The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  “To what?”

  “Your book. Sometimes you stop reading.”

  She shrugged. “So?”

  “So nothing.”

  “So you’re an observant little boy.”

  “So I’m not so little.”

  “That’s right,” she said, looking him up and down. “You’ve grown…How old are you?”

  “Sixteen.”

  She laughed the way she did in theaters. “You’re the vagabond, aren’t you? Across the street.”

  “You don’t have to ask. You know that.”

  She smiled. So she liked to be called on things. “Quite a playhouse you’ve got there.”

  “I live there. I work there. I have yet to play. I don’t have time.”

  “Oh, sensitive! But it must get chilly. In winter.”

  “I do,” he said, “wear a sweater evenings.”

  “I used to watch you,” she conceded. “I felt sorry for you. Sometimes I thought about asking you in for the night. But I figured, Ah, Walter wouldn’t like that so much.”

  “What might I do that ‘Walter’ wouldn’t like?”

  She smiled. “If you don’t know that,” she said, stretching down on her towel so that her rib cage rose toward him, “then you really are a little boy.”

  He nodded and looked at her body frankly. “We’ll see,” he said, “how little.” He turned on his heel and returned to his factory, realizing as his heart whomped against his chest that he had, for the first time, made a promise.

  Raphael checked out Anna Karenina. When he found out what the book was about, he laughed out loud.

  He didn’t finish the novel. He liked Vronsky. He was angry when he saw the author turning on his favorite character, making the man look mean and small.

  Raphael strode up to Ida’s towel and threw the book beside her. She jumped.

  “I quit,” said Raphael.

  “Quit what?”

  “That book. The writer has no respect.”

  “For?”

  “The count. Starts to treat him like a jerk.”

  “Who does?”

  “Tolstoy!”

  “You think Vronsky’s so great?”

  Raphael shrugged. “He’s all right.”

  “I think,” said Ida, “he’s petty and arrogant. I think he’s just a dumb, pretty boy.”

  For some reason this made him bristle. He had to remind himself that he didn’t care about books, and take a breath. “He’s better than what’s-his-name. Levin. Vronsky has something. Levin is mush. Levin is like mashed potatoes. And Kitty is a bimbo.”

  “A bimbo? That’s your literary analysis?”

  “Just my analysis.”

  Ida looked up at him through her eyelashes. “But you like Anna.”

  “She’s all right.”

  Ida rolled her eyes. “You’re just aglow with enthusiasm.”

  He paused, and licked his lips so that they shone red in the summer sun. “No, I like her enormously.” Then Raphael tried out something he’d rarely tested: he smiled. A small smile; deft, even; the pilot versions must have been mere models of the commercial lines to come, yet even in its experimental phase that smile must have had something—a gentleness, a grace, a terror. Raphael spread out those clean white teeth like wings, and the thing lifted off the ground. Ida took a breath; and sat up straighter.

  “My,” she said. “We could start a regular book club, couldn’t we?”

  “With regular meetings. I’d like that.”

  Ida slowly shook her head in amazement. “Sixteen.”

  “That can be a lot of years,” said Raphael. “A lot of winters.”

  Ida stared up at him from her towel. He seemed taller than ever, foreshortening into the periwinkle sky; his eyes flashed like jet sides catching the light overhead. “How did you get like this?”

  “I’ve always been like this.”

  She looked at him a long time, and said at last, “You know, I think you’re right,” and laughed.

  Errol knew that at that moment both she and Raphael understood something about character: yes, there were reasons, there were winters, as Raphael had said; there was Cleveland Cottons, there was Frank, and certainly Nora—you could point to all these factors and still have nothing. How did you get like this? We have always been like this. There was something before. How did you get like this? We have always been like this. That was the mystery. There was no explaining. Raphael Sarasola was a certain way and he had always been, even when Nora was still there; in his crib his eyes had shone like that, like the metal on airplanes in the sun, and there was nothing to say about that, no explanation. They shone like airplane siding in the summer sun. That was all there was to say. He was like this. Raphael was like this, and the only reason to say anything else at all was that you were bored and needed to pass the time by the swimming hole as the afternoon got later and more and more orange.

