The Inner Circle (58 page)

I said nothing. I couldn't look at Iris.

“You're not getting sex shy on me, are you, Milk? Iris?”

That was when Iris spoke for the first time since we'd entered the room. She said one word only, and it went right to my heart. She said, “Purvis.”

“What was that?” Prok asked, his voice low and ominous.

She turned her head away. “I'll do it with Purvis.”

There was a long pause, everything in freefall, the whole project—files, the interview sheets, dog-eared proofs and thick-bound volumes—poised to drop down out of the sky as if dumped from the hold of an airliner, and I could picture it, clumps of papers thick on the hedges and lawns and rooftops of America and the housewives and their harried husbands plucking at the strings of one anonymous heartbreaking secret after another till they collapsed in one another's arms and wept for us all, us poor suffering human animals with our lusts and our hurts and our needs. And then Prok dropped his voice to a whisper and said, “No, not with Purvis. With me.”

I remember his legs, his massive hardened arterial legs, as he rose then and tugged at her wrist till she was standing too, her breasts exposed, all of her, and how she pulled back against him, how she said, “I would die first,” and then I was in motion and it was just like that wrestling match, like the football field. I don't know what came over me—or I do, I do—but Prok was on his back in the middle of the floor and everybody was rising now, even as Iris bent to snatch up her clothes and run.

We were very late with the babysitter that night—or at least I was, because Iris wasn't in the car and she wasn't at home or on any of the dark windswept streets I roamed till the sky went light and the sitter thrust her furious face at me through the gap of the door and John Jr. went heavy in my waiting arms.

I didn't go into work the next day. I saw to the needs of my son and sat by the phone, waiting for it to ring. After lunch—I boiled franks and opened a can of pork and beans—I put John Jr. in the car and drove the streets in a slow repetitive pattern, as if I were one of those geriatric cases looking for something I couldn't name. But I could name it:
Iris.
And what did I expect—that she'd be bouncing down the sidewalk somewhere, her hair flying in the wind, going shopping? I stopped in at the elementary school where she'd worked till our son was born, on the off-chance that she was filling in for an absent teacher, but, no, she wasn't there—in fact, the secretary in the main office, a new employee apparently, couldn't quite grasp who I was talking about. John Jr. chattered away at me for the first half hour or so, and he fooled with the buttons on the radio till he fell asleep in a haze of static, the car creeping along on its own while I stared through the windshield and let my mind race. At one point, desperate, I drove out to the quarry where in more innocent times we used to park and neck, and found myself scrambling over the stepped white rock and peering down into the darkening waters as if I could detect the slow wheeling drift of a suicide there.

After dinner—more franks, more beans—I sat numbed in the armchair in front of the cold fire and read
The House at Pooh Corner
aloud till I had it memorized and still John Jr. wanted me to go on. Couldn't we listen to the radio? I wondered. “No, read,” he said. And he interrupted me in the middle of the windy-day episode to ask, in his half-formed tones, “What's
blusterous?
”

“You know, like yesterday,” I told him, “when we were flying the kite?” He sat there beside me, the foreshortened limbs, the recalcitrant thatch of his hair that was a replica of my own (unbrushed, just as his face was unwashed, because I wasn't
much at that sort of thing either), and after a moment, he said, “Where's Mommy?” for what must have been the sixtieth time. “She went out,” I told him, and then I told him it was time for bed.

No one had called, not Mrs. Matthews to inquire if I was ill or Prok to apologize (or rather to accept my apology), not Rutledge or Corcoran or Mac. Finally, around eight, I dialed Corcoran's number, and Violet answered.

“Violet, it's John. Is Purvis there?”

Her voice was muted, all the familiarity washed out of it. “John,” she said, as if trying the name out. “Sure. Sure. I'll get him.”

“Hello, John?” Corcoran came on the line, and before I could respond, he was onto me. “What was that all about last night? You can't be—John, listen, we're all in this together, you know that. Nothing personal, right? You don't go shoving Prok around, nobody does. And then you don't show up for work—?”

“Is Iris there?”

