The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  Errol tromped for a couple of miles back down the road, kicking cans out of the way and stepping on wildflowers with satisfaction. However, it was hard to maintain this high quality of anger in the face of such a day. It was warm but not yet hot, and a light breeze held Errol in its breath and whispered that no one would have an accident on a morning like this one. The trees at his side listed and blurred, their leaves splashed in brushstrokes like Van Gogh’s. There was hardly a car on the road, but once Errol stuck out his thumb, a pickup truck pulled over right away. Errol was forced to allow a finely tuned headache to ease into the summer air as he swung into the front seat and was sent so easily careening back toward Boston.

  Errol placed the driver in his early thirties; from his dirty hands, leathered skin, and billowing arm muscles, Errol guessed he did manual labor. Errol prepared himself for a long ride of silence and taxes and weather.

  “Don’t tell me,” said the driver. “You were a boring, screwed-up kid, and now you’re making up for it.”

  “What?”

  “I haven’t seen anyone your age hitching since I had a fight with my dad by the side of the road when I was sixteen and swiped the car out from under him. There was Dad out there on the road, stranded, a regular Jack Kerouac in double knits.—I tried on a double-knit jacket once at a yard sale. Those things are hot, boy. Ever worn that stuff? Oh, I bet you have.”

  “You’ve got me wrong. I’m more the tweed and rumpled-cottons type. Patched elbows. Corduroys. Work shirts and painter’s pants on weekends.”

  “Professor.”

  “No, but close. Go on with your story, though. Did you go back and pick him up?”

  “I looped around. Passed by. My father red in the face, his chest bulging at his buttons, not sure whether to hold his thumb out, up, or down. Hysterical, really. He pointed his thumb toward the ground, looked like he was saying, ‘Down with everything.’ Poor Daddy. I tooted and waved and hit the gas.”

  “Did he get a ride?”

  “’Course not. He walked a few miles to a gas station, nearly keeling over from the grueling journey. Called a fucking taxi, can you believe it? From forty miles away. Cost a fucking fortune, like, a hundred, hundred-fifty dollars. Which he tried to charge me. That was a laugh.”

  “He didn’t get any money out of you?”

  “How’s the guy gonna get me to give him money if he can’t even keep hold of his goddamned car?” The driver extended his hand. “Gabriel Menaker. Call me Gabe.”

  “Errol McEchern. And I was a strange kid, you were right there.”

  “I got an eye for them.”

  “I was actually headed toward normality when I was eighteen, until my older sister got married. That threw me for a loop.”

  “How’s that, Aaron?”

  “Errol. I was—close to her.”

  “You fucked her?”

  “No.”

  “Hey, don’t act so shocked. Like, it happens all the time. I fucked my sister.”

  “Is that so,” said Errol quietly.

  “Sure. The younger one. No big deal. She loved it.”

  “Really?” asked Errol skeptically. “How much younger?”

  “Four years. She was twelve. I helped her out, you know? That was no time in this country to be a virgin.”

  “You’re quite an altruist.”

  “Hey, I’m giving you a ride. So don’t come down like it was so terrible that I had a sick relationship with my sister.”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to. Come on. You probably wanted to fuck your sister blind, right?”

  “Oh sure,” said Errol with a sigh. “Everyone wants to sleep with everyone else, isn’t that right? In the end? Isn’t that the revelation we’re all hurtling toward?”

  Gabe leaned back, with his arms braced straight against the steering wheel and his eyes narrowed. “I guess you’re right. It’s pretty simplistic.”

  “And then eventually,” Errol went on, “when we come to our realization, we can in fact have sex with everyone and with our pets and our doorknobs and our tennis rackets and all the other things we’ve secretly desired all our lives. And then everything will be different, I suppose. The planets will align in some special way.”

  Gabe smiled and nodded. “That’s good. That’s good, you’re not some dumb guy. Maybe I’ll take you all the way to Boston, after all.”

  “Don’t go out of your way. Where are you headed?”

