The Inner Circle (47 page)

“That's all right, John,” she said after a moment. “You need a break, don't you? I understand. Go out and have a couple of drinks, but be careful if you do wind up driving home.” There was a click over the line, and I thought she'd hung up, but then her voice came back: “Did Mike say how much the car was going to be?”

“I don't know. Fifty dollars, maybe sixty, seventy. Who knows?”

“Oh, John.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I know.”

There was no one I recognized at the tavern, a new crop of students, two men my age at the end of the bar who might have been lecturers or assistant lecturers, a smattering of women sitting with men in shirtsleeves, the jukebox going, the bartender presiding with his swollen, tenderized face. It was hot and the ceiling fan wasn't doing much to improve the situation. I settled in with a beer and bourbon chaser and lost myself in the newspaper. After a while—I might have been on my second round, I suppose—I became aware of movement to my right, of someone hovering there on the periphery, and I looked up absently into the face of Richard Elster. He was smiling, as if he were glad to see me, and there was another man with him—tall, thin-faced, in a dark wool suit that looked expensive and much too heavy for the place and the season—and he was smiling too, as if we were old acquaintances. “Hi, John,” Elster said, “nice to see you. This is Fred Skittering. Fred, John.”

We shook hands, and then Fred Skittering said something about how hot it was and he reached up to pull his tie loose and unfasten the top button of his shirt collar. “No reason to stand on formality here, is there?” he said. “We are in Indiana, after all, aren't we?”

“Yes,” I said, “that we are.”

Elster's grin was of the canned variety, and there was something in his eyes I should have been alert to. Years had gone by since I'd worked as his underling and we saw each other almost daily in the corridors of Biology Hall, and yet there had always been a coldness between us. As I've said, he was the petty sort, and though Prok had put him in charge of that part of our library that remained on the shelves—that is, the tamer books in the field—he never forgave me my elevation above him. Generally, he passed me in the hall or on the walk out front of the building without so much as a nod—and now, here he was, elbowing in beside me at the bar, all smiles, with his sliver-faced friend in the big-city suit. Warning bells should have gone off in my head, but I was preoccupied and I was drinking and I just looked from Elster to his friend and back again, chasing round a smile myself. I suppose, in my mood, I was glad for the company.

I watched them order, light cigarettes, watched the bartender move heavily from the tap and set down two beers on the counter before them. Fred Skittering drained his in a gulp, while Elster raised the glass to his lips with both hands, like a priest with the chalice, and took a delicate sip. Both of them set down their glasses with a sigh of satisfaction, and then Elster leaned in confidentially and asked, “Everything going all right with Iris? It's her first, isn't it?”

I didn't know what to say. This was the first I knew that he was even aware I was married, let alone that my wife was pregnant.

“You know, Claudette's expecting too—in three weeks, actually. This'll be our third—we've got one of each now, and she wants a girl, but I'm hoping for another boy.” He bent to his beer. Skittering held on to his smile. “They have the same obstetrician,” Elster went on, “the one Prok recommended. He did recommend Bergstrom to you, didn't he?”

Again, I was astonished.
Prok?
He was calling Kinsey
Prok?
“You—I didn't know, well, that you—and Prok, that is—”

“Oh, yes, yes. We've been conferring on the library quite a bit, you know. Space, that's what we're looking for, more space.”

Skittering flagged down the bartender. “Another round,” he said, and
what I heard in his voice was New York, cab drivers, alleyways, nightclubs. “And buy one for John here too,” he said. “On me.”

The beers came, and a shot of bourbon with each of them. I thanked Skittering and we made small talk awhile. What did he do for a living? Oh, he traveled. For a company. Nothing exciting really. “And what about you?” he asked.

I told him I worked with Dr. Kinsey.

“The sex researcher?”

“I'm part of his staff.” I drank off the bourbon and chased it with a long pull at the beer. “The first person he took on, actually,” I said, and I couldn't help the pride from creeping into my voice. “I've been with him since the beginning.”

