The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  Gray’s eyes shot wide. She jockeyed him across her until she slid his body off to her side. Gray lay panting as Corgie propped himself up on his elbow and looked down at her with a smile one might use after an excellent appetizer, when the meal to come promised to be even better. He took a deep breath and followed the indentations of her ribs with his fingertips as her chest rapidly rose and fell. Her cheetah skin had inched down still farther, and he trailed up to the swell of her slight breasts, up, over, down; up, over, down. Gray didn’t imagine for a minute he had stopped. He was resting. He was restraining himself. That was his pleasure. For now.

  “I was wondering when you’d come around,” said Charles. Her ear was up against his chest, and the cavity amplified the sound, like a tomb.

  “Oh?” Her voice was small.

  “Yeah. You’ve been pretty funny, I gotta say.”

  Gray struggled up on her elbows. Trying to look casual about it, she shifted the parachute to cover between her legs. “How is that?” She didn’t like the idea of amusing him just now.

  “Sleeping in your corner; playing the anthropologist.”

  “Oh?” she said again, pulling a little farther up on the pillow. The crease between her eyes indented, just a little. Playing the anthropologist. Gray remembered the snuffling in the night. How many other women had lain here?

  “But I figured pretty soon you couldn’t stand it anymore. Really, watching you’s been a riot.”

  Gray looked over at him, scanning for some sign that this was any different for him than one more snuffling. “A riot,” said Gray. The indentation between her eyes was discernibly deeper now.

  “A one-woman amusement park.” He licked his lips. He seemed pleased with himself.

  Gray tugged at her cheetah skin, now threatening to slide off her breasts altogether. “And how else have I been entertaining you?”

  “Tromping out in those fields of yours. Taking notes. It’s cute. But it’s been obvious from the first few days what you’ve really been doing here. Guess the study’s gonna be real indepth, right?”

  Gray pulled herself to a sitting position. She rearranged the straggles of her hair. She felt her face tingle and her ears heat; she was sure they were red. How did she get here? What was she doing in this bed? She tucked the folds of her skirt one by one decisively into its band. “Well, I suppose it takes me a long time to do my work, Charles,” she said quietly, “since I spend so much time daydreaming about when big handsome Charlie Corgie will finally kiss me good night.” Gray swung her legs over the side of the bed. She looked down at her outfit, for the first time finding it regrettably ridiculous. She decided she did not want to cry. She looked down at her lap and decided this was very, very important to her, and asked herself not to cry, the way you would ask a favor of a friend of yours.

  “Getting your back up?” Charles went on behind her, still leaning on his elbow. “You’re not gonna tell me you don’t lie behind that screen just eating your heart out. Those sighs that keep me awake at night? They’ve cracked me up. And that night I brought a bedwarmer up here? Next morning you went nuts. It was hysterical.”

  Gray slowly uncurled and brought her spine straight. Her eyes were sharpening. “Funny,” said Gray. “I don’t remember going nuts.”

  “Sure you did. But now’s the time to look back on it and laugh, right?”

  “So far only one of us is laughing.” Gray rose from the bed. She was six feet tall.

  “Come back here, toots, we’re just getting started.”

  “No, we’re finished,” said Gray calmly, smoothing the billows of her parachute down her hips. “I’m going to hoe. I guess I’ve just looked forward to this with you so obsessively for so long, all the while pretending to be a professional at work on some silly study, that now the time has finally arrived and you deign to look my way, I just can’t handle the excitement.” Gray started out the door.

  “Okay, you’ve made your little speech, now come back here.”

  Gray started down the ladder.

  “Come on,” said Corgie at the top, suddenly more serious. “Give me a kiss and forget it.”

  Gray paused mid-step.

  Encouraged, Corgie continued: “We’ve wasted plenty of time already, right? All these weeks we could’ve been having a fine time. Get up here. You look great. You’re driving me crazy.”

  Gray came back up the ladder.

  “That’s more like it,” said Charles with a smile. He gave her a hand up, but when he put his arm around her she slipped away, angling past him through the doorway.

