“I guess what I was wondering, Gray, was this, see: were you glad I kept my promise? Did you ever wish I had tried one more time? And were you proud of me? Because you asked me once whether I thought you were pathetic. I never asked you whether I was. Was I, Gray? Are we all pathetic? Is that the secret? We’re all desperate? Or was it just me?”
The leopards on the wall would purr. The wildebeest bones would rattle softly. The eyes of Frank Sarasola (in Errol’s senility, Vincent would return to Frank) would stare back, clear and trusting. The brandy would swirl in Errol’s glass and the fumes would sting his eyes when he raised the liquor to his lips and he would listen for an answer. Yet there would be nothing. Nothing, Ralph. I always think of you when I hear that word.
Maybe then Errol would shuffle off to bed. Or, no. Maybe at that moment Errol would suddenly curl over from a stroke. That would be appropriate, having finally approached the big taboo, as if he could rest in peace only after having addressed it. Errol had always felt, too, that were he to bring it up, something terrible would happen: lightning would strike, a flash of blinding white would fell him in the middle of this den. So then Errol would ask his questions and lie on the crimson carpet with the globe of brandy shattered after all these years and the smell of the stuff rising from the red pile. When you had a stroke, did you bleed? Errol wondered. Did it hurt? Could you think clearly? And would he, maybe, in the end there on the carpet, not even talk to Gray, but reach deeper and keep asking questions, but of someone dead much longer than Gray and therefore, perhaps, better informed on these matters?
Ralph, my buddy. I hated you, I did. I always got the feeling you enjoyed that. Gray was right, Ida didn’t hate you, to your regret. I did, though. You seemed to savor walking into a room where I would glare at you and you could say things to needle me. We worked it out, you and I; we had a pact. But you didn’t hate me, did you? Did you, Ralph? No, I think I was one of your closest friends. Isn’t that appalling.
You admired me. I know that for a fact. I may be laid out here on the carpet, but I’m still the one who’s alive; I have the upper hand at last, so I can make my accusations to my heart’s content. I accuse you of admiring me. I watched you listen to Leonia Harris. I know you thought she was a sucker. I know you thought Walter and I were suckers. Absolutely, Ralph. We were. Across the board, we’d capitulated. And you were so eaten up with envy I could smell it in the air.
As for me: I worshipped you, Ralph. I would have given anything to be you, Ralph. But of course I could only want to be you being me. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be you one bit. Funny how that works. You’d hate being me, too—toadying and groveling all these years, writing some woman’s biography.
But you disappointed me. I’ve looked at those pictures of you, I’ve looked down your magnificent back, I’ve watched the way the early-morning light shone on your cheekbones, the way that amazingly thick black hair of yours flamed out on the pillow, and I remember that number you pulled with your Porsche. Ralph, such a pretty car—how could you? I thought you had it over on her, I really did. I envied that so badly—I thought you had her in the palm of your hand. But she plowed you straight into a telephone pole. Is that what people do over whom we have complete control? She destroyed you with only $45,000, with that grotesque generosity of hers, and where did that come from, anyway? She was never like that before, Ralph. She was never like that with me.
But Errol wasn’t dead yet, neither was Gray; she was sixty, Errol was only forty-eight, and when she finally spoke and returned him to this particular February day well before he had a stroke and lay mumbling on the carpet, Errol felt suddenly very young at that, and full of possibilities.
“By all means, Errol, you should accept that position. As you said, it’s a wonderful opportunity.”
Incredulously Errol looked at her in that chair, and suddenly remembered his earlier fear last summer—that vision he’d had of her with all the pins out, the terrible deflated old woman he’d seen her become. He’d imagined Ralph would do this to her, and he stared at her hard as she sat there looking him bravely in the eye and trying, though Errol didn’t want to flatter himself, not to cry. Was she withering before his eyes? Were the pins falling from her face? Was the skin hanging sadly from her bones as he’d seen so clearly that one summer night as he drove faster and faster to get home?
Before him sat a beautiful woman. Her bones were slender. Her skin had acquired a slight translucence Errol had never noticed before. With the lamplight welling in her collarbone and shining through the tendons in her high neck, she seemed to glow there, more than ever. No pins fell from her face, for there didn’t seem to be any pins, after all. Furthermore, her body looked so light and airy and vertical that surely what would happen in the coming years would not be a gradual crumbling and collapse but an extension—he imagined she would finally get so tall that her head would touch the ceiling, like Alice after she’d eaten too much mushroom, and she might have grown so weightless by that time that when she took a step her whole body would rise from the floor and she’d have to wear those ankle weights of hers just to keep from floating away altogether.
“Gray,” said Errol, “are you sure you can manage? Because I’d be glad—”
“I’ll be fine, Errol, but that’s not even the point.” Her voice was clear and lovely. “You’ve served your time. You have to stop worrying about me for a while. Tend to your own life. Your own success.”
“I don’t mind tending to your life, Gray. I never have.”
