by T. C. Boyle
Prok was standing there rigid, the fingers of his right hand arrested in the act of running through his hair. He gave me an acerbic look, a look that pinned and measured me as if I were one of his errant gall wasps. “Don’t be childish,” he said. “This isn’t the time for levity, nor the place either.”
Mac was at his side, one hand on his arm, just above the joint. “Prok,” she murmured, “now calm yourself,” but he snatched his arm away.
He was still focused on me, his jaws clamped in fury, and there was a minute twitching of his lips, as if he’d tasted something bitter. “That is precisely the sort of thoughtless remark that undermines the entire project—that has been undermining the project for as long as I’ve known you. Your work is retrograde, Milk—is, was, and always will be. Do you hear me?”
The crowd breathed as one. The building quaked. I bowed my head. “I was just, I, that is—it was only a joke.”
“And stop stuttering, for God’s sake. Speak up like a man!”
“Prok,” Mac said, interceding for me. “Prok, please. He was only trying to—”
“I don’t give two figs for what he was trying! He should know, of all people, that I don’t need his assistance”—and now a look for Mac—“or anybody else’s, for that matter, when I prepare to address a gathering …”
Mac’s voice was reduced. “Perhaps you’d like us to leave, then?”
It was at that moment that Corcoran, the fair-haired boy, appeared in the doorway with a glass of water, the vast percolating intensity of the crowd arriving with him in a wave that rolled through the room and crested against the trophy-laden bookcases. “Yes,” Prok snapped, stepping forward briskly to snatch the glass from Corcoran’s hand, “yes, I’d like you to leave. Most emphatically. And take him”—the accusatory finger pointed at Corcoran now—“with you.”
By the time we’d found the seats reserved for us in the front row, I’d already forgotten—and forgiven—the incident. It was nerves, that was all. Prok was under intense pressure to perform, and though I’d never seen him waver in any of the hundreds of lectures for which I’d been present, this one was special. There had never been a crowd like this, and he would have been less than human if he didn’t have a case of nerves. At any rate, the vice president—that generic face and figure, the academic, the bureaucrat—made his own stab at levity in his introductory remarks, and the students in the audience let out a collective titter. Shuffling through his notes and gazing up myopically at that mass of humanity, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m pleased to see so many faculty here today, and faculty wives, in attendance at a university meeting. Of course, most of us must view the subject to be discussed largely in retrospect.” There was a pause, as if the audience hadn’t heard him right, and then the titters ran through the stacked tiers of chairs and benches like a motif out of Die Walküre.
Then there was Prok. He strode out of the wings, chest thrust forward, spectacles flinging light, and mounted the podium to an avalanche of applause, which suddenly died to nothing as he raised a hand to adjust the microphone. As usual he began speaking extemporaneously, without notes or props of any kind, his voice low and unmodulated, adopting the matter-of-fact tone that had served him so well through the years. He started off with variation and how the extremes at both ends of a given behavior define the norm, an old theme. Listing the various outlets available to the human animal from puberty on—masturbation, petting, coitus, the oral component—he went on to discuss frequency, and here the crowd, which had been slowly awakening to what he was saying, nearly got away from him. “There are those, for instance, who require no more than a single orgasm a month or even a year, and others who require several per week, or even per day.”
At this, there was a low sustained whistle from the row behind me, what was known to us then as a “wolf whistle.” The crowd jumped on it as if it were a rallying cry, the whole interconnected organism stirring again with that sound as of the wind in the trees, but Prok came right back with a barb that stopped them dead. “And then there are some,” he went on, unfazed, “whose output is as low as that of the man who just whistled.”
