T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

We shook hands, and then Fred Skittering said something about how hot it was and he reached up to pull his tie loose and unfasten the top button of his shirt collar. “No reason to stand on formality here, is there?” he said. “We are in Indiana, after all, aren’t we?”

“Yes,” I said, “that we are.”

Elster’s grin was of the canned variety, and there was something in his eyes I should have been alert to. Years had gone by since I’d worked as his underling and we saw each other almost daily in the corridors of Biology Hall, and yet there had always been a coldness between us. As I’ve said, he was the petty sort, and though Prok had put him in charge of that part of our library that remained on the shelves — that is, the tamer books in the field — he never forgave me my elevation above him. Generally, he passed me in the hall or on the walk out front of the building without so much as a nod — and now, here he was, elbowing in beside me at the bar, all smiles, with his sliver-faced friend in the big-city suit. Warning bells should have gone off in my head, but I was preoccupied and I was drinking and I just looked from Elster to his friend and back again, chasing round a smile myself. I suppose, in my mood, I was glad for the company.

I watched them order, light cigarettes, watched the bartender move heavily from the tap and set down two beers on the counter before them. Fred Skittering drained his in a gulp, while Elster raised the glass to his lips with both hands, like a priest with the chalice, and took a delicate sip. Both of them set down their glasses with a sigh of satisfaction, and then Elster leaned in confidentially and asked, “Everything going all right with Iris? It’s her first, isn’t it?”

I didn’t know what to say. This was the first I knew that he was even aware I was married, let alone that my wife was pregnant.

“You know, Claudette’s expecting too — in three weeks, actually. This’ll be our third — we’ve got one of each now, and she wants a girl, but I’m hoping for another boy.” He bent to his beer. Skittering held on to his smile. “They have the same obstetrician,” Elster went on, “the one Prok recommended. He did recommend Bergstrom to you, didn’t he?”

Again, I was astonished. Prok? He was calling Kinsey Prok? “You — I didn’t know, well, that you — and Prok, that is—”

“Oh, yes, yes. We’ve been conferring on the library quite a bit, you know. Space, that’s what we’re looking for, more space.”

Skittering flagged down the bartender. “Another round,” he said, and what I heard in his voice was New York, cab drivers, alleyways, nightclubs. “And buy one for John here too,” he said. “On me.”

The beers came, and a shot of bourbon with each of them. I thanked Skittering and we made small talk awhile. What did he do for a living? Oh, he traveled. For a company. Nothing exciting really. “And what about you?” he asked.

I told him I worked with Dr. Kinsey.

“The sex researcher?”

“I’m part of his staff.” I drank off the bourbon and chased it with a long pull at the beer. “The first person he took on, actually,” I said, and I couldn’t help the pride from creeping into my voice. “I’ve been with him since the beginning.”

“Really?” he said. “Well, that’s certainly interesting.” And he tipped his head back to drain the shot glass while Elster, his grin still in place, toyed with his own. “But uh, sex research — how exactly do you go about that, I mean, you can’t just burst into people’s bedrooms in the middle of the night, can you? Say, barkeep,” he called and made a circular motion with one hand to indicate that another round was in order. “What is it, surveys and the like?”

I’m sure you’ve already anticipated me, of course — I was being played here, and by a past master. Fred Skittering, as it turned out, had been a war correspondent and had made something of a name for himself in the European Theater, a name I might have recognized in another connection. But here, in Bloomington, in the neighborhood tavern I’d been frequenting since my student days, it went right by me. He was working for the Associated Press even as he stood there at the bar, though I didn’t yet know it and I’d already taken the bait. “Surveys?” I gave a disdainful shrug. “Surveys are all but useless. Think of it: where’s the control? You get a survey in the mail and either you fill it out or you don’t, either you’re honest and forthcoming or not, and who’s to know the difference? No, our methods”—I lowered my voice—“our methods are as scientific and statistically reliable as you could ever hope to get.”

A period of time went by. People drifted in and out of the bar. Beyond the windows, at the far end of the street where the trees gave out, lightning snaked across the horizon. I was never particularly loquacious, never one to run off at the mouth, as our lower-level subjects might have put it, but I just couldn’t seem to stop talking that night. Maybe it was my mood. The weather. Iris. Maybe it was just shop talk — I was inordinately proud of what we were accomplishing, Prok, Corcoran, Rutledge and I, four against the world, and yet I was frustrated too because to this point we’d kept it all so close. Here was a sympathetic ear. Here was Elster — and this stranger — and who would have guessed?

What saved me was Betty. I was on the verge of compromising the project, undermining Prok’s faith in me, embarrassing myself in the deepest, most hopeless way, the way of the apostate, the quisling, the dupe, when Betty appeared. I hadn’t laid eyes on her since she’d played the female lead in the previous fall’s demonstration in Prok’s attic — I didn’t even remember her name actually. But there she was, ducking through the door with another young woman, both of them dressed casually, in skirt and blouse, as if they were students — or wanted to be taken for students. I looked up and we exchanged a glance, and then she was slipping into a booth at the far end of the room in a single graceful movement, one hand going to the back of her thighs to smooth out her skirt as she slid over the slick wooden surface of the bench. Skittering was saying something about another sex survey he’d heard of — in Denmark, he thought it was — while Elster (his shill? his Judas?) leaned over his elbows and concentrated on my face.

I saw the girl— Betty, and her name came to me in a flash — glance up at me again as the waitress set two martinis down on the table. She gave me a smile when she saw that I’d recognized her, the child’s eyes fading into the woman’s face, the prominent cheekbones, the sharp teeth, her hair pinned up at the crown and spilling into a complex of curls at her shoulders. I smiled back even as Skittering said, “But Kinsey, the man, I mean, what’s it like working with him?” and because I was drunk, I raised my glass and saluted her across the room.

And then I was back in the moment, regarding Elster’s face — the face of a saboteur, not a friend or well-wisher — in a whole new light. I took a moment, studying Skittering now, and all at once I understood. Skittering had got to Elster, and Elster had got to me, and what they were after wasn’t statistics, but something deeper, more dangerous. I shrugged. “He’s a genius,” I said. “A great man. The greatest man I’ve ever known.”

“Yes, but”—a cigarette to the lips, a distracted wave at the ashtray—“underneath all that, I mean. The man. The man himself? Certainly he must have some sort of oddities or quirks, irritating habits — I hear he can be pretty short sometimes, isn’t that right?”

“Listen,” I said, “I don’t mean to be rude, but I see a friend over there — an acquaintance, a friend of the research, actually — and really, I have to”—I was pushing myself away from the bar, patting down my pockets for cigarettes—“but thanks for the drinks, thank you, nice meeting you.”