Corcoran had put the car in gear and we were moving slowly down the street, but I was so wrought up I barely registered the movement. After a moment, he said, “What about the tavern? How’s a drink sound? It’s on me.”
There was a clarinet solo in that tune — the band was famous for its clarinetist — and we both listened as the instrument went slipping and eliding through its paces. “I never realized how much I hate the clarinet,” I said, “not till now, anyway.”
Corcoran reached out a cuff-linked wrist to flick off the radio. He seemed to decide something then, swinging the wheel hard to the right to nose the car in at the curb. “Listen,” he said, “John, I hope you’re not going to take this the wrong way, because it can get awkward for all of us, and there’s no reason—”
Was I glaring at him? I don’t know. All of a sudden, and this was the foremost thing in my mind, grown there full-blown like an instantaneous cancer, I was overcome with a fear of embarrassing myself, of showing my hand — of being petty, hidebound, of being the cuckold. “No,” I said, turning away from him, and I didn’t know what proposition or argument I was dismissing.
“It doesn’t mean anything. Not a thing. Not between us.” He was turned to me, studying me in profile, and I could feel him there, feel the heat of his breath against the carved wooden mask of my face. “Look, before I did anything I consulted Prok—”
At first I thought I hadn’t heard him right — Prok? What did Prok have to do with this? — and then the single curt syllable began to reverberate in my head like a pinball ringing up the score. Maybe my ears reddened. Still I didn’t turn to him, but just sat there staring out the window, fighting for control.
“Well, of course I did. You don’t think I would just — hey, I might have an overactive libido, I admit to it, but I wouldn’t do a thing without Prok’s go-ahead, not anymore, not now, not with the situation out there in the world like it is. That’d be nuts, that’d be suicide.”
Prok. He’d consulted Prok — Prok, but not me. As if — but I couldn’t finish the thought, because Prok had known all along, Prok had approved, given him the green light and his blessing too, all for one and one for all. And I’d sat there stolidly through the morning while Prok loomed over me dictating letters, my fingers hammering away at the keys of the typewriter as if I were some obsequious little clerk in a Dickens novel. Letter after letter, and never a word about Iris or me. First there were the letters to the parents, then to the principal, the superintendent, the minister and the gas station attendant, and finally, the children.
Dear Suzy: Uncle Milk and I wanted you to have a very special letter all your own that the mailman will bring to the box just for you. We will write a special letter to your sister, Katie, too, and the mailman will bring it just for her so that she can have one as well. What we want to say, most of all, is how much we enjoyed meeting such a sweet and intelligent girl as yourself and how proud you should be for helping us with our science. Yours Truly, Uncle Kinsey
“And I think you know how he feels when it comes to the inner circle — we have no secrets, we’re bonded, each of us, together. John, listen, he encouraged me — for your good and mine. And Iris’s, don’t forget Iris.”
I hadn’t forgotten her, not for an instant.
Corcoran’s face hung there in the car as if dissociated from his body, the last light of the day laminating his features at the far blurring edge of my peripheral vision, and still I was staring straight ahead. I wouldn’t look at him. I couldn’t. There was a picket fence two doors up, fresh white paint peerless against the unfolding copper-green leaves of the climbing roses that were just then starting to take hold of it. “And there’s Violet, don’t forget Violet. She’s a very passionate woman, John, believe me. And she’ll be here sooner than you know.”
In my hurt — in my hurt and my refusal to acknowledge it to Corcoran, Prok or Iris or anyone else — I went to Mac. I telephoned beforehand to let her know I was coming — it was Saturday morning, Iris behind the cash register at the five-and-dime, Prok lecturing his biology students on gametes and zygotes or the sex life of the fruit fly or I don’t know what, nest robbers, parasitic wasps, the cowbird and the cuckoo — and she was waiting for me at the door in a light sweater and her walking shorts. “I thought you might want to go for a walk,” she said, her eyes searching mine.
I gave her nothing back, just nodded, and we went off empty-handed down the street and through the familiar fields and into the woods beyond. It was coming on to high spring in southern Indiana, the wet black furrows spread open under the sun, wildflowers in the clearings, a smell of mud and ferment under the trees, birds everywhere. And gnats. We swatted them as we moved along, ducking away from one swarm only to walk headlong into another. It was warm where the sun hit us, cool, even a little chilly, in the shade. Mac went out of her way to make small talk — if Prok knew, then she knew — and I give her credit for that, trying to defuse the situation in the way Corcoran had, nothing amiss here, life as usual, the study of sex and the free and unencumbered practice of it inextricably linked, and where were the grounds for complaint? We found a spot in one of the clearings where the sun invested a spike of weather-worn rock with its heat, and made ourselves comfortable.
For a long while I just sat there, my back against the rock, and let Mac do the talking. She wasn’t saying much, nothing of substance, that is, and I knew what she was doing (“Isn’t that a bluebird over there, on that branch just above the stump, right there, see? They’re getting rare, aren’t they, ever since the starlings invaded, anyway, but don’t you love the smell of the outdoors, especially this time of year? I do. I can’t get enough of it. When I was a girl, oh, no older than eight or nine — have I ever told you this?”) but I didn’t care, it was conversation as anodyne, and I let it wash over me. Gratefully. I don’t know how long this went on — ten minutes, twenty — but eventually she fell silent. I leaned back, closed my eyes and let the sun probe my face. I wanted her, and we’d come here to engage in sex, but I was in no hurry — or maybe I was fooling myself, maybe I didn’t want her at all.
Her voice seemed to come to me out of nowhere, out of some place in my head, and my eyelids, blue-veined, pulsing with the sleepy drift of floating bodies, snapped open. “John,” she was saying, “John, listen, I know how you feel. I do. But you can’t let it get to you, because that way of thinking — jealousy, recrimination, whatever you want to call it — is wrong. And it’s destructive, John. It is.”
She closed her hand over mine. The light was stark, flaming all around her as if she were on the apron of a stage, her pupils shrunk to pinpoints, a splay of lines radiating out from the corners of her eyes as if the skin there had been fractured or worked with a sharp tool — she was old, getting old, and the visible signs of it, the apprehension of it, made something shift inside me. “I’ll tell you,” she said, dropping her voice, “it wasn’t easy for me in the beginning. You’re not the first, you know. There was Ralph Voris — has Prok ever mentioned him?”
“Yes.”
“And there were graduate students too, casual affairs — things with women.”
I said nothing, but I may have flushed, thinking of the day I’d broken the code and pulled his file. And hers.
“He’s highly sexed, Prok, and to be away so often, for so long — you don’t know. It was before your time, ten years ago and more. He went to Mexico for three months, collecting galls with three healthy young men — and he was a healthy young man himself. Was I hurt? Did I complain? Did I resent being all but abandoned? Do I resent it now?”