  “I need my work clothes to hoe.” She whisked back out with her khaki in a bundle and brushed coolly by again. In no time she tapped back down the ladder and strode off between the manyattas.

  “You don’t know what you’re missing!” he shouted after her.

  “I don’t expect I ever will!” she shouted back.

  “That’s right, don’t think you’ll get a second chance!”

  “Well, I guess I’ll have to live with that terrible disappointment.” Her parachuting swirled out on all sides, alive like white flames.

  Corgie watched her go from his porch. No doubt he muttered something like “She’ll be back,” but, an intelligent man despite his recent behavior to the contrary, he wouldn’t be so sure.

  5

  These scenes have their satisfactions, but they cost you. In Toroto, everyone paid for this one. Something had gone wrong; the script was awry. No one was happy. No one got what he wanted. Errol decided this is what it was like:

  Corgie had “bedwarmers” almost every night. He laughed a lot then. He was loud. Gray lay on the other side of the partition trying to keep her breathing slow and audibly even. Yet the more asleep she sounded, the more Corgie rocked the frame of his bed. When he reached his pitch Gray even tried snoring. Finally neither of them slept well, or woke jaunty.

  More than ever, they threw themselves into their separate projects. They drew up separate crews. The tribe was split tacitly down the middle, like troop divisions.

  The tower got higher. Corgie liked to climb to the top at sunset very far away from everything.

  Corgie had another worship service and Gray didn’t come. He hadn’t invited her. He came back and said it went wonderfully, though Il-Ororen seemed sodden enough afterward and didn’t fix much food; they mostly got drunk.

  The rains made everything worse. Gray would record interviews, with irritation helping his cause with the miracle of her machine. Corgie would lope in long, hapless laps through the expanse of his gymnasium. But it was the tendency of the rainy-day mind to stay home. Gray would lie about in her corner craving a book to read, but in lieu of that, starting to write her own. This was no relief, though, as she wrote about Il-Ororen, and she was beginning to despise them—they all seemed just like Charles Corgie. For distraction she made herself a deck of cards from the stiff dividers in her notebooks. Refusing to play with Charles, though, Gray was left with solitaire. She hated solitaire. Gray tried drawing next, but she didn’t draw very well, and disliked doing anything she did badly. She wanted to hear music. She wanted to read a newspaper. She wanted to have a conversation.

  Instead, they gave each other directions, edicts; they informed each other of passing incidents with great economy of language, as if every word were being telegraphed overseas.

  Charles cleaned his guns. He worked on a new model. For several days Gray wouldn’t ask what the model was of. Yet the severe angular structure, with its jagged points and narrow corridors and tiny rooms with no doors, did not shape into anything recognizable. Finally Gray came up to Corgie in the midst of a torrential, desperately endless afternoon and asked, “What is that?”

  “A monument.”

  “To what?”

  “To whom.”

  “You decided the tower wasn’t pointless enough?”

  “I’ve passed beyond functionalism,” said Charles mildly, “to pure form.”

  “Pure something,” Gray mutter
ed.

  “What’s that?” asked Charles nicely.

  “Is that just a monument?” asked Gray. “Or your gravestone?”

  Charles turned to her squarely. “Now, why do you care?”

  Gray turned away. “It’s a boring afternoon,” she said flatly. “It’s raining. It was something to say.” Gray wandered back to her corner and pulled the curtain tightly shut.

  During the rainy season Il-Ororen worked in clay, for it dried evenly in the moist air. Out of raving boredom rather than anthropological duty, Gray made water jugs on rainy afternoons. To satisfy her own sense of irony, Gray fashioned Grecian urns with Apollos and Zeuses curling from the handles and sending fire and lightning bolts down the sides of the bowls. The women were delighted, and fouled Gray’s already limping study of their traditional vessel forms by immediately copying hers—one more eager betrayal of their fusty Masai inheritance. It didn’t matter whether Gray’s innovations were better so long as they were new. They imitated urns and Chinese vases and squat British teapots indiscriminately, though they did not make tea. Gray had never read of any African tribe so taken with modernity.

