The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  “What do you mean?”

  “The point of view. On Charles Corgie.”

  “Mixed…” she said, taking a step back from him.

  “By mixed, do you mean critical?”

  “In a sophisticated portrait,” she hedged, “a man is neither hero nor villain.”

  “So you don’t see him as a hero?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Gray.”

  “What.” She busied herself with some papers.

  “He enslaved a thousand Africans and murdered God knows how many of them—what do you mean you don’t see him as exactly a hero?”

  “His actions,” she said steadily, “were morally dubious—”

  “Dubious!”

  “But he was a complicated man and he had his reasons and he had many admirable qualities.”

  “Like what?”

  She spoke quietly. “He was powerful.”

  “And he used that power to do what? I’m warning you, if this film turns out as some rhapsodic elegy about dear old Charles, I’m taking my name off it.” It pained Errol as he said this that in the eyes of the world, as long as Gray Kaiser’s name was still attached, Errol’s withdrawal would have no effect whatsoever.

  “I would hate for you to do that, Errol. That would hurt me.”

  Before he left, she stopped him and added, “You’re a very nice man. We’re not the same.”

  “You’re not nice?”

  She shook her head, once. “I don’t think so.”

  Errol wondered as he walked out of their hut how difficult it had been for her to admit this—whether she was ashamed of not being nice or proud of it. Errol was convinced as he grew older that niceness was a much underrated quality.

  When they filmed the fire, everyone else’s color rose; Gray went pale. She couldn’t eat dinner. When in an extension of the day’s pyromania the village lit a bonfire that night, Gray went to bed early.

  The following day was the last scene, with the plane, the bomb. They needed a take of Corgie surrounded by smoke and flames. Errol was close to Raphael when they shot these frames, and would long remember his glimpse of that face. Raphael had all along seemed in sync with the production; as aggravated as Errol got with Raphael’s remarks about reincarnation, the man did seem to understand Corgie with an uncanny intuition. In this last scene, then, Errol was curious how Raphael would play it. He was surprised. Astride the plane, the man ordered Il-Ororen away with a remarkable kindness. Swinging his gun from the crowd to the back of his plane, Raphael swept toward the bomb and squeezed the trigger with an odd lyricism, even grace, like a dancer, and in the midst of the explosion the face the camera zoomed in on was not pained or regretful but ecstatic; relieved.

  The movie was shot. They packed up and said goodbye to Il-Ororen. The chieftain had been eyeing the film crew’s bullhorn; Gray left it as a gift. Raphael had grown fond of the red baseball cap and aviator goggles, and she said he could keep them. Il-Ororen presented Gray with a parting gift of pottery. Errol and Gray exchanged glances. Il-Ororen were still imitating Gray’s Grecian urns and collapsed “modern” vessels from thirty-seven years before.

  On the plane from Nairobi Raphael inquired conversationally about Gray’s next project.

  “Are you familiar with my other work?”

  “Not really.” He didn’t seem embarrassed.

  Errol found this incredible. Gray was covered even in most introductory syllabuses. “And you’ve been in anthropology how long?”

  “I don’t read much.”

  “How do you manage that?” asked Gray.

  “I do well. In school. For some reason I always read what I have to. Though I may have read nothing else in the book, I will always have read the one passage covered on the exam. Uncanny,” he observed.

  “That uncanniness may fall out from under you one day,” said Errol.

  “We’ll see. Things have a way of working out for me.”

  Errol had taken offense at Raphael’s reading lapses, but Gray, it seems, had chosen not to.

  “Had you read my work,” she went on, “you’d know I’ve done considerable research on matriarchies. One of them, in Ghana, is the Lone-luk. I’ve followed their society for thirty-five years. We plan to spend several months with the Lone-luk next year, starting in February.”

  “Why?”

  “Matriarchies are important to me,” she said simply.

  “Politically?”

  “Personally. It’s personally important to me that they exist. I don’t feel—incapable. I never have. Lesser. I’m not talking about political movements at all, opinions. I mean the way I feel.”

