The Inner Circle

by T. C. Boyle

  She listened dispassionately, let me go deeper and deeper until at some arbitrary point her face lit with a smile and she said, “I took a friend. To the play, I mean. And it was one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done since I got here freshman year.”

  “Oh,” I said, “well, I, in that case—”

  “Don’t you want to ask his name?”

  We were drinking tea and fighting the impulse to dunk our powdered donuts into the little ceramic cups set out on the saucers in front of us. I didn’t drink tea. I didn’t particularly like tea. But I was drinking tea because that was what she had ordered with a look at the waitress—and then at me—that made tea seem exotic, the ultimate choice of those in the know. I’d just raised the cup to my lips, and now I put it down again. I tried to be casual. “His name?” I said. “Why, do I know him?”

  She shook her head, her hair catching the light through the window. “I don’t think so. He’s a senior, though. In architecture. Bob Hickenlooper?”

  What can I say? Hickenlooper’s face rose up before me, a conventionally handsome face, the face of one of the most popular men on campus, one who had a reputation for chasing anything that tottered by on a pair of heels—or in flats, for that matter—and he was a brain too, with a great and staggering future ahead of him. Jealousy seized me. My hair—the loop of it that never seemed to want to stay where it belonged—fell across my forehead and I had an impulse to reach up and tear it out of my scalp with a single furious jerk. “He’s—he lives in my rooming house,” I said, making my voice as cold and small as I could.

  She was enjoying herself now—that much was evident from the glint in her eyes and the way she shifted in her seat to get a better look at me. I watched her lower her head and purse her lips for a long slow sip of tea. “But enough of me,” she said, “what about you? I hear you’ve been promoted.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “Sex research, right?”

  I nodded, a hundred thoughts warring in my brain, not the least of which was how she would have known: Through Hickenlooper? Paul? Her mother? But how could her mother know if mine didn’t? I wanted to change the subject, wanted to ask her out to the pictures for Saturday night, right then and there—and I did, but not before she said, “How did ever you get that?”

  The weather warmed. Prok and I spent more and more time in the garden, hauling rocks for edges and borders, spading up the earth, pushing wheelbarrows of shredded bark and chicken manure back and forth, trimming, cutting, pruning. We divided and transplanted endless clumps of lilies of all varieties, and irises—irises were his passion, and he’d collected over two hundred and fifty varieties of them and was forever trading and selling bulbs by post all across the country. We also planted trees—fruit trees, ornamentals, saplings we dug out of hollows in the hills—and all sorts of native plants, poke, goldenrod, snakeroot, wild aster, Queen Anne’s lace, which had a surprising cumulative effect, setting off the splendor of the flowerbeds and giving the whole property a sylvan air, as if it were the product of nature rather than man. While we worked, Prok talked of one thing only—sex—and particularly of the H-histories he was collecting not only in Chicago and Indianapolis now, but in New York as well. He was moved almost to tears by the accounts of sex offenders he’d interviewed in prison, people incarcerated for common acts that happened to run afoul of the antiquated laws of record and who were prosecuted almost arbitrarily, like the South Bend man jailed for having received oral sex from his wife (or rather ex-wife, and on her report), or the many homosexual couples ferreted out and exposed by vindictive spouses, parents, small-town police. Coitus out of wedlock was universally banned, masturbation illegal, sodomy a felony in most states. “You know,” he told me, and he told me more than once, making his case, already preparing the next lecture in his head, “it’s utterly absurd. It’s got to the point where if all the sex laws on the books were rigorously prosecuted, some eighty-five percent of the adult populace would be behind bars.”

  I told him that I agreed with him. That I couldn’t agree more. That my life would have been a thousand times better if it weren’t for all the prohibitions placed on me from the time I knew what the equipment between my legs was for.

  He smiled, put an arm round me. “I know, I know,” he said, “I’m preaching to the converted.”