“Really?” he said. “Well, that's certainly interesting.” And he tipped his head back to drain the shot glass while Elster, his grin still in place, toyed with his own. “But uh,
sex
research—how exactly do you go about that, I mean, you can't just burst into people's bedrooms in the middle of the night, can you? Say, barkeep,” he called and made a circular motion with one hand to indicate that another round was in order. “What is it, surveys and the like?”

I'm sure you've already anticipated me, of course—I was being played here, and by a past master. Fred Skittering, as it turned out, had been a war correspondent and had made something of a name for himself in the European Theater, a name I might have recognized in another connection. But here, in Bloomington, in the neighborhood tavern I'd been frequenting since my student days, it went right by me. He was working for the Associated Press even as he stood there at the bar, though I didn't yet know it and I'd already taken the bait. “Surveys?” I gave a disdainful shrug. “Surveys are all but useless. Think of it: where's the control? You get a survey in the mail and either you fill it out or you don't, either you're honest and forthcoming or not, and who's to know the difference? No, our methods”—I lowered my voice—“our methods are as scientific and statistically reliable as you could ever hope to get.”

A period of time went by. People drifted in and out of the bar. Beyond the windows, at the far end of the street where the trees gave out,
lightning snaked across the horizon. I was never particularly loquacious, never one to run off at the mouth, as our lower-level subjects might have put it, but I just couldn't seem to stop talking that night. Maybe it was my mood. The weather. Iris. Maybe it was just shop talk—I was inordinately proud of what we were accomplishing, Prok, Corcoran, Rutledge and I, four against the world, and yet I was frustrated too because to this point we'd kept it all so close. Here was a sympathetic ear. Here was Elster—and this stranger—and who would have guessed?

What saved me was Betty. I was on the verge of compromising the project, undermining Prok's faith in me, embarrassing myself in the deepest, most hopeless way, the way of the apostate, the quisling, the dupe, when Betty appeared. I hadn't laid eyes on her since she'd played the female lead in the previous fall's demonstration in Prok's attic—I didn't even remember her name actually. But there she was, ducking through the door with another young woman, both of them dressed casually, in skirt and blouse, as if they were students—or wanted to be taken for students. I looked up and we exchanged a glance, and then she was slipping into a booth at the far end of the room in a single graceful movement, one hand going to the back of her thighs to smooth out her skirt as she slid over the slick wooden surface of the bench. Skittering was saying something about another sex survey he'd heard of—in Denmark, he thought it was—while Elster (his shill? his Judas?) leaned over his elbows and concentrated on my face.

I saw the girl—
Betty,
and her name came to me in a flash—glance up at me again as the waitress set two martinis down on the table. She gave me a smile when she saw that I'd recognized her, the child's eyes fading into the woman's face, the prominent cheekbones, the sharp teeth, her hair pinned up at the crown and spilling into a complex of curls at her shoulders. I smiled back even as Skittering said, “But Kinsey, the man, I mean, what's it like working with him?” and because I was drunk, I raised my glass and saluted her across the room.

And then I was back in the moment, regarding Elster's face—the face of a saboteur, not a friend or well-wisher—in a whole new light. I took a moment, studying Skittering now, and all at once I understood. Skittering
had got to Elster, and Elster had got to me, and what they were after wasn't statistics, but something deeper, more dangerous. I shrugged. “He's a genius,” I said. “A great man. The greatest man I've ever known.”

“Yes, but”—a cigarette to the lips, a distracted wave at the ashtray—“underneath all that, I mean. The man. The man himself? Certainly he must have some sort of oddities or quirks, irritating habits—I hear he can be pretty short sometimes, isn't that right?”

“Listen,” I said, “I don't mean to be rude, but I see a friend over there—an acquaintance, a friend of the research, actually—and really, I have to”—I was pushing myself away from the bar, patting down my pockets for cigarettes—“but thanks for the drinks, thank you, nice meeting you.”

The girl—Betty—watched the entire transaction, the nod in her direction, the dual handshakes, the fading expressions of Elster and Skittering, even as her friend turned to look over her shoulder and I weaved my way across the room to her, glass in hand. I didn't know what I was doing really, just that I was extricating myself from an awkward situation, and that, as much as anything, impelled me toward her. “Hello,” I said, sweeping the hair away from my forehead with my free hand as I swayed over her, “remember me?”

