T. Boyle - The Inner Circle

Leaning over her, I caught a smell of the liniment she rubbed on her legs each night and of the warm, yeasty air trapped beneath her skirts. The cat looked up at me blankly. “Yes,” I said, her cool, dry fingers coming into contact with mine as I took the tape measure from her, “I will. It’ll just be a minute and I’ll be right back with it, I promise.”

I was nearly out of the room when she stopped me. “But what on earth would you need to measure, John? What is it, curtains? Because I sincerely hope you two haven’t damaged—”

“It’s a, uh, project. For my literature class.”

“Literature? What, lines of poetry? The number of feet per line in ‘Don Juan’? Hmm?” She let out a laugh. “Now there was a poem — is that part of the syllabus still? Or, no, of course it must be. Lord Byron, eh? Now there was a poet.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “but you’ll have to, I mean, I have to—”

“Go, go,” she said, making a shooing motion with both hands. “No need to waste your time on an old woman when you’ve got measuring to do.”

I trudged back up the stairs, the tape measure burning like a hot coal in my pocket. I felt guilty, dirty, all the worse for the lie and the use to which I was going to put my landlady’s blameless instrument, and I kept thinking of her handling the thing and holding it up to a scarf she was knitting for a favorite niece or granddaughter. Maybe I should just return it to her, I thought, right now, before it’s been desecrated. I could slip out in the morning and purchase one of my own — a tape measure was a practical thing to have, after all, because you never knew when you’d be called upon to measure something, like bookshelves, for instance. My feet hit the stairs like hammers. The storm whispered at the windowpanes.

By the time I got back to the room, I found that my enthusiasm for Dr. Kinsey’s little statistical exercise had worn thin, but I loosened my belt and dropped my trousers dutifully, unscrolling Mrs. Lorber’s tape measure to record my now-flaccid dimensions. But the thing was, as soon as I laid the measure against my penis I began to grow hard again and couldn’t get an accurate measurement; before I knew it, I was stroking myself and trying to summon the look of Laura Feeney as she sat beside me in the semi-darkness of the lecture hall while the slide projector clicked and clicked again and we all held our breath. And then I was seeing a girl from the front row of my literature class, a girl with puffed lips and violet eyes and calves that caressed each other under the desk until I wanted to faint from the friction of it, and finally there was just a woman, featureless, anonymous, with her breasts thrust out and nipples hard and her cunt — that was what I wanted to call it, her cunt — just exactly like the one on the screen.

I was up early the next morning, the light through the window trembling on the sloped ceiling above the bed — it was a paler light than we’d been used to, bluer, like the aqueous glow at the bottom of a swimming pool, and I was filled with the anticipation that comes with the first good snow of the season. The storm had passed on, but outside the sky was a polished silver, a big, upended tureen of a sky, flurries trailing down like an afterthought. I didn’t wake Paul. He’d come in late — long after I’d gone to bed — and I didn’t want to disturb him, not so much out of any consideration for his beauty rest, but because I wasn’t in the mood for company. I wanted to tramp the streets, see the world transformed — just enjoy it, all to myself — before heading over to the Commons for breakfast and a final look at my notes for the exam.

There was a foot and a half of snow, maybe more — it was hard to say because the wind had piled it up in drifts against the fences and buildings. None of the walks had been cleared yet, people’s automobiles sat drifted over at the curb and the birds dipped in perplexity from the black field of the evergreens along the street to the sealed white envelope of the ground. Lights gleamed dully from the depths of the houses. I smelled bacon, woodsmoke, the clean, dense perfume of the new air swept down out of the north.

It wasn’t yet seven, and hardly anyone was stirring on campus. Those who were out moved silently across the quad, huddled figures excised from a dream and patched in here where they didn’t belong, and there were no more than ten students in the Commons where normally there would have been a hundred — even the staff was reduced to a single illdefined woman who served out the food mechanically and then moved to the cash register through crashing waves of silence to record the sale. I took a table by the window and sat there staring out over my books and into the trees along the creek, idly stirring sugar into a cup of coffee. It was one of those quiet, absorbing moments when the world slows to a standstill and all its inherent possibilities become manifest. Magic. The magic moment — isn’t that what they call it in the love songs?

She was speaking to me before I became aware of her—“Hello, John; hello, I said”—and when I did look up I didn’t recognize her at first. She was in a winter coat and hat, the black silk of her hair tugged down like an arras on either side of her face, her eyes lit from within as if there were twin filaments behind them and a battery secreted under her clothes. It was seven a.m. — or no, not even — and she was wearing mascara, the better to show off the color of those eyes, which managed to be both blue and green at the same time, like the sea off the port of Havana where the onshore waters meld with the pelagic and the white prow of your boat drifts placidly from one world to another and everything dissolves in a dream. “Don’t you recognize me?”

She was unfastening the snap at her collar, working at her hat, her hair, the scarf wrapped twice round her throat. Everything was suddenly in motion again, as if a film had just been rethreaded through the projector, her books sliding onto the tabletop beside mine, the coat open to reveal her dress and the way it conformed to her, and then the chair beside me pulling out and the girl — who was she? — perching at the edge of it. And then it came to me. “You’re Iris,” I said.

She was giving me her full-lipped smile, the smile that borrows some of the juice from her eyes and runs off the same hidden power source. “Iris McAuliffe, Tommy’s little sister. But you knew that.”

“I did, yes. Of course I did. My mother — I mean, she, and then I saw you around campus, of course—”

“I hear you’re engaged.”

I didn’t know what to say to this — I certainly wouldn’t want it getting back to my mother in any way, shape or form — so I dipped my head and took a sip of coffee.

Iris’s smile faded. “She’s very pretty,” she murmured. “Laura Feeney.”

“Yes,” I said, my gaze fixed on the cup. “But I’m not really — we’re not …” I looked up at her. Off on the periphery of my vision the woman at the cash register rang up a coffee and cruller as if she were moving underwater, and I saw the balding head and narrow shoulders of my literature professor, his coat dusted with snow. “That is, it was a pretense, you know. For the marriage course.”

I watched her grapple with this ever so briefly before the smile came back. “You mean, you — faked it? Just to—? God,” she said, and she let her posture go, slouching back in the seat, all limbs and jangling, nervous hands, “I hear it was really dirty …”

I took exams, wrote papers (“Duality in John Donne’s Love Poems”; “Malinowski’s Melanesia”), took a bus home to Michigan City for Christmas break and gave my mother a set of bath oils and scented soaps carved in the shape of fishes and mermaids. Some of my old high school friends came round — Tommy McAuliffe, in particular, who was now assistant manager at the grocery — and what a surprise that he’d thought to bring his kid sister Iris along, and did I know that she was a sophomore at IU now? There she was, standing on the doorstep beside him, and though I barely knew her I began to appreciate that here was the kind of girl who understood what she wanted and always got it — always, no matter what. I told Tommy I’d just seen her on campus — on the day of the snowfall, wasn’t it? — while she looked on with her big ever-widening sea-struck eyes as if she’d forgotten all about it. We ate pfefferneuse cookies in front of the fireplace and sneaked drinks of brandy every time my mother went back out to the kitchen to check on her pies. Just before New Year’s I thought of asking Iris to the pictures or maybe to go skating — on a date, that is — but I never got around to it. Then I was back at school and the days closed down on the bleak dark kernel of mid-January.