The Inner Circle

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Later, when we’d both cooled off, she got up and dressed and changed the baby. She made a real effort to tidy up the place—it just wasn’t in her nature to let the housekeeping go, at least not for long—and she went out of her way to make a nice meal that night. I’d gone in to the Institute to put in half a day, and when I got back I must have dozed off, because I remember waking to the smell of something in the oven, and then Iris padded into the room—the living room; I was on the couch—and deposited a bathed and talcum-scented toddler in my lap, along with a glass of beer.

  I played with John Jr. a moment, and then he got down and staggered off across the room to rummage among his dump trucks and steam shovels. “Listen, Iris,” I said, lifting my eyes to hers, “I’m sorry about this morning. I didn’t mean—I was tired, that’s all.”

  Iris had her own glass of beer. She was wearing a gingham house-dress, blue and white, and her hair was up. “You were in a pretty foul mood,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sorry.” I was thinking of the calculus of a relationship, how sex equals love equals babies, mortgages and cellar doors left ajar, and how love itself is nothing more than a hormonal function, purely chemical, like rage and hate. But I had a beer in my hand and a roof over my head, and my son was there, and my wife, and what more could anyone want? Other wives, other sons, other roofs? I felt charitable. Felt content. “But, hey,” I suggested, “how about if I build a fire? Would you like that?”

  “Sure, that would be nice.” She was propped on the arm of the chair, one leg dangling, her pretty leg, her ankle, her foot in its trim felt slipper. “But, John, there’s something I wanted to say to you—and don’t give me that look because it’s nothing like that. It’s—well, I want you to teach me how to drive. Violet and Hilda drive everywhere—Violet says she’d be lost without her car—and even Mac, Mac drives, and if you’re going to be gone all the time—”

  “I’m not, I’m not gone all the time—and I’m not going to be.”

  “—leaving me alone way out here for how long? Weeks at a time?”

  “Ten days.”

  “Okay, ten days. But I’m stuck here. What if the baby needs something? What if I run out of flour—which I did—or, I don’t know, what if I just feel bored? Don’t you know I get bored out here—don’t you realize that?”

  “You’re the one who wanted the place.”

  “You wanted it too.”

  I stared into the black pit of the hearth. Cold ash there, the butt ends of charred sticks poking through like bones at the crematorium. Across the room, John Jr. was talking to his toy trucks. “Bad boy,” he was saying, over and over, “bad!” The ice cream was in the freezer, the pistachios still in the bag on the counter. I looked up at my wife. “When do you want your first lesson?”

  If I was reluctant at first—forced into something I had neither the time nor the patience for—it took only one lesson for me to realize my mistake. I can’t speak for Iris, but for me the next few weeks were some of the best times we’d ever had, John Jr. in my lap, Iris at my side, focused and intent, her hands locked on the wheel even as she negotiated the perdurable mysteries of clutch and accelerator. We memorized the back roads, watched the hills roll at us, one after another, like waves on a concrete sea, and we went where the mood took us, stopping for a milkshake or a hot dog or just to wander up a streambed and share a sandwich on a fallen log. Then it was back in the car, the clutch, the accelerator, jerk forward and stall, grind the ignition, the clutch, the accelerator, jerk forward and stall again. I don’t know what it was, something to do with her fragility, I suppose, with her very narrow and specific need and my ability to direct it—“Turn left,” I would say, “stop here; third gear; put it in reverse”—but I cherished that time. I never lost my temper, never raised my voice, not even when she swerved off the road to avoid a hell-bent squirrel and put three long gouges in the right front fender.

  Indulge me a moment, because this is important—not to Prok, maybe, but to me. It was the day after Thanksgiving, the sun stripped of color, Iris gaining in confidence, the wheels firm on the road and my attention drifting into another realm altogether, when suddenly the squirrel made his dash across the pavement and my free hand got to the wheel an instant too late. There was the shock of the impact, a screech of stone on metal, and then the car stalled. Startled, John Jr. began to pipe and then the piping grew in fullness and volume till he was bawling at the top of his lungs though there wasn’t a mark on him—on any of us. She hadn’t been going more than twenty miles an hour.

  Iris’s voice rode a thin tube of air up out of her constricted throat, even as John Jr. began to hit his stride. “Oh, God, I’ve ruined it. I wrecked the car, I wrecked it, wrecked it!”