  “I’m building this house in Boxford. Gotta deliver these two-by-fours in the back, but the rest of the crew is off today, so I’m loose after I unload. But what you said, that’s good. See, you’re right—I wasn’t that close to my sister. I fucked her and I still wasn’t that close. It didn’t—uh—make so much difference.”

  “Well, maybe, with or without sex, all that’s important is how someone feels about you, really. How you feel about them. Do you leave them beside the road and take their car or not? Can they make you pay for their taxi, or not?”

  “Except no,” said Gabe. “Getting back to this. Okay, I lied a little. We’re in the truck, right? And I don’t know you. I said she loved it. Well, it turns out she didn’t. She wrote me this long letter a couple years ago—out of the blue, you know? Out of nowhere. I hadn’t seen her in, like, five years. Shit, she must have been seeing some shrink or something. Anyway, typed, single-spaced, like, seven pages, all about how she hated it when she was a kid and I’d come into her room when my parents weren’t home. Jesus. It was something. I mean, she lost it in that letter. So, what I’m getting at: it did make some difference, after all, my fucking her. Damnedest thing. I thought she liked it.”

  “You did not,” said Errol.

  Gabe’s head whipped around. “How’s that?”

  “You did not think she liked it,” said Errol calmly.

  Gabe said nothing and rapped his fingers against the steering wheel. “All right,” he said grudgingly, “I guess I knew she wasn’t too hot on it. But, so, what I said still stands: fucking her made a big difference. She was pissed as all hell. She put this trip over on me like she was scarred for life or something.”

  “I believe it,” said Errol. “But if you hadn’t made her sleep with you, you would have done something else.”

  “Why?”

  “You wanted to have power over her.”

  Gabe didn’t say anything.

  “And that,” Errol speculated, “was why she was angry. She figured out what you were about.”

  “You mean she found out I was a son-of-a-bitch.”

  Errol shrugged, worried he’d gone too far.

  Gabe laughed. “Well, good for her. She’s right.” He hit the steering wheel. “I’ll have to write her back, then: ‘Dear Glenda: You’re right. Love, Gabe.’ Think she’d get it?”

  Errol laughed. “Maybe not. I’m sorry about butting in. I’m left alone a lot lately. I think too much.”

  “No problem. Long as I’m not bored, you can say whatever you want. But you never explained why you were hitching. Your car break down?”

  Suddenly the whole ordeal with Raphael and the Porsche seemed a long time ago, and stupid at that. “I was with two friends of mine in a smart little sports car. The driver took this road at eighty-five, and I asked him to let me out. He obliged. Here I am.”

  Gabe scrutinized the road. “Eighty-five. I can see that. A good car?”

  “Porsche. Handsome. Shiny. He takes great care of it. He’s a pretty cold customer otherwise, so I suppose all his tremendous affection for the world at large has to go somewhere. I think it goes into lubrication and hard wax; pistons and valve jobs.”

  “Sounds pretty sexual.”

  Errol smiled, because they were already beginning to develop a joke between them, a good one, and they were strangers. “Oh yes. All imagery is sexual. Gets exhausting, interpreting all the time. Never being able to look at the Washington Monument without making a remark.”

  “So, is this guy a good driver?”
/>
  “I suppose. I don’t know. He’s very graceful,” Errol remembered. “Smooth. He handles the car with connectedness, if you know what I mean.”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “He’s a good-looking man,” Errol conceded. “He makes a pretty picture in that car. He drives like—” Errol stopped and smiled, because so often the same images recurred. “Like an animal. He and the machine together. When he shifts it’s as if he’s inhaling.” Errol was surprised he could be so generous, but as they drove in the opposite direction he seemed to see Gray, Raphael, and the Porsche more and more in perspective, drifting off to the horizon, less and less involved with his life and more just a spot, something to see. He felt calm. The windows of the pickup were open and his shirt fluttered; the air was warm; the sun was high. Errol felt young and easily amused.

  “So if he was such a hot driver in such a hot car, why did you get out? I mean, eighty-five is pushing it for this road, but it’s not impossible. Give me a tight machine and I could—”

  “To make a point.”