  The kraal where Gray potted belonged to Elya’s family, once, before Corgie, the richest and most powerful in the tribe. The father had been the chieftain before Corgie arrived; Charles had shot him early on. Yet the remaining wives did not seem to hate Il-Corgie, and took Gray into their homes with deference but no anger. Corgie’s murder of their husband seemed to make sense to them. Unlike most of the Masai tribe, Il-Ororen had no problem with killing, as long as it worked to your advantage and you got away with it. The wives clearly admired Corgie for felling such an imposing man as their husband, and spoke of the scene of his death not with grief but with awe.

  The sons, however, kept their distance. The oldest, Odinaye, regarded Gray with suspicion when she came to the hut. Even for a Masai he was tall and grave. His eyes smoldered before the fire while she built her vases. He would stare silently at Gray for hours through the smoky haze between them. Gray couldn’t shake the feeling that he was waiting for her to make a mistake. She would sometimes try to make conversation with Odinaye, but he never responded with anything but even keener scrutiny.

  Gray began to notice Odinaye in her vicinity too often. She would look down from the porch when she was eating lunch and find him staring up at her with steady, unblinking accusation. She would lose her appetite, and go inside.

  With Odinaye so often a few paces away, Gray found it increasingly difficult to slip off into the bush alone to attend to her all too mortal toilet. When she and Corgie had their dry, cryptic tiffs in the middle of the compound, Gray would turn and find Odinaye watching from the sidelines. Gray found herself talking more softly; though they were using English, she had the eerie sensation of being overheard.

  “I’m being followed,” Gray finally told Charles. “By Odinaye. I dream about him now. He’s there every time I turn around.”

  “Maybe he’s in love,” said Charles.

  “This is serious.”

  “Isn’t everything serious lately?”

  “What should I do?”

  “Why come to me? You’ve got a problem. So take care of it.”

  It was an ordinary afternoon. Gray was struggling with a large water jug. She’d gotten the clay too wet; the sides were collapsing. Odinaye’s presence on the other side of the hut, crouching and staring as usual, was especially irritating. She couldn’t help suspecting—was it only the play of smoke between them?—that there was a wisp of a smile on his face today. She was sure he could see she was having trouble—well, any idiot could see that; the thing was falling apart.

  Gray decided to take advantage of her role as the leader of the avant-garde and cave in the sides intentionally. She composed her expression. When one side fell in again, she looked down at it archly and revised a dent here and there, as if that was exactly what the goddess of modern pottery had in mind. Imperiously, she told Odinaye to give her the wooden paddle beside him; she would bat in the other side, too.

  “Here it is,” said Odinaye, handing her the paddle readily.

  Gray accepted the paddle before she went white. Now that he was closer, his small grim smile was unmistakable.

  The daring of the avant-garde potter left Gray entirely. Awkwardly she used the paddle to bat the collapsed side back out again. Using props inside the jar, she secured the sides and quickly put it aside to dry out. When she dipped her hands in a pot of water to rinse off the clay, she noticed they were shaking. Not saying another word, she ducked out the doorway and went straight to Charles Corgie.

  “What’s going on?” asked Charles, leaning on his bed with a cigarette as Gray paced the room. “Why can’t you sit still?”

  “Would you stop worrying about the way I move for once and listen to me?” Gray whispered.

  “I’ll listen if you talk loudly enough for me to hear you—”

  “Shsh! Talk more quietly.”

  “WHY?” Charles boomed.

  “Shut up!”

  Charles rolled his eyes. “Shoot.”

  “I was working on a pot that wasn’t going very well—”

  “So your pot didn’t come out pretty and now you’re mad?”

  Gray looked at him; there must have been something in her face to make him sit up without quite the same sultry boredom and put out his cigarette.

  “Odinaye was there, naturally,” she went on in a low voice. “I said, ‘Hand me that paddle,’ and he picked it up and said, ‘Here it is.’”

  Charles waited. Gray didn’t go on. “And?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Some story,” said Charles.

  “Yes,” said Gray. “It is.”

  “I guess it’s one of those subtle narratives that depends on texture.”

