The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  “I think I resist generalizations about age,” said Errol. “Maybe if you learned more over the years, getting older would mean something, but I don’t have the feeling that I understand things much better than I did when I was twenty-five. My tendency is more to see myself in a big mess that I’ve always been in. Know what I mean?”

  “Not really.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Are you always this abstract?”

  “It’s safer.”

  She smiled. Gray’s weimaraner, Bwana, muzzled at Ellen’s knee. She stroked his head diffidently. Bwana was a reserved dog and demanded a certain deference. “What a beautiful animal. How old is he?”

  “Twelve. Feeble, for a dog.”

  “I envy the way dogs age, don’t you? They get a little slower. They sit more. But physically they hardly show it. People fall apart.”

  “Not all of us.”

  Ellen smiled and shook her head. “You mean Gray. I know. I must have met her, oh, twenty years ago. Since then, well, her hair’s turned, her face is a little more drawn. Otherwise she hasn’t changed.”

  “No doubt there’s a portrait up in the attic somewhere that looks terrible.”

  Ellen chuckled.

  “Go for a walk?”

  They climbed down the steps and strolled onto the street. Ellen was quiet for a while.

  “I saw a friend of mine this afternoon,” she began reluctantly. “We used to be quite close. Seeing her was upsetting.”

  “Why?”

  “She was up for tenure in the history department last year. She had a good shot at it. Now she’s a word processor at an insurance company.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “She got into something over her head,” said Ellen vaguely.

  “You make it sound like a narcotics ring or something.”

  Ellen smiled. “She did have an addiction, at that.”

  “Pretty mysterious, Ellen.”

  She sighed. “It was an affair, of course. And instead of tenure, they fired her. Capsule version.”

  “Ellen, if everyone in the United States who had an affair lost their jobs, five people in this country would be working.”

  “He was a student, that didn’t help.”

  “That’s not so unusual.”

  “No. But she started acting inexplicably irresponsible. Not showing up for classes. Sometimes he’d come and sit in the hall where she was lecturing and stare at her until she forgot what she was saying and stuttered and dropped the chalk and scattered her notes. After he’d gotten her to really fall apart in the middle of the period, he’d get up and leave, looking disgusted. She’d make it about five more minutes and then dismiss the class. She used to come and see me afterward in tears.”

  “She should have told him in no uncertain terms to stay out of her classroom.”

  “You keep missing the point, Errol. She’d sacrifice her lecture just to have laid eyes on him that day.”

  “Sounds pretty adolescent.”

  “You mean you’ve never been so in love with someone that you organized every choice in your life around her? Ever?”

  Errol grunted and shut up.

  “Well, people began to report her, in droves. Meanwhile, he used her to the hilt. I’m sure it was largely her pressure that got him funding in graduate school. After that it was just fun and games, the way you play with a small trapped animal in a malicious mood.” Ellen sank down on a bench and leaned back. “I’m sorry to get so worked up, Errol. It’s just this came to a head only a few months ago, so it’s still fresh. Anita—I didn’t know people got like that, Errol. I wish I still didn’t. And all over this stupid kid. I don’t understand it.”

  “Or you do,” Errol speculated. “As far as I can tell, that’s what disturbs you, isn’t it? That you understand it all too well.”

  Ellen sat up. “If you mean that I’ve been in that situation, I certainly have not—”

  “Oh no,” said Errol. “You and I, we’re too solid, right? Feet on the ground. Charting our careers. We’re sensible and responsible, and we make our decisions on the basis of what needs doing. We make everyone else feel better, because they know that at least someone will be paying bills on time and making airline reservations well in advance, showing up for work and sending routine correspondence, while they fly off the handle with these attachments of theirs. We grind away and make all their histrionics possible. Isn’t that right, Ellen? We’re the rational workhorses of the world.”

  “That’s exactly what I meant, of course. I have no emotions. I’m a cold, efficient machine.”

  “Me too,” said Errol. “What a relief.”

  They both laughed. Errol put his hands in his pockets and the two of them strolled down the street in silence.

  “Sometimes—” said Ellen quietly, after a few minutes. “Don’t get me wrong, Errol. I’ve enjoyed talking to you, even telling that story, but—sometimes I get tired of relationships. Just people and other people and their problems. Do you know what I mean? It’s so wearying: the phone and the fights and the divorces. Friends and enemies, both of them.”

  “I know,” said Errol. “It never stops: endless shifting alliances.”

  “Yes,” said Ellen. “I get tired. And anthropology is no distraction: how people marry and bury each other. Who steps on whom and why. It’s the same stuff, Errol. Sometimes I wish I’d gone into manufacturing. So I could talk about how two gears weren’t interlocking and how to fix them.”

  “Sounds metaphorical. For a relationship.”

  “See, you can’t get away! I just like something else sometimes. I like cleaning, even. Dirt here, a dried spot of jam to get rid of. For once a task rather than a gesture.”

  “Yes,” said Errol, feeling in this last part of their conversation somehow lighter, sensing the air around him, hearing each silence between her words, walking with more spring.

