The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  His conversations with the boys were terse and spread with silences that his friends enjoyed because they seemed so manly. It didn’t take long for his classmates to notice that Raphael had little taste for loud, rambunctious, knee-slapping evenings, with pranks and dirty jokes and shows of physical bravado. No, these boys had to steel themselves for evenings of terrifying maturity. A visit with Sarasola was not a relaxing social occasion; it was a test they could not goof their way through. They would talk about serious things, school and politics, but not for too long, because Raphael had no qualms about telling them in the middle of a diatribe on the Vietnam War that he was quite bored. The savvy found he had a weakness for stories—stories, Errol smiled, like this one. He liked to listen. He liked to take things in and store them away for later. He loved small bits of information—he liked knowing that strong winds often preceded a temperature change; that there was a solvent which glued plexiglass in such a way that the molecules actually bound together like one piece of plastic; that doughnuts were good if you dunked them in hot coffee and then whipped them right back out again before they got too soggy. Raphael was never bored by information, however trivial.

  Yet the best bet with Sarasola was to work. Raphael had ambitions for the whole structure of Cleveland Cottons, not just his original corner. As long as the two upper floors were infested, he would continue to hear long scuttering diagonals cut across his ceiling as he went to sleep. These former tenants had to go, and that meant dragging out all the boards and refuse, shoring up supports and holes in the floor, and laying out poison generously along the edges of every room. When Raphael worked he said no more than he had to, delivering cursory instructions which his friends had better get right the first time. Yet the boys enjoyed the delicious seriousness of it all—moving boards far too big for them, and saying nothing, just as Errol had enjoyed moving those two-by-fours with Gabe; tersely noting close calls with rotten floorboards and leaping broken steps on the dark way upstairs; coolly removing rotting rodent carcasses and flinging them in a long arc out the windows to bloop in the river below; getting small injuries, which Raphael would tend neatly and professionally with the medical supplies they brought him on their regular visits.

  “But you’re not going to tell me,” said Gabe, “that this guy built his whole little empire with boys, are you?”

  “No,” said Errol. “I’m not going to tell you that.”

  “I can see it,” said Gabe. “The entire school of blond German darlings and dark Italian sweethearts, in love with him. Out of control. Am I right?”

  “Uncannily.”

  “We had a guy like that in my school,” said Nathan. “Unbearable. But I stuck around him. Hang around the hoop, you can pick up the rebounds, right? I let them cry on my shoulder. After a while they got tired of crying, if you know what I mean.”

  “Likewise in North Adams,” said Errol. “Boys would hint they were in Ralph’s inner circle and, bang, they had a date for Friday night.”

  But they told Raphael everything. The secrets girls confided in his friends all arrived at Cleveland Cottons, so he knew which girls to hit up for his next meal and which girls to lay off because they were getting too frustrated. It was a great game, which all the boys enjoyed, for he generously left the girls for their own pickings.

  The extent of Raphael’s sexual exploits was entirely unknown. He collected information but didn’t deliver much back. The aura of secrecy he first generated in eighth grade did nothing but expand. In fact, he kept his hands largely to himself. Girls would knock on his boarded entrance late at night, with pies, flowers, or, if they’d done their homework, nails and caulking and a new Phillips screwdriver. He’d give them a tour of the place by lamplight, warning them of stairs not yet repaired and leading them through high-ceilinged rooms, showing them the polished machinery that once wound thread. He led them across his dance floor-in-progress so that they could later imagine themselves rocking into the night with Raphael as they went to sleep that same evening. At the end of the tour, to be described over the phone several times by morning, he would sometimes take the trembling face between his hands and kiss it once, carefully. Raphael’s kisses were kind and sensual and deep, but overly defined, cut clearly at the end, resolved in a way that would not get reported over the phone but which the girls understood at once: they made no promises.