  I began to see more of Iris during this period—I took her to the pictures and we went for walks or met for study dates at the library—though with finals coming up, graduation looming and the time I was required to devote to the project, not to mention the garden, our relationship progressed by fits and starts. By this time both Prok and I were stripped down to the barest essentials while working out of doors, and both of us developed such deep tans you might have mistaken us for a pair of Italian laborers. Prok wasn’t a nudist, not officially (he was far too self-sufficient to join any group or movement), but he was often naked or as close to naked as he could reasonably be given the circumstances, because to his mind nudity was an expression of the most natural and relaxed state of the human animal—the very same agencies of social control that had proscribed certain sex acts dictated that people should wear clothing, whereas any number of societies outside the ken of the Judeo-Christian tradition did perfectly well without it, or with very little of it. “The Trobriand Islanders, for instance, Milk, think of the Trobriand Islanders. Or the Samoans.” To emphasize his point with the neighbors and any uninformed pedestrians who might happen by, Prok ultimately reduced his gardening costume to a kind of flesh-colored jockstrap and a single shoe, which he wore on the right foot, for digging. I followed suit, of course, because this was what was expected of me, and I always did what was expected. (It was a question of loyalty, that was all, of an ethic central to my training, my upbringing—my very nature, I guess—though Iris in later years could be savage on the subject.)

  What happened next—it was just before graduation in June—surprised even me, and I was the initiator of it. All this talk of sex, of how natural and uncomplicated it was and would and should be if only society would loosen its strictures, got me thinking about my own situation and the outlets (Prok’s term) available to me. I was young, healthy, and the exercise and the sun and the feel and smell of the soil had me practically bursting with lust. I was hot, never hotter, frustrated, angry. I wanted Iris, wanted Laura Feeney, wanted anyone, but I didn’t know where to begin. On the other hand, Prok and I continued to have encounters (but how he would have hated the euphemism—sex, we had sex), though, as I say, my H-history was limited and if I were a 1 or at best a 2 on the 0–6 scale, that would describe the extent of my inclination in that direction, and so I began in my hesitant way to broach the subject of heterosexual relations with him. But let me draw back a moment, because I remember the day clearly and need to set the scene here.

  It was a Sunday morning, and we’d got to work early in the garden, church bells tolling in the distance, people strolling by on their way to services, the air dense with heat and humidity, the promise of a late-afternoon shower brooding over the hills. The garden was open—each Sunday Prok posted a hand-lettered sign to that effect so that people could have a chance to tour the property and listen to him lecture on each variety of flower and plant, its classification, its near relatives, its preferences with regard to soil, light and watering. Prok liked nothing better than to show off what he’d accomplished horticulturally, and again, this derived as much from his competitive instincts (nobody’s lilies could ever hope to match his) as anything else. We were working on a massive clump of daylilies in one of the beds in the front yard, both of us down on all fours, when Prok glanced up and said, “Why, look, isn’t that Dean Hoenig? And who’s that with her? I’ll bet—yes, I’ll bet that would be her mother, come to visit all the way from Cleveland. Hadn’t somebody mentioned that her mother was visiting?”

  Prok had risen to his knees, a tight smile on his lips. I looked up to see the Dean of Women, dressed for church, making her way along the walk past th
e house, talking animatedly with a stooped, open-faced old woman in a hat like an inverted wedding cake. I knew that the dean had just recently moved into a house two doors up from Prok’s, but beyond that I knew little or nothing of the faculty and really didn’t have an answer for him. “I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything.”

  The smile broadened. He was watching them in the way of predator and prey, and I saw that they didn’t have a chance, the old woman moving with such deliberation she was practically standing still. “It occurs to me,” Prok said, his voice rich with subversive joy, “that the garden is open, is it not?”

  I didn’t give back the smile. I wanted nothing to do with the dean. I might have been under Prok’s protection, but still I couldn’t help shrinking inside every time I saw her, guilty, guilty as charged, and the irony was I’d never got more than that single kiss out of Laura Feeney despite all the squirming the situation had caused me.