  “I’m divorced,” she went on. “I live alone now. Once in a while I do miss living with a man. I do. Sleeping with someone warm, talking. All right, even fighting, having a problem. But lately it’s more the case that I’ve been reading and it’s midnight and I stop. I brush my teeth. I take off my clothes and fold them on the chair. I pull back the sheet and crawl in and it’s cool, Errol. In five minutes, I’m asleep. It’s so sweet, Errol. It’s so simple. Such a relief.”

  They walked a few more minutes in silence, watching the trees now leafed out and deep green bend in the breeze. Errol thought of Ellen Friedman lying straight and easily between those sheets, her small body quietly living its life there, dreaming of objects, of gears and cleaners and these trees, with the sound of smooth breathing and the clock ticking on the dresser, for hours. He knew she didn’t toss back and forth or sweat or snore or grind her teeth. Errol would have imagined himself with her, but that would have ruined the picture—the air would be thicker then; limbs would have to be woven together; there would be conflicts and competitions and things to say. No, just Ellen Friedman, there in the bed. The image made Errol feel rested and clear.

  “He has an interesting history,” said Gray out of the silence of the interstate. They were headed for New York, where Gray was a consultant for an exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History. The sweetness of Ellen’s vision had completely worn off. Errol was in a mood.

  “Don’t tell me,” said Errol. “He was raised by wolves in the wilderness, and that explains everything.”

  “Errol,” said Gray, tapping the steering wheel testily, “these remarks of yours are beginning to accumulate.”

  “Remarks?”

  “About Raphael. What is your problem?”

  “My problem.” That was a tall order. Errol tapped his own counter-rhythm against the car door. He measured his syllables with care into the small space of the coupe. “My problems,” he amended. “I have two. One: Sarasola is an egomaniac, but with nothing to back it up. Two: he’s a sadist.”

  Gray readjusted herself behind the wheel angularly
. The muscles in her jaw tensed visibly in and out. “All right,” she said. “One at a time. Ego. Did he have something to back it up on the tennis court?”

  “Yes, Gray, he plays much better than I do.”

  Gray shot Errol a look. “But did he brag about his game?”

  “Of course not. He lost.”

  “But how did he lose? Was he annoyed? Upset?”

  “No, I got the impression he enjoyed it.” Errol stroked his beard and read billboards. “It’s his attitude toward you that gripes me, Gray. How can he be so blasé? As if he’s in his element or something. As if he’d give Henry Kissinger a call tomorrow but he just doesn’t have the time.”

  “You mean why isn’t he obsequious.”

  “Fine. So he knows you would hate that. So he’s clever.”

  “But why is he a sadist?”

  “Because he tortures me,” Errol wanted to say; instead he told her, “Pamela Rose was the clincher, obviously.”

  Gray sighed. “Granted, he wasn’t overly kind—”

  “Overly kind! ‘Your behavior is unattractive, Pamela. Go home.’ My God, I’m nicer to infestations of silverfish—”

  “Errol, all right—”

  “That was not just a tired tennis partner in a bad mood, Gray. That was the kind of man you don’t want to run into on the T late at night—”

  “Listen. Have you ever had a woman interested in you who wouldn’t leave you alone?”

  “Errol the Eunuch have a woman interested in him? Never.”

  “I tell you, lately this moping and baiting of yours all the time, Errol, it’s—”

  “Unattractive?”

  Though they were riding along at sixty-five, Gray and Errol looked each other in the eye.

  “I think the word we use in the United States is ‘stupid,’” she said, looking back at the roads.

  “Good.” Errol turned back to the billboards. “That’s a better word. Less chilling.”

  They rode the rest of the way in silence.

  Yet working together at the museum on case arrangements and slide order, they jockeyed back to Old Errol and Old Gray: usualness. They were a team. She smiled and hit him lightly on the shoulder and made jokes about pottery. By the time they were driving back two days later, Errol was in good enough humor that he could actually listen to stories about Raphael Sarasola without getting a headache.

  “You believe this stuff?” asked Errol halfway through. “This sounds like Walt Disney to me.”

  “Why would he make it up?”

  “To impress you.”

  “He probably thinks he can impress me without going to any lengths.”

  “No doubt. Go on.”

  While Gray tried to draw the narrative out for as much of the drive as she could, the story didn’t take long to tell, as Raphael’s version had been quick and dry. Errol, however, was used to making home movies on scanty material, so in his mind filled it out quite nicely.

  9

  North Adams, Massachusetts, is a dark industrial town in the western part of the state that has not, unlike the eastern half, gotten the word about electrodes and microcircuits, the boom of high technology. North Adams invested in low technology, so is overshadowed not just by the foothills of the Berkshires but by long, brick textile mills, boarded, broken into, boarded again. On top of every hill these monuments loom; they’ve given the last two generations of fathers something to say. “Stay out of those old factories, boy. There’s rats there bigger than you. Big as me, even. You think I’m scary? How’d you like a big old rat with whiskers and sharp teeth to tell you to finish your supper?”

