The Inner Circle (34 page)

At the end of the second day, having heard nothing from Iris, I went back to the apartment, but warily, looking for signs, coming up the walk and approaching the front steps with the slow deliberation of a sapper, as if the place had been mined and booby-trapped by the retreating forces. The first thing I noticed was the milk—there they were, two bottles, nestled side by side in the insulated box on the porch, undisturbed. There was no sound of the radio, no lights left burning. Everything sank in me. I turned my key in the lock and came in to a smell of nothing, of a tomb, of a place that was empty and had been empty and might never be inhabited again. It was as if the people who'd lived here had disappeared, that nice young couple, as if they'd been kidnapped and held for ransom and no one could tell if the sum would ever be raised.

Her clothes were there still, hanging in the wardrobe, her brushes and toilet things, her shampoo—it was all there. It probably took me fifteen minutes, a good quarter hour of poking through things in a kind of mind-numbing despair, until I noticed that the poem was gone, replaced by a few lines in her own hand, and I still don't know where she got them from:

I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly.…
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

I couldn't breathe. I had to pour a drink and ease myself down in the armchair, so weak suddenly my legs wouldn't support me.
Gone? I shall be gone?
And what was that supposed to mean? I couldn't fathom it—was she saying she would leave me, that she didn't want me anymore, that Corcoran had taken my place and negated everything between us in the course of what, a week? Sane? No, it was insane. I loved her, she loved me. How could anything ever change that?

If I thought that was the low point, exchanging bitter poems, warfare by proxy, the drink and the chair and the empty apartment, I was wrong. Because even as I sat there in the armchair, the glass in one hand and the sheet of paper she'd inscribed in the other (and I'd sniffed that too, holding it to my nose and breathing deep in the hope of catching the remotest fleeting scent of her), there was the sound of her heels on the steps and her key turning in the lock, and in the next instant I had to look her in the face and listen to her tell me that she was in love.

There she was, flush with it, her hair disheveled and her clothes looking as if they'd been slept in (and they had, or no, they hadn't, and I didn't want to think about that either). She came straight into the room, threw down her purse and her coat, and told me she was sorry, but that was how it was, she was in love.

I don't get angry. I suppress my anger, drink it down like Angostura bitters, digest it, let it run through the bowels, shit it out—my mother taught me that.
Do what I say. Mind your manners. Live for me.
“We haven't even been married a year yet,” I said.

She was frantic, she couldn't sit down, pacing back and forth while I clung to the chair as if the ship had gone down and this was all that was left to me. “I don't care,” she said. “I'm sorry, and I don't want to hurt you—I'll always love you, and you're my first love, you know that—but this is something bigger than that, and I just can't help it. I can't.”

“He's married,” I said, and my voice was flat and toneless. The faucet was dripping in the sink, one thunderous drop after another hitting the
greased porcelain of the unwashed plates and cups and saucers. “He doesn't love you. It's just sex—he told me that. Just sex, Iris. He's a
sex
researcher.”

All the intensity of her face drew down to the frozen eyelet of her mouth and for a second I thought she was going to spit at me. “Is that what you call it—research?” She was trembling, lit up with the ecstasy of the moment, her eyes gone clear and hard. “Well, I don't care, I love him and it doesn't matter what happens. I can do research too. You'll see. You just wait and see.”

The next morning, early, while Prok was still upstairs brushing his teeth and Mac presiding over the kitchen with her whisk and bowl and a mug of coffee, I went to the house on First Street and rapped on the door till one of the children let me in. I don't recall which one it was—it might have been Bruce, the youngest, who would have been thirteen or fourteen at the time—but the door swung open, the adolescent face registered my presence and then vanished and I was left standing there in the anteroom, unannounced, the door open wide to the street behind me. Two years earlier I would have been mortified to be put in this position, but now, as the sounds of the house percolated round me—three children preparing for school and the slap of Prok's razor strop echoing down from above—I felt nothing but relief, blanketed by normalcy, by the regular thump of footsteps overhead and the murmurous dialogue of the girls drifting down the hall. I stood there a moment, then shut the door softly behind me. There was a smell of coffee, butter, hot grease, and I let it lead me to the kitchen, even while I tried to calm the pounding in my chest. Mac was at the stove, beating eggs for the pan, her back to me. She was wearing a housedress and an apron, her feet were bare and her hair was uncombed, and when I spoke her name she started visibly.