  “It’s all right,” I told her, though I knew it wasn’t.

  “I don’t want to do this, I don’t, I can’t.”

  I remember feeling expansive, feeling calm despite myself. I got out of the car, John Jr. still clutched tightly to me, calmly assessed the damage—heartbroken, my first car, my pride and joy—and then leaned in the window to reassure her. “It’s nothing,” I said. “Just a scratch. Nothing a little rubbing compound won’t cure, and maybe a tap or two with the hammer. Really, Iris, it’s okay.”

  She sat there rigid, eyes shut, forehead pressed to the wheel. Her shoulders began to quake. Her fingers trembled. She couldn’t seem to breathe. I saw her humbled in that moment, defeated and brought low, and felt everything a man is supposed to feel for a woman. I wanted to protect her, save her, comfort her, and I eased back into the car and took her in my arms, John Jr. reaching out for her at the same time till the three of us just sat there and held the embrace as if there were nothing more to life.

  Unfortunately, it couldn’t hold. Three days later—on the Monday—Prok, Aspinall, Corcoran, Rutledge and I took the train for Oregon, where we would shoot nearly four thousand feet of film exhibiting H-behavior among bulls at an agricultural station there. “You see,” Prok would exclaim excitedly as one animal mounted another, “it’s just what I’ve said all along—all our behaviors have their antecedents in nature.”

  8

  It was a little over a year later, in February of 1950, that we moved into our new quarters in Wylie Hall, another of the venerable old buildings on campus. This time we were given an entire floor to ourselves, albeit the basement, though in all fairness I should say that the basement was partially above ground, so that at least we could stare up into the opaque wire-reinforced glass of the windows and speculate as to whether it was morning, afternoon or evening. Prok oversaw all the details in his usual obsessive way, of course, insisting on the highest standards of fireproofing in order to protect our records and the rapidly accumulating stock of the library, as well as air-conditioning so that we could seal the place off during the hellish Hoosier summers, and sheets of soundproofing to ensure absolute privacy in our interviewing. Each of us had an office to himself now, there was a file room, a darkroom, and for the first time space enough to consolidate the library in one place (with additional room for visiting scholars to consult our holdings without disturbing the workings of the Institute). None of this was particularly grand—we were in a basement, after all, with long, close corridors and exposed pipes running overhead—but Prok would have revolted against anything that smacked in the least of luxury. Still, the university deemed the project enough of a success to sink seventy thousand dollars into the remodeling of the space, and finally, at long last, we had a place of our own, where we could pursue our research as we saw fit, without worry or interference of any kind.

  What do I remember most of that time? Boxes. Cardboard boxes stuffed full of books, files and correspondence. For two solid weeks, during the worst an Indiana winter could offer, I traipsed up and down the stairs at Biology Hall, staggered across campus with my arms straining at the sockets, and deposited said boxes in the commodious basement of Wylie. Anyone else would have hired movers, or at the very least, students, b
ut not Prok. He insisted that our records were far too sensitive to entrust to anyone but the senior members of the staff, and somehow the gall wasp collection, the filing cabinets and even our desks, chairs and coat racks fell under that designation too. Corcoran, Rutledge and I packed, moved, unpacked and reordered everything we possessed, and then we stood back and marveled at all the empty space yet to fill.

  Ted Aspinall had joined us the previous year, but he was excluded from any of the heavy lifting by virtue of his speciality—he was an artist first, a technician second, and his province was the film laboratory. He moved permanently to Bloomington around this time, arriving with a suitcase of clothes and two trunks of photographic equipment, and immediately set up shop in our new offices (or “laboratories,” as Prok preferred to call them). He’d never been outside of New York City before in his life, and he did seem a bit lost at times, wandering the streets of Bloomington in his dark glasses and trench coat as if he’d gone to sleep on the subway and got off at the wrong stop, but Prok had made him an attractive offer (he came in at a higher salary than I was making, but there was nothing new there, low man on the totem pole as I was and always will be) and his commercial photography—the eternal weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation ceremonies, the unvarying frozen portraits of grandparents, uncles, cousins, even dogs—had begun to grate on him. He came to Bloomington to stay, and the whole tenor of the project changed to accommodate him. We were no longer an earnest if underfunded seat-of-the-pants operation working out of a warren of cramped dismal offices in the biology building, but a shining enterprise with international recognition, a ready influx of cash and our own full-time staff photographer.

