The Female of the Species

  As Tom’s grandfather clock struck midnight, Errol kissed Ellen Friedman, and was surprised by the heat in her lips, at the lingering after. He looked at her quickly and noticed she was pretty. Prettier than he remembered.

  Yet Errol had to turn to the big picture window. Many mouths were at each other. It was a strange cultural ritual: one minute for giving away secrets, grabbing other men’s wives, slipping in the tongue. Normally Errol enjoyed watching this gathering jockey for position before the bell, but tonight it gave him no pleasure. For on either side of this brief bacchanalia stood two pillars. Stalwart and austere, Gray and Raphael stared at each other from opposite ends of the room. The hysteria fell from Gray’s figure, the sleep from Raphael’s eyes. The grappling crowd looked grotesque between them. Errol shivered. Ellen, beside him, seemed disappointed, but he would not kiss her again, or touch anyone else tonight, and having been taught some time ago to take his own car, he left five minutes later. He did not leave in time, though, to miss Bob Johanas planting a big kiss, wet and sardonic, on Gray’s cheek, which broke her line of contact with Raphael, and struck Errol, skeptical as he was of Gray’s alliance, as a regrettable defilement.

  New Year’s Day Gray came to Errol looking haggard. “I want you to escort me somewhere,” she said. Only a couple of days later, on the way, did she explain. “We’re going to my gynecologist. I didn’t want to go alone.”

  “Routine, or anything special?”

  “Since I was thirteen you could set your calendar by my periods. I’ve missed two.”

  “Jesus. Well, have you two been using any—”

  “No, nothing.”

  “But the chances—at your age—”

  “There are medical anomalies.”

  “Would an abortion be difficult for you? Dangerous?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I wouldn’t have one.”

  “Woman, you are out to lunch!”

  “So? I’m paying the check, as usual.”

  “Pregnancy could kill you.”

  “I could die from worse.”

  Errol sighed. “God, I hope there’s nothing to this. Have you experienced any symptoms?”

  “I have felt odd lately. Food often makes me ill. I can’t sleep. I run fevers. We’ll see.” She sounded oddly hopeful.

  In the outer office they were surrounded by pregnant women of reasonable child-bearing age and young, nervous girls. Gray sat calmly with her urine sample perched on her knee. “I’ve never done this before, you know. I never knew how the test was performed before this week.”

  “Gray, why did you want to come here with me instead of Ralph?”

  Gray looked meditatively at her jar and swirled the yellow liquid against the sides like brandy in a snifter. She raised her eyebrows and took a breath as if to say something, but let it go, and swirled.

  “Sorry,” said Errol. He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for, but somehow that hadn’t been a nice thing to ask.

  Gray surrendered her jar to a nurse, who shot her a quizzical glance, and fifteen minutes later she was ushered into the doctor’s office. She took Errol with her, gripping his hand like a talisman. They sat down before his desk to await the verdict.

  Dr. Denton swung genially in his chair. “Well, Gray, it’s negative. Now, while you’re here, I’ve looked at your records. It’s been a couple of years since your last Pap smear, and at your age—”

  “Negative?” said Gray.

  “Yes, relax, Gray. You’re not pregnant. Now, if you’ve got the time, I could get that Pap in five minutes…”

  Gray did relax, but not, it seemed, with relief. She compressed her lips in what she must have hoped to pass off as a smile. She wasn’t looking at Denton but was staring fixedly at the photographs of his family behind him on the wall.

  “Gray, are you feeling all right?” asked Denton. “Is there some other problem?”

  “I suppose I’m wondering,” she said, pronouncing each word carefully, “why I’ve missed two periods. I’ve always been quite regular.”

  “Well, Gray,” said Denton, seeming a little embarrassed, “you’re almost sixty. It’s surprising you didn’t shut down a few years ago.”

  “Shut down?”

  “Well, excuse my language. But you know.”

  “Of course,” said Gray, and she had to clear her throat. “This whole thing was silly, I suppose. I’m sorry I wasted your time.” She stood to leave.

  “You didn’t waste my time, Gray, that’s what I’m here for—” Denton rose and seemed apologetic, though he surely had no idea what he’d said wrong. “But if you could let us take that Pap—”

  “I really can’t do that today, thank you. Errol?”

  “For some women,” said Denton after her, “this is a difficult period. If you have any questions—”

  “I have plenty of questions,” she said crisply. “You can’t answer them.” Looking at neither Denton nor Errol, she clipped out the office door.

  Gray wouldn’t talk on the way home.

  “It’s a big relief to me,” said Errol. “Really.”

  She said nothing; she changed gears stiffly and kept her eyes on the road. When she got home she walked upstairs without a word. Errol heard the door to her bedroom close and shortly afterward the sound of strained breathing and an occasional thump against wood. Errol stayed upstairs, pausing nervously when he passed her door, hovering nearby when he heard her suck air through her teeth a little too audibly. After about an hour of this, a heavy thud shook his office floor.

