T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

But back to that particular gathering, at Bryan Park, the first to include the Corcorans en famille. Iris didn’t want to go. She categorically refused, in fact, at least at first. Prok had guillotined her affair. He’d talked to her behind closed doors — lectured her, berated her — and she’d listened to him only because it meant my job if she didn’t, but she was resentful, and though I don’t like to think about it even now, she was in love. Still. With Corcoran. I woke up early that Saturday and went to the grocer’s while our biggest pot rattled on the stove with the tumbling diced wedges of the potatoes I’d peeled the night before, and another, smaller pot seethed with eggs cooking hard in their shells, and yet I can’t say I was looking forward to the picnic myself. I’d been tentative around Iris ever since the confrontation at the office, and I felt we were just beginning to make progress, to appreciate each other again in a tender and loving way, and I didn’t want to do anything to threaten it.

When I got back from the store she was still in her dressing gown, the Victrola turned up too loud and Billie Holiday annihilating all hope, phrase by phrase, bar by bar, with her unfathomable lisping sorrow. I heard that voice and I felt like pulling out a gun and shooting myself, but Iris was at the table, slicing egg and chopping onion, and when I came through the door she looked up and gave me a rueful smile. I didn’t say anything for fear of breaking the spell, just set the bag on the table — mayonnaise, in the twelve-ounce jar, paprika, apple cider vinegar — and went into the bedroom to dig out an old blanket to spread on the grass. We’d talked the night before about the practical importance of accepting the invitation — Prok wanted us there and we were going to have to go, it was part of the job, part of the commitment — and I could see that Iris was softening. Yes, it would be awkward, we both admitted that, and, yes, Violet Corcoran would be there, but we had to move forward, get it over with, get it out of our systems, didn’t we?

I’d been sitting at the foot of the bed, idly plucking at the raised pattern of the bedspread while Iris lay propped against the headboard, her feet splayed before her, beautiful feet, high-arched and bobby-socked, feet that I loved as I loved every part of her. I wanted to make amends, wanted her back, fully, in body and soul both.

“We’re above all this, Iris,” I argued, “we are. Truly. Sex is one thing and marriage another. Commitment. Love. That’s what we have. There’s just no room for raw emotion in this business, and you know it as well as I. We’re professionals. We have to be.” I’d paused then, studying her face, but she was staring down at the book in her lap and wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Besides,” I said, “if anyone should get, well, emotionally upset, you’d think it would be me — and Violet. What about her? Shouldn’t she be the injured party? Because, if — well, you know what I mean.”

She’d looked up then, the outflow of her eyes, the faintest ripples of irony at the corners of her mouth. “Yes, John,” she said, “you’re the injured party, you, always you.”

“That’s not fair,” I said, “and you know it.”

She shifted her weight to draw her legs up to her chest, as if to protect herself. She gave me a long look, then dropped her eyes. I could have said more, could have made accusations, but there was no point.

“That’s not fair,” I repeated.

It took her a moment, and when she spoke her voice was barely audible. “I know it,” she said.

But now she was chopping onion and preparing to anoint the diced potatoes with vinegar and mayonnaise, and when that was done and the potato salad crowned with sliced egg and a dusting of paprika, she was going to stride into the bedroom and put on a pair of shorts and a blouse and we were going to heft the picnic basket and amble down the street together, like lovers. From the bedroom, I heard Billie Holiday parsing her misery.

Prok was in a high state of excitement that day — he’d been communicating with a man in his sixties whose serial sexual feats dwarfed even the most prodigious we’d encountered for variety and continuity both and the man had indicated that he might be amenable to an interview — and he radiated his delight all over Iris, giving her his biggest Prok-smile, bending from the waist like a mock courtier to kiss her hand, and he clapped my shoulder and called me John and avowed that we were on to great things now, great things and getting greater. Mac and Iris embraced gingerly, in the way of war veterans, as if they were afraid of tearing open each other’s wounds, and then we turned to the fire, which Prok had already built to a controlled inferno, thinking, in his ever-efficient way, of the coals it would furnish when it was time to lay the chops and bratwurst on the grill.

I was watching Iris when the yellow convertible pulled up on the street across from the park. Corcoran was at the wheel, smiling like an ambassador, already waving, Violet regal beside him, and the two girls, Daphne and Lucy, emerging from the car in identical pink dresses and with the perfectly composed faces of the innocent. Iris might have been paler than usual, might have seemed thinner and smaller, as if she’d been reduced inside her clothes, but when Violet had made her way across the expanse of the field, her shoulders thrust back and her breasts pointing the way, Iris took her hand and smiled and made small talk without missing a beat. And Corcoran. She looked him right in the face, gave him her brightest, fullest, most rigidly unwavering smile and small-talked him too, and before long we were all sitting on the blanket listening to Prok and sipping punch while the sun graced us and the Corcorans’ girls played decorously in the distance.

Prok, as I’ve said, was a great camper, and he took delight in squatting before the fire and looking to the slow incineration of the various cuts of meat he’d laid out on the grill (little of which he’d eat himself — he hated any foods he considered dry, and that included steaks and chops which were overcooked, and, I’m sorry to say, when he was at the grill everything was overcooked). The scent of the open fire brought me back to our honeymoon and the first meals Iris and I had prepared together, and back even further, to my boyhood and the woods behind the house, and maybe the others were having similar thoughts, the day lazy and serene and the smoke drifting out over the lawn in running tatters. Any small tensions we might have felt seemed to dissipate, everyone gradually unwinding as the afternoon wore on, and I was able to help there because I’d secreted a bottle of bourbon in the depths of our picnic basket, and when Prok wasn’t looking I poured stiff little pick-me-ups into everyone’s cups, except his, because he wouldn’t have approved of our drinking in public with the family gathered.

Violet, especially, seemed to relax into the day, both hands cradled behind her head as she stretched out her abbreviated but extremely robust body on the blanket, and Corcoran was his usual insouciant self, entertaining us with jokes and quips as he pulled at his cup and sucked the bourbon and fruit juice from his upper lip. Iris didn’t get drunk — or not that it showed — but she did seem to climb down the ladder from a kind of edgy animation to an enveloping quiet that might have been interpreted as contentment or surfeit, and she too stretched out in the sun on her own corner of the blanket while Prok chattered on and Corcoran and I bantered in quiet tones and Mac pulled out her knitting and mutely counted stitches in a dapple of shade. As for me, I was beginning to think that the world that had so recently seemed skewed away from its axis had all at once come back into alignment. My colleagues were taking their ease and so was I. I felt the sun like a benediction on my face. All was well.