Nervous laughter, and then silence. He had them. And he never let go of them for the next sixty minutes, every last one of those nine thousand souls intent and focused on Prok, that erect figure on the podium, the celebrity of sex, the reformer, the pioneer, the preacher and spellbinder. I watched him from the front row, Mac on one side, Corcoran on the other, and though I’d heard the speech so often I could have recited it verbatim, right on down to the statistics and the pregnant pauses, the intensity of it in that setting on that afternoon gave me a chill. This was the apex, the moment of glory, Prok at his height. The students held their breath, the professors’ wives leaned forward. There wasn’t a sound, not a cough or murmur. No one stirred, no one left early. He concluded with his usual plea for tolerance, then took a step back and ducked his head in acknowledgment of the audience—it wasn’t a bow, exactly, but it had that effect.
And oh, they roared. They roared.
9
When we got back I found that Elster had been named official librarian of the Institute and that Iris had taken up the clarinet again, the hollow doleful sound of it greeting me even as I came up the drive and assessed the state of disrepair in the house and yard. The car (I’d left it for her, Corcoran having given me a lift home) was listing over a flat tire on the driver’s side front, and there was a raw new crease in the rear bumper. Because it was very still and clear and cold, the sound of the clarinet carried to me from deep inside the house, and it took me a moment to realize what it was—at first I’d thought some wounded animal was moaning out its final agony behind the toolshed. But no, it was Iris. Playing her instrument, the instrument in the little black velvet-lined case she’d kept untouched in the lower right-hand drawer of the dresser all these years.
Imagine that, I thought, and that was the extent of my thinking. The car was undrivable, half a dozen other failures leapt to my attention as I came up the front steps, and it didn’t really affect me one way or the other. I was beyond caring. The place could fall down for all it mattered to me, the car could go up in flames—I was tired, deeply tired, and there was no way in the world I could continue to travel with Prok and fit neatly into the role of house-husband like one of those cool unflappable fathers grinning out at us from the television these days.
As I stepped through the door, John Jr. leapt up from the welter of his toys and bolted across the room to throw his arms round my knees, and I set down my suitcase to lift him high and greet him with a kiss. Iris had her back to me. She was seated on the sofa before the fire (she had a fire going, at least, but I saw that she’d used the wrong wood, the stuff I’d reserved for kindling only and had begged her at least a hundred times to use sparingly), her legs splayed in front of her, the instrument at her lips. The sound it produced was pitched low and mournful, a groaning, creaking reverberation that put me in mind of the freighters plying the fog on Lake Michigan. I felt depressed suddenly, seeing her there with her distended cheeks and splayed legs, her hair in disarray, her eyes shut tight in concentration, Iris, my Iris, and she might have been anybody, a girl in the marching band, a prodigy of practice and desire working toward something I couldn’t begin to imagine. For just a moment, before I set down my son (gently, gently, the miniature grasping limbs, the uprush of the carpet) and called her name, I felt I was losing her. Or, no: that I’d already lost her.
“Iris,” I said, “Iris, it’s me,” and she started, her eyes flashing wide, the instrument pulling away from her lips with a long filament of saliva still attached. It took her a moment, and then she smiled, and I said, “Playing the clarinet again, huh?”
“Come here,” she said, and I sat beside her and we kissed, John Jr. scrambling up into my lap and the cat appearing from nowhere to adhere to the arm of the chair. It was a sudden joyful moment, the return of the hero, and I felt my depression begin to lift. We let the moment
stretch out a bit, and we said the usual things to each other, and I filled her in on the highlights of the trip, the scare at San Quentin and Prok’s mastery at Berkeley, and we had a drink together and I gave John Jr. the box of Crackerjack I’d brought back for him and dug out the lacquered nautilus shell I’d got at a seashore gift shop for Iris, and then, after a silence, I came back to the subject of the clarinet.
“So what prompted you to start playing again?”
Iris gazed up at me over the rim of her glass. She’d made herself a gin and tonic, though it was cold still and would be for some time yet. The instrument lay tucked in against her shoulder, the reed and mouthpiece wet and glistening, the keys shining, the long black tube cutting like a shadow across her arm.
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging, “something to do, I guess. You know, to pass the time.”
There was the hint of an accusation here, the old argument, and the anger came up in me. “You left the car out there with a flat. You didn’t drive on it, did you? Tell me you didn’t drive on it.”