  Raphael nodded. “It has nothing to do with groups. With anthropology.”

  “That’s right.” She smiled; they seemed to understand each other.

  “Do you have,” she asked with unusual delicacy, “opinions? On sexual politics? On—supremacy?”

  “None. I don’t care. Men mean nothing to me. I am—” He seemed about to complete a statement, but it turned out he was finished. Raphael himself seemed surprised. “I am.” That was it.

  “The matriarchy is still politically useful,” Errol horned in. “It’s of obvious importance in dispelling biological assumptions of natural male dominance.”

  Raphael looked over at Errol with, he thought, the most inappropriate disdain.

  Gray sighed. “That’s true, of course. Except the Lone-luk haven’t been dogmatically—tidy. Few things in anthropology are. Messiness is the field’s annoyance, also its appeal. You know, the whole concept is a lie, in a way,” she mused. “Defining ‘cultures,’ the way people are. Construct the ‘typical American,’ you’ll have put together the one person in the country who doesn’t exist. I find people behave as much in resistance to their culture as in cooperation with it. No one embraces his inheritance completely, just as no one absolutely obeys the law.”

  “I like that,” said Raphael.

  “What?”

  “I like that you said that. You’re intelligent.”

  Gray laughed. “I’m so relieved you finally decided that.”

  “I know you are.”

  Gray shot him an odd look, then went on, adjusting the tilt of her seatback. “Anyway, the Lone-luk. When I first studied them they did make near-perfect dogma. The stuff of pamphlets. A lovely, smooth society. Artistic and prosperous. As far back as I’ve been able to ascertain, this tribe has been led by women. The women were the acknowledged heads of household, and held all positions of power. They did prestige work; the men did brute labor. The firstborn daughter inherited. Et cetera. However…” She proceeded with some pain; the Lone-luk had become a sore spot with her from way back, which was why she’d finally put a definitive update at the top of her agenda. For some reason, perhaps because she’d first lived with them when she was so young, she took their fate personally. “Unlike Toroto, their villages aren’t cut off. They’ve been exposed to both Western civilization and other tribes in Ghana, largely patriarchal. The men of the Lone-luk got the idea that elsewhere men were king of the mountain. Shortly after my first visit there, the men grew resentful, sullen, and uncooperative.”

  “You can hardly blame them,” said Errol. “They really were treated like oxen, you know.”

  “True.” Gray chewed her lip. “The women weren’t about to abdicate, though. So the most peculiar thing happened. There was a rift, a split. The men actually moved to separate villages. For years now the schism has done nothing but get more hostile and more entrenched. There’s never talk of compromise, of parity. Both sides want the upper hand. For thirty years the Lone-luk have been in a state of war. Marriage even more than sex has become taboo. Occasional intercourse has become fast and ugly and often aggressive; a high percentage of pregnancies are the result of rape. An entire generation of women has passed through its reproductive cycle largely without offspring. Huge numbers of middle-aged women are single and barren. The population has plummeted. The age structure of the society has
shifted, gotten older. The children that are born, boys and girls alike, are raised by the women, but the boys are treated badly, like runts. Once they’re about thirteen, the boys either run away or are kidnapped to the other side. And that’s not all…” Gray’s eyes gazed out the window forlornly. They were in a cloud; there was nothing but lost gray air outside.

  “What?” asked Raphael.

  “Well.” She sighed. “Any society is an elaborate system of interdependencies, not just sexual ones. Somehow the lack of trust between the sexes of the Lone-luk has spread to other things. They won’t cooperate intrasexually now. Each man or woman keeps a tiny separate garden. They won’t help each other build houses or effect repairs. They won’t take care of each other’s children or sit with the sick. In many ways they’re reminiscent of the Ik.”

  “Colin Turnbull,” Errol interjected helpfully for the ill-read.

  “Thank you,” said Raphael coldly.

  “The economy has fallen apart,” said Gray. “Barter is limited and suspicious and full of fraud. Other tribes now refuse to trade with them. Their culture has become more racist. Crime, which was nonexistent when I first went there, has skyrocketed.”