“Iris? What are you talking about?”

“My wife. Iris.”

“Isn't she with you?”

“No,” I said, all the blood rushing to my face. “Isn't she with you?”

“John, listen, you're just upset right now, and it's foolish, it really is. Don't let this break us down, don't throw away your whole career over, over—”

“Love?”

He came right back at me, his voice cracking with exasperation. “No,” he said, “this isn't about love. Love has nothing to do with it. Nothing. Nothing at all.”

I put John Jr. to bed as best I could, with a cursory brushing of the teeth and a minimal face-scrubbing—he objected to the washcloth for some reason, it was too rough or it wasn't warm enough or there was too much soap on it or too little—and the next thing I knew I awoke to the sound of the car turning over in the driveway. By the time I got out the door and into the still-blustering night, the car was at the end of the drive, receding taillights, a quick angry flare of the brakes, no signal, and
then the twin beams of the headlights swinging out onto the highway, and by the time I got back in the house, back to John Jr.'s room, it was too late to realize that he wasn't there anymore.

For the next two days I was drunk. Not a pretty thing, not a rational thing, a weakness of mine, inherited in the genes from my dead father and his father before him—the Milches, from Verden, on the Aller River south of Bremen—and for all I knew there were a dozen Milch lushes there still, cousins and grand-uncles listening to tinny postwar jazz on second-rate radios and drowning their sorrows in Dinkelacker and schnapps. The first day I lay prostrate on the couch and drank what we had in the house, which consisted of a quart of beer gone flat in the refrigerator, my reserve fifth of bourbon, and finally, the contents of my flask (half-full of something that tasted like Geritol but was actually, I realized, the dregs of a pint of Southern Comfort with which I'd last filled it when Iris and I went to an IU football game the previous fall). I brought the flask to my lips—JAM, my graduation present, from Tommy, from Iris's brother—and stared at the ceiling. Earlier, I'd called Iris's mother in Michigan City. Was Iris there? A pause. The deep-freeze of my mother-in-law's voice. Yes, Iris was there. Could she come to the phone? No, she couldn't.

The second day I woke with a headache and made a shaky mess of the eggs and bacon and the rock-hard remains of Iris's loaf. I wasn't going into work, I wasn't calling my wife—let her call me—and above all I wasn't allowing myself to think about anything, not Prok, not the project or my colleagues or what had come over me in the attic three nights ago. We'd drunk Zombie cocktails, hadn't we? Well, all right: now I was a zombie, without affect or will. Around noon, still shaky, I walked into town in the burnished sunshine of an early spring day and made for the tavern, where they would have beer in abundance and a cornucopia of backlit bottles of hard liquor to steady it on the way down. I kept my head low and my eyes on the pavement, because the last thing I wanted was to see anybody I knew.

I don't remember having had anything to eat that afternoon. I drank, read the newspapers, went to the restroom, drank some more. It must
have been about six or so when I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see Elster standing there beside me. Richard Elster, that is, newly appointed librarian of the Institute, the man in charge of what would soon become the biggest sexology—and erotica—collection in the world, bigger even than those of the British Museum and the Vatican. “Hey,” he said, “John, where've you been?”

I didn't answer.

“I asked Bella, she said you were sick.”

I felt the irritation rising in me. “Who?”

“Bella. Mrs. Matthews. She said you had the flu.”

“I don't have the flu.”

The barman intervened to ask Elster what he was having and Elster ordered a beer before turning back to me. “Everything all right? Are you sure? Because I heard a rumor, about the other night—something about you and your wife?”

He was fishing. He didn't know a thing. None of us would have leaked a word, not on pain of death. I was sure of it. Absolutely. Still, I felt something clench inside of me.

“How is she, by the way? Because I wanted to tell you to tell her how well Claudette's doing, and Sally, our little one. Did you know Claudette's expecting again?”

“She's fine,” I said.

There was movement at the door, comings and goings, the jukebox lurched to life with some brainless female vocalist cooing something about love nests, and I lifted a finger for the barman. “What do I owe you?” I said.