She ignored me. The glass went to her lips and came away again. “And Hilda. She encouraged me—she plays herself, you know, and we’re planning on getting up a duet for the picnic this spring, on Memorial Day, maybe, just Hilda and me. I didn’t think I’d get my embouchure back, but I have.” The fire gave a sigh, then subsided, because it was built of twigs instead of the painstakingly split oak that was stacked up in the woodshed perhaps fifty feet from where we sat. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“I didn’t know Hilda played.” I tried to picture Rutledge’s wife, angular and airily blond, with her stingy lips and small high breasts, perched at the edge of a chair with the sheet music spread before her, taking the instrument into her mouth.
“All through college. Like me.” She smoothed her thumb over the pale glistening surface of the reed. “We’ve got to do something, what with our men gone all the time.”
“Oscar was here.”
“Yes,” she said, “that’s right. But you weren’t.”
At this point, John Jr., who’d gone back to his toys, looked up and announced that he was hungry. “Mommy, I’m hungry,” he piped, as if he’d just discovered some essential truth about the nature of existence and himself in particular.
“Maybe we should just go out,” I said.
Iris gave me a look. “Can we afford it?”
“Something cheap. Hamburgers. A pizza.”
“Pizza!” John Jr. cried, taking up the refrain. “Pizza!”
“Hush,” she said, and he’d flung himself at her legs now, burying his head in her lap. “There’s no reason why I can’t whip something up, because we really don’t have to make a celebration of it, do we? I mean, you go away and you come back. Isn’t that the way it always is?”
I had nothing to say to this, and we sat there a moment in silence, even as John Jr. tugged at her blouse and keened, “Please, Mom, please?”
“I’d have to change,” she said. “And put on some makeup. And I do want to get right back—”
I tipped my glass to her. “For what—more practice?”
She was smiling now, John Jr. all over her—Please, please—something playful in her eyes, as in all is forgiven and why wrangle when love, the love between us, between two young healthy male and female human beings, was so much more than the sum of its losses and hesitations. “No,” she said, “it was something else. A statistic you could maybe help me with because it’s been a while.”
“Yes?”
“What was the average frequency of s-e-x”—spelling it out so that our son wouldn’t make a pet word of it, as he had with “bra” and “jock”—“for couples married at least five years? Once a week, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, no,” I said, wagging my head in a professorial way, “it’s at least twice that.”
The next day, at work, Rutledge and I took a coffee break together, and that was when I learned about Elster. We’d started out on the subject of the clarinet—I’d said something like, “I hear Hilda’s rediscovered her musical inspiration”—and then we’d gone on to discuss the Pacific Coast trip and how happy he’d been to stay behind this time because he really was getting tired of conducting interviews like a hired hand (“No offense, John”) when he thought he’d been taken on to do original research. As Prok’s equal, or at least his partner. And then, casually, as if it didn’t matter a whit, he dropped the news about Elster.
I was dumbstruck. “Elster?” I repeated. “But he’s, well, he’s no friend of the research. He—did I ever tell you about Fred Skittering, that whole incident?” And I told him, at length.
Rutledge was imperturbable. That was his chief characteristic. The building could be on fire—his hair could be on fire—and he wouldn’t raise his voice or move any more precipitately than he would at a funeral. I remembered the night in the hotel room with Mac and how he’d squared his shoulders and strolled into the bedroom with her as if it were a military matter, orders given, orders received. But now, as I revealed Elster’s perfidy—or his potential for it—his face took on a new look altogether. Finally he said, “You don’t think he can be trusted then?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
He stroked his mustache, glanced down the hall to see if Prok were in sight, and lit up a cigarette. I watched him shake out the match, drop it to the floor and grind it underfoot. “Well, we’ll just have to be careful, that’s all, make a note of it, be sure Prok’s aware of the situation, because really, nobody’s in on anything here except for us, and I don’t have to tell you how the shit would hit the fan if anything, even the least tidbit, got out to the public. But look at Mrs. Matthews and the other women we’ve taken on, Laura Peterson and what’s her name. They haven’t got a clue, have they? And they’re right there with us every day in the office.”