  “The original crime-free state was intellectually convenient,” said Errol.

  “That’s true. But, Errol, crime isn’t on the rise just with men, but with women. Maybe because they’ve been used to an aggressive role, but even violent attacks among women aren’t uncommon.”

  A stewardess asked if they wanted drinks, and Gray glared; she didn’t like to be interrupted.

  “It used to be so beautiful!” she lamented once the woman was gone. “Their villages were peaceful and well kept and just. It was a warm, even idyllic community.”

  “You were young,” said Raphael.

  “I was young, but I wasn’t blind. It’s not just my ancient cynicism warping my perspective now. I am not talking about a subtle shift. Those villages are squalid now. Ugly, littered, impoverished, covered in feces. Full of flies and starving animals. And the people aren’t nice.”

  “Sounds as if you should stay home,” said Raphael.

  “No. I have to go. It’s my lot, I suppose.”

  “Is it dangerous?”

  “Quite. It’s like an inner-city slum.”

  “Actually, this worries me, Gray,” said Errol. “Since you and I are going to have to live in separate camps, there’s not going to be anyone to look out for you.”

  “There’s me to look out for me,” said Gray. “As usual.”

  “Maybe you should bring someone—”

  “That doesn’t concern me,” she cut him off.

  “You haven’t changed since you were twenty-two,” Errol muttered.

  “And I don’t plan on changing, either,” she snapped.

  “You may have to,” said Raphael.

  “Why?”

  Raphael said nothing.

  “At any rate,” she continued gruffly, “in the meantime I’ll be doing a parallel study in the U.S. while I pull together this documentary about Charles. The one truly matriarchal element of our own society is urban black culture. Most households are headed, even supported financially, by women. So I’ve targeted an area of the South Bronx in New York. We’ll be putting together family histories and doing interviews on attitudes about sex and marriage and power. As far as I can tell, the situation there has degenerated to a similar state of siege. It should be interesting.”

  But Gray didn’t sound interested. She sounded depressed.

  7

  It was a relief to be back in Boston, and a disappointment—as usual.

  But then Errol liked usualness. Much as he thrived on the excitement in other people’s lives, in his own he liked predictable routines. One of the most distressing aspects of this whole next year was to be its constant sense of disruption.

  Errol had hopes that Charles Corgie would die back down into history. They’d troubled his brittle bones, but that wasn’t to say they couldn’t be buried again. Yet ghosts, once disturbed, don’t settle so easily, especially when they are twenty-five and in good health and have found their “carrot.”

  Still, when Gray announced the week following their return that she was going to play Raphael at tennis, Errol had to smile. In the film they’d skipped over the game between Gray and Charles, and this was a scene Errol would particularly enjoy seeing replayed.

  “I bought you a cheesecake for the big day,” said Errol over breakfast. “The good kind. Third shelf.” Gray was a nutritionist’s nightmare; she lived mostly on sugar.

  “Big day?”

  “Aren’t you playing the reincarnate this afternoon?”

  “Oh, that’s right,” she said quickly, gulping down her coffee so that it must have hurt her throat. “I’d forgotten.” A drip of coffee trickled down her chin; she wiped it away with the back of her hand. Gray got up and washed the stray dishes in the sink.

  “I thought you hated washing dishes in the morning.”

  “Big piles,” said Gray. “Crusty food. But a few water glasses and teaspoons can be relaxing. Warm water on your hands. Clean clear glass. Round metal.”

  “Why would you need relaxing?” asked Errol. “You’d forgotten.”

  “Forgotten what?”

  Errol didn’t bother. “You’re really not going to eat that cheesecake?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Errol got up and plunked the whole two pounds of solid cream cheese in the middle of the table. “Gray, it’s not enough that you win. You have to do it with style. For that you need energy. I have no interest in wasting my time watching a routine victory. I want to see him weep.”

  “That seems unlikely, don’t you think? Can you picture it? Raphael weeping?”