  As the entire adolescent population of North Adams supported him, Raphael did his part in return. He never disillusioned them. Only when one of his followers decided to run away and join his idyllic life at the mill would he tell about the winters, about the poolroom and the lechers with bad breath. Then he would describe how older men sometimes walked along the riverbank drinking cheap Scotch and so discovered his lair, how he’d have to run them out at knife point, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy against several irate drunks, so that it was only the look in his eyes of someone who had used a knife before, and effectively, that kept him safe on these late nights. Finally, Raphael would confide that his mother had left him and his father was dangerous and that was why he lived at Cleveland Cottons, not because he’d read The Swiss Family Robinson too many times.

  Unless pressed, though, Raphael kept his mouth shut and didn’t complain. His classmates imagined he lived in exhilarating Pippi Longstocking independence, and Raphael allowed them to believe that, to feel their own freedom through his surprisingly difficult, even restrictive life.

  “Now, hold it. This went on for years?”

  “Five, I think.”

  “And no adults knew about it?”

  “No, I’m sure people figured it out. But Raphael pulled himself off as a phenomenon. People are tolerant of phenomena in small towns. Probably the owner of the mill didn’t even live in town anymore, and no one in North Adams was going to turn it into a shopping mall.

  “Anyway,” said Errol, taking a breath, “there was a woman.”

  “I figured,” said Gabe.

  “An older woman,” said Errol.

  “I even figured that, too.”

  “Pretty—”

  “Check.”

  “Dark—”

  “Check.”

  “Married.”

  The men on the bank laughed.

  “Son-of-a-bitch,” said Dave. “Every girl in town he can have, and he picks some old married lady. God, how stupid can a kid be.”

  “Very stupid,” said Errol. “But people pretty much get what they want. He must have wanted a challenge.”

  “Come on,” said Nathan. “He didn’t want a challenge, he wanted Mommy.”

  Errol inhaled and leaned back in the grass, staring at the blue sky and tapping his fingers against his ribs with a slight annoyance. “I think,” he said at last, “that we’ve all been raised with too much watered-down Freudian psychology.”

  “What, are you trying to tell me I’m off the mark? This guy doesn’t have some kind of mother thing?”

  “I’m telling you,” said Errol, “that I don’t care. All right, he wanted his mother. He missed his mother, can you blame him? She was gorgeous and loved him and left him when he was only thirteen. But. He also wanted this other woman, Ida. She existed in the world and they had an actual relationship. Not a mother-son one, either.”

  “You mean, so he wanted his mother, who gives a flying fuck,” said Gabe.

  “Yes,” said Errol. “Fine. We can say he was transferring. But then what do we know that we didn’t know before? What use is looking at it that way? It’s not even interesting anymore.”

  “Errol buddy,” said Gabe, stretching, “I like the way you think, boy. You guys should listen to him.”

  “I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” said Dave. “But I do want to know what happened with this Ida woman. Skip the philosophy. Did he fuck her?”

  “Dave, you sure know how to kill a story, don’t you?” said Nathan. “Right to the punchline.”

  “Nate, come on, you know how Dave tells a story. ‘I met this girl. We ate. W
e fucked. We broke up.’ Whoosh, it’s over.”

  “I like to get to the stuff that’s interesting,” said Dave.

  “You call that interesting?”

  “Sure.”

  “And you probably thought in high school,” said Errol, “that the Monarch Notes were better than the book.”

  “I wouldn’t know.” Dave shrugged. “I never read the books. The notes went on forever.”

  The crew laughed and everyone got another beer, settling down for the Monarch Notes of Raphael Sarasola’s first affair.

  14

  Ida O’Donnell lived across the street from Cleveland Cottons in a sprawling, two-story, New England clapboard, painted white with dark-green trim. While the house was in dilapidated condition, it still retained its original latticework, garden trellis, and lovely diamond-shaped windowpanes, at which Raphael would stare jealously through plastic until he began himself to replace it window by window with real glass. Her clothesline was in the front yard, and she would saunter out with a basket in the warmer seasons and slowly pin a line of white shirts and boxer shorts next to a line of black slips and red nightgowns and dark-blue lingerie.

