The Inner Circle

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  As it turned out, Mr. X had almost perfect recall. He slouched in the armchair, smoking one cigarette after another, and brought us back to his childhood, to his father and grandmother and his siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles, and then on through his adolescence and adulthood, through boys and girls, women and men, dogs and sheep and even, in one case, a parrot, and it took two and a half days to record it all. I listened to that voice, that soft hitching rasp of breath, the tireless recitation, act after act, partner after partner, and I couldn’t help thinking of Iris, of what she’d said, but I put on my professional face nonetheless and bent over the position sheet and did what I’d come halfway across the country to do.

  In all, we were gone just short of five weeks. Prok was clearly enjoying himself, exulting in the season and the freedom of the road as he hadn’t in a long while, this trip reminiscent for him of the gall wasp expeditions he’d made a decade earlier, fieldwork, getting out from behind the desk, that sort of thing, and he kept coming up with excuses to prolong the journey. He made a point of seeking out college towns along the route, and we would drive in unannounced and park in front of the administration building, Corcoran and I sitting in the car having a surreptitious smoke while Prok chatted up the dean or the provost. As likely as not we would be invited to stay on and collect histories, Prok, in most cases, being called upon to give an impromptu lecture to concerned faculty or a local civics group. We could have traveled like that for the rest of the year if we’d wanted to—for the rest of our lives, I suppose, gypsy scholars, men of science on the prowl—but of course it was problematic, not only for the cohesion of the project and the correlation of our data toward the ultimate goal of publication, but for our domestic lives as well.

  I wrote Iris every day for the first week, postcards featuring pastel cowboys in chaps or an oil rig set against a backdrop of tumbleweed and cactus, and though I was full of enthusiasm I tried to keep my tone neutral and even somewhat regretful, playing down the sheer adventure of it so as to avoid stirring up any feelings of jealousy or resentment on her part. By the second week, I was writing her every other day, three-sentence descriptions of a meal—frijoles and tortillas, with a hot sauce made of chopped green tomatoes and chilies, a wonder of a thing, like nothing I’d ever tasted—or a depiction of a town or landscape. And then it was every third or fourth day, or when I remembered, guiltily, that she was home alone, in the constricted world of the apartment and the grid of repetitive streets and not even her job to sustain her because it was summer recess now and what was she doing with the long unraveling thread of her days? Finally, in the end, I wrote simply to tell her I missed her.

  In Tucumcari, I found a shop that sold silver-and-turquoise jewelry, and I bought her a heavy silver bracelet in what the woman behind the counter described as an Aztec flower pattern, and then in Amarillo I found her a basket made of the tanned skin of an armadillo looped tail to snout. She didn’t write back, of course. She couldn’t. We were in no place longer than a day or two at a time, and our progress was haphazard in any case. There were telephones, but long distance was cripplingly expensive, not to mention unreliable. I could have wired her, I suppose, and she could have wired back. But I didn’t. I promised myself I’d make it up to her when we got back.

  By the time we did finally pull into Bloomington, I was as homesick as I’d ever been in my life. All the novelty of travel, the excitement of the wide-open spaces and the long-horned steers and all the rest faded during that last week, and I missed my wife, longed for her with an inconsolable ache that kept me awake in the cramped confines of the tent or the anonymous bed in one or another of the string of motor courts and cheap hotels we checked into every third or fourth night, missed the simple routine of going off to work in the morning and coming home to her in the evening, of feeling the reassuring pressure of her hand in mine as we strolled down the leaf-hung avenue for a beer at the tavern or a night out at the picture show. I’d never been away from home, from Indiana, for so long before, and when we crossed the state line at Jeffersonville, I felt my heart soar.