  Walter was out of town the following weekend, so Raphael invited Ida to the mill for the evening. That afternoon he didn’t know what to do. His preparations had been made. He peeked out the window and there was Ida on her towel, darker than ever, actually reading this time. Slowly he made his way out to the front of the mill, leaned against the brick, and stared. She smiled and kept on reading. He’d said seven. It was only three. It was hot, but he stayed against the brick, feeling the smooth, warm clay with his fingers, the rough rivulets of mortar, pressing his body up against the big, hot building, resting his cheek against the brick, feeling its redness, its pores. Now it was three-thirty. He would wait. The air was thick and humid and oxygen-poor, like breath under blankets. The three sections of Ida’s body floated above her lawn. He smiled. She was actually turning pages. He wondered if she understood anything she read. But then she was older. Maybe at thirty you could actually read on afternoons like this.

  Gradually the shade of her oak tree crept across the grass, and Ida picked up her towel to follow the sun. At five the patch of yellow was no longer large enough for her whole body, and she stood, stretched, and yawned in the spotlight left there. Methodically she marked her book, folded her towel, and swayed in the front door, without a wave or a nod.

  Raphael returned to the mill, where brilliant orange rectangles shafted into the room. The walls and drapes blended in yellows and grays. He lay on the couch, and the sheet over it was cool and smelled bright. The hours were long and rich. He tried to think of as little as possible. The lean spears of light lengthened and flushed, cutting clean diagonals across the couch. He extended his legs into the sun and looked at them, as if for the first time. There were long muscles in his calves like unopened tiger lilies, soft and smooth and oily to the touch. He’d never really seen these muscles before. The hair on his legs was darker and thicker than he remembered. When he lay down, his legs would no longer fit entirely on the couch. He set them gently on the arm of the sofa as if they were an expensive present he’d just been given and he wanted to show the donor with what care he would treat them for the rest of his life.

  At six-thirty, he reached over and put his bottle of French white wine in a cooler filled with ice, and leaned back on the pillow. Fifteen minutes later he reached back and pulled out two wineglasses, setting them on the table to scrutinize them carefully. They weren’t entirely to his taste, but he’d worked them out of a box of unsold garage-sale merchandise that had been thrown out; he could hardly complain. Besides, they rather suited him right now—tall and fluted, with rippled rims, the glasses were thin and tinted a delicate pink. He decided to give Ida the one with the chip.

  At just seven he heard a hollow rap at his entrance and let her in, taking her hand as she stooped through the hole. She handed him a spray of tiger lilies from her yard. Raphael put the flowers down on the table by the wine. She was wearing a short black kimono over the same black bikini and a string of tiny pearls around her neck. Ida went straight to the wine, opened it, and poured two glasses. They toasted, to nothing. The mill was fantastically quiet. Neither had yet
said a word. Sipping her wine, Ida lingered around the room, looking out the front windows to note the view of her lawn. Raphael watched her legs, the crook of her elbow at her waist, her slow but wide stride, the sway of the black silk as she swung from window to window.

  “The concrete,” she said, nodding at her feet, “is nice and cold.” She smiled.

  Raphael said nothing. He stood where he’d been standing, and she circled back to him at last; her glass empty, she put it down. He did the same, and refilled them, not because he was going to drink any more but because they looked nicer with the wine, the small bubbles forming on the inside of the glass and gliding occasionally to the top, to float, to pop. He set them in the light, and the wine caught shards of sun.

  Slowly Ida unbuttoned his blousy white shirt until it hung open. He looked down at his own chest, again with a feeling of newness and revelation, a sense of finally having been given something—not a pie or nails or a caulking gun—for which he was grateful. His chest was still hairless, though with a fine dark down between his pectorals that Ida smoothed with the pads of her fingers. She trailed her fingers between the halves of his rib cage, then swept her palm around his side and smoothed up and down the furrows of his ribs. With the most pastoral look on her face, a kind of simplicity and lack of conniving he’d never seen in her before, she slid this same hand down the flat left side of his stomach, down behind the waist of his cutoffs to the hollow of his hipbone, until she moved subtly toward his middle and ran the length of her hand along the round of his prick.