  “Charles,” said Gray. “He said ‘Here it is’ in English.”

  Corgie sat up. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  Corgie stood and paced. “Well,” he reasoned, taking out another cigarette, “one phrase. Big deal.”

  “No, he knows at least two, Charles. I made a mistake. I asked for the paddle in English, too. And I didn’t point. He knew the word ‘paddle.’”

  “So? Here it is. Paddle. So?”

  “How do we know how many other words he’s picked up, Charles? What else has he heard?”

  Charles grunted. He smoked fast, as if his cigarette were hard work to get over with. “Damn it.” He paced some more. “Jesus, we’re gonna have to be careful.” He was speaking more softly now himself.

  Gray sighed. “He obviously figured out the language by watching us interact.”

  “When have we been doing that?”

  “We do still fight sometimes.”

  Charles sunk into a chair. “So—what? We’re going to talk even less than we’ve been doing? I don’t even know if that’s possible.”

  “Do you know any other languages? French, German, Latin?”

  “Nope. But you do, of course.”

  “That wouldn’t do any good if you don’t know them, too.”

  “Why not? We could have our own separate languages. You could walk around speaking German. I can definitely see it, Kaiser.”

  “Well, say. How’s your English vocabulary?”

  “Me? The poor uneducated architect? All I know is damn, fuck, and shit. Jane-loves-Puff. Go-Timmy-go. You know that.”

  “Stop it. We have to work on this. I mean, we have to—cogitate on our—contretemps.”

  “Say what?”

  “Odinaye may have learned go-Timmy-go. But he hasn’t learned perambulate-Timmy-perambulate.”

  “Let me get this straight. When I hit my thumb with a hammer, I’m supposed to yell, ‘Oh, coitus!’?”

  “Exactly.”

  “This is going to be disgusting, Kaiser.”

  “Or fun. As long as we can’t be heard we can drop it, but if we have to talk to each other in public we should only palaver, parley, or discourse.”<
br />
  “Or lately, harangue, wrangle, or contend.”

  Gray laughed as Charles leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Maybe their learning English is all for the best,” said Gray softly. “Maybe they’ll finally appreciate that your invocation is a Wrigley’s spearmint-gum commercial.” With a rare moment of affection, Gray reached out with a wistful smile and tousled his hair.

  The plan seemed to work to a degree. When Gray and Charles were in earshot of Odinaye, they switched to their most professorial language, and Gray could tell by the light panic with which Odinaye’s eyes followed the conversation that he was no longer picking much up.

  The whole vocabulary scam might have issued in an era of reconciliation, but Gray’s lexicon was considerably larger than Corgie’s. When she used a word he didn’t know, he would furiously stalk off in the middle of her definition. To her credit, Gray wasn’t trying to impress him but simply to use an effective scramble on their broken code. To her these multisyllabic marathons were an entertainment, like crossword puzzles.

  Charles had his eye on another sport they could share, though; he waited impatiently toward the end of the season for a few dry days in a row. Finally the rain did let up for a week, and the ground was hard enough for Corgie to introduce Gray to the pleasures of his tennis court.

  Charles claimed to have played an excellent game back in New York before he was drafted, and told Gray it was tennis he missed more than any other element of Western civilization. After setting a full work crew to refurbishing his court, he walked Gray proudly around its hard-packed clay. He’d had the crew lay down the sacred white lines with ash and string up the heavy hemp net the women of the tribe had woven. He showed her two rackets—laminated strips, soaked and bent and bound at the bottom with a leather grip. Carved at their throats were antelopes on one, lions on the other. They’d been strung with wet gut; as the gut dried it tightened, so the tension on the strings was surprisingly high. The rackets were a little heavy, but lovingly made, and beautiful.

  Corgie’s most controversial achievements were his tennis balls. He’d scrounged rubber out of the carcass of his plane and bound it with hide. They were, Gray conceded, miraculously spherical, but the bounce was another matter. “But they do bounce,” said Corgie, taking his ball back from her ungrateful hands. “You try to make a tennis ball.”