I wasn’t convinced. Maybe I was overreacting, maybe I’d misread the man—but then there was that night at the tavern when he tried to get me to talk, and it wasn’t even for his own sake, but for some third party’s, for a journalist’s. Had he been paid off? Or was he just constitutionally a snake?
“By the way,” Rutledge said, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette and taking a sip from his coffee mug at the same time, “did you hear about the musicale Sunday?”
I held out my palms in response, and I suppose I must have looked bleak over the prospect. “Uh-uh,” I said finally. “No.” It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the opportunity to learn about classical music—as I say, I’ve really come to appreciate it, even opera—but that the musicales seemed just another extension of work, of the Institute’s tentacles. And Iris hated them. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m tired. I’ve had it up to here with musicales, if you want to know the truth.”
Rutledge was watching me steadily, his lips composed round the butt of his cigarette and the thin tracery of his mustache. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But something’s up—it’s going to be just us. And the wives.”
“Just us? That is odd. Because Prok, not to my knowledge anyway, has never given a musicale with fewer than twenty or thirty guests—that’s the whole point, to educate people.”
“And to show off.”
This seemed to suck the wind out of the conversation. I wouldn’t hear any criticism of Prok, and especially not from one of my own coworkers and colleagues, and I gave him a look to warn him off.
Rutledge shrugged, threw a furtive glance up the hall, then came back to me. “Listen, John, loyalty is one thing, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not above criticism, you know. He can be a real pompous ass at times, with his obbligato and his menuetto and largo e cantabile and all the rest of it, and then there’s that look he gets on his face, the same look he gets when he comes, like a penitent nailed to the cross.”
I felt as if I’d been slapped across the face. “Listen, Rutledge—Oscar—” I said, and my voice went cold, “I have to tell you I don’t feel comfortable with any sort of criticism or
bad-mouthing of Prok, I just don’t, I’m sorry, so please, in future, if you would just keep it to yourself—”
“But you’ve seen it. You’ve seen that look on his face. You’ve been on the receiving end of it, haven’t you? Well so have I. It’s part of the job, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t want to talk about this.”
He was still watching me, holding my eyes as if he were taking my history. “And Ted, of course. Ted’ll be there,” he said. “With his camera.”
The sunday came, wind-whipped and bathed in a tentative March sunshine that hinted at better times ahead. Crocuses were blooming, pussy willows, azaleas. Townspeople were out in their yards, raking the grass, thinking about where to string the hammock, and the students were everywhere, crowding the sidewalks in clusters of three and four, their jackets open to the waist, grinning and frolicking and shouting to one another as if it were May already, as if it were June and finals were over. It was kite-flying weather, and though I hadn’t flown a kite in twenty years, Iris and I bought a cheap paper version at a novelty shop and took John Jr. to the park to launch it. All well and fine. But before we’d gone to the park we’d done something even more out of the ordinary, and I didn’t know how I felt about it or what it meant exactly. We went to church. It was Sunday, and we went to church.
As I’ve said, Iris was raised in the Roman church, but she’d given it up in college, and certainly I myself had neither the faith nor reason to enter any ecclesiastical structure of any denomination. But Iris had awakened that morning with an idea fixed in her head—we were going to church because it was Lent and because she missed the ritual of it, the mumble of Latin, the immemorial fragrance of the censers—and I couldn’t argue with her. I wouldn’t want to say that she was reverting to childish things because that wouldn’t be fair to her, and yet she’d begun to write long missives to her mother almost daily, about what I couldn’t imagine, and she had taken up the clarinet again … and baking. She told me she’d loved to bake as a girl. And now, over breakfast—eggs poached just the way I like them, lean strips of bacon, crude crumbling hunks of a homemade bread that hadn’t risen—she’d announced that we were going to church. The whole family.
