The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  Errol could depend on a few points of distinction, though. There were photographs of Charles Corgie, and these were not, precisely, photographs of Raphael. At first crude glance the similarity was overwhelming—the long face, the dark coloring, the tall, tight build, the contour of the heavy brow; the two profiles would have matched like the sides of an ink blot. They both had black eyes. All right, there’s no such thing as black eyes, but these were so brilliant and so protected that you couldn’t tell what color they really were. Otherwise, the more Errol studied Raphael, the more the man distinguished himself from Corgie. Corgie approximated Raphael as a rough-hewn sculpture does the finished piece. The bones of Corgie’s cheeks now rose higher; below them was smoothed hollow; the lips were sanded and narrowed. At every point the artist had peaked what was once blunted, articulated what was once vague. Raphael’s face was worked over with fine files and the skin buffed to a high polish. Corgie was handsome; Raphael was beautiful. His face was warm and olive and obscure, lit on the high points, with the rest sunk into soft, secretive shadow, like the portraits by Rembrandt; like those portraits, too, it was inexplicably sad. Corgie looked vengeful; Raphael, more tinged with regret. Like Charles, Raphael looked as if someone had done something terrible to him at one time, but not as if this were an offense he was planning to redress. Not that he had no taste for revenge; rather, he understood to his despair that there was no such thing. It was never possible to do something back to someone that would undo what he had done to you. Your only power was to create more pain, if that was your pleasure. This was a peculiarly mature perception for someone his age; it was certainly a peculiar thing to emanate.

  Gray got more money. Of course. And it turned out that the question of format hadn’t been a question at all.

  Because Gray “hated actresses,” when Arabella West wired she was better, they agreed she should take Gray’s part when she arrived. In the meantime, Gray worked on the script; Errol drafted set sketches. Raphael had brought some work with him, too; as they were all working distractedly one afternoon, Gray inquired what it was.

  “A grant proposal,” said Raphael.

  “Which one?”

  “For a Ford Fellowship.”

  Errol noted with a look over Raphael’s shoulder that he was hard at work on a doodle of some ratlike little creature in the margin of his pad. “Ford?” said Errol. “I won a couple of those. It’s good money, isn’t it?”

  “Forty-five thousand,” said Raphael, now doodling “$45,000” across the top of his paper.

  “That’s higher than they used to be,” said Errol. “Competition’s pretty stiff for those things, though. Your proposal had better be in good shape.”

  “Oh,” said Raphael, embellishing his dollar sign now, “I’m working on it.”

  “I’m chairing the board on that grant,” said Gray.

  “I know,” said Raphael, not looking up from the page.

  Gray put her pen down. “How did you know that?”

  “Oh, I knew before I came here,” said Raphael with a shrug. “It’s common knowledge.”

  Gray looked a little unsettled, then picked up her pen again.

  Gray ducked in the hut with Errol behind her, and stopped. The lantern was lit. Raphael was in front of it, studying a square of paper.

  “Stay out of my things,” said Gray.

  “Yes, Dr. Kaiser,” said Raphael, turning to look at her with an intensity that was impudent. He put the square down and left the hut. Gray tucked it back in her file folders.

  “What was that?” asked Errol.

  “A photograph.” She straightened the papers with agitation.

  “Of?”

  “Charles.” She put a stone on top of the folders, though they were hardly going to blow away in here.

  “Had you told him?”

  She shook her head.

  “And you weren’t going to.”

  “It would have been just as well if he thought he was Raphael Sarasola—period. In my experience so far, that’s plenty of trouble already.”

  “And what would you do with your grant money?”

  “What I’d like to do,” said Raphael, “is find a village in a valley and become a god.”

  “Ford would love that,” said Errol.

  “Ford isn’t making the decision,” said Raphael.

  “You might not like that valley as much as you think,” Gray warned softly.

  “I might like it even more.”

  “Charles wasn’t so fond of it. Not really.”

  “According to you,” said Raphael. “But then, you’re not Charles.”

  “No one here is,” said Errol.

  “Did you know him well?” asked Raphael.

  “Yes,” said Gray.

  “How well?”

  “Sometimes,” she said, “looking at his face was like looking in a mirror.”

  “How were you alike?”

  “We were both pigheaded.”

  “About what?”

  “Everything,” she said vaguely, folding her laundry briskly in piles.

  “Did he like you?”

  “I think so.” Socks.

  “Very much?”

  “After a while…” Gray rolled a mismatched pair and had to unbunch them.

  “Did you sleep together?”

  Gray froze, and turned a rare red. “What did you say?”

  “You heard me.”

  Gray turned around. “You’re my graduate assistant. What makes you think you can ask me that question?”

  Raphael smiled. “So you didn’t.”

  “But you liked him.” This was later.

  “Yes,” said Gray. “With reservations.”

  “Which were?”

  “He murdered people.”

  “That doesn’t seem to have bothered you so much.”

  “It bothered me.”

  “But not that much.”

  Gray turned pages, jotted in the margins, bowed her head.

  “How much did you like him?”

  “Just fine…”

  Raphael leaned forward. “But you made him very angry, didn’t you?”