  Raphael first really noticed her when he was just fifteen. It was summer, and he’d been in the textile mill for a year and a half. Ida would bring out a huge black towel and lie out in the front yard to tan. She wore a solid black bikini that blended in with her towel, so that from across the street her body was laid out for him in three discrete sections. Her face was sharp. She had an insolent pointed chin, a short but severe little nose. Her black hair was boyishly cropped and tousled, and abruptly stood on end. This peakedness extended to her whole body—her shoulders came to points; her collarbone jutted forward; her rib cage hurtled upward, then plunged to her waist. Ida’s stomach was the only part of her body that looked soft and whose shape was gentle, though two military hipbones rose on either side of her belly to protect it. Her flanks were lean, though with one endearing bulge of fat at each top inside, just about a mouthful. The rims of her kneecaps looked as if they could slice your finger; her shins gleamed like the bevel of a knife. She had long feet with high arches. At least Raphael knew she had high arches by the end of the summer, because he got one of the girls in the neighborhood to bring him binoculars.

  Ida was not known in North Adams as a particular beauty. She was a little bony, too tall, and besides, she had an attitude. There was something about the way she carried herself, the way those bones of hers protruded so insistently forward, something arrogant and aggressive and fenced-in. Her neck was too long; it held her head too high. And she didn’t talk to people. She didn’t buy chocolate from kids trying to raise money for the football team; she didn’t buy Girl Scout cookies. She didn’t join committees. She had no children. She didn’t shop much, and when she did, she didn’t compare brands or look at unit-pricing stickers but walked listlessly through the aisles throwing a stray box or two into her cart. Raphael had seen her in the grocery and openly stared. He loved what she bought, stupid things: smoked abalone at five dollars a can, but store-brand saltines; candied kumquats and brandied apricots, but long, two-pound loaves of white bread, too, and American cheese. She was no gourmet, but she played. Sometimes she’d pick a jar off a shelf, look at the label, and laugh out loud, tossing it in the cart without looking at the price. When she stood in line at the checkout, people would stare at her groceries; Ida would take a look at tabloid headlines and then focus somewhere off to the side—on what, Raphael couldn’t see, some point in the middle of the air maybe—and someone would have to nudge her to put her food on the belt.

  She liked olives. They were always in her cart. Raphael had never had an olive in his life, but somehow he liked the idea of Ida popping them compulsively in that house. He liked it a great deal.

  However, she wasn’t in the store very often; no one knew what she did. Raphael had a better idea than anyone. She took thick books out with her towel and scowled over them, starting about noon. (He yearned to know the titles, but his binoculars weren’t that good.) She spent the better part of the afternoon that way, and she might have been extremely well read if the same thing didn’t happen on the towel as in the grocery store: Ida would gradually focus on a point beside the book. He often trained his lenses on her gaze. He’d watch it blacken and glimmer once it left the page. One time she looked right into Raphael’s binoculars. He dropped them quickly to his waist, his heart racing.

  Walking home, he deliberately remained on her side of the street, strolling by her lawn and taking in her body casually before he crossed to Cleveland Cottons. Sometimes she looked back at him, with the same cool assessment, with impudence, actually, like a dare.

  Yet Raphael was fifteen and Ida must have been thirty, so he tried to put her out of his mind, working on the mill with his crew full-time now, taking his occasional satisfaction in the small shaky pairs of lips offered up to him evenings at the entrance to his castle. He knew, though, that there was something thin about those tiny mouths, something too simple, for their saliva didn’t have the viscosity he was looking for; their spit ran down his throat like water and left no trail. Their tongues were eager but nervous, fluttering in and out of his mouth. It was easy to kiss these girls; it was also easy to stop. It would have been easier still not to kiss them at all, and sometimes, from sheer boredom, he left them at his entranceway, with their lips bright red and parted; he would nod farewell. They stumbled off bewildered, their eyes hot. Surely he’d lost a nice dinner or two, a pie, a new shirt, but sometimes it was worth the sacrifice just to keep his body whole and untouched and held cleanly by the air around it.