  But for Raphael Sarasola, imagining his father as a large and dangerous animal must not have been so difficult. Errol could see Frank Sarasola as a wide, hairy man who beat his child, as his father had beaten him, with a kind of sociological dutifulness, as if he’d read articles. What did he do for a living? Gray didn’t know. Surely like everyone in that town he was professionally disappointed. Errol had driven through North Adams before, and he imagined the place as a mecca for bleak, disillusioned personalities who’d been romantic in their youth. Errol suspected the entire population sat at home listening to the radiator hiss day after day (it would be winter—it must always be winter in North Adams), listening to the wind shaft its way through the cracks in the window frame, always cold, always lonely, no matter who else was in the room, always put upon and grudging, and of course disappointed. On Fridays they probably passed out checks for the diligent disappointment the people had worked on all week, and there were bonuses for overtime, for those who made flat, eventless dreams in their sleep, full of dust and broken things and boarded-up brick.

  Now, what did Frank do? Was he the mailman that children were afraid of, who never delivered any news? Errol liked that: Frank putting one more catalogue in the box, shoddy correspondence courses, death announcements of distant relations, last month’s magazines.

  It was his mother who’d named the boy Raphael, and you can bet Frank hated the name. “Ralph,” he might say, “Ralph, you don’t get that garbage carted off to the dump, you’re going with it, understand? You can just move there. You could lie down on that mattress that caught fire over at Mrs. Willis’s when she fell asleep smoking in bed. You saw that thing, all black and springy? Sound comfy, honey, sweetie, lover boy—” He imitated Raphael’s mother by spitting these endearments like a string of profanities.

  Raphael had to come by his looks from somewhere, so his mother must have been pretty. A little cringing; she was married to Frank. (What was her name? Errol made one up with care. Elise, Camille, Gabrielle…No, something simple. Dora. Nora. Nora would do.) But even given the occasional lucky throw of genetics and the unattractive cowering with which Nora must have buried her looks, for Raphael to have turned out with those long, sallow, carved features, his mother must have been something to see. Then how did she end up with Frank? All right, Frank the Inventive, Frank the Strong, but also Frank the Violent, Frank the Mongoloid? For Errol imagined Frank as a man of colossal thickness in every respect.

  Errol had several theories. The first, pregnancy, he discarded as dull. It too patly explained why Frank would resent his son, and it did not explain how Frank would ever be in a position to get Nora pregnant in the first place. Why would she even share a Coke with a man like that? Pretty Nora, with all those ideas of hers, all her pictures? For Nora wanted to be an artist. When she first married she could only finagle enough money from her husband for cheap, chalky watercolors, though she yearned for oils. She used to explain to Raphael when he was young that the pale pink in her pictures was really “naphthol crimson,” that a wash of leaves should really have been “peacock green,” and she would search the house for the right color to show him, scrounging around scraps of material and the bright printing on ten-cent coupons and the quick-sale vegetables darkening in the hydrator until she found the sample she was looking for.

  No, Errol had to get back to this: Frank and Nora. Nasty Old Frank and Lovely Nora. Explain this, Errol told himself. You’re an anthropologist. Put some of those theories to work for once.

  It made sense that for a whole town to make its living being disappointed, each citizen had to do an initial internship in expectation. Errol figured this precious period of enchantment hit at about seventeen. That was the age that Nora had hung a bedspread down the middle of the room she shared with her sister to create her “studio,” with an old bulletin board for an easel and the chair swiped from her mother’s vanity as a stool. Nora did portraits of people she’d never met and landscapes of places she’d never been. In the faces there wasn’t a line or a sag, in the landscapes not a board or a brick.

  Now, Frank had been seventeen himself. Frank had not always been so wide. Perhaps, too, the beatings he’d endured as a child had given him resilience, power, energy. No doubt he’d learned to hit back. No doubt he had plans, Frank did. Frank was going to “get out.” (Surely planning to get out was a major pastime in North Adams�
�and judging from the number of digits dropping off the population sign every time Errol drove through town, an occasionally successful one. Errol knew that pastime well, though. Getting out always meant getting back in somewhere else. When you were born breathing that kind of bleakness in the air, it got into your lungs. You developed a taste for it, as for nicotine. Tarry and dangerous, bleakness was easy to pick up elsewhere—there were a lot of nasty boarded-up little towns in New England to absorb refugees from North Adams and make them feel at home.)

  That’s right. Nora, in this illness that struck the residents of the town in the prime of their young adulthood, could paint landscapes but could also have remained indefinitely in the room with the 60-watt overhead light and the bedspread beginning to tear on the nails that held it to each wall and the hairs falling out of her cheap brushes one by one and sticking into the paint. She wanted privacy, and she was pretty, with amazing thick dark hair and tall bushy eyebrows that mingled sweetly above her nose, but she didn’t have a fire under her; she needed Frank to “get out.” And it was the oddest thing. In the end he did help her do just that. But by staying where he was.

  So it wasn’t hard to picture. The illness subsided. Frank layered in thickness like a candle being dipped once, twice, three times in a vat of hot wax. Nora at least had her pictures; nothing presented itself, as nothing ever presents itself, and there was always a living to be made being disappointed in North Adams.