The Inner Circle (20 page)

“Well,” I said, and a gobbet of meat, soft as a sponge, seemed to have climbed back up my throat, “not exactly. He
is
happily married himself, you know, and he, he wants us to be too—”

Her face was flushed. The crucified pork congealed in its gravy on the table before her. I felt a draft come up, somebody opening a door somewhere, and I craned my neck to pinpoint the source of it. “Do you feel a draft?” I said.

“You're lying to me,” she said. “I know you've slept with people.”

“Who?” I demanded.

She was working loose the ring I'd given her, twisting it back and forth to get the band over the bone of the finger joint. It was a diamond
solitaire, and I'd borrowed twenty-five dollars from Prok, as an advance on my salary, to put a down payment on it. I had never in my life purchased anything so lavish—had never even dreamed of it. I watched her jerk it off her finger now and set it on the table between us. She was feeling around her for her jacket, all her emotions concentrated in her eyes and the unforgiving slash of the drawn-down wound of her mouth. “Mac,” she said. “Mac, that's who.”

Talk of women's intuition, of the subliminal signals the sex is somehow able to pick up on, in the way of the dog that knows its master is coming home when the car is still six blocks away or the cat that lifts its ears at the faintest rustle of tiny naked feet in the farthest corner of the attic. For a solid week I walked around with that ring in my pocket, and I made no attempt to contact Iris or convince her that she was wrong, other than what I told her that night at the Commons—that she was out of her mind, that Mac was a surrogate mother to me, and far too old, and married, and that I wasn't attracted to her in any case. Iris listened, wordlessly, as if to see how far I would go before I stumbled, and then she was on her feet and stalking across the cafeteria to the door at the far end of the room. Which she slammed behind her.

This was our first tiff, the first round in a long series of preliminary bouts and featured attractions, and I was miserable over it—miserable, but not about to give in. What had I done, after all? Interviewed a couple of prostitutes? That was my job, couldn't she see that? And if such an insignificant thing could set her off, I dreaded to think what the future would bring, when certainly we would be obliged to interview a hundred more prostitutes, not to mention whole busloads of sex offenders of all stripes. I wanted to call my mother and tell her the engagement was off, but, as I say, I'd always had difficulty confiding in her because she never seemed to see things my way—she would take Iris's side, I was sure of it, and lay me open like a whitefish she was filleting for the pan. In the end, I went to Mac.

I chose a time when I knew Prok would be in class and the children at school. I made my way down the familiar street, the sun in my face, leaves unfurling on the trees, the world gone green with the April rains.
The garden was coming along nicely, just as Prok had said it would, though we were devoting less time to it this spring because of the accelerating schedule of our travels, and I might have lingered over the flowerbeds for a moment or two before I screwed up the courage to ring the bell. All I could think of was Iris and what I could do to extricate myself from the sheath of lies I'd constructed around me—a marriage counselor, I needed a marriage counselor even before I was married—and I was more than a little tentative with regard to Mac too. She'd given us her blessing, just as Prok had, and she couldn't have been more excited if one of her own children were getting married. I wondered how I could turn around now and tell her that it was all off—off because of what we'd done between us, in the garden, on the bentwood sofa in the living room and on the marital bed in the room upstairs. So I stood there, vaguely aware of the life seething around me, the insects descending on the flowers and the sparrows squalling from their nests in the eaves, took a deep breath and put my finger to the bell.

Mac came to the door in her khaki shorts and the matching blouse with the GSA insignia over the breast pocket, but she was wearing a cardigan too. (The house was cold this time of year because Prok, always frugal, shut down the furnace on the first of April, no matter what the weather—a habit I've taken up myself, by the way. Why waste fuel when the body makes its own heat?) She'd been in the kitchen, fixing a pot of vegetable soup and bologna sandwiches for the children's lunch, and she was expecting the postman, one of the neighbors, a traveling salesman—anybody but me. I saw it in her eyes, a moment of recognition, and then calculation—how much time did she have before the children came tramping up the path? Enough to pull me in and wrestle off my clothes? Enough for a quick rush to climax with her shorts at her knees and the blouse shoved up to her throat?