She turned to me, puzzled. “John?” she said, as if she couldn't quite place me. “What are you doing here at this hour—are you and Prok off somewhere? I thought it was next week you were going back to Indianapolis?”

“No,” I said, fumbling for the words I wanted, “I just, well—I came to see Prok, is Prok in? It's, well, it can't wait—”

She gave me a stricken look. There was danger here, and heartbreak too, and I was out of bounds—she could see that at a glance. “Have you eaten?” she said suddenly. “Because I can just add a couple eggs—and toast, do you want toast?”

“Is he upstairs?”

She might have nodded, or maybe she said, “Go ahead,” but the permission was implicit—I belonged here, I was part of this, part of this household, this family—and in the next moment I was bounding up the stairs even as the two girls, Joan and Anne, were coming down, dressed for school. I suppose they might have given me a quizzical look and perhaps even a giggle or two (they were eighteen and sixteen respectively), but it was nothing out of the ordinary—I was there, on the staircase, and I'd been there before, John Milk, the handsome young man with the recalcitrant hair, Daddy's friend, Daddy's assistant, his colleague and traveling companion. I found Prok in the bathroom, standing before the mirror, shaving. The door was open, he was in his underclothes, and he'd just scraped the last of the shaving cream from his chin when he became aware of me standing there in the doorway. “Prok,” I said, “I hope you won't—well, I didn't know where else to turn.”

I couldn't eat—I was too wrought up for that—but the two of them, Mac and Prok both, insisted on sitting me down at the table with a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. Throughout breakfast, Prok kept fastening on me with that intent gaze of his, as if he were trying to reduce me to my constituent parts for a physiologic study of variations in the human organism under stress, but he talked exclusively of the project. “The children were really something, weren't they, Milk? And, Mac, you should have seen them, fully cognizant of sexual roles even at four and five years old, and by seven or eight a number of them had already seen the genitalia of the opposite sex, and there was that one girl, Milk, you remember her? The one in pigtails? She'd seen both her parents naked—
saw
them on a regular basis.” When we were done—I barely touched my food—he got up in his usual brisk way, squared his bow tie
in the hall mirror and informed me that we'd better hurry if we were going to be at work on time.

The minute we were out of the house he asked me what the matter was.

“It's Iris,” I told him, struggling to keep pace with him as we swung through the gate and out onto the street. I was having trouble getting it out, the words colliding in my head, and the emotions too, choking at me in some deep glandular way. Prok shot me an impatient look. “She says she's in love with Corcoran, and that”—and here I felt myself breaking down—“that she wants to move in with him, to live with him. To, to—”

His head was down, his shoulders hunched, and he was already elongating into his no-nonsense stride, no time to waste, no time to stand still in the street and shoot the breeze when there was work to be done. What he said was, “We can't have that.”

No,
I thought,
no, of course we can't.

“But you approved,” I said, “or that's what Corcoran told me, that you said, well, that you gave your blessing. To the whole thing, I mean.”

The look he gave me—sidelong, over his jolting shoulder—wasn't in the least sympathetic. It was fierce, irascible, the sort of look that came over his face when he was challenged, when the Thurman B. Rices and Dean Hoenigs of the world rose up to castigate him on whatever grounds, whether statistical or moral. “We're adults, Milk,” he snapped. “Consenting adults. No one needs my permission to do anything.”

I was right there now, right at his shoulder, drawn up even with him, and I came as close to losing control then as I ever have—there were accusations on my lips, I know it, and I wanted to throw his words right back at him, but the best I could manage was just another reflection of my own inadequacy, a kind of bleat of agony that might have come from the lips of a child. “It's eating me up inside,” I said, and for all my conditioning I seemed to be out of breath, my legs pumping automatically, air in, air out. “I love her. I want her back.”

