The Inner Circle (39 page)

The room was dim, stifling, and Iris was there, seated on the sofa with another woman, the radio turned up loud and a dance band keeping the beat. There was cigarette smoke, there were cocktails, and as I set down the suitcase I saw that the other woman was Violet Corcoran, in a pair of shorts and a blouse that left her midriff bare.

“John?” Iris called, and her voice was slurred with drink, or maybe that was my imagination. “John? Is that you?” She was up out of the couch now, barefooted, in a pair of white shorts, and she ran to me and threw herself into my arms. “My God, I thought you'd never get here!” We kissed, hurriedly, frantically, and I tasted the alcohol on her tongue—gin—and the heat and surprise and exultation. “Violet,” she called, swinging away from me, “look who's here!”

I don't know if this is the time to mention it, but I should say that my relationship with Violet Corcoran, begun on that night in the office at Prok's instigation, was never anything more than merely satisfactory. We came together—she had me inside of her practically before I could get my trousers down—and afterward we had a drink and I walked her home, and then we met in a motor court outside of town three or four times, but it all felt scripted and cold, and gradually we both came to understand that there was no need to pursue things further. I liked her. Truly, I did. She was effusive and genuine and I was glad to see her there keeping Iris company.

“The return of the wanderers,” Violet said, or something like it. She'd risen from the couch and was already gathering up her things. “I guess
this means I'd better hightail it home for Purvis—and oh, God, the babysitter—but hi, John, and goodbye.” She gave a wink. “I wouldn't want to get in the way of anything here—”

The screen door slammed behind her and we both turned to watch her skip down the walk even as a flash of lightning lit the room, followed by a dull rumble of thunder. It took me a moment to realize the radio was still on—static crackled from the speaker, followed by three quick incinerating bursts that were like a rudimentary code—and then the program went dead and everything was still. I could smell the edge of the wetness on the air, as if a swamp had been dredged and everything that had lain seething there had been drawn up into the atmosphere, fish, newts, turtles and tadpoles, the muck itself, and every plant left naked to the root. Nothing moved. The light was like poured metal. I turned to Iris, but she seemed strange to me, a dark and pretty stranger with bare feet and painted toenails staring out through the rusted grid of the screen door. The moment lengthened, stretched to the breaking point, and I have to admit I felt awkward there in my own house with my own wife, as if I were a stranger to her too. Finally, she turned to me, hands on her hips now—more body language—and said, “I guess you want a drink, huh? Or dinner. You want dinner?”

“Sure,” I said. “A drink would be nice. But we already, well, we stopped along the way, and—well, I missed you. I did. It was—I never expected it would be so long. It was Prok, you know that.”

Her eyes were moist—but they were more than moist, they were wet, overflowing. The breeze stirred the trees and rushed the door. “I feel like a war bride,” she said, letting her hands drop to her sides. “I might as well be. And you. You might as well be a soldier. On Tarawa or someplace. You might as well be dead.”

I said her name, softly, and I drew her to me and put my arms around her. I held her a moment, rocking with her in my arms, and then it all came out of her. She was crying—sobbing, actually—and I could feel the tug and release of emotion running through her like a new kind of heartbeat geared to some other system altogether. “I missed you too,” she whispered.

Ten minutes later we were nestled on the couch, watching the rain sweep the street and bow the trees. The smell of rot faded as soon as the storm broke, replaced now with an astringent freshness out of the north, clear pellets dropping down from the troposphere to beat tinnily at the gutters and saturate the patch of lawn out front. Iris had made me a bourbon and water and another gin and tonic for herself. We were celebrating—drinking to my return—but it didn't feel like a celebration. It felt sad and unformed, and I wanted to take her into the bedroom and show her in the most elemental way how much I'd missed her, but that wouldn't have been right, not yet. First we had to talk things out.

“He was disgusting, wasn't he?”

“Who?”

“Your Mr. X.”

I had to give her this. I sipped my drink and nodded slowly. She'd put something on the stove for me, out of duty, I suppose, though I'd reiterated that I wasn't hungry—at least not for food—and the lid of the pot rattled as whatever it was came to a boil. “Yeah,” I said. “I suppose.”

