The Inner Circle (11 page)

There seemed to be a ringing in my ears, some sort of tocsin repeating itself there, and I must have raised my voice to be heard over it. “I have a confession to make.”

For once, Prok had nothing to say. He receded into his interview mode, all ears.

“Well, I—when you were away I broke the code. The secondary code, that is. I—I'm afraid I went through your desk.”

His first response was disbelief. “Impossible,” he said.

I held his gaze unflinchingly, the bells ringing in my ears, his eyes fading in and out of focus till they were like twin blue planets floating in the ether. “I looked up only two histories, that's all, and I know it's unforgivable but I just couldn't help myself …”

One word only: “Whose?”

Something flew at the window then, beating toward the light of the lamp, a bat, I suppose, or a bird disoriented in the shadows of the fallen night. There was a dull thump of wings against the glass, and then it was gone. “Yours,” I said, the voice strangled in my throat. “And Mac's.”

He let me dangle a moment, then said, “You broke the code?”

“Yes,” I murmured.

“I never imagined anyone could break my code, even if they did somehow get access to it. You realize I'll now have to devise a new one?”

“Yes.”

“And that it will have to be infinitely more complex?”

I said nothing, thinking of the work it would entail, the waste of his irretrievable time, my own idle curiosity and how I'd set back the project before I'd even had a chance to contribute to it. I was angry with myself. And ashamed.

Prok got up, crossed to the mantel and spent a moment rearranging the framed photos there. I studied him from the rear, the long tapering range of him, the narrowed shoulders, the bristle of hair. He went next to the window, peered out into the darkness, then came back across the room and settled on the sofa before reaching up to flick off the lamp. Shadows stole out to enclose the room, the only light emanating from a lamp in the hallway. “So,” he said finally, “you know my history, then? But here”—patting the place beside him on the sofa—“come here and sit.”

I obeyed. I got up from the chair and eased in beside him on the sofa.

He put his arm round my shoulder then and drew me to him so that our faces were no more than six inches apart. “You shouldn't have pried, John,” he whispered. “Shouldn't have. But I tell you one thing, it was good of you to confess.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“Demonstrates character. You realize that, don't you?” He gave my shoulder a fraternal squeeze. “You're a fine young man, John, and I appreciate your candor, I do.”

And then something strange happened, the last thing I would have
expected under the circumstances—he kissed me. Leaned in, closed his eyes and kissed me. Some period of time passed during which neither of us spoke, then he took me by the hand and led me up the stairs to the spare room in the attic, and I remember a Ping-Pong table there, children's things, a fishing rod, an old sewing machine—and a bed. I didn't go home that night, not until very late.

Iris was taking a Shakespeare course that semester in the same building where I was sitting in on Professor Ellis's Modern British Poetry. I didn't realize it at the time because I hadn't yet got around to contacting her, though I'd meant to, so it was something of a surprise to run into her in the corridor one afternoon. As I remember it, the day was dismal, hanging like lint in the windows, the linoleum slick with wet, the whole world giving off a reek of mold and ferment. Rain had fallen steadily for the past week and there was more in the forecast. I was thinking nothing, umbrella, notebook and poetry text tucked under one arm, dripping hat in the other, making my desultory way through the mob of students in the corridor. Perhaps I was dreaming. Perhaps that was it.

She was on me before I could prepare myself, right there in front of me, two sets of shoulders parting, a girl in a yellow mackintosh grinning and ducking out of the way, somebody calling out something. Iris. There she was. We both pulled up short. “Hi,” she said, and her smile was an education in itself.

“Yes,” I said, “hi.”

Her eyes seemed to drain all the available light out of the corridor, and there was nothing I could do but stare into them, fascinated. She seemed to have done something to her hair too, or maybe it was just wet. What was she wearing? A sweater six sizes too big for her, woolen skirt, ankle socks, saddle shoes. “You have Ellis this period?”

“Modern British,” I said. “Poetry, that is. But listen, I never—did you get my note?”

She gave me a quizzical look.

“You know, that day—when we were supposed to go to the play? I left
the tickets, and you know, a note, with the girl at the desk. The RA. I just wondered if you, well, if you got them.”

Two streams of students were making their way round us as we stood there like posts in the dank hallway. There was a buzz of talk, I saw Professor Ellis at the far end of the corridor, a hundred pairs of shoes squealed on the wet linoleum. “Please, John,” she said, her mouth drawn down to nothing, a slash, a telltale crack in the porcelain shell of her shining, martyred face, “not here. This isn't the place.”

I just stared at her, mortified. An overwhelming sense of guilt and loss, of a doomed and inextricable culpability, began to drum at the taut skin of me, and, yes, the back of my neck went cold and the hair prickled on my scalp. “At least hear me out,” I said.

“You want to talk? All right. Fine. I'd be interested to hear what you have to say, I really would.” Her face was bled of color now, and she held herself absolutely rigid. “Four o'clock,” she said, her voice struggling for the right tone, “at Webster's. You can't miss me. I'll be the girl at the back table, sitting all by herself.”

I had to ask Prok to shift my hours that day, and I can't say that he was overjoyed about it—anything that interfered with work was antithetical to his project, and so, by extension, to him—but I managed to get to Webster's Drugstore before she did, and when she came through the door in her rain hat and made a show of shaking out her umbrella and throwing back her hair to mask whatever she was feeling, I was there. I told her I was glad she could come and then I told her how much I liked her and how sorry I was for what had happened, and my explanation probably ran to several paragraphs, but suffice it to say that I did adduce Prok and the importance of cultivating him for the sake of my job and future prospects.

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?”