  Prok caught them at the gate. “Dean Hoenig, Sarah!” he called, darting out onto the walk in his jockstrap and single flopping shoe. The dean gave him a look of bewilderment, while her mother, who couldn’t have stood more than four feet ten in her heels, visibly started. But Prok would have none of it. He was the smoothest, courtliest, most perfect gentleman in the entire state of Indiana, and he’d happened to see the ladies passing—“On your way home from church, I take it?”—and felt he just had to awaken them to the delights of his garden and offer them the rare privilege of a personal guided tour. “And who might this charming lady be?” he inquired, turning to the old woman with a bow. “Your mother, I presume?”

  The dean—compact, busty, tough as a drill sergeant—was at a loss. She was always in command, overseeing her charges and ruling the dorms with an iron hand, but the situation was clearly out of her control. “Yes, this is my mother, Leonora. Mother, Professor Kinsey of the Zoology Department.”

  Prok took the old lady’s hand and gave it a squeeze. There was a sheen of sweat on his chest, the long muscles and veins of his arms stood out in work-hardened definition, his lower abdomen bristled with pale blond hairs that were beginning to turn gray. He loomed over the old woman like a naked troglodyte, all flesh and presence, and yet what she heard coming from his mouth was the language of culture and civility. “I understand you’re from Cleveland?”

  The old lady’s eyes had retreated into her head. She could barely croak out an answer in the affirmative.

  “A jewel of a city,” Prok said, idly scratching at the axillary hair under his left arm. “First-rate museum. Absolutely. Not to mention your symphony orchestra—I do envy you that, Mrs. Hoenig. But, please, don’t let’s stand out here in the street, come and let me show you my pride and joy—you do like lilies, don’t you?”

  The dean’s mother nodded in a numb way, then shot a helpless look at her daughter. Dean Hoenig was wearing a tight smile, and it wasn’t a welcoming smile, not at all. “I’m afraid we must be going, Professor Kinsey, though I do thank you for thinking of us—”

  Prok cut her off. “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said, taking the old lady by the arm and steering her toward the gate, “it’s no imposition at all, my pleasure, in fact, and how often does your mother get to see a botanical wonder like this and at a time when it’s looking its very best too, I might add? Isn’t that right, Mrs. Hoenig?”

  The dean’s mother didn’t have an opportunity to express an opinion one way or the other because that was when she caught sight of me standing there in front of the hydrangeas, all but naked myself. (Prok had lectured me on what he saw as my excessive modesty, and I’d gradually come round to his way of thinking—though my gardening attire wasn’t as minimal as his, I was at the time wearing nothing but a kind of dun loincloth he’d fashioned for me and a pair of earth-stained tennis shoes, sans socks.) She jerked back as if an electric current had just passed through her, but Prok held firm and guided her up the path to me, the dean following grudgingly behind. “Mrs. Hoenig,” he was saying, “I’d like to introduce my assistant, John Milk. Milk, Mrs. Hoenig. And I think you know the dean …”

  Even as I took the old lady’s hand in my own and gave it a gentle shake, I could feel the dean’s eyes probing me. She was out of her element here, already defeated—she was going to see the garden with her mother and listen to Prok’s nonstop monologue and in the process learn something about the natural condition of the human animal whether she liked it or not—but she couldn’t help making a thrust at me. “Yes, certainly,” she said. “From the marriage course. But I guess you’re waiting till after graduation to tie the knot, is that it, John?”

  I was learning. From Prok. From the master himself. And I didn’t flinch, didn’t drop my eyes or let my face give me away. “Not really,” I said. “Not actually, that is.”

  The old lady let out an exclamation over the bearded irises, a kind of long, attenuated coo, and Prok encouraged her, delighted, but before the dean could come back at me, he looked over his shoulder and said, “He’s met someone else, isn’t that right, Milk?”

  What could I do but nod?