  “What point?”

  “You know, I’m not sure.”

  “Seems like an asshole thing to do is all.”

  “It was,” said Errol mildly. “So was going eighty-five. So was my best friend of twenty-five years not backing me up for the sake of a man she’s known for five months.”

  “We’re all assholes, right?”

  Errol laughed. “Right. Everyone wants to have sex with everyone. And everyone is an ‘asshole.’ This is a big day for truth, I must say.”

  Errol found himself in a state of mind he had rarely experienced. All that he considered important had inexplicably dwarfed. Major dramas had shrunk to squabbles. His career was now a job. There was only this man beside him and the road as it sped underneath Errol’s feet and the trees out the window. Houses. Small failing stores and pumps with overpriced gas. This sign. That fence. The expansion of his own lungs, the texture of the tattered serape covering the front seat. Errol felt as if he had cast aside everything: anthropology, newspapers, Boston; political opinions, his tastes in music and food; certainly Gray. With absurdly little prompting, he could go with Gabe to the house the man was building and hire himself out for light carpentry, rent a room nearby, and eat in diners and truck stops for the rest of his life. He could pick up a little plumbing and use coarser language and watch more TV. And this didn’t sound so terrible. It sounded comforting and easy.

  “Can I give you a hand with those boards?” asked Errol.

  “It’s not really in the same direction you’re going.”

  “I don’t care. I’m taking the day off. Two-by-fours appeal to me.”

  Gabe built houses, so he understood that.

  When they arrived at the building site, Errol deliberately took more boards at a time than he could comfortably handle. With his jacket and tie off and his shirt-sleeves rolled up, he felt more relaxed around Gabe. Errol wished oddly that he, too, could tell stories of leaving his father by the side of the road, though his own father was a quiet, obsessive physicist with whom Errol had always gotten along appallingly well.

  By the time they were finished, it was hot, and Gabe asked if Errol would join him at a nearby swimming hole where some of his construction crew were taking the day off. Errol easily agreed to go.

  When Gabe finally asked Errol what he did for a living, as they drove over, Errol had to think for a minute before he answered, “I’m a social anthropologist.” Errol had already so clearly imagined his little apartment in his carpenter’s life that his real profession and Gray’s Victorian house had grown dim. Errol now believed he lived in the back of someone’s clapboard, with a cheap, small-screen, black-and-white TV that was always losing its vertical hold, mismatched dishes with only enough plates to have two guests over at a time, and sparse furniture: a metal table and two aluminum chairs, the kind with padded plastic seats with rips in the upholstery that he played with through breakfast; one ugly but amazingly comfortable armchair in which he often fell asleep at night, a beer at his side, a detective novel in his lap; a rack for stacks of newspapers, bad ones but entertaining, full of scandal, advice columns, comics, and raking editorials. Perhaps the bed folded into a couch to save space, and on the nights he didn’t fall asleep in the armchair Errol went through a careful and satisfying ritual of laying out the mattress and tucking in the bedding and folding back the sheet, tossing two springy pillows out of the closet.

  Errol remembered Ellen Friedman’s description of going to bed, “so sweet, Errol…so simple. Such a relief,” and had to smile. There had been such a smooth, freshly laundered feel to her picture. He felt it in her presence, too, a cleanliness. Perhaps when she’d been married she’d been as entangled and stained as anyone else, but now there was a clarity to her life, a well-ironed, cottony feel to it with sharp, straight creases. Errol realized sadly as he rode toward the swimming hole that he’d lived with a bentness and a festering for many years.

  It was clearly worse than it had ever been. When Errol walked into that Victorian foyer now, the air was thick enough to clog his breath; his tie hung crooked; his shoulders rose and took a strange, hurtling curve. Errol yearned for the simple straight-backed chairs, for two tiny rooms, and a kitchenette kept scrupulously neat, for stacks of identical work shirts folded methodically in his drawers, for bare floors, for day after day of ordinary hard work and uninteresting friends. Errol would talk about taxes and weather.