  Errol rushed into Gray’s bedroom to find her splayed on the floor, her chair tipped over and a barbell beside her sitting in a dent it had made in the wood. Gray’s eyes were closed; her face was splotched purple and white. He touched her cheek, finding it moist and cold. He patted it lightly; she didn’t move. Errol collected her carefully in his arms and lifted her onto the bed. He went to get a warm washcloth, and a few minutes later as he was wiping her forehead she came to.

  “What?” she asked feebly.

  “Sh-sh,” said Errol, swabbing her long neck.

  “I’m cold.”

  Errol pulled out several blankets. “Gray,” he said after she looked more awake, with her head propped up on pillows. “There’s something we haven’t talked about much, and I think it’s time, all right? Today’s a big day for reality; we might as well get it all over with at once.”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready for this.”

  “You’ll never be ready. That’s why I’m not going to wait any longer. Because we’re going to talk about how old you are, Gray—”

  “Errol, please—”

  “And,” Errol overrode, “we’re going to talk about Ralph.”

  “It seems to me both those subjects have come up before.”

  “Yes, but certain things we’ve never said out loud, and I think it’s time. You’re almost sixty and—”

  “How many times do I have to hear that today?”

  “Be quiet and listen to me. Remember? Gray Kaiser, anthropologist, grows more astute. Gray Kaiser, animal—”

  “Disintegrates.”

  “Basically. And that’s true no matter how much tennis you play or how much weight you lift. You’re going to kill yourself one of these days with those crazy barbells of yours—”

  “They’re not crazy. I simply pushed it too far today.”

  “Sh-sh. Now listen.” Errol wiped her forehead again with the wet cloth. “This is going to hurt, but you’re a grown-up. Ralph is a handsome man of twenty-five. Do you really expect him to stick around for years and years? Do you expect him to marry you?”

  “I would marry him,” said Gray.

  It pained Errol to hear this, but he persevered. “That’s not the question I asked.”

  “I’ve never said that, Errol, about anyone. Don’t pass over that so lightly.”

  “I have to, because you’re avoiding the subject, and we are going to discuss it, I don’t care if you don’t want to. Now, you know I’ve
got my problems with our friend Ralph. He’s not my favorite person in the world.”

  “You have a positively British gift for understatement.”

  “But the point is, even with Ralph I can be sympathetic. I wonder if you’re asking him to be too much of a hero. You’re going to get old, Gray, and you’re going to die. You’re asking him to watch all of that.”

  “I’m in tremendous condition. I could live to be a hundred.”

  “But what are hundred-year-old people like?”

  “They’re wizened and funny and smart, and they eats lots of yogurt,” she said sulkily.

  Errol stood up from the bed and sighed. “Do you ever think how you’d feel if Ralph were sixty and you were twenty-five?”

  “Raphael will never be sixty. He won’t live that long.” She said this quickly and with certainty.

  “You say the oddest things sometimes.”

  “I know the oddest things sometimes.”

  “If you’re so perceptive, why can’t you hear what I’m telling you? You’re asking him to make a tremendous sacrifice, and one that I’m not sure anyone has a right to expect.”

  “It’s a sacrifice of which he’s entirely capable. If he’ll choose to make it.”

  “But, Gray,” said Errol in exasperation, “a man like that doesn’t have to make a sacrifice! He’ll have plenty of opportunities.”

  “There’s where you’re wrong,” said Gray, sitting up and letting the blankets fall away. “A man like that has very few opportunities. This may well be his last. And he knows it.”

  Errol suddenly had a sense of something large in that house he’d been quite left out of. He had the humbling impression that she knew far more than he did about all of this. Still, with the residue of his original surge of paternalism, he kept her weights away from her for the rest of the afternoon.

  23

  Errol went to the screening of Gray’s documentary about Charles Corgie, King of Toys, with trepidation. He had stayed away from the project through its editing, and had every intention of following through on his threat to take his name off the credits should the movie turn out the adulatory eulogy to the great white ruler that he feared. Whether or not the gesture meant anything to the rest of the world, it would at least mean something to Gray.

  Errol grew particularly concerned when, on the way to the auditorium, Gray prefaced the screening with a nervous defense: “There have been plenty of critical treatments of white imperialism done by now” halfway there: “Charles was always asking me to give him a break” and as they got out of the car: “Try to understand that this material is too close to me to be used politically.” Errol held his tongue and waited to see the film.

  It was not like watching Errol’s own version. The plot was censored—there was no kiss in the cathedral, no scrambling on Corgie’s bed, none of Corgie’s insults, and no Gray marching away from the ladder, hurtling them back. No tennis game, no war. Yet in spite of her scrupulous G-rated cleanup job, there was still a suggestion of a romance. Those “wet green eyes” of Arabella’s gave it away. Because of Arabella’s warm performance, then, Corgie seemed to be the one holding out. He was daily tempted by a beautiful, affectionate redhead, and he did nothing.

  However, more than the plot had changed. Gray slumped in her chair next to Errol. Halfway through she said, “Something is wrong.” Errol understood. Whatever intentions she might have had, they’d been subverted. It was as if someone had crept into her office late at night while she slept and changed frames, shifted cuts, revised inflections. Charles Corgie had been perverted.