“You're not leaving, are you?” Elster's mouth tightened around a look of disappointment and something more, belligerence. His voice went up a notch. “Because I just got here, and we're colleagues now, right? We're going to work together, share things, aren't we?” He was leaning over my shoulder as I gathered up my change, too close to me, invading my space, pushing—pushing, and I didn't know why. Then he said it: “Secrets, right? What goes on behind closed doors? I won't breathe a word, I swear it.”

I'd been drinking all day, and now all of a sudden I was sober. I
stood—he was a small man, his head at the level of my shoulders—and I think I might have jostled him, just a bit, and if I did it was purely accidental. “I've got to go,” I said.

“Where? To an empty house? Where's the fire, John?”

I stood there at the bar looking down into his prodding eyes. Elster, a little man in every way, but dangerous for all that. My voice was thick. “Nowhere,” I said, and I shoved by him.

“I know you!” he called at my back. “I know what you do!”

I'm not a violent person. Just the opposite—Iris is forever saying I let people walk all over me, and I suppose she has a point. But not that night. That night was different. It was as if everything I'd ever wanted or had was suddenly at stake—Prok, Iris, my career, my son—and I couldn't control myself. I was on my way to the door, faces gaping up at me, students, locals, women with their drinks arrested at their lips, when I swung round and grabbed Elster by the lapels of his jacket. His face whitened, his eyes sank into his head. “Hey,” the barman shouted. “Hey, cut that out!”

I could feel Elster coming up out of his shoes. My hands were trembling. “You don't know me,” I said, my voice steady now. “And you never will.”

The next morning I went into work. Mrs. Matthews tried not to show anything, but she couldn't help giving me a look caught midway between puzzlement and relief, and as I passed Prok's office he glanced up and leveled a steady gaze on me for a moment, then cleared his throat and said, “I'm going to need those charts, Milk. As soon as it's convenient.”

I might have said,
You can stuff your charts.
I might have said,
I've had it. I've had enough. I quit.
But all I did was return his stare just long enough so that he got the meaning of all I was feeling, and then I said, “Yes,” with a long propitiatory release of air, “I'll get right to them.”

I worked without pause all morning. I focused on the rectilinear lines and shadings of the graphs I was drawing, the correlated figures, the means and incidences that never lied. Both Rutledge and Corcoran stuck their heads in the door to welcome me back while Prok stayed put
in his office and Elster twice marched down the corridor with his shoulders thrust back and his gaze fixed on a point in the distance. The first chance I got—when I heard the telltale sounds of Prok rattling the paper bag in which he kept his lunchtime repast of sunflower seeds, nuts and chocolate bits—I went straight to his office and shut the door behind me.

“Prok,” I said, “I just wanted to, well, I wanted to—”

His elbows were splayed over his work, his eternal work. He looked worn and vitiated. His head hung there a moment as if on a tether, his shoulders slumped forward, and there was something in his eyes I'd never seen before—it wasn't weakness, never that, but something very near to it, a mildness, an acceptance, a plea. “No need, John,” he said, and then he repeated himself in a softer, gentler tone, “no need. But sit please. I need to talk to you—
we
need to talk.”

I pulled up the chair reserved for interviewees and eased myself down on the cushion. Something clanked in the pipes overhead. A thin restless light roamed over the windows, clouds chasing after the sunlight and then giving it up again.

“Where do I start?” he mused, sitting back now to run a hand through his hair. “With women, I suppose. With marriage. We are studying the female of the species, after all, aren't we, John?”

I nodded.

“Interesting how the X chromosome prevails, isn't it—over time, that is?” He picked up a pen, set it down. “But what I mean to say is that marriage is the great and governing institution of our society, and we're devoted to it, you and I both, devoted to our wives, to Mac and Iris. And what you did the other night—no, now just hear me out—was understandable in its context, even if it shows how little you've learned here all these years.” He let out a long, slow breath. “But really, I do think that as my colleague, as my co-researcher—almost my son, John, my
son
—you have to realize that emotions, and emotional outbursts, have no place in our research. Let it go, John. Please.”