“Hello,” I said, and my face must have been heavy because the kittenish look went right out of her eyes. “Have you—may I come in for a minute?”

She said my name as if she were sleepwalking, then pulled back the door to admit me. “What's wrong?” she said. “What is it?”

I stood there, shaking my head. I don't think I'd ever felt so hopeless as I did in that moment.

Mac knew just what to do. She led me to the kitchen, sat me down at the table with a cup of tea and set about feeding me what she could spare of the children's lunch. I watched her glide round the kitchen, from stove to counter to icebox and back, a whole ballet of domestic tranquillity, and I began to let it all out of me. I remember there was a sound of hammering from the yard two houses over where they were putting up a garage and it seemed to underscore the urgency of the situation—and the hopelessness. “I don't know what I'm going to do,” I said, and the hammer thumped dully, then beat a frantic tattoo.

To this point, Mac hadn't offered much, other than the odd phrase—“And then what?” or “Do you take mustard, John?”—and I had the sudden intimation that she was jealous somehow, jealous of Iris and what she meant to me. Mac was masterful at inhabiting her role—dutiful wife of the scientist, selfless helpmeet, hostess, cook and mother—but I wondered how she really felt about things. About me, that is, and our relationship and how this would affect it—how it already had.

“Should I—I mean, do you think I should be the one to, to—?” I wanted her to tell me to go to Iris and make it up, to say that honesty was the best policy, to let the truth come out and we'd all be the better for it, but, as usual, I fumbled round the issue.

Mac pulled out the chair across from me and sat at the table, her own cup of tea in hand. She leaned forward to blow the steam off the cup, then sat up and stirred the dark liquid with a spoon. “You do love her, John,” she said. “You're sure of it?”

I did, I was sure I did, and it wouldn't be the first time I'd confessed it to Mac, but now, sitting in the gently percolating, sun-grazed kitchen where we'd copulated on the linoleum tiles in front of the stove—the two of us, Mac and I—it felt awkward to admit it.

“Yes,” I said, and the hammer came down twice. “I'm sure.”

She took a long while over it, blowing at her tea with pursed lips, then lifting the cup to her mouth and watching me over the edge of the ceramic rim. Her hands were beautiful, her eyes, the imbricate waves of
her hair. I was in love with her too—with Mac—and I'd been fooling myself to think it was purely biological. And what had Prok said to his critics, to the Thurman B. Rices and all the rest who accused him of taking the spiritual essence out of sex, of regarding it in a purely mechanistic way?
They've had three thousand years to go on about love, now give science a chance.
I'd agreed with him, taken it as a credo and worn the credo as a badge. It was us against them, the forces of inquiry and science against the treacle you heard on the radio or saw on the screen. But now I didn't know. I didn't know anything. I set down my sandwich, too upset—too confused—to eat.

Mac was smiling suddenly, even as the first footsteps hit the porch out front and the squeal of the hinges and the slamming of the door came to us in quick succession. “You know what?” she said, and the hammer pounded with a slow, deliberate rhythm that was like the drumbeat of a funerary march. “I think I'll go have a talk with her.”

Again, though, I can't help thinking I'm straying off the path here, because this is about Prok—or it should be. Prok was the great man, not I. I was just fortunate to have been there with him from the beginning and to have been allowed to contribute in my small way to the greater good of the project and the culture at large. Prok was defined by his work, above all, and his detractors—those who find sex research a source of prurient jokes and adolescent sniggers, as if it weren't worthy of investigation, as if it were some pseudoscience like studies of spacemen or ectoplasm or some such thing—might like to know just how consumed by it he was. I'll give one example from around this period—I can't really recall whether it was before or after Mac and Iris had their little tête-à-tête—but it speaks volumes of Prok's single-mindedness and dedication. And it's of interest for another reason too—it was the one occasion when our roles were reversed, when I was the teacher and he the pupil.