“I'll bet Prok loved him.”

“Prok doesn't make those judgments, you know that.”

She said nothing, and we both stared out at the rain.
“Tortillas,”
she said after a while, enunciating a hard
l
where she should have elided, “they're Mexican, is that it?”

“Tortee-yas,” I said. “Yes, that's right. They have them in Texas. New Mexico too.”

“What are they like, pancakes?”

“A little, I guess. They're flat. Like unleavened bread. They make them out of flour or cornmeal, pat them with their hands—the Indians and Mexicans—and then they put a filling inside or use them to scoop up beans and rice and whatnot.”

She was silent a moment, sipping at her drink. “Pretty exotic, huh? You're not going to turn Mexican on me, are you? With what—a
serape,
isn't that what they call them, and a
sombrero
? What do I call you, Don John? Or Don Juan, would that be better?”

I leaned in to kiss her. “Don Juan will do nicely. But I wish you were there to taste them, and the
frijoles
and
salsa
too. And these things they call
tamales,
wrapped up in corn husks. You'd like them. You would.”

She shrugged. “Yeah,” she said. “Sure I would. If I ever got to go anyplace.”

“You will,” I said. “I promise.”

“When? We can't afford a vacation. It's a joke. And my mother—just to visit her, just the bus fare puts a strain on the budget. No, John, you can keep your tortee-yas.”

The rain seemed to intensify then, a crashing fall that silenced everything. I didn't want to bicker, didn't want anything to interfere with the unalloyed pleasure of seeing her again and the prospect of sex, marital relations, the two of us in bed together after five long weeks of enforced abstinence, and I was on fire to touch her, undress her, put my tongue in her mouth and lose my fingers in her hair. I leaned forward to light a cigarette, trying to figure what I could do to defuse the situation. She was bitter, I could understand that. She felt deserted, felt that life was passing her by while I was off experiencing it to the full—which wasn't true, not by a long shot, as I think I've made clear here. The problem wasn't unique. Any man who traveled for a living, whether he was in the service or in sales or meteorology or the railroad industry, had of necessity to leave his wife behind for long stretches at a time—that was just the nature of certain professions.

Mac had the same problem, and she'd found a way to deal with it. Though she never let it slip in public, I knew she was frustrated—she wanted to be included too, but Prok made a fraternity of his research and she turned to the children and her knitting and the Girl Scouts in compensation. The closest she ever came to criticism, to my knowledge, was a phrase she let slip in one of the women's magazines after the male volume had come out. She'd been asked about Prok and his travels and if his devotion to research didn't make things hard on her, and her answer was telling: “I hardly see him at night since he took up sex.” Everyone had laughed—Clara Kinsey had come up with a bon mot—but I saw the truth of it.

One time—and this was after Rutledge had joined us and the Kinsey children were grown and out of the house—Mac came along with us on one of our expeditions, just to participate, to do something other than housework for a change. I can't recall now where it was, some uninspiring midwestern college town, no doubt, a place little different from Bloomington, and it was probably winter too, so that even the scenery was unrelieved. We checked into a hotel, the usual arrangement, and got two adjoining rooms, Prok, Mac, Rutledge and I, Corcoran having stayed behind to man the fort at the Institute. Mac entertained herself as best she could while we recorded our interviews—she might have gone to the snowbound park or poked in at the library or a thrift shop, I don't know. Afterward, we had a late supper and went up to the rooms, where I assumed Prok and Mac would retire and leave Rutledge and me to fend for ourselves. But Prok was especially keyed up that night, pacing round the floor and going on about his enemies—their legions had grown over the years—and some of the oddities that had come up in the interviews that day. And films. He was just then pioneering the use of film in recording the mating habits of various species of animal, and I remember he was particularly excited about the work of a Professer Shadle at the University of Buffalo, who had apparently documented the reproductive behavior of captive porcupines. “Porcupines!” Prok kept exclaiming. “Can you imagine that? With all that defensive armor? And yet they still, of course, manage coitus, or where would the species be?”