  Aspinall didn’t waste any time. Prok budgeted some eight thousand dollars to the purchase of the newest movie-making, processing and editing equipment, and Ted went through the lion’s share of it in a week. Prok was busy everywhere—furiously busy, lecturing, taking histories, posing for photos and sitting for interviews, overseeing the move and the reshelving of the library’s holdings and at the same time puzzling over the data for what would become the revolutionary female volume—and yet he found time to hide away in the darkroom and consult with Aspinall over every last piece of photographic equipment. Film—the rapid frame-by-frame encryption and exposure of animal behavior, from the porcupine to the erotically charged bull to the uninhibited couple in their Florida apartment—this was Prok’s new obsession, and Aspinall was his purveyor.

  And, yes, I’m aware of the evolutionary progression here. Aware that the lower animals are one thing, the recording of their habits uncontroversial, educational, salutary even, and the human animal quite another. Perhaps we did go too far. Perhaps some of the critics of what the public was calling The Kinsey Report had a valid point, though none of us saw it at the time. What was it Margaret Mead had said of the male volume? Something along the lines of accusing Prok of being a reductionist, too dour, too scientific—all those statistics and not a single mention of fun, and that was the term she used: “fun.” As if “fun” could be measured or catalogued. And Lionel Trilling, Lawrence Kubie and the rest, denouncing Prok—and by extension, us, me—as championing a mechanistic view of human relations over the spiritual and emotional. I see now what they were getting at, if only narrowly, but still I stand by everything we did—if we hadn’t been rigorously scientific, consummately professional, the whole thing would have been a sham. In any case, I saw the criticism as nothing but a goad, narrow-minded, puritanical, anti-scientific, and to move forward—to progress—we had to ignore it. And so it was only logical that we began to film human sexual behavior.

  But let me backtrack a moment here. It wasn’t solely the arrival of Aspinall and the acquisition of all that equipment that pushed us in the direction of live filming, nor simply the evolutionary progression of the project either, but a third factor played into it as well: the ready availability of subjects. For one thing, Betty was in town still, and still willing. I saw her occasionally, driving down the street in a late-model convertible, pushing a basket up the aisles of the supermarket in the starched white nurse’s uniform she’d tailored to fit her lush proportions, and occasionally I stopped to chat with her—we were friends. She was a friend of the research and I a friend of—well, friendly relations. And then there was Vivian Aubrey, the former Columbia student who’d been such a prodigious help to us during our early visits to New York. She was in Bloomington increasingly now, attracted by the aura of Prok’s fame, as were a number of other women (another Vivian, the multiorgasmic Vivian Brundage, comes to mind, a sixty-year-old Philadelphia gynecologist we were to film a number of times with various partners) and men. Always men. Because more and more, Prok craved men.

  The first film we made—of Corcoran and Betty, reprising their earlier roles—was the one I remember best. It was late in the year—the holidays were nearly on us, Prok dusting off his Santa Claus whiskers, Vivian Aubrey preparing to go off and visit her parents in Florida, my own mother appearing out of the blue to spend some time with her grandson—when Prok, with a hint of mystery in his voice, asked us to gather at his house that evening, sans wives, on Institute business. My mother didn’t understand. All through dinner she’d quizzed me about the project and Prok—When was she going to see Prok again? Such a nice man. So dedicated. What had I thought of his picture in such-and-such magazine? And Mac. Didn’t that photograph flatter her, because God knows she’s no beauty. I sliced meat and dipped the tines of my fork into a mound of mashed potatoes and assured her that Prok hadn’t changed at all (a lie) and that he talked of her often and fondly (another lie) and we’d see him at the Institute tomorrow, but that tonight’s meeting was strictly business and bound to be a bore.

  Iris concurred. “You don’t want to go, Irene, believe me. It’ll just be Prok and his boys, heads down, worrying over the female orgasm.”

  My mother gave me a look across the table, then turned to Iris. “But you’re not being fair, Iris, he’s such a—”

  “—sweet and generous man?”