  Errol thought a moment. “You know, it’s rather odd. I can.” For just as she said that, an image flashed into Errol’s head that he’d never seen: the long chin pointed up, the head tilted back, and the eyes wide and unblinking. There were tears marking an even, steady track down both cheeks, a drop every few seconds, with the precision of an IV. The face itself was set in its usual relaxation, as if the tears were part of its natural state. As always with his images of Raphael, there was no sound—just the faint flap of his glottis, swallowing, with the Adam’s apple lurching up and down.

  Gray paused at the sink and looked over at Errol, and slowly nodded. “You’re right. I can, too. Isn’t that peculiar?”

  “No sound,” said Errol.

  “Completely still,” said Gray. “And in terrible pain.”

  Errol felt his scalp shift over his skull. They were seeing the same thing. They’d been together too long.

  Gray turned away and wiped the counters briskly, though they were clean. “I don’t think we’ll get him to cry over a tennis game.”

  “No, I’m sure that wasn’t it.”

  “It?”

  “What was making him cry.”

  Gray didn’t like this anymore. “What are you talking about, Errol?”

  “An image. Which you saw, too, and can’t pretend you didn’t. I’d pay money to know what gets to a guy like that.”

  “Spoiling his own happiness deliberately,” said Gray right away.

  “He told you that?”

  Gray stopped whisking the sponge across the table and laughed. “Raphael would never tell me something like that. I don’t know why I said that. It just came to me.”

  “So why would he spoil his own—”

  “Errol, this whole conversation is getting ridiculous.” Gray squeezed out the sponge and strode out of the room, leaving the cheesecake untouched in the middle of the table.

  She walked down the stairs at three in her usual tennis dress. She’d worn this outfit to play ever since Errol could remember. The material was soft and gauzy, like cheesecloth; though once white, it was now the color of muslin. Gray wouldn’t buy a new tennis dress, because she wore her wide amber sweat stains with pride, like old war wounds. Like Gray herself, the material had l
ost some of its body, but made up for it in grace and texture. She’d wear this dress until its threads dissolved on her back, for she held on tight to all that aged well.

  Once at the courts, Errol realized he’d expected Raphael to show up in dazzling boxer shorts with smartly turned cuffs and a blazing Ban-Lon polo—the untrammeled overstarched look Gray so detested in a tennis partner. Catching sight of Raphael leaning against a bench, with his racket cocked behind his shoulder, Errol was disappointed. His faded cutoffs certainly weren’t starched, and his broken-down T-shirt had the same amber mottling as Gray’s dress. He took off his sunglasses as Gray approached. As imposing as he looked in their reflective chrome lenses, they were no match for Sarasola’s naked eyes. Today these were insanely open and a wide confessional brown—Raphael seemed to breathe through his pupils.

  Raphael reached for Gray’s hand and kissed her deftly on the cheek. “Nice weather,” he said.

  “Lovely weather,” said Gray.

  They were talking about the weather, and Errol already felt left out. “Heat is good for suffering,” said Errol to Raphael.

  Ignoring Errol completely, Raphael swung his racket languidly off his shoulder and strode to the court with Gray. Errol thought about leaving, seriously, but instead found himself following behind them to a green bench that would surely give him splinters. He wished he had a book. No, forget the book. He wished a beautiful blond woman in a short, flouncy tennis dress would sit beside him and complain to him about arrogant young men, how she wanted someone for once who was considerate and intelligent and responsible. Then Errol thought about these adjectives that described him and felt drab.

  Raphael and Gray were warming up with a rally. Their play was careful and polite. Gray could return balls like that in her sleep—an inch above the net, but still with a slope, and when the balls hit Raphael’s court they actually bounced above the surface. Errol smiled and forgot about the girl in the flouncy dress who was obviously just looking for a father. This was going to be good.

  Yet Raphael’s shots were solid and evidently easy for him. He never seemed to have to run very far. For the first five minutes neither player was sweating. Each was toying with the other. They were smiling. It was a joke.