Mac was right there with him, never shy about expressing her views, and Rutledge was fully engaged too, interjecting opinions, pulling his chin over this thought or that, waving his hands in expostulation; I was content to sit back with a Coca-Cola and listen, though I wished I could have lit up a cigarette. (About Rutledge: he was a Princeton Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology, thirty-eight years old, a neat, limber man with a slight stoop and a sardonic grin who wore a wire-thin mustache in homage to his Iberian ancestry on his mother's side, and maybe even to Duke Ellington too. For what it's worth, incidentally, Prok detested all facial hair, arguing that only someone with something to hide would
want to mask his features.) After a while, the subject turned from porcupine sex to human sex and Prok's usual gloss on the mores of the day—we were all too inhibited, he insisted, even those of us in the highest ranks of sex research, those of us right there in that very room. “Oh, really?” Rutledge put in, rising to the bait. “How so?”

“Take Mac, for instance,” Prok said, catching himself up in midstride. “Here's an engaging, desirable woman sitting right here with us as we jaw on about sex, and we haven't given a thought to taking advantage of the situation, now have we?”

“What do you mean?” Rutledge was leaning against the far wall, an empty soft-drink bottle and a half-eaten hamburger sandwich on the bureau beside him. Two quick nervous fingers went to his mustache.

“To enjoy ourselves with her, obviously. You're willing, aren't you, Mac?”

Mac, seated in the armchair with her knitting, glanced up sharply, then looked away. She murmured something that sounded like assent, and I felt myself go numb. I couldn't look at her. I wanted to get up out of the chair, push through the door and go out into the dark streets of a city I didn't know and didn't care about and just walk till my legs gave out. It wasn't jealousy I was feeling, but something else altogether, something I couldn't have put in words if you'd asked me.

“Oh, but that hardly proves anything—that's just convention.”

Prok's eyes were glowing. “My point exactly.”

There was some further debate, Mac's opinion solicited, mine, the ball going back and forth between Rutledge and Prok, but ultimately Prok made a challenge of it: either we expressed ourselves sexually, without inhibition, or we proved his point. “Actions speak louder than words, wouldn't you agree?”

Was she enthusiastic? I couldn't read her, but all traces of her girlishness had vanished and she'd put on her objective face—this wasn't what she'd come for, wasn't what she'd expected. Rutledge—he was married, the father of two—seemed nonplussed. “But go ahead,” Prok insisted, “enjoy yourselves—Rutledge, you're the new man, why don't you go first?”

What I'm trying to indicate here is that Iris's feelings were by no means unique, though I understood and wanted only to placate her, to love and support her and give her everything I had to offer, emotionally and physically both. “Iris,” I said, “come on. Let's not fight.”

“Keep them,” she said, even as the thunder rattled the windows and drummed at the walls, “and all the rest of your Mexican delicacies.” Her face was featureless in the dimming light. “I can eat meat loaf.”

“Are you listening to yourself? That's ridiculous. You don't have to—”

“Or salt pork. Or hardtack,” she said, and she was smiling now, her beautiful smile, enriched with softness and sympathy. “Give me hardtack any day.”

I reached out and stroked the back of her hand. “Okay, point taken. I'll never mention
tortillas
again.”

Before she could respond there came a plaintive choked cry from the kitchen, something very like a cat's mewing, followed by the thump of a compact body springing from sink to floor, and in the next moment the bead curtains parted and I found myself staring into the unblinking yellow gaze of the biggest tomcat I'd ever seen. “What's that?” I asked stupidly.

“A cat. His name's Addison.”

“You're kidding,” I said.

She ignored me. “Here, Addison. Come here, boy,” she cooed, and the cat, which had frozen at the sight of me, began to inch across the carpet on its abdomen. When it reached the couch it sprang up with a practiced leap and settled down in her lap.

“But we can't have a cat. You know I'm allergic, and its food—it's an expense. I mean, who's going to pay for the food?”