  Gray slammed her notebook shut. “Now, why would I do that?”

  “My next question.”

  She paused, then blurted impulsively, “Because he was arrogant.”

  “And you made him pay.”

  “Everyone paid.”

  “He must have hated you,” said Raphael softly.

  “Most of the time,” Gray admitted. “There was nothing else for him to do.”

  “You were beautiful then, weren’t you?”

  Red again. That past tense.

  “Like now,” he amended.

  “I was all right.”

  “And you drove him crazy.”

  “I did my work.”

  “You held out.”

  “What are you accusing me of, please?”

  “No accusation. I admire it.”

  “You admire strange things.”

  “I admire,” said Raphael, “what you admire.”

  They looked at each other. “One of the things I learned with Charles,” said Gray carefully, “was that finding someone is like you does not necessarily mean that either of you should be that way.”

  “So what were you like at twenty-two?”

  “The way I am now,” she said. “That was the problem.”

  “It’s still a problem,” Errol intruded.

  “I don’t see,” said Raphael, reading over Gray’s script, “why he didn’t think of something. In the end. Why he had to blow up with that plane. Why couldn’t he get out of it?”

  “I don’t think he wanted to,” said Gray.

  “I was serious before,” said Gray. “About the Ford Fellowship. What are you proposing to study?”

  “An obscure society in the Pacific. The Goji.”

  “I read something about them once,” said Gray, tapping her fingers together. Then her color changed. “That’s right. I remember
now. The article was in a linguistics journal.”

  “The Goji,” said Errol. “They’re the ones who don’t have a word for ‘love,’ isn’t that right?”

  “Yes,” said Raphael. “Curious, isn’t it?”

  “Could be a depressing study,” said Errol.

  “Maybe,” said Raphael. “Maybe not. That’s the question, isn’t it?”

  “For you, maybe,” said Errol.

  “Yes. For me.”

  “Why did you go into anthropology?” asked Gray.

  Raphael didn’t hesitate. “To travel.”

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Errol. “That’s if?”

  “Errol,” Gray cut him off. “That’s why I went into anthropology.”

  Errol shut up. Little by little he was learning to do that.

  So their triad took shape. It formed less in these short parries—deft strokes, like line drawings, never filled in—than in silence. They arranged themselves in quiet like actors before the curtain. Raphael would put his feet up. Gray would scratch out lines and pace and scratch and sit with her back to the leading man, pointedly. Errol would listen, and leave. From his distance, Errol watched Raphael. What he saw was Raphael watching Gray. Her new assistant licked his lips. He yawned, like a lazy lion under an acacia on hot afternoons. He was in no hurry. He didn’t seem concerned that his prey would get away—as if she were fated for him; as if she had nowhere else to go.

  The camera crew arrived. All five had worked with Gray before, and treated her with warmth and deference. During the day they never argued. When they were building sets of Corgie’s architecture and they too successfully evoked the originals. Gray sometimes went stone white again and walked away; they made no remarks. At night around the fire she told them myths from Ghana or described amusing cross-cultural misunderstandings, and they laughed; they adored her, carefully.

  Raphael would watch her hold court from a few logs away. Errol couldn’t tell if he enjoyed her performances or if they annoyed him. So often it was impossible to tell what the man was thinking. He seemed to watch in a pure way, without appraisal; his face soaked up information and gave nothing back. This made Errol nervous. Furthermore, Raphael was too relaxed. Gray put most people on their toes. Raphael rested calmly on the full soles of his feet.

  Since Arabella had not yet flown in, they began shooting a few scenes before the arrival of the “young anthropologist.” Gray had been right: Raphael didn’t have to do anything but say his lines normally. It would take another project to test his skills as an actor. Steelier and more underplayed than Errol had imagined Corgie, Raphael’s Charles was more chilling. Gray found she had to cut a lot of lines, for he didn’t have to say much to get his point across. This Charles was quiet, terrifying, and compelling. During takes, the crew and surrounding tribespeople were cold and silent, and Errol felt the hair rise on his arms. Listening to that low, even voice, Errol had a crawling sensation that, were he among Il-Ororen, he, too, would follow its orders.

  Panting, her color high, Arabella West puffed into the village late one afternoon. “Errol!” she cried, throwing her pack off and scraping her thick red hair out of her face. “Save me. I am wasted.” They hugged. Errol and Arabella liked each other. More calmly, Arabella nodded to Gray. “Dr. Kaiser. So sorry I couldn’t make it earlier.” Arabella plunked herself down on a rock. “That mountain is too much.”

  Gray shook her head slightly. Errol knew what she was thinking. Arabella was wearing eyeliner in the bush. Arabella had well-manicured nails.

  Errol was thinking something else. He was thinking that Arabella was gorgeous. She had big green eyes and light skin. Her breasts were full, her hips wide. She had one of those lush bodies that in later years, without her losing weight and doing an awful lot of jogging, would run to cellulite, but just now, in her mid-twenties, it was holding up nicely. Errol found it comforting to be around her kind of beauty—plush, expansive, curved. Certainly Gray was beautiful in a more sustainingly interesting way, but Gray’s whole body was tautly strung, and somehow to be around it for long stretches of time was tiring.