  It was late in the afternoon when Prok dropped me off in front of the apartment, and I was out the door with my suitcase before he’d come to a complete stop, yes, thank you, so long, see you at work in the morning, and I remember how intoxicating the smell of the grass was, the dahlias along the walk, the geraniums in the window box. I was perspiring under the arms and the shirt was stuck to my back, but I hardly felt it. The soles of my shoes pulsed with radiant energy as I came up the walk, my heart pounding, no thought but for Iris and how I was going to surprise her and give her the bracelet and the basket and tell her how much I’d missed her and how I was never going to go on a collecting trip again, never, or at least not for a long while to come. A sudden flash of lightning fractured the sky over the elm then, and as I reached the porch the light shaded from copper to silver and a breeze came up out of the south. That was when I heard the music sifting through the screen in the front window, and the sound of laughter, of women’s laughter, two voices clenched round the pith of a joke, and I pushed open the door and stepped inside. “Iris?” I called. “Iris, I’m home.”

  The room was dim, stifling, and Iris was there, seated on the sofa with another woman, the radio turned up loud and a dance band keeping the beat. There was cigarette smoke, there were cocktails, and as I set down the suitcase I saw that the other woman was Violet Corcoran, in a pair of shorts and a blouse that left her midriff bare.

  “John?” Iris called, and her voice was slurred with drink, or maybe that was my imagination. “John? Is that you?” She was up out of the couch now, barefooted, in a pair of white shorts, and she ran to me and threw herself into my arms. “My God, I thought you’d never get here!” We kissed, hurriedly, frantically, and I tasted the alcohol on her tongue—gin—and the heat and surprise and exultation. “Violet,” she called, swinging away from me, “look who’s here!”

  I don’t know if this is the time to mention it, but I should say that my relationship with Violet Corcoran, begun on that night in the office at Prok’s instigation, was never anything more than merely satisfactory. We came together—she had me inside of her practically before I could get my trousers down—and afterward we had a drink and I walked her home, and then we met in a motor court outside of town three or four times, but it all felt scripted and cold, and gradually we both came to understand that there was no need to pursue things further. I liked her. Truly, I did. She was effusive and genuine and I was glad to see her there keeping Iris company.

  “The return of the wanderers,” Violet said, or something like it. She’d risen from the couch and was already gathering up her things. “I guess this means I’d better hightail it home for Purvis—and oh, God, the babysitter—but hi, John, and goodbye.” She gave a wink. “I wouldn’t want to get in the way of anything here—”

  The screen door slammed behind her and we both turned to watch her skip down the walk even as a flash of lightning lit the room, followed by a dull rumble of thunder. It took me a moment to realize the radio was still on—static crackled from the speaker, followed by three quick incinerating bursts that were like a rudimentary code—and then the program went dead and everything was still. I could smell the edge of the wetness on the air, as if a swamp had been dredged and everything that had lain seething there had been drawn up into the atmosphere, fish, newts, turtles and tadpoles, the muck itself, and every plant left naked to the root. Nothing moved. The light was like poured metal. I turned to Iris, but she seemed strange to me, a dark and pretty stranger with bare feet and painted toenails staring out through the rusted grid of the screen door. The moment lengthened, stretched to the breaking point, and I have to admit I felt awkward there in my own house with my own wife, as if I were a stranger to her too. Finally, she turned to me, hands on her hips now—more body language—and said, “I guess you want a drink, huh? Or dinner. You want dinner?”

  “Sure,” I said. “A drink would be nice. But w
e already, well, we stopped along the way, and—well, I missed you. I did. It was—I never expected it would be so long. It was Prok, you know that.”

  Her eyes were moist—but they were more than moist, they were wet, overflowing. The breeze stirred the trees and rushed the door. “I feel like a war bride,” she said, letting her hands drop to her sides. “I might as well be. And you. You might as well be a soldier. On Tarawa or someplace. You might as well be dead.”

  I said her name, softly, and I drew her to me and put my arms around her. I held her a moment, rocking with her in my arms, and then it all came out of her. She was crying—sobbing, actually—and I could feel the tug and release of emotion running through her like a new kind of heartbeat geared to some other system altogether. “I missed you too,” she whispered.

