations on my lips, I know it, and I wanted to throw his words right back at him, but the best I could manage was just another reflection of my own inadequacy, a kind of bleat of agony that might have come from the lips of a child. “It’s eating me up inside,” I said, and for all my conditioning I seemed to be out of breath, my legs pumping automatically, air in, air out. “I love her. I want her back.”

We walked on in silence a moment, and I can’t tell you whether the sun was shining and the squirrels clambering up the trees or the wind blowing a gale, because I was at the breaking point and nothing of the world of appearances held any interest for me, all of it just a backdrop now to the scene I was playing out, the heartsick lover, the cuckold, the fool in motley. “You say she wants to move in with him?” he said. He gave me the snatching look.