  “Well,” said Arabella when Errol introduced her to Raphael. “So you’re my replacement.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Raphael. “You and I are after different prizes.”

  “I’m not after a prize,” said Arabella warily. “I’m here to do a job.”

  Raphael shook his head. “Every nose has its carrot.”

  “Oh?” asked Arabella. “So what’s yours?”

  “The nature of a man’s carrot,” said Raphael, “is his biggest secret.”

  “Sounds phallic.”

  “Yes.” Raphael smiled. “Doesn’t it.”

  They started shooting with Arabella the next day. Mid-morning, Gray said quietly from the sidelines, “I’m not sure this is going to work out.”

  “Why?” asked Errol. “I think she’s doing beautifully.”

  “She’s too flighty.”

  “She seems vulnerable. I think that makes her more sympathetic.”

  “She seems helpless, you mean. And the way she looks at him all the time with those wet green eyes? It’s off. It’s coquettish.”

  “Gray!” said Errol in exasperation. “What do you want, that she should roll onto the set like a tank?”

  “No, but she comes across as weak.”

  “She comes across as a woman.”

  “Are you implying—”

  “I’m implying that maybe you should watch her and learn something.”

  Gray opened her mouth, and closed it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Errol.

  Gray looked as if she wanted to walk away again, but she must have realized she was doing that an awful lot lately; she stayed. Her eyes curdled.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Errol stammered. “Maybe she should be stronger—”

  Gray shook her head and looked at the ground.

  “Is there some problem?” asked Arabella, walking over to Errol and Gray when the take was finished.

  “No,” said Gray, her voice with a slight throttle to it. “You’re doing a lovely job. You’re quite—winning. Likable. Keep it up. Go on to the next scene.” Gray tried to smile.

  “Listen, I have a question, Dr. Kaiser.”

  “Arabella,” said Errol, “maybe later—”

  “Go ahead,” said Gray.

  “Is this a romance?”

  She smiled wanly. “That depends on how you play it, I suppose.”

  “How do you want me to play it?”

  “…No,” said Gray, thinking. “There’s no going back and fixing things, is there?”

  “What?”

  “Arabella—” said Errol, hoping to urge her away.

  “It’s just the situation is a natural,” Arabella went on. “And if you want to appeal to a popular audience—”

  “It is not a romance,” said Gray heavily. “You are here to work. He occasionally interferes. He makes you angry, or for you—a little angry. As for popular appeal, I wouldn’t worry about it. Charles was a very interesting man.”

  The evening after they filmed the worship service, Errol leaned back on his mat, hands behind his head. “I wonder what it would take to get Americans to go bonkers like that. To bow down in the middle of the common and offer up their Cuisinarts and frozen wieners.”

  “Exactly the same thing,” said Raphael, with his aviator goggles still on his forehead and his red baseball cap on backward. “A man like Charles.”

  Errol’s mouth twitched. He’d been asking Gray. “In Boston we’d recognize Corgie as the small-time opportunist he really was.”

  There was a funny tingling in the following silence. Errol looked back and forth from Raphael to Gray, at their coolness, their embarrassment.

  “Il-Cor-gie!” a native called at the door. Raphael turned. Silently the Kenyan slid a tray into the hut, along with a stack of beautifully folded clothes, and crept away. Raphael put the laundry by his mat, sipped the drink he’d been given, and w
rapped the hot towel lying beside it around his neck.

  “Gray,” said Errol with annoyance, “you’re the brand-name anthropologist. Do Il-Ororen understand about actors?”

  “The concept, yes. But not about Raphael.”

  “Or maybe they do,” said Raphael.

  Errol was tired of these enigmatic quips. He sat up. “Are you a ghost? Is that what you mean? Or is it a god?”

  Raphael looked back at Errol, his eyes dancing.

  “It is odd,” said Gray, with anthropological diplomacy, “that they’ve debunked white people. But Charles was exempt. I was always afraid for him that they’d find out. But they never did.”

  “There was nothing to find out,” said Raphael. “They always knew who he was.”

  “You’re evading my question,” said Errol. “How do you think you know so goddamned much about Charles Corgie?”

  “You’re the sort who’s done his homework,” said Raphael, barely smiling. “How many societies believe in reincarnation?”

  “So you were Charles Corgie in a past life?” asked Errol squarely.

  “Now, how would I know?”

  “Well, if you were,” said Errol, “that’s not much to be proud of, is it?”

  Raphael shrugged.

  “Gray?” Errol pushed. “Is it?”

  Gray turned her back. Errol pulled the sleeping bag over his head.

  The whole next day Errol watched the filming with a different eye. They shot the scene with Login that afternoon; Errol watched Raphael fire a blank into a young boy’s chest and shuddered as the sound rippled through his own body. Yet when they filmed the scene in which Gray broke her arm, with the ensuing unrest, the fall of the house of Corgie was shot as a tragedy. Errol took a long look at the script after dinner.

  “Gray,” said Errol, “what’s the angle on this project, anyway?”