  Ten minutes later we were nestled on the couch, watching the rain sweep the street and bow the trees. The smell of rot faded as soon as the storm broke, replaced now with an astringent freshness out of the north, clear pellets dropping down from the troposphere to beat tinnily at the gutters and saturate the patch of lawn out front. Iris had made me a bourbon and water and another gin and tonic for herself. We were celebrating—drinking to my return—but it didn’t feel like a celebration. It felt sad and unformed, and I wanted to take her into the bedroom and show her in the most elemental way how much I’d missed her, but that wouldn’t have been right, not yet. First we had to talk things out.

  “He was disgusting, wasn’t he?”

  “Who?”

  “Your Mr. X.”

  I had to give her this. I sipped my drink and nodded slowly. She’d put something on the stove for me, out of duty, I suppose, though I’d reiterated that I wasn’t hungry—at least not for food—and the lid of the pot rattled as whatever it was came to a boil. “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose.”

  “I’ll bet Prok loved him.”

  “Prok doesn’t make those judgments, you know that.”

  She said nothing, and we both stared out at the rain. “Tortillas,” she said after a while, enunciating a hard l where she should have elided, “they’re Mexican, is that it?”

  “Tortee-yas,” I said. “Yes, that’s right. They have them in Texas. New Mexico too.”

  “What are they like, pancakes?”

  “A little, I guess. They’re flat. Like unleavened bread. They make them out of flour or cornmeal, pat them with their hands—the Indians and Mexicans—and then they put a filling inside or use them to scoop up beans and rice and whatnot.”

  She was silent a moment, sipping at her drink. “Pretty exotic, huh? You’re not going to turn Mexican on me, are you? With what—a serape, isn’t that what they call them, and a sombrero? What do I call you, Don John? Or Don Juan, would that be better?”

  I leaned in to kiss her. “Don Juan will do nicely. But I wish you were there to taste them, and the frijoles and salsa too. And these things they call tamales, wrapped up in corn husks. You’d like them. You would.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure I would. If I ever got to go anyplace.”

  “You will,” I said. “I promise.”

  “When? We can’t afford a vacation. It’s a joke. And my mother—just to visit her, just the bus fare puts a strain on the budget. No, John, you can keep your tortee-yas.”

  The rain seemed to intensify then, a crashing fall that silenced everything. I didn’t want to bicker, didn’t want anything to interfere with the unalloyed pleasure of seeing her again and the prospect of sex, marital relations, the two of us in bed together after five long weeks of enforced abstinence, and I was on fire to touch her, undress her, put my tongue in her mouth and lose my fingers in her hair. I leaned forward to light a cigarette, trying to figure what I could do to defuse the situation. She was bitter, I could understand that. She felt deserted, felt that life was passing her by while I was off experiencing it to the full—which wasn’t true, not by a long shot, as I think I’ve made clear here. The problem wasn’t unique. Any man who traveled for a living, whether he was in the service or in sales or meteorology or the railroad industry, had of necessity to leave his wife behind for long stretches at a time—that was just the nature of certain professions.

  Mac had the same problem, and she’d found a way to deal with it. Though she never let it slip in public, I knew she was frustrated—she wanted to be included too, but Prok made a fraternity of his research and she turned to the children and her knitting and the Girl Scouts in compensation. The closest she ever came to criticism, to my knowledge, was a phrase she let slip in one of the women’s magazines after the male volume had come out. She’d been asked about Prok and his travels and if his devotion to research didn’t make things hard on her, and her answer was telling: “I hardly see him at night since he took up sex.” Everyone had laughed—Clara Kinsey had come up with a bon mot—but I saw the truth of it.