  “That’s not what I was going to say, but, yes, I think he is. And a great man too. And John should feel privileged to be part of the whole undertaking. I’m very proud of you, John, I am.”

  Iris dabbed at a blackish smear of strained spinach that had somehow migrated from John Jr.’s bib to his forehead. “Oh, yes, I know,” she said, her voice weary and saturated with sarcasm. “I count my blessings every day.”

  And then it was off in the cold, the Dodge wheezing to life on the third try, headlights drilling the road all the way into town and out to Prok’s house, where the faerie cottage glittered with Christmas lights. I slammed out of the car, huddled against the cold, and hurried up the path to the house, hardly noticing the dark humps of the frost-killed flowerbeds and the forest of saplings that had begun to take hold in the neglected yard. I stood on the familiar doorstep and rang the bell.

  Mac answered the door with a welcoming smile, and she was dressed up—and made up—as if she were going out to a concert or the theater, in a dress I’d never seen before and earrings in the shape of miniature jeweled Christmas trees. Her hair was newly permed. She was wearing lipstick. “John,” she breathed, “come in and welcome,” and I felt bad that I had nothing to offer her, not flowers or candy, not even a cheese.

  “I don’t, well, I didn’t know this was a formal gathering, or I would have brought a cheese, at least.”

  This was an old joke between us, and she laughed to show her delight in it. “No need for cheeses tonight. Prok’s made a Barbados punch specially for the occasion.” A pause. “And your mother—she’s well? And Iris? Good. Well, send them my love. And we’ll have them out to the house over the weekend, just us, just the girls. Will you tell them?”

  She held my hand a moment too long, and I felt the pulse of all that had passed between us, the slow, sweet, soft heartbeat of those times, and then she led me into the living room.

  The others were already gathered there, the erratic light
of the fire distorting their features so that they looked like strangers in a crowded waiting room till I came close and all was familiar again, Hello, John. Good evening. Cold out there? A lamp was lit in the corner. The Christmas lights at the window winked on and off, fixed to a timer. There was a smell of woodsmoke, the oak and apple wood Prok liked to burn, and of the scented white candles Mac had set on the mantelpiece, everything cozy and festive. I greeted everyone in turn, but when I saw that Betty was there, lounging in the far corner and chatting casually with Corcoran, it gave me a jolt—something was up, and my interest was piqued, no doubt about it—so that I wound up presenting her with an awkward nod and a puzzled little half-formed smile before settling into a chair beside Rutledge and Prok. Betty acknowledged me with a smile that flickered across her lips and vacated her eyes before turning back to Corcoran, and I wondered what that meant. Did I feel a stab of jealousy, as ridiculous as that might seem? What had she said that night at the tavern—Purvis is a great friend of mine, you know that, don’t you? But wasn’t I a great friend of hers too?

  “Is this alcoholic?” Aspinall was saying. He was stalled at the punch bowl, his shoulders slumped and head hanging, as if he were afraid of breaking something. “Ted?” Mac glided across the room to him. “Did you need some help? What about you, John?” she called. “Punch? Or something lighter—a soft drink maybe?”

  And then I was clutching a cup of warm yuletide cheer, pressing it to the yielding strip of cartilage at the base of my nose until the alcoholic fumes began to soften the passageways there and the distinct voices of the room came clear to me. Prok was talking about San Quentin, the prison in California—we’d been invited to interview the prisoner population there, and he’d managed to set up some lectures at Berkeley as well. His voice was straining for modulation, riding up and down the emotional ladder—clearly he was excited at the prospect of going into a maximum-security prison to delve into the histories of some of the most dangerous men our society had to offer, the ne plus ultra of extreme cases, but shouldn’t we have been investigating the monasteries too? I smiled at the thought. Prok in a monastery. Imagine that. Mac’s voice came to me then, fluting and soft—the weather, that was her subject—and the buzz of Aspinall’s high-pitched rasp wrapping itself around it. I couldn’t hear what Betty and Corcoran were talking about, but I heard Betty’s laugh, the whole trajectory of it, rising up to fly out over the room like a dart descending to the bull’s-eye painted across my brow. We were going to witness living sex again, and we were going to film it. That was what was going on here. Corcoran and Betty. And why him? Why not me? What was wrong with me?