The Female of the Species

by Lionel Shriver

  The stars glimmered and fattened and doubled. He wondered fleetingly if he was raping her, but he knew as he felt the walls of her vagina spasm and contract, and looked down to see her lips fall open and flush, her eyes blur and go liquid, that it was entirely the other way around. She had set this up. She had somehow made him do this, in front of her husband on the lawn, and it was Raphael who was being raped, not Ida. With anger, a sense of his own abuse, he racked against her, and their pelvises met bone against bone. “I’m coming, Walter,” he shouted. “I thought she’d want you to know that.” Raphael felt used and sick, and came like spit. He rolled off her onto his back and wept. Ida stood up and pulled her robe around her, facing away from both men.

  “Ida,” said a tired voice on the porch. “Come inside, sweetheart. It’s too cold.”

  He heard her take one breath, a single breath, a sigh of some sort, he supposed. That was all he got: his reward, his punishment, he wasn’t sure which. She strode numbly back to the porch. Raphael heard the screen door creak, bang shut, and rattle. It was coming off its hinges, and he lay on his back with only a shirt on, listening to that door creak and waver in the wind for a long time.

  “I don’t believe this,” said Dave.

  “I do not have such a sick mind,” said Errol, “that I would make this up.”

  “He fucked her in the front yard, with her husband watching.”

  “So I understand,” said Errol.

  “And I thought I was a wild kid.”

  “So what happened?” asked Gabe.

  “I’ve got it,” said Nathan. “She divorced her husband and married Raphael, and now they have three kids and a cocker spaniel.”

  “Right,” said Errol wanly, feeling the same perverse sympathy for Raphael that Walter had from that window. “That’s the way these stories always end up, isn’t it?”

  Errol shivered; the sky was scarlet. Regretfully, he pulled on his pants and drew on his shirt.

  “You’re not going?”

  “No, but what do you say we go get a couple of drinks indoors? It’s getting cool.”

  So the four of them drove off to a nearby bar, where there were only a few other customers; as Errol told the end of his story, strangers switched stools to sit nearby. It was such a familiar and predictable ending, Errol wondered that they were interested. A boy, a married woman who was a lunatic—what would happen, really? Errol was saddened there weren’t more surprises in the world.

  All through those high-school summers Raphael and his crew had regularly made trips to Cape Cod, so he knew the feeling of riding the crest of a wave, keeping his board just inside the curl, and surveying the whole beach as he rode forward. He knew how to cut a fine figure and stand high on liquid with a balance as on solid earth. He reminded himself that March that he knew this feeling, and tried to remember the light spray in his face, the feel of his hair whipping back, the keen cut of the board as it shore its way into the water. All he could recall, though, were earlier trips to the beach, family vacations when he was five or six. He had forged into the water then, too, but with no board and no height and no exhilaration either, only that stoic bravery that had gotten him through his entire childhood. At five he had trudged dutifully into the surf, stumbling at first in knee-deep foam, but walking on, even quickly and easily as the water drew back, until suddenly he faced a wave three times his height. He’d stand straight before it and wait, as he did in front of his father when Frank was going to hit him. In sickening slow motion the wave drew up and crumbled him under. The boy rolled and hit against the stony bottom and saw nothing. As he tried to stand up and stumble back, he’d no sooner get the water away from his eyes than the undertow sucked his legs out from under him and tucked him under the next wave, and the next—it wouldn’t have been so bad, he remembered, just one wave, some salt in his eyes, a few swallows of brine—just one wave, and the others saved for another time, he could have taken that. But it never stopped. Over and over the water broke and pulled and dragged him down, and little by little Raphael swallowed too much water and not enough air, until he could no longer stand between waves and he gave over to his life as being lived below the surface of the ocean. Finally, and always a little too late, Frank would wade out and drag his son, coughing and limping and blinded by salt, back to shore.

  But Raphael had left his father behind, and the steady crush of his affair with Ida was unrelenting. No one was pulling him out for air. Gradually his lungs were filling with water. Gradually his balance was less steady; there was no resting, no shore. The breakers from across the street bore down on him, and little by little he was being plowed under. With the same terrifying slow motion of a wave about to break, April and May curled over his head.

  So much had changed. He did his homework with insane eagerness, and was frightened when it was through and he no longer had a sure distraction. He began to lose weight, for he wasn’t very good about stringing girls along for pies lately; besides, at eighteen they expected more than a kiss at the door. Louis and the crew were loyal and brought him what they could, but at the end of senior year all their lives were widening and speeding up; Cleveland Cottons seemed smaller now, and behind them. And Raphael did not reliably deliver what he’d always traded for food: stature, silence, live black eyes. There were times his tensile strength failed, and he had trouble keeping his height; he could be heard to mumble; his eyes would deaden and go white.

  Of course, there was always Ida if he got hungry enough, and sometimes he did. One weekend in late April, though, she insisted on sitting him down to eat a sandwich she’d prepared for him. Walter was there, naturally. Raphael was ravenous, but he could hardly swallow the bunches of heavy bread, and halfway through the meal decided that even starving to death was better than this: Walter looking dully at him and trying to make conversation, out of either sadism or embarrassment, he couldn’t tell which, and Ida, as usual, having the time of her life. Finally, when Walter asked him, “How is school going?” he rolled his eyes and walked out the door.