  If such a life was boring, so be it; that would be Errol’s fault. Boredom was a personal failing; he believed that. If Errol would be bored in his little apartment, making instant coffee in the morning and sleeping late on Saturdays and meeting the rest of the crew at the swimming hole in the afternoon, then it would be only from his own corruption. The complications, the festering, got into your blood. You developed a taste for it; being busy and having screwed-up relationships with other people had their compensations. There was always something to think about. You could wonder, What are they doing now? or What are they saying about me? or What did she mean by that remark? because you would not have relationships with these people simple and direct enough that you could ask them what they said and did and thought and they would tell you. There were advantages to being lost in labyrinthine intrigue; there was always somewhere to go because you could never get there.

  What was Errol really thinking? Really? This: Why couldn’t he just tell Gray, say to Gray, “Listen—” Why couldn’t he just ask her, “Gray, listen—Listen, I—Gray, I—Gray—” Ask her, “Why, Gray, why don’t we—” No, more direct: “Gray, I would like to—” No, harder, fewer and fewer words, “Gray, I—Gray!” That was what always happened in Errol’s fantasies: he said things—with the smallest words—and Gray said things back, not only what he wanted to hear but with short, terrifying clarity, with no bentness, with no wryness or irony or bite. “Yes, Errol, I—” “Gray, could we—”

  It was no good. It would never happen. It was no good. They were at the museum now. Errol wondered what they were doing. Where they would go for lunch. What they were saying. He would never know for sure.

  Gabe and Errol wound their way down amid a cropping of rocks to a pool where the river collected clear and deep. Errol leaned over and dipped his finger in the pool and felt the coolness cut through his complicated life and its problems. On the small grassy patch beside the hole there were two naked men stretched out asleep, the tan lines from their Levi’s drawn across from hipbone to hipbone, as with a ruler. They were handsome bodies, on the whole, but each with its comforting imperfections. Errol stripped off his own clothes and dived into the water, then dried off beside Gabe.

  Gabe introduced Errol to the two men, Dave and Nathan, when they woke. The four of them drank beer from the cooler and assessed one another’s body furtively. While the crew told Hunter Thompson—style drug adventures, Errol glanced down at his own body with pleasure for the first time in months. Not too shabby, he thought. It could handle a good m
any two-by-fours in an afternoon. And Errol certainly had less of a gut than Gabe. True, there was a soft place right under Errol’s navel, about exactly a handful, for Errol had often inspected it with exasperation in the mirror of Gray’s upstairs bathroom. However, even if he did skip Gray’s desserts, the main part of the meal, for weeks, his limbs lost their brawn but the little bulge remained. Yet today Errol could be content at last to be well into middle age and still be able to hold his imperfection entirely in one hand.

  When the other men told stories of acid, hashish, and cocaine, Errol returned with stories of hallucinogens they hadn’t heard of—in Ghana, New Guinea, or Ethiopia; stories of whole tribes high for days, snorting green powder, so that when you entered the village the entire town was scattered along the edges of the road with mucus running in globs down their faces, the whole population glazed and oblivious—and no one was arrested and no one shot other people to get more. The men were entranced by everything but the snot, and Errol conceded that it wasn’t a pretty picture, though if you snorted the powder yourself it didn’t bother you anymore…

  Their stories came faster, about joining rock bands and convincing psychiatrists they were too crazy to be drafted and bombing public high schools. They were young, but they’d worked on having stories from an early age. Once they got onto women, Errol knew he had a couple of good ones up his sleeve, and after a few beers he had no reason to save them. That was one thing you could say for a life of complications: it made for good stories, though someone had always suffered for them.

  13

  So Errol told the crew about Nora and Frank; he used different voices. He told them about North Adams and the textile mills. They liked Nora. They weren’t sure about the little boy.

  Yet at this juncture in the story there was no point in liking Nora. Nora was gone. Raphael had turned his back on his mother at thirteen, leaving the screen door to creak and waver in the wind behind him. He stood there just inside the door, poised at the entrance of the living room now in shambles, long after he heard the car start and stutter and lurch away.