But I'm already making too much of it. Anybody, any man on the street, could have given Prok what he required—I just happened to be available, that was all. In any case, we were in the office one evening—it
must have been around six or so—and I don't think we'd exchanged a word in hours, when I heard Prok get up from his desk. I had my head down, busy with one of the preliminary graphs on sources of orgasm for single males at the college level, and so I didn't look up, but I did register the sound of the file drawer opening and closing again, of the turning of the key in the lock, signals that Prok was getting set to shut down the office for the day. A moment later, he was standing over me.

“You know, John,” he said, “since Mac and the girls are away on this Girl Scout Jamboree, or whatever it is they call it, and my son seems to be absorbed in a school project he's doing over at his friend's house—the Casdens, decent people—I wonder if we shouldn't spend the evening together—”

I thought I knew what he meant, and I no doubt did have plans—brooding over Iris would have topped the list—but I nodded in compliance. “Yes,” I said, “sure.”

He was opening up that dazzling smile, pleased, delighted—and, oddly, he reached across the desk and shook my hand as if I'd just given him the keys to the kingdom. “A bite of dinner, maybe, and perhaps we can combine that with what I had in mind, a little practice in one of the areas where I find myself sadly deficient—with an eye to improving my technique, that is.”

“Technique?”

“Interviewing, I mean.”

I gave him an astonished look and said something along the lines that he was the consummate interviewer and that I couldn't imagine how he could expect to improve on what was already as close to flawless as anyone could hope.

“Kind of you to say,” he murmured, giving my hand a final squeeze and releasing it. “But we're all capable of improvement, and, you know, I think, that I'm not as comfortable as I should be around revelers.”

“Revelers?”

“Where do we spend most of our time—in the field, that is?”

I didn't have a clue as to what he was talking about.

“In taverns, Milk. In barrooms, roadhouses, beer halls, at parties and
gatherings where smoking and drinking are de rigueur, and you know how I—how awkward I am, or perhaps
untrained
is a better word, with those particular sybaritic skills.”

I still wasn't following him. “Yes? And?”

He laughed then, a short chopped-off laugh that began in his throat and terminated in his nose. “Well, isn't it obvious? You're the expert here, Milk. I'm the novice.”

“You mean you want me, to, to—?”

“That's right. I want you to give me lessons.”

We went back to the house on First Street that night with a brown paper bag of ham sandwiches, three packs of cigarettes, two cigars, a quart of beer and a fifth each of bourbon, scotch, gin, rum and vodka, as well as the standard mixers. It may have been raining. The house was cold. Prok built up a fire in the hearth and we spread our acquisitions out on the coffee table, set ourselves up with the proper glasses, ice and ashtrays, and started in.

First came the cigarettes. “You don't have to inhale, Prok,” I said, knowing how much he loathed the habit. “Just let the thing dangle from your lips, like this”—I demonstrated—“bend forward to light it, squelch the match with a flick of the wrist, take the smoke in your mouth, like so, hold it a moment, exhale. No, no, no—just leave the cigarette there, right there at the corner of your mouth, and let the smoke rise. That's right. Squint your eyes a bit. But you see? Now your hands are free, and you can pick up your drink or, if you're interviewing, go right on with your recording. Yes, yes, now you can remove it—two fingers, index and middle—and tap the ash. That's it. Right. Very good.”

Of course, he hated it. Hated the smell, the taste, the idea, hated the smoke in his eyes and the artificial feel of the dampening paper at his lip. And on the second or third puff he inadvertently inhaled and went into a coughing fit that drained all the color from his face and swelled his eyes till I thought they would burst. The cigars were even worse. At one point he went to the mirror to examine how he looked with the sodden stub of a White Owl clenched in the corner of his mouth, and then wordlessly came back across the room and flung the thing in the
fireplace. “I just don't understand it,” he said. “I just don't. How can people derive enjoyment from burning weeds under their noses—from burning weeds anywhere? From
inhaling
burning weeds? And what about men with facial hair, with beards—what do they do? It's a wonder every barroom in America hasn't burned to the ground by now.” He was stalking back and forth across the floor. “It's maddening is what it is. Maddening.”