  Raphael continued to give parties, but not because he was in a festive mood. At least it was one sure way of eating something once a week or so; his guests brought provender, and often there were leftovers. He sometimes wondered, though, if the real reason he kept giving dances on his second floor was for the preparations beforehand, taking the cord over the road, pulling it down to Ida’s house, and plunging those two prongs of his plug deep into her side socket. He liked the idea of the umbilical wire connecting them those evenings, the electricity tripping from her outlet to his mill, and he would watch out the window late at night to catch sight of the wire waving between poles in the moonlight.

  Then it was June. School ended. At his graduation Raphael looked over the audience from the stage to find Ida clapping happily in the front row, in an insanely upstanding way, like a proud aunt. Then he noticed Walter next to her, clapping, but faintly, and looking pale, and he could not believe the man was there, as he could not believe it was June and it was time. He had to bolt from the auditorium to the boys’ room to vomit what little food he had eaten that day.

  “I cannot believe,” said Ida, collapsing onto his white couch, “you’re asking me to run away with you. I am stunned, I really am.”

  Raphael stood some distance away from her, tall again, determined. “There’s nothing else for me to do. So believe it.”

  “Well, I’m curious,” said Ida. “Where is it you propose to run off to?”

  “Boston, for now.”

  “Pretty high rents.”

  He had to smile. “So I’ve heard.”

  “You’re going to find another factory to play in?”

  “I’ll live somewhere. I’d like running water. I think I’ve earned running water.”

  “And how’re you going to pay for your flush john?”

  “I may go to school.”

  “That pays?”

  “It can.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then I’ll trave
l. With you.”

  “And I thought I lived in a fantasy world.”

  “You do.”

  “Raphael baby, sweetheart, my little darling, don’t you realize? All I can do is watch movies and get a tan. I cook like shit. I don’t have a high-school diploma. I can’t even read worth a damn, you idiot—I can’t concentrate for more than five pages. I’m unemployable, stupid. And how would you buy me a john and paperbacks and olives? Forget oil-cured, how about the no-frills green ones?”

  Raphael raised his hand to his forehead and touched himself between the eyes lightly with two fingertips, with a rare gentleness and sympathy for himself, as if giving himself a blessing or a baptism. “This is all beside the point,” he said quietly. “The world is malleable. Ingenious people don’t die in it without a fight. I’ve proved that. At thirteen I proved that. You’re thirty-three. You’d think of something.”

  “If this is all beside the point, what’s the point?”

  Raphael shook his head. “Why do I have to say it?”

  “You don’t. I told you a long time ago, questions don’t have to be answered. But if you don’t say something, we’re both just going to sit here.”

  “We are just sitting here. You don’t mean that crap about olives. You’re just talking. You’re not even considering coming with me. You’re just saying words. Making yourself feel better.”

  “I don’t need to feel better,” she said defiantly. “I feel just fine.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Raphael with difficulty. “You’ll miss me.”

  Ida looked down and played with that same black kimono, over the same black bikini, and said nothing.

  “Is that true?” he asked. “That you’ll miss me?”

  Ida mumbled something.

  “What?”

  “I said yes. Okay?”

  Something huge in the boy fell. He turned away from her and exhaled; his shoulders crumbled toward each other. “Yes, okay,” he said softly. “But you can only miss me if you’re not with me. So we’re straight. Thank you.”

  Behind his back Ida fidgeted in the ensuing silence, and at length jumped up from the couch and took several short, quick steps around the room. “You could stay through the summer,” she said. “It was always our best season.”

  Raphael didn’t turn. He said nothing.

  Ida looked out the window at her lawn and tapped her fingernails against the pane. The sound was unnervingly loud; she stopped.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, what did you expect?”

  “I didn’t expect anything,” said Raphael. “I don’t think that way. I’m only eighteen.”

  “Well, come on. You’re a kid. I’m a grown-up.”

  He laughed.

  “Thanks a lot,” said Ida. She scuffed along the floor. “And I’m married.—Don’t laugh at that, too, ’cause I am married.”

  “I wouldn’t laugh at that, Ida. You think your marriage is funny. But I don’t.”

  The next silence was longer.

  “—Well, Raphael, it was fun and—”

  “It was not fun.”

  “Come on, you’ve forgotten, when we used to—”

  “Ida.” Raphael turned to face her. “If you’re going to keep saying things like ‘It was fun,’ maybe you’d better be out the door. I don’t know what movie you last saw, but it seems to have been a comedy, or at least full of clichés. For God’s sake, get out of here and go watch something with a little integrity. See Casablanca again and listen to the ending. You may not be discriminating, but I am. I don’t want your bad movies in my life.”