  The winter was a hard one, cold. Though by this time Raphael had both a fireplace and an oil-drum wood stove, fuel was hard to come by, and the mill was too cavernous to heat. He slept little, usually during the day after school. His pool game improved enormously. Weekends and evenings he often spent in movie theaters, where his friends were ushers and let him in free. He dozed there, listening to the same movie over and over again, Bogart or Hepburn intruding on his dreams. He noticed that Ida often turned up at the movies alone, too. She also stayed through more than one showing, though she didn’t have to keep warm. Sometimes he sat behind her, and smiled when he saw those eyes gradually shift from the screen to somewhere in the curtains and remain there, catching the light of the projection, flecking, going white, black. She laughed in the wrong places. Even tragedies amused her, and in moments of crisis suddenly a jagged little laugh would cut through the theater; other moviegoers would turn and clear their throats.

  Toward the end of that winter Raphael grew thin and pale and was often lightheaded. There were times he couldn’t answer his teachers’ questions; often during lunch he slipped so quickly into a comatose sleep that he didn’t manage to scavenge leftovers in the cafeteria and returned to the mill with nothing to eat. Louis and the boys brought him hot meatballs and cartons of soup, but not every day, and they didn’t stay long; it was too cold. They slapped him on the back with a familiarity they’d never before have dared.

  Then came March, April, May; Raphael was still alive, and more. When the color returned to his lips they were a keener scarlet than ever before. His cheeks had sunken in the cold and remained that way, but in the sun the mound of his cheekbones warmed and darkened, and his face was no longer waiflike but more striking, more aggressively defined. In that year he’d grown astonishingly tall, so that by spring he could see over Ida’s head when he sat behind her in the theater.

  So Raphael turned sixteen and school ended and Ida was back in her black bikini. Yet winter had made him harder-edged. He didn’t watch her through binoculars or keep track of her from behind his drapes. Afternoons he leaned against the brick face of his fortress and stared at her squarely for an hour, with the same insolence she’d taught him the year before. She didn’t seem uncomfortable. She’d glance up from her book to make it clear she knew he was there, and then go on reading or staring at a spot of towel. She se
emed to enjoy being watched. He enjoyed watching. It was a good deal.

  In July Raphael sat himself down. He knew what she looked like; those three sections of by now well-tanned flesh were burned permanently on his retinas. Watching was no longer enough, or even enjoyable; it was a torment. Much more of this and he’d start to hate her. But he liked having someone in his life he didn’t disdain and who didn’t bore him. Here he was, sixteen, and he could pass for twenty. She was married, but he never saw her husband much; he assumed the marriage was bad. Besides, who was she? A housewife. Big deal.

  Still, his stomach grew heavy and drew together like a fist as he approached her house in mid-July. She’s a housewife, he repeated. Big deal. For the first time Raphael walked straight across the lawn to her towel. She rose on her elbows; her shoulders charged forward. Her eyes glittered; she looked amused but not surprised.

  “Your name is Ida,” said Raphael.

  “I know that,” said Ida. “You came over here to tell me what my name is?”

  “You like olives,” he said, unfazed. He handed her a jar, and she took it as if picking it off a grocery shelf, with that much surprise, with that much gratitude. Raphael admired this. It was the way he himself accepted presents.

  She looked at the label and nodded. “Oil-cured.”

  “What are you reading?”

  “Anna Karenina.”

  “Is it good?”

  “I don’t have the vaguest idea.”

  “You don’t understand it?”

  “If I didn’t, who would tell me? I mean I’m not a discriminating reader. I don’t know if it’s good. And I don’t care.”

  “Sometimes you don’t pay attention,” said Raphael.