  First, Errol couldn’t help but notice that the movie was now more Raphael’s. It seemed less as if Raphael had stepped in to imitate Charles than that Charles had been standing in for Raphael until his successor was born and old enough to play his rightful part. The movie now read as some grotesque, enigmatic parable about Raphael’s current relationship with Gray. Errol found himself looking around the audience nervously. He was embarrassed for Gray that all these people were watching. It was too intimate.

  Second, and most surprising to Errol, was that as he watched the movie he did not feel the admiration for Charles Corgie that he had feared. He felt pity.

  In the last close-up of Raphael on top of the plane, the frame held: Raphael in that strange ecstasy, the flames framing his face, the credits rolling in silence. Errol was double-billed with Gray for production and direction; he felt flattered; his name would stay. The houselights went up much too quickly. No one talked. Gray dragged herself to the podium to lead the discussion.

  A man in front spoke up. “In comparison with your previous work, Dr. Kaiser, do you really believe this film represents a professional treatment of your subject? I have to confess I was surprised at the amount of obvious editorializing here. You’ve traditionally been so—restrained and—objective.”

  “Objectivity, in film and in our profession, is often a cultivated illusion,” Gray explained. “In some ways it’s more honest to admit our biases than to cover them up unsuccessfully. As for the contrast with my other work, at this point in my career I am interested in a—departure.”

  “To what degree this film holds up as anthropology I don’t know,” another man commented, “but as a character study I think it’s outstanding.”

  “Yes,” the man next to him agreed, “I saw it more as an art film. It may imply too much about Charles Corgie to constitute a serious academic work. Why, the inferences one can make are almost fictional—”

  “I had intended,” Gray interrupted with difficulty, “to create an enigmatic portrait.”

  “I wonder if you succeeded, then,” the man went on. “The point of view seems clear enough.”

  “And how would you characterize that?” asked Gray, but without any eagerness, as if she didn’t really want to know.

  “Well, he’s completely lost,” said the man easily.

  “Not even contemptible,” a woman joined in. “More pathetic. Desperate—”

  “But not egomaniacal,” a young man added enthusiastically. “That’s what interested me. Like Il-Ororen, who thought they were the only people in the world, our Lieutenant Corgie thought he was the only person in the world. So he could be great or nothing. It didn’t even matter. Without comparison there’s no such thing as scale, isn’t that part of your point? There was no difference between the models and the real buildings, because he wasn’t sure that either one of them existed outside his head. A fascinating study of the mind in isolation. Of a different kind of African starvation than we’re used to.”

  “I thought the presence of the young woman made him particularly poignant,” commented a woman. “Someone who so obviously cared about the man and for whom he seemed to have some feelings if he were to allow them—”

  “The ending, too, I thought was tremendous,” joined her companion. “His embrace of his own death. As if he’d arranged it; his joy in it. That scene sent chills down my spine, Dr. Kaiser, really.”

  “Yes,” said Gray quietly, “mine, too.”

  Raphael sat in the very back row, his eyes burning.

  “Mr. Sarasola,” said Gray bravely, “you played this part. Do you have anything to add?”

  Raphael cocked his head. “One thing.”

  “Yes?”

  The gathering turned and craned toward Raphael. He waited until they were silent, all rustling of programs stilled. Then he reminded Gray quietly, “He couldn’t be any other way.”

  That was it.

  “Would you care to elucidate?” asked another audience member.

  “No.”

  The audience breathed, turned frontward, and rubbed their arms; the hall suddenly felt cold.

  “In Charles’s defense,” said Gray, looking at Raphael as she spoke, “he had his moment of salvation. I meant it to be clear: he could have used the anthropologist to cover his own retreat. He refused. He granted the existence of one person. Perhaps that’s enough.”

  “Yes.” Raphael pronounce
d this with difficulty, as if speaking his first few words in a foreign language. “That’s everything.” He licked his lips. “It’s not always possible.”

  Gray looked down at her lectern, and announced abruptly and much too soon that the discussion was closed.

  Errol understood that Gray needed to be gotten home. He threaded through the crowd to pull her away, for he could see she was fending off questions, keeping her head down and shuffling papers in a manila folder. Before he could retrieve her, though, “’L-oo-lubo!” resounded through the room. Gray looked up with sudden recognition and smiled for the first time that whole afternoon.

  The crowd parted for a tall, aging African with splendid bone structure. He and Gray clasped each other’s hands.

  “So veddy good to see this feelm!” He smiled, his teeth rich. The man seemed large and booming and ingenuous. “This was the Corgie as Hassatti see him in the head.”

  “I had to leave him with his gun, Hassatti,” said Gray, “so I couldn’t bring it back to you. I could only bring it back on film.”

  “I hear of ’L-oo-lubo other times before now. She return from this puddle with one barrel of Corgie’s gun in each eye.”

  Yet suddenly those gun-barrel eyes of hers constricted. Gray craned over Hassatti’s shoulder to follow a certain young man as he skirted the auditorium and walked out the door. Gray’s eyes went bare, casting over the carpet, rumpling over Hassatti’s feet.