  “You condescending son-of-a-bitch.” Her eyes flashed as she looked at him; though she was angry, Ida hesitated for a tiny instant before swinging toward the door. No doubt Raphael missed this moment, for he had no mirrors in the mill and so could not now see himself as she saw him for one instant and as the world saw him then and ever after: Raphael Sarasola, hair blazing, lips full and red and drawn together, and most of all, those eyes beginning to burn. They did not look like the eyes of a man on whom any woman would turn her back ever again. Perhaps for some portion of that moment even Ida had second thoughts about walking out, but Ida was Ida and this story was set up from the very beginning to end a certain way. Maybe as much because she was a reader, a moviegoer, and could show some loyalty to form and plot, Ida did, then, turn and let herself out the boarded entranceway, imagining to herself that it was just Raphael. It was just Raphael, the vagabond.

  So the next morning Raphael folded a few clothes into the same backpack with which he’d left Frank behind and let himself out of Cleveland Cottons with a hammer and a bag of nails. Slowly he drove nail after nail into the boards of the entranceway. All around the mill he covered the windows with planks, and the sound of his hammer, steady and slow and hard, carried across the street to wake Ida from her sleep. Incredulously she drew herself out of bed and watched from the porch in her robe as Raphael went with a deadly level gaze from window to window. He didn’t look at her. Board after board he slapped over the glass, until the building let no light in and no light out and it stood facing Ida wooden and impenetrable. It would stare at her stoically for years this way; that was the idea.

  After driving his last nail, he was about to throw the hammer aside, but he paused before he tossed it. You never know, he figured, what you’ll have to protect, what you’ll have to hit or drive in, where you’ll need to board up next, so instead, he tucked the hammer in his pack along with Nora’s rolled-up paintings and walked on down the road toward Boston.

  “He did go to college,” said Errol. “When he filled out forms he said his parents were dead, and they gave him financial aid. In school you can bet he burned his way through several dozen women. He was a terror. And, gentlemen,” said Errol to the gathering at large, placing his hands flat on the bar, “Raphael Sarasola is still with us. He is only twenty-five. And he is still”—Errol shook his head—“a terror.”

  16

  For the next three evenings running, Errol threw on his corduroys and went slumming in roadside bars with Gabriel Menaker’s construction crew, drinking heavily, driving wildly in Gabe’s pickup over the same weaving roads that had made him so cautious in the Porsche, embellishing stories of Gray and Raphael and even Charles Corgie. For these few days the crew became Errol’s secret underground life, one in which he was loud, expansive, garrulous, and well liked. Errol McEchern was a novelty to them—the anthropologist was, according to Dave, “a hoot.”

  Errol liked being a hoot. With a curious dread he noticed the light on in the den when he returned to the manse on the third night. So Gray was back from New York; the party was over.

  He found Gray stooped by the ferret’s cage. She toyed with the animal through the bars, and Solo didn’t bite this time.

  “Ralphie here?”

  “No.”

  “Ah,” said Errol, going over to the pet, “but his emissary is. This animal is a spy.”

  The ferret bared his teeth at Errol and hissed.

  “I thought you’d like to know I’ve decided to give up anthropology and become a carpenter.”

  “That’s nice, Errol.” Gray finally pulled herself away from the ferret and looked at him. “So you’re drunk. You don’t usually do that. It’s cute.”

  “I am cute. That’s another thing I decided today. I am a handsome and entertaining man.”

  “I could have told you that a long time ago.”

  “But you didn’t. Isn’t that the way,” said Errol cheerfully. “You know, I told a whole bar the other night about Ralph and that schizo in North Adams. Made quite a sensation, I must say.”

  Gray wasn’t paying enough attention to find this strange. “I was thinking about Ida O’Donnell today. That pattern—I wouldn’t want to repeat it.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t want to hurt him.”

  “You don’t want to hurt him?” Errol laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Our friend Ra
lph—well, I’ve never met anyone so impenetrable in my entire life! He’s worse than you are.”

  “Oh?” She took a seat in her chair; the leather creaked stiffly.

  Yet Errol felt breezy and somehow, after the raucous nights with Gabe, immune. “So tell me,” he said flippantly, lounging onto the couch and propping his feet on the table, “are you fucking him yet?”

  Gray looked up sharply.

  “Pardon me,” said Errol. “Let’s give you both the benefit of the doubt: have you two made love?”

  “It wasn’t the wording. It was the question.”

  “And the answer?”

  Gray paused and drew herself farther into the padding of her armchair. “No,” she said finally.

  “Ah. And has he tried?”

  Gray chewed on the inside of her cheek and flipped the edge of her skirt down over her knee.

  “Well?”

  “Tonight.”

  “But you said no.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why? He’s not bad-looking.”

  Gray just shook her head and said, “Too much,” looking away.

  Something about the way she said that made Errol stop. He didn’t want to be cruel to her. She seemed sad. “Gray, do you want to talk about this? Do you want me to leave you alone?”

  Gray looked down at the arm of her chair, her hand against her cheek with that same gentleness with which Errol had imagined Raphael touching himself when Ida wouldn’t come with him to Boston. “No. Don’t leave me alone. Who else am I going to talk to?”

  “You wouldn’t rather talk about this with a woman?”

  She laughed bleakly. “What woman?”

  “A friend.”