  After the women left, laden with cut flowers, Prok and I finished up the chore that had been interrupted out front and then put in a good solid hour of pick and shovel work in the backyard (Prok was then constructing the lily pond, and there was plenty of hard labor involved in digging out rocks and hauling and spreading the dirt we removed). Just after noon, Mac came out with sandwiches and soft drinks and the three of us sat on the ground contemplating the contours of the hole and chatting. She was barefooted and dressed in the khaki shorts and blouse she wore as a camp counselor and troop leader for the Girl Scouts. I noticed that she’d parted her hair on the left, swept it across her brow and pinned it in place with a barrette over her right ear. I don’t know what it was, but on this particular afternoon she was as gay and lighthearted as I’d ever seen her. She drew up her legs and rocked back against them as she ate and laughed and broke in on Prok’s running monologue to make one point or another, and though she was in her early forties then, she seemed insouciant and girlish, not at all what you would expect from a housewife and mother.

  What did we talk about over lunch that afternoon? I don’t know. The pond, most likely, its depth and dimensions, the plantings Prok was planning for it, pickerelweed, irises of course, with their feet right in the water, and what did we think of Sarracenia purpurea for the transitional zone? I found myself stealing glimpses of Mac, of her legs, her ankles, the place where her tanned thighs vanished into the crotch of her shorts. That was what prompted it, I suppose, what made me dare something I would have been incapable of even a few weeks earlier, but as I say, my education was rapidly advancing. Here it is: when Mac gathered up the plates and Prok and I had watched her saunter across the lawn and disappear into the rear of the house, I turned to him. “Prok, I hope you won’t, well, take this in the wrong way,” I began, “but I’ve been thinking—with regard to my education and my needs too—about what we were talking of yesterday, my need for a female outlet, that is?”

  He was in the act of pushing himself up, already anxious to get back to work. “Yes,” he said, “yes, what of it?”

  “Well, you see, I was wondering how you would feel about, well, about Mac—?”

  He looked puzzled. “Mac?”

  “Yes,” I said, and I looked him right in the eye, apt pupil that I was, “Mac.”

  It took him a moment. “You mean, you want to—with Mac?”

  You can say what you will about him—and everybody has an opinion, it seems—but Prok was no hypocrite. He preached sexual liberation for men and women both and he lived what he preached. A wan smile came to his lips and his eyes sparked with amusement, as if the joke were on him, then he laid down the shovel and told me he’d put the proposition to his wife that night, and that if she consented, I had his blessing.

  As it turned out, Mac was as surprised as her husband, surprised but flattered too, and when I came to work in the garden the following w
eekend I found that she was alone in the house. I was out back, knee-deep in the crater Prok and I had excavated, wondering where he was—had he slept late? (an impossibility in itself; even when his heart was failing him in his late fifties he never slept more than four or five hours a night)—when I became aware of the susurrus of bare feet in the grass and looked up to see Mac standing there before me, a soft shy smile pressed to her lips. “Hello, John,” she said, her eyes shining, that cloying catch in her voice, “I just came out to tell you that Prok has taken the children to Lake Monroe for the day. To do a bit of hiking and collect galls. He said—”

  It felt as if the chambers of my heart had been wedged shut. I was having trouble breathing. The sun was a palpable thing, a weight on my shoulders I could barely sustain. I thought I might lose consciousness, and maybe I did, for just an instant, swaying there on my feet while the earth spun out of control beneath me.

  “He said you really didn’t have to work today. Not if you didn’t want to.”

  Again, I want to be frank here—if Prok taught me anything, he taught me that. Euphemism is the resort of the inauthentic, the timid, the sex shy. I don’t deal in euphemism and I believe in telling it like it is. Or as it is. To put it simply: I became intoxicated with Mac. She was my first, the woman who relieved me of my virginity, or to put it in the crudest possible terms, just to get it out, to express it in the way our lower-level subjects would in countless interviews—in the vernacular that so often gets to the truth so much more powerfully than the loftiest circumlocution—she was my first lay. There, I’ve said it. And if Iris should ever listen to this once events have played themselves out—or transcribe it for a book, and that’s what it should be: a book—I have nothing to hide. She knows my sex history. She’s known it from the beginning, just as I’ve known hers.