“I know that. I’ve admired that, even.” Errol felt a flush of blood rise to his cheeks. “But I haven’t been fair to you, Errol. Sometimes I think I’ve used you, just a little bit. So you can use me for a while. I can help you more than I have. I can help you get those NET grants if you want them, and better if you’re up for it. Send postcards, Errol. Come back and visit.”
“I’ve thought,” said Errol, “about asking Ellen Friedman to go with me.” Errol felt a breaking between his ribs, and his voice began to crack. “I’ve thought I might ask her to marry me.”
Gray smiled with difficulty. “I think that’s a splendid idea. I’m sure she’ll accept. She’s a lovely and intelligent woman, a fine choice.”
“Gray, what are you going to do now?”
“I might take that time off, as I was threatening. Go somewhere warm. Think. Maybe write a book. Collect shells. Remember. I can’t just go right back to work, Errol, not for a little while. I think that might be arrogant.”
“You’ve always liked being arrogant.”
“I have. And I’ve been that way. Maybe I’ll try something else for a change.—But I think you’d better go now. You’ve got a lot to think about, too. You should give Ellen a call, it’s before eleven. Tell her the good news. Ask her to marry you. Go out and celebrate, have a piece of chocolate cake on me.”
“I don’t have to do that tonight, Gray. I can stay. It’s your birthday.”
“You do have to go now, Errol. You won’t always be able to leave here; I won’t always be able to tell you to go. Take advantage of a few minutes of grace and intelligence on both our parts and kiss me goodbye.”
Gray held out her hands, and without thinking Errol wrapped his arms around her and pressed her against him, kissing her on the mouth with a long, lingering savor he hadn’t experienced in twenty-two years.
“I think I’ve always wanted to kiss you one more time,” said Gray, as if she knew what he would ask her at the age of ninety-five. “I’ll miss you terribly. Get out of here before I cry.”
She hugged him one more time, and Errol would not glance again at the crimson den but walked out of the house and into the cold night air. The wind hit him in the face with all the force of his future, in New Guinea, in Kenya, wherever he might end up, and Errol walked down the familiar pathway to his car no longer able to see himself at ninety-five in any place in particular, nor for that matter all alone or even in separate bedrooms. As he placed his hand on the cold hand
le of the door, he thought maybe he would call Ellen, after all. When he accelerated into the night air he sped a little faster than usual, spinning the wheel with three fingers. He took a roundabout route home, passing at one point a couple of miles away a set of blinking orange lights that steered him around the scene of an accident. Errol slowed for a moment, but thought better of stopping and, flooring the accelerator, kept on going.
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About the author
Meet Lionel Shriver
About the book
Looking Back at a Debut Novel
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About the author
Meet Lionel Shriver
AH WAN OW! It took a while for my mother to decode the first words from my crib as “I want out.” Since, Ah wan ow has become something of a running theme.
I wanted out of North Carolina, where I was born. I wanted out of my given name (“Margaret Ann”—the whole double-barrel; can you blame me?), and at fifteen chose another one. I wanted out of New York, where I went to university at Columbia. I wanted out of the United States.
In 1985, I cycled around Europe for six months; one hundred miles a day in wretched weather fortified a lifetime appetite for unnecessary suffering. The next year, I spent six months in Israel, including three on a kibbutz in the Galilee helping to manufacture waterproof plastic boots. Thereafter, I shifted “temporarily” to Belfast, where I remained based for twelve years. Within that time, I also spent a year in Nairobi, and several months in Bangkok. Yet only my partner’s getting a job in London in 1999 tore me decisively from Belfast, a town that in those days addictively commanded equal parts love and loathing. As We Need to Talk About Kevin attests, I’m a sucker for ambivalence.
“I wanted out of the United States.”
Though returning regularly to New York, I’ve lived in London ever since. I’m not sure if I’ve chosen this city so much as run out of wanderlust here. London is conventional for me, and I’m a bit disappointed in myself. But I’ve less appetite for travel than I once did. I’m not sure if this is from some larger grasp that people are the same everywhere and so why not save the plane fare, or from having just gotten lazy. My bets are on the latter.
“I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty-two years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.”
At least the novels are still thematically peripatetic. Their disparate subject matter lines up like the fruit on slot machines when you do not win the jackpot: anthropology and a May-December love affair (The Female of the Species), rock-and-roll drumming and jealousy (Checker and The Derailleurs), the Northern Irish troubles and my once dreadful taste in men (Ordinary Decent Criminals), demography and AIDS in Africa (Game Control), inheritance (A Perfectly Good Family), professional tennis and career competition in marriage (Double Fault), terrorism and cults of personality (The New Republic, my real seventh novel, which has never seen the light of day), and high school massacres and motherhood (We Need to Talk About Kevin). My latest, The Post-Birthday World, is a romance—about the trade-offs of one man versus another and snooker, believe it or not—whose nature seems in context almost alarmingly innocent.