Her smile was glossy, her lips pulled back tightly over her teeth, and forgive me if I couldn't help picturing those lips as they stretched wide to receive Corcoran, that heroic motion, in and out, and the tissue there glistening with fluids. “Yeah, sure,” she said, and she slid over and patted the seat beside her. “Here, take a load off. Come on.”

I eased in beside her, a quick glance for Elster and his companion, who were fixed on me like birds of prey, and the olfactory memory of her came back to me in a rush, that perfume, the heat of her body, the smell of her hair.

“This is Marsha,” she said, indicating the friend across the narrow table (spaniel eyes, the face of Stan Laurel, a frizz of apricot-colored hair), “and what was your name again?”

My name was John. And I gave it to her. And I gave her her smile back too.

The waitress was there and she asked if we wanted to see a menu. The girls' martini glasses were empty. Betty wanted another drink and she thought looking at the menu might be a good idea. The friend claimed that the one drink had gone to her head, and she didn't know, but sure, what the hey, she'd have another. That was fine by me, though I didn't have a whole lot of cash on me, because I'd planned on a couple of drinks, a bite to eat, and then a five-point-two-mile hike, and nothing more. Iris was at home, big as a house. The house was at home, bigger than a house. I ordered another beer and Betty told the waitress to bring her a porterhouse steak—“rare to bloody”—with fries and a house salad with Thousand Island dressing.

After that the three of us beamed at one another for a while and we talked about Bloomington, how endlessly, hopelessly, stuporifically dull it was, and we talked about movie stars—John Garfield, wasn't he disgusting, or raw or whatever you wanted to call it?—and our travels, such as they were. Both girls were mad for New York, though as it turned out neither had been there, and I suppose it was only natural that I should play up my experiences there and maybe even embroider them a bit. Then the steak came and the friend left—she had to be up early in the morning—and when I glanced over my shoulder Elster and Skittering were gone too.

“So are you married?” the girl said.

“No.”

“Then what's that on your finger?”

“This?”

“Yeah,
that.
”

“It's a wedding ring.”

She dropped her eyes to the plate a moment, the knife, the fork, cut a wedge of steak and looked up again as she tucked it between her lips. “Divorced?”

“Does it matter?”

She shrugged, dropped her eyes to the plate again.

“What about you,” I said. “Are you—and please don't take this the wrong way—are you, well, a
professional
?”

She was chewing thoughtfully, slowly, her eyes reemerging now to lock on mine. “What is this—another interview?”

“You mean you already—?” I made a mental note to go to the files in the morning and violate our code of anonymity yet again. “Who was it, Corcoran?”

“Yeah,” she said, “Purvis. He's a great friend of mine, you know that, don't you?”

I wasn't very good at this, but the liquor was in my veins and liquor always made me feel unbeatable. “I gathered that,” I said. “From the last time I saw you.”

She ignored me. Went for the steak again. Picked up a french fry and licked the salt from it with quick pink stabs of her tongue before folding it into her mouth. “No,” she said, “in answer to your question. I'm not a professional, whatever that means. I don't take money for it, if that's what you're asking, and that's down on the interview sheet too.”

I was getting the defiant look now, the look she'd given us all when we were milling around Prok's living room trying to summon the courage to get on with what we'd come for. “I like men,” she said. “Is that a crime?”

“No,” I said, “that's no crime at all.”

And then we were both laughing, laughing to beat the band, as they say, and in the throes of it she put a hand on my thigh to steady herself. The jukebox—I wasn't even aware to this point that it had fallen silent—roared back to life with something that had plenty of jump to it and we let the laughter trail off even as we began to feel the beat vibrating through the tabletop and the glasses in our hands and the seat of the bench we were sharing. People around us got up to dance and my fingers, independent of thought, began to tap out the rhythm. I was thinking I should ask her to dance, though I wasn't much good at it, but instead I said, “So what do you do—for a living, I mean?”