  Raphael did nothing but breathe. He knew he should be tense, that he probably even was, but he felt as relaxed as if he’d been drugged, and stood on his feet with a slight sway. He would have to lie down soon. His head was light, his balance precarious, for suddenly it seemed that two feet were far too few to stand on.

  Ida unbuttoned his Levi’s and unzipped his fly; the cutoffs slid to the floor. With great concentration Raphael lifted one foot, then the other, out of the legs of his jeans. He didn’t want to fall. Not because it would make him look stupid; he just didn’t want to fall.

  Ida seemed to understand the delicacy of his balance now, for she led him by the hand to the long trunk opposite the couch. It was only three steps, but he felt so appallingly tall by now that the floor seemed far away; though the ceilings in the mill were vaulted, he wondered if he might graze his hair against the roofbeams. As if on stilts, he tottered slowly on his new legs and let himself down; it was a long way, and took a long time to get there. Ida pushed him gently back until he was stretched out along the length of the trunk, which had cool white sheets tucked around it like the rest of his curbside furniture. His shirt fell to either side.

  When Ida leaned over him a moment later, she was still wearing the black kimono, but the bikini was gone. Ida O’Donnell was no longer edited, and with relief he saw her as a unified body, not the three pieces he’d grown so used to. He looked at her small conical breasts, with the nipples sharp and angular and protruding like the rest of her. Between her legs was a severe, well-defined triangle; he had to smile. She was so consistent.

  Ida drew herself over his pelvis, nestling one knee up against his ribs, letting her other leg extend between his, and together they held his prick tight between their stomachs. Ida looked down at him and smiled; she seemed pleased with what she saw. She took one of his hands in each of hers and pulled his arms over his head, over the edge of the trunk. Again he was conscious of his own span, and as Ida moved up his body until the tips of her pubic hairs tickled the head of his prick, he felt his whole body pull taut and lengthen, lengthen, until when she pushed back down on him it was as if he weren’t three-dimensional at all, just a vector shooting from one end of the room to the other.

  Raphael had expected his vision to blur, for the shapes in the room to go fuzzy as in soft-focus PG sex scenes; instead, their lines went sharp and hard. Perspective exaggerated, as the far end of the couch hurtled away from him and its closer end loomed large. The shafts of sun from the windows were at their longest and most narrow, and drew keen, even parallels across the floor. The wineglasses on the table were fully lit and glowed with a strange super-reality—not unreality, but an existence and dimension so startling that Raphael imagined he’d never perceived any two objects as so clearly present in his life. The whole room took on this quality, an exactitude, a definition, a clarity of edge, so that each piece of furniture was placed perfectly where it was and each chair was in the precise relation to the next one that it was, those folds fell that way and that shadow cut deeply there. The yellows and grays of the room were suffused with pigment, and textures rose from the cement; Raphael was sure he could see each thread and each interstice in the sheets on the windows and over the bed.

  When he looked at Ida above him he could see it was from her that the clarity was emanating. The edges of her body were drafted with a square, the angles with a protractor, and she was really on top of him, until, fully alive at the age of sixteen, Raphael Sarasola came into a woman for the first time.

  15

  “I can feel your heart beating,” said Ida. “Here.” She pressed her hand on his pelvic bone. She raised herself up on her arms, but he was still inside her.

  “I’ve still never kissed you.”

  “That’s not what you wanted,” she said. “To kiss me.”

  “That’s right. I’ve done that before.”

  “I’m surprised,” said Ida. “I see pretty little girls sneak in and out of here at all hours.”

  “Why do you think they come back? I don’t give them what they want.”

  “I got what I wanted,” said Ida, “and I’ll come back.”

  Raphael flushed with relaxation and relief. He stretched his feet and arms over the edges of the trunk and felt something he had never felt before and so could not name. He was already getting hard again; she smiled.

  “You’re a natural for this stuff, you know that? You’ve got a future.”

  “Do you do this all the time? With boys?”

  “You know, sometimes I can’t tell what I’ve done and what I haven’t.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I think about a lot of things,” she said vaguely. “I do a few of them. It’s hard to keep straight after a while is all. What actually happened; what I read; what I dreamed; what I saw someone else do. It gets to be—all the same.”