  One time—and this was after Rutledge had joined us and the Kinsey children were grown and out of the house—Mac came along with us on one of our expeditions, just to participate, to do something other than housework for a change. I can’t recall now where it was, some uninspiring midwestern college town, no doubt, a place little different from Bloomington, and it was probably winter too, so that even the scenery was unrelieved. We checked into a hotel, the usual arrangement, and got two adjoining rooms, Prok, Mac, Rutledge and I, Corcoran having stayed behind to man the fort at the Institute. Mac entertained herself as best she could while we recorded our interviews—she might have gone to the snowbound park or poked in at the library or a thrift shop, I don’t know. Afterward, we had a late supper and went up to the rooms, where I assumed Prok and Mac would retire and leave Rutledge and me to fend for ourselves. But Prok was especially keyed up that night, pacing round the floor and going on about his enemies—their legions had grown over the years—and some of the oddities that had come up in the interviews that day. And films. He was just then pioneering the use of film in recording the mating habits of various species of animal, and I remember he was particularly excited about the work of a Professer Shadle at the University of Buffalo, who had apparently documented the reproductive behavior of captive porcupines. “Porcupines!” Prok kept exclaiming. “Can you imagine that? With all that defensive armor? And yet they still, of course, manage coitus, or where would the species be?”

  Mac was right there with him, never shy about expressing her views, and Rutledge was fully engaged too, interjecting opinions, pulling his chin over this thought or that, waving his hands in expostulation; I was content to sit back with a Coca-Cola and listen, though I wished I could have lit up a cigarette. (About Rutledge: he was a Princeton Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, thirty-eight years old, a neat, limber man with a slight stoop and a sardonic grin who wore a wire-thin mustache in homage to his Iberian ancestry on his mother’s side, and maybe even to Duke Ellington too. For what it’s worth, incidentally, Prok detested all facial hair, arguing that only someone with something to hide would want to mask his features.) After a while, the subject turned from porcupine sex to human sex and Prok’s usual gloss on the mores of the day—we were all too inhibited, he insisted, even those of us in the highest ranks of sex research, those of us right there in that very room. “Oh, really?” Rutledge put in, rising to the bait. “How so?”

  “Take Mac, for instance,” Prok said, catching himself up in midstride. “Here’s an engaging, desirable woman sitting right here with us as we jaw on about sex, and we haven’t given a thought to taking advantage of the situation, now have we?”

  “What do you mean?” Rutledge was leaning against the far wall, an empty soft-drink bottle and a half-eaten hamburger sandwich on the bureau beside him. Two quick nervous fingers went to his mustache.

  “To enjoy ourselves with her, obviously. You’re willing, aren’t you, Mac?”

  Mac, seated in the armchair with her knitting, glanced up sharply, then looked away. She murmured something that sounded like assent, and I felt myself go numb. I couldn’t loo
k at her. I wanted to get up out of the chair, push through the door and go out into the dark streets of a city I didn’t know and didn’t care about and just walk till my legs gave out. It wasn’t jealousy I was feeling, but something else altogether, something I couldn’t have put in words if you’d asked me.

  “Oh, but that hardly proves anything—that’s just convention.”

  Prok’s eyes were glowing. “My point exactly.”

  There was some further debate, Mac’s opinion solicited, mine, the ball going back and forth between Rutledge and Prok, but ultimately Prok made a challenge of it: either we expressed ourselves sexually, without inhibition, or we proved his point. “Actions speak louder than words, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Was she enthusiastic? I couldn’t read her, but all traces of her girlishness had vanished and she’d put on her objective face—this wasn’t what she’d come for, wasn’t what she’d expected. Rutledge—he was married, the father of two—seemed nonplussed. “But go ahead,” Prok insisted, “enjoy yourselves—Rutledge, you’re the new man, why don’t you go first?”

  What I’m trying to indicate here is that Iris’s feelings were by no means unique, though I understood and wanted only to placate her, to love and support her and give her everything I had to offer, emotionally and physically both. “Iris,” I said, “come on. Let’s not fight.”

  “Keep them,” she said, even as the thunder rattled the windows and drummed at the walls, “and all the rest of your Mexican delicacies.” Her face was featureless in the dimming light. “I can eat meat loaf.”

  “Are you listening to yourself? That’s ridiculous. You don’t have to—”