T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Until we’d eaten, that is, and the first clouds — both actual and metaphorical — closed over the day. With the cloud cover came a slight chill, and we slipped into sweaters and jackets (all except for Prok, who was bare-chested and — footed and barely contained by his khaki hiking shorts). Violet called her daughters to her to help them into matching knit pullovers while Prok’s children said their goodbyes and walked off in the direction of home. The other cloud fell over us after we’d split into two groups on either side of the fire, which Prok had built up again for the sake of warmth and the little girls’ delectation in the toasting of marshmallows. Mac, Iris and Corcoran were seated on one side of the fire, their faces distorted by the thermal currents rising from the flames, and Prok, Violet and I were on the other.

The afternoon was getting on, shadows lengthening, the sun tugging itself toward the horizon as if there were something urgent about the process. Prok sat cross-legged, poking at the fire. He was talking about Gilbert Van Tassel Hamilton, the psychiatrist and author of A Research in Marriage, and how courageous the man was, but how flawed the results of his sex surveys (too small and selected a sample, results compromised by the researcher’s own preconceptions, moralizing, psychologizing, et cetera), when he suddenly fell silent and looked from me to Violet Corcoran and back again, as if he’d just remembered something. Violet was leaning back on her elbows now, her bare legs stretched out before her and crossed neatly at the ankle. I was sitting up, Indian-style, in unconscious imitation of Prok. Birds had begun to settle in the trees. From across the street came the crack of a baseball and the cries of several small boys racing after it.

Prok lowered his voice and leaned forward. “Do you know,” he said, “I was hoping you two might become better acquainted, for your own pleasure, of course”—a pause—“but don’t you agree that it would bring a kind of symmetry to our inter-relationships, that is, in light of your wife, John, and your husband, Violet, having enjoyed themselves together?”

He looked to me, then let his gaze rest on Violet. My heart began to misfire. I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. My first thought was Has he gone crazy? but then almost immediately I began to understand that what he was proposing wasn’t crazy at all. Far from it.

Violet’s eyes were dark, nearly as dark as her hair, and they dominated her face. She was attractive, as I’ve said, if not particularly pretty, but there was something carnal in the way she held herself, the way she smiled and continually readjusted the set of her shoulders and breasts, almost as if it were a tic. I thought she might laugh or try to deflect the comment with a joke, but she surprised me. “Are you suggesting a liaison? Is that it, Prok?”

Prok never waffled, never vacillated — nothing embarrassed him, and he was continually pushing the limits so as to break those limits down; that was his crusade and he was a crusader at heart. “Yes,” he said, “that’s exactly it.”

I couldn’t look at him, couldn’t look at Violet. There was an old, familiar stirring in the crotch of my pants. I wanted to slow things down, hold the moment in abeyance— Had he actually said that? Was he pimping for me? — and I got my wish.

The two girls had been off playing tag in the field, their shouts riding high on the cooling air, but all at once they were right on top of us, their faces alive with hope, crying “Mommy, Mommy, can we toast marshmallows now? Can we?”

“Sure, honey,” Violet murmured to Lucy, the eldest, “but you’ll have to cut two green sticks — and sharpen the ends. Can you do that? And help your sister?”

Lucy’s face took on a sober look. “Yes,” she said, “I can do that. C’mon,” she said, turning to her sister, barely able to suppress the excitement in her voice, “let’s go find sticks!”

I stole a glance at Iris. She was smiling at something Mac was saying, and now Corcoran put his two cents in and she turned to him, oblivious, even as the wind shifted and the flames fanned and broke apart in a ragged ascending trail and the two little girls darted off into the trees.

Violet leaned away from the drift of smoke, propping herself up on one elbow to redistribute her weight. Her voice was soft and relaxed, and we might have been talking about a rubber of bridge or a swimming party. “It’s nothing to me,” she said, looking first to Prok — a long, slow, languid look — and then to me. “But I’m game if John is.”

It wasn’t long after — and I don’t recall when or how this came about exactly — that I was working late at the office on a series of new charts and tables incorporating updated data that Prok was eager to have. This was work that I especially enjoyed. I’d found that I had a talent for drawing, for squaring off the orthogonal angles and gently rising curves of our graphs, and as the new Hollerith calculating machine made tabulating data so much easier and our new secretary had assumed the lion’s share of the clerical duties, I had more time to devote to it. It must have been eight or so. The building was deserted. Insects of some sort — Prok would have known in an instant what they were — kept battering at the glass of the window, attracted by my light. I was in a state of suspension, so tightly focused on my work that I’d forgotten all about dinner and about Iris too — but she would have been busy cramming for her final exams in any case. My ruler framed the sheet before me, my pencil ticked off the figures. All was still.

On some level, I suppose, I might have been aware of the footsteps approaching from the far end of the hall, but that’s neither here nor there, because the first I knew that I was no longer alone was when I glanced up from my work and saw Violet Corcoran standing there in the doorway. She was wearing a stylish dress — belted, with an off-white front and collar and the back and sleeves a very dark navy — and she’d spent some time in the sun, deepening the color of her legs till it seemed as if she were wearing nylons (this was during the war, remember, and nylons were all but impossible to come by, and so women had taken to baby oil and to drawing that ersatz seam up the backs of their legs, from ankle to hemline, and I’m sure I wasn’t the first man to wonder just how much higher along the incline of the thigh that line was meant to reach). Her makeup was designed to accentuate the appeal of her out-sized eyes. She was short, Italian, busty. She came into the room without a word and perched herself on the edge of the desk.

“Oh, hello,” I said, glancing up from the page before me, expecting Iris, or maybe Prok dashing in for something he’d forgotten, and I had some trouble getting her name out, “hello … Violet.”

“Hi,” she breathed, and she threw her eyes to the ceiling and back again, as if the effort of the greeting had exhausted her. She brought her purse into view, clicked it open, and began fishing for cigarette and lighter, and I almost expected her to present me with a silver cigarette case, as if this were a scene out of the pictures, William Powell and Myrna Loy, or Bacall warming to Bogart in To Have and Have Not. She took her time with the ritual of the tobacco, and I made a stab at small talk—“Going to rain tonight, isn’t that what they say?”—but I was hard already, hard instantaneously.

“Want one?” she asked, and I did, and she leaned in to light it for me.

For a moment, we just sat there, inhaling, exhaling, nicotine seeping through our veins and capillaries in the way of a shared secret. I knew what was coming — I’d pictured it since the afternoon of the picnic — but now that it was here, I felt tentative and unsure of myself.