  “You mean you’re a nut.”

  “I don’t care what you call it,” she said, rolling off him.

  Raphael felt the air hit his prick with disappointment. It seemed lost dangling over his stomach, lonely and blinded. Ida bound the kimono closed with its belt, and he felt punished.

  “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t used to apologizing for anything, and the words sounded funny coming out of his mouth. “It’s just I asked you a question and you didn’t answer it.”

  “That’s right,” said Ida. “Some people think that asking a question gives them a right to know the answer somehow. Well, it’s not true. You’ve no right to anything. I’ll tell you what I want to. I don’t care what you ask.”

  “Do you lie?” he asked on impulse.

  “If I feel like it.”

  “So I can’t believe you when you tell me something?”

  “I don’t care if you believe me. That’s your business, what you want to believe. I don’t owe you or anyone anything. If someone doesn’t like that and they still stay around me, then they’re just stupid. ’Cause they can leave.”

  “I find the truth very useful.”

  “No,” said Ida. “I don’t believe in it. I think the truth is a lie.”

  Raphael smiled and sat up. “You have one twisted little mind.”

  “It may be twisted, but it’s mine,” said Ida. “People are always trying to get at it, but they can’t. It’s mine.”

  “People like ‘Walter’?”

  “Of course,” she said. “He thought he got me. He didn’t. But he knows better now. He leaves me alone.”


  “Sounds like a great marriage.”

  “It is, actually,” said Ida, with a warning in her voice. “It suits me just fine.”

  Raphael showed her the rest of the mill by lantern light, for the sun had set now. He led her around with a strange apprehension, for he realized he wanted to impress her. Annoyed with himself for this weakness, he went through his precious upper floors quickly and casually. It didn’t end up mattering. At last Ida broke down laughing and admitted that she’d come in here several times while he’d been out; she’d seen all this before. Raphael felt resentful, and pleased.

  When they returned to the living room, he lit the line of lanterns in their sconces, and the room flamed on all sides with the white, clean glow of alcohol. They finished the wine. Both were still only in shirts. Raphael pulled Ida down on the couch and fucked her—even Errol had to admit there was no other word—fucked her hard. His position over her felt so natural he was surprised it was new to him. The gnashing of their pelvic bones felt so familiar, the withdrawal, the attack: it was his life—thrust, retreat; drive forward, deny; press, pull away; take, take back; take, take back. He liked it. It was his life.

  He fell asleep with Ida on his arm. When he awoke it was light and the lanterns on the walls were out and dry. She was gone. Be that way, thought Raphael. He proceeded upstairs to work on some broken steps and polish textile machinery; with concentration he refused to look out the front windows to her lawn, on which she’d surely be lying. He got a good deal of work done that day, almost too much in an odd sort of way. There was an edge on his life now that he wasn’t sure he liked. No matter how brightly the metal shone on the spindles, levers, and wires, the shine gave him only the thinnest satisfaction, and he was sure that if he hadn’t fixed the steps he could have jumped over the broken ones without much trouble.

  Raphael worked late that night, went to sleep, which was boring, and set back to work the next morning. Still, in everything he did he felt oddly undercut, as if while he built his supports for the second-floor ceiling someone were digging underneath him, tunneling out below his mill to make the whole foundation shaky. He kept changing tasks that day, assuming if he could hit on the right job he’d feel whole and stable and sufficient again. Nothing worked, though, and he quit early to forage for food. He went out the back door and down the path by the river to avoid her house. The detour pained him, and he tried to hike a good distance. As he drew away from her neighborhood, though, he was overcome by malaise and wandered into the theater to score some half-eaten buckets of popcorn. Of course, he knew she sometimes came here on Sunday afternoons, and Raphael hated himself for staying through two showings of a movie he had seen and disliked. At dusk he scuffled home, passing in front of her house. She wasn’t out, and her husband’s car was back. He returned heavily to the mill, fidgeted restlessly around all three floors, and finally jerked off. It was no fun. This, too, had been undercut. The fucking had been fine, but he was none too keen on this erosion.