She was smiling now, John Jr. all over her—Please, please—something playful in her eyes, as in all is forgiven and why wrangle when love, the love between us, between two young healthy male and female human beings, was so much more than the sum of its losses and hesitations. “No,” she said, “it was something else. A statistic you could maybe help me with because it’s been a while.”
“Yes?”
“What was the average frequency of s-e-x”—spelling it out so that our son wouldn’t make a pet word of it, as he had with “bra” and “jock”—“for couples married at least five years? Once a week, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, no,” I said, wagging my head in a professorial way, “it’s at least twice that.”
The next day, at work, Rutledge and I took a coffee break together, and that was when I learned about Elster. We’d started out on the subject of the clarinet — I’d said something like, “I hear Hilda’s rediscovered her musical inspiration”—and then we’d gone on to discuss the Pacific Coast trip and how happy he’d been to stay behind this time because he really was getting tired of conducting interviews like a hired hand (“No offense, John”) when he thought he’d been taken on to do original research. As Prok’s equal, or at least his partner. And then, casually, as if it didn’t matter a whit, he dropped the news about Elster.
I was dumbstruck. “Elster?” I repeated. “But he’s, well, he’s no friend of the research. He — did I ever tell you about Fred Skittering, that whole incident?” And I told him, at length.
Rutledge was imperturbable. That was his chief characteristic. The building could be on fire — his hair could be on fire — and he wouldn’t raise his voice or move any more precipitately than he would at a funeral. I remembered the night in the hotel room with Mac and how he’d squared his shoulders and strolled into the bedroom with her as if it were a military matter, orders given, orders received. But now, as I revealed Elster’s perfidy — or his potential for it — his face took on a new look altogether. Finally he said, “You don’t think he can be trusted then?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t.”
He stroked his mustache, glanced down the hall to see if Prok were in sight, and lit up a cigarette. I watched him shake out the match, drop it to the floor and grind it underfoot. “Well, we’ll just have to be careful, that’s all, make a note of it, be sure Prok’s aware of the situation, because really, nobody’s in on anything here except for us, and I don’t have to tell you how the shit would hit the fan if anything, even the least tidbit, got out to the public. But look at Mrs. Matthews and the other women we’ve taken on, Laura Peterson and what’s her name. They haven’t got a clue, have they? And they’re right there with us every day in the office.”
I wasn’t convinced. Maybe I was overreacting, maybe I’d misread the man — but then there was that night at the tavern when he tried to get me to talk, and it wasn’t even for his own sake, but for some third party’s, for a journalist’s. Had he been paid off? Or was he just constitutionally a snake?
“By the way,” Rutledge said, squinting against the smoke of his cigarette and taking a sip from his coffee mug at the same time, “did you hear about the musicale Sunday?”
I held out my palms in response, and I suppose I must have looked bleak over the prospect. “Uh-uh,” I said finally. “No.” It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy the opportunity to learn about classical music — as I say, I’ve really come to appreciate it, even opera — but that the musicales seemed just another extension of work, of the Institute’s tentacles. And Iris hated them. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m tired. I’ve had it up to here with musicales, if you want to know the truth.”
Rutledge was watching me steadily, his lips composed round the butt of his cigarette and the thin tracery of his mustache. “Yeah,” he said, “I know what you mean. But something’s up — it’s going to be just us. And the wives.”
“Just us? That is odd. Because Prok, not to my knowledge anyway, has never given a musicale with fewer than twenty or thirty guests — that’s the whole point, to educate people.”
“And to show off.”
This seemed to suck the wind out of the conversation. I wouldn’t hear any criticism of Prok, and especially not from one of my own coworkers and colleagues, and I gave him a look to warn him off.
Rutledge shrugged, threw a furtive glance up the hall, then came back to me. “Listen, John, loyalty is one thing, don’t get me wrong, but he’s not above criticism, you know. He can be a real pompous ass at times, with his obbligato and his menuetto and largo e cantabile and all the rest of it, and then there’s that look he gets on his face, the same look he gets when he comes, like a penitent nailed to the cross.”
I felt as if I’d been slapped across the face. “Listen, Rutledge — Oscar—” I said, and my voice went cold, “I have to tell you I don’t feel comfortable with any sort of criticism or bad-mouthing of Prok, I just don’t, I’m sorry, so please, in future, if you would just keep it to yourself—”
“But you’ve seen it. You’ve seen that look on his face. You’ve been on the receiving end of it, haven’t you? Well so have I. It’s part of the job, isn’t it?”
“No,” I said. “No, I don’t want to talk about this.”
He was still watching me, holding my eyes as if he were taking my history. “And Ted, of course. Ted’ll be there,” he said. “With his camera.”
The sunday came, wind-whipped and bathed in a tentative March sunshine that hinted at better times ahead. Crocuses were blooming, pussy willows, azaleas. Townspeople were out in their yards, raking the grass, thinking about where to string the hammock, and the students were everywhere, crowding the sidewalks in clusters of three and four, their jackets open to the waist, grinning and frolicking and shouting to one another as if it were May already, as if it were June and finals were over. It was kite-flying weather, and though I hadn’t flown a kite in twenty years, Iris and I bought a cheap paper version at a novelty shop and took John Jr. to the park to launch it. All well and fine. But before we’d gone to the park we’d done something even more out of the ordinary, and I didn’t know how I felt about it or what it meant exactly. We went to church. It was Sunday, and we went to church.
As I’ve said, Iris was raised in the Roman church, but she’d given it up in college, and certainly I myself had neither the faith nor reason to enter any ecclesiastical structure of any denomination. But Iris had awakened that morning with an idea fixed in her head — we were going to church because it was Lent and because she missed the ritual of it, the mumble of Latin, the immemorial fragrance of the censers — and I couldn’t argue with her. I wouldn’t want to say that she was reverting to childish things because that wouldn’t be fair to her, and yet she’d begun to write long missives to her mother almost daily, about what I couldn’t imagine, and she had taken up the clarinet again … and baking. She told me she’d loved to bake as a girl. And now, over breakfast — eggs poached just the way I like them, lean strips of bacon, crude crumbling hunks of a homemade bread that hadn’t risen — she’d announced that we were going to church. The whole family.
“Church?” I’d said.
“That’s right.”
“But why? What are you thinking? You know that I don’t, well — I’ve got better things to do with my day off, don’t you think?”
“Because I miss it, that’s why. Shouldn’t that be enough? Can’t you do anything for me, just for me, just once? And for John Jr.?” We were at the kitchen table, the aforementioned boy nearly four years old now and perched on the edge of his booster seat, making an improvisatory scramble out of his own eggs. She paused to wipe his chin, the cheerful yellow splotch there, and then came back to me. “He’s growing up a pagan. Doesn’t that bother you?”