The Inner Circle by T. C. Boyle

Author:T. C. Boyle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2004-03-24T16:00:00+00:00

It was around this time that we began to conduct our first interviews with children, which, as most people will know, served not only to break a long-standing taboo but to lay the foundation for the many studies into childhood sexuality that were to follow. In fact, in trying to reconstruct events, I’m almost certain that our initial foray into the field must have come just after that unnerving scene with Iris—the very next morning—because I remember distinctly how unsettled I was, turning the situation over and over again in my mind as if it were a sharp-edged object I could worry until it was as smooth as fired clay. It was odd. As I sat beside Prok in the front seat of the Buick on our way to the Fillmore School in Indianapolis, listening to him chatter on about infantile sexuality and the preadolescent awakening of desire, I couldn’t help feel that my emotions were on a collision course with my objectivity. I kept telling myself that I was a researcher and that sentiment had no place in the scientific ledger, no quantifiable value at all. It was a negative, a disqualifier, a weakness that had to be conquered. Prok had indoctrinated me well, and I was getting there, almost over the hump, but I kept slipping back. I couldn’t help myself.

“Are you all right?” Prok asked, giving me one of his hooded, searching looks.

I must have been twisting in my seat, jittering a knee, lifting my chin to the flicker of roadside light as if I were on my way to martyrdom, but at least I didn’t have to face Corcoran, not yet anyway—Prok had given him three days off to see to his affairs and attend his daughters’ Easter pageant back in South Bend.

“Milk?” Prok said. “Milk, did you hear me? I said are you all right?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m fine.”

The motor hummed beneath the floorboards. Scenery flitted by. Prok cocked his head and shot me another glance. “Getting enough sleep? Because really, Milk, you look like one of the living dead—”

“No, I—well, not last night, I guess.”

He went off on a mini-lecture about the vital importance to health of the three telling factors—diet, exercise and sleep—and was in the middle of one of his long, artfully congested sentences when he suddenly caught himself. “But, John,” he said. “Are you—do you have something caught in your eye?”

I told him that I was allergic, that was all. “Hay fever,” I said.

He was silent a moment. Then he turned his face to me, his eyes shifting focus briefly and then darting ahead to the road. “A bit early in the season, isn’t it?”

In the end, I hadn’t confronted Iris—how could I? How could I have said anything without looking like a hypocrite? We’d eaten our dinner in silence, listening to the radio. She had a text—Modern British Poetry, my old marked-up copy—spread out on the table beside her plate, and she never lifted her eyes from it, though I didn’t see her turn the page, not once.

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