We walked on in silence a moment, and I can't tell you whether the sun was shining and the squirrels clambering up the trees or the wind
blowing a gale, because I was at the breaking point and nothing of the world of appearances held any interest for me, all of it just a backdrop now to the scene I was playing out, the heartsick lover, the cuckold, the fool in motley. “You say she wants to
move in
with him?” he said. He gave me the snatching look.

I nodded. We were hurrying along so fast I was on the verge of breaking into a jog. “She's been with him the past three nights and she, she came home only to get her things last night and she told me she was”—I felt ridiculous saying it, but I couldn't stop myself—“doing
research.
”

Suddenly we were stopped dead in our tracks, right there in the middle of the sidewalk, a pair of student lovers splitting up to edge around us on either side, the trees wheeling overhead and everything aside from Prok's face, his glasses, his eyes, rushing past in a blur of motion. “Research?” he said. “But that's absurd. It's wrong. And you know, John, you of all people, because I've emphasized it over and over again, how much our work depends on the public perception of it?”

“Of course. That's what I'm saying.”

His jaw was set. The wind, if there was a wind, might have ruffled the stiff crest of his hair. “We can't afford to give them any ammunition.”

“No, of course not.” I wanted to look away. There was fluid in my eyes—tears, that is—and I didn't want to expose myself.

“You and Mac, for example. Mutually beneficial, just as I've said all along, pleasure given, pleasure taken. That's the way it should be. We need to break down our inhibitions and express ourselves to the fullest, I do believe that with all my heart. But it has to be kept strictly confidential, and every one of us—not just the husbands but the wives too—must understand that we're part of something larger here, much larger. And under scrutiny, under the microscope, John. You know that, don't you?” He caught himself. We were still rooted there, and he made as if to move off, but caught himself again. “Has anyone seen her with him, seen her go to his apartment?”

“I don't know,” I said miserably. I was studying the pattern of the sidewalk. I couldn't look him in the eye. “But I don't see how, well, in a small town like this—or not for long, anyway.”

Prok didn't curse. He never used expletives or indulged dirty jokes, though of course in later years he was deluged with them, but now, standing there in the street, he came as close to it as I can recall. He spat something out, some Latin term, and then we were walking again and he was muttering about Corcoran, about how he blamed himself for not making the situation “absolutely clear, so clear any idiot could see through to the truth and necessity of it.” We crossed Atwater, then Third, moved up the walk and into the aegis of the big looming limestone buildings of the campus. “I'm sorry, John,” he said, pinning me with his gaze as if I were the one threatening to bring the research down, “but we just can't have it.”

Two weeks later, though her daughters' school was still in session and they would have to miss the last six weeks of the term, Violet Corcoran left South Bend and moved into her husband's cramped apartment on College Avenue in downtown Bloomington. She took charge of things right away, opening up an account at the grocery, arranging for a tutor and putting Lloyd Wheeler, the best real-estate agent in town, on the trail of a suitable property, with a yard for the girls, a garage for the Cadillac and shade trees to mitigate the summer heat. Prok had had a talk with Corcoran—he came right up the stairs of Biology Hall the morning I'd voiced my complaint, slammed into the back office and chewed him out, in no uncertain terms—and Corcoran had a talk with Iris five minutes later, on the telephone to his apartment. All the while I sat at my desk, drinking coffee as if my veins flowed with nothing else.

If I think about it now, I have to chalk the whole thing up to Iris's immaturity—she was just twenty when we married and, as I say, hadn't had any previous experience with men, and perhaps that was unfair to her, or certainly it was, especially in the context of the project we were all engaged in and the relations I'd had outside of the marriage. She had no way of gauging what she was doing, of putting a cap on her emotions and keeping things in perspective—she was infatuated, that was all, like so many of the teenage girls we interviewed over their first crushes and so on. Above all, she was stubborn. Once she set her sights on something,
it was hard to turn her, and when she came through the office door an hour later, her face drained of color and her eyes red-veined and swollen, I can't say I was surprised, though I shrank inside. Prok happened to be standing over me, comparing a chart with one of mine, and Corcoran, the self-satisfied smile for once kneaded out of his features, sat hunched at his desk in the back room. “You can't do this,” she said.