For the nosey: I am married, to an accomplished jazz drummer from New York. Perhaps mercifully for any prospective progeny, I have no children. I am confessedly and unashamedly fifty-two years old, and never lie about my age because I want credit for every damned year.
Lesser known facts:
I have sometimes been labeled a “feminist”—a term that never sits well with me, if only because connotatively you have no sense of humor. Nevertheless, I am an excellent cook, if one inclined to lace every dish with such a malice of fresh chilis that nobody but I can eat it. Indeed, I have been told more than once that I am “extreme.” As I run through my preferences—for dark roast coffee, dark sesame oil, dark chocolate, dark meat chicken, even dark chili beans—a pattern emerges that, while it may not put me on the outer edges of human experience, does exude a faint whiff of the unsavory.
Illustrating the old saw that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, I cycle everywhere, though I expect that eventually this perverse Luddite habit will kill me, period. I am a deplorable tennis player, which doesn’t stop me from inflicting my crap net-game and cowardly refusal to play formal matches on anyone I can corner on a court.
I am a pedant. I insist that people pronounce “flaccid” flak-sid, which is dictionary-correct but defies onomatopoeic instinct; when I force them to look it up, they grow enraged and vow to keep saying flassid anyway. I never let anyone get away with using “enervated” to mean “energized,” when the word means without energy, thank you very much. Not only am I, apparently, the last remaining American citizen who knows the difference between “like” and “as,” but I freely alienate everyone in my surround by interrupting, “You mean, as I said.” Or, “You mean, you gave it to whom” or, “You mean, that’s just between you and me.” I am a lone champion of the accusative case, and so—obviously—have no friends.
I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to be 110. Though raised by Adlai Stevenson Democrats, I have a violent, retrograde right-wing streak that alarms and horrifies my acquaintances in London and New York.
“I read every article I can find that commends the nutritional benefits of red wine; if they’re right, I will live to be 110.”
Those twelve years in Northern Ireland have left a peculiar residual warp in my accent—house = hyse, shower = shar, now = nye. Since an Ulster accent bears little relation to the more familiar mincing of a Dublin brogue, these aberrations are often misinterpreted as holdovers from my North Carolinian childhood. Because this handful of mangled vowels is one of the only souvenirs I took from Belfast, my wonky pronunciation is a point of pride (or, if you will, vanity), and when my “Hye nye bryne eye” ( = how now brown cow) is mistaken for a bog-standard southern American drawl I get mad.
About the book
Looking Back at a Debut Novel
I HAVEN’T READ The Female of the Species in its entirety since its publication in 1986. I don’t make a habit of rereading old work, a pastime that surely falls under the heading of “Get a Life.” Nevertheless, I’m surprised by how vividly I remember it. I recall the full names of all the characters and exactly what they look like in my head. I can still replay the story in mental Cinemascope, just as Errol McEchern—his imagination inflamed by decades of unrequited love for his august mentor, Gray Kaiser—is able to spool through whole reels of her life that he never witnessed himself. Like first loves, first novels are indelible.
In terms of career trajectory, most first novelists fall into one of two camps. One sort immediately establish themselves as forces to be reckoned with. A debut met by widespread acclaim seems enviable, of course, but it isn’t always. Philip Roth was clearly unfazed by the sensation caused by Goodbye, Columbus, which he has followed with a long and distinguished literary career. Yet others find the raised expectations of early success a burden, and some writers discover, horribly, that they only had one story to tell. In the worst case, writers praised to the skies for their first novels will spend the rest of their lives trying to regain heights reached back in their twenties, and often end up crafting poor imitations of their own work. Joseph Heller never wrote another novel that was quite as good as Catch-22. Jay McInerney has never captured the spirit of his times as well as he did in Bright Lights, Big City. Even Richard Yates, whose work I adore, believed that his debut, Revolutionary Road, was probably his finest book. Structurally, what an awful arc: all downhill from here.
“Like first loves, first novels are indelible.”
The second sort of first novelist may garner some appreciative reviews, but they don’t hurtle his or her career into the stratosphere. Perhaps the book fell sho
rt of genius; perhaps its genius was overlooked—for publishing is capricious, and luck plays as great a role as talent. In either case, as a rule, the second sort of novelist? Gets better.
“In retrospect, I wouldn’t have wanted The Female of the Species to have been hailed as a work of insurmountable genius because I was hoping to surmount if myself in many novels thereafter.”
On publication, The Female of the Species was critically well received and sold a respectable number of copies. I was encouraged. But my literary life was hardly sewn up, and that made me fortunate. I’ve always felt sorry for writers who are successful before they know how to handle the stress, before they know their own voice, before they’re quite sure what they want to say. While I didn’t exactly savor fifteen years of obscurity, not achieving significant commercial success until my seventh novel was good for the books, and good for my character. In retrospect, I wouldn’t have wanted The Female of the Species to have been hailed as a work of insurmountable genius because I was hoping to surmount it myself in many novels thereafter. I wouldn’t have wanted publishers, agents, and magazines breathing down my neck when I